The case with infants is different, the infant will grow up and gain moral comprehension, the animal will not. The ethics concerning infants do not come from their temporary lack of ethical insight, but rather our moral responsibility to them as fellow human beings.
Anyway, we seem to have a fundamental disagreement, I do not think just about anything can be “included in ethics”, but if I did I would probably agree with you here.
As for pets, I dont see a relevent distinction. — DingoJones
Chatterbears, you need to decide which question you want to debate, the title of your post or the final question in the text. Notice that they are different, and require different answers. To the first one in the title, yes, I think our dominion over animals is ethical and positive in principle. Someday it will pay off when we fight back an alien invasion. — DiegoT
To the second one, no, there is no excuse for making other sentient beings, from insects to orangutans, suffer unnecessarily. Other animals can not do this, because they lack ethics; but luckily we do. We need to avoid pain and stress to other creatures when it is possible to do so. — DiegoT
We don't eat animals - we eat carrion. In nature, animals eat eachother alive. Agriculture is less cruel than nature! — karl stone
Nazivegans are right in denouncing that animals are not usually well treated in farms. And they forget about animals that are poisoned and exterminated to produce vegetables, which is much worse in terms of scale of global animal suffering. — DiegoT
So I think what you are left with only one counter argument here, that under my view it would be ok to torture the psychopathic, the severly retarded, or pets. I would answer that absent a practical reason to torture/harm the subject, the moral agent could only have immoral reasons for doing so. This is where I would apply the sentiments you expressed above about amoral creatures entering human moral spheres. — DingoJones
On the economic side, the meat industry allows unskilled and trade labourers to make a living. As a consequence of ban on meat eating, they might experience a serious drop in well being. On the other hand, it could be argued that they could make a living from only farming the land and producing plants. However, this would decrease the price of plants, and there would still be some people left without of jobs due to the inability for competition. Also several industries - such as fashion, food, medical etc. would experience serious changes. This step risks the loss of a lot of economic wealth. — Fortress of Solitude
Here is a logical phallacy: The dominant farming practices today are harmful for the biosphere, therefore ALL possible farming is harmful. Obviously this is not the case, there are ways of growing plants and animals that offer a very positive externalization to the environment. That is why NASA thinks that someday terraformation of Mars could be possible. — DiegoT
Farming can not be abandoned by Man, because all those animals and plants whose mere existence depend of our agrosystems do not deserve extinctions after so many millennia feeding us; and after we have killed off their wild varieties. Not only the domesticated species are to be considered, but also the many species that need agrosystems to feed. Many national parks in the world depend on agrosystems around them to keep their diversity. — DiegoT
We need to control our population and greed, shift to healthy farm practices that offer positive externalizations, and try to prevent the loss of diversity in agriculture, that is huge. And we need to keep on eating our animals and plants because they are part of our family; the Homo Sapiens phenomenon has never been just a bunch of individual hominids, but also the relationships with other species. — DiegoT
You really think it is the same to force impregnate a cow by hand or give her the choice to allow a bull to mount her in the wild? — chatterbears
I dont have the time to respond to the points made to other people another time with you, nor to tediously respond to your cherry picked portions (again, most were not even directed at you) point by point. Besides, ive heard your sermon already. Many times.
I mean no offense, but I restrict my forum activity to engagement of ideas rather than listening to preachers “educate” me about their ideology, so U wont be responding to any of that. Im sure you can understand its not personal. — DingoJones
We don't eat animals - we eat carrion. In nature, animals eat eachother alive. Agriculture is less cruel than nature!
— karl stone
Can you give an example of this? And I will assume you do not know what goes on within these factory farms. — chatterbears
If I said I tortured a dog, and used the dog's skin to make shoes, most people would call me an immoral monster. But what if I paid someone else to torture a dog, so I can get shoes made of dog skin. Does it make me less immoral, just because I am not doing the dirty work myself? — chatterbears
So, knowing all this, why don't I abstain from meat? Because at this stage in life I don't want to radically change my diet (I'm 72). — Bitter Crank
In addition I'm something of a hypocrite. At least some of the meat I eat is from large scale factory farms and bad things happen to the animals there. I disapprove, but I still like meat, milk, and eggs. — Bitter Crank
I think our dominion over animals is ethical, within certain limits. Animals should not be treated cruelly for their sake, and should not be raised unhealthfully for our sake. The Old Testament, which says we have dominion over the earth, also says that one must not prevent the ox which is laboring on the threshing floor (separating grain from the chaff) from eating some of the grain. "“You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain” (Deut. 25:4)." — Bitter Crank
What you're saying is that the killing is my responsibility - but in fact, I don't know what goes on in these factory farms, and I don't want to know.
Similarly, when I boil a kettle - it's not my fault that the electricity is not renewable energy. That responsibility lies elsewhere. What should I do? Not boil a kettle, not wash my clothes, not watch TV because for reasons beyond my control or understanding - it's not renewable energy when it could be?
Similarly, should I not eat meat because the animal might not have lived and died in the best conditions possible? How could I possibly know? The responsibility is not with the end user. It's with the producer - of electricity, of meat, and of every other thing. — karl stone
You'll say - well, you don't have to eat meat. Maybe that's true - but I like meat. The animal could have lived well and died humanely; more humanely than in nature. If you would demand I know the provenance of everything I eat, ultimately you place an unsustainable cognitive burden upon me - that's simply not my responsibility. Or demand that I forego that which I cannot guarantee is consistent with the highest ethical standards. — karl stone
And because I can't guarantee any such about anything, the logical conclusion of your argument is sitting around in hemp kaftans, singing cum-by-yar, while waiting on a pot of lentils to cook by the heat of a beeswax candle - and that's just not a way of life that appeals to me in the least. — karl stone
Since a utilitarian could accomodate the commercial use of animals as being acceptable within their system of ethics, the claim can not be absolutely true since, for them, commercial use of animals is not only ethical, but required given the utilitiy-loss that would result from not using them commercially.definitely is unethical to support these industries — chatterbears
if the cow flexes intensely while one's arm is all the way into the cow, it can break one's arm. — Bitter Crank
Ok, so the problem with your point, philosophy in general, and my posts too, is that you're attempting to apply logic to a human experience. This process is more an expression of what we wish were true than what is actually true, thus the process itself is fairly labeled rather illogical. — Jake
Generally speaking, humans kill, eat and otherwise abuse animals because we want to, and because we can. Logic has little to do with it, other than helping us design the most efficient methods of killing. As we can see in the thread above, if we apply logic at all it is typically only to rationalize what we wish to do for reasons that have nothing to do with logic. Logic is, if you will, merely a cover story. The real story is power. — Jake
As example, all of us have probably met people with very limited ability with logic. Such folks typically careen through their life from one calamity to another. If you try to assist by applying logic, it's a waste of time, not because they don't agree with your reasoning but because they aren't on the logic channel. It's as if you are talking to them in Chinese, it doesn't matter what you say, because there is no common ground which effective communication might be built upon.
That's the underlying fundamental problem the documentary and this thread in general faces. The arguments presented might be brilliant, but that's typically not going to matter. — Jake
What might matter is if a person witnesses their friend die a gruesome death from colon cancer because their friend has decades of rotting animal flesh stuck in their bowels. That is, if the power equation changes and it is seen that animals can exact their revenge, that is a logic that may be be listened to. Or, maybe not, because what I've just typed is already widely known and the information has quite limited effect. — Jake
You're not a farmer, so you know this how? — Hanover
I realize that you assert in the OP that using animal products is unnecessary. I can't argue for or against that claim since it requires significant empirical economic research. I suspect it is ultimately not capable of clear evidentiary proof either way. In any event, you provide no good grounds or summary from the documentary link for believing it's true. My guess is that it could be true for developed countries, but may hold significantly less the less developed a community is. — Mentalusion
That said, even assuming it is true that using animal products is unnecessary, a utilitarian justification can still be worked out on the basis of (2) above. In fact, you seem to admit that animal exploitation does produce "pleasure and convenience". Without discounting the former but focusing on the latter, this means that factory farming creates economic possibilities for pursuing other life-enhancing activities that people would not otherwise be able to pursue if they had to direct their resources (personal or societal) to compensating for the lack of factory farms. — Mentalusion
Since a utilitarian could accomodate the commercial use of animals as being acceptable within their system of ethics, the claim can not be absolutely true since, for them, commercial use of animals is not only ethical, but required given the utilitiy-loss that would result from not using them commercially. — Mentalusion
What might matter is if a person witnesses their friend die a gruesome death from colon cancer because their friend has decades of rotting animal flesh stuck in their bowels. — Jake
In my view our exploitation of other species is no more of an ethical problem than other species' exploitation of our bodies for food and housing (bacteria, mites, mosquitoes etc.), or other species' exploitation of other species. — Terrapin Station
In any event, I'm a moral relativist/subjectivist/noncognitivist who believes that no moral utterance can be true or false, objectively correct or incorrect. Morality boils down to individuals feeling however they feel about interpersonal behavior. — Terrapin Station
It is a scientific fact that we do not need to consume animals to survive — chatterbears
In the long run (like within the next hundred years of global warming) we will all be eating a vegetarian diet if we are eating at all, because climate change will steadily render more and more current agriculture untenable. Humans and most animals do not do well in excessive heat and high humidity. — Bitter Crank
factory farming is one of the leading causes of environmental damage — chatterbears
51 percent or more of global greenhouse-gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture, which is more than transportation. — chatterbears
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