Animals can have rights and be protected from unnecessary cruelty without anthropomophizing them and granting full human rights. You’re equating full, sapient humans with a species specifically bred for a base purpose without higher levels of thought and expression.
I don’t even think that statement is anthropocentric hubris. If ultra-advanced aliens showed up tomorrow and started domesticating humans for food or some other purpose, I would have the default expectation of them having the same or similar morals. Maybe we’d get access to decent healthcare and good libraries before we went to the slaughterhouse.
Cows get more rights than trees or crops because they have an ability to express pain and convey emotion. They don’t have the same rights as humans because they could never give a passionate argument for suffrage to a jury.
And to be clear: there are plenty of real, tangible reasons to end animal husbandry and make everyone vegan without even touching philosophy.
If ultra-advanced aliens showed up tomorrow and started domesticating humans for food or some other purpose, I would have the default expectation of them having the same or similar morals. Maybe we’d get access to decent healthcare and good libraries before we went to the slaughterhouse
I can’t believe you said this with a straight face. This is the depths of depravity and mental gymnastics that a non vegan philosophical position leads to. I’m also sure that if this actually happened, you would throw your logic in the trash, where it belongs, and you would fight for the liberation of the slaughtered race.
Do you want to extend the argument to a person who is in a permanent comatose state? By your definition, they are without “higher levels of thought and expression”. Is it cool to eat them?
If the advanced aliens had the control over us that we exert over animals then I wouldn’t have a choice. And whether I fight or not isn’t relevant to their choice to farm me. If anything it’s in their best interest to keep me healthy and content until I’m harvested.
Your coma example is laughable. They’re a human. A medical procedure (even if we don’t have the technology to perform it) could return them to normal function. Turning a cow into a human-like creature is a different discussion altogether, it would be a transformation at such a fundamental level that we might as well be discussing artificial personhood instead of the ethics of diet.
If we invented a procedure that could make corn moo would it no longer be vegan?
If the advanced aliens had the control over us that we exert over animals then I wouldn’t have a choice. And whether I fight or not isn’t relevant to their choice to farm me. If anything it’s in their best interest to keep me healthy and content until I’m harvested.
You keep avoiding the moral implications here because you know the argument is bs. If some groups of people mass bred and slaughtered monkeys or dogs on an industrial scale would you not care, because they don’t have a choice? It would be the same as your example, without the alien hypotheticals.
A medical procedure could return them to normal function
The disconnect between the logical, robotical analysis in the first case and the childish, optimistic look here really just highlights the compartmentalization you have to go through for a “coherent” position.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by moral implications. Would I be upset if aliens started eating people? Yeah, that would suck. Would it be morally defensible to fight back in the same way a cow might kick? Of course. But I can’t consider their view because they are defined as a higher tier of being in this scenario.
You’re imagining little green humans with forks when it may just as well be a hyper-developed cloud of space bacteria. In their view, every human gut biome is a slave pit where trillions can be massacred at will.
Using us as incubators and then harvesting the “human” collection of cell resources is a perfectly ethical thing to do. Who cares about the shrieking sound waves and fluid that spills out while humans melt, that might as well be the smell of fresh cut grass. It’s just a bunch of clones of one DNA sequence vs the plethora of diverse cells unleashed from the gut. Easy decision.
Keeping us happy and healthy is crucial for the health of the gut biome, no need to cause any undue stress because that would hurt the final product. But of course, through gene manipulation or artificial selection they can make us into a more durable and docile species.
…And at that point modern humans are effectively extinct. I don’t have to worry about the ethics of an incubation vat in the same way you don’t worry about our bizzarre and unnatural domesticated crops.
the childish, optimistic look here really just highlights the compartmentalization you have to go through for a “coherent” position.
I’m totally lost here. You’re saying a comatose human is actually not a human but it is an animal (and therefore gets human rights)? My “higher thought” point is that our measure of life is relative to human features and human ability. A comatose human is very obviously still a human. Hell, even a dead human is still a human until it decays away and is recycled into something else.
Instead of silly screaming corn: What if I bred creatures that couldn’t express pain in any measurable way? Just sacks of flesh that you could herd around and harvest when they’re big enough. Slice off some reproductive piece and stick it in a tube to grow the next batch. Basically a meat tree on legs.
Is that unethical? Just because it’s gross? It’s no different than a plant. What if I told you I made them from pig DNA [no harm was done to the pig btw] but I cut out all traces of sensory organs that might convey pain. They can sense just barely enough to stand upright and only have the barest parts of a brain needed to grow more mass.
At what point does the distasteful husbandry become acceptable gardening? When the creatures can’t move? When the red blood is sap? Does the flesh have to be green instead of pink? Do the insides need to taste like a mango instead of bacon? Does it need photosynthesis like a spotted salamander or a sea slug?
Your position is incoherent if you can’t tell me exactly where the line is crossed AND that line is solid for all vegans.
When does that lifeform gain or lose rights?
If you can’t do that or admit there’s subjectivity in the judgment then why can’t that subjectivity hold for cultures that bred dogs for food? Dogs are clearly not humans, but they’re too close to my personal experience of pets for comfort. That clearly isn’t the case with all humans, so I can’t pass judgment on the mere fact that a dog is eaten.
Slaves can have rights and be protected from unnecessary cruelty without anthropomophizing them and granting full human rights. You’re equating full, sapient humans with a species specifically bred for a base purpose without higher levels of thought and expression.
You seem to have extremely poor reading comprehension.
The point is that slavers used racist pseudoscience to claim that enslaved people were a different, “lesser” species, to justify their enslavement. Not only was this incorrect, but even if it were true it would provide no justification. Speciesism is irrational and the human-invented line between species is completely irrelevant to the moral worth of individuals on either side of that line.
I said speciesism, not speciation. Again with the reading comprehension.
You seem to have a conception of species as some magical boundary ordained by God that permits all harm. In reality it is an arbitrary human concept pertaining to evolution and genetic relatedness. There is no inherent moral component to it. Your prescription of moral unworth to individuals of different species from our own is called speciesism, and it does not follow logically from the mere differentiation of species.
This will be my final comment, because you’re incredibly rude.
That’s exactly how people justified slavery in the past, and it is how the person I replied to justified their argument. That’s my entire point. It’s the same argument.
This is a ludicrous argument. If you truly believe that all animals have the same rights then the only internally consistent conclusion is the virtual extermination of the human species.
Life is a zero sum game. Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources. Optimizing for the minimum harm to earth’s ecosystem is always going to be the end of agriculture, housing, hunting, industry and basically everything other human institution. We’re the most insidious invasive species ever and the world would be healthier without us mucking around.
So unless you’re stumping for that, don’t pretend to have the moral high ground. If you are, stop wasting your time shaming people and skip right to culling them.
Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources.
True, but no one gives a shit when the consumed life is a plant.
People say the “plants feel pain” thing rhetorically, but it isn’t a serious argument. And if they were somehow actually being serious, then this would actually strengthen the case to only consume plants due the efficiency of doing so vs consuming animal products.
Plants don’t have to feel pain to be a lynch pin in the ecosystem supporting the animals around them. One less native plant is one less place to shelter or feed an endangered animal, or one less set of roots preventing the erosion of a habitat at risk.
Eliminating animal products mitigates the problem but it in no way absolves you from our exponential consumption of finite resources, and in many ways it’s naive non-solution.
For example: culling and eating pest animals like deer is not vegan, but leaving them alone with no natural predators does exponentially more harm to all other animals that depend on the native plants decimated by an unchecked deer population. Eliminating the predators is a human-caused problem but washing our hands of the situation will kill far more.
I advocate for humanity to live in harmony and balance with our environment, that is why I am anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist as well as vegan. Our history is plagued with exploitation, that can’t be denied, but I am trying to change it and you are arguing that it cannot be changed and that we shouldn’t even try.
Humanity’s relationship with animals and nature has historically been exploitative but it doesn’t need to be that way.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance. Human greed and selfishness is rewarded by our society. That means our society needs to change.
I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game. My happiness does not need to come at the expense of another’s unhappiness. We can all work together to create a better future for all living things on our planet.
I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game
Then you’re a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That’s 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.
From there you’re now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc…
Humans aren’t friendly little forest nymphs, we’re megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That’s a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.
That’s just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance.
Uh ooooooh… someone isn’t familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬
We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don’t even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food.
And it has been largely the (petro)chemical industry responsible for this. The Haber-Bosch process transformed agriculture, but accounts for percent-level quantities of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. And it requires raw materials that are typically produced from hydrocarbons (although admittedly there are renewable options). And other nutrients typically come from mining (even organic options) - which displaces many species of all sorts. And this does not account for pesticides, etc., that others have mentioned.
Prior to the development of modern chemistry, our best sources of fertilizer were often animal manures - which require breeding, raising, and ultimately usually killing animals.
Sure, there is a lot we can do to minimize harm, and generally we should, and I try to myself as much as possible. But I’m not fooling myself into thinking that eating vegan or growing my food organically means nothing or no one suffered. Until we all go back to pre-agrarian societies, we will continue to cause large-scale destruction in some way. But of course this in itself would cause massive population decline and resultant suffering in humans.
I’m not fooling myself into thinking that eating vegan or growing my food organically means nothing or no one suffered.
There isn’t any vegan out there who believes that. The point of veganism isn"t to be perfect, it’s to reduce harm as much as practically possible.
Of course I am in favor of sustainable farming practices and minimizing use of fossil fuel industry products, but even with all of that factored in, the social/environmental impact of a vegan diet is hugely reduced, compared to a meat-eater’s diet, and significantly healthier with massively reduced risk of heart disease and cancer among other conditions. That’s not really a solid reason to go vegan IMO, I think animal welfare is the only reason that matters, but it’s a nice bonus I guess.
Brother I am vegan (at least 95% in diet if you want to quibble over niche animal product additives). I’m just not going to shed tears over every single creature on earth like they’re my family pet while losing sight of the purpose of harm reduction. Why is the few grams of milk powder in your chips more important than mass deforestation supporting your avocados and coffee?
If most militant vegans actually examined their emotional arguments before they posted them people would take them way more seriously. Animals suffering and dying might make you deeply uncomfortable but that’s not a universal experience. You can’t browbeat people out of 15k years of animal husbandry just because you personally couldn’t stomach skinning a rabbit.
Animals can have rights and be protected from unnecessary cruelty without anthropomophizing them and granting full human rights. You’re equating full, sapient humans with a species specifically bred for a base purpose without higher levels of thought and expression.
I don’t even think that statement is anthropocentric hubris. If ultra-advanced aliens showed up tomorrow and started domesticating humans for food or some other purpose, I would have the default expectation of them having the same or similar morals. Maybe we’d get access to decent healthcare and good libraries before we went to the slaughterhouse.
Cows get more rights than trees or crops because they have an ability to express pain and convey emotion. They don’t have the same rights as humans because they could never give a passionate argument for suffrage to a jury.
And to be clear: there are plenty of real, tangible reasons to end animal husbandry and make everyone vegan without even touching philosophy.
I can’t believe you said this with a straight face. This is the depths of depravity and mental gymnastics that a non vegan philosophical position leads to. I’m also sure that if this actually happened, you would throw your logic in the trash, where it belongs, and you would fight for the liberation of the slaughtered race.
Do you want to extend the argument to a person who is in a permanent comatose state? By your definition, they are without “higher levels of thought and expression”. Is it cool to eat them?
If the advanced aliens had the control over us that we exert over animals then I wouldn’t have a choice. And whether I fight or not isn’t relevant to their choice to farm me. If anything it’s in their best interest to keep me healthy and content until I’m harvested.
Your coma example is laughable. They’re a human. A medical procedure (even if we don’t have the technology to perform it) could return them to normal function. Turning a cow into a human-like creature is a different discussion altogether, it would be a transformation at such a fundamental level that we might as well be discussing artificial personhood instead of the ethics of diet.
If we invented a procedure that could make corn moo would it no longer be vegan?
You keep avoiding the moral implications here because you know the argument is bs. If some groups of people mass bred and slaughtered monkeys or dogs on an industrial scale would you not care, because they don’t have a choice? It would be the same as your example, without the alien hypotheticals.
The disconnect between the logical, robotical analysis in the first case and the childish, optimistic look here really just highlights the compartmentalization you have to go through for a “coherent” position.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by moral implications. Would I be upset if aliens started eating people? Yeah, that would suck. Would it be morally defensible to fight back in the same way a cow might kick? Of course. But I can’t consider their view because they are defined as a higher tier of being in this scenario.
You’re imagining little green humans with forks when it may just as well be a hyper-developed cloud of space bacteria. In their view, every human gut biome is a slave pit where trillions can be massacred at will.
Using us as incubators and then harvesting the “human” collection of cell resources is a perfectly ethical thing to do. Who cares about the shrieking sound waves and fluid that spills out while humans melt, that might as well be the smell of fresh cut grass. It’s just a bunch of clones of one DNA sequence vs the plethora of diverse cells unleashed from the gut. Easy decision.
Keeping us happy and healthy is crucial for the health of the gut biome, no need to cause any undue stress because that would hurt the final product. But of course, through gene manipulation or artificial selection they can make us into a more durable and docile species.
…And at that point modern humans are effectively extinct. I don’t have to worry about the ethics of an incubation vat in the same way you don’t worry about our bizzarre and unnatural domesticated crops.
I’m totally lost here. You’re saying a comatose human is actually not a human but it is an animal (and therefore gets human rights)? My “higher thought” point is that our measure of life is relative to human features and human ability. A comatose human is very obviously still a human. Hell, even a dead human is still a human until it decays away and is recycled into something else.
Instead of silly screaming corn: What if I bred creatures that couldn’t express pain in any measurable way? Just sacks of flesh that you could herd around and harvest when they’re big enough. Slice off some reproductive piece and stick it in a tube to grow the next batch. Basically a meat tree on legs.
Is that unethical? Just because it’s gross? It’s no different than a plant. What if I told you I made them from pig DNA [no harm was done to the pig btw] but I cut out all traces of sensory organs that might convey pain. They can sense just barely enough to stand upright and only have the barest parts of a brain needed to grow more mass.
At what point does the distasteful husbandry become acceptable gardening? When the creatures can’t move? When the red blood is sap? Does the flesh have to be green instead of pink? Do the insides need to taste like a mango instead of bacon? Does it need photosynthesis like a spotted salamander or a sea slug?
Your position is incoherent if you can’t tell me exactly where the line is crossed AND that line is solid for all vegans. When does that lifeform gain or lose rights?
If you can’t do that or admit there’s subjectivity in the judgment then why can’t that subjectivity hold for cultures that bred dogs for food? Dogs are clearly not humans, but they’re too close to my personal experience of pets for comfort. That clearly isn’t the case with all humans, so I can’t pass judgment on the mere fact that a dog is eaten.
Your ancestors, probably
Kind of racist to suggest that slaves were a different species
That’s the point
The point is that the animals I eat are the same species as me?
You seem confused.
You seem to have extremely poor reading comprehension.
The point is that slavers used racist pseudoscience to claim that enslaved people were a different, “lesser” species, to justify their enslavement. Not only was this incorrect, but even if it were true it would provide no justification. Speciesism is irrational and the human-invented line between species is completely irrelevant to the moral worth of individuals on either side of that line.
Right, but cows are not the same species as human. Slaves are human. Do you really not see the difference?
Or are you literally arguing against the entire concept of specication? Becuase if so, then that’s really fucking stupid.
I said speciesism, not speciation. Again with the reading comprehension.
You seem to have a conception of species as some magical boundary ordained by God that permits all harm. In reality it is an arbitrary human concept pertaining to evolution and genetic relatedness. There is no inherent moral component to it. Your prescription of moral unworth to individuals of different species from our own is called speciesism, and it does not follow logically from the mere differentiation of species.
This will be my final comment, because you’re incredibly rude.
Human rights for bacteria!
Fucking idiotic.
That’s exactly how people justified slavery in the past, and it is how the person I replied to justified their argument. That’s my entire point. It’s the same argument.
Except that slaves were/are humans. Literally the same species.
Yes, obviously, we all agree on that today, but at the time, that wasn’t widely accepted.
So one day we’ll all agree that cows and humans are the same species? Is that the implication?
This is a ludicrous argument. If you truly believe that all animals have the same rights then the only internally consistent conclusion is the virtual extermination of the human species.
Life is a zero sum game. Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources. Optimizing for the minimum harm to earth’s ecosystem is always going to be the end of agriculture, housing, hunting, industry and basically everything other human institution. We’re the most insidious invasive species ever and the world would be healthier without us mucking around.
So unless you’re stumping for that, don’t pretend to have the moral high ground. If you are, stop wasting your time shaming people and skip right to culling them.
True, but no one gives a shit when the consumed life is a plant.
People say the “plants feel pain” thing rhetorically, but it isn’t a serious argument. And if they were somehow actually being serious, then this would actually strengthen the case to only consume plants due the efficiency of doing so vs consuming animal products.
Plants don’t have to feel pain to be a lynch pin in the ecosystem supporting the animals around them. One less native plant is one less place to shelter or feed an endangered animal, or one less set of roots preventing the erosion of a habitat at risk.
Eliminating animal products mitigates the problem but it in no way absolves you from our exponential consumption of finite resources, and in many ways it’s naive non-solution.
For example: culling and eating pest animals like deer is not vegan, but leaving them alone with no natural predators does exponentially more harm to all other animals that depend on the native plants decimated by an unchecked deer population. Eliminating the predators is a human-caused problem but washing our hands of the situation will kill far more.
I advocate for humanity to live in harmony and balance with our environment, that is why I am anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist as well as vegan. Our history is plagued with exploitation, that can’t be denied, but I am trying to change it and you are arguing that it cannot be changed and that we shouldn’t even try.
Humanity’s relationship with animals and nature has historically been exploitative but it doesn’t need to be that way.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance. Human greed and selfishness is rewarded by our society. That means our society needs to change.
I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game. My happiness does not need to come at the expense of another’s unhappiness. We can all work together to create a better future for all living things on our planet.
Then you’re a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That’s 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.
From there you’re now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc…
Humans aren’t friendly little forest nymphs, we’re megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That’s a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.
That’s just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.
Uh ooooooh… someone isn’t familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬
We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don’t even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.
And it has been largely the (petro)chemical industry responsible for this. The Haber-Bosch process transformed agriculture, but accounts for percent-level quantities of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. And it requires raw materials that are typically produced from hydrocarbons (although admittedly there are renewable options). And other nutrients typically come from mining (even organic options) - which displaces many species of all sorts. And this does not account for pesticides, etc., that others have mentioned.
Prior to the development of modern chemistry, our best sources of fertilizer were often animal manures - which require breeding, raising, and ultimately usually killing animals.
Sure, there is a lot we can do to minimize harm, and generally we should, and I try to myself as much as possible. But I’m not fooling myself into thinking that eating vegan or growing my food organically means nothing or no one suffered. Until we all go back to pre-agrarian societies, we will continue to cause large-scale destruction in some way. But of course this in itself would cause massive population decline and resultant suffering in humans.
There isn’t any vegan out there who believes that. The point of veganism isn"t to be perfect, it’s to reduce harm as much as practically possible.
Of course I am in favor of sustainable farming practices and minimizing use of fossil fuel industry products, but even with all of that factored in, the social/environmental impact of a vegan diet is hugely reduced, compared to a meat-eater’s diet, and significantly healthier with massively reduced risk of heart disease and cancer among other conditions. That’s not really a solid reason to go vegan IMO, I think animal welfare is the only reason that matters, but it’s a nice bonus I guess.
deleted by creator
Brother I am vegan (at least 95% in diet if you want to quibble over niche animal product additives). I’m just not going to shed tears over every single creature on earth like they’re my family pet while losing sight of the purpose of harm reduction. Why is the few grams of milk powder in your chips more important than mass deforestation supporting your avocados and coffee?
If most militant vegans actually examined their emotional arguments before they posted them people would take them way more seriously. Animals suffering and dying might make you deeply uncomfortable but that’s not a universal experience. You can’t browbeat people out of 15k years of animal husbandry just because you personally couldn’t stomach skinning a rabbit.