"I hate animals so much I don't want them anywhere near my food"
Just kidding. I am a vegetarian, but for different reasons than most. I see nothing ethically wrong with eating cow as eating tomatoes. It's all life, I suppose.
However, I refuse to eat meat because of the current state of environmental health. The primary cause of deforestation is over-farming (mostly for cow, which requires a lot of land compared to pig/chicken/etc.), and the biggest single way a human being can help reduce his/her carbon footprint is by not eating meat (so I've read and heard from a variety of reputable sources). If you're more interested about this, Mark Bittman sums up my rationale very well in this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_what_we_eat.html
Based on my beliefs/rationale, I really should be a vegan, but I just love cheese too goddamn much. I think I could give up eggs, milk, and yogurt, but cheese, that'll be difficult... I used to be a pescitarian, until I realized that ~70-80% of the fish I was eating were either farm-raised (in tanks on land) or fished from regions that have already been overfished. Anyway, I don't have a single close friend or family member who limits their diet for an ethical/moral reason, so I almost always feel like the odd one out at mealtimes, especially at restaurants. Italian restaurants are especially difficult (which is an enormous problem because I absolutely love Italian food).
Well that's my short little food rant. I doubt anyone actually wants to hear more about it, but if you'd like to, I really do love talking about it, and could recommend a few articles/books to take a look at (about both easting habits and environmental awareness). _________________ 51 Washington, D.C. albums!
Christ almighty, can we stop with the fucking moralising already?
Well tbf this whole thread is an argument about the morality of eating meat so I don't really see your problem. I disagree with Tekin's main argument but it's still a way better argument than "meat is tasty so I don't care". If you think nobody has a right to criticise the morality of eating meat then counter their argument rather than criticise them for daring challenge your idea of morality, try and justify why you think it's ok to eat meat if it's not too hard.
Defago wrote:
Now, I don't think the problem is on the eating part, but on the killing part. If you want to eat a dead human's body under your possession, it's weird, but it's not wrong. At least not for me. I consider killing a human wrong, though, and I wouldn't do it except on the most extreme situations. I don't have the same qualm with killing a spider, an ant, a bird, or a dog. I certainly seek to avoid unnecessary pain or trouble to them - I'm not going around kicking dogs for the fun of it, and consciously abusing them is plainly wrong - but I don't think anyone here thinks stepping on an ant is a crime of the same level as crushing a human being to death. I don't think killing a cow at the same level of moral wrongness as killing a human. Mainly because the human is smarter, is self aware and is worth more to society alive than dead, unlike the cow. Like I said, even babies are potentially smarter, self aware and worth more monetarily speaking than the cow.
As far as I see it your (Tekin's) main argument for not eating meat is that all species life is worth an equal amount, which is something I definitely don't agree with. So you don't like generalisations of human life being more than other species' life and you present a situation of the brain dead man as an example of human life that you might expect someone to value as less or equal to that of an animal, but I don't really think that exposes the intelligence argument though. If people feel this way about the braindead guy it's because they immediately imagine him and feel they know him, have an emotional attachment to him and they have sensibilities towards killing a fellow human, ie they empathise with him in a way they can't with a chicken.
If you do genuinely consider an ant's life equal to that of a human's (any ant, any human) then I don't really know what more to say other than that I disagree entirely.
EyeKanFly wrote:
However, I refuse to eat meat because of the current state of environmental health. The primary cause of deforestation is over-farming (mostly for cow, which requires a lot of land compared to pig/chicken/etc.), and the biggest single way a human being can help reduce his/her carbon footprint is by not eating meat
Aye, when I mentioned in my first post that "There's plenty of ethical reasons besides the fact that animals feel pain when dying that might make someone want to be vegetarian, more important ones too IMO" this was mainly what I was talking about, principally world food shortage and the environmental aspect of eating meat. These are far better reasons to be vegetarian than worrying about killing animals IMO and they're the ony reason I feel slightly guilty for eating meat. _________________ Shut up mate you're boring!
As far as I see it your (Tekin's) main argument for not eating meat is that all species life is worth an equal amount, which is something I definitely don't agree with. So you don't like generalisations of human life being more than other species' life and you present a situation of the brain dead man as an example of human life that you might expect someone to value as less or equal to that of an animal, but I don't really think that exposes the intelligence argument though. If people feel this way about the braindead guy it's because they immediately imagine him and feel they know him, have an emotional attachment to him and they have sensibilities towards killing a fellow human, ie they empathise with him in a way they can't with a chicken.
If you do genuinely consider an ant's life equal to that of a human's (any ant, any human) then I don't really know what more to say other than that I disagree entirely.
My main argument (which I think is obvious that isn't mine originally) was not that all forms of life are equal. I didn't say anything like that and I try to avoid as much as possible evaluating value of different forms of life because it's relative and it's clear from the "super-intelligent alien" example that can be used against humans. My main argument is this which I've pointed out earlier in this thread:
tekin wrote:
The most important reason for arguing against eating meat is that you take a life for luxury. You can easily live without it.
Yes; it's not that a sheep's or pig's life (we don't eat ants in industrial amounts) is equal to that of a human. That's nonsense and doesn't prove anything. As if I say if a lion attacked a human and we had to kill one of them to save the other one's life we had to morally choose which one we have to kill. We simply would kill the lion. People talk here as if it's a case of life of man on one scalepan and life of an animal on the other. Our whole discussion has nothing to do with life of human. When we think that killing animals is immoral we don't say that in case of a dying human who needs the meat to survive so we think he should not use the meat and should die. No many of those who eat the meat can easily replace it with sth else. It's the contrast of taking an animal's life and enjoying the taste of meat not a contrast of taking an animal's life and taking a human life.
Your argument about the braindead man was clearly comparing the value of human life to animal life to try and prove the hypocrisy, or 'specism', of meateaters but whatever.
No I don't think it is about the relative inteligence of animals vs humans. Animals lack the ability to think and feel certain things and even if you introduce the idea of a super intelligent alien species this does not affect the absolute intelligence of humans or animals which is what is in question.
The argument of whether a burger is worth the life of a cow is much simpler and makes much more sense IMO. Though you have the fact that these animals wouldn't have life in the first place if it weren't for the fact that people eat them, and if they are raised ethically and aren't aware that they're going to die (they're obviously not) then I actually don't have a massive problem with it. Again, you probably hate me for that but oh well. _________________ Shut up mate you're boring!
Your argument about the braindead man was clearly comparing the value of human life to animal life to try and prove the hypocrisy, or 'specism', of meateaters but whatever.
No, it wasn't to show that those forms of life are equal. It was to show that the reasons people give to justify meat consumption is all relative and can be refuted in special cases and a basic reason that can be refuted by a special case is refuted for all cases. So when I argue that when you try to say that we kill and eat animals because humans have such and such properties which animals don't have, your reasons are groundless because when even a human doesn't have such and such properties (so basically not different from a highly intelligent animal) again you will consider killing him immoral while killing that animal moral. Refuting a point doesn't prove its negation.
HigherThanTheSun wrote:
No I don't think it is about the relative inteligence of animals vs humans. Animals lack the ability to think and feel certain things and even if you introduce the idea of a super intelligent alien species this does not affect the absolute intelligence of humans or animals which is what is in question.
There's no such thing as absolute intelligence. They can be defined relative to each other. I think that the case of super-intelligent alien shows this completely. We humans think that animals don't have some feelings and mental faculties and therefore we kill and eat them. I don't see why a super-intelligent alien cannot tell that for us.
HigherThanTheSun wrote:
The argument of whether a burger is worth the life of a cow is much simpler and makes much more sense IMO. Though you have the fact that these animals wouldn't have life in the first place if it weren't for the fact that people eat them, and if they are raised ethically and aren't aware that they're going to die (they're obviously not) then I actually don't have a massive problem with it. Again, you probably hate me for that but oh well.
First of all I'm not your average poophead urban machine to have this everpresent question of "Do I hate this or love it?" I won't hate anybody because of eating meat or thinking in a certain way. 90% of people around me eat meat; I'd have a miserable life if I hated them for it. For me the fact that we give life to animals merely for the purpose of raising them and killing and eating them is even more repellent. You say they aren't aware of it; but do you know that before you eat meat or do you think that is the reason people will try to justify meat consumption with? Read these very short articles:
http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/N...rning.aspx http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shorts...umans.html
No, it wasn't to show that those forms of life are equal. It was to show that the reasons people give to justify meat consumption is all relative and can be refuted in special cases and a basic reason that can be refuted by a special case is refuted for all cases. So when I argue that when you try to say that we kill and eat animals because humans have such and such properties which animals don't have, your reasons are groundless because when even a human doesn't have such and such properties (so basically not different from a highly intelligent animal) again you will consider killing him immoral while killing that animal moral. Refuting a point doesn't prove its negation.
Fair enough. Think I explained, or tried to, why I have more of an issue killing a braindead man than a chicken though.
tekin wrote:
There's no such thing as absolute intelligence. They can be defined relative to each other. I think that the case of super-intelligent alien shows this completely. We humans think that animals don't have some feelings and mental faculties and therefore we kill and eat them. I don't see why a super-intelligent alien cannot tell that for us.
Don't get this at all. Of course you can have an absolute level of intelligence. You can measure a living thing's ability to do/think/feel certain things against an objective measure rather than against other living things.
tekin wrote:
First of all I'm not your average poophead urban machine to have this everpresent question of "Do I hate this or love it?" I won't hate anybody because of eating meat or thinking in a certain way. 90% of people around me eat meat; I'd have a miserable life if I hated them for it. For me the fact that we give life to animals merely for the purpose of raising them and killing and eating them is even more repellent. You say they aren't aware of it; but do you know that before you eat meat or do you think that is the reason people will try to justify meat consumption with? Read these very short articles:
http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/N...rning.aspx http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shorts...umans.html
Whether people have their arguments before deciding to eat meat or to justify it after is irrelevant IMO, they're still the same arguments. Those articles talked about chimps and elephants having some sort of awareness of death but I don't think that's very relevant to the argument, cows still don't grieve for other dead cows.
And no, most animals raised for meat aren't raised ethically but that's a different debate to the principle of whether it's moral to eat meat at all or not. _________________ Shut up mate you're boring!
/thread? Not while some f**gy moral vegetarians are allowed to get out of this unscathed to get back to crying over chicken graves and not bathing. I'm assuming you're a pinko too. Ugh, so predictable.
Animal-based products are in pretty much everything - including pretty much all instruments and computers, so, you know, tekin, you should probably both stop listening to music in general and stop posting in forums. You should also cripple the fuck out of your own legs, cause polio vaccine? That shit came about thanks to monkey experimentation. How about smallpox? Anthrax? Tetanus? We have vaccines for all of them thanks to animal experimentation. A great deal of our advancement as a species owes to using animals for our own gains. And why shouldn't we? Quick answer, you unwashed hippy: we should.
Animals understand death and companionship and love and et cetera, but they still eat each other. Ever seen how affectionate dogs can be? Ever seen those teeth they got on them? Ever see a coyote tear into another animals throat? Here you go:
Also, we're biologically equipped to be omnivores. Our stomachs produce hydrochloric acid, something herbivores don't. Plus they usually have multi-compartmental stomachs like cows, deer, sheep, etc... So eating animals is in our nature. It's in our biology. We are the dominant species on this planet and we can and will use it's resources to better serve us. If they coyotes had thumbs and improved cognitive functions they'd be farming and eating us. And why shouldn't they.
P.S. This isn't directed at any users in particular, but hey, if any of you want to bitch that's cool #yolo _________________ A dick that's bigger than the sun.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
