This is giving me some vibes of “without religion people be murdering each other”.
There’s no moral conflict in eating meat and not murdering humans, eating meat and refusing to hurt animals other ways, or even eating only some animals and not anothers.
I have well developed morals about the animal thing. And they are not based in giving animals rights. I don’t consider animals as having rights like humans. What I consider, on the other hand, is humans having the duty not to be cruel. So hurting animals (or even plants) for no reason is cruelty thus is wrong. This allows for the hurt of other living beings without cruel intentions, and sits pretty good with a lot of different situations and dilemmas on what’s right and what’s wrong.
So hurting animals (or even plants) for no reason is cruelty thus is wrong.
The entire point is that meat isn’t necessary for the vast majority of people. Which thus makes it cruel and wrong.
This is before we get to all of the points about land use, pollutants, climate change, and the general inefficiency of getting calories from animals, which are all good reasons regardless of the above.
I’m not really swayed by the cruelty argument personally. I am much more open to the environmental damage arguments, but it’s specifically the way vegans prefer to paint the issue in terms of a moral imperative which keeps me at arms length.
There are legitimately places in the world where the only realistic way to extract nutrients from the land is to graze goats and eat them. That reduces the morality argument to agricultural privilege imo.
97% of animals in the US are factory farmed. If you live in the US, it really is as simple as I stated. If you are one of the vanishingly few people that actually do live in places where the only option is pastoralism, then that’s fine. But the vast majority of people do not. Judging Americans by the standards of a Sub-Saharan shepard is just as ridiculous as the other way around.
The beauty of this logic is that the wrongness of something falls into what we define by “cruel” which fits better into our actual moral arguments and lets room for changes in opinion without changing all the logic.
For instance for a person to move from not being vegan into being began only would need to consider that eating meat without need is indeed cruel, and then wrong. But the whole structure of trying to avoid cruelty stands.
I find it more “elegant” that a moral solution that tries to give animal rights, because then you would need to move into big changes in logic to move from one position to another.
Enh. I don’t personally see the issue with the rights argument - although I think the environmental damage/inefficiency argument is probably the most effective. Plenty of places have animal cruelty laws, often protecting cats/dogs/pets above farm animals. These are legal rights that these animals have been given. We can then point to research on animal cognition - e.g. that pigs have been shown to be as smart as many dog breeds - to demonstrate the hypocrisy.
Personally, it boils down to this: being violent towards less powerful beings is almost universally considered to be evil. We have quite a lot of laws about this. Extending these rights to non-human beings is just as natural as extending it to your neighbors, and done for the same reason - a society that commits wanton acts of cruelty in one legal arena will be more willing to commit them in others. It is self-defense as much as goodwill towards others.
The animal rights logic is usually the following: Animals have the capacity to suffer and a will to live, therefore they deserve a right to not be harmed or killed needlessly.
No sane person would argue that they should have the right to vote or anything like that, just the basic ones. I feel like there’s a lot of confusion about this.
E.g. kicking a dog on a whim violates their right to not be harmed and should be illegal in an ideal world.
It seems like you share the ethical concern. Why wouldn’t you be in favor of granting them these two basic rights then?
Maybe your problem is with extending this logic to something like killing a pig for taste pleasure compared to kicking a dog? I’d argue that if you’re against the latter, there’s no ethical reason to defend or even support the former. Something being culturally ingrained or pleasurable doesn’t automatically justify it after all.
My issue with that approach is that all rights that we concede to animals are related to humans. We would not police interactions between animals (unless provoked by a human). So it feel strange to give an animal the right to live just if its live would be taken by a human, but that right becoming meaningless if the life-taker is another animal. At the end we are only caring about human-animal iterations so why not simplify making it an human duty instead of an animal right?
I’m also fond of duties. From two perspectives. We could talk about giving animal rights, but we could not talk about giving animal duties. So they would be recipient of rights without duties. And I also like to remind people that humans not only have rights, that we also have duties which are equally important.
The base of the underlying logic is also not against veganism. As soon as you consider killing an animal for it’s meat something cruel it becomes inmoral. The the debate gets simplified in talking about what constitutes cruelty and, if killing for eating is cruel or not. Which to me seems much more on point that talking about animal rights which could get complicated and have the deep meaning lost in words and concepts.
At the end the animal having or not having rights is meaningless as most people debating this care only about what the human is doing to the animal. For instance, in a word without humans, would the animals still have those human invented rights?
This is giving me some vibes of “without religion people be murdering each other”.
There’s no moral conflict in eating meat and not murdering humans, eating meat and refusing to hurt animals other ways, or even eating only some animals and not anothers.
I have well developed morals about the animal thing. And they are not based in giving animals rights. I don’t consider animals as having rights like humans. What I consider, on the other hand, is humans having the duty not to be cruel. So hurting animals (or even plants) for no reason is cruelty thus is wrong. This allows for the hurt of other living beings without cruel intentions, and sits pretty good with a lot of different situations and dilemmas on what’s right and what’s wrong.
The entire point is that meat isn’t necessary for the vast majority of people. Which thus makes it cruel and wrong.
This is before we get to all of the points about land use, pollutants, climate change, and the general inefficiency of getting calories from animals, which are all good reasons regardless of the above.
I’m not really swayed by the cruelty argument personally. I am much more open to the environmental damage arguments, but it’s specifically the way vegans prefer to paint the issue in terms of a moral imperative which keeps me at arms length.
There are legitimately places in the world where the only realistic way to extract nutrients from the land is to graze goats and eat them. That reduces the morality argument to agricultural privilege imo.
97% of animals in the US are factory farmed. If you live in the US, it really is as simple as I stated. If you are one of the vanishingly few people that actually do live in places where the only option is pastoralism, then that’s fine. But the vast majority of people do not. Judging Americans by the standards of a Sub-Saharan shepard is just as ridiculous as the other way around.
you don’t know what others need
K
The beauty of this logic is that the wrongness of something falls into what we define by “cruel” which fits better into our actual moral arguments and lets room for changes in opinion without changing all the logic.
For instance for a person to move from not being vegan into being began only would need to consider that eating meat without need is indeed cruel, and then wrong. But the whole structure of trying to avoid cruelty stands.
I find it more “elegant” that a moral solution that tries to give animal rights, because then you would need to move into big changes in logic to move from one position to another.
Enh. I don’t personally see the issue with the rights argument - although I think the environmental damage/inefficiency argument is probably the most effective. Plenty of places have animal cruelty laws, often protecting cats/dogs/pets above farm animals. These are legal rights that these animals have been given. We can then point to research on animal cognition - e.g. that pigs have been shown to be as smart as many dog breeds - to demonstrate the hypocrisy.
Personally, it boils down to this: being violent towards less powerful beings is almost universally considered to be evil. We have quite a lot of laws about this. Extending these rights to non-human beings is just as natural as extending it to your neighbors, and done for the same reason - a society that commits wanton acts of cruelty in one legal arena will be more willing to commit them in others. It is self-defense as much as goodwill towards others.
The animal rights logic is usually the following: Animals have the capacity to suffer and a will to live, therefore they deserve a right to not be harmed or killed needlessly.
No sane person would argue that they should have the right to vote or anything like that, just the basic ones. I feel like there’s a lot of confusion about this.
E.g. kicking a dog on a whim violates their right to not be harmed and should be illegal in an ideal world.
It seems like you share the ethical concern. Why wouldn’t you be in favor of granting them these two basic rights then?
Maybe your problem is with extending this logic to something like killing a pig for taste pleasure compared to kicking a dog? I’d argue that if you’re against the latter, there’s no ethical reason to defend or even support the former. Something being culturally ingrained or pleasurable doesn’t automatically justify it after all.
can you explain what you mean by will to live?
My issue with that approach is that all rights that we concede to animals are related to humans. We would not police interactions between animals (unless provoked by a human). So it feel strange to give an animal the right to live just if its live would be taken by a human, but that right becoming meaningless if the life-taker is another animal. At the end we are only caring about human-animal iterations so why not simplify making it an human duty instead of an animal right?
I’m also fond of duties. From two perspectives. We could talk about giving animal rights, but we could not talk about giving animal duties. So they would be recipient of rights without duties. And I also like to remind people that humans not only have rights, that we also have duties which are equally important.
The base of the underlying logic is also not against veganism. As soon as you consider killing an animal for it’s meat something cruel it becomes inmoral. The the debate gets simplified in talking about what constitutes cruelty and, if killing for eating is cruel or not. Which to me seems much more on point that talking about animal rights which could get complicated and have the deep meaning lost in words and concepts.
At the end the animal having or not having rights is meaningless as most people debating this care only about what the human is doing to the animal. For instance, in a word without humans, would the animals still have those human invented rights?