One pretty consistent moral among societies is that needlessly causing harm is considered wrong. Outside of lab grown, its impossible to acquire meat without grievously harming an animal. Further, the vast majority of our meat is NOT gained by hunting but instead by factory, and the conditions of meat factories are appalling and horrific. So yes, if we CAN get the nutrients we need without the consumption of meat, that is the most moral way to get our nutrition met. All that being said, even today, being able to meet all nutritional needs without any form of animal cruelty is an incredibly privileged position to be in, and we arent quite at the stage where its fair to judge others for not doing so
(edit: and I say this as a meat eater, meat is fuckin delicious and I dont want to give it up. I’m personally banking on lab grown meat becoming an economical option, at which point we have removed the ethical muddiness of it)
(Edit 2: Lmao, I ruffled the feathers of a lot of meat eaters who’ve likely never actually had to kill any if the animals they’ve eaten. I have, I still eat meat. Reality is messy, fucking own it)
One pretty consistent moral among societies is that needlessly causing harm is considered wrong.
besides your total lack of specificity about ethical systems or societies in which they exist, your use of “needlessly” is doing a lot of work there. on the one hand it sets up a no-true-scotsman where you can always claim no need is great enough, but it also gives anyone challenging this claim a loophole the size of a walmart to walk through: just claim it’s necessary.
i don’t think you really understand the claim you made. worse, if you do, that means you’re intentionally using vague language and intellectually dishonest tactics to persuade. this is called sophistry.
Im kinda done arguing with dumbasses in good faith about whether or not killing an animal is less ethical than not killing one. I’m a meat eater, I find meat delicious, and I ALSO recognise that most of the world isnt in a privileged enough position to NOT eat meat in order to fulfill their dietary needs. None of this takes away from the fact that killing is less ethical than not killiing
Im kinda done arguing with dumbasses in good faith about whether or not killing an animal is less ethical than not killing one.
calling your interlocutors names is a great way to indicate you’re done arguing in good faith, but you just came out and said it. too bad you don’t seem capable of defending the claim you’re making.
One pretty consistent moral among societies is that needlessly causing harm is considered wrong.
The problem with this as your moral compass is that “needless” can mean whatever you want it to mean. It’s not actually a guideline to any specific behavior
Thats a semantics arguement to a generalized statement which is special kind of stupid. I gave a detailed response to further explain why this applies to meat eating and even ended with saying we havent reached a point in society where its fair to judge others for not abandoning eating meat. Just because society has always done things a certain way, doesnt make it right or moral, slavery was the NORM until around the last couple 100 years, and now its near universally considered atrocious. Meat eating from once living animals will likely be the next once norm, now evil, societal concept. But we arent there yet
Damn near everything is subjective dumbass, its why theres so many societal problems that are still around even though they’ve plagued us for centuries
The entire purpose of a moral compass is to not be subjective. I didn’t make the claim that everyone should, or does, live by one set guideline. You did
The idea that morality is entirely based on subjectivity is your personal opinion. You can’t use it as if it was a fact and ground your argument upon it like you could do with an actual fact.
Plants dont experience life the same way we do dumbass. Do you think its ok to torture a pet cat as fun? Probably not, if so, you already recognize that harming an animal is less ethical than harming one. Really not that hard a concept to grasp. Eat meat, meats fucking delicious, but dont fucking delude yourself into thinking NOT killing an animal isnt less ethical than killing one.
Counterpoint, something can be less moral than another thing WITHOUT being immoral. There are many MANY reasons to continue eating meat in this day and age, being just as moral as not, is NOT one of them
i have a tendency to write very short comments, but i feel i’ve been misunderstood. let me try again:
you set up an claim that, if i’m reading it correctly, says “people believe torturing cats is wrong because they think harming an animal is less ethical than not harming an animal”
but that doesn’t necessarily follow. people may believe torturing cats is wrong, and that belief may have nothing to do with the other (that harming an animal is less ethical than not harming an animal). in fact, they can hold that belief without out believing the other at all.
Dude the level of semantics you are arguing is NOT important in the real world. The general reason torture is bad is because its harmful and inflicts pain. The fact that that translates to animals means that (non human) animals deserve to be considered in human morals. Therefor having to harm an animal to sustain oneself is LESS moral than not having to. Since you’ve been actually arguing with me in good faith, even though I feel like this is a semantics arguement, I do feel I need to point out that my stance was never that meat eating is Immoral, I don’t feel with society as it is today that it is. In the future, I think that will be likely, but right now we NEED meat, and far more people would be harmed by removing it as a food staple until we’ve reached a point where access to ethically untainted food has matured to a point that everyone has access to it.
ethics is generally presented with a scale that has three stops: moral duty (something you must do), amoral (something it doesn’t matter if you do), and immoral (something you shouldn’t do). if eating meat is less moral than not eating meat, the only way it’s possible for it to be less moral without being immoral is if eating plants is a moral duty, and no one believes that. it’s not like chewing a tomato is a good thing in and of itself like saving a drowning kid would be.
here’s what i think: you have no formal training in ethics as a branch of philosophy, so you are using terms with which you have some familiarity, but you are playing fast-and-loose with terms that have specific meanings.
you may actually not believe eating meat is immoral, but if that’s the case then it isn’t consistent to believe eating meat is less moral than not eating meat.
There are many MANY reasons to continue eating meat in this day and age, being just as moral as not, is NOT one of them
most ethical systems, in fact, do support that position: meat eating in and of itself is amoral to nearly every ethical system i can think of (and i know a lot)
Well hunting is a pain in the ass as it is. In an industrialized society we traded markets with shared goods to more specific specialties. Sure I can hunt for food because of licenses and availability but the trade off is most of the people have really good health care. At least objectively they have access to healthcare that can cure things that back in the 1500s would kill you within days.
My point is that at some point someone said “Hey I can take care of the meat portion if you take care of (insert many specialists careers).” There was no morality involved. Choosing to be vegan is fine. I think that it’s easier to get certain things from animal sources. So does nature.
problem is that only some well of westerners can reliably eat vegan and cover their nutrient intake, if you are worried about animal cruelty look into sustainable and ethical meet production
Spoken like someone who’s never had dirt-cheap lentils or beans & rice in their life that feeds literally billions. But we can delve into precisely what nutrients you’re referring to, versus the average nutrients (or excess of anti-nutrients) the average poor omnivore American gets in their diet. This doesn’t even cover the fact that if you’re poor, then you also are going to struggle to afford sustainable, healthy, and ethical “meet” production just the same.
sounds like someone who doesn’t understand that lentils rice and beans does not cover all the nutrients you would need, and thus you would be nutrient deficient. a massive problem for the people stuck eating lentils beans and rice (because hint: it is a massive problem), as for the ability to afford said meat, you don’t need a daily portion of meat.
It’s funny how you dodged the substance: Exactly which nutrients are you referring to?
When we finally get there, it’s going to boggle your mind that Beans & Rice and Lentils have a more diverse nutrient profile, while simultaneously having a greater calorie-density yield per square-mile of farmland.
That’s not even to raise soybean in combination with rice, which has gone on to feed massive populations of people for cheap in Asia for literally thousands of years…
Edit: The user below is incorrect. 60-80% of soybean production goes straight to the livestock feed. 34.3 million tons of soybean meal goes straight to feeding livestock. By contrast, only 11.9 million metric tons goes to soybean oil production; it’s thus likely the other way around and the extraction of oil is a byproduct of soybean meal production for livestock.
Expressed this way, it is clear that soybean meal actually contributes the bulk of the crushing value of soybeans on a per bushel basis.
Edit: The user feels as though they proved me wrong, but that graph only aids my case: 76% is used as animal feed. Soybean oil needs processed out and is sold in addition to the soybean meal, and the aforementioned links continue to prove that it is indeed the animal feed that is the most profitable part overall. Thank you. To repeat:
The demand for soybeans is currently tied to global meat consumption and is expected to grow, fuelled by Asia.
Per USDA:
Just over 70 percent of the soybeans grown in the United States are used for animal feed, with poultry being the number one livestock sector consuming soybeans, followed by hogs, dairy, beef and aquaculture
It continues to amuse me that one cannot find a single source supporting their case that animal feed supply would drop if soybean oil demand dropped. All evidence points to soybean oil being dependent upon animal feed demand in all actuality.
(Friendly reminder, again, that 2/3 of the Bushel value for the farmer comes from – you guessed it - the processed meal for animal feed. Waste products aren’t generally the driving value-maker).
Finally, the nail in the coffin:
"meeting animal [farmers’] needs drives meal demand,” and soy “meal is the engine that drives profitability,”
the vast majority of the soy that is fed to livestock is the industrial waste from pressing it for oil. feeding it to animals is conserving resources.
edit: about 7% of the global soy production goes directly to livestock. about 17% of all the end uses of soy is as soybean oil. since a soybean is only about 20% oil that means that 85% of all the soybeans in the world must be crushed for oil. The industrial waste from that process is called soy cake or soymeal and that is what is fed to livestock. if we didn’t feed it the livestock it would be a waste product.
It’s only wrong if you believe hurting other living things is wrong, it depends on your upbringing / mental framework and how you relate those between different species.
But I believe most people agree that the current way we mass produce meat and how we treat these animals is like a dystopian endgame. If humans were treated like that by a higher intelligence that would be extremely disturbing and cruel. We just accept it as we place the priority on a steak on our plate.
It is how it is, everyone is ignorant or a hypocrite in some parts of life. Good or bad are only subjective perspectives. But if you look at the harm we cause to other beings with eating meat and in what mechanistic way, that might be one of the things in 100 years we look back at and just can’t fathom.
Could you explain which part of eating meat is wrong? We have evolved to what we are today, thanks largely to our ancestors’ diets.
One pretty consistent moral among societies is that needlessly causing harm is considered wrong. Outside of lab grown, its impossible to acquire meat without grievously harming an animal. Further, the vast majority of our meat is NOT gained by hunting but instead by factory, and the conditions of meat factories are appalling and horrific. So yes, if we CAN get the nutrients we need without the consumption of meat, that is the most moral way to get our nutrition met. All that being said, even today, being able to meet all nutritional needs without any form of animal cruelty is an incredibly privileged position to be in, and we arent quite at the stage where its fair to judge others for not doing so
(edit: and I say this as a meat eater, meat is fuckin delicious and I dont want to give it up. I’m personally banking on lab grown meat becoming an economical option, at which point we have removed the ethical muddiness of it)
(Edit 2: Lmao, I ruffled the feathers of a lot of meat eaters who’ve likely never actually had to kill any if the animals they’ve eaten. I have, I still eat meat. Reality is messy, fucking own it)
besides your total lack of specificity about ethical systems or societies in which they exist, your use of “needlessly” is doing a lot of work there. on the one hand it sets up a no-true-scotsman where you can always claim no need is great enough, but it also gives anyone challenging this claim a loophole the size of a walmart to walk through: just claim it’s necessary.
i don’t think you really understand the claim you made. worse, if you do, that means you’re intentionally using vague language and intellectually dishonest tactics to persuade. this is called sophistry.
Im kinda done arguing with dumbasses in good faith about whether or not killing an animal is less ethical than not killing one. I’m a meat eater, I find meat delicious, and I ALSO recognise that most of the world isnt in a privileged enough position to NOT eat meat in order to fulfill their dietary needs. None of this takes away from the fact that killing is less ethical than not killiing
Abso-fucking-lutely based. Sometimes it’s better to just call a dumbass, ‘a dumbass’ than engage with their bullshit sealioning.
stealing this
calling your interlocutors names is a great way to indicate you’re done arguing in good faith, but you just came out and said it. too bad you don’t seem capable of defending the claim you’re making.
Nah, it just means you idiots arent worth the headache
more name-calling, but no defense for your position.
=D
No one’s obligated to debate you. 🙄
I don’t want a debate
The problem with this as your moral compass is that “needless” can mean whatever you want it to mean. It’s not actually a guideline to any specific behavior
Thats a semantics arguement to a generalized statement which is special kind of stupid. I gave a detailed response to further explain why this applies to meat eating and even ended with saying we havent reached a point in society where its fair to judge others for not abandoning eating meat. Just because society has always done things a certain way, doesnt make it right or moral, slavery was the NORM until around the last couple 100 years, and now its near universally considered atrocious. Meat eating from once living animals will likely be the next once norm, now evil, societal concept. But we arent there yet
The subjectivity of these takes is my entire point.
Damn near everything is subjective dumbass, its why theres so many societal problems that are still around even though they’ve plagued us for centuries
The entire purpose of a moral compass is to not be subjective. I didn’t make the claim that everyone should, or does, live by one set guideline. You did
Morality to some degree HAS to be subjective as its based on the time period it is formed. Society progresses for a reason
“My rights end where yours begin” is not subjective, as one easy example.
The idea that morality is entirely based on subjectivity is your personal opinion. You can’t use it as if it was a fact and ground your argument upon it like you could do with an actual fact.
This is just totally missing the plot.
Isn’t all morality subjective, rendering your comment moot?
Generally accepted morals certainly can be guidelines for behaviors.
So, quit eating. You must harm the plant to eat as well.
Plants dont experience life the same way we do dumbass. Do you think its ok to torture a pet cat as fun? Probably not, if so, you already recognize that harming an animal is less ethical than harming one. Really not that hard a concept to grasp. Eat meat, meats fucking delicious, but dont fucking delude yourself into thinking NOT killing an animal isnt less ethical than killing one.
wrong. torture can be wrong while incidental harm may be totally amoral. one has nothing to do with the other.
Counterpoint, something can be less moral than another thing WITHOUT being immoral. There are many MANY reasons to continue eating meat in this day and age, being just as moral as not, is NOT one of them
i have a tendency to write very short comments, but i feel i’ve been misunderstood. let me try again:
you set up an claim that, if i’m reading it correctly, says “people believe torturing cats is wrong because they think harming an animal is less ethical than not harming an animal”
but that doesn’t necessarily follow. people may believe torturing cats is wrong, and that belief may have nothing to do with the other (that harming an animal is less ethical than not harming an animal). in fact, they can hold that belief without out believing the other at all.
Dude the level of semantics you are arguing is NOT important in the real world. The general reason torture is bad is because its harmful and inflicts pain. The fact that that translates to animals means that (non human) animals deserve to be considered in human morals. Therefor having to harm an animal to sustain oneself is LESS moral than not having to. Since you’ve been actually arguing with me in good faith, even though I feel like this is a semantics arguement, I do feel I need to point out that my stance was never that meat eating is Immoral, I don’t feel with society as it is today that it is. In the future, I think that will be likely, but right now we NEED meat, and far more people would be harmed by removing it as a food staple until we’ve reached a point where access to ethically untainted food has matured to a point that everyone has access to it.
this isn’t semantics. it’s syllogism.
you’ve said clearly it’s less moral.
ethics is generally presented with a scale that has three stops: moral duty (something you must do), amoral (something it doesn’t matter if you do), and immoral (something you shouldn’t do). if eating meat is less moral than not eating meat, the only way it’s possible for it to be less moral without being immoral is if eating plants is a moral duty, and no one believes that. it’s not like chewing a tomato is a good thing in and of itself like saving a drowning kid would be.
here’s what i think: you have no formal training in ethics as a branch of philosophy, so you are using terms with which you have some familiarity, but you are playing fast-and-loose with terms that have specific meanings.
you may actually not believe eating meat is immoral, but if that’s the case then it isn’t consistent to believe eating meat is less moral than not eating meat.
no, it doesn’t. why should it?
that’s not what kant would say.
most ethical systems, in fact, do support that position: meat eating in and of itself is amoral to nearly every ethical system i can think of (and i know a lot)
Source? Dumbass
Well hunting is a pain in the ass as it is. In an industrialized society we traded markets with shared goods to more specific specialties. Sure I can hunt for food because of licenses and availability but the trade off is most of the people have really good health care. At least objectively they have access to healthcare that can cure things that back in the 1500s would kill you within days.
My point is that at some point someone said “Hey I can take care of the meat portion if you take care of (insert many specialists careers).” There was no morality involved. Choosing to be vegan is fine. I think that it’s easier to get certain things from animal sources. So does nature.
problem is that only some well of westerners can reliably eat vegan and cover their nutrient intake, if you are worried about animal cruelty look into sustainable and ethical meet production
Edit: well off western vegans be mad
I agree, I addressed this in my response
Spoken like someone who’s never had dirt-cheap lentils or beans & rice in their life that feeds literally billions. But we can delve into precisely what nutrients you’re referring to, versus the average nutrients (or excess of anti-nutrients) the average poor omnivore American gets in their diet. This doesn’t even cover the fact that if you’re poor, then you also are going to struggle to afford sustainable, healthy, and ethical “meet” production just the same.
sounds like someone who doesn’t understand that lentils rice and beans does not cover all the nutrients you would need, and thus you would be nutrient deficient. a massive problem for the people stuck eating lentils beans and rice (because hint: it is a massive problem), as for the ability to afford said meat, you don’t need a daily portion of meat.
It’s funny how you dodged the substance: Exactly which nutrients are you referring to?
When we finally get there, it’s going to boggle your mind that Beans & Rice and Lentils have a more diverse nutrient profile, while simultaneously having a greater calorie-density yield per square-mile of farmland.
That’s not even to raise soybean in combination with rice, which has gone on to feed massive populations of people for cheap in Asia for literally thousands of years…
… Forget the impact to climate change and general sustainability… Meanwhile feed for the animal has to come somewhere, and 60-80% of all meat is fed…Soybean. Perhaps, I dunno — cut out the middle-man… ?
Edit: The user below is incorrect. 60-80% of soybean production goes straight to the livestock feed. 34.3 million tons of soybean meal goes straight to feeding livestock. By contrast, only 11.9 million metric tons goes to soybean oil production; it’s thus likely the other way around and the extraction of oil is a byproduct of soybean meal production for livestock.
To drive home the point more clearly:
To add insult to injury:
Edit: The user feels as though they proved me wrong, but that graph only aids my case: 76% is used as animal feed. Soybean oil needs processed out and is sold in addition to the soybean meal, and the aforementioned links continue to prove that it is indeed the animal feed that is the most profitable part overall. Thank you. To repeat:
Per USDA:
It continues to amuse me that one cannot find a single source supporting their case that animal feed supply would drop if soybean oil demand dropped. All evidence points to soybean oil being dependent upon animal feed demand in all actuality.
(Friendly reminder, again, that 2/3 of the Bushel value for the farmer comes from – you guessed it - the processed meal for animal feed. Waste products aren’t generally the driving value-maker).
Finally, the nail in the coffin:
- United Soybean Board
Case closed.
the vast majority of the soy that is fed to livestock is the industrial waste from pressing it for oil. feeding it to animals is conserving resources.
edit: about 7% of the global soy production goes directly to livestock. about 17% of all the end uses of soy is as soybean oil. since a soybean is only about 20% oil that means that 85% of all the soybeans in the world must be crushed for oil. The industrial waste from that process is called soy cake or soymeal and that is what is fed to livestock. if we didn’t feed it the livestock it would be a waste product.
And some civilisations practised human sacrifice. “We did it in the past” isn’t really an arguement.
Congratulations, you’ve completely missed the point. Apples and oranges.
Our bodies grew and developed thanks to the nutrients meat provided. What does that have to do with human sacrifices?
Our ancestors hunted wild animals
Industrialized meat production is horrible and wrong
That’s the part that is wrong
Let a pig have a happy life, then kill it. There is no need to force feed it in a coffin size pen for its whole life.
I didn’t ask what is wrong with the current industrial approach to farming animals, I asked what is wrong with eating meat.
You said which part.
That’s the part that is wrong
When you go to the store and purchase meat from an animal that was kept in inhumane conditions, you are supporting the system.
It’s only wrong if you believe hurting other living things is wrong, it depends on your upbringing / mental framework and how you relate those between different species.
But I believe most people agree that the current way we mass produce meat and how we treat these animals is like a dystopian endgame. If humans were treated like that by a higher intelligence that would be extremely disturbing and cruel. We just accept it as we place the priority on a steak on our plate.
It is how it is, everyone is ignorant or a hypocrite in some parts of life. Good or bad are only subjective perspectives. But if you look at the harm we cause to other beings with eating meat and in what mechanistic way, that might be one of the things in 100 years we look back at and just can’t fathom.
That’s an incredible weak argument. Our ancestors did all kinds of stuff which lead to societies prosperity. Doesn’t make all of it morally right.