What’s spiritual and ethical about taking a living being’s life in 2024? There are just so many other foods to eat and ways to think about food that there just isn’t an excuse to kill animals in my books.
Spirituality doesn’t cut it for me. I’d for sure not like to be part of something like that
How is abstaining from killing a living being extreme? I’m not saying you’re not part of the natural world, I’m not saying I’m not part of the spiritual world by not eating animal-derived products. There’s more to spirituality than killing animals.
And comparing people to lions is silly. A lion is dependant on meat by nature of their being. Humans, by their very nature, have volition and are able to do without eating meat. Animals rape and kill their young - should we do that too? Bar saying that being omnivorous means that we’re fine without meat regardless.
I think there’s something to be said about hunting. I still wouldn’t support it 100% but it’s “better” than factory farming, sure. Still no reason to kill other than convenience, supposed heritage or convenience. It just shows a lack of empathy towards other living beings is the way I see it.
It just shows a lack of empathy towards other living beings is the way I see it.
What’s the moral basis of your ethical argument? Is it simply that all living beings deserve to live, or is it about preventing harm/pain?
The question is pretty simple when it’s asked about something like a mammal, but less so when you ask about something like a krill. Why does a krill have the same ethical weight as a mammal, and why wouldn’t that same moral imperative be applied to something like a mushroom?
Both are living beings, to our best knowledge both krill and mushrooms lack the ability to sensate pain as we understand it. Both can respond to stimuli in a way that tries to negate bodily harm.
I don’t eat meat because of my own beliefs, but I often see vegans propose that veganism isnt based on a belief system, rather that it’s logically conclusive. There are just too many internal contradictions for that to be true.
For example, as someone who grew up on farms… I think everyone would be surprised to know how many animals are killed collecting something like corn. I’ve spent more time than I would like clearing thousands of dead frogs from screens of combine harvesters. In my experience if every life is ethically similar, than something like hunting causes a lot less harm than harvesting an acre of corn or wheat.
Here’s our belief system: don’t kill or hurt animals as much as is possible.
We don’t need to theologize and systematize our ideology because it’s a movement with very little requirement to be part of.
There are whole foods plant based people, there are vegans who eat fun junk food (that’s not a judgment statement BTW). There are people from all over life who woke up one day and thought about their life choices. There really are not many other requirements than don’t exploit animals or consume them or their products.
One feels pain and has a brain. The other does not feel pain. Also one is an animal with a much more complex body than a mushroom. That makes for a more complex creature which can feel more and experience the world more.
I’m not saying krill are moral philosophers or poets. But they are much more advanced than mushrooms
There is no scientific consensus that invertebrates on the evolutionary scale of krill feel pain, and a ganglia isn’t exactly what passes as a brain in vertebrates.
That makes for a more complex creature which can feel more and experience the world more.
I think that’s highly reductive, especially considering that we continue to discover more and more about mushrooms. We already know that mushrooms are capable of learning, individual decision making, and have a short term memory.
We cant really make a qualified position of their complexity because we still don’t understand a lot about mushrooms.
Accepting for the sake of discussion (but not generally) that hunting is “ethical”, hunting is also a privilege. We obviously cannot all eat hunted meat for survival. You’ve no doubt seen the figures. There are barely enough animals to support tourism and retroprimitivism. It’s not a real solution, it’s just something you can use to trick yourself. The lies we tell ourselves are not convincing to others.
Accepting for the sake of discussion (but not generally) that hunting is “ethical”, hunting is also a privilege. We obviously cannot all eat hunted meat for survival. You’ve no doubt seen the figures.
The sheer variety of produce we currently experience is also an unsustainable privilege.
Eating something with palm oil is also a privilege, one that destroys natural habitats and leads to excess carbon being released to the atmosphere.
I’m not trying to equivocate the two, but the moral justification is similar.
To add to what the other two commenters mentioned, it’s about intent too. Crop deaths are a thing, sure, but it’s the next best to actually outright killing animals and harvesting their flesh. The animals that die in crop fields die regardless given that the corn harvested - and then some - to feed other animals which you end up consuming. Thus, it’s fewer animals dying overall.
To add to what the other two commenters mentioned, it’s about intent too.
I don’t actually think intent is really important to the moral equation. A species going extinct because of over hunting, and a species going extinct because of habitat destruction are pretty morally equivalent to me.
The animals that die in crop fields die regardless given that the corn harvested
Is that not the same reasoning people use to validate hunting?
then some - to feed other animals which you end up consuming. Thus, it’s fewer animals dying overall.
This is getting closer to the ethical imperative question I asked. So it seems that the ethical dilemma is based on preserving as much life as possible?
If so, would it be more ethical to eat the insect as a protein source rather than the soy beans they are feeding upon? If the insects as you say are going to be destroyed during the harvest, would it not be morally justified to gather and eat the insects before or after?
My point isn’t to be pedantic or actually implement anything we’ve talked about. I’m just pointing out the internal contradictions that occur in veganism. Not to try and sway anyone’s life choices, but to allow for people to understand that it’s logically imperfect, and to not let perfection be the enemy of good.
The point I was trying to make about crop deaths is not that corn gets harvested either way and that makes it okay but rather that eating farm animals brings a lot more crop deaths considering the huge amount of feed that needs to be harvested for them compared to just eating the crops themselves. Additionally, if we converted ca. 80% of all farmland that is currently being used just for animal agriculture - feed as well as the animals themselves (look up the exact figures on the Vegan Society sources page) - into farmland for plants to consume directly and reforestation, we would bring back a lot of habitats.
I know it seems like I’m getting off track here, but the point I’m trying to make is that while the ethics of veganism are a personal thing and offer about as much discussion potential as any big philosophical question, I think, considering the state of the world, there has got to be a little utilitarianism involved because that is what veganism is essentially: the effort to cause the least harm to animals that is possible.
That doesn’t mean that frogs are worth less than pigs it just means that if by not eating pigs I save the pig and the frogs whereas by not eating corn I only save the frogs, then eating the corn is the way that I cause the least harm possible. Therefore, I think it’s important that veganism evolves with our options.
There’s also an argument to be made that climate change kills countless animals and increases their risk of going extinct, following which veganism, by being less environmentally taxing, is also saving or attempting to save lives in that regard.
Ultimately, it comes down to how I can reduce the harm I’m causing to the animals in this world. If I had no choice but to hunt, then I would be just like a lion and that would just be nature, but I have choice, so I’m attempting to come as close to the lion as possible in a way that I only cause the minimum of harm I absolutely need to survive. The lion kills to survive but not any more than that - he doesn’t breed animals and eat them. I eat plants to survive because that’s the least harmful choice of eating/living I can conceive of at this moment.
Eight or nine years ago, I start giving a thought to where my food came from. Taking inspiration from what I had been told about FN practices, I started making the animal psychologically present, and acknowledged its suffering and the abuse and violence it was subjected to. Within a year, I was vegan. I can’t imagine how a person can actually do that and remain a meat eater. I think you are conditioning and priming yourself in ways you are not acknowledging. Certainly you are not putting the needs of the animal before your own desires and “traditions”.
“making the animal psychologically present, and acknowledged it’s suffering”
What do you mean by this, bc as written Im interpreting it as some sort of Catholic guilt thing but focused on guilt of eating animals.
(Genuinely curious)
@[email protected] can correct me if I’m off-base here, but I think what they’ve said can be simplified to “empathize with the animal.” Addressing land mammals like cows, goats, and pigs, which I think are a gateway for a lot of people, you start with the premise that the animal is sentient – capable of happiness, fear, suffering, anger, excitement, love – and work from there. (Just to clarify, I think that “pain” is where the buck really stops, but sentience is a good bridge.) I think most people will acknowledge that dogs are fully capable of all of these things, and that it’s wrong outside of very extenuating circumstances to hurt them (let alone for personal pleasure or gain). They have rich inner lives, they have fears, they have loves – they have a world, one that starts with them and ends with them.
Consider for a second that every person you’ll ever meet has their own inner world that you’ll never really know or fully understand. You can query them, sure, and humans have remarkable tools to communicate their worlds, but it’s ultimately somewhere you’ll never be. Wordlessly, though, I’m betting that you can assume those people have wants – to be safe, to be comfortable, to be happy, to be loved. Inside their world, what they want at a fundamental level is probably something like what you do. And I’m willing to bet that through empathy, you have some appreciation of and respect for that.
I fundamentally believe based both on the preponderance of the ever-expanding body of scientific evidence and on my own experiences interacting with animals that many of them have the same basic wants as we do too, and that these include animals like cows, goats, sheep, chickens, and pigs. I think a lot of people – myself previously included – simply fail to realize this because we’re raised not to, because it’s just alien enough, and because we have every incentive to keep feeling that way.
I think my first step into cutting out meat began with “if I were there in person, could I bring myself to kill this defenseless animal for food instead of just eating something else?” – because functionally I was doing the same thing by paying someone else to do it. And even as I began to process my feelings more and went from a typical omnivorous Western diet to pescetarian to vegetarian, I always found myself getting stuck on veganism. I was suddenly stuck back where I was when I was omnivorous, where in hindsight I was rationalizing my way out of empathy. I can’t remember when it was, but at some point, I found my way from the vegetarian subreddit onto the vegan one after people would show up there condemning the cheese recipes as cruel. I began to lurk there out of curiosity, and it was basically inevitable – unbeknownst to me – that I would stumble across the 2018 factory farming documentary Dominion. Setting aside some time one evening, I started it…
It took multiple sittings across multiple weeks because I almost couldn’t bear what I was seeing, and from that, something viscerally clicked inside of me: that we’re, on purpose, giving an animal a world, only to make it one where their life is spent like this. (NSFL) One where every waking moment, the world they want and deserve just the same as we do is broken, worn down, drawn further away, and dangled in front of them as something they’ll never have – stealing theirs for some ultimately superfluous part of our own. We’ve given them their one chance at life only to force them to spend it in agony. I realized at that point that the only arguments I ever made for myself that weren’t predicated on outright falsehoods – i.e. not I can’t be vegan; I would be less healthy vegan; they can’t process feelings; nothing I do will impact anything – could all be reduced to “might makes right”, and that to me was no way to live a life.
Westerners are so arrogant that they think we’re not part of the world - yes, absolutely. The holistic view of the world has been trumped by individualism.
What’s spiritual and ethical about taking a living being’s life in 2024? There are just so many other foods to eat and ways to think about food that there just isn’t an excuse to kill animals in my books.
Spirituality doesn’t cut it for me. I’d for sure not like to be part of something like that
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How is abstaining from killing a living being extreme? I’m not saying you’re not part of the natural world, I’m not saying I’m not part of the spiritual world by not eating animal-derived products. There’s more to spirituality than killing animals.
And comparing people to lions is silly. A lion is dependant on meat by nature of their being. Humans, by their very nature, have volition and are able to do without eating meat. Animals rape and kill their young - should we do that too? Bar saying that being omnivorous means that we’re fine without meat regardless.
I think there’s something to be said about hunting. I still wouldn’t support it 100% but it’s “better” than factory farming, sure. Still no reason to kill other than convenience, supposed heritage or convenience. It just shows a lack of empathy towards other living beings is the way I see it.
You do you, in the end. No offense meant
What’s the moral basis of your ethical argument? Is it simply that all living beings deserve to live, or is it about preventing harm/pain?
The question is pretty simple when it’s asked about something like a mammal, but less so when you ask about something like a krill. Why does a krill have the same ethical weight as a mammal, and why wouldn’t that same moral imperative be applied to something like a mushroom?
Both are living beings, to our best knowledge both krill and mushrooms lack the ability to sensate pain as we understand it. Both can respond to stimuli in a way that tries to negate bodily harm.
I don’t eat meat because of my own beliefs, but I often see vegans propose that veganism isnt based on a belief system, rather that it’s logically conclusive. There are just too many internal contradictions for that to be true.
For example, as someone who grew up on farms… I think everyone would be surprised to know how many animals are killed collecting something like corn. I’ve spent more time than I would like clearing thousands of dead frogs from screens of combine harvesters. In my experience if every life is ethically similar, than something like hunting causes a lot less harm than harvesting an acre of corn or wheat.
Here’s our belief system: don’t kill or hurt animals as much as is possible.
We don’t need to theologize and systematize our ideology because it’s a movement with very little requirement to be part of.
There are whole foods plant based people, there are vegans who eat fun junk food (that’s not a judgment statement BTW). There are people from all over life who woke up one day and thought about their life choices. There really are not many other requirements than don’t exploit animals or consume them or their products.
Right, but by what is the ethical delineation between say a krill and a mushroom?
What is the difference between lesser evolved animals and highly evolved plants or microbes?
One feels pain and has a brain. The other does not feel pain. Also one is an animal with a much more complex body than a mushroom. That makes for a more complex creature which can feel more and experience the world more.
I’m not saying krill are moral philosophers or poets. But they are much more advanced than mushrooms
There is no scientific consensus that invertebrates on the evolutionary scale of krill feel pain, and a ganglia isn’t exactly what passes as a brain in vertebrates.
I think that’s highly reductive, especially considering that we continue to discover more and more about mushrooms. We already know that mushrooms are capable of learning, individual decision making, and have a short term memory.
We cant really make a qualified position of their complexity because we still don’t understand a lot about mushrooms.
Accepting for the sake of discussion (but not generally) that hunting is “ethical”, hunting is also a privilege. We obviously cannot all eat hunted meat for survival. You’ve no doubt seen the figures. There are barely enough animals to support tourism and retroprimitivism. It’s not a real solution, it’s just something you can use to trick yourself. The lies we tell ourselves are not convincing to others.
The sheer variety of produce we currently experience is also an unsustainable privilege.
Eating something with palm oil is also a privilege, one that destroys natural habitats and leads to excess carbon being released to the atmosphere.
I’m not trying to equivocate the two, but the moral justification is similar.
To add to what the other two commenters mentioned, it’s about intent too. Crop deaths are a thing, sure, but it’s the next best to actually outright killing animals and harvesting their flesh. The animals that die in crop fields die regardless given that the corn harvested - and then some - to feed other animals which you end up consuming. Thus, it’s fewer animals dying overall.
I don’t actually think intent is really important to the moral equation. A species going extinct because of over hunting, and a species going extinct because of habitat destruction are pretty morally equivalent to me.
Is that not the same reasoning people use to validate hunting?
This is getting closer to the ethical imperative question I asked. So it seems that the ethical dilemma is based on preserving as much life as possible?
If so, would it be more ethical to eat the insect as a protein source rather than the soy beans they are feeding upon? If the insects as you say are going to be destroyed during the harvest, would it not be morally justified to gather and eat the insects before or after?
My point isn’t to be pedantic or actually implement anything we’ve talked about. I’m just pointing out the internal contradictions that occur in veganism. Not to try and sway anyone’s life choices, but to allow for people to understand that it’s logically imperfect, and to not let perfection be the enemy of good.
The point I was trying to make about crop deaths is not that corn gets harvested either way and that makes it okay but rather that eating farm animals brings a lot more crop deaths considering the huge amount of feed that needs to be harvested for them compared to just eating the crops themselves. Additionally, if we converted ca. 80% of all farmland that is currently being used just for animal agriculture - feed as well as the animals themselves (look up the exact figures on the Vegan Society sources page) - into farmland for plants to consume directly and reforestation, we would bring back a lot of habitats.
I know it seems like I’m getting off track here, but the point I’m trying to make is that while the ethics of veganism are a personal thing and offer about as much discussion potential as any big philosophical question, I think, considering the state of the world, there has got to be a little utilitarianism involved because that is what veganism is essentially: the effort to cause the least harm to animals that is possible.
That doesn’t mean that frogs are worth less than pigs it just means that if by not eating pigs I save the pig and the frogs whereas by not eating corn I only save the frogs, then eating the corn is the way that I cause the least harm possible. Therefore, I think it’s important that veganism evolves with our options.
There’s also an argument to be made that climate change kills countless animals and increases their risk of going extinct, following which veganism, by being less environmentally taxing, is also saving or attempting to save lives in that regard.
Ultimately, it comes down to how I can reduce the harm I’m causing to the animals in this world. If I had no choice but to hunt, then I would be just like a lion and that would just be nature, but I have choice, so I’m attempting to come as close to the lion as possible in a way that I only cause the minimum of harm I absolutely need to survive. The lion kills to survive but not any more than that - he doesn’t breed animals and eat them. I eat plants to survive because that’s the least harmful choice of eating/living I can conceive of at this moment.
Eight or nine years ago, I start giving a thought to where my food came from. Taking inspiration from what I had been told about FN practices, I started making the animal psychologically present, and acknowledged its suffering and the abuse and violence it was subjected to. Within a year, I was vegan. I can’t imagine how a person can actually do that and remain a meat eater. I think you are conditioning and priming yourself in ways you are not acknowledging. Certainly you are not putting the needs of the animal before your own desires and “traditions”.
“making the animal psychologically present, and acknowledged it’s suffering” What do you mean by this, bc as written Im interpreting it as some sort of Catholic guilt thing but focused on guilt of eating animals. (Genuinely curious)
@[email protected] can correct me if I’m off-base here, but I think what they’ve said can be simplified to “empathize with the animal.” Addressing land mammals like cows, goats, and pigs, which I think are a gateway for a lot of people, you start with the premise that the animal is sentient – capable of happiness, fear, suffering, anger, excitement, love – and work from there. (Just to clarify, I think that “pain” is where the buck really stops, but sentience is a good bridge.) I think most people will acknowledge that dogs are fully capable of all of these things, and that it’s wrong outside of very extenuating circumstances to hurt them (let alone for personal pleasure or gain). They have rich inner lives, they have fears, they have loves – they have a world, one that starts with them and ends with them.
Consider for a second that every person you’ll ever meet has their own inner world that you’ll never really know or fully understand. You can query them, sure, and humans have remarkable tools to communicate their worlds, but it’s ultimately somewhere you’ll never be. Wordlessly, though, I’m betting that you can assume those people have wants – to be safe, to be comfortable, to be happy, to be loved. Inside their world, what they want at a fundamental level is probably something like what you do. And I’m willing to bet that through empathy, you have some appreciation of and respect for that.
I fundamentally believe based both on the preponderance of the ever-expanding body of scientific evidence and on my own experiences interacting with animals that many of them have the same basic wants as we do too, and that these include animals like cows, goats, sheep, chickens, and pigs. I think a lot of people – myself previously included – simply fail to realize this because we’re raised not to, because it’s just alien enough, and because we have every incentive to keep feeling that way.
I think my first step into cutting out meat began with “if I were there in person, could I bring myself to kill this defenseless animal for food instead of just eating something else?” – because functionally I was doing the same thing by paying someone else to do it. And even as I began to process my feelings more and went from a typical omnivorous Western diet to pescetarian to vegetarian, I always found myself getting stuck on veganism. I was suddenly stuck back where I was when I was omnivorous, where in hindsight I was rationalizing my way out of empathy. I can’t remember when it was, but at some point, I found my way from the vegetarian subreddit onto the vegan one after people would show up there condemning the cheese recipes as cruel. I began to lurk there out of curiosity, and it was basically inevitable – unbeknownst to me – that I would stumble across the 2018 factory farming documentary Dominion. Setting aside some time one evening, I started it…
It took multiple sittings across multiple weeks because I almost couldn’t bear what I was seeing, and from that, something viscerally clicked inside of me: that we’re, on purpose, giving an animal a world, only to make it one where their life is spent like this. (NSFL) One where every waking moment, the world they want and deserve just the same as we do is broken, worn down, drawn further away, and dangled in front of them as something they’ll never have – stealing theirs for some ultimately superfluous part of our own. We’ve given them their one chance at life only to force them to spend it in agony. I realized at that point that the only arguments I ever made for myself that weren’t predicated on outright falsehoods – i.e. not I can’t be vegan; I would be less healthy vegan; they can’t process feelings; nothing I do will impact anything – could all be reduced to “might makes right”, and that to me was no way to live a life.
Thank you!
They’re delving into the religious side of it in the reply to you. It is exactly like self delivering catholic guilt.
Westerners are so arrogant that they think we’re not part of the world - yes, absolutely. The holistic view of the world has been trumped by individualism.
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