this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Hypothetical moral questions posed genuinely is not trolling. If you're okay with eating cows and pigs, why is eating dogs considered trolling?
it's bad faith
I have no intent to deceive. There's a moral inconsistency amongst meat eaters. Pigs are okay, dogs are not. Why? "Oh, because we like dogs" Does that mean I can eat any sentient thing I dislike? "Well, no, dogs are intelligent!" Pigs are smarter than most breeds of dog, and have equal capabilities for emotion.
There is no logical argument against veganism in western society. Literally none. Meat eaters collectively breed and kill literally billions of animals per year, destroying the planet, because it's yummy. Meat eaters have essentially caused swine flu, bird flu, ebola, corona virus, just for the taste of meat. Meat eaters are causing treatment resistant bacteria by abusing antibiotics on high intensity farming, all for meat. That's crazy.
there is no logical argument for a lot of things, its just culture. and it is tasty and thats all that need be said.
There's a lot of awful things in culture. It was culturally acceptable to slap a women on the bottom for a good job.
Your argument is "ah well".
That's not a reasonable defense for your objectively immoral actions. You are causing the suffering of sentient life for taste, that makes you immoral. Not to mention the horrible effect your diet has on the planet.
yeah there are, luckly this isnt one of them eating meat is perfectly fine.
Go on, give me a valid defense for western populations killing animals for taste alone.
give me a valid offense against it there is nothing to defend because there is nothing wrong with it.
Okay, I believe it is morally reprehensible to kill a sentient being - one that feels fear and does not want to die, solely for pleasure. Eating meat is immoral and in a just world, would be punishable.
well we arent killing anything sentient so i dont see ur problem
Sentience means "the capacity to have feelings", and it is widely understood by the scientific community that the vast majority of the animal kingdom has sentience.
Do you believe cows can experience pain? Because we're right up close against rejecting scientific consensus just to justify immoral actions. And that typically is frowned upon historically.
Subjecting something that feels pain to experience pain for your pleasure is immoral.
honestly i got sentience and sapience confused English isnt my first language, anyways point is it really doesnt matter that they feel pain that in no way affects this, and u know that it doesnt because if farm animals were first sedated before being killed it would not make u ok with it so stop being disingenuous.
You're right. If farm animals were sedated before being killed, it would certainly be preferable, but wouldn't make it right.
We have no right to cause pain, fear or death to sentient beings, purely for ~15 minutes or pleasure. Doing so is immoral. There is no valid argument against this. Trust me, I did NOT want to be a vegan. I argued against it for four years trying not to become one. But there was and is no argument against it. Eating meat is immoral, bad for the planet, bad for the animals, bad for modern medicine, and in a typical western diet, bad for your health.
I repeat, there is no argument against veganism, and being vegan is objectively he correct moral choice.
u keep saying there is no argument against veganism but reality is that there doesnt need to be one because there is also no argument FOR veganism, there is nothing immoral about eating meat, and u have not at any point presented an argument that would even suggest it is wrong, u just keep saying it is.
Okay, if you and I were sitting on a park bench together, and we saw a dog walk past, and I went off to go stomp the dog to death - would you think that was morally wrong of me? Would you try stop me?
i see the argument u are trying to make and its nonsense, almost everyone makes a distinction between killing something just for the fun of it and killing something to eat it, for 99.9999% of people those are completely different actions.
So if I then ate the dog it would be okay? Why does eating it make it better? Because eating it is pleasurable? It's not necessary for survival in the western world to eat meat, it's just yummy.
Why - in my hypothetical - is your pleasure derived for eating the animals flesh, more significant than my pleasure from dog stomping?
You're contributing to the needless subjugation and slaughter of sentient life, purely for ease and pleasure. That's what's nonsense.
idk why eating it makes it better, but it does, and most people would agree with that. Morality and feelings arent some kind of objective truth u can just find and explain in exact detail. Maybe pleasure derived from eating is more valid because deriving pleasure from just killing something makes it clear that u are crazy and a danger to society, maybe its not that eating it makes it better but that doing it for no reason makes it worse, after all people kill rats and other pests all the time without eating them for the pleasure of not having them around and no one seems to mind.
And u keep saying things like "slaughter of sentient life" (which is a funny way of saying farming but whatever) as if thats somehow wrong but u have never said why it would be wrong.
And there it is. "I don't know why", followed by an appeal to the majority (most people at one time believed slavery was ok, that doesn't mean it was morally justified).
Your argument has come down to "I don't know why, but it just is".
I have said countless times why I believe eating animals is wrong. It is objectively wrong to cause something pain and death purely for taste pleasure.
If your argument has boiled down to "it is what it is", then I suppose we can finish off this back and forth. It was a good chat, I enjoyed it! Thank you
I said i dont know but i did posit a likely possibility. Thats called "not being full of shit" when i dont know i say it, and no there wasnt a time when most people believe slavery was ok, there were times when it was more accepted and less but at every point in history there was a very large number of people who opposed specially slaves idk if it was always a majority but it almost certainly was. Even in the history of amerikkka famous for its love of slavery and genocide if u actually study the "democratic" decisions that allowed slavery to persist in most cases the margins were very narrow which means that when u add... the slaves to the question (+people who didn't own land and women and many other groups who would be less slaver friendly) its clear that slavers weren't a majority. Please stop trying to legitimize slavers.
People have been eating meat since before people were people u coming here and suddenly asking me to justify it is like asking me why i dont like getting rained on or why i like drinking cold water better.
There is nothing objective about ur assertion, why would it be and who decided that, why would it be wrong to cause something pain and kill it just to eat it thats just something u said and have never justified in any way And besides as we have already established its not about pain and i doubt its about death either considering u are arguing for veganism not vegetarianism and even if u werent i doubt u would be ok with animals being sedated then having a body part that would regrow cut off and then eating that. So why do u keep coming back to pain and death, its catchy i guess?
Also no, my argument isnt it is what it is my argument is that u havent provided and argument against eating meat that u do infact refuse to provide one u just keep saying its wrong but never why, probably because u dont know because the reasons behind moral values are mostly unknowable which is why i also dont know but im not the one trying to impose my subjective morality on others am I?
And it has been fun tho obviously fruitless u were never going to change my mind and i wasnt even trying to change your, atleast not about eating meat, but i do hope u respect other peoples cultures, habits, and believes more.
Ah a few more classic meat eater points to rebut, I thought we had run out!
Your initial point is that "most people think eating meat is fine, so it's fine". I doubt that's binding your morality, as if suddenly 50.1% of people were against eating meat, you wouldn't then swap to veganism. You're asserting that if the majority think something is morally permissible, then it should be. Which would make Hitler's reign (who was very popular in Germany at the time) morally permissible. Also I'm not trying to legitimise slavers, and you know that, don't strawman.
"People have been eating meat since before people were people". That's either an appeal to nature or an appeal to tradition. First, nature. Just because animals eat meat, doesn't mean we should. Animals eat meat out of necessity, which makes it morally permissible. We do not need to do that. Furthermore, animals murder and rape, surely you don't find this nature permissible? As for appealing to tradition, that argument could be used to justify any number of problematic issues. "Gas companies have been polluting since time immemorial!" "Men have been marrying 13 year Olds since the 40s!", it's a broken argument without validity.
You keep saying that I haven't justified the assertion that it is wrong to cause harm to sentient beings for pleasure. Rather, it is your responsibility to assert that the harm IS justified. YOU'RE the one causing harm, YOU'RE the one who needs to justify it. Currently your justifications include "because we just do", "because we always have" and "because it's not wrong". Those are extremely poor reasons to harm others.
A valid argument to kill and eat another sentient being could be "because it's necessary for me to live". That would be valid. "Because you haven't convinced me not to" is not. You wouldn't accept that excuse from a murderer.
When did we establish that it's not about pain? I don't want to cause animals pain. Vegetarianism DOES include death. Male chicks can't produce eggs, so are ground up in a machine shortly after hatching. Male cows do not produce dairy, and must be killed as soon as financially possible. I say pain and death, because that's what meat eating causes? Sorry I didn't understand your paragraph on this one.
As for "respecting other cultures", you wouldn't accept that as reasoning for me to kill and eat people would you? If a culture/people require the killing and eating of animals for their own survival, it is permissible. But as for western culutures, it is not necessary, and thus is only done for pleasure. Which is not a valid reason for killing something (as we agreed upon in the dog stomping example).
Like I've said here, I'd love to not be vegan. I loved eating meat, I grew up on a farm in rural New Zealand. If you can come up with a good reason to kill and eat animals, I'd LOVE to hear it. But if the argument "you haven't convinced me not to" doesn't justify the murder of humans, why would it justify killing animals, who also feel pain, sadness, grief and fear?