How do you morally justify eating animals? (itt the OP discovers forum discussions)

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Damn, you caught me. That is the last time I try impressing the uneducated masses with my meager understanding of irony.


Anyway, really good post, sumginazu.
 
There's a distinction I think people have missed here, and I think it's causing a few arguments to occur cross-purposes.

First question: Is meat-eating unethical?
Second question: Should we stop eating meat?

These are two entirely separate questions, and the answer to the second absolutely does not follow based on the answer to the first. Now you might be saying "but FB! if something is unethical then clearly we should stop doing it!" Well, no. I brought up an example of this before - passing a homeless person on the street while having $200 in spare cash and not giving him all of that money could be construed as unethical. Yet we all do it on a regular basis (at least, those of us lucky enough to have spare cash).

Mind, my argument is not "we all do unethical things anyway, so let's do more of them"; rather, my argument is that behaving in a manner that is unethical but pleasurable when the ethical consequences of your actions are irrelevant to your life is just the way people have to behave. Otherwise we'd all have to be self-sacrificing saints to maintain any semblance of consistency, not to mention sanity.

So if you're going to worry about the ethics of meat eating, I think it would be wiser to first worry about the amount of slave labor used in harvesting and transporting produce from South America.
 
sumginazu said:
But you're missing a major point. Yeah, rape used to be common. And from an evolutionary standpoint, it's beneficial. Stronger males with a bigger libido produce stronger offspring who will grow to have bigger libidos. But then why is it morally wrong in this day and age?
We've grown out of it.
As time goes on, science progresses and cultures develop. At some point in history, people realized that rape wasn't fun for everybody, so they stopped. Did everyone stop? Of course not. But over time, it gradually became the norm. And yet rape still happens because we are still biologically committed to passing on our genes.
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Rape isn't a biological imperative. Rapists don't rape as part of an incentive to pass on their genes.

I hesitate to relate this to smoking, but it's really not that different a situation. Not too long ago, it was all the rage simply because nicotine had a convenient effect on our brains; it was designed to make us want more. As people realized it was bad, less people smoked - but it's still certainly not uncommon.
I predict the same thing will happen to the consumption of meat. Humanity is still developing, there's no question about it. As education increases, more people will become aware of the harmful effects of meat-eating, including but not limited to the suffering of the animals and the environmental impact of cultivation, processing and transportation of meat. (Not to say that a proper education would imply vegetarianism, simply that the majority of meat-eating Americans don't know much about where their food comes from.) Some people have already decided that eating meat is bad. They're ahead of the game. Vegetarianism is becoming more and more common. Within a generation or two, it might become the norm.
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Possibly; but our biology is evolutionarily adapted for carnivorous behaviour. The harmful effects are not related to biology, but to the social, business and economics side of things. There's a possibility, maybe even a likelihood, that sustainable farming practices etc. develop instead of a conversion to vegetarianism.

We can't decide that it's moral or immoral right now. We're in a transition period. We can all agree that rape is bad, right? Would we agree about a thousand years ago? Maybe some of us, but not all of us. Some day, the consumption of meat will be frowned upon as well. But for now, it's an important part of first-world society.
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Morals are quite subjective, and depend on how you've been brought up and the society in which that happened. Not long ago I saw documentary footage of interviews with Congo militiamen, and some were describing how they believed rape was an important part of liberating the Congo, and that they wouldn't stop a man raping their mother or wife if they were doing it as part of the fight for Congo.

I find it difficult to ascribe morality to many things in the sense of an underlying universal level of morality, certainly without recognising any snap moral judgement I have to something is a product of my social upbringing.

I've tried, of late, to review my gut reaction and make more pragmatic views about something based on objective outcomes. One question I was asked as a hypothetical on this issue recently was "If someone came up to you and said "Our dog was hit by a car and killed. Is it morally wrong for the family to wat it?", what would you say?"

My first-instance reaction was "Ew, no.", but then I stopped and thought about it, and said "Why not? I wouldn't want to eat it, and I'd be somewhat concerned with hygiene issues, but I don't think there's anything inherently reprehensible about it - I can conceive of cultures/people who would find that a good way to ritualise/memorialise their pet."

Ultimately, getting back on topic, I think if your problem on a moral level with eating meat are the harmful effects of farming etc., then the moral problem is not with eating meat specifically but with those poor practices, so if you could repair the practices (humane/painless killing, sustainable farming, etc.) there would no longer be an objection to eating meat.

As a side note, does anybody else find it ironic that it's too expensive for us to eat vegetarian, but the vast majority of people in third-world countries can't afford to eat meat?
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I would, if I thought it was too expensive to eat vegetarian; pretty sure you can eat vegetarian more cheaply than meat - that's why so many students here (in Australia) go vegetarian when they move out of home, and we've got some of the cheapest meat in the world.

Although, those in third world countries who can't afford to eat meat usually can't afford vegetables either - it's basically plain rice when you can get it, for them.

As an aside, have there been studies into whether or not you could commercially produce enough vegetable farming to support the current population on purely vegetarian diets? It's something I'm not aware of.

(In general, I think almost every problem facing the world and humanity today in terms of ecology and environment are entirely based on overpopulation, most of which was supported by the discovery of ammonium fertiliser).
 
Kristoph said:
Damn, you caught me. That is the last time I try impressing the uneducated masses with my meager understanding of irony.
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strawman.jpg
 
As a side note, does anybody else find it ironic that it's too expensive for us to eat vegetarian, but the vast majority of people in third-world countries can't afford to eat meat?
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care to explain exactly how being vegetarian is more expensive?
 
@Neonian; I also use the leather to make myself some super-cool shorts. It's delightfully comfy and easy to wear. =]

As for the actual eating, I enjoy me some meat in my mouth. If you don't like eating things that have a face, that's fine. I eat my bacon, you enjoy your wheat-bran. Fair enough?
 
If I don't eat it, someone else will. Or the animal will just die and rot away. If I eat it it won't. And meat is too tasty to just pass on.
 
Being vegetarian is masturbatory imo; you're only making yourself feel better.

That being said I have serious qualms with eating fish in general due to how fucked up our oceans and ecosystems in the sea are becoming. I'm fine with cows (as long as they aren't treated horrifically) being breed and raised to be food but when you're pretty much completely wiping out a species in the wild, that's morally wrong in my book.
 
Kristoph said:
Deck Knight's "argument" is: we, at some point, derived significant benefits from eating meat. Therefore, it is morally justified to eat meat. This is just an offshoot of the generic we evolved in order to eat meat, I mean just look at our teeth and digestive systems and stuff argument that every run-of-the-mill "low-brow but strangely educated" 17-year-old posts in a Facebook comments section.
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It's not just offshoot of that argument, and it is a better explained version of the argument. Believe it or not, bad arguments can be offshoots of good arguments.


Kristoph said:
Just because an argument seems to make intuitive sense doesn't mean that it is comprised of anything more than convenient (but ultimately meaningless) pattern identification:
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Maybe I'm crazy, but the whole point of making an argument is to use pattern identification to connect points. In fact, all your arguments are just convenient (but ultimately meaningless (because I'm not changing my eating habits, and I have justified it to myself in a way that you'd just call Naturalist Fallacy (which I still don't think is a real fallacy, just some buzzwords that save you from having to write your own reasons) even though it's not)) pattern identification as well.



Kristoph said:
It needs to be "pointed out" that Deck Knight's argument strictly doesn't follow any line of logic.
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It actually does follow lines of logic. Eating meat gave us distinct biological advantages in the past, which over time, allowed you to become empathetic enough to realize that eating other animals doesn't sit will with you.


Kristoph said:
...while completely devoid of any logical consistency, "just seem too perfect" to our emotionally-vulnerable, reaffirmation-seeking brains.
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There is logical consistency there. It just doesn't align with your morals so you don't want to understand it.


Kristoph said:
...it is therefore easy to curry emotional favor with those desperate to settle their cognitive dissonance by drawing irrelevant patterns in a confident tone. So he ignores the inconsistencies and lets you do the rest of the work, because, appropriately, you're kind of biologically wired to do so. I think there might be some irony in there somewhere!
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You mean like the emotional favor you are trying to use to convince us all that eating meat is wrong? I can see where you are coming from but the fact remains that morally, eating meat is not the red flag that rape is means that comparing the two doesn't really work that well. Morals are defined by a culture and our culture has decided that there is nothing wrong with eating meat.

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I'm not going to act like I am going to give a perfect defense of why I justify it that you won't find some hole in. All I am saying is that it makes sense to me, and I feel no obligation to stopping eating meat. Do I approve of the methods used to mass produce the meat? Not all of them. Am I going to stop eating meat just because of these companies? Nope.

Also, the problem with this question is that different people have different sets of morals, and while something may be morally good and acceptable by my standards, your morals can disagree with it.
 
Morally justify...?
My only reasoning is a natural craving and need for survival.
Don't vegans have to take specific vitamins that normally are found in meat and byproducts of animals?
 
Deck Knight said:
Vegetarian boosters seem not to get I totally ripped off Jack Nicholson's speech in A Few Good Men.

Insofar as it was an argument, the fact is the vast majority of highly intelligent animals are meat-eaters. You can count on one hand the number of reasonably intelligent creatures that subsist on a meatless diet. From an evolutionary perspective, if a creature eats meat they also need to be faster, stronger, and generally smarter than their prey in order to get the advantages a carnivorous diet offers.

Human intelligence skyrocketed when our ancestors found a way to harness fire to cook meat, further increasing meat's already extremely concentrated nutritional benefits. Our bodies required much, much less effort to access the proteins once the cooking process broke them down to a far more consumable level. That isn't "naturalistic fantasy," it's history.

Why do traits like forward vision and color vision manifest? Because they are massive boons in hunting prey. Many herbivores have absolutely shitty vision because you don't need to see anything but grass and maybe a tree here or there to survive as an herbivore. Scent and hearing play a larger role, but even there predators often gain the advantage. Once you head far enough north, everything intelligent eats meat of some kind. Dolphins, Walruses, Orcas: All meat eaters or omnivores. Birds Of Prey are equally sharp. For every instance of an intelligent herbivore there are scores of intelligent carnivores and omnivores.

What I'm getting at here is that past is prologue, and biology tells humanity that any ethical concerns with eating meat are socially constructed feel-goody pap. Big cats rip their prey apart from the jugular and tear them to shreds. Humans use guns, or in the case of livestock we have literally bred the wilderness out of them. Humanity is the most brutal, cunning predator on earth. A farm raised chicken is still a chicken humanity has basically trained to be our eternal subservient. At the end of the day they still end up on a plate, whether we mimic feelings or compassion for them or not.

Now as to what you want to believe, that's your prerogative. If you don't like eating meat or think it is morally wrong to kill another creature, feel free to alter your economic activity so as not to patronize any entity that would offend your values. For me, human ingenuity has the capacity to solve every human problem. The only way humanity can ape sustainability of any resource is if we hunt something to extinction. Everything else has a technological solution, generally speaking.

And as far as meat not being necessary for good health: We don't all live next to Vegan Mart. We normals can't spend $500 a week just so we can ape mother nature who clearly decided through natural selection that plants should have incomplete proteins. If you're a rich, luxuriant upper class snoot (who doesn't have nut or other plant allergies, thus winning the genetic lottery too) who can afford that kind of lifestyle, so be it. Don't look down on me because all I can afford is the $4.99 a pound lunch meat. Snoot whims about who needs to justify what sicken me, and I'd toss them in a cage with a highly intelligent evolved carnivore (perhaps a crocodile, their species outdates ours by a several million years) just to prove the point. Mother nature doesn't care about suffering or ethics, she cares about who has the biggest teeth or the sharpest mind. No one is more selfish than a vegan who thinks everyone else should conform to their super special diet because they feel bad about eating animals. How do they justify their arrogance? Eons of natural selection bombard them, and they pretend to the station of inquisitor.

No animals were harmed during the making of this post.
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This is, hands down... one of the most epically awesome and intelligent posts I have ever read on these forums... I am in awe good sir.


Kristoph said:
Deck Knight's "argument" is: we, at some point, derived significant benefits from eating meat. Therefore, it is morally justified to eat meat. This is just an offshoot of the generic we evolved in order to eat meat, I mean just look at our teeth and digestive systems and stuff argument that every run-of-the-mill "low-brow but strangely educated" 17-year-old posts in a Facebook comments section.

I guess you want me to give some sort of in-depth explanation as to why it makes no sense to arbitrarily assign moral value judgments to biology, but I struggle to see the merit. Just because an argument seems to make intuitive sense doesn't mean that it is comprised of anything more than convenient (but ultimately meaningless) pattern identification: "look at these teeth that can cut through animal flesh! Oh look, what a surprise, that's exactly what our biological ancestors used them for! It must follow that that is precisely the correct thing for us to have done. Morally! And well hey, what's stopping us from saying that it's the correct thing for us to continue to do! You know-- morally!!" As far as I'm concerned, the fact that this is clearly emptyheaded thinking isn't something that needs to be "explained" per se; merely "pointed out."

It needs to be "pointed out" that Deck Knight's argument strictly doesn't follow any line of logic. It needs to be "pointed out" that Deck Knight's argument is "convincing" in the same way that many religious debaters try to convince people that God exists, or that scam artists and psychics manage to fool so many people-- by using irrelevant sensationalism (check), theatrics (check), and appeals to very specific sets of "facts" which, while completely devoid of any logical consistency, "just seem too perfect" to our emotionally-vulnerable, reaffirmation-seeking brains. Biologically, we are capable of killing and eating animals for nutritional (and perhaps cognitive) benefit. This, intuitively, seems like a nice, innocent template from which we can pattern our future behavior. But what about the other things we are "biologically capable of?" My understanding is that rape was relatively prevalent in our biological ancestors (it certainly is in animals), and we can imagine many potential "evolutionary benefits" of such behavior. If this is the case, I think Deck Knight has a few posts to revise in the recent "male rape" thread-- after all, he has shown us that arbitrary moral value judgments can be assigned to picked-and-chosen bits of biological "history" with impunity (whoops, I think I just "explained" by accident).

But of course, he won't actually do that. That would be crazy and irresponsible, not because there is any appreciable argumentative difference between the two scenarios, but because meat-eating happens to be popular at the moment, and it is therefore easy to curry emotional favor with those desperate to settle their cognitive dissonance by drawing irrelevant patterns in a confident tone. So he ignores the inconsistencies and lets you do the rest of the work, because, appropriately, you're kind of biologically wired to do so. I think there might be some irony in there somewhere!
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Too bad ethics is even more baseless than biology. Care to derive for us an absolutely acceptable basis upon which to establish what is "ethical" and what isn't?
 
Hey Kristoph how is it a "Naturalistic Fallacy" to ask why the fuck we should care about animals when they don't care about each other?

Or just why the fuck we should care in general.

You say "you can't appeal to how everyone else does it that is a FALLACY and arbitrary" but then how is what you are putting forth any less arbitrary? Why is what you view as moral behavior the only view and why are you trying to shove it down my/others throats?

Where is the evidence that eating meat is harmful to groups of people? And if you have none, why should I or anyone else care what happens to animals so long as we don't put them on the verge of extinction and thus risk losing the benefit of having them around for later?

I am aware what I am proposing is utilitarianism (or something similar to it) applied to animals. No, I don't support this same view to human behavior, as C. Sheen has mistakenly put forth in this thread before.

Essentially, given we have no particular stake in the survival of any other species (apart from losing potential benefits it gives us), how is it not completely arbitrary to decide that we will treat animal species identically to humans when literally nothing else extends the same courtesy to us (or just about anything else)? Because it makes some of us feel better about ourselves?

Basically please explain why it is alright for you to shove your version of morality down my throat and how what you view as moral is not simply your own opinion.
 
Crona said:
Morally justify...?
My only reasoning is a natural craving and need for survival.
Don't vegans have to take specific vitamins that normally are found in meat and byproducts of animals?
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nah bro I think dey get that from beanz and shit yo

Yeah I eat meat, no, I don't have any moral qualms about it. If you don't want to eat meat, don't eat it, but don't patronize me because I don't subscribe to your set of moral values.
Humans are the best, our lives are worth more than the lives of [animal]s, end of story.
 
i don't know where people are getting this idea that adopting a vegetarian lifestyle is a more expensive one: pulses are cheaper and provide all the protein you need, unless elsewhere is the world this isn't true

whether it's a less tasty option is irrelevant
 
jrrrrrrr said:
If your argument for being a vegetarian is "I don't like when animals die", then you should realize that more animals would die if everyone changed to a vegetarian diet. This is just one source but there are plenty of others out there which describe the increase in number of animals killed so that vegetarians can feel morally superior. The truth is that unless you're growing all of your own food, a lot of animals are going to die no matter what diet you have. That's before you even get into the politics of food, which are far too deep for one thread to contain.
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That article is complete and utter bullshit. We would farm significantly less land if everyone switched to a vegan diet, because WE NEED TO FARM MORE LAND TO GROW CROPS TO FEED THE ANIMALS WE THEN EAT. It is an incredibly inefficient method of consumption. I am at work and do not have the book with me but I will be happy to provide scholarly articles when I get home. But this website seems to be pretty accurate from what I have read in studies.
 
VirtualKaraokeCircusAct said:
nah bro I think dey get that from beanz and shit yo

Yeah I eat meat, no, I don't have any moral qualms about it. If you don't want to eat meat, don't eat it, but don't patronize me because I don't subscribe to your set of moral values.
Humans are the best, our lives are worth more than the lives of [animal]s, end of story.
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Why are human lives worth more than an animals?
 
It's because of culture. And as you said:

C.Sheen said:
If culture has any say in morality than morality means absolutely nothing and there is no use in even discussing this.
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Culture has, and always will have a role in morality. After all, the definition I found for morality is "A particular system of values and principles of conduct, esp. one held by a specified person or society."
 
Also, human beings feel more and care more for each other, so killing a human would have greater impact than killing a rabbit.
Also, humans are our species. Of course we're going to value ourselves more. (Before someone thrusts that Naturalistic Fallacy crap on me again, consider that it is more beneficial for a human being to preserve the life of another human rather than another animal.)
 
RBG said:
It's because of culture. And as you said:



Culture has, and always will have a role in morality. After all, the definition I found for morality is "A particular system of values and principles of conduct, esp. one held by a specified person or society."
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I have already discussed a lot of the problems that come with basing morality off of culture but if you accept the theory and live with the consequences of it than that is fine. However, our culture also says that destroying our environment is morally wrong and animal argiculture is much much worse for the environment than a plant based diet.
 
I'm not saying morality doesn't have problems if it is based off of culture. On fact, I agree with that statement. But it's not a theory that they are relayed. It's proven fact.
 
Woodchuck said:
Also, human beings feel more and care more for each other, so killing a human would have greater impact than killing a rabbit.
Also, humans are our species. Of course we're going to value ourselves more. (Before someone thrusts that Naturalistic Fallacy crap on me again, consider that it is more beneficial for a human being to preserve the life of another human rather than another animal.)
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Of course it is more beneficial to save a human life over an animal's. But that is not what the discussion is about, because we have the opportunity to save both lives.

And basing morality on the value we place on it is completely unfair because we have no way to determine how much value animals place on their lives. They could just as well value their lives as much as we value ours. Also how do we define value? A homeless, schizophrenic, meth addict would seem to have very little value to society, but we would still not kill and eat him.
 
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