Why vegans are simply better people

[Belz...]

Abstinence (sex, meat, beer, etc) is not in and of itself a virtue.

Amen. Extremes are seldom good. But being reasonable is so hard.

 

[ConspiRaider]

Um, as long as we're talking about destroying life forms and then eating them: Plants are life forms. I'm sure that ear of corn on the barbie can't feel very good about first having been severed from its life-giving sustenance - and then roasted.

I suppose it is okay to eat plants, since, although they live out their lives (kinda be nice to have the lifespan of a bristlecone pine) - we really don't understand them. CHOMP!!!!

 

[Belz...]

I am in my mid 30's. who gives a *****. Athlerosclerosis starts occuring in our children for Christ sake. You just don't get it man. The Big macs and James Coney Island's you feed your kids are painlessly, slowly killing them. I guarantee, you in your mid 30's. You have athleroscloris, a painless killer you would not otherwise have without your oil and meat diet. I gurantee you have it.

Excuse me, I don't understand a single word you're saying. Could you at least make a small effort, please ?

 

[Dessi]

Actually we don´t eat people because human meat is a health hazard. Not so much with other types of meat.

Eating pufferfish can be a health hazard too if its improperly prepared. Eating any sort of animal meat can be a health hazard if its inadequately cooked.

So as long as the health risks of human cannibalism are avoided, its ok. Good to know. I'm particularly fond of this comment on the subject:

Prior to 1931, New York Times reporter William Buehler Seabrook, allegedly in the interests of research, obtained from a hospital intern at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of a healthy human killed in an accident, then cooked and ate it. He reported, "It was like good, fully-developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."[128][129]

Lions and cheetahs and other predators don´t give two tosses about their meat, why should we?

Talk about apples to oranges. Lions and cheetahs don't make moral decisions about their diet, they probably couldn't exercise a choice to minimize the harm they cause even if they wanted to, what good reason would we have to take moral inspiration from them? Rational people like ourselves, on the other hand, can make moral decisions about our diet and can minimize the harm we cause to others, so we should do exactly that.

 

[Johny2x4]

What a bizarre comment. Lions and cheetahs don't make moral decisions about their diet, they probably couldn't exercise a choice to minimize the harm they cause even if they wanted to, what good reason would we have to take moral inspiration from them? Rational people like ourselves, on the other hand, can make moral decisions about our diet and can minimize the harm we cause to others, so we should do exactly that.

That´s awfully arrogant from you. Are you saying animals are inherently inferior because they can´t make moral decisions?

In any case, Christan the Lion would disagree with you.

 

[citizenzen]

The point is that you have yet to display how the animals you speak of which are confined, gathered and consumed, are aware of what is happening to them ...

That's from out of the blue. Since when has an animals ability to be aware of what's happening to them been the subject here? I certainly haven't made a point of it, nor would I as I wouldn't dream of telling you what an animal is aware of or not.

 

[Dessi]

Um, as long as we're talking about destroying life forms and then eating them: Plants are life forms. I'm sure that ear of corn on the barbie can't feel very good about first having been severed from its life-giving sustenance - and then roasted.

I suppose it is okay to eat plants, since, although they live out their lives (kinda be nice to have the lifespan of a bristlecone pine) - we really don't understand them. CHOMP!!!!

Once more with feeling:

Ethical vegans will almost universally acknowledge that life, in and of itself, isn't valuable. Its not biological life that matters, but biographical life and life which has an experiential welfare -- like the capacity to feel pain, pleasure, satisfaction, suffering, see one's self over time, have wants, expectations, and so on.

Plants, salmonella, ants, AI opponents in video games and such have no mental life. In what way is something harmed if it has no experiences whatsoever? How do you make an argument that being killed or staying alive is in an organisms best interests if it cannot, even in principle, prefer one outcome or the other? What moral characteristics do they have at all? Name just one which makes them comparable to an organism with experiential welfare.

This is not a controversial point of view. I'm quite certain that you support abortion up to a certain point, likely support non-voluntary euthanasia for people in a permanent vegetative state -- you might have your talking point reasons in debates, but if you're anything like me, you've probably wondered what moral characteristics early term fetuses or vegetative humans even have, how do you even harm something without a mental life in principle?

 

[citizenzen]

Amen. Extremes are seldom good. But being reasonable is so hard.

So you find that occasionally doing something evil is a good thing?

After all. if as you say extremes are seldom a good thing, then being extremely good could be considered a bad thing.

 

[BravesFan]

I do in the same sense that you reject the many medical advances gained by non-consentual human experimentation.


I usually think of cruelty as anything which causes suffering, particularly suffering that is easy to avoid. Some cruelty can be relatively trivial, like tying a sock around your cats belly to watch it fall over; sometimes cruelty can be profound, such as pouring lighter fluid on a cat and setting it on fire. Most of the time, cruelty is going to refer to acts that are closer to the "lighting a cat on fire" level of severity than the "tying a sock around a cat's waist" level. I think that's a good starting point.

I like to use the words "mentally similar" because people talk about human abilities, particularly human intelligence and rationality, as if the mental capacities between humans were homogeneous and uniform across the entire population. For example, people often make the remark that its ok to kill animals because animals aren't smart enough to make moral decisions... well, there's a whole class of humans in that category, like infants, children, severely mentally handicapped, who are no more or less capable of making moral decisions than animals, a fact which kinda throws a wrench into the argument against animals if we're not prepared to apply it non-rational humans. I like to use "mentally similar" as kind of an umbrella term for a humans, usually called marginal persons, who lack requisite rationality, intelligence, moral reciprocity, sense of self, or other properties people fall back on when they try to draw moral distinctions between rational humans and animals.


In other words, appeal to nature. You know, the exact same argument fundies use when they say homosexuality is immoral because its unnatural.

Ok, that was too easy, maybe even glib. Nevermind the fact that the naturalistic fallacy is, well, a fallacy. Let's actually consider the argument for a moment: we not only evolved to compete against other animals, but competing against members of our own species. Sure, I can cooperate with you for my own benefit, or I can enslave you, take your property, and harvest your organs for my own benefits. That's the scary thing about an appeal to nature: we can use it justify eating meat in exactly the same way we can justify slavery, ethnic nationalism, every manner of human cruelty ever inflicted to grant a survival advantage over any other person.

We evolved in a lot of ways, but no one takes evolution seriously as a normative moral theory, and certainly not a human rights moral theory at that.


Correct, eating meat is not necessarily equivalent to animal cruelty. I'm often asked whether I would eat a dead animal found the forest, or roadkill for that matter. I probably wouldn't for sanitation reasons, but the general argument against animal slaughter doesn't really carry over, there's no obvious objection.

The problem here isn't necessarily with eating meat, its that the justifications for doing so aren't very good, they fail a test for logical consistency on even cursory examination, something you've no doubt realized seeing how quickly you're "nature made us omnivores" argument went south.

That's really all I care about, that people understand the principles they hold, and apply their principles consistently. I don't think many people hold very consistent ethics with regard to how they treat animals.

In your opinion the justification isn't good.

Why these broad jumps from a discussion of cows to "the same arguments fundies use when they say homosexuality is immoral..." These two thinfs have nothing to do with each other? You have assigned a moral compass to a type (that you have created in your mind) and then anyone who you view expresses this "type" you then view through these blinders.

I can make a statement that it's morally justifiable to kill vermin when the infest a residence. That doesn't mean that because Hitler may have used a similar justification for the holocaust I am now immoral for not wanting disease carrying vermin in my house!

I think that your post reeks of what i call "marginalized vengeance" . Often when people feel marginalized as kids/teens they grow up and become great defenders of all things marginal. Yet they seem to not understand the basic foundations of the mainstream because they view the world with a sort of vengeance viewpoint for marginalizing them to begin with (and it's understandable). However, it makes having discussions with said people difficult because everything seems to be stated in absolutes, affirmations and strange correlations in morality and ethics between marginalized subjects that aren't connected. (like say Veganism and the persecution of gay people by fundies).

I understand why it happens, and I understand the desire to right wrongs that we feel we experienced when we were young. However, if you lose sight of the house because you are to busy defending the gates, eventually you come home and all your stuff is gone.


(I understand because i was once marginalized myself in high school, cuz I was a punk rock kid in Mississippi. )

 

[Belz...]

Reverbvision gave the impression that he/she was stuffing themselves with vegetables all day. I suppose that the windows are always open in that household.

And one has to wonder: if all humans did that, how much crops would we need ?

I wonder how he/she/it reconciles that vegie-only approach with the observation that humans are constructed to operate as omnivores...

Indeed.

 

[RandFan]

I've heard of her work. If you're interested, here she is in a TED talk. It's really more about autism, but she does touch on a bit of her work with animals.

Here is an excerpt of one of her papers, Animals Are Not Things, A View on Animal Welfare Based on Neurological Complexity ...

To discuss whether or not animals should be property, I first have to define what the word property means in a concrete manner. I will limit my discussion to the framework of the U.S. legal system and culture. When I own an item as property, I am allowed to do certain things with it. If I own a cow and a screwdriver I can sell them, give them away, destroy them, experiment on them, eat them, put them in my will, profit from them, or use them in my business. I am also allowed to buy another cow or screwdriver. For example, I am allowed to slaughter the cow or destroy the screwdriver in a stamping press. Although absurd, I could even eat the screwdriver if I ground it into very fine powder. Both the cow and the screwdriver can be used in my business and I can put them in my will. I am allowed to modify cattle by selective breeding and I can modify my screwdriver by painting its handle green.

However, both the laws in the U.S. and our culture put severe restrictions on the kinds of things I can do to the cow and but place no restrictions on the things I can do to the screwdriver. I could be punished for felony animal abuse if I stabbed the cow in the eye with the screwdriver, but there would be no penalty for mangling the screwdriver and slowly destroying it by hitting it with my hammer.

The cow has legal protections that a screwdriver does not have. These legal protections only apply to live animals that have a well developed nervous system.* Science has shown that animals such as mammals and birds feel pain in a manner similar to humans. Insects, viruses and microbes are not able to feel pain or suffer. More research is needed to determine the extent that fishes and amphibians feel pain. Present research shows that they do experience fear. Fear is very aversive and animals should be shielded form situations that cause great fear. Fear will cause a great rise in stress hormones. Animals such as dogs also need to have environmental enrichments. Melzack (1954) and Burns (1955) found that puppies kept in barren kennels became hyperexcitable and had abnormal EEG patterns which indicated extreme arousal.

When the structure of the brain and nervous system is studied, there is no black and white line between people and higher mammals such as chimps, dogs or cows. The genome project has shown that humans and mice share many genes (Gunter and Dhand, 2002). In mammals 30 to 40% of all genes are involved in nervous system development and function. The basic design of the nervous system and the neural mechanisms that process fear and pain are similar in humans and other mammals (Rogan and LeDoux, 1996). Colpaert et al. (2001) reported that rats will self medicate themselves with pain killers to relieve pain in arthritic joints.. Pain and fear both cause suffering. As nervous system and brain complexity increases the welfare needs of the animal increase and become more complex, but all animals that have sufficient nervous systems complexity to suffer from either pain or fear need basic welfare protections. Animals with complex brains also have greater social needs and a need for greater environmental enrichment.

With the framework outlined above, I can argue that animals can be property and still have a high standard of welfare. However, I will argue very strongly that animals need many protections because they are not things like a screwdriver. As the phylogenetic tree of animal species is climbed, protection from suffering must be increased. Chimps would require more protection and need different kinds of protection than frogs to insure that they would not suffer. Chimps have a more complex brain than frogs and a rich social life. As nervous system complexity increases, the animal needs increasing amounts of protection from society to insure that it does not suffer from pain, fear or a lack of environmental and social stimulation. Even though the phylogenetic tree is not linear it moves along its various branches from less complex nervous systems to more complex. Comparative physiology and psychology has shown that there is a broad range of nervous system complexity. As complexity increases a brain forms in the head of the animal that becomes increasingly complex. Different animals can be ranked in order of brain complexity. For example, ranking from less complex to more complex would be clams, lobsters, fish, birds, mice, dogs, apes, chimpanzees and people. There are some animals that are approximately equal in nervous system complexity such as dogs and pigs. Both rats and chimps should have equal protection from pain and fear, but the chimp may need additional protection to insure that it has adequate social stimulation. Chimps have a greater need for social and environmental stimulation than rats but new research indicates that even mice need social stimulation to prevent abnormal stereotypic behavior (Bohannon, 2002). Simple environmental enrichments such as materials to burrow in and several compansions are probably adequate for a rat, but a chimp needs much more.

Animals are not things, but there is probably a point where legally protecting an organism from pain and fear should cease. From my knowledge of neuroscience, I can be reasonably sure that oysters, flu viruses and bacteria do not need legal protection to prevent people from being cruel by inflicting pain and fear. Advocating for the rights of oysters is something I think is silly.**

In conclusion, animals can be property and still have many laws and other protections to insure their welfare. Changing language based concepts like property are only important to animals if changes in rhetoric cause people to treat animals better. I have little interest in rhetoric unless it provides actual changes where the animals live. All my life I have worked, making concrete improvements out in the field.​

* There's a little something for the "what about bacteria?" crowd.
** Again, a little something for the "what about bacteria?" crowd.

Thanks, I've seen the video and the movie. Though I will confess the TED talk to be far more informative. Good information.

 

[Dessi]

What a bizarre comment. Lions and cheetahs don't make moral decisions about their diet, they probably couldn't exercise a choice to minimize the harm they cause even if they wanted to, what good reason would we have to take moral inspiration from them? Rational people like ourselves, on the other hand, can make moral decisions about our diet and can minimize the harm we cause to others, so we should do exactly that.

That´s awfully arrogant from you. Are you saying animals are inherently inferior because they can´t make moral decisions?

I'm saying the argument "animals eat other animals, why shouldn't I" is not a particularly good one for the reasons enumerated above.

I've said nothing about animals being "inherently inferior" nor implied anything of the sort, and I'm not particularly interested in discussing such a obvious mischaracterization of my comment.

(Apologies for my tone if you were just making a joke. I smiled at the Christian the Lion comment.)

 

[BravesFan]

Amen. Extremes are seldom good. But being reasonable is so hard.

If they had a NOMINATE button for post of the day , i would be submitting this one for approval!!!!

 

[Belz...]

I will tell you why I think some vegan in general avoid that. Because some keep harping on how much we make animal suffer, it would be the higher moral ground to not use them for food etc... What is never mentionned is that the moral choice is not between us letting the animal live to their natural end of life and eating them prematuraly, but rather the choice is between those animal not existing at all and us eating them, which don't make the moral choice all that clear suddenly. Because after all we give the chance the animal to live, eat, be content at least up to a certain period of time, at least for a minimum number of well cared for food animals, then we eat them.

I think most of those animals live better in farms than in the wild. Those cows don't seem too nervous, anyway.

 

[Morrigan]

In other words, appeal to nature. You know, the exact same argument fundies use when they say homosexuality is immoral because its unnatural.

Except that homosexuality DOES happen in nature.

Saying that eating meat is not morally wrong because we are biologically omnivore is not a fallacy, because unlike murder, rape, slavery, etc. and other "might makes right" arguments, you do NEED nutrients to survive, and some of those nutrients are more easily obtained with meat. Sure, now with modern technology and with significant effort, you can obtain those nutrients without meat, but that was not always true in the past. If you want to argue that technology has made a (historically) morally neutral action into a now-immoral one, well, I suppose that's your prerogative...

 

[RandFan]

Suppose I value my furniture and companionship equally maybe the fabric has sentimental value, or something. I want declawing to be my decision and my decision only. When I went to the rescue agency, a house, I might have taken issue with cats crowded into closed bedrooms because some of them don't get along.

I could have saved a cat from that overcrowded prison like atmosphere yet due to my attachment to my furniture, there the cat(s) remain because the rescue agency gets to make the call as to what's cruel and whats not.

OK I'm just making this argument hypothetically, I'd never go for declawing but my point is that these rescue agencies, the local ones at least come off as being more interested in their needs/wants and are putting the cats secondary. In short, I think they're power tripping.

I sure was pissed that they decided not to allow me to adopt because I was letting the cat go outside. They wasted weeks of my time. Yea, sure it's "dangerous" out there but I've had this big black fluffy cat whose been going outside daily for 13 years,he's making out just fine.

Glad to hear the waterfront cats are making out. I was just wondering, playing the numbers game, what their chances of survival were in that environment compared to life on the farm. We don't have mountain lions here in the city, well not often at least but we do have raccoons and one of those can tear up a cat pretty bad.

Well, as Temple Grandin (thanks RandFan for recommending her) pointed out, there's a fundamental difference between an inanimate object, cloth, and animate object, cat. If you value the inanimate object over the animate one, then Grandin, I assume RandFan, and I have a bone to pick with you.

It comes down to making an adult decision. Sometimes we can't have everything we want. And when our needs conflict, difficult choices need to be made. If the cloth were as important to you as the welfare of the cat, then the best decision is to not own the cat.

Yes, I would agree with citizenzen.

 

[Belz...]

This guy has no affiliation to PETA.

Except the money he got from them and the tacit approval of Ingrid Newkirk ?

This is an unfortunate reality of animal shelters, some animals are euthanized. Unfortunately, some shelters are not equipped to euthanize humanely.

How convenient for the animal rights supporters.

 

[Johny2x4]

I'm saying the argument "animals eat other animals, why shouldn't I" is not a particularly good one for the reasons enumerated above.

I've said nothing about animals being "inherently inferior" nor implied anything of the sort, and I'm not particularly interested in discussing such a obvious mischaracterization of my comment.

(Apologies for my tone if you were just making a joke. I smiled at the Christian the Lion comment.)

I wasn´t making a joke, I´m being serious here. I´m comfortable with the way things are and don´t see myself stopping eating meat. Even my reason are flawed, meat is too good to give up. Does it makes me a bad person? Meh, I honestly don´t care.

And then there´s the fact I have no patience for "preachers". I´m being honest here, if this was a conversation in RL, I would laugh in your face because of your attempts at saying "eating meat is bad". I´m enough of an d*** to do that. Let´s be clear about one thing too, the fact you belong o PETA actually influences my dislike of you. Were you from WWF, my tone would be different.

 

[Belz...]

I believe it comes down to the age-old conundrum of one man's "terrorist" is another man's "freedom fighter".

You can't be serious. Targetting civilians is freedom fighting ?

Terrorist!

Appeal to emotion.

Double terrorist!

Man, those lambs look delicious !

 

[Belz...]

Incorrect. PETA is a huge advocate for animal adoption, many members already have pets.

That seems to clash with this:

“There is no hidden agenda. If anybody wonders about -- what’s this with all these reforms -- you can hear us clearly. Our goal is total animal liberation. [emphasis added]”
— Ingrid Newkirk, “Animal Rights 2002” convention, Jun 2002