...so I have accepted ethical consistency as a constraint and challenged the monotonic absolutism of empathy/compassion as "pillars" - the solitary foundations of any moral position. — apokrisis
Apo is clearly trolling you. He likes to disguise the vapidity and trollishness of his replies in an endless word-jumble that he'll inevitably say you don't understand anyways. — Akanthinos
Empathy, compassion and consistency are ALL SEPARATE thing. — chatterbears
Empathy refers more generally to our ability to take the perspective of and feel the emotions of another living being. Compassion is when those feelings and thoughts include the desire to help. — chatterbears
So the goal of health is to improve the body's condition. From there we can make objective assessments, based on this goal, such as "Drinking 20 sodas per day is bad for you." — chatterbears
If we agree on a goal first, we can make objective assessments. We can say, for the sake of argument, that the goal of morality (being moral) is to improve (not diminish) the well-being of sentient beings. — chatterbears
Based on that goal, we can say "Killing someone because of their hair color, is immoral" - Killing someone [based on an unreasonable justification] will diminish the well-being of that living being. That's just a fact, and it coincides with the goal we have set. — chatterbears
But even without me and you agreeing on a goal, I can still lead you [within your own subjective moral perspective] to Veganism. — chatterbears
If you don't care to be consistent in your beliefs, then that is a big problem. — chatterbears
He can't even clearly communicate his position without pointing to something I said or something I implied (when I clearly didn't imply it). — chatterbears
You claim to have accepted my 3 pillars while somehow still eating animals and holding a reasonable position? — chatterbears
Half the time you were arguing from a position you didn't even say you held. — chatterbears
And the other half you were arguing that animals don't feel pain in a way you find reasonable enough to stop contributing to. That is a clear violation of empathy. Unless you are stating you only have empathy for humans? In which I would push your position into a consistency test. The reason you eat animals is probably not a reason you'd accept for yourself to be eaten, which makes your position contradictory/inconsistent/hypocritical. And if you would accept being eaten based on the same justification you have used to eat animals, I would say your position is absurd and/or unreasonable. — chatterbears
But veganism IS cult-like. It is one thing to talk about the pragmatic health or environmental benefits. It is another to want to take over the world with an absolutist moral prescription. — apokrisis
Could you not say the same for the prohibition on slavery? — chatterbears
Apparently not wanting to cause harm to another living being when it is not necessary is an absolutist moral prescription? — chatterbears
The irony of most meat eaters is, they look at dog or cat abuse as immoral. But when you point out that cows/chickens/pigs should ALSO be included in that same fair treatment as the dog/cat, "WHOA YOU HAVE AN EXTREME POSITION!!" — chatterbears
Wrong. Many of us seek pain and discomfort, so pain is not necessarily bad. Making mistakes is how we learn and develop. Enduring hardships can make us better and stronger people. Then there are those that say that being born is wrong and being alive is suffering and ending your life would be good (just look at some of the other threads on this forum). This is what I mean by it being subjective.Humans have a higher intelligence level, and therefore can understand morals/ethics on a higher level. And the only thing I have applied to humans and animals that is universal, is that we ALL want to avoid pain and suffering. Every other moral dilemma or quality can be viewed as subjective, but the will to live and the goal to avoid pain, is universal. And we can build a moral system just off that foundation alone. If we all want to avoid pain and suffering, to cause NEEDLESS pain and suffering would be wrong. And by NEEDLESS, I am referring to pain that didn't need to be caused because there is an alternative. For example, we don't need to factory farm animals, because we have an alternative of a plant-based diet. Therefore, since it is not NEEDED in the same way a lion NEEDS to hunt an animal to survive, our actions have become immoral. Especially when you self-reflect on why you want to farm animals, most of it comes down to taste pleasure/convenience/cultural norms/etc... All reasons which are not valid or consistent within your own ethical views. — chatterbears
Your survival depends upon existing within a community that to a large degree fuels/feeds itself on the use of animals. — Inyenzi
We have the entire universe for our living space. If we would just stop focusing on nationalism dividing humans into different groups based on culture and heritage, then maybe we could focus on expanding out into the universe. We don't want to keep all of our eggs in one basket regardless of what we end up eating. For the human race to survive extinction, we need to move off the planet.So meat-eating is not a sane general practice for the human race if it wants both a population peaking at 15 billion and to survive that in reasonable shape. — apokrisis
Veganism can be a healthy diet. But overall, we are evolved to eat like hunter/gatherers. Consuming wheat, or drinking animal milk, are more unnatural than boiling a squirrel so far as our digestive system is concerned.
However if we were actually talking about an objectively nature-honouring human diet, then every modern supermarket is the grossest abuse of that. There are immoral levels of sugar, bad fats, preservatives, colourings, etc, in what gets sold.
So which is the bigger social crime - factory farmed chicken or sponsorship of kid's soccer by "sports drink" manufacturers?
I'd admire any true vegan. So not one who lives on pasta and noodles. But really, given the way the food industry is set up, you would also have to have a crank's level of intensity to overcome all the obstacles put in the way of achieving that "perfect diet".
But to get back to the high level view, I think it is amazing just how much we have already changed the ecology of earth. When it comes to terrestrial mammalian ecosystems, it is now mostly a planet dominated by domestic animals.
Vaclav Smil has written great stuff on this like Harvesting the Biosphere....
If the domestication of the world's ecosystems is a moral dilemma, then vegans are ultimately just as caught up in that as meat eaters.
Smil says the human population has grown 20-fold in the last 1000 years and nearly quadruppled in just the past century. The numbers are still swelling by 230,000 every day.
So by his calculations, between 1900 and 2000 – allowing for the fact that humans have got on average somewhat taller and rather fatter – the global anthropomass has grown from 13 to 55 million tonnes of carbon (Mt C) by weight, or from 74Mt to 300Mt if you include the water and the body’s other mineral elements.
That is a lot of flesh to feed obviously. But Smil says bottom-line is what scientists call HANPP, or the human appropriation of net primary production – the amount of the planet’s total harvestable plant growth that this many humans now take as their share.
And Smil says it is about a quarter. That is, 25 per cent of the annual terrestrial phytomass production, the conversion of sunlight to plant material, winds up one way or another supporting the 55Mt of human carbon.
Hey yes, we rule!
The calculation is complicated of course. It includes not just the plant growth directly for food but also our take in fuel, fibre and timber.
And nearly half the HANPP figure represents the global loss of photosynthetic potential due to erosion, desertification, human created forest fires and the building over of good land – all the ways we have taken away from the Earth’s usual productivity.
Smil notes the world’s big cities now cover nearly 5 million square kilometers. In the last 2000 years, he says, with deforesting and other deprecations, humans have cut the total phytomass stocks from 1000 billion tonnes (Gt) of carbon to 550Gt.
But there is good news in the HANPP. At least farming efficiency has been keeping it somewhat under control.
Smil says it is estimated that a third of the Earth's ice-free surface has been taken over by human agriculture, some 12 per cent for crops and 22 per cent for pasture.
However because of the green revolution of the mid-20th Century – the switch to industrialised farming with diesel machinery, petroleum-based fertiliser, irrigation schemes and new crop strains – the figures have not blown out quite like they could have.
Over the past century, the global HANPP has only doubled from the 13 per cent supporting 1.7b people in 1900 to the 25 per cent supporting 7.2b people now.
And looking ahead, even with the global population expected to hit 9b by 2050, the human share of the Earth’s photosynthetic bounty may only hit 30 per cent.
Well, that is unless biofuels are needed as an alternative energy source and the resulting agricultural expansion balloons HANPP out to 44 per cent, as some studies suggest.
... then where Smil’s book gets especially thought-provoking ...
As well as the anthropomass and the phytomass, there is also the story of the zoomass – the drastic shift from wild to domestic animals in terms of the planet’s mammal population.
Smil calculates that the agricultural revolution of the past century has seen a seven-fold increase in plant production. In 1900, humans grew 400Mt of dry matter a year. Now it is 2.7Gt. But because humans like meat on their plate, half this phytomass goes to feed our farm animals.
We know the equation of course. It takes about 10kg of grain to produce 1kg of burger meat. And Smil says the consumption of meat in developed countries has shot up from just a few kilos per person per year to over 100kg.
In 1900, the world had 1.6b large domestic animals including 450m head of cattle and water buffalo. Today, that number is 4.3b, with 1.7b cattle and buffalo, and nearly 1b pigs.
In terms of biomass, the increase is from 35Mt of carbon to 120Mt. So about double the 55Mt of humans treading the planet in fact.
Wild zoomass has naturally gone skidding in the other direction, halving from 10mt to 5Mt during the 20th Century. With large grazing animals, the drop has been especially severe says Smil. Elephants have gone from 3Mt to 0.3Mt, the American bison is right off the radar at 0.04Mt.
Tot it up and the numbers are a little bonkers. The combined weight of humanity is today ten times the weight of everything else running around wild – all the world’s different mammal species from wombats to wildebeest, marmosets to rhinos.
And then our livestock, the tame four legged meals soon to end up on our dinner table, outweigh that true wildlife by 24 to 1 all over again. Talk about transforming a planet within living memory. The world is now mostly constituted of people, cows, sheep, goats and pigs.
As Smil says, the balance has gone from 0.1 per cent 10,000 years ago, to about 10 per cent at the start of the industrial revolution, to 97 per cent today. There may still be tens of thousands of wild mammal species sharing our Earth, but really they don’t add up to much of any consequence.
Again, just think about it. We harvest a quarter of the biosphere now. Ourselves and our four legged meals outweigh other terrestrial mammals by a combined 34 to 1.
We have the entire universe for our living space.
For the human race to survive extinction, we need to move off the planet. — Harry Hindu
So is your problem in hurting another living creature or killing them? We could kill our food with no pain, if that is your problem. If it is the killing itself, then you vegans have that problem of killing life. Plants are life.Yeah, it is REALLY EXTREME to not want to hurt another living creature needlessly. — chatterbears
If it is the killing itself, then you vegans have that problem of killing life. Plants are life. — Harry Hindu
Your survival depends upon existing within a community that to a large degree fuels/feeds itself on the use of animals. — Inyenzi
Wrong. Many of us seek pain and discomfort, so pain is not necessarily bad. Making mistakes is how we learn and develop. Enduring hardships can make us better and stronger people. Then there are those that say that being born is wrong and being alive is suffering and ending your life would be good (just look at some of the other threads on this forum). This is what I mean by it being subjective. — Harry Hindu
If it is the killing itself, then you vegans have that problem of killing life. Plants are life. — Harry Hindu
Yes, this is a problem for most living beings in this planet, we can't go on without killing something else. — jonjt
I was assuming silence implied tacit agreement from all posters.:wink:I believe his point remained unanswered.
Justify means "to show (an act, claim, statement, etc.) to be just or right." Since you are trying argue that buying/eating meat is okay, you are justifying it. — NKBJ
You can be. It's called "aiding and abetting." Paying someone for an immoral act falls in that category. — NKBJ
I'm talking about killing a whole plant, like a head of lettuce, or a whole forests of trees that are chopped down for fuel, building materials, etc.Yes, this is a problem for most living beings in this planet, we can't go on without killing something else. But this relation with fruits at least isn't that bad, the tree is giving the fruit for anyone that wants to eat it, so they defecate their seeds and proliferate their species. — jonjt
When we exercise, we experience physical pain, but we keep doing it for the health and social benefits. Physical pain teaches you what is dangerous to your body and what isn't. We need pain in order to survive. It evolved for a reason.Really? So how about you go into a factory farm, lay on the floor and let one of the workers slit your throat. They can then feed you to a cannibalistic tribe who can benefit from your corpse.
It's extremely ignorant to conflate mental hardship with physical pain. The pain I am referring to is physical pain, which is an evolutionary trait. The fight or flight response. Either way, you want to avoid pain, whether that is by running away, or fighting for your life. The rare case of people who want to end their lives is NOT what I am referring to. I was referring to an overall commonality that all living beings share. Which is to avoid pain and suffering.
I am starting to think you're a troll as well, but I hope not. — chatterbears
I can't take you seriously because you don't read posts and instead insist on these replies that do not address what I have said. I already made that same point in my post you are replying to. If it is about pain that you are worried about, then we can kill animals without them feeling any pain. If it is life you are worried about, then you kill life every time you eat a head of lettuce and are being inconsistent yourself. Who are you to determine which organism gets to live simply because of the arbitrary boundary you have chosen of having a nervous system or not.I can't take you seriously any more. Vegans care about SENTIENT living beings that can experience pain and suffering. A plant does not have a brain or a nervous system, and therefore cannot experience pain and suffering. You keep conflating things in a ridiculous manner. I cannot tell if you're trolling at this point. — chatterbears
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