For chrissakes yourself. Depression is an irrational state of mind. So no matter how thoughtful the OP is otherwise, his or her actions could be triggered by anything we say or do. So, yes, I think a thread where the OP is openly contemplating suicide shouldn't be allowed and anyone attempting to post such a thing should immediately be directed towards seeking irl help from non-anonymous sources where long-term solutions and relief can be found.

Someone has already suggested death as a painkiller.

You have no idea what someone is going to do with your listing the pro's and con's of suicide.

This is irresponsible.

[reply="leo;247810"ho

You're entirely ignoring the fact that the total sum of suffering is less if you don't kill animals for food.

And your hypotheticals are just silly. We have to go on what we know. You can pretend to be all cynical about it, and pretend that you question how much we can know about the inner lives of anyone but ourselves, but in reality, we acknowledge that others feel pain.

We can locate where in the brain pain is processed. We know the biological function and process of pain. It's not some huge mystery.

And just to reiterate, so you don't forget: fewer plants AND animals die and suffer when you avoid eating the latter.

We tend to be very fatalistic, believing that things can't be changed, but do we really try? — leo

Vegans try. It's the stubborn omnis who want to posit that plants have feelings to and therefore lets slit pig's necks who don't want to change a darn thing about the status quo.

We're amateurs dabbling around and this is a person in acute and chronic need of psychological help.

Honestly, I think what keeps me alive is my irrational survival instinct and the possibility that there might be something after death (e.g., afterlife, reincarnation, etc.). This has created an incredibly difficult life for me, and I regularly fall into depressive episodes (for which I've been seeking help) — simmerdown

You've got it backwards. Suicide is an irrational thing to do.
Your depression is messing with your ability to think clearly, and there's no way to "logic" your way out of mental illness.
Seek professional help, use your meds as directed, and please always keep in mind that thoughts driving you to self-harm are not coming from the coherent, sane, logical part of you.

To the mods: I'm not sure how great of an idea it is to let this kind of thread go on too much. We're not professionals and I fear we'll do more harm than good if people commenting seriously (or just for kicks) entertain suicide as a viable option for someone who is clearly dealing with mental issues beyond our control and expertise.

I know that life forms with brains feel pain.
I have no proof whatsoever that life forms without brains feel pain.
I have to go with what I know over what I can only make vague guesses about.
And even if brainless life forms felt pain, avoiding animal products protects more of them too, so the sum total of suffering is less.

It's not clear how a tree could feel pain. It's pretty unlikely that it can. It's so unlikely, that it's safe to say it can't.

It is clear that a cow can feel pain.

Also consider that fewer plants are killed in the process of feeding vegans than omnis cause of the plants used to feed the animals they eat.

Yes, but how much suffering is still something we can control. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater and saying "might as well cause more, even though I could cause less, because I have to cause some" is just illogical.

My point was that we have a choice about which ones we eat.

We need to be more careful about what we eat. We're killing the planet and ourselves on top of all the animals we needlessly murder.

You can't do a great idea or theory justice in some short quip. Life is complex. Philosophy and art should mirror that.

If you just want to write a pop-culture book, then go ahead, but don't pretend it's any deeper than that.

How does it offer to refute solipsism and do you have to read the entire novel to find this out? — Andrew4Handel

I literally loled at this. Yes. Yes, you have to read a whole book.

You're starting to sound like some of my students who tell me that they love to write, and they're great writers, but they hate to read... It really really does not work that way.

It's not new news, but it's back in the news:
We need to stop eating meat to save the planet--yes, that includes plants.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/17/scientists-call-global-agricultural-revolution-and-planetary-health-diet-save-lives

Not to mention the brains of the majority of even otherwise reasonable omnis turn to mush when it comes to this issue.

Most people are bored by any philosophical discourse. Or math. Or science. Or history. I don't think the value of most things should be based on what teens feel about them.

The classics, for the most part (and I'll admit to some exceptions) are classics for good reason.

A good refutation of solipsism can be found in Robinson Crusoe, btw.

There's no accounting for taste, as they say. But you can educate and refine your tastes.

Most people interested in a philosophical novel are going to be bored with a novel that is too simple in style and/or content.

think the point of writing a novel is to entertain people in some way.If you wanted to inform someone you could write something factual or write a philosophy article.

I want to know if a book made a coherent powerful philosophical point then what was it? — Andrew4Handel

Well, which is it now? Are you trying to make a powerful point or merely entertain? You can do both, but your first paragraph implies you think novels oughtn't do that.

I'll embrace elitism if it means I'm not just reading surface level books that are at best vague, and at worst, contradictory.

A regular novel may just want to entertain. I want to read something enlightening at least, at best, transformative. That's what great literature does.

While I do believe in morality and rights, that does not mean I recognize them to be real. — RosettaStoned

That is a contradictory statement. But whatever. You admit to believing in morality, and we should be discussing the actual topic at hand and not your metaethical ruminations.

you technically have the right to do that. — RosettaStoned

If you don't believe in morality, you don't believe in rights either.

And, I agree, the universe doesn't give a hoot what we do to each other. But we are moral creatures. But just because humans make morality doesn't mean it's random, illogical, or whatever you want it to be on whatever whim you have.

Well, really nothing is immoral/moral unless you dictate to be in your own head. — RosettaStoned

If it's for a good cause, then you're absolutely correct. — RosettaStoned

Those statements contain absolutely contradictory metaethical positions.

You said:

I don't care what you say! — Bitter Crank

So clearly you're not interested in actual discussion.

As has been previously stated, they don't have nervous systems or brains, and so are incapable of thought or feeling.

We have no more choice about consuming other life forms than any other creature. — Bitter Crank

That's clearly wrong, since some if us do choose not to.


Also, you already admitted to just being a troll.

Guess that means killing babies and lynching black people is free game!

Will the dietary moralists please clear out of the dining room, and once you are outside, keep walking. I don't care what you say! — Bitter Crank

Maybe then this is not the thread for you and you should stick to commenting on threads you actually care about/have an open mind about.

To all of those, I say: we'll just have to find another way to fix it. It's a problem humans created, after all. We have to do better than perpetually bandaging the problem with murder.

And also, this is such a fringe topic--you can't feed the current human population on wild caught deer. Human animal consumption relies on billions of factory farmed animals.

Abandoning thousand year old practices because a few scientists have done some maths is ridiculous. — Isaac

Oh, you mean like when we ended slavery because it was the right thing to do? Or when we liberated women cause it was the right thing to do?

But if the actual math and facts don't make you even reconsider your position, there's nothing more to talk about here and it's obvious that you're just being stubborn.

Actually, no. The math does not check out. The ratio of animals killed to calories gained still weighs more heavily in favor of plant farming than deer hunting.

There's about 100lbs of meat on the average deer. And about 715 calories per lb. That's 71,500 calories per deer.
Soy yields on average 6 million calories per acre. There are 2.47 acres to a hectare. That's 14,820,000 calories per hectare.
They estimate that about 15 animals are killed per hectare of crops. 14,820,000 divided by 15 is: 988,000 calories per dead animal. 988,000 divided by 71,500 is 13.8.

Almost 14 times more animals are killed on a calorie for calorie basis when hunting deer than harvesting soy--which is not even one of the most calorie-dense crops.

Maybe in one or two rare exceptional cases. But hypothetical edge-case scenarios exist for all moral positions.

It's really not an argument against veganism.

Any moral claim obviously falls under the tacit restriction: ought implies can.

And back to square one. Well, if you can't/won't understand how animal agriculture (obviously) kills more animals, then you're beyond hope.

I'm not even sure what your point is.

We are more confident of the limits of an animals intellect than we are about the disabled. — Xav

How does that work? I recommend the book "are we smart enough to know how smart animals are" by Frans de Waal. There you'll see that we actually have a lot of proof that animals are way smarter than we've ever given them credit for. Provably smarter than some disabled humans.

We can't really justify not sending all our money to the 3rd world or halting society until we all have equal privilege, but we do. Fairness is a fairy tale. — Xav

Oh, well, I guess we should just stop all good acts then. s/
If you don't send your money to Africa, you're not engaging in a good act.
If you avoid animal products, you're avoiding engaging in a bad act.
Those are different things.

I think perhaps the zero issue becomes associated with veganism because some of the most vociferous campaigners are zero perfectionists — andrewk

Gary Francione for one. (It's hard to prove him wrong, though.)
But other than that I think it's just a red herring meat eaters have purposefully created so as not to have to listen to the actual arguments.

You said:

However, veganism is not ethically sound as it implies the destruction of a huge part of the human phenomenon and the human soul, incarnated in these life forms and the ways in which we engage with them culturally and personally — DiegoT

Either we eat animals and therefore must murder them for our "soul" (your description of which I find troubling), or we refrain from murdering them, and either totally or mostly (if you want to eat animals which have died of natural causes, I guess that's fine too) go veg.

Lol. I'm just going to take that as you conceding the argument.

you don't show the slightest humility about any potential alternatives to your own blindly fundamentalist dogma — Isaac

I think I'm just as right as you think you are.
But let's dissect your label for a moment:

fundamentalist: adjective, 1. relating to or advocating the strict, literal interpretation of scripture.
Well, there is no "scripture" I'm referring to. No religion I'm following. No god I'm appealing to. So that's just not accurate.
2. relating to or advocating strict adherence to the basic principles of any subject or discipline.
Well, I also strictly adhere to the principles of not murdering babies, not raping people, and not beating my spouse...so I guess not all fundamentalist attitudes are so bad.
That being said, I never maintained that there are no circumstances ever in which meat eating might permissible. My stance is that if you can be vegan, due to your circumstances, then you ought to, and that this applies to most people living in industrialized countries.

dogma: noun, a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.
a) I guess science could count as an authority in veganism? But I prefer to see it as a source of information...um, nope: no appeals to authority in veganism. And as stated above, I don't believe veganism to be "incontrovertibly true." There are exceptions. And when lab grown meat is available, that'll be an alternative to veganism. And I'm always open to new evidence or a good argument--just haven't come across any yet.

Naturalness and "doing things exactly like we always have for millennia" are not synonymous. — Isaac

You're the one who talked both about being natural and insisting on meat-eating cause it's a millennia old practice. But okay.

Your insistence on naturalness still makes no sense. I mean, you can read how the appeal to nature has been debunked in any logic 101 textbook.

This is probably due to an excessive emotional implication; — DiegoT

Please refrain from assuming you know what is going on in my mind or what my emotional state is. That's not only impolite, it's also poor philosophizing.

You still haven't explained a)what the heck the human "soul" is
and b) why it requires murder to thrive.

The human "soul" (whatever the heck you mean by that) requires us to lock up billions of animals in over-crowded factories, torture them their whole lives, and then slit their throats?

Your position can only arise out of a total denial of the inner life of anyone but a human. Which means you don't have even a basic understanding of Darwin's theories.

Guess you live in a cave without air conditioning, medicine, factory farmed meat, and electronics...oh wait, you're chatting with us here. Hm, how does that figure into "naturalness" and doing things exactly like we always have for millennia?

Ought implies can. We need to eat to live. The question is how do we reduce harm as much as possible while doing so. Eating only plants caused both fewer animal deaths as well as flora deaths. That is because the animals you eat have to be fed many times the amount of plant matter you would have to eat to make up the nutritional difference of avoiding animal consumption.

But the whole question relies on a big if. Plants don't have brains or nervous systems, which are the only way we currently know to experience...anything.