New to the sub but i've consumed a good bit of vegan content (Alex OcConor, Atunshie ect). Apologies if this is one you guys get alot but on the most base level it seems (to me) to be the most fundamental problem with your argument.
If animal life is just as valuable as human, if humans are animals and thus do not deserve any higher valuation, consideration, or sympath, if humans and animals are in all senses of the word equal in their normative value: why should humans be held to any higher standard then animals are?
We dont judge animals for eating meat even though many omnivores could technically subsist off plant based diets just as humans can; why judge humans for doing the same??
More over if you're a materialist and an atheist (as most vegans seem to be) it seems kinda silly to morally judge a human being for anything he's compelled to do by biology; let alone obeying his most base natural instincts as every other animal on the planet does.
I guess i just dont se where any of the justification comes from; unless of course you DO se humans as "higher" beings who as such hold a higher degree of responsibility but if you just se humans and animals as equals not sure how any of this makes sense.
Where is the coherent philosophical justification in your mind??
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This isn’t the position of most vegans so if the rest of your post is contingent on this IF, then it fails.
Absolutely; if that is not a position you hold my critique does not apply to your ideology.
To clarify, do you think veganism is contingent on animals being of equal value as humans? Because it mostly isn't. It's sufficient to value animals enough to avoid their exploitation, regardless of their relative value to each other, including humans.
Why is it sufficient, because that’s the presupposed end? Isn’t that begging the question when one ask, ”Is this moral?”
Not sure if I understand. Morality is subjective, so whether it is immoral to unnecessarily exploit non-human animals depends on the moral consideration of them. Arguably, most people morally consider animals, but their actions are not aligned with that, causing cognitive dissonance.
In veganism, animals are valued/morally considered enough to avoid their unnecessary exploitation. This isn't begging the question, because it only applies to vegans, who by definition already answered the question "is this moral?" in this context.
This is black/white irrationality. Just because most people morally consider animals doesn’t mean they morally consider them as you believe they ought to. Most people believe babies have rights but that doesn’t mean most people believe babies have ALL rights (like the right to vote). Most people believe animals have moral protections but not moral protections against dying to make a cheeseburger. Also, cognitive dissonance only happens when there is pain or negative feelings associated with inconsistency so even if you were correct, if there’s nothing bothering the person with the inconsistency there is no coginative dissonance.
An example is
If you have no discomfort from holding these two clashing beliefs then they do not have cognitive dissonance. Moral concepts get their meaning from how they are used in life and not from theories. That means morality is not subjective or objective but intersubjective. Subjective morality cannot be shared between people just like it is impossible to directly share the feeling a song gives you and you have to analogies it. Your subjective sense of morality is like someone with senestia saying the color purple taste like s. What is s and how can they directly tell what s taste like free of analogy? They cannot and we cannot understand. Objective morality is a hypothesis and unproven by objective facts. As such, we are left with intersubjective morality.
I agree with you that it is not question begging so long as it only applies to vegans but that literally means you cannot judge omnivores as our community does not share the same language use as your community does and there is nothing objective to allow independent judgement across commuunity lines. It is void of meaning.
I do animal rights outreach, mostly using socratic questioning. Obviously there is a selection bias in who is stopping to watch the animal farming videos we are showing and is willing to talk to me. I would say that most non-vegans I speak to show cognitive dissonance, they don't like what they see and would not actively do it, but still support it by creating demand. We talk about how they see animals, how they value them and how this fits into their moral framework. We are basing our mutual understanding on a shared experience of being human.
Veganism is not an abstract philosophy, it is a practiced one. What exactly are you asking for? I have barely argued for veganism, more stated what it is, starting with that it's not contingent on human and non-human animal equality.
Of course I can judge non-vegans, because they break my subjective morality. I seldom voice judgment, because it usually doesn't change minds, and yes, it's is meaningless if they don't see it that way. That is true for all questions of morality, with the difference that some are codified in law, so the judgment can come from the state with the monopoly on violence. I guess the latter is what you mean by independent judgment?
What part of what you’re seeing here bothers you the most, the suffering, the killing, or the scale/industrial system behind it?
It bothers me that animals are treated like objects, means to an often unnecessary end. On my journey to becoming vegan, I got to know some of the animals more closely, individuals with preferences, showing an inner world beyond a biological machine that produces food or work etc.
The system that scaled it up is the same that exploits humans as well. My political philosophy intersects with my veganism there.
What about you?
The problem with this is that if you morally consider animals, and the environment, it's then dissonant to inflict suffering on billions of animals and increase emissions because yum. Certainly if we lived in a time where it was a necessity it could be considered a necessary evil but if it is being done only for taste pleasure, there's little to separate a carnist from someone who sexually abuses animals.
No but i think alot of vegans think and speak in these terms (some even have showed up in the thread bellow).
Their ideology (in so far as it claims humans and animals are equal) is the one which seems incoherent to me.
Okay - fair enough
Alex Conner is no longer vegan for a while and has spoken about it
What allows vegans to hold animals to a lower standard than humans but not as low of standard as omnivores?
Well yeah I do see humans as different than other animals in many ways. And if I could only save a dog or a human, I would save the human.
Vegans see animals we raise for meat similarly to cats and dogs— not human, but still good to avoid harming them when possible, because they’re sentient and can feel pain.
We are more intelligent than other animals, and the most significant difference is that we’re moral agents rather than moral patients. Other animals don’t have the same capacity to understand that hurting another animal causes them to suffer.
Other animals also have no choice but to kill in order to survive. But a lot of the time for us, it’s easy to just choose a different protein at the grocery store.
We’re also omnivores, and not obligate carnivores like lions. So we can choose to eat plant proteins instead of animal proteins.
What do you mean by that? One would think a human is as much of a moral agent as, say, a dog is. A human also can be both feral and civilized, and civilizing a human being is basically identical to what training of a dog is (positive reinforcement of favorable behaviors and the opposite). The only difference is most humans don't require explicit civilizing as we are seamlessly and imperceivably civilized during our upbringing.
What fundamental difference could there be to call specifically a human being a "moral agent"?
Yeah so the fundamental difference is essentially higher intelligence that allows for abstract reasoning and the development of morality.
Moral agency is “The state of being able to make ethical or moral judgements and to take responsibility for choices and actions.”
So while dogs can help others or act compassionately, overall they don’t have the level of intelligence and abstract reasoning required to be considered a moral agent.
They don’t have the intelligence to like understand the concept of morality, cause they can’t really reflect on their actions and be held responsible for them.
I would argue that it’s different than training a dog because humans are able to reason a lot more than a dog and really understand like why not to hurt someone.
A dog can be taught not to bite, but doesn’t really understand why not to in an abstract sense. So I would say it’s a difference in like understanding, reflection, and the ability to develop our own moral sense independent of negative / positive reinforcement.
What are your thoughts on empathy in rats? I believe rats do possess a primitive form of moral agency, in that they are able to feel empathy for other rats to the extent that they have been shown in experiments to be able to act against their own immediate gain in order to free another rat they can tell is in unpleasant circumstances. The example, forgoing food to instead release another rat from an uncomfortably small cell. They may be the only non-primate that will do this of their own volition - obviously any trainable animal can be taught to do something like this, but rats just do it. And it's not like rats are all sunshine and rainbows to each other, under other circumstances they might fight another rat, on rare occasions even to the death.
Another example - background info, rats eat mice. They're a food animal to rats. But occasionally, someone has had a wild mouse get into their rat cage, and the rats adopt it as a pet. It cuddles with them in the rat pile, eats their food, uses their toys, and for some apparently totally arbitrary reason, all the rats together decide they like that one and they're keeping it safe and feeding and grooming it.
Do you mean you can intellectually explain why the effects of a more developed organ, like sentience, are objectively, morally, definitely more valid for honoring one's will for survival than, say, defensive enzymes are in a plant?
(Most) humans develop what's called a theory of mind, it's true. However, it's a psychological social fitness implement, not a "moral organ". The fact that I understand how you might feel based on how I might feel in your place doesn't translate into "making you feel that way is immoral". Morality is another thing entirely. I might justify killing you as moral if you're actively threatening lives of others, and despite that being morally right, it may still feel wrong and hard to do. You might be in such a hopeless, unrecoverable pain and in such a bad way that you beg me to kill you, and yet it will still be impossibly hard and traumatic to do, but I'd argue it'd be morally right.
Understanding that "doing that will cause him/her pain" is not automatically "causing pain is always morally wrong". Those are two different plains, however they tend to make following the generally practiced morality very easy for most humans.
All this just tried to justify veganism, but we all understand that this is another thing entirely. Veganism is about such abstract and remote events, at such imperceivable scale that it just boils down to what mental model about it you induce in yourself as morally important. If I told you that over 5 million vertebrates die on the roads everyday (which is true), will you now be compelled by your sense of empathy and understanding of others to immediately stop participating in vehicular travel?
You can't ask a jack Russell terrier not to kill a rat and have it listen
You can generally eventually condition it not to, at least in some cases. There's cases of humans who have no implements allowing for proper understanding of the consequences of their actions (usually related to prefrontal cortex issues) and you won't ever be able to convince them not to murder other people just as well. Both types of organisms in general can be successfully conditioned in very many ways quite successfully, though.
And if you condition a human like the Jack Russell by electroshocking him every time he tries to <do ill thing>, then it stops being a moral choice, by the same token as it's not a moral choice by me to not kill the emperor of Japan. It's simply a matter of me not being able to -- by not being able to outmaneuver his tight security for example.
Moral evaluation and considerations are categorically different things that above pure material constraints.
How do you imagine behavior moderation in humans work? You take a human, and you build power structures arount them - society, justice system, religion - and they behave like they should. If you kill someone today, the law enforcement is generally effective enough to work like an electric shock on an action-reaction basis. That means to you that it's not a moral choice not to kill? Perhaps not, but I don't understand the very idea of moral choice in the first place. We know beyond any doubt that there's no human agency in free will. I not only don't see how your idea of moral choices works, I don't see how it could make sense in the first place at all. Humans will always behave like the will given the circumstances, and there's nothing else to it.
And those people also aren’t considered moral agents..
There are also countless examples of humans and behaviors for which a moral statement alone is almost always insufficient for behavior change, and yet the human is considered a moral agent. Overcoming a harmful addiction like alcohol, gambling or overeating, for example. The need for interventions stronger than moral sentences alone seems compatible with agency.
So the dogs whose behavior you can sufficiently moderate are not moral agents and the ones you can't aren't moral agents either, but humans whose behavior you can sufficiently moderate are moral agents, but the ones you can't aren't?
Is it so hard to grasp that not being able to make moral considerations is the opposite of moral agency?
Animals can be trained (not) to do things but they don't have a concept of morals. Teach humans that it's morally good to prevent suffering and they can compare the outcomes of different scenarios and will choose the one with the least suffering if they are acting morally (in an utilitarian way).
The closest thing non-human animals can be capable of is empathy, which can have a similar effect when they try to do "good" things to other animals or humans and avoid harming them. But empathetic behaviour doesn't require consideration. A dog will protect its owner that might have treated him well, even when the owner is robbing a bank at gun point fo no other reason than greed.
When animals are trained not to do things, the trainer sanctions "bad" behaviour. So the reason for an animal not to do something is the expectation of some kind of punishment (or reward for "good" behavior) or habituality, not a moral consideration.
"Teach humans that it's morally good to prevent suffering" - but that's exactly the same as "teach a dog not to jump on the couch". Do humans have obligation to understand that?
We know we don't have more agency than any other organism, there's nothing this agency could come from in the first place. You are a slave to your behavior (and to the tools you happen to have to moderate that behavior), you're never really behind the steering wheel. This is not new science either, we know this beyond any doubt. How then you can be simultaneously a moral agent? That just doesn't make any sense to me.
It is not. You teach humans morals by making them understand why something is bad or wrong. You teach a dog what to do by making it understand that it will get punished or rewarded for it's actions. Doing something because you think it's the morally right thing to do vs doing something because you expect to be punished or rewarded.
Such a boring world view. It doesn't matter how much chemistry in our body influences our psychology and therefore our actions. If you'd think that this is the only thing that influences our actions then nobody is responsible for anything. Before any choice you can tell yourself that the choice is already made and you can't do anything about it. It's just a worthless consideration, the options are still there and one of them is probably the better one (not necessarily morally).
I think many social animals (and some typically solitary ones) ought to be called moral agents. I think a lot of people are confusing agency in general with the ability to be persuaded by the content of moral propositions in language, which seems like a rather myopic way to view ourselves as unique.
Right, I don't think the ability to be persuaded translates to the obligation to be persuaded by any specific ideas, either
If this is your position i think that's fair.
I guess i just feel like I've seen a good chunk of vegans (maybe not all) who really do go far down the road of seeing human life and animal life as equal and if you really hold to that, as i laid out above, i dont think the moral arguments for veganism hold water.
If you DO however se human beings as higher organisms whose lives are more valuable but also have a greater duty to act morally i think the argument is more coherent though.
I don't believe you. These people are not the norm and this is not what veganism is.
…have you been on the Reddit vegan subreddit? Because it’s pretty aggressive about the speciesism stuff.
It’s also just a pretty negative echo chamber in general, so no one should be getting all their opinions on veganism from there
What do you think speciesism is and what does anti-speciesism mean to you? Because I think you're understanding just as little as OP and are operating on assumptions.
I’ve seen repeated upvoted comments on there about animals in general having the same inherent value as human beings and downvoted plenty many times I have expressed a vegan sentiment while still admitting that yes I value human life over the life of a cow or a dog or a rat, if some unfortunate scenario requires that prioritization.
This is the common vegan position, I believe.
I would agree with you, I’m just elaborating on that sub in particular, in the context of a conversation where someone else on Reddit seemed to think it was not the most common vegan position.
Yeah but they watch vegan YouTubers. Like, two of them. And then talked about "a big chunk of vegans" sharing this opinion. Which is just odd, in my opinion.
Well yeah, I think that was pretty weird of them honestly.
I don’t know man I’m just drinking some vegan wine and tried to add some specific vegan Reddit perspective to the conversation, that’s all. Lol
I mean fair if you think that.
Most of what I know about vegans come from large vegan youtubers like those i mentioned above; if you want i can provide videos and time stamps of where i think they're leaning into this view that human life is no more valuable then animal life.
Would you like me to do that??
Sure.
Currently watching through atun shei videos at 2x speed to find the video (one of these two i believe):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roRD4F9pg5s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIkQrr8pgSI
where he says something to the effect of "the very term humanize shows how we view animals as lesser then humans" so i can provide a time stamp.
If anyone remembers this vid please feel free to link it bellow.
Thankyou. I just don't understand why you would claim that "a large chunk of vegans" hold a certain position and then citing one single person saying something this "large chunk of vegans" apparantly believes in.
We do not have leaders in veganism whose position we follow.
Bt "lesser", he seems to mean having lesser value as moral patients.
Yeah that’s a pretty unusual perspective. Most vegans would choose to save a human over another animal if it comes down to that. It’s just that we don’t see favoring humans in an extreme scenario like that to justify harming animals in other scenarios where we don’t have to choose between a human or an animal.
I think you are conflating things say off the cuff with their position. Most conversations are not debate and people are not explicitly stating their positions at all times in all conversations. We (humans) use abstractions to communicate in the way we think best conveys the message knowing that most recipients are not really paying attention and won't listen to long statements.
With this in mind taking someones off the cuff abstraction as their position is not acting in good faith. Gotta clarify that shit yo.
Also have to clarify what "moral value" would mean. If it just means we deserve moral consideration then yes that would be part of the vegan conclusion. But it is not the same moral consideration as humans. Just that any action performed against an animal has the potential for moral risk.
I agree with almost everything. Saying we are more intelligent than other animals is a very egotistical view to have. We have no way to judge another animal’s intelligence atm.
This is such a weak argument, with this mindset no non-vegan will ever be convinced to stop eating meat. Many people don't care about cats and dogs, why would they then care about pigs or chickens.
An animal's life is equal to humans, just in their own ways. All living beings have different standards to live, but all of their lives are equally meaningful.
Humans are sneaky, manipulative, calculating and backhanded, while animals don't have these intentions.
Nobody needs to eat meat, let alone daily. If i had the choice between a pack of potatoes and a wild boar which i would need to kill first, i would always choose the potatoes.
I always see vegans claiming moral agency but never substantiated. We’re all apes and no one can prove we have any more free will than any other animal or that morality is objective or even subjective.
Sure, so Oxford Reference defines moral agency as:
So it’s not saying that humans are subject to some kind of objective morals. Moral agency is just the ability to reflect on our actions and make moral judgement based on our own sense of morality.
Also I would say that humans do have a greater degree of free will than apes due to things like our ability for complex reasoning and ability to plan far into the future.
You would be surprised at some of the planning chimpanzees do. You might be interested to read In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall. For example male chimps will strategically plan alliances for months to work their way up the ranks or take down a particular male or rival community. Lower ranking males will also actually plan ahead by sensing when a female will become fertile and force her to go to an isolated area of the territory way ahead of that point so that he has her all to herself when she does becomes fertile. It's called a consortship and lower ranking males that normally would not get a chance with a fertile female use it to shoot their shot. On a shorter term basis I have also known chimps who would deliberately block doors so that we could not shut them (they got their food outside so that we could shut them out and clean their indoor areas every day), or who would deliberately break or steal items specifically to trade for treats. One who would break, say, a board, and instead of trading the whole board she would break it into a bunch of little pieces so she could get a treat for each little piece. Same chimp would also point to fallen Chow outside the mesh, and if you said, sorry it's dirty, and shook your head, she would point at the full Chow bucket or point outside to the commissary area to tell you to go get her something fresh then!
Is this something you believe in regards to all forms of morality?
Humans are not compelled to eat meat by their biology. Humans evolved from apes, and apes eat an overwhelmingly plant-based diet.
Meat is unnatural for humans to eat.
If my taste preference, olfactory glands and appetite circuits are a part of my biology, and I feel extremely compelled to eat when I smell seared tenderloin, then how could you excuse a conclusion that I'm "not compelled to eat meat by my biology"? Meat is among the most palatable foods out there.
You can say we're able to biologically survive without meat, but saying that we're (at least some of us) are not compelled to prefer it and eat it is just plain nonsense.
Also, a ton of details of our biology and anthropology indicate beyond any scientific doubt that humans evolved eating meat. Our brains are literally unable to develop properly without nutrients like B12, which is only bioavailable to humans in meat. Animal products contain overall many much more bioavailable nutrients than plant products do, and that's also undisputed scientific fact.
Would you also say you're biologically-compelled to eat jelly donuts then? ... How about refined sugar? Ice cream?
There are lots of foods that are very unhealthy for humans biologically that taste good to humans, so it doesn't make sense to say that just because something tastes good your biology compels you to eat it.
Humans started eating meat only very recently during the history of their evolution. This suggests it's a learned behavior, not something that comes naturally. The bulk of the time humans evolved, their ancestors ate an overwhelmingly plant-based diet.
And I expect humans obtained vitamin B12 from eating unwashed plant-based foods in the wild. Vegetables pulled from the dirt have naturally occurring vitamin B12 on them.
We are not biologically compelled to eat foods that have been engineered to taste good like ice cream and doughnuts. Those have not been in existence since we started evolving and because they've existed for such a short amount of time we haven't had time to evolve for them to be healthy for us.
Therefore only foods that can naturally be found in the wild should be included in this because someone in the wild isn't going to come across an ice cream tree and just pick a pint of ice cream and eat it.
Not to mention many modern fruits and vegetables did not exist during our evolution. Humans have selectively bred fruits and vegetables to be sweeter and juicier in the case of fruits and less bitter and with less plant toxins in the case of vegetables. How does it make sense that we should be eating these foods knowing this?
Absolutely, we're conditioned to prefer energy-dense foods, cause they were literally the best foods you could find out there. They give you almost immediate access to high amounts of energy and are great for survival. Humans in the modern form are so new that they barely started to exist at all, we're still biologically conditioned to prefer energy based foods just as we were for the entirety of human history, for which we today often pay dearly by the way, as you noticed.
Not at all, during the rapid expansion of the human brain (which allowed for present humans to be a thing at all) we've certainly ate meat, which is theorized allowed for it at all. The amounts of B12 that happen to be found on plants are so unreliable and low that it would not make that brain expansion possible. You need to make sure you get a lot B12 regularly, and plants are just sometimes contaminated with it while meat is guaranteed to have high amounts that are bioavailable. It's true there was an idea in science that we used to have cellulase to be able to digest cellulose, which allowed us to eat many more than just the subset of plants we can eat today, but modern science generally retracts this conclusion.
"Humans started eating meat only very recently during the history of their evolution."
I mean you can believe that if you want if it helps you sleep better at night, some people believe the earth is flat. However, that's simply not scientifically true at all. Simply put, the homo sapiens brain could not have evolved as we all know and love without eating meat and neither of us would be here now.
Unless you consider 2.5 million years ago as "very recent during the history of our evolution".
Source?
After a 5 minute pubmed search:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5417583/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14672286/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/04/eating-meat-led-to-smaller-stomachs-bigger-brains/
Alright, I REALLY would like for you to source this, because not only are most of the closest relatives to Humans (Chimpanzees and Bonobos) omnivorous, to my knowledge one of the deciding factors for humans to be able to develop our brain was the ability to make digestion of meat easier by cooking it.
Your taste preference is not simply part of your biology, it is extremely culturally dependent also. The smell of cooking flesh is repulsive to me. Does that mean that corpse meat is poisonous? Of course not. And b12 isn't just inherently found in all meat anyways. It has to be supplemented in those animals too, so no matter your diet you're taking b12 supplements anyways.
You are perfectly capable of getting over your petty, learned compulsion and addiction. Good nutrition isn't just about nutrition density, it's about a balanced diet. Animal fats are what cause high cholesterol, heart disease, and other serious ailments in people all across the world.
It's not impossible to eat "healthy" on a meat based diet of course, but eating plant-based is typically(not always based on circumstance) healthier and even cheaper. You can 100% get everything you need form a plant based diet, otherwise the vegan community would have starved to death by now instead of bickering online, and eating extremely delicious high-protien meat replacements.
I didn't go vegan all at once. Neither should you. But anyone who both gives a shit and is paying attention should strive to make veganism their goal. That's my opinion, and I know it's a rare opinion so don't bother telling me how stupid I am, we hear it all the time.
Part of it is culturally conditioned, sure. However, a part of it is also certainly not. Watch some videos of very small children/newborns reacting to foods - are they also all culturally conditioned? Cause they very visibly prefer many animal-based products, and there's not much besides pure human biology at play there.
Historically it didn't need to be supplemented, it often is now though (due to top soil being exhausted from nutrients), it's true. However, we were talking about historical humans, and they had no other source of bioavailable and predictably plentiful B12 than meat.
I don't disagree with what you say later, both vegan and non-vegan diets can be healthy if properly managed. The core of the discussion though is moral, not nutritional. I would first have to understand why one would excuse vegan philosophy to consider following a diet like that.
This is an interesting point. In my experience, kids are extremely averse to meat in its "natural" form - aka, a live animal. Give a toddler a rabbit or something and they're MUCH more likely to play with it and view it as a friend than to try to kill it.
Children who do try to kill small animals don't usually do so for food, it's usually out of experimentation and or even cruelty, and it's not done to eat the animal. Raw animal flesh is repulsive to most humans, unless trained to do so (which makes sense because it's almost poisonous to us with some form of processing - eg, cooking, which wouldn't have been available for most of our biological history.)
Put two kids in a room with a bunny or a chicken. The one who plays with it will be seen as cute. The one who tries to eat it will be punished by adults of almost every culture.
"Give a toddler a rabbit or something and they're MUCH more likely to play with it and view it as a friend than to try to kill it." - well duh, it won't peel and boil a potato either. It's not about hunting that's argued here is biologically mandated, it's the preference towards meat in its cooked form. It's not cultural that we prefer it, if toddlers prefer it automatically.
Fruits and edible veg they would though. Potatoes are a recent discovery remember.
I do also think we evolved eating fish as most people do almost seem to think of fish almost like vegetables and enjoy eating them in their completely untampered (other than cooked) form. A whole food plant diet with a daily portion of oily fish is the uhdesputed "healthiest" diet too. B12 and omega 3 is practically impossible to get without fish, algae, yeast or supplementation (remembering most meat counts as fortified food since most farm animals are fed or injected with supplements)
Most people need meat to not look like it's come from an animal in order to eat it, and be completely detached from the process.
Well, I don't think that many toddlers would crack a live fish open and start chomping, either. Fish was no doubt important, especially in coastal civilizations, but I don't think it's as palatable as, say, red meat or bacon is to us. Not exactly sure why there's such a strong preference one way, bit there certainly is one
If you don't eat red meat, beef is pretty bland and pork/bacon smells pretty vile. Eating beef and pork is definitely learned cultural behavior. Fish is much more universal, I think. Almost all civilisations until relatively recently have been either coastal or river based!
It's actually believed that the appendix's original function was to digest raw meats, and after so long cooking our food (meat specifically), we stopped needing it and it slowly became less important to our bodies....so your point of "cooking wouldn't have been available for most of our biological history" isn't accurate.
It's consistent with the aquatic ape theory though, that we were the monkeys that evolved in the niche of beaches and rivers. Raw meats are a niche cultural thing but raw fish is relatively common.
Being omnivorous (as primates are) and with fish as a whole protein source, it's not a big leap to then realize you can kill and eat "any" animal. But then it also makes sense why a huge proportion people feel a bit squeamish about eating animals that aren't fish and need to be separated from the farming process.
B12 has to be supplemented because the soil is so depleted, partly because of human agriculture. These species would have gone extinct if humans had to give them B12 since the dawn of time.
What's wrong with higher cholesterol? There's a recent study showing people with moderately high cholesterol live longer.
Many vegans do stop and they don't always want to but they have such big health problems due to their diet that they have to. The ex vegans subreddit doesn't exist for no reason. Very few people who make it 5-10 years are going to quit unless they have to because at that point they've made the decision that they prefer to save animals over eat meat.
Edit: forgot to mention this. Why do babies generally prefer meat over vegetables? They have not been conditioned at all because they are like 6-12 months old. If you give a 6 month old a steak or a vegetable 9 out of 10 of them will go for the steak first and won't touch the vegetable unless you take the steak away from them. Why do we have to teach so many kids to eat vegetables if they're so healthy?
We wouldn't need so much agriculture, and we would have much less ecological impact if we weren't feeding the majority of our crops(at least in america, imported crops too I would assume) to the factory farm slaughter industry. Animal "agriculture" is the most inefficient way to use the calories produced by the plants we grow.
High cholesterol is not a problem for everyone, but it's pretty clear that there's a link between some types of cholesterol and heart disease. Vegan products aren't perfect either, like I think coconut oil can clog your veins in a similar way for example. If more people began to transition to a plant-based diet, I'd bet rates of heart disease would significantly reduce in those people if for no other reason than they're getting more vegetables in their diet.
Some people do go back to eating corpse flesh for different reasons, although I never plan to. I'll let you know if I do. However, this isn't evidence that a plant-based diet is unsustainable. In fact, there are many vegans who have been so for decades, or for their entire life. Your opinions are in disagreement with scientific observation. Look up "position of the American dietic association: vegetarian diets".
I haven't seen that study with the babies, but I don't doubt their findings. However, I would reason that babies would naturally prefer cooked plain meat to cooked plain vegetables because it is an oilier, more calorie dense food, and evolutionary pressure would condition us to find those foods more appealing. That doesn't necessarily mean those foods would be healthier for that baby than, for example, nuts and berries in a smoothie, or vegetable soup.
Also, if that same baby were to choose between plain cooked meat and a vegan carrot cake, you you think that baby would always choose the carnivore option? The baby isn't going to chose plain vegetables because yeah, they do taste bitter to children. Everyone knows kids don't wanna eat their broccoli and asparagus. Children will eat whatever they think is tasty to them, or whatever their parents can get them to eat. It doesn't mean any of it is necessarily healthy or not healthy, whether it's vegan or not.
An infant also can't make the connection between the food its eating and the way it's produced, but a small child can. A common reaction in children when they make the connection that an animal must die to produce their food is horror, real horror, and the realization that this is a moral wrong.There are examples of the opposite of this happening, too , so I don't really consider the opinions of toddlers to be valid moral critique. It could be worth considering though.
I'm ceasing to whatever points you make that I don't respond to.
Of course many babies would choose vegan carrot cake over plain cooked meat. It's a sugary treat. Junk food like that is engineered to taste good and better than any natural food.
I never said eating animals is morally right or morally wrong because toddlers like it or don't like it. Humans clearly have the instinct to eat meat over vegetables but that doesn't mean it's right or wrong. I do think looking at humans who have never been conditioned by their society or culture what is tastiest and what is most morally correct to eat is a good way to know what humans instinctually eat and babies who have just started to eat food besides breast milk are really the only people that have not been conditioned yet.
As an aside, I am obviously not a toddler but I have watched Dominion and I did not feel much compassion for the animals. I don't really care if they suffer for meat to be produced. Does this make me a psychopath? Maybe, but I can't find the compassion for animals. No idea if this is normal within adults and also within toddlers.
Just a hypothesis but it could be that toddlers will be affected by whoever is presenting the information to them. If their dad is showing it to them and their dad is vegan they would probably be more likely to feel sorry for the animals than if their dad is not vegan because toddlers are more likely to follow what their parents or teachers or other authority figures are doing/believing than adults and very few people who are not vegan are going to show their child these types of documentaries. Like I said though I don't know if this is true.
It's fair to say that not everyone is motivated by morals and empathy, and although I hate the cultural apathy that's grown so pervasive, that's not necessarily always a bad thing. There's a theory that says a community with a small number of psychopaths is more likely to succeed than a community with none, and that behavioral diversity is a strength, even though that might cause negative traits to express themselves too.
I don't consider it psychopathy to not feel abject empathy for a video of a suffering animal, apart from maybe a cultural psychopathy. Not even all vegans feel this empathy towards animals either, though. For some, it's enough to understand that this animal is capable of experiencing pain and suffering similar to a human, and it's simply wrong to inflict that pain unnecessarily, empathy or not. There are other rational reasons to go vegan also.
Anyways, I've been having much nicer conversations here than other vegan topic subreddits, so thanks for that. I'm gonna attempt to take a break from reddit now.
Okay enjoy your break. Thanks for the conversation too
Edit: I should clarify I don't know what babies eat after being weaned. I know what happens to male calfs in the dairy industry though.
Personally I don't consume dairy because I don't think it's healthy for humans (I'm lactose tolerant though). Dairy is for calves that need to grow as fast as possible because a small calf is vulnerable in the wild so it is addictive and causes you to gain weight quickly. Also most dairy just tastes gross to me for some reason.
I don't consume dairy replacements like oat juice or almond juice either because they don't taste very good and I don't think they are healthy either (unless you produce them yourself and I can't be bothered to do that). The reason I don't think they are healthy is because is they usually contain at least one of the following: seed oils, gums like xanthan gum or guar gum, and carrageenan.
I'm not sure this follows; sharks evolved from other fish groups to.
The fish groups sharks evolved from where largely herbivores for millions and millions of years; that doesn't mean it was unnatural for the ancestors of the shark that became an omnivore to start eating meat after his genetics evolved.
Same with humans; alot of our unique evolution and increased brain power is specifically related to our increased meat eating (especially eating cooked meats allowing our bodies to break down proteins with less energy).
Natural/unnatural is a misnomer. Who decides what is natural?
Secondly, you're definitely right that humans evolved this way because of eating meat. That doesn't imply that you have to eat meat though. It's like saying that we exist because an ancestor left the ocean so therefore I'm not going to learn to swim.
I disagree with the unnatural word, but we've certainly got biology that more closely resembles herbivores than carnivores (long digestive tract, jaw and teeth structure).
As meat is a more recent introduction to our diet, and we basically have to cook it to eat it safely, I do understand the point they were going for.
Homo species started eating meat around 2.5 million years ago starting with Homo Habilis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_human_diet
"Stone tools and butchered animal remains dating to 2.6 million years ago have been found together in Ethiopia."
No, humans are omnivores at the beginning of our species history. In fact, all species in our genus (Homo) are omnivores, and around 60-70% of species of our family (Hominidae) are omnivores.
But that's only 200-300k years which isn't that much in the grand scheme of things
As I understand, there's only evidence of us and our ancestors eating meat for around 2 million years.
When compared with other true omnivores like bears and canines, it's clear that we evolved from and sit more on the herbivorous side of things.
Purely speculative here, but each of the studies that come out linking different types of animals foods with cancer risk and other health concerns kind of confirm it for me. Or at least that my diet works well.
We evolve form herbiovour is very different from whether we are or we should be herbivores. Our species' ancestor is not us. We are clearly omnivorous. And if you talk about health and nature, naturally, it's way easier for us to keep healthy as omnivores than herbivores. Without modern supplements like B12, a global food market that supplies us with all the food that can hardly be found in one place, and a carefully designed diet from modern nutritionists, it will be almost impossible for humans to stay healthy with a strict herbivore diet. With an omnivore diet, on the other hand, you can easily be healthy without them.
I hear your point but it is worth noting that cows are fed piles of cobalt so that they can get b12. There's nothing natural about our animal agriculture system and the world's meat eater population would be b12 deficient without this same supplementation
Many studies point to increasing the proportion of plant foods in the diet for better health outcomes. Being totally vegan is just taking it a little further
No, I don't know where you find this misinformation. Cobalt is contained in natrual environment, naturally you don't need to feed cows extra cobalt for that. Modern agriculture needs to do that because we raise so many cows in such high density that natrual don't contain all the material we need. Feeding them cobalt is just the same as feeding them corn. It's because they don't have enough local stuff to eat. The world's meat-eating population won't be B12 deficient without this supplementation; there will just be less meat eaten as meat will be more expensive, and for the people who can afford meat as they do now, they won't be B12 deficient.
The modern population (especially in developed countries) needs to eat more vegetables, because they don't consume enough vegetable so they don't get enough nutrient abundent in vegetables but lack in meat, and they are taking too much fat with unhealthy propotion. It's very different from that they shouldn't eat meat. Which in that case they will lack the nutrient audent in meat but lack in vegetable and usually needs to take carefully cacluted diet with supplement.
You say it's misinformation but your comment seems to say the same thing as mine? Modern animal agriculture is unnatural and requires the supplementation of cobalt so the cows aren't b12 deficient. It's not true in all cases but the vast majority (usually over 90%) of beef is from factory farmed cattle
I didn't quite jump to saying we shouldn't eat meat. But we have multiple studies linking red meat and cancer, notably of the bowel
It's dairy that seems to be the most unnatural and newly introduced. Breast cancer links, most of the world is intolerant and theres absolutely no way we've consumed that for more than ~15k years since the dawn of animal agriculture
No, I am not saying the same of your opinion. I am claiming quiet the opposite. Since English is not my first language, I apologize for any mispresentation. Without modern technology people who eat beef like nowadays won't become lack B12, it's just not enough beef can be produce and less people will able to afford it. I'm just saying naturally omnivores diet make us easier to keep health compare to herbivores diet. Naturally without modern technology, most people will die of hunger, and the remaining of us will live like medieval. And even then an omnivore diet will make you healthier than if you are vegan.
The link between red meat and cancer is because of the fat if you eat too much of it and excessive salt and nitrite in cured meat and smoke meat. That doesn't make meat itself inherently unhealthy. It a very healthy portion of diet. "Eating too much red meat or cured meat or smoked meat is unhealthy” is very different from “eating meat is unhealthy'.
Dairy is the same. It's unnatural in the past because human at first is mostly lactose intolerance. But it's natural to many people now, for majority of us have gain the mutation to digest dairy in certain degree. Nation depends more on animal husbandry and pastoralism in history usually have less lactose intolerance population issue. Like in East Asia about around 90% have some degree of lactose intolerance nowadays, but in north Europe only about 10%. And currently, most lactose intolerance population is just partially intolerance, they can eat some but will have problem if they eat over their capacity. So many people may not drink a lot of milk, but they can eat cheese or drink yogurt with no problem. For people who can digest dairy and absorb the abandoned nutrition from it, it's natural for them to eat dairy since they have these gene inherently.
No, that was around 2.5 million years ago starting with Homo Habilis.
What I say in the second sentence there?
Humans are compelled to eat. When they get hungry enough they are compelled to eat pretty much anything. That would include meat.
Human biology is very different from apes. We have the same stomach acidity as obligate carnivores, we are more intelligent/have bigger brains, we absorb nutrients from plants much less efficiently than nutrients, we are able to absorb very little energy from fibre compared to apes, we can get every nutrient we need to consume from food through meat but the same cannot be said for plants, and we have much better endurance than apes (in fact we have better endurance than any other animal, which we can use to our advantage to hunt animals).
To add on to our intelligence, our way of hunting uses weapons such as spears to hunt down our prey. We are able to rotate our shoulders in the correct way to do that but apes can't. This is why we never evolved to have teeth like most obligate carnivores; we simply use our endurance and intelligence to hunt the animal and then cook and rip it apart before we chew it.
Because of all our differences to apes I think saying we evolved from apes and because apes are very plant-based therefore we must be biologically plant-based is a very bad argument.
No, most apes are omnivores just like us. All species in our genus (Homo) are omnivores, and around 60-70% of species of our family (Hominidae) are omnivores.
In the absence of modern biotechnology you need to occasionally eat some animal matter to obtain vitamin B12. An vegetarian diet was possible, but a truely animal-free one was not.
Vitamin B12 exists naturally on many types of unwashed vegetables.
And in soil, especially if it has been fertilised with feces. However the concentration is rather low, you'd have to eat a lot of those to meet your needs. Some sources suggest over 100g of soil daily, which if nothing else would do a real number on your teeth assuming you chew whatever you are eat it with (you wouldn't just like... swallow dirt, right?).
Also healthy soil is full of little animals: mites, microscopic worms, springtails etc. if you don't wash your veggies you'll be eating those little guys so your diet still isn't animal free, just low animal.
Lots of omnivores evolved from herbivores, why is it any different in the case of humans like OOP is asking???
The important part is we evolved from apes. You know things change when they evolve? That’s actually an essential part of evolution. We have a shorter simpler digestive tract due to meat being a natural part of our diet. We also lost the ability to digest cellulose, which would be pretty essential if we didn’t eat meat.
If an animal kills another animal, we consider it to be just nature. There is no crime being committed, it's just the way things are.
If a human kills another human, basically everywhere in the world that's considered a crime. I'm sure you have no problem with morality being applied. So humans do hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Animals like lions don't have a choice about killing. We do.
The difference is we know better. We know that fur is wrong. We know that abusing dogs and cats is wrong. We know that foie gras is wrong. We know that breeding animals just to raise them caged inside warehouses and kill them when they've barely reached adulthood is wrong. We know that slamming a sick chicken's body against the ground, or whipping a weak horse, or punching a cow that wants to escape slaughter is cruel and evil.
We are capable of holding ourselves to a higher standard.
You make alot of assumptions of agreement there.
While i have kept farm animals i've never taken the life of an animal i raised (just collected their eggs, fed them, gave them warm water in the winter so they didn't freeze ect).
I have killed deer and fish though and eaten both and neither felt wrong to me.
It just felt like i was an animal on this planet like any other, hunting for food as members of my species have done for 10s of thousands of years.
I agree factory farming is immoral and on a personal level i'm not sure i could ever kill an animal i cared for but i dont think it's wrong for humans to just do what they've been doing since we came down from the trees. There are alot of worse ways for a deer to go then getting shot by a human hunter who has an incentive to end the animal's suffering in the quickest way possible.
You're still not addressing the argument, though. You went into the woods and shot a deer, and there was no recourse because you're legally empowered to enact that kind of violence; if a stranger came into your home and shot you through the heart with a bow, your analogy falls apart--it's no longer "just nature" as it is in the wild.
What you're saying here is not how the world we live in works. The 80 billion animals that are killed for eating every year are not just plucked out of nature without suffering.
I'm sorry, but do I?
Yes you do, in the last paragraph. For example, judging by the amount of humans that like fur, the first one is clearly false. Unless you mean with "we" not humans but vegans. But that would basically mean "people that think fur is wrong agree that fur is wrong", so I doubt you meant that.
Not going against your general argument here. Just clarifying what they likely meant.
I see this argument a lot, which is some mix of a strawman and an either-or fallacy.
Strawman, because veganism makes no claim about whether any two individuals are equal, or what it would even mean to be equal or unequal. That's a framing you've introduced.
Either-or fallacy, because your argument suggests that either a human and a non-human are "equal" (whatever this means), or else humans are "higher " beings (whatever this means). But this is a false dichotomy.
The reality is simply that we should hold individuals with higher levels of moral agency to a higher standard of behavior.
In a human context, this is boring and completely uncontroversial. For example, we generally hold adult humans to a higher standard of behavior than children. It seems reasonable to attribute greater responsibility to those who can better understand the moral implications of their actions.
Extending this principle across species leads us to the intuitive conclusion that humans ought not to rape, kill, and torture just because some animals might. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard of behavior, because we have the capacity to hold ourselves to a higher standard of behavior.
I think the humans and animals being equal is that we are not “morally superior”. That concept is rather self aggrandizing. The idea that we are better because of our intelligence is not necessarily true. I’d even argue that our intelligence is what causes a lot of the issues we create in the world. So for us to look at nature and say we understand it all better and have to do better is very arrogant of us as a species.
I have no idea what it means to be morally superior. I think this framing is unhelpful for answering the question being asked in OP.
Regarding the question, I think that it is reasonable to hold individuals with higher levels of moral agency to a higher standard of moral behavior. What do you think about this?
By your words “we should hold individuals with higher levels of moral agency to a higher standard of behavior.” That sounds like you are saying humans have a higher moral agency than animals, or in other words you see humans as morally superior. I disagree with this. I feel history shows humans are most definitely not a morally superior creature
This is why the "morally superior" framing that you insist on using is unhelpful. You're smuggling in meaning that isn't being stated outright.
For a moment, consider my point in an exclusively human context. It seems reasonable to say that you are more able to discern the rightness and wrongness of your actions than a 3-year toddler is. That's a skill you have developed better than the toddler has. That's all I mean when I invoke moral agency.
So because of your greater skill in discerning right and wrong, we should hold you to a higher standard of behavior, relative to the toddler.
Is that reasonable to you?
Again though, if you dont buy into this "grandiose" view of humanity where do you get the justification for our grandiose moral imperative to prevent harm to animals??
If we're just the same as everything else why would you expect us to act any better then everything else?
I don’t get how you believe we aren’t different to the other animals on this planet?
We are clearly an exception, not every animal can enslave entire species, I believe this ability should come with some conscientiousness. To enslave all species could be seen as immoral. But to enslave cattle is reasonable in most eyes due to believing that it is equivalent to opportunistic predator-prey hunting.
The realities of the situations are wildly different.
But alas, people who do not know of or see the wrongness of their actions can not correct them. I do not expect them to know better. This is where we get to the initial assumption.
To say humans are not a special case is stupid / unjustified, we are special in that there are no other comparable species.
I personally do believe humans are above animals. And I believe people with morals are above those without. Regardless of whether I agree with those morals.
The ability to defend, repair and protect ecologies and species is not one held by many, we are special in this regard and should not abuse our abilities.
I know it’s nice to say oh we’re all equal but we are not. Hierarchies exist and people and animals alike will self organise into them.
I do believe people with compassion and care for other beings are better than people who don’t. And I don’t feel bad for that, there should be no shame in accepting moral responsibility. I’d save a vegan over a meat eater any day and I’d save a human over another animal unconditionally.
I don’t. I think trying to act better is what causes problems.
>Strawman, because veganism makes no claim about whether any two individuals are equal, or what it would even mean to be equal or unequal. That's a framing you've introduced.
True, veganism unto itself makes no normative claims; it's life style decision not a justification for said decision.
But none the less people who make this decision (in my experience) do make the positive claim of being rational: and thus a burden of proof is created for them to provide a coherent justification for their actions.
If you DONT claim to be rational, if you dont claim there is any reason why you are a vegan you're right: you have no burden of proof and any hole i attempt to poke in your normative justifications is a false Dilemma.
If however you DO claim to be rational and DO claim there is a reason why you are vegan...
This comment suggests you don't understand the position you're trying to debate against.
Veganism is a normative position that animal exploitation is wrong and should be avoided. Veganism makes no claim about whether two individuals are equal or unequal.
are you compelled by biology to eat meat? obviously not, since otherwise there would be no vegans whatsoever.
Yeah, if we weren’t there wouldn’t be any non vegans right?
Should is perhaps not the correct question, but rather, are you capable of holding yourself to a higher standard, and if so, why not do so.
There's a lot wrong with your understanding of veganism, but ultimately, it doesn't matter for the purposes of this argument.
Vegans aren't slapping the Big Mac out of your hands. Vegans aren't wrestling lions to stop them from eating gazelles.
Vegans are having conversations about whether it's ok to treat certain individuals like objects for your use and consumption. The day we can have those conversations with lions, we will.
It's simply part of the human condition. We can do better so we must do better. Or at least those of us who want to be a good person must.
Do you want to be a good person?
If I shouldn’t hold you to a higher standard because you are capable of it, why should I hold myself to a higher standard just because I’m capable of it? What if I just eat you? It’s a slippery slope.
Humans do eat humans. It’s pretty heavily rejected by most societies today but it most definitely has and does happen.
Yeah but most humans view that behavior as morally repulsive. If humans view that behavior as immoral, maybe they should also view killing animals for food as immoral if doing so is unnecessary.
Most animals don’t eat their own species either. Maybe we should take our lessons from animals instead of thinking we know better than them.
Animals also rape each other.
Cause we're all members of society (humans and, in a way, pets), and our fundamental interest is behavior moderation to a degree that guarantees stability of that society. Every species does this, us included. Also, every species has no problem with antagonistic behaviors towards other species, if nutrition of their own is a consideration (even optional, like opportunistic carnivores).
Then I would strongly suggest that we transform the global food system towards being mostly plant-based so that climate change does not wipe out society. Right? Glad we agree.
I'm just curious, but can you provide a single source for a successful, large scale, plant based food system?
I'm going to assume that this food system does not rely on any animal inputs so as not to exploit the animals - obviously you cannot use animal power to till your fields, animal power to remove pests, animal power to provide manure, animal power to provide honey. Oh, and let's not forget, animal power to pollinate your crops.
Honey is not vegan. Not sure why this is in your list.
You don't seem to understand what veganism is.
Well for the purposes of global warming and otherwise breaking ecological homeostasis to a degree that negatively affects humanity - yes, we actually do agree. It's just that it's a very different conversation than "obtaining and eating meat is morally wrong, period".
So why are you still supporting factory farming?
I think you can manage the switch.
"So why are you still supporting factory farming? " - where did that idea ever come to your mind? I don't support anything at all, I'm not opposed to anything automatically either. The topic here is not "why you dislike factory farming specifically", it's "why eating meat is bad, period" which is, again, a completely different conversation.
If veganism concentrated on facordy farming specifically, then perhaps it would be so popular that it would not require any discussions at all. However, it chose a very different path which is, in my view, many times more difficult to excuse, and it needs to carry that burden. There's no pretending it's just about factory farming, sadly.
The conversation you and me are having is about the stability of human society which you - in my opinion - used to justify meat consumption. Fact is that our current meat & animal product consumption threatens this stability. It does not matter if you look at it from a vegan standpoint or not. Your claim is flawed.
Okay, so what's the conversation about? As I already said - yes, we actually do agree. There's certainly some worrying environmental impact from meat industry and farming more broadly (not strictly animal husbandry related, a significant part is for oil palms for example), especially stuff like cutting down swaths of natural forests for fields and pastures, which should be prevented. I'm okay with those efforts be prevented, even at some manageable decrease of meat availability or increase in price.
However, I certainly value my own pleasure many times more than the "impact" that changing my personal diet would make in the matter. The negative value of that would not excuse any positive value (effectively zero).
So you actually don't care about the stability of our society?
You're proposing that if one cares about something then they care unconditionally and in every imaginable way this caring might be materialized?
Most vegans declare they care about animals, and yet they participate in vehicular transport, that kills over 5 million vertebrates daily. You're proposing that no vegans really care about animals, then?
While moving to a much more plant based diet is indeed the right thing to do for our society, the ideal scientifically backed diet for that is neither vegan nor vegetarian. See lancet diet.
You see no problem because you are not the victim. And you see humans as superior because you are human and it's convenient for you. But we are all equal, each at their level. And I believe we go through all of the levels. And it's in our best interest to treat others as we'd like to be treated because we are gonna be in their position too.
Wow I love this post and have never heard this. The hierarchy with humans at the top always comes up in this debate for me as well. A lot of the practices seem to reinforce this hierarchy, while weirdly not giving sympathy to humans at all. I know this is a commonly mentioned one, but the topic of cells phones is huge. Humans are literally forced to live in horrible, exploitative conditions, all so you can get your new iPhone every year?? Where is the emphasis on ecological practices that help every creature + earth in our ecosystem? That is systematically much less exploitative than what we are doing now.. the response is always “well vegans can’t be expected to lift the weight of everything, and this is their contribution.” Well same for people who are “giving up” all sorts of other things that are good for the world. So why all the dang judgement idk.
They are required to, they don't have grocery stores and access to tons of Plant based options.
We morally judge humans for all sorts of horrible things that are completely normal in nature. I'm assuming you're not pro-murder or rape, and yes they are both very common on nature.
Human live in sealed off communities, out of most of hte dangers and ignorance of wild life, we have access to all sorts of food, we understand science and psychology to a degree wild animals could never even dream of (We assume anyway), to me that seems like a pretty good argument for us holding ourselves to a slightly higher standard than that in the wild where adult males of some species will murder any other baby that isn't theirs to ensure their own genetic line...
> I'm assuming you're not pro-murder or rape, and yes they are both very common on nature.
True but i'm not a materialist.
I think human beings have value because they were made in the image of God and if there is a case to be made for us to be kind animals it is grounded in this higher nature.
If we're just all teritorial apes i dont se any argument for us to be anything but territorial apes.
If we cant agree at least on what gives human life this value and thus human beings this responsibility i dont se how we can make a case for anything normative beyond that which is evolutionarily advantageous.
If you're a believer in an Abrahamic religion, the Garden of Eden was God's idea of perfection and it was plant based.
The Golden Rule is seen through many religions, cultures, etc because it's pretty self explanatory. If you don't want to be raped, tortured, and murdered, you shouldn't rape, torture and murder. Humans are animals, objectively speaking none of us are "special", so logic and common sense should say we should try to not cause others to suffer horribly needlessly because we don't want to and the more suffering there is int he world, the more likely we, or someone we love, will suffer too.
Holding ourselves to a higher standard is part of what makes us human.
There are all sorts of things that animals do that we consider immoral, we don't base our ethics on them in other cases. Many animals eat or abandon their young for example but you wouldn't do that.
We have the privilege of being able to think about ethics in a way they can't and also the power to choose not to cause harm.
Veganism is just about treating cows and pigs the same way we treat cats and dogs.
People don't have moral base instincts to eat meat. It's a learned social behavior. If you put a tiger cub in a room with a bunny, the cub will try to kill it and eat it. A human toddler will not, because it doesn't have the instinct.
Interestingly, chimpanzees are similar to humans in this. They don't have a natural instinct to hunt. It's a learned social behavior. If they grow up in a community that regularly hunts and eat meat, they will learn to do so too. If they are not exposed to hunting and meat eating, they won't learn to do it on their own and often dont show interest in meat even when presented with it.
For humans as well, many who did not grow up eating meat or hunting, who don't have that desensitisation, they're repulsed by the smell, taste, texture, etc of meat. Even people who did grow up with meat are not naturally drawn to meat, but practice meat consumption as cultural tradition. Most people are not attracted to the smell or taste of a cow carcass, but to the taste of a clean, cooked, seasoned piece of meat.
So it's not an instinct, it's a cultural tradition that's been passed down for milennia, especially by ancestors whose survival depended on it.
Now, why do we hold human to a moral standard that we don't hold bears too (bear cubs also dont generally hunt prey unless they are taught to do so).
1) intellect and the capacity for sophisticated moral reasoning. While some animals other than humans can experience emotions like guilt and regret, they do not have the capacity to understand sophisticated moral reasoning or large concepts like animal rights and environmental equity.
2) necessity. Veganism isnt about being 100% vegan, but being vegan to the best of your ability. A bear that needs salmon because it doesnt have sufficient access to nuts and berries, is different from a human who makes a choice.
Thats the same reason vegans dont hold tribal people to the same standard. Some do know the impact of meat consumption on environment and biodiversity, many dont. Some might have other choices for diversified diets, many dont.
Why do we jail an adult man who hits a woman, but not a toddler, who hits the same woman? Because the adult man has a capacity to reason that a toddler does not have. Why do we hold humans accountable when their dog bites someone? Because the human understands the law and morality of not attacking others, and the dog doesnt.
So in summary, meat eating is not instictual for humans, its cultural & we hold adult humans to different standards all the time, why should this be different?
Humans should be held to a higher standard of morality because we're capable of it. Just the same way adult humans are held accountable for more of their actions than toddlers are.
Morality doesn't follow from desires and desires aren't biological compulsions. You desire to eat meat, you're not biologically compelled to. You would be biologically compelled to eat meat if you couldn't do anything else. For example you're biologically compelled to not be able to see light outside of VIBGYOR. Simply put, a human can desire to have sex with another human, that doesn't mean they're biologically compelled to.
Morality follows from consent and sentience. The animal that you're eating is incapable of consenting while being sentient. This means that they're moral targets but not moral agents, the same way someone who's on a high end of Autism spectrum or a baby for example is. This means that, vegans argue that since an animal is sentient (aware of its own existence) but not capable of consent (by lack of enough brain development) they should be treated as such and shouldn't be used like they are.
TL;DR: All sentient beings should be moral targets, while all beings capable of higher level understanding should be treated like Moral agents. In the case of a moral agent, also being a moral target, morality is defined by consent. Hence animals shouldn't be labelled moral agents, but should be labelled moral targets.
I don’t see humans and other animals as equal. Humans have a much higher capacity for logic and reasoning and are the only species capable of truly understanding morality.
Animals frequently steal from each other and rape each other (because they don’t know any better than to just follow their biological instincts). However, most humans wouldn’t say that makes it okay for us to do the same. Even among humans, toddlers may scream and hit you when they are upset, but that doesn’t mean we do the same to them.
Side Note: Even if you were to ignore all this, omnivorous animals kill and eat other animals because food is scarce in the wild — choosing to forgo eating an animal even once could lead to starvation later on. While it is true that many omnivorous animals (just like humans) can survive eating only plants, this only applies when there is an abundance of different types of plant foods that allows them to easily get all the nutrients they need. It’s the same reason why veganism would probably have been impossible in the hunter-gatherer age. But in the modern environment we live in today, there is a wide variety of plant foods available, making it no longer necessary for us to eat animal products to be healthy (but this cannot be said for animals living in the wild).
Your question illustrates why, despite the deep confusion of several prominent activists and the valiant attempts of some academics (particularly Tom Regan), veganism is not naturally deontological.
Consequentialist ethics doesn't view moral worth as grounded in the ability of a being to be held to a particular standard of behavior itself. The capacity to have positive or negative experiences as a sentient being is enough for moral status.
For a consequentialist like myself, holding beings to standards is a derivative value, based upon the degree to which various sorts of incentive are likely to improve the impact of that being's actions of itself and others. There are some ways that many nonhuman beings can have their behavior improved through incentives, though obviously not in all of the complex ways we use for other humans.
If we can get dogs to stop ripping apart other dogs, we should. You might, of course, call this "not really holding accountable in some metaphysical sense, just trying to improve outcomes." If so, I'd say that on principle that's the ideal attitude to have toward punishment and reward of humans as well. We are equally the result of causal forces; we differ only in the complexity of social incentives that affect us.
Which is to say, I hold people accountable for economically supporting horrific exploitation of nonhuman beings, not because I think they have some kind of free will outside the causal forces that determine other animals' behavior, but rather because my moral judgment is a factor that has a significant probability of positively changing them.
"why should humans be held to any higher standard then animals are?"
I'm a vegan and I believe that humans ought to be held to higher standards than animals. The key word here is 'standard', since depending on what is meant then the answer will vary. I may be equivocating on the meaning you are leading the charge here with in your question, but I take standard to mean the way we treat the thing in all respects. So, in some ways we do hold some animals to the same standards as humans. You wouldn't punch a dog walking down the street or kill a dog just as you wouldn't do the same to a human stranger.
Other animals are not so fortunate, as they are physically abused (in virtue of being born into captivity/terrible living conditions) or outright killed.
Expanding on the examination of the term standard, another reason why animals aren't held to the same standards is because they lack a level of cognition similar to humans. They lack complex reasoning skills, logical deduction, and so on. If by standard, that's what we mean, then there are some pretty convincing reasons to exclude animals from being expected to, say, argue a case in some setting where a human of sound mind would be expected to do the same.
OP, you're conflating
Not everyone has the same responsibilities and obligations. Do you blame a baby for making a mess? No.
In philosophical circles, it is often said that nonhuman animals are moral patients/subjects. This means that they "are morally relevant," or "have moral value," or "are worthy of moral consideration."
The human animal, however, uniquely has a deep degree of understanding of morality, a deep understanding of the world around them, unmatched power and resources, and is not (usually) in a desperate bid for survival. In other words, they have moral responsibility -- an obligation to be better and do better than nonhuman animals. A dog, although smart in its own way, can't be held to the same responsibility/standards (just as how a human infant or patient with dementia has different standards). Hence, humans are said to be moral agents in philosophical circles.
Nonhuman animals...
Your question is:
You further asked:
And you concluded with the following overarching question:
The answer is simple. Humans hold themselves to a higher standard than nonhuman animals when it comes to rape/sexual assault and infanticide which is common and natural amongst many nonhuman animal species. Let’s call this the coherent philosophical justification X.
By logical extension of this same coherent philosophical justification X, humans hold themselves to a higher standard than nonhuman aninals when it comes to deliberately and intentionally killing nonhuman animals outside of self-defense.
I don't really get some of what you're saying. In the colloquial sense humans *aren't* animals, in the biological sense we are. The possibility for equivocation is a bit annoying. In any case, generally people don't believe animal life is equally as valuable as humans.
Humans are moral agents normally, we have a rational decision making faculties and are responsive to rational thought normally. So we can also recognise normative reasons, and see what is wrong and right.
It's not about *judging*, but saying we shouldn't do it because it causes so much suffering. Animals do all sorts of insane things in the wild that we recognise as wrong.
As for materialism, I mean I still think it would be wrong to inflict needless suffering on animals, and would be something we shouldn't do.
Do you judge the oceans for causing a tsunami? This seems to be a question on par with the ones you asked here. The scenario isn't exactly the same, as animals do have free will, but similar enough to compare. Other animals don't have a consistent understanding of higher level morality. I don't hold them to a moral standard because they have no reliable understanding of morality in the first place. Natural phenomena, non-human animals, and babies have one thing in common and it's that they are not moral agents. In contrast, the very fact that we human adults can even sit here and argue intellectually about morality shows that we are actually able to be held to a moral standard, unlike other creatures.
Suppose someone has the required training, land, and resources to design and build a house. Such a person would build themselves some shelter rather than sleep outside in the cold rain.
But a wolf sleeps outside in the cold rain. We're not puzzled by this. The wolf doesn't know how to build a house.
Are we holding the human to a higher standard than the wolf? No! The human is just using their skills and understanding to take actions that the wolf cannot. We don't require the human to build a house, it's just the sensible thing for them to do given their intelligence and abilities.
It's the same with the choice of what to eat. Wolves aren't smart enough to understand the suffering of members of other species, and they have dietary restrictions that humans do not. It would be just as stupid to expect wolves to be vegetarian as it would be to expect them to build houses. Don't you think?
Veganism is not about the value of life, but rather about reducing suffering and exploitation.
Imagine a toddler punches you in the face with enough force to actually hurt you. What happens to the toddler? Do we arrest them for assault?
Now imagine that you punched a toddler in the face with enough force to actually hurt them. What happens to you? Do you get arrested for assault? If not, would you be more or less likely to be arrested than the toddler?
How do you account for the difference in treatment? If we arrested you and you are sentenced to 3 years in prison, how would we justify not arresting the toddler and giving them the same sentence?
Of course humans are morally responsible but not animals.
This is kind of like the appeal to nature fallacy - perhaps not exactly but close.
We also don't judge animals for killing one another, raping one another, killing their young and many other acts that we judge humans for.
Are you going to also condone murder, rape, infanticide too because those also happen in the animal kingdom?
Flawed assumption from the get go, because already individual humans are held to different standards. If a baby or a small child smacks you in the eye it is not the same as a an adult (if this person is not mentally impaired) smacking you in the eye.
And if YOUR "base instinct" truly is needlessly exploiting, torturing and killing sentient beings you should see a therapist.
Do you also think that if you have sexual desires you should follow your "basic instincts" and just rape any woman you fell will satiate these desires?
This is cope. The vast majority of people alive today are either humanists (who naturally think humans are great), or followers of Abrahamic religions (who believe humans are the only creatures with souls).
The only people who can willingly be cruel to animals and justify it as "we're just like them" are true animist types who are actually being one with nature and don't have a hierarchical worldview. This is surprisingly rare actually because of how egotistical human beings are.
I as a vegan do not value human life equal to animal life. I simply value an animals life over its use as a luxury.
An animal does not have the same access to vegan food we do, but even if they did and where cable of reasoning and moral judgment that doesn’t justify my meat consumption. Just because someone does something doesn’t justify it.
Simply put I have the ability to be vegan and the moral reasoning to see veganism is correct, hence am vegan, all else is secondary.
Your comparison is wrong.
Humans don’t just eat other animals, they force breed them into lives of enslavement, confinement, torture, and death. It is brutality and cruelty unmatched in scale.
No other animals do this.
But even more basically, veganism is about choice. Veganism is not opposed to humans in subsistence situations consuming animals.
Humanity, as a whole, is not in subsistence situations. If anything, animal agriculture creates scarcity and food insecurity.
For what it’s worth, if someone is arguing that humans and animals are “equal”, they’re most likely arguing that humans and animals are equal in terms of moral consideration, rather than equal in terms of responsibility to act morally.
If any vegan is arguing that animals ought to act in a manner consistent with human moral behavior, they are extremely far outside the norm and the argument you’re making becomes sort of a red herring or straw man.
Edit: typo
Do you think the value of an individual determines whether they have a moral right to not be eaten by others?
Should it be considered moral for humans to eat other humans who are considered less valuable?
Should humans considered less valuable have less legal rights?
Obviously, you value animals and humans more than you do plants for various reasons which is why you eat plants over those, nothing special about this. You also value the things you do more than the things you don't do, which is why you do the things you do and sacrifice every other potential thing you could be doing instead, it simply is more aligned with your "Will" and what you value (as in what is most consistent with your worldview and your identity). This applies to All beings, depending on what they value most they do different things.
Depends on what you value, there is no absolute, stance independent answer to this, if you claim otherwise you are basically a fundamentalist who treats their own personal value system as the absolute truth.
Same answer, depends on what your goal and worldview are.
I would ask if you disagree with either of these points:
Is "someone else did it" a good basis for right and wrong?
Is "That possum over there did it" REALLY a good basis for right and wrong?
i'm 100% sure you don't agree with your own premise.
Also - nearly every human holds humans to higher standards of behavior than wild animals. Nobody ever tried to arrest a squirrel for peeing in the street.
One way to look at this is to accept the opposite: let’s judge animals the same.
If there were humans living in a jungle, who literally must hunt other creatures for survival, I would not morally condemn them. Conversely, if another animal started rounding up billions of mammals and subjecting them to systematic and unnecessary cruelty, I would condemn them.
Its actually not that difficult of a position to hold. We consider autonomy, capacity, scope of harm, and intention when judging other people’s actions. We can just do the same towards non human animals.
It's not. (But I'm not sure it matters because I think my next point holds regardless.)
For the same reason adults are held to higher standards of behaviour than children, and than the mentally impaired: because they're capable of it.
Sigh.
Humans are held to a higher standard because we possess the cognitive ability to make ethical decisions, the body to digest solely plant-based foods with no ill health effects, and the technology to buy stuff at the store or grow stuff from the ground instead of having the singular choice to eat whatever happens to cross our path for dinner.
None of those things make human life more valuable than an animal's life, but it does make us responsible for our decisions in a way that animals never could be.
even if we accept your premise as true, the harm we inflict on the factory farm chicken is leagues greater than the harm the lion inflicts on the gazelle, and has much greater and more significant externalities in terms of climate change and ecosystem destruction.
I think it's fair to say this is also a slippery slope - what animal behaviours do we view as a step too far? How does financial support of, for instance, factory farming fit into your moral standards?
Fundamentally, as others have pointed out, animals don't have a moral standard, and you do.
edit: my first post:
even if we accept your premise as true - that we humans ought to hold ourselves to the same standards as the mallard duck - the harm we inflict on the factory farm chicken is leagues greater than the harm the lion inflicts on the gazelle, and has much greater and more significant externalities in terms of climate change and ecosystem destruction. However, animals don't have a moral standard and you do, so this is basically an argument for moral nihilism. It's already far down the slippery slope and can be used to excuse the most depraved behaviour we see in the animal kingdom, such as silverbacks killing their rival's young. Personally, I feel like if I could meet a Silverback that I could speak with, and I could explain to it why it shouldn't kill its rivals young, and it could understand this, and could internalise it, and did not have a good moral refutation as to why it should do so, then I think that Silverback really ought to consider no longer killing its rivals young.So you're saying that even if we resigned from special standards for humans, we should stop lions from feeding themselves as soon as there's some fixed number of them and the collective harm they cause to gazelles daily is just too large?
I disagree completely. Me and you, I assume, accept the death and suffering of animals caused by many other human-related factors, like vehicular transport. It's over 5 million vertebrates daily. I assume you have not resigned from using vehicles and don't protest its use. We agree animal death and suffering is acceptable, we just disagree where exactly is the line. For me, a species being able to feed its members is a fair game, to you it isn't. We're either both moral nihilists, or we both aren't.
I don't think I said anything like that; however I did edit my post (and get rid of the moral nihilism angle). I suppose there is some potential 'is killing an invasive species justified?' angle you could go for but it's very tangential to the day-to-day lives of the average Western vegan. I'd probably leave that decision up to 'experts in that particular local ecology'.
I was saying 'moral nihilism' because I read the OP as meaning 'we can give ourselves the same moral standards as a lion', whereas really they were saying 'why do we have to consider morality in our treatment of animals without moral standards - why don't we give animals this burden', so I revised my post.
We have greater capacity for moral thought than animals.
But does that translate into some specific moral obligations automatically? We can have a moral discussion and arguments for each point of view, sure, but bringing this up seems like it should justify that "..and by the sole virtual of having moral thought, one side of the conversation is morally right, while the other isn't". I don't think that tracks.
Yes, but if one side of the conversation has compelling arguments why one behaviour is immoral - i.e the stress and harm faced by animals in factory farms, the meat industry's impact on climate change and the associated human cost - then the other side needs a good rebuttal!
No, that would simply not make any sense. You'd be saying "no, you're not obligated to morally agree with me, but you better see (and try to outweigh) the moral value in my arguments (which requires you to agree with me)".
It's as if I said "the red pigment is morally more important than blue, so you're evil for wearing red clothes. You should stop immediately or better have a really good rebuttal to that!". Doesn't make sense.
you have the capacity for better moral reasoning for animals, so when I explain that animals are hurt unnecessarily in cramped conditions to feed a populace that already eats too much meat to the detriment of the climate then you can understand this moral framework. And I'm curious how you can have a moral framework that justifies all these harms to animals and the wider world for unnecessary protein. You have the capacity for moral thought and can therefore consider these quandries in a logical way.
Can you understand how you can excuse all the animal death and suffering that you accept for the existence of human vehicular transport? You have the moral capacity to understand and boycott that, why wouldn't you?
at some point we have to say that capping my behaviour in this way would be inordinately burdensome. For instance, I think we should give to charity, so therefore I think it would be very virtuous to give all of my property away to charity and live out in the cold.
I do consider these externalities but instead I limit my behaviour in other ways - such as by favouring walking.
Really, anyone with standards and virtues could be forced to do all kinds of things for fear of being accused of hypocrisy. One who gives blood ought to also give a kidney and their liver lobes and their bone marrow. One who puts a penny in the poorbox should donate all their free time to alleviating poverty. The only people who don't have to put 'caps' on their morals and virtues surely must be those without them. Causing some level of cruel or negligent treatment to animals is just part and parcel of being a human - for instance, wild animals would've once lived where my house is, and they got displaced. But you can surely at least try to minimise the harm you cause. And continual patronising of factory farmed meat is not doing so.
When a harm is large, systematic, unnecessary, and low-cost to avoid, it's moral to avoid it. If you care about unnecessary suffering, the environment, and harm reduction, there's only one dietary answer. Avoiding high-speed - transport is unambomber-incontacted-tribe-level burdensome compared to tofu. And I suppose I would note that the harm of bug splatter on windows is leagues less significant than the destruction of the meat industry too.
Great, so you say "it's too much of a bother not to participate in killing of 5+million animals a day", I say "it's too much of a bother not to do so for some trillions from meat industry", and another person says we're both immoral demons for participating in either. We all agree to disagree and respect each other's views on morality and live happily ever after.
"More over if you're a materialist and an atheist (as most vegans seem to be) it seems kinda silly to morally judge a human being for anything he's compelled to do by biology; let alone obeying his most base natural instincts as every other animal on the planet does."
animals in the wild rape eachother, you might wanna rethink this
We have moral agency. I believe a pigs life is just as valuable as mine and does not deserve to suffer any more than I do. But at the same time I have to hold us to a higher standard because we have moral agency and do not act off instincts alone. That’s a big difference between us and animals.
Vegans don’t necessarily think we are equal to other animals, just that animals should not be exploited.
Humans are held to a standard. We can control our own actions and expect one another to cooperate on serious long-term societal and planetary management. I can't hold a cat accountable for the way they treat others the way I can hold my neighbor or coworker to account.
Why are adults held to higher standards than children are?
Why are public figures held to higher standards than private citizens are?
Why is anyone ever held to a higher standard than anyone else? Is it always hypocrisy?
For one of the same reasons we don't prosecute 4 year old for acts that would be crimes if done by an adult - the ability to engage in moral reasoning is a necessary component of moral blameworthiness.
I'm trying to be polite. Bring cleverer then an ant doesn't gone you the right to kill an ant. Hard to measure intelligence, but what if someone is cleverer than you
Humans are held to a higher standard because they are more intelligent than other species and can potentially understand that it is bad to harm others.
a) animals have sufficient value to not be exploted and kulled for food
b) animals are just as valuable as humans
Not the same thing.
They shouldn’t be.
But individuals who are capable of moral thought should be held to a higher moral standard than those who aren't.
Cause we can be.
If another human violates ethical principles is that justification for you to violate them too?
Other animals can’t drive to a store and choose a plant based option.
They need to name the trait that makes us special and different.
Here you go:
https://youtu.be/AKvCew98rKY?si=N_iDkFwgfBsf6IOk
Fake philosophers are the most annoying people in the world.
Alex O'Connor is a fake philosopher and was a fake vegan.