thoughts on mic the vegan?

[theropod]

so basically the logic here is that if it doesnt feel pain , then it is ok to kill it?

Well, my first paragraph was simply replying to what you wrote:

to say animal lives matter more than plant lives is a little silly , seeing how they are both living things that can feel pain

I was pointing out to you that your claim is wrong, animals feel pain, plants do not. That is not a moral statement, merely a biological one.

From a moral standpoint, I would of course argue that the less pain we cause to others, the better, which I think is a universal rule that we can apply to all organisms (and of course with an organism that cannot feel pain, you cannot cause any pain, so that’s a plus). But there are other reasons playing into plant lives and animal lives not being morally equivalent. For example the aforementioned resources necessary to raise an animal vs a plant.

then lets just put the animals to sleep before we kill them!

This is already being done. It is error-prone due to the industrial scale on which is it done. And does nothing to prevent the suffering caused during the animals’ life, as creature explained.

, great idea! , problem solved

No, problem most certainly not solved. Your "solution" has already been implemented, and it doesn’t solve half the problems of meat production.

again , im not saying eating plants is morally wrong but plants have just as much as right to live as animals do

So according to your logic, since we can firmly establish that a cow or pig has much more in common with a human than either does with a plant, animals also have the same right to live as humans, right? So why don’t you eat humans?

i love animals but understand that they need to be killed for me and my dog to have dinner

They do not "need" to be killed for that. Nobody is forcing you to have a carnivorous pet, and you could live on a vegetarian diet perfectly well if you chose to do so. You just don’t want to. Which I can understand perfectly well, but still you shouldn’t make it look like eating animals was an absolute necessity in order to survive.

And sorry, but this statement

i dont care , i eat the animal and i can careless how it was killed as long as i have food to eat

really doesn’t strike me as a classic thing to expect from someone who "loves animals".

someone elese will buy it anyway

I don’t think you have a very firm grasp of economics. If there is demand for less meat, less meat will be produced. If I chose to go vegetarian, my neighbour won’t think "great, now I can eat twice as much meat", because most likely they are already eating as much meat as they want.

they really arent doing the world a favor as they like to think they are

But they really are! You should be grateful, that some people are vegans actually means the rest of us won’t (inevitable future!) have to reduce our meat consumption quite as much.

veganism is a choice people make because they cannot cope with having to eat a dead animal

I am certainly not a vegan, but I’m defending veganism here in spite of being perfectly fine with eating dead animals, including ones I have killed myself. There are many reasons why someone might choose a vegan diet. It can be health, animal welfare, climate protection, culinary reasons or whatever. Claiming they are all vegans simply because they cannot cope with eating dead animals is frankly insulting.

[dinosauria101]

rock
creature
theropod
Please excuse me for misunderstanding, but what point are each of you trying to prove here? I'm finding these very long posts a bit hard to keep up with

[creature386]

I was basically trying to explain why I can't take the "Plants habe feelings, too" argument seriously and why I find vegetarianism/veganism/flexitarianism a good idea.

As for what I've argued in this debate as a whole so far, I've argued why I kinda have bad feelings about killing animals for food, but none with doing the same for plants or keeping animals as pets and why I think this doesn't contradict each other.

[theropod]

Aug 3, 2019 0:18:08 GMT 5 dinosauria101 said:

rock
creature
theropod
Please excuse me for misunderstanding, but what point are each of you trying to prove here? I'm finding these very long posts a bit hard to keep up with

I am pointing out whatever argument I think doesn’t hold up logically, ethically or scientifically; basically as you might have already noticed I just have a very low tolerance for BS.
But the key arguments by rock that I have problems with are firstly, that plant lives matter just as much as animal lives (and especially why he thinks that), and secondly that as a result of that it doesn’t matter whether we eat plants or animals.

For one, the two are different questions. Even if we presuppose that plant lives and animal lives are morally equivalent, that doesn’t mean it is not worse to eat animals than it is to eat plants. Both me and creature have explained this repeatedly: In order to produce the same amount of food from an animal, you need to kill far more plants than if you were producing if from the plants directly, so by eating the animal, you don’t harm the animal INSTEAD of the plant, you harm it IN ADDITION to MANY MORE plants than you otherwise would. Also, and due to this, the environmental impact of lifestock is undeniably far higher than that of plants, and considering how a huge part of our environmental impact is related to food production, we simply cannot keep ignoring that. Those are facts.

Secondly, rock has repeatedly claimed that plants can feel pain, just like animals, and used this to suggest harming an animal isn’t any worse than harming a plant. The premise is plain wrong. As of now, there is no shred of scientific evidence to suggest they can feel anything like "pain". In fact the whole concept and biological purpose of pain is inconsistent with plant biology. Pain is a signal meant to elicit a reaction to a stimulus. Most plants entirely lack the ability to respond. They also lack a nervous system, or any equivalent complex system to process such sensations, and without a brain, it’s doubtful if, per definition, pain can even exist. The structures necessary to feel pain simply are not present in plants.
Even if plants’ capacity to feel pain were the same as that of animals (ridiculous because it isn’t even the same in all animals, and most of those at least have nervous systems), that wouldn’t automatically mean their lives matter as much as those of animals. There are rare genetic mutations of people who cannot feel pain, that does not make their lives any less valuable either.
My personal moral stance would be that animals with greater cognitive capacity, should also be entitled to more rights, because such an animal has both greater "value" as an individual by means of more unique, complex, and less rigid behaviour ("personality" if you want to call it that), and greater capacity to feel and understand "pain" and "distress" as we understand them. To some extent at least, lawmakers agree with me, by prescribing stricter regulations for dealing with more complex organisms, usually vertebrates. To some extent, most other people probably agree with me too, or at least with the implications of my reasoning. At least I have never seen someone freak out when witnessing someone swat a fly or a mosquito, but lots of people freak out when they see a rabbit or a lamb being slaughtered (also there are many vegetarians who are fine with eating fish or insects, though I’m sure if this has more to do with their lower neurological complexity, or rather with their lower environmental impact). This is certainly subjective and debatable. However member rock entirely refuses to give coherent reasons for his claims other than the scientifically wrong one already explained above, so I can only assume he doesn’t have any.

If one were to consider all lifeforms, or even just all animals, to be morally equivalent, that raises the question as to why it would be wrong to kill and eat humans (which almost everyone agrees it is, at least as long as it is against their will), if it isn’t wrong to kill and eat other animals. Something I pointed out to rock, but have yet to receive an answer to.

Also the logic that because one is already doing a morally wrong thing, that one is forced to do (in which case I would not necessarily consider it to be morally wrong), it doesn’t matter how many other morally wrong things one does, it plain stupid, unethical, plain revolting (I guess it’s in good company if it’s found in religious texts). For someone subscribing to that moral theory cheating on their spouse and murdering them literally wouldn’t make any ethical difference.

Another thing I find very irritating is this irrational and frankly offensive attitude towards people who don’t eat meat. I get not wanting to be lectured what you are supposed to eat, but then he shouldn’t partake in such a debate, and especially he shouldn’t try to lecture others himself. And most vegetarians, and even most vegans really don’t do that, but you couldn’t blame them for justifying their choice of diet in a discussion if challenged now, could you?

And again, and I think especially rock should keep this in mind while evaluating my arguments, I am not a vegan, nor a vegetarian, nor do I categorically state that eating meat or killing animals is wrong. I am merely adressing his arguments, which I think are faulty. I find radical vegans who spread lies about human nutrition, try to missionize people, or yell "murderer" at them as annoying as the next guy, and would gladly argue against them. But getting so hung up over this vegan guy, or PETA, or whatever, that one starts to behave just like them, just with the opposite standpoint, is unbecoming of anyone on this forum.

[creature386]

A bit off topic, but since we're talking about ethics, why not present my newest taxonomy of value?

I'm not sure what criteria to use, but "likeness" sounds good. "Likeness" is what makes someone "human"* (e.g., similar to me). On a basic level, it can be consciousness, cognitive capacity or the capacity to feel pain. On a more advanced (interpersonal) level, it can be possessing a complex personality and having the same core drives as I do.

All ethical theories are in some way based on empathy. If they're not, but instead focus on concepts such as "How do I avoid eternal punishment?", they fall into what I call moral sociopathy. Some of the criteria I listed above can also be viewed as valuable for non-moral reasons. Someone with greater cognitive capacities can contribute more to society and is hence more "valuable", but not in a moral sense of the word.
But let's get back to empathy. Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in someone elses shoes and see the world as if you were them. In order for that to work, that someone must actually be similar to you. Sure, you could go on and pretend there is "someone" inside a rock in whose shoes you could put yourself, but to our best knowledge, rocks aren't conscious, so you are likely lying to yourself.
Just to avoid misunderstandings, this is not meant to justify racism or other forms of bigotry. Superficial traits like skin color are unimportant in defining an individual. That's why bigots hate certain groups of people not just because of their skin color, but because of attributes they ascribe to them which make them less "human" (e.g. assuming that certain people don't have the amount of complexity you do, but instead behave like one-dimensional cartoon villains).

Here's a rough ranking of the world by "likeness".
1. Humans above the age of 10
2. Chimps, whales, elephants.
3. Very young humans (age 4-5)
4. Most livestock
5. Even younger humans (age 1-3)
6. "Lower" animals (this is a broad category intended to include everything from trouts to termites)
7. Plants
8. Bacteria
9. Minerals.
(It should be noted that, on an individual level, how much you know about a certain person influences the empathy you can feel for them and how valuable they are for you.)

I get what many of you are asking. "What, does that mean a cow is more valuable than my baby?"
And this is precisely why I gave up trying to define hard criteria for morality. Ultimately, your conscience does not listen to hard criteria and everyone's conscience is different, although there is broad overlap.

If, no matter how much you have read or know on cognition and how much you think speciesism is no better than racism, an infant human in a burning building still evokes far stronger emotions to you than an adult chimp, go ahead and save that human instead.

My ranking does raise some interesting questions though. Where would aliens with hyperawareness and an IQ of 2 million fall under? They score high on the "likeness" criteria, but are ultimately very much unlike me. Personally, I don't know the answer.

*The quotation marks are important here. The use of "human" here has everything to do with the philosophical usage of the term and nothing with the biological one.

[Deleted]

Never heard of him before, I’ll have to check this guy out.