Morality of eating Meat, does it matter?

[brimstoneSalad]

What made you think I was defending raping and killing in the modern world in the first place?

You may be arbitrarily not defending that, but the same arguments you are making and think are valid can equally be used to defend that.

Bottom Line: We are humans and they are animals.

"Bottom line: We are white and they are black."
"Bottom line: We are men and they are women."
"Bottom line: We are adults and they are children."

This is not an argument based on reason, but on dogma appealing to an arbitrary difference, and asserting moral relevance.

If you just happen to arbitrarily prefer humans and consider it fine to torture and kill animals for enjoyment, then you must come to realize that's not inherently different from somebody who arbitrarily prefers "white" humans and considers it fine to torture and kill "black" humans.

I'm not sure I understand why you are comparing the morality of eating to harming humans. The two do not even come close in my mind.

I did not say they are they same in magnitude. I have repeatedly corrected you on that point, and you keep putting words in my mouth. You're making a straw man fallacy and it seems deliberately ignoring and misrepresenting my argument.

You seem not to be intellectually honest, as you implied. If you have no interest in learning here, and just in preaching and misrepresenting us, that's not going to fly.

For a free society to work properly, people have to be able to respect each other and know that their interests are protected.

What you're advocating is a pure social contract, like what Randian Objectivism claims to be.

I don't necessarily want to live in a pure "free" society, where psychopathic pedophiles are welcome to lock children up in their basements -- as long as those children are their children, and have not been stolen from other citizens -- and rape and torture them to death as they please.

Otherwise there is totalitarianism and chaos, such as in the third world.

That's complete bullshit. You're making a slippery slope fallacy. You don't have to permit horrible things (as I mentioned above) to avoid totalitarianism. There are happy mediums where everybody agrees on rules to make society a little nicer to live in and forbid even those evil actions that don't affect them personally.

This boils down to motivation. For people to want to contribute to the growth of a society, they have to be respected and treated fairly or they abandon it.

You can be respected and treated "fairly", and equally before the law, but also not be allowed to rape your children to death for enjoyment -- nobody is allowed to do this, so it seems pretty fair overall. But "fairness" is subjective, so there will never be a system that everybody can agree is fair. I have already talked bout this at some length elsewhere.

Why should people be motivated to promote a cause (such as animal rights) that does not benefit them? The answer is they won't and probably never will, particularly if it costs them money.

Again, you're completely misrepresenting my argument. I am not promoting animal rights. Animals have no need to vote or drive cars, and they don't even necessarily have a concept of ownership, so they don't need the "right" not to be owned. I'm promoting better standards of welfare, and that people stop consuming meat and other harmful animal products.

It DOES benefit people to stop consuming meat. It benefits health which has massive economic benefits, it results in higher efficiency agriculture (beans, which are a superior original protein source), and it benefits us by curbing global warming which is quickly leading us to crop instability and massive disaster for human beings. It also reduces antibiotic resistance to stop farming animals, which is another threat we're facing today.

The only place animals provide benefit is where there is no modern plant agriculture.
Animal agriculture in the first world (and most of the developing world) is the worst way to do things, a primitive practice which involves substantial harm to human society.

But animals don't contribute to society for anything other than as pets, scientific experiments, or protein.

Pets are fine, and we have increasingly good welfare laws to protect them from abuse. This is a good thing, just as is child welfare.

Animals do not provide protein, they consume it and convert most of it into shit and methane, which damages the environment. Plants provide protein; a small percentage of the protein eaten is incorporated into animal tissue, which if consumed also comes with substantial amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol which promote heart disease and have substantial economic cost. As well, the proteins the animals keep are more substantially methionine, which increases risk of cancer and possibly other ailments (which itself adds substantial economic cost).

Scientific experiments for the benefit of humans may be fine. This is an issue in contention among vegans. If you're interested in that subject, there's another recent thread on it. Much like the animal agriculture issue, using animals to experiment on may be holding us back scientifically (superior models are being developed that use human cells to form organs on "chips" which model human responses much better than mice).

That is why the vegan movement will never become mainstream, people have to see a reason that is good for them in order to change their behavior.

There are plenty of reasons it's good for them. However, perhaps unlike you, most people aren't psychopaths who have no empathy for animals, so for most people, avoiding harm to animals is another great bonus to going vegan.

If going vegan were not also healthy and beneficial to the environment (which affects humans), there would probably be fewer people going vegan. For many people, it's the sum of all three arguments which provides enough motivation to finally give up meat.

And the vegan movement is centered around what is best for animals, which in turn couldn't care less about what is good for us.

Whether they care about us is irrelevant. Babies don't care about adults, or know what's going on -- so we should be free to rape them to death, right? According to your reasoning.
And how about people suffering in third world countries who don't care about people in the first world? Should we be mutually apathetic?

Anyway, it's not just centered around animals. Environmental concerns (and saving human lives from catastrophe), as well as human health are also major focal points.

This particular thread was about animals, and morality, because you made it that way. You can't then claim that, because this is the question you asked, the only arguments made for veganism are the "protect animals" arguments.

Yet science is 100% man made so of course it is a human byproduct. I don't know why you are pointing out the obvious here, as if we don't know that science by itself doesn't just manifest things out of thin air.

Apparently you don't, because you repeatedly make this claim in various forms (as you did before):

I'm not saying that they don't have value, but they don't create anything either.

Science doesn't create anything either. Human beings create things. Science provides the method and knowledge to do so.
Likewise, morality provides knowledge and methodology in figuring out the right thing to do. It can help us (using it) create laws and society, inspire the creation of art and literature, and inspire people to create infrastructure to help the less fortunate.

Science (knowledge/methodology) -> Humans -> Human action (making or doing things)
Morality (knowledge/methodology) -> Humans -> Human action (making or doing things)

And not all morals are a good thing either, we don't have to look far into some religious beliefs to see that.

All legitimate morals are good. Religion contains pseudomorality. Like pseudoscience, pseudomorality is not useful, and can be harmful.

You can read about pseudoscience here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience

Do you value pseudoscience equally to science?
If not, then why put pseudomorality and morality in the same category?

In either case, there are clear differences between the two.
Pseudomorality is based on assertion rather than reasoning and logical arguments, and is often based on tradition or personal aversion rather than actual causation of harm or harmful consequence.

Interesting, I wonder if you feel the same way about about the morality of a steady decrease in harvested meat vs. something like gradual emancipation of slavery.

Yes. The consequences of legislating the end of slavery instantly was a huge population of people who were uneducated and didn't know how to take care of themselves, and a reaction of hate and racism against them.

Slavery still exists today, and we see the same problems: People become slaves because they don't have the education or empowerment to sustain freedom. Even if you buy them out of slavery, or force it with military intervention, it will just go back to the way it was.
People need to be educated out of slavery, and uplifted by establishing economy and rule of law so they can protect themselves.

So you understand supply and demand then, what do you think will happen say when pig farms start becoming less profitable to quickly?

It's not quick, that's kind of the point: vegetarian and veganism are growing relatively slowly. There is no realistic risk of it happening "too quickly".

As the price drops slowly, most individual farmers are diversified, so they will stop investing in pig farming, stop breeding pigs, and/or slowly sell the rest of the pigs (possibly at a loss), and invest more in other agriculture.
Due to this diversification, however, even if it were quick it would not result in wide scale economic disaster as happened during the great depression (which had other important differences too).

The only case we'd see a cull is if the price of meat globally dropped below the cost of feeding the animals, but this increase in itself would happen gradually due to the differences in costs between farms, so it wouldn't happen globally.
And in the case of cows, it would never happen at all during grazing since it's provided by federal land (inherently subsidized, the government would just lower its rates even more).

The bottom line is that as the price falls, we'll see more concentration of farming to efficient operations (which means even fewer people are reliant on the industry), which means the threat of economic disaster for farmers is reduced naturally as the price drops due to consolidation.

or maybe they will just kill off half their livestock and throw away the meat to drive prices up.

This is not what happens in reality. Apparently you don't understand supply and demand very well.
What you're talking about is artificial scarcity, and it does not exist in free markets. They would not choose to do this, unless they were a monopoly. It's never a viable business strategy to throw out product to drive price up in a free market when you're in competition.

If you don't get that, you need to go back to economics 101.

No one can say for sure because the conditions of your scenario haven't played out and might not ever. Scoff if you like but the scenario I have described actually has played out, such as during the Great Depression.

You're apparently talking about the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was a rather ill conceived act of government intervention on the free market:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultu ... stment_Act
It was only done as an act of emergency due to a market crash, jeopardizing the livelihood of a substantial number of farmers who relied on the price of those goods.

Interestingly, while food was being polluted and destroyed in massive quantities, people were also starving. This is thankfully not something that would survive modern scrutiny.

Modern government trends are toward bailouts instead, but for a dying industry of limited scope and which affects very few actual people (since we aren't a primarily agrarian economy anymore), it's more likely the government would just leave it alone if the price crashed for meat.
Grain prices (as a more important agricultural staple) are already controlled through government legislation.

The benefit of consolidation, however, is also more knowledge and foresight on the part of those consolidated companies, meaning they will be prepared if the economics are trending that way and be able to consolidate further and exit the market.

Again, you are assuming that people will start gradually eating less meat. Probably not going to happen, at least in our lifetimes.

That's what IS happening. If you think it's going to happen instantly, you're an idiot.
If it doesn't happen at all, then we're looking at much larger environmental catastrophe.

Would you rather a couple billion humans die from environmental catastrophe, or a few billion animals be killed to avert it if it has to happen?

The only way the vegan goals could be achieved is by government coercion, and the results would be catastrophic for the animals.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act was government coercion, not the free market.

You're speaking out both ends now. Is the government ordering people to kill animals, against the free market, or is the government making it illegal to kill animals?
We're not going to see both from the same government.

The only way government intervention would happen is gradual; we're talking slow reform of welfare, and taxation on emissions, which raise the price of meat and decrease demand from increasing price.
More likely, this also happens gradually through commercial innovation; more mock meats which are healthier, cheaper, and taste the same as meats.

The only way meat (and killing animals) would be outright banned is with a vast majority in favor of that, and by that time there would be few enough of them that there would be no such catastrophe.

However, this is all nothing more than a HUGE red herring on your part, because I'm not asking you to support a spontaneous government ban on killing animals. I'm only asking you to do the right thing and not contribute to killing them personally; unless you think going veg. yourself will cause the entire world to immediately follow suit, none of this is an argument against you personally cutting out meat.

There are many (probably most) vegans who do not promote government banning animal agriculture. They promote choice, and gradual animal welfare reform.

Not all science is driven by morals, just look at weapons technology. Science is also driven out of necessity. Also don't assume that scientists all have the same morals as yourself. They routinely do terrible things to all sorts of creatures in the name of science or whatever they "think" is better. I am not attacking science but pointing out a glaring omission from your statement.

This isn't an omission; I didn't say scientists have perfect knowledge of morality. I quite explicitly said moral progress is being made.
Pseudomorality is gradually being corrected and replaced. The idea of being good or doing the right thing inspires even weapon development, incorrectly based on the mistaken ethic of nationalism, or more legitimately, for reasons of protecting civilization and destroying threats to modern social and moral progress -- I.S.I.S., for example.

Scientists do what they do because they understand it to be the right thing. Correcting mistakes in that perception, and fine tuning knowledge of moral action, is essential to that motivation working and yielding good results.

Again, not sure why you are comparing enslaving children to eating meat. Maybe they are the same in your morale standard but not for 95% of the rest of the human population.

And yet AGAIN you put words in my mouth, and deliberately misrepresent me when I have repeatedly said this is not the case.

I have said they are matters of differing degrees of wrong; the important point is that they are both wrongs, and you can not dismiss one entirely while criticizing the other.

The "enslavement of children" is a kind of wrong which is useful to explore as a thought experiment because it does not affect other people, so it is a kind of evil that can persist in a "libertarian paradise" you seem to be advocating.
As long as they are your own children (you can't take other people's children), and you never release them into society to cause problems for others, it affects nobody, and is merely an exercise of your personal liberty.

Most people will never equate raising and eating an animal to be as bad as doing the same to a human.

And I am NOT doing so. So fuck you for putting words in my mouth AGAIN, after I explicitly said that's not what I'm doing.
Just because non-human animals may have less moral value does not mean they have no moral value at all. You can not dismiss moral harm to non-human animals just because there are other hypothetical harms that are worse. That's like dismissing the harm of rape because murder is worse, or dismissing the theft of a hundred dollars because stealing a million dollars would be worse.

That is because animals are not equal in our eyes, they are food.

This is because you are brain washed to see them as food, despite the harm that practice does to us, and the environment we rely on.
If you had been raised to eat other humans, say a racial minority, then you would not see them as equal either: you would see them as food. This would also be wrong. And no, I didn't say it would be equally wrong, asshole.

They are clearly inferior in most ways, if (in your eyes) that makes me a racist than so be it.

It makes you irrational. Children are inferior to adults too. Women, in some ways (like physical strength) are inferior to men.
Inferiority of one quality or another does not justify cruelty against that group.

Because I am for the only true race, the human race. personally I couldn't care less about most of the other species on this planet and they couldn't care less about me.

If you want to promote humanity, then you should be against the harmful practice of animal agriculture; it's holding us back, and threatening our future existence.

Perhaps that makes me morally bankrupt but I am not the one comparing eating cheap protein to raping children.

You are, and fuck you for constantly misrepresenting me. This was a civil conversation until you started throwing shit like this at me.

You should know very well I have not equated these. There is no large audience here for your to impress by insulting me and lying about my position. Your dishonesty is transparent, or maybe you're just trying to delude yourself.

Have a great evening, Cheers!

There you go, pretending to be nice after insulting me repeatedly and deliberately misrepresenting me. Classy.
Have a terrible evening.

[SpitF!R3]

First off, I never insulted you so I don’t know why you are so upset and decided to send this discussion in the gutter. If you think I misrepresented your statements, fine. That was not my intention and I apologize if I did. But taking it is a personal attack and throwing out profanities is thin-skinned and childish. That said you had some great points so I thought they deserved a candid response.

You may be arbitrarily not defending that, but the same arguments you are making and think are valid can equally be used to defend that.

I have never defended it and for one to understand your argument they would have to accept that animals deserve the same treatment that we give to each other. The arguments I make are about the treatment of animals. You are the one using them to compare and contrast between hurting humans, repeatedly. I get it, you are trying to invalidate my arguments by using the same ones on people and show them as hypocracy. But animals DON’T create music, science, art, or civilization. They are not our equals. Perhaps we can both agree that they a separate in magnitude and move on?

"Bottom line: We are white and they are black."
"Bottom line: We are men and they are women."
"Bottom line: We are adults and they are children."

This is not an argument based on reason, but on dogma appealing to an arbitrary difference, and asserting moral relevance.

If you just happen to arbitrarily prefer humans and consider it fine to torture and kill animals for enjoyment, then you must come to realize that's not inherently different from somebody who arbitrarily prefers "white" humans and considers it fine to torture and kill "black" humans.

Arbitrary difference? There is a reason to differentiate between the two because one is OUR species with reasons noted above. Which one is it? Either hurting people can be compared to hurting animals or it can’t? We can’t have it both ways. Yet you bring it up again and claim the opposite?

Of course I would not condone hurting other humans unless absolutely necessary. You feel the same argument is valid for animals? Fine then we do not agree on that point. I’ve already said why.

I did not say they are they same in magnitude. I have repeatedly corrected you on that point, and you keep putting words in my mouth. You're making a straw man fallacy and it seems deliberately ignoring and misrepresenting my argument.

You seem not to be intellectually honest, as you implied. If you have no interest in learning here, and just in preaching and misrepresenting us, that's not going to fly.

Again you just said there was arbirtrary difference between hurting people and animals

At least we agree they are not the same

What you're advocating is a pure social contract, like what Randian Objectivism claims to be.

I don't necessarily want to live in a pure "free" society, where psychopathic pedophiles are welcome to lock children up in their basements -- as long as those children are their children, and have not been stolen from other citizens -- and rape and torture them to death as they please.

I don’t know what you are talking about or how you derived that from my statement. When has he Libertarian movement ever advocated hurting children if it makes you feel good? You see, the premise of Libertarianism comes with the understanding of individual (human) rights, to include children. It states that as long as I don’t violate someone else’s rights’ (ie children) I should pretty much be able to do what I want. It has never been used an excuse to abuse other people. You might want to read up on that… anyways

That's complete bullshit. You're making a slippery slope fallacy. You don't have to permit horrible things (as I mentioned above) to avoid totalitarianism. There are happy mediums where everybody agrees on rules to make society a little nicer to live in and forbid even those evil actions that don't affect them personally.

You totally missed what I was saying. This applies to all societies, even socialist ones. People still have to think that they are being treated fairly and their interest are protected. And they do in most of the first world regardless of their politics. What horrible things was I advocating other than eating animals?

You can be respected and treated "fairly", and equally before the law, but also not be allowed to rape your children to death for enjoyment -- nobody is allowed to do this, so it seems pretty fair overall. But "fairness" is subjective, so there will never be a system that everybody can agree is fair. I have already talked bout this at some length elsewhere.

Again, I don’t know what you are talking about.

Again you're completely misrepresenting my argument. I am not promoting animal rights. Animals have no need to vote or drive cars, and they don't even necessarily have a concept of ownership, so they don't need the "right" not to be owned. I'm promoting better standards of welfare, and that people stop consuming meat and other harmful animal products.

It DOES benefit people to stop consuming meat. It benefits health which has massive economic benefits, it results in higher efficiency agriculture (beans, which are a superior original protein source), and it benefits us by curbing global warming which is quickly leading us to crop instability and massive disaster for human beings. It also reduces antibiotic resistance to stop farming animals, which is another threat we're facing today.

The only place animals provide benefit is where there is no modern plant agriculture.
Animal agriculture in the first world (and most of the developing world) is the worst way to do things, a primitive practice which involves substantial harm to human society.

Fair enough, you are not an abolitionist but promote the welfare of animals. Again I apologize if I misrepresented that. I agree there are plenty of good reasons for people to eat more veggies.

Pets are fine, and we have increasingly good welfare laws to protect them from abuse. This is a good thing, just as is child welfare.


Animals do not provide protein, they consume it and convert most of it into shit and methane, which damages the environment. Plants provide protein; a small percentage of the protein eaten is incorporated into animal tissue, which if consumed also comes with substantial amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol which promote heart disease and have substantial economic cost. As well, the proteins the animals keep are more substantially methionine, which increases risk of cancer and possibly other ailments (which itself adds substantial economic cost).

Scientific experiments for the benefit of humans may be fine. This is an issue in contention among vegans. If you're interested in that subject, there's another recent thread on it. Much like the animal agriculture issue, using animals to experiment on may be holding us back scientifically (superior models are being developed that use human cells to form organs on "chips" which model human responses much better than mice).

There are plenty of reasons it's good for them. However, perhaps unlike you, most people aren't psychopaths who have no empathy for animals, so for most people, avoiding harm to animals is another great bonus to going vegan.

If going vegan were not also healthy and beneficial to the environment (which affects humans), there would probably be fewer people going vegan. For many people, it's the sum of all three arguments which provides enough motivation to finally give up meat.

And those are the reasons that should be promoted most. Unfortunately, far too many people are concerned with what makes them feel good and not what is logical. But I guess I am just a psychopath so what do I know.

Whether they care about us is irrelevant. Babies don't care about adults, or know what's going on -- so we should be free to rape them to death, right? According to your reasoning.
And how about people suffering in third world countries who don't care about people in the first world? Should we be mutually apathetic?

Anyway, it's not just centered around animals. Environmental concerns (and saving human lives from catastrophe), as well as human health are also major focal points.

This particular thread was about animals, and morality, because you made it that way. You can't then claim that, because this is the question you asked, the only arguments made for veganism are the "protect animals" arguments.

But babies DO have legal rights, at least in most of the first world and at least when their born anyway. I am aware of the suffering of people in the third world and they are a much larger concern for me than the suffering of animals.

Apparently you don't, because you repeatedly make this claim in various forms (as you did before):

Yes, because I don’t understand that. Really? Come on now, we both know what I meant. This is just a diversion.

Science doesn't create anything either. Human beings create things. Science provides the method and knowledge to do so.
Likewise, morality provides knowledge and methodology in figuring out the right thing to do. It can help us (using it) create laws and society, inspire the creation of art and literature, and inspire people to create infrastructure to help the less fortunate.

Science (knowledge/methodology) -> Humans -> Human action (making or doing things)
Morality (knowledge/methodology) -> Humans -> Human action (making or doing things)

Agree with you say about science. Morals are not so clear to me since so many people in the world have bad ones.

All legitimate morals are good. Religion contains pseudomorality. Like pseudoscience, pseudomorality is not useful, and can be harmful.

You can read about pseudoscience here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience

Do you value pseudoscience equally to science?
If not, then why put pseudomorality and morality in the same category?

In either case, there are clear differences between the two.
Pseudomorality is based on assertion rather than reasoning and logical arguments, and is often based on tradition or personal aversion rather than actual causation of harm or harmful consequence.

Sounds like we agree here. Not all morals are good. But morals based on logic generally are. It all comes down to building the foundation of your principles on knowledge, although we do not always come up with the same conclusions.

Yes. The consequences of legislating the end of slavery instantly was a huge population of people who were uneducated and didn't know how to take care of themselves, and a reaction of hate and racism against them.

Slavery still exists today, and we see the same problems: People become slaves because they don't have the education or empowerment to sustain freedom. Even if you buy them out of slavery, or force it with military intervention, it will just go back to the way it was.
People need to be educated out of slavery, and uplifted by establishing economy and rule of law so they can protect themselves.

Well said, I agree 100%.

It's not quick, that's kind of the point: vegetarian and veganism are growing relatively slowly. There is no realistic risk of it happening "too quickly".

As the price drops slowly, most individual farmers are diversified, so they will stop investing in pig farming, stop breeding pigs, and/or slowly sell the rest of the pigs (possibly at a loss), and invest more in other agriculture.
Due to this diversification, however, even if it were quick it would not result in wide scale economic disaster as happened during the great depression (which had other important differences too).

The only case we'd see a cull is if the price of meat globally dropped below the cost of feeding the animals, but this increase in itself would happen gradually due to the differences in costs between farms, so it wouldn't happen globally.
And in the case of cows, it would never happen at all during grazing since it's provided by federal land (inherently subsidized, the government would just lower its rates even more).

The bottom line is that as the price falls, we'll see more concentration of farming to efficient operations (which means even fewer people are reliant on the industry), which means the threat of economic disaster for farmers is reduced naturally as the price drops due to consolidation.

That would be the preferred way no doubt. I think it needs to be a macroeconomic choice made up by people’s individual decisions to change their life style if they so choose.

This is not what happens in reality. Apparently you don't understand supply and demand very well.
What you're talking about is artificial scarcity, and it does not exist in free markets. They would not choose to do this, unless they were a monopoly. It's never a viable business strategy to throw out product to drive price up in a free market when you're in competition.

If you don't get that, you need to go back to economics 101.

Well they don’t happen naturally no. But often the government intervenes for special interest. How much individual farming is done anyway these days. Point is, if raising animals for food was outlawed and measures weren’t put in place for a gradual transition bad things could happen.

You're apparently talking about the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was a rather ill conceived act of government intervention on the free market:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultu ... stment_Act
It was only done as an act of emergency due to a market crash, jeopardizing the livelihood of a substantial number of farmers who relied on the price of those goods.

Interestingly, while food was being polluted and destroyed in massive quantities, people were also starving. This is thankfully not something that would survive modern scrutiny.

Modern government trends are toward bailouts instead, but for a dying industry of limited scope and which affects very few actual people (since we aren't a primarily agrarian economy anymore), it's more likely the government would just leave it alone if the price crashed for meat.
Grain prices (as a more important agricultural staple) are already controlled through government legislation.

The benefit of consolidation, however, is also more knowledge and foresight on the part of those consolidated companies, meaning they will be prepared if the economics are trending that way and be able to consolidate further and exit the market.

Perhaps yes. But bailouts would just result in lots of waste and excess, uneaten meat. Same if the price was allowed to collapse. Hopefully this will never happen.

That's what IS happening. If you think it's going to happen instantly, you're an idiot.
If it doesn't happen at all, then we're looking at much larger environmental catastrophe.

Would you rather a couple billion humans die from environmental catastrophe, or a few billion animals be killed to avert it if it has to happen?

Well I think that it isn’t going to happen and we are there will be an environmental catastrophe one way or the other. What the first world does probably won’t have much of an impact anyway since the most of the damage is caused by the countries that are trying to Industrialize, not the ones that have already done so. And they aren’t going to change anytime soon.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act was government coercion, not the free market.

You're speaking out both ends now. Is the government ordering people to kill animals, against the free market, or is the government making it illegal to kill animals?
We're not going to see both from the same government.

The only way government intervention would happen is gradual; we're talking slow reform of welfare, and taxation on emissions, which raise the price of meat and decrease demand from increasing price.
More likely, this also happens gradually through commercial innovation; more mock meats which are healthier, cheaper, and taste the same as meats.

The only way meat (and killing animals) would be outright banned is with a vast majority in favor of that, and by that time there would be few enough of them that there would be no such catastrophe.

However, this is all nothing more than a HUGE red herring on your part, because I'm not asking you to support a spontaneous government ban on killing animals. I'm only asking you to do the right thing and not contribute to killing them personally; unless you think going veg. yourself will cause the entire world to immediately follow suit, none of this is an argument against you personally cutting out meat.

There are many (probably most) vegans who do not promote government banning animal agriculture. They promote choice, and gradual animal welfare reform.

Fair enough but like you said not all vegans agree on everything. My point was that if the abolitionists had their way anytime soon then it would be a mess to handle the existing livestock. But since that is not what you are promoting then no reason to keep discussing it.

And yet AGAIN you put words in my mouth, and deliberately misrepresent me when I have repeatedly said this is not the case.

I have said they are matters of differing degrees of wrong; the important point is that they are both wrongs, and you can not dismiss one entirely while criticizing the other.

The "enslavement of children" is a kind of wrong which is useful to explore as a thought experiment because it does not affect other people, so it is a kind of evil that can persist in a "libertarian paradise" you seem to be advocating.
As long as they are your own children (you can't take other people's children), and you never release them into society to cause problems for others, it affects nobody, and is merely an exercise of your personal liberty.

But even you agree that they are not wrong in the same magnitude so why even bring it up in the first place? And like I said I don’t believe that it is morally wrong to raise and eat meat but you do so we disagree there. Also, you are misrepresenting libertarian-ism horribly but that is another matter altogether.

And I am NOT doing so. So fuck you for putting words in my mouth AGAIN, after I explicitly said that's not what I'm doing.
Just because non-human animals may have less moral value does not mean they have no moral value at all. You can not dismiss moral harm to non-human animals just because there are other hypothetical harms that are worse. That's like dismissing the harm of rape because murder is worse, or dismissing the theft of a hundred dollars because stealing a million dollars would be worse.

But you repeatedly brought up examples of raping and murdering and eating people which we both agree is wrong. And your point is that because it is wrong to hurt another person it is also wrong to hurt an animal needlessly. So yes you did equate the two, over and over again. You are comparing apples to oranges.
Squashing a bug isn’t the same as shooting a pig which isn’t the same as cutting a human’s head off. The difference is I only see one of those things as truly immoral. Obviously, we have a very different set of values and while I won’t needlessly hurt most animals (other than bugs). But I will kill animals that are pests or for food and not feel any regret for doing it.

This is because you are brain washed to see them as food, despite the harm that practice does to us, and the environment we rely on.
If you had been raised to eat other humans, say a racial minority, then you would not see them as equal either: you would see them as food. This would also be wrong. And no, I didn't say it would be equally wrong, asshole.

Brain washed? Asshole? And again you bring up eating people. And I am the one misrepresenting? I don't follow.

It makes you irrational. Children are inferior to adults too. Women, in some ways (like physical strength) are inferior to men.
Inferiority of one quality or another does not justify cruelty against that group.

We clearly have a different definition of cruelty to animals. You say it is irrational to not recognize that humans are different from other animals. But my premise is based on logic and value. Animals don’t contribute the same things to society that other humans can.

If you want to promote humanity, then you should be against the harmful practice of animal agriculture; it's holding us back, and threatening our future existence.

Animal agriculture has its problems no doubt, but there are bigger fish to fry at the moment in my opinion.

You are, and fuck you for constantly misrepresenting me. This was a civil conversation until you started throwing shit like this at me.

You should know very well I have not equated these. There is no large audience here for your to impress by insulting me and lying about my position. Your dishonesty is transparent, or maybe you're just trying to delude yourself.

There you go, pretending to be nice after insulting me repeatedly and deliberately misrepresenting me. Classy.
Have a terrible evening.

I had a wonderful evening thank you. I thought the discussion was civil until the profanities and insults came out. No problem, I don’t take it personally.

[Unknownfromheaven]

And not all morals are a good thing either, we don't have to look far into some religious beliefs to see that.

Those are not morals, facts and dogma that imply harm or any other deviations are clearly not moral based, but dogmatic based..if they say these are their morals it does not mean it is the case.

Some religious people are great inventors of lies and they believe their own lies when they defend their god, when they lie other people...this is why some religions are very dangerous.

they will just kill off half their livestock and throw away the meat to drive prices up.

This is happening from a long time..i used to work in the industry about 10 years ago and i saw with my own eyes that tons of meat and rest of food is thrown ”right out the window”/ garbage,, my father is also a navigator and he told me he saw tons of meat thrown in the sea... and in some countries they burn food (to keep the prices artificially high) here a beef burger ranges from 3 to 5 or even 10 rons, and salads are 23 to 25 ron ? (ron is the romanian currency) now why is that!?

Again, you are assuming that people will start gradually eating less meat. Probably not going to happen,

This is happening, its evolution, the community starts growing gradually. with the help of the internet and messages from social media which is now a tool to forward something, the growth will increase, it will not happen in a second, its takes time.

Because I am for the only true race, the human race. personally I couldn't care less about most of the other species on this planet and they couldn't care less about me

SpitF!r3, you sound like...we are the true race...other species are a false race....no words there. Perhaps it would be fit as an advanced extraterrestrial species would come here to consume us, and to treat us just like we treat other animals...because at the bottom line, we too are also animals, our true meaning of humanity means reason, empathy, compassion since based in all these we have evolved and we continue to do so. Without reason, without morals and compassion the true meaning of humanity fades. This was the only distinction between us and other species....and if we choose not to make any difference we are no better.

The Golden Rule does not apply to animals because they are incapable of recognizing them in the first place.

Of course they are able, they are capable of much more love than humans have, compare a pig to a dog, they are behaving in the same manners.

Sometimes it is good to do bad things when you benefit from them.

i d rather die. I went trough a lot of bad things and been experiencing betrayal...i could not have done such a thing to have a great life when i cared and loved some humans....but with the exact mentality they hurt me back for their own interests (other species cannot and will not do that)

[brimstoneSalad]

First off, I never insulted you so I don’t know why you are so upset

Of course you insulted me.

I spent several paragraphs explicitly outlining gradation in morality, and showing how I wasn't equating them but examining the process by which we decide if a thing is right or wrong.

So, it's wrong to rape a child, but is it wrong to stick your tongue out at a child and make him angry? Where does it end! Might as well say morality is arbitrary since you can't draw any hard lines between right and wrong.

OR we could be reasonable, and recognize that wrongs come in gradations.
It's very wrong to kill a human being, less wrong to kill a dog, less wrong still to kill a fish, and even less wrong to kill an insect.

Beings themselves have varying moral value, and actions against them have varying levels of harm within that context. It's more wrong for me to kill you than to step on your foot.

I believe I actually stated as much a few times throughout the posts. You completely ignore what I say, because you're too busy trying to form arguments to insult me and prove me wrong, rather than reading carefully and trying to understand my arguments.

Your behavior is more insulting than any amount of profanity you could throw at me. I'd much rather you cuss like a sailor and actually engage with the arguments I'm making and understand my point, than present a deceptive facade of politeness and be an asshole like you're doing.

But taking it is a personal attack and throwing out profanities is thin-skinned and childish.

If you can't take a little mild profanity, you can fuck off, because you're too thin skinned for the internet.
You're the asshole who is too childish to actually attempt to read and understand others positions before straw manning them, and too dishonest to admit you're trying to insult me and don't actually care about what I believe.

Half of your post amounted to an immature implication of, "I know you are but what am I?"

Read it again in the context of what I actually said, and consider all of the time you wasted, then you might understand how you were being such an asshole. And if you so choose, you can try to avoid doing that in the future.

If you think I misrepresented your statements, fine. That was not my intention and I apologize if I did.

Forgive me for not believing your apology is sincere when it's coupled with another insult.

If you can present a more sincere apology for wasting our time without coupling it with a flimsy justification and another insult, and apologize for your intellectual dishonesty of ignoring all of my very explicit statements that I am NOT equating these things in order to attack my character, and you promise to not do so in the future, we can continue with civility.

If you don't even understand the concept of comparing reasoning and how it differs from equating effect, then this is a bigger issue, and you are not suited to engage in philosophical discussion at this point.

[Jaywalker]

As for 1-
Your argument for why veganism is unique in being about helping others for the sake of being good is based on the idea that, unlike the civil rights movements, it doesn't help human society. Equality for all 'races' has helped all of human society prosper, for example- it didn't just help the oppressed.
A. So, what if these movements didn't help human society in general? What if suppressing a bunch of people and abusing them didn't halter prosperity? Then it's ok?
It's almost like you're saying human suffering isn't really bad- it's only bad if it hurts the 'growth of society'. So do you just not really give a shit about humans?
B. Why do you arbitrarily care about the 'growth of society' (and what does that even mean?)? The way I see it, the only reason why the 'growth of society' is important (morally speaking) is because it helps people, and it sounds like you're saying helping people isn't good.

Nice... Then he responded in a convoluted way that basically amounts to "I do it for me". It's fine for him to do anything as long as he benefits in the end. Of course, he also wants to maintain a semblance of moral integrity, so we get a few paragraphs of contradictory nonsense.

"Sometimes it is good to do bad things when you benefit from them." Why only sometimes? If you benefit from it, do it, no?

[EquALLity]

I think you might have misunderstood, or you are jumping to conclusions. I was trying to point out that there are actually practical reasons to treat other people good which isn't really the case with animals. The fact remains that a society a that treats people fairly is more likely to treat you fairly. There is an inherent self-interest in living in a free society, so you can be free as well. By establishing ideas such as "human rights", we empower ourselves, again not so much with "animal rights".

So you don't actually care about people, you only care about how they can serve you?

If so, that would make you a psychopath.
You would be so selfish and uncaring towards others that you don't even understand why people would do things just to help others.

As far as would I disagree with the Civil Rights movement if it didn't benefit society as a whole? Well I don't think matters what I think because changes happen like that if society doesn't recognize the benefit. Would it have benefited Rome to free all of their slaves? Of course not, that's why it never happened during the Empire. If you really believe that things like Civil Rights are all about equality then you probably have not considered how the affect power and who benefits from them. I'm not saying they are not worthy objectives rather that they are rarely without ulterior motives.

You're mixing two issues.
1) Would society support equality just to help the oppressed?
2) Do you personally care about the oppressed?

I was trying to understand if you actually do care about other people, and if you just are cynical and don't think that veganism will catch on because you think other people are selfish, or if you don't give a shit about others and assume that's the case for everyone.
It sounds like you just don't give a shit about others, because when I ask you about human rights, your reason for supporting them is that they will benefit you, and because you won't answer my question about the Civil Rights movement (whether or not you'd support it if it wouldn't benefit society in general).

Also, slavery actually was beneficial to the economy of the United States, from my understanding.

But do you actually think people were fighting against slavery because they thought that in some way it would make people more likely to be compassionate towards themselves?

But in an attempt to answer your question I think with humans in a free society, the Golden Rule applies very well. I treat others as I want to be treated because they can recognize the mutual benefit and we all live better because of it. The Golden Rule does not apply to animals because they are incapable of recognizing them in the first place.

Why do you care about the Golden Rule?
1) People following it would benefit you personally, and the help towards others only matters because in the end it would help you.
2) People following it would benefit others (and you want to help others to help others) and you.

You must also consider that a person's morals are not concrete or absolute and they will change as their environment dictates.

I'm not sure what your point is. Obviously people change over time. So what?

And were that to suddenly change, you would be knocked right off your moral pedestal.

...As if I'm vegan to make myself feel superior to other people?

This further supports the idea that you don't care about others.
You can't imagine, even though I'm saying so, that I'm vegan because I care about others. You think it must be that so I can put myself on a pedestal and act better than people.

Sometimes it is good to do bad things when you benefit from them. If this seems like I am saying that humans (including myself) are selfish, then I am.

Translation: Sometimes I do things that hurt others because the consequences give me personal pleasure, and I think that this is good somehow.

Also, I do care about the "unnecessary" suffering of animals, just probably not as much as you. That and I think we probably have a different definition of "suffering".

It doesn't seem like you even care about the unnecessary suffering of people. And why did you but unnecessary in quotations?
It's not necessary for you to kill animals because you like how they taste.

A different definition of suffering? What? How are you defining it, if not harming others?
I'm guessing you've defined it in some way so that you can rationalize that you're not causing suffering towards animals by torturing and killing them for your taste-buds.

Again, I think the difference between us is in degrees. I agree that animals shouldn't be tortured or mistreated, what good do we get from that anyway? However, I don't believe raising animals and slaughtering them humanely (which I will define if you insist) is immoral or bad

Oh, so you only buy animal products from farms you have examined to make sure the animals were treated humanely?
So you eat vegan when you go to restaurants and dinner parties? I seriously doubt it.

And you can't do the wrong things humanely. Killing animals who don't want to die for personal pleasure can't be made humane.
If you mean painless, how? Do they give the animals a shot and put them to sleep?

Of course I don't want them to suffer unnecessarily

That's not really an of course when you say it's good to do bad things to people because it gives you personal pleasure.

If animals can't find a niche or survive the world as it is then the will die out, as they always have.

First of all, that's not even what we're talking about. But just because animals will die because of that doesn't make it ideal. If they don't want to die, it's bad if they do. I don't see how this is controversial with you.

But we're not talking about staying out of the lives of wild animals. We're talking about bringing new animals into the world and killing and abusing them solely for personal pleasure.

It's not like we can save all the animals anyway...

By this logic, since we can't stop all crime, we might as well just not have laws and a justice system.

[SpitF!R3]

Of course you insulted me.

I spent several paragraphs explicitly outlining gradation in morality, and showing how I wasn't equating them but examining the process by which we decide if a thing is right or wrong.

I believe I actually stated as much a few times throughout the posts. You completely ignore what I say, because you're too busy trying to form arguments to insult me and prove me wrong, rather than reading carefully and trying to understand my arguments.

Your behavior is more insulting than any amount of profanity you could throw at me. I'd much rather you cuss like a sailor and actually engage with the arguments I'm making and understand my point, than present a deceptive facade of politeness and be an asshole like you're doing.

If you can't take a little mild profanity, you can fuck off, because you're too thin skinned for the internet.
You're the asshole who is too childish to actually attempt to read and understand others positions before straw manning them, and too dishonest to admit you're trying to insult me and don't actually care about what I believe.

Half of your post amounted to an immature implication of, "I know you are but what am I?"

Read it again in the context of what I actually said, and consider all of the time you wasted, then you might understand how you were being such an asshole. And if you so choose, you can try to avoid doing that in the future.

Forgive me for not believing your apology is sincere when it's coupled with another insult.

If you can present a more sincere apology for wasting our time without coupling it with a flimsy justification and another insult, and apologize for your intellectual dishonesty of ignoring all of my very explicit statements that I am NOT equating these things in order to attack my character, and you promise to not do so in the future, we can continue with civility.

If you don't even understand the concept of comparing reasoning and how it differs from equating effect, then this is a bigger issue, and you are not suited to engage in philosophical discussion at this point.

As an atheist, I would think that you would accept that morals principals are not universal or absolute. But that is indeed the position you seem to take, much like many theist would believe in absolute moral "truths" granted by a Deity. Your entire argument is based on the theory that because a moral principal can be applied to humans than it must able to be applied to animals. Personally, I reject that notion, and you are offended by it.

You have been arguing for a seemingly logical progression in right and wrong but you don't understand why so many reject the "logic" argument. I can only speak for myself, but I obviously do not value animals the same way you do and probably never will. No one argument has to be justifiable, but together they are, at least to me. We all apply different values to different things based on our background, preferences, religion or whatever. It doesn't make one right over the other.

While we may share many of the same moral "truths" inherited to us from society, that doesn't change the fact that morals are a human creation that only exists in our minds. This is way I reject moral realism. Nevertheless, I accept that I do have my own moral code, I just don't assume it to be superior to others way of looking at things. As I have pointed out, our morals conveniently change with our environment over time. I don't expect to be changing any vegan's opinion's anytime soon, but I thought it would be fun to share my own take and get a little criticism in the process.

Oh, and you haven't offended me. I don't even know you. But you seem to be very offended in this discussion so if you take a leave of absence that's OK.

[brimstoneSalad]

Personally, I reject that notion, and you are offended by it.

Again you ignore what I say, and again you misrepresent me.

Disagreeing with me is not what is insulting; misrepresenting me and ignoring my arguments (as you just did again) is.
You have made it abundantly clear that you are either unable or unwilling to engage in honest discussion and try to understand others' perspectives.
You don't even understand what I find insulting about how you're behaving. That's a big problem.

You have been arguing for a seemingly logical progression in right and wrong but you don't understand why so many reject the "logic" argument.

I understand why irrational people reject arguments based on logic. Theists do the same, and also follow arbitrary moral concepts they cherry pick from their scripture -- just as you're cherry picking what you like or don't like, rather than being consistent. Rationality and consistency are not values of yours, if they were, you would be troubled by your inconsistency.

No one argument has to be justifiable, but together they are, at least to me.

And as a theist would say, "no one argument has to prove god, but together they do, at least to me."

Your inherent irrationality is why you can not and will not engage in logical discussion on anything.

We all apply different values to different things based on our background, preferences, religion or whatever. It doesn't make one right over the other.

And here we have pure nihilistic relativism. So, you are fine and dandy with the pedophiles raping children to death: you have no place to claim your morals are better.

You aren't the norm in that respect. Most human beings aren't unapologetically irrational amoral nihilistic worthless pieces of shit. Most people care, at least a little, about doing the right thing, and being consistent. And the value MOST people place on moral decency is what makes society worth protecting. If most people were like you, it would be better if humanity went extinct, since it would present no value to the world and be nothing but a swarm of selfish locusts.

While we may share many of the same moral "truths" inherited to us from society, that doesn't change the fact that morals are a human creation that only exists in our minds. This is way I reject moral realism.

By that standard, you should reject science and mathematics too. But you won't, because you're inconsistent and cherry picking what you like and what you don't.

Nevertheless, I accept that I do have my own moral code, I just don't assume it to be superior to others way of looking at things.

Which makes it pretty damn useless.
If you can only use your "moral code" to judge yourself, and an Islamic terrorist can only use his or her moral code to judge his or herself, then everybody's good! Yay!
Nobody ever need behave in any other way than what they were already inclined to do; no matter what you do, as long as you think it's moral, then it is.

That's a pretty bullshit useless standard.

How about we apply that same standard to science?
As long as you think something is science, then it is! Christian Science is just as valid as Newtonian physics, which is just as valid as Einstein's relativity, which is just as valid as Homeopathy. Nobody should judge anybody else's idea of what science is.

Relativists are morons.

But you seem to be very offended in this discussion so if you take a leave of absence that's OK.

I'm not offended by the discussion, it's your habitually dishonest behavior in this discussion (and not your honestly sharing your beliefs) that is insulting -- that is, your habitually ignoring my explanations and misrepresenting me.

If you want to apologize for that without tagging on excuses and insults, then great.

[brimstoneSalad]

By the way, EquALLity, really great posts!

You can take over here if you want.

[EquALLity]

By the way, EquALLity, really great posts!

You can take over here if you want.

Thanks!

Alright, sure. I'm still waiting for Spit to get back to me.