Eating Animals

I notice the 'capacity for moral discernment' seems to be on most's checklists.

I guess that excludes babies, the mentally ill, the senile, and most geriatrics declining in 'normal' abilities to discern right and wrong.

Rationality, I repeat, is not the basis for moral consideration. It is a qualifier for who or what is attended to in a greater degree, but as rational agents ourselves, and as sustainable omnivores, we can choose to alleviate pain. To me, flavor preference is a horrible way to justify pain.District 9 and Avatar are great movie-led thought experiments that illustrate such.

Vegetarianism is not a first-world luxury, as I've heard Anthony Bourdain put it; in fact, most of the world in arcane times was vegetarian reluctantly. Meat in the dark ages was to stew and hide flavors in the sour and sorry mix of veggies they had in the pot.

Why should moral consideration prevent us from eating them?

If an animal dies accidentally or is euthanased eating the corpse could damage only your own health.

David Drum Bum is right, and the way in which farm animals are intensively bred,reared and fattened is wrong because it causes them sustained pain.

i. Then kill it healthy.

ii. Then don't buy meat produced in that way.

i.We should all watch carefully that commercial abbattoirs do the job cafefully preferably by waged professionals and not workers on piecework rates.

ii.I don't because I am a good veg cook, and can afford to buy organic meat on special occasions. Trouble is that factory farmed meat and dairy are cheap and popular food sources in the absence of mass- produced vegetarian fast food.And in the absence of proper nutrition education.

but as a college student it's expensive to sustain a purely vegetarian diet and get all the nutrients required.

I know this. If it's any consolation it's probably better for your health to cut down on meat and dairy. Red lentils are really good. They must
be boiled ten minutes. Other pulses need soaking plus boiling read the instructions.Add vegetable bouillon powder or cubes to just about every savoury veggy dish. A tiny soupcon of sugar adds a great flavour to veggy soup and stew. And dont forget the pepper pot.And olive oil.

[Scott]

Why should moral consideration prevent us from eating them?

David Drum Bum is right, and the way in which farm animals are intensively bred,reared and fattened is wrong because it causes them sustained pain.

ii. Then don't buy meat produced in that way.

ii.I don't because I am a good veg cook, and can afford to buy organic meat on special occasions. Trouble is that factory farmed meat and dairy are cheap and popular food sources in the absence of mass- produced vegetarian fast food.And in the absence of proper nutrition education.

I think that is the result of the legalization of a type offensive violence mixed with capitalism. Capitalism tends towards resulting in the most cost-efficient way to conduct business even in very large complex economies, but it only counts that which has a financial cost or selling value. Where human slavery is legal, the non-financial costs of slavery (i.e. the pain it causes to the unwilling victims) are not measured and products made by slavery will beat products made by the more expensive method of persuading workers to voluntarily work by offering them payment in return.

In parallel to the treatment of animals, companies that use violent, slavery-ridden sweatshops from the third-world sell cheap clothes more competitively than companies that produce in the first world.

In capitalism, cost-effectiveness becomes the ever so important deciding factor of which companies succeed, how products are produced and which products sell. This of course can be a great way to increase wealth production and efficiency. But it makes what is counted as 'costs' and what is not very important. If certain things such as the pain caused to slaves by enslaving them or the pain caused to animals by enslaving them, then these things will happen even if they would be considered drastically less cost-efficient under a different way of measuring cost.

The debate of what to count as costs has no objective answer because value is relative. As an amoralist, I do not bother to say eating animals is wrong or human slavery is wrong. But we can get enough people to agree that they consider these things to be undesirable, meaning that they would consider them to be costs. (That is, they in their opinion count those things as cons when weighing the pros and cons of doing something that causes those things.) If we get enough people, then we can change the policies that determine how much it financially costs to engage in the behaviors. If they are not financially costly in the capitalist market, they will happen en masse. To use the human slavery analogy once more, at one time it was very financially cost-effective in the US capitalist market for plantation owners to use slave labor, but eventually enough people decided it was costing them to much in terms of happiness and self-respect and these people made it very financially costly for the plantation owners in the US to enslave others. Nowadays, if you enslave others in the US, you will likely go to jail, pay large amounts in legal fees, fines and civil restitution to the victims. Products that are made using human slave labor in the US would thus cost more in dollars at a store than products made without.

But do enough people feel the same about animal victimization and animal slavery as they do about human victimization and human slavery? I don't think so. So for now those of us who want vegetarian, organic or humanely produced foods may have to pay more for them to make up for the otherwise uncounted costs of causing harm to animals. Eventually, we may convince enough people to have policy changes. I doubt the mistreatment of animals and slavery of animals will ever be as illegal and commonly disliked as the mistreatment or humans and human slavery--and understandably in my opinion. Even I as a vegetarian do not sympathize nearly as much with animals as much as I do with humans. But even if animal slavery is not as illegal as human slavery, the costs of it could be counted more than they are now by such methods as say charging a fee to those who hurt animals or kill them for product-production or outlawing especially inhumane treatment of animals when alternative methods available (e.g. "only X number of chickens in a Y-sized cage"). Non-legal methods such as boycotts are also at our disposal.

Scott, as you say, self respect is important with regard to not causing suffering to others.This is where what is sometimes called
'consciousness -raising ' comes in . Education in other words.Education in both moral philosophy and emotional intelligence.

Chinese fur imports must be stopped.If you can stand to read horrors:
http://www.advocatesforanimals.org/cont ... w/269/580/

Well-done Scott. Thanks for the perspective.


David Drum Bum said, "To me, flavor preference is a horrible way to justify pain."

Nicely put. I agree. I see it as insensitive and selfish. And we so often complain when WE are treated with such lack of consideration so we might want to consider extending compassion more frequently, if for no objectively moral reason, then because it promotes ethical fairness regardless of race or species and this may come to OUR rescue one day.

I would add that increased financial struggle in the search for morally appropriate nutritional intake should be viewed as a testing ground for our convictions. Bring on the belly-ache.

I think I remember that the USA has banned fur imports from China

I dunno about you guys, but I've never 'murdered' an animal. When I buy meat, someone else has already done the killing for me.

Kinda like gettin a hitman to take our your Mother-In-Law

It strongly believe in the circle of live...and I also believe that some people should be murdered. We got one planet and we all have to live on it equally. So those who waste life, and purposefully destroy the Earth should be sheppered, and killed.

Ive heard "everyone has something to offer" but does everyone have something 'useful' to offer?

Murder is a legal term. You therefore cannot murder an animal. You can only kill it. Killing for food is legal. Killing and hurting animals without reason is a criminal offense.

I graduated from college in 1975 with a degree in Psychology. The head of the Psych deparment taught that only man had the ability to think in abstract terms and communicate with others. Every thing animals did was said to be inherit instinctive behavior. The Bible also supports that humans are the only creation of God that has an eternal soul. I believe in God, but there are many things in the Bible I find very questionable and I believe it was definitely influenced by man's point of view at the time it was written.

I have never bought into the idea that animals do everything instinctively; not in the seventies and not now. Animals can think and feel and some have very sophisticated communicative skills. Some can think in the abstract.

Philosphically I believe we should all be vegetarians. However, to eat meat or not to eat meat is a choice each individual has to choose for himself.

But please don't abuse animals or kill them for sport.

If people tasted better than animals (and we might), would we convert to cannibalism?

But of course, only eat foreigners. 'Cause we're patriotic.

Why shouldn't it be illegal to kill animals for food?
Especially if we don't have to eat them to survive?

Is it social conditioning mixed with selfish desire mixed with abusive power mixed with insensitivity mixed with specism (bigotry against something because of its species, which, like racism, is absurd because one cannot control how or into which category one is born)?

Are we the only animal that possesses a conscience with which to decide that, though we have the power and the desire, we can choose to refrain from killing those who are lower on the chain because we are fully aware of the things we've come to cherish so deeply: freedom, fairness, and safety?

Are we also the only animal that squanders such enlightenment?

Reminder - I've only been a non-meateater for 2 months. The rest of my 26 years were spent as a hypocrite because I demanded fairness but did not extend it.

In answer to your question HP, its quite simple, economics. The meat industry is exactly what it says on the tin, an industry. It is legal to kill animals for food for the exact same reason that it is legal to buy alcohol (which ruins people's lives), cigarettes (which give people lung cancer), pornographic movies (which if you know anything about the porn industry is not as ethically perky as many think), why abortion is legal, many doctor assisted suicides, and why it is legal conduct experiments on animals. It is legal because these things are always the lesser of other evils. It is a utilitarian issue, unfortunately (I know where you stand on that one), yes, it sucks to kill animals, but what is our alternative?

We are currently in the middle of a recession, if not a depression. We have unemployment going through the roof. We owe China trillions of US dollars worth of funds. The west is struggling to stay aflote as it is. Now what happens if we suddenly release all these animals? We suddenly have a generation of lifestock, which due to years of genetic modification cannot survive in the wild and so in order to keep them alive we must spend yet more time and resources, that we will literally not survive doing, it would basically beat us into the stone age. Because it is not possible to keep them alive and they will die anyway, me must prevent them taking us down with them, so we must prevent them consuming our resources, the only way of doing that is a mass culling, so then as apposed to killing an animal for food we have killed them for no reason other than to save our skins, which is a greater evil me thinks. Then, if we survive that, we must then survive millions of previous meat industry employees trying to get jobs, and losing the income we got from meat trade, which is a multi billion dollar industry, one of the few ones that kept the country running.

With such a ridiculous loss made financial, there simply will not be enough to keep industries like our health care, or other essential food producers running, and so the death toll then becomes? You may think its important to adhere to a principle no matter the cost, but believe me, the cost of adhereing to this principle of not killing no matter the cost, is pretty damn high trust me!

You cannot just expect massive economic changes to just happen. Economics is like physics and money is like energy. As massive shift of energy is usually destructive in nature, money is no different.

But there is an alternative, and it doesn't involve giving up on solving the problem. We cannot solve the problem of animals dying, because death is a fact of life no matter what you do. We also cannot solve the problem of unethical reering and slaughtering by boycotting, but we can by wisely investing. Economic change comes quantities less than it does from ratios. The trick is to invest heavily in specific kinds of meat products and boycot others, so for example, we boycot fish because of over fishing, and chicken cos unethical slaughters in the poultry industry is a massive loophole that nobody seems to have noticed, and invest heavily in pork, beef and lamp products, which are subject to the ethical slaughtering act (electric shock to the back of the neck), and ontop of that aim for free range. That way, in order to compete financially with the meat producers who are making millions because people are investing in ethical techniques, these other producers too will need to resort to ethical means.

In other words, use greed against them to change the nature of their industry. THAT is how you make a difference, you must GIVE to the RIGHT people.

I will not be content with that which is wrong.
And if we must burn for sins then so be it.

We CAN stop. Right now. All of us. If we choose. And we MIGHT go bankrupt. But to refuse to stop out of fear for ourselves is the selfish insensitivity that I am yelling at and if we don't stop now we never will. This is how the world destroys itself. The "cycle of life" is not an excuse to do whatever we want.

There will always be reasons why it is more lucrative to continue with abusive traditions and we must pay no mind.

Where the meat industry experiences job loss, the vegatable, fruit, oats/grains/rices/breads/pastas, dairy, tofu, etc. industries will compensate.

well, what i personally feel is that, if u feel that eating animals is immoral because a life was taken away in order for your continued existance, then don't eat. But you will starve to death eventually.

So if you want to survive, eat. Eat to live. If you think that an animal shouldn't die for your sake,then don't live. We eat because we want to survive, it is a necessity. If you feel that it is immoral, then you just have to accept the fact that we all consume like parasites. This is nature. If you feel that your existance is immoral, then really, every living thing on earth is immoral since we all eat or consume resources. At the end, we kill for our own survival. Between your survival and the living thing's life, which will you choose?

This maybe hard but it is a fact. Well, i don't find anything wrong with living. It maybe selfish but if we care too much about every poultry and vegetable we eat, if the whole humanity chose to not have them killed for our consumption, then what do we eat? There isn't really much point in discussing whether is it immoral or not because in we still need to kill/slaughter them in the end. This is just how i feel.

zcnmashleu, a human being can survive without eating meat, so your argument fails. But even supposing a human being needed to eat meat to survive, all your argument succeeds in justifying is eating enough meat to prevent death. Do you only eat just enough meat to keep from dying of malnutrition, or do you eat as much as you feel like eating?

pjkeeley

You are absolutely right. I have friends who have been vegetarians for many years and are not only perfectly healthy, but are not obese. They don't eat fast food such as burgers and fried chicken.

If you want to eat meat you can't use health as a reason to eat meat. We eat meat for the same reason we eat ice cream. Because it tastes good.

Also, all animals are not meat eaters, so the nature argument doesn't fly either.