Koyaanisqatsi

I wasn't going to chime in, but having read the whole thread I did find inconsistencies in your position, pyrrho, number one being, why the insistence on consistency?

Nothing about human behavior is "consistent." We are a dynamic species, not a static one. The reasons not to eat babies and retarded people vary from group to group as well as from circumstance to circumstance.

To raise a thought experiment of my own, if you were in a desert and there was no vegetation to be found, would you consider a baby or a retarded member of your tribe to be food then? The suffering of a child or a retarded person would arguably be much less if you simply killed them outright rather than let them die of starvation and their death would mean the survival of the whole of your tribe.

Context is, obviously, everything and so to posit something in a vacuum of ideals is therefore worthless.

Also, you stated:

Likewise, we don't know enough about what is going on with the plants you eat to make an absolute determination, so if one truly followed the cautious approach, one would kill oneself rather than risk inflicting any suffering.

You try to rationalize this in later posts by giving, IMO, an inconsistent, hypocritical semantics dance regarding the comparative suffering of plants to animals, yet you do not and can not ever know to any degree of "absolute determination" that plants don't suffer the most of all (factoring in that almost all animals eat plants). For all you know, plants are the nerve cells of Gaia Earth and every single time you step on them, let alone pcik and eat them, you are causing the entire Earth's ecosystem to scream in a language you aren't capable of hearing or even registering!

You are doing nothing more than most carnivores in this regard; rationalizing your own inconsistent application of your concept of morality in regard to the biological necessity of consumption.

For you to be truly consistent (and I am by no means actually advocating such a thing, just leveling the playing field, as it were) to apply your standard of suffering, you must conclude that the only way to actually prevent the greatest amount of possible suffering on your part is to kill yourself.

This would save any possible suffering of the many hundreds of trillions of beings that die every second as a direct result of your exsitence; from the plants you eat to the parasites in your body to the very cells of your body, since, like carnivores, you cannot say to any degree of "absolute determination" that the skin cells you jettison every second do not suffer.

Am I exploding extremes? Of course, but then, so are you when you keep making "consistency" a benchmark and "suffering" an assumption to base your veganism upon.

The fact is that we require sustenance to continue living. If you want to pretend that plants don't suffer because you have arbitrarily decided that from what you (and even scientists) can discern, they don't suffer in any recognizable manner to us, have at it, but don't accuse anyone else of "inconsistency" when nothing about the human condition is consistent.

The arrogance that assumes a plant does not suffer simply because we have no known manner of registering that suffrage is appalling to me, but then I'm used to hypocritical claims around these parts. Even if it could be convincingly shown that they don't suffer, that doesn't mean that they aren't alive and therefore perfectly within their own rights to continue living uneaten.

But that's not the way things work in nature. In nature, all other animals hunt down and kill and then eat their victims, often while still alive. Many animals, in fact, go to great lengths to keep their victims alive while they are eating them in order to insure freshness.

If the totality of nature does this on an alarmingly regular basis, then who are you (or anyone else) to claim that it is immoral to do this exact thing? Because only humans have a moral imperative because we can create moral imperatives?

Talk about inconsistency! Indeed, compared to what the rest of the animal kingdom does to its food supply, I would say that we are already "morally supperior" (if I ever were to be forced to say such a pointless, homo-self-glorifing thing).

If you don't wish to eat meat, then by all means, that's your decision, but please don't pretend that you aren't also inflicting a comparatively equal amount of suffering on another living being while doing it, just because you can't hear a plant scream when it dies.

Indeed, for all you know, plants flower in order to communicate to you through beauty that you shouldn't eat them.

Koyaanisqatsi

Sorry to be so caustic (it's a personality flaw), but I think my points are valid and I was responding to perceived piousness, which, no doubt, is why these discussions (in the past) have tended to degenerate into flame wars.

I think it is admirable that all of us have empathy and/or sympathy for any suffering we inflict in this life, whether directly or inadvertantly, but to remain consistent, one shouldn't, IMO, intone a moral supperiority, of piousness in regard to the suffering others inadvertantly inflict when the same arguments you present can just as easily be applied to the suffering you inadvertantly inflict as a necessary "evil" to this existence.

The natural order is to consume, process and fertilize (either through death of the self or through death of the consumed), so to point a finger in one direction (however well intentioned or even couched in moral abstraction terminology) and claim that one is inflicting comparatively more suffering when there is no way to determine such a thing just grates because it implies that you are somehow removed from the natural order looking down on all of us ignorant folk who just don't know any better.

I understand your intention was probably to ellevate this discussion to a level of abstraction, but, as I pointed out previously, this fails since your own standards of consistency and comparative suffering do not obtain in veganism.

Gurdur

Because anything you eat arouses gut feelings.
That should be obvious.

Bill Snedden

<rimshot> That's right, he'll be here all week, folks...

acronos

The distinction is communications. If humans someday learn to speak chicken and cow, I think that we would quickly stop eating them. If humans someday find a race on another planet, I think we will treat that race completely different depending on our ability to communicate. I don't see humans in today's society eating anything that can communicate with us.

However, humans cannot survive without food. If we discover someday that plants are intelligent and can communicate, then I think we would continue to eat plants because our existence is at stake. It is us or them. We were not gifted by God or evolution with the gift of photosynthesis.

I think it is vegetarians who are silly to make the distinction between animals and plants. I find vegetarian arguments very weak for this reason.

Someday, it is my hope that we will grow our food in factories using technologies that select for the muscle and nutrients that we need and crave. I do not see any technical obstacles to growing steak, chicken breast, or fish without the attached nervous system. Just put the correct cells in the right solution and wave a massive technological hand and viola, we have stake dinner without killing a cow similar to the way we are about to be able to grow replacement kidneys for medical purposes. Then we will grow meat similar to the way we grow plants and the moral concerns will probably be much less.

Until then, unless I see a much more convincing argument, I will continue to eat meat.

The AntiChris

By that reasoning I guess societies that have popular support for animal welfare legislation but a complete absence of vegetable welfare legislation are "silly" too?

Chris

acronos

AntiChris
Have you ever heard of tree huggers? We have tons of environmental legislation concerning plants.

Yes. I think the distinction is silly. I have met people who claim that plants scream when we kill them.

The AntiChris

Fine. Your empathy clearly works in a very different way to mine.

Chris

acronos

Actually, it's probably not. The closer something is to a similar nervious system to the one I have, the more empathy I feel. I feel a very strong correlation to cats, dogs, great apes, etc. I can see emotion on their faces. I do not doubt that cows feel pain. I sometimes wonder if fish do. I don't wish suffering on anything, including cows, and I do understand your argument from that point of view. However, I don't see an arbatrary line distinguishing fish, starfish, fungus, cows, and brocoli. Any line we create is just that, created by us. We are all made out of very similar cells and DNA.

I feel very bad on a vegetarian diet. The only diets that I seem to function well on are ones that include a bunch of meat. I disagree with the vegetarian propoganda that we are herbovores. Anyone using an honest clasification system would clearly classify us as omnivores, both from a biological perspective and from a what we actually do perspective. Your body may be different from mine and I'm not being sarcastic in that statement. You may be able to eat vegetarian and get away with it without problems. I cannot. People are different.

The AntiChris

It appears then that you too in fact, have a similar empathic reaction to vegetarians who "make the distinction between animals and plants".

So what you're really saying is that it's not that vegetarians actually make this "distinction" that you find "silly" but the fact that they respond to this distinction in a different way to you that you find "silly"?
I'm not sure why felt the need to mention this. Are you suggesting that if you didn't suffer from this rare disorder you wouldn't consider vegetarianism "silly"?

The strongest argument for meat-eating I've heard is the simple statement:

"The pleasure I derive from eating meat outweighs the empathic concerns I have for the suffering of the animals I eat."

All attempts I've seen to rationalise this subjective preference in order to portray the vegetarian position as in some way irrational seem "silly" to me.

Chris