I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
This argument also implies that “dominionism” is wrong, i.e. all life has a right to not be killed or abused. Yet human life is impossible without killing and consuming other living organisms, be it plants, animals og fungi. Thus it is unethical to continue living.
This argument is bad, because for human life to be possible, you must draw the line between life that you consider ethical to kill and life that you consider unethical to kill.
It’s not about “all life” but about “all sentient life”. Only beings that are able have pleasant and unpleasant experience should be considered. If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition.
Sentience is studied scientifically. It cannot be stated with absolute certainty but scientists have good sets of criteria and experiences that helps identify it. With the current knowledge it’s almost certain that all mammals are sentient, like us. Fishes and birds are also very likely to be sentient. Some species of insects are probably sentient while others may not be. And plants are likely not sentient.
But even if all living things are sentient, it doesn’t change very much. Speciesism means treating beings differently only because they belong to some specific species. There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species (and studying sentience helps identifying these interests). It’s very likely that we do less harm by growing plants than by breeding animals. And even if it was the same amount of suffering we would still do less harm by avoiding eating animals because breeding them to eat them actually requires more plants than just eating plants. We should seek to minimise suffering and avoiding eating animal is a good way to do that.
I don’t agree on your analysis of sentience. The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this? Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.
If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition
This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.
There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species
And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence. If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
I’ve heard this tired argument that plants and sentient mammals have the same capacity for suffering so many times. I think it is a disingenuous way of excusing the suffering your choices support.
A plant does not grieve when it’s offspring is removed from it. It does not have fear, or joy. Plants don’t play with each other and bond.
Yes. They communicate, and react to stimuli. So does a computer, but neither are sentient
The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this?
It does have a concrete meaning. Scientific papers usually define what they are studying. For example the Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans has a definition. It also has criteria to evaluate it.
Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.
Having reactions to external stimulus is different from having feelings. Feelings require consciousness, or sentience.
Even having nociceptors doesn’t mean you can experience pain (see the above review in the “Defining sentience” section).
If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition
This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.
Yes you can be harmed without knowing it, but it still must have a negative effect on you. If something can’t have negative (or positive) experience then how can you say it’s being harmed?
If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed. Being sentient is having this ability to experience being harmed. That’s why I meant it’s by definition that non sentient beings can’t be harmed. The word exists to distinguish what can and cannot experience harm (among other feelings).
There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species
And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence.
But having food doesn’t necessarily mean harming something. And even if it does, different foods have different level of harm. We can choose the foods that minimize harm.
If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
Because if something is not sentient it cannot have negative experiences, so it can’t be harmed.
Sure, so then they should instead be arguing that sentience is the morally correct line to draw.
This is kind of a straw man argument. I don’t feel guilty at all eating a carrot I pulled out of the ground.
So we can all agree that it’s morally ok to eat a carrot, but not to eat a human. The difference is sentience. The hard part is where exactly to draw the line. Which side of the line is a cow on? A fish? A bug?
This guy thought about that question, if you wanted to see that perspective.
https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/#Summary
I’m not a meat eater personally.
But I don’t understand why people who like to eat meat don’t eat human.
I think there are, or have been, some who do. It’s seems cultural, and a bit of a luxury to be wasteful.
I don’t think there’s any socially agreed line between “good” and “bad”.
I reckon people mostly do what their culture prefers or tolerates.
Different cultures have different ranges of acceptable behavior from different people fulfilling different roles within them . Most people are members of many sub-cultures going right down to small family groups , professional associations, work-teams, sports teams and so on. There’ll be some sort of consequence for transgression, maybe verbal shaming, spitting in someone’s beer, withheld services, exclusion from jobs, or expulsion from the group.
Sometimes people (in power) agree to put in laws and expend resources on enforcement instead of cultural norms; probably because the clashes within or between (sub)cultures and the inconsistent treatment of transgressions becomes too costly or disruptive.
That’s when you get a “line” that says “wrong”, once its been put into an enforced law. Even then the law, and enforcement, is always still a bit blurry. partial, and biassed so it’s really just a formalisation of the process for administering the consequences of transgression.
i think it is possible to find things that look similar in other social animals too like, other apes, wild dogs, things with pecking orders , rats and so on. I wonder if there are even roles similar to " police" in some non-human cultures?
I don’t believe this is a straw man argument, I never claim that they believe these conclusions. Quite the opposite, I am showing how their argument, not their conclusion, is not good. As I understand their argument, it is basically this:
(i) If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it. (ii) Animals do not want to be killed. Thus, it is morally wrong to kill animals.
I do not agree with (i), which I try to explain by reductio ad absurdum, arguing that if (i) is true it leads to obviously incorrect conclusions, thus (i) must be false.
The straw man argument comes from your point about combining plants and animals as food, and stating that they were both living. If you compare a cow to parsley, it is silly to say that we shouldn’t eat parsley for the sake of it being a living organism. With cows in the same argument, they get dismissed since they’re in the same group as plants.
Plants are the straw man in this case because it’s easy to dismiss the argument that we shouldn’t eat plants, for some reason. Animals are conscious creatures that experience suffering. Plants don’t experience the same pain.
And others don’t feel guilty for eating meat. Than you for recognizing that people have different feelings.
And others don’t feel guilty for eating meat.
Carrots are incapable of feeling anything: they can’t be affected in a morally relevant way. Animals have emotions, preferences, can experience suffering and can be deprived of positive/pleasurable experiences in their lives.
Than you for recognizing that people have different feelings.
Obviously this isn’t a sufficient justification for harming others. “I don’t care about people with dark skin, please recognize that different people have different feelings.” The fact that I don’t care about the individuals I’m victimizing doesn’t mean victimizing them is okay.
