Veganism, like all other idealogies that could be described as “if only everyone did X,” will never, ever be as widely-adopted as you’d like without authoritarianism driving that adoption.
Also — I’m saying this as a former vegan — I have developed so many food allergies that I literally cannot be vegan anymore (the vast, vast majority of my food allergies are plants). And yes I carry an epi-pen, they can kill me, etc. If I ate plants only, I would die.
Reality is a whole hell of a lot more complicated than those casually pushing ultimatums on the internet ever seem to realize or acknowledge.
Your first paragraph is probably right, just like we need laws against rape and slavery. Go back in history and you’ll find people who would have said “I can’t imagine a world without that” on those issues too. I’m all for it.
Well, what aspect would you say that I'm comparing between these seemingly unrelated things? Hint: they don't need to be ethically equivalent for me to make my comparison.
Bio reactors would be nice, if they were already here. But they are not and for the near future might not be. We may lose the ability to repair the damage already done before they come.
But you know ... plants are already here. We could stop damaging the planet now if we'd manage to switch to plant-based diets.
The issue is that people en masse don’t actually care all that much about the cruelty of killing animals so long as it’s not reasonably torturous. The future, however dystopian you may see it, is sustainably growing the animals we want to eat for slaughter.
Define reasonably torturous. Please see https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch and come back to tell me that we know how to humanely grow & kill animals, and that we don't cause them unreasonable suffering by our farming practices.
Define sustainably. If everybody ate like an average american, we would need 4+ earths. Don't forget to count in the wildlife & destruction of oceans. Sustainable economies are mostly plant-based.
We eat animals because we were taught to and because the system is set up this way. We can change that and lose nothing (not even the pleasure from the food, however alien vegan food seems to you), and gain/solve everything. We just need to open the eyes and learn to cook differently.
Or eat our way to our extinction. What will we say to our children / grandchildren ? That we liked the steak too much?
These have flopped. Most people who like meat want real meat. Most people who don't like meat don't want fake meat. The remainder is the market for fake meats, and it has proven small.
They have not flopped. They are extremely popular among vegetarians.
They flopped as "meat substitutes" because they are not in fact meat substitutes and never were. They are flavored soy protein. They are junk food. Absolutely nothing like lab-grown meat or any other kind of meat, in neither form nor function nor nutritional value.
Saying they’re absolutely nothing like meat in form or nutritional value doesn’t make sense to me - the Whopper and Impossible Whopper are basically the same item. An impossible patty has very similar fat/protein content to a beef (80/20) patty but with more carbohydrates (beef having none).
Impossible patties seem a legitimate meat substitute for those who choose to purchase them.
Counting macronutrients is a pretty poor way of comparing foods. They have different amino acids, fats, trace minerals, and vitamins, and are digested differently in the body. They don't even smell the same or behave the same when cooking.
This isn't some kind of pro-meat screed, either. It's just not true that they are equivalent culinarily or nutritionally. They are a pretty good approximation of beef, but they're not the same.
If the Whoppers seem the same, it's because Whoppers are junk food, and Impossible meat is kind of just vegan junk food.
I wonder what it is that drives the human desire for meat. Meat substitutes seem to be trying to solve the environmental issues by taking advantage of that inbuilt natural desire, albeit imperfectly. I have to wonder if thay is an easier strategy than trying to change people's habits on a mass scale.
I actually like Impossible Burger. It doesn't take like a burger exactly, but it tastes good. And if you screw up an Impossible burger, it doesn't taste nearly as bad as a screwed up beef burger, which gets as dry as leather.
they flopped because they're expensive. I've tried both. They're both more or less edible. But impossible burgers are more money than just buying beef, and not as good. Why is this pea protein more money than beef?
I don't think those will really ever make a noticeable dent in the market. Most people don't want plant based burgers, especially with the negative reputation of soy and masculinity. I think lab grown meat will be the future. If you are able to present it in packages that look exactly like the cuts that one can currently buy in the store I see no reason they wont catch on.
That's a ruse/tactic of the meat industry, nothing more. Meat/dairy is full of estrogens, phytoestrogens are in fact protective against real estrogens.
Btw, I don't think that masculinity depends on eating corpses / animal secretions.
Among the phytoestrogens, it seems like hops are exceptionally potent and disruptive to human hormones as well. This is a bit ironic because it’s a common ingredient in beer, another thing sometimes associated with masculinity.
Various sources put beyond burgers at less than a kg of co2 per kg of food, whereas turkey is close to 20kg of co2 per kg of meat.
The thing with plant based meat is that even with processing, it’s virtually impossible to come close to farmed meat in terms of water, energy, and feed. Since the animals eat the plants their meat is compared to, they will have eaten the equivalent of what they’re being compared to in a very short period of time to begin with. Then you are comparing the processing and delivery carbon which is negligible in the scheme of things.
People (even very intelligent people) often seem to estimate the carbon footprint of plant based diets incorrectly by several orders of magnitude.
Where are you getting that from? Other data suggests that even worst case production of plant sources of protein come out far ahead of even the best case production of meat, dairy, etc.
> plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
> […]
> Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
That's precisely the problem. I cannot provide one, and neither can you. Neither of those companies internally audit their CO2 footprints, and their supply chains are opaque:
Quite literally wild. There is nothing quite like watching David Attenborough walking us through the absolute ruthlessness of the animal kingdom in his plummy staccato voicing. There is no doubt that had cows evolved differently they would be as torturous to their prey as any other animal.
I think we can definitely do better, but I think it's equally clear that mother nature is not very opinionated on the topic.
Every horrifying thing beyond imagination has happened in nature, including all sorts of rape, torture, murder, and infanticide, much of this by humans as a part of that nature.
Does this justify humans in engaging in rape, torture, murder, and infanticide?
This is a discussion of ethics, not what nature allows (which is everything possible within the laws of physics).
I don't think it is an appeal to nature fallacy because I have no implicit axiom that "what is natural is good." The statement I made seems, to me, closer to "what is natural is." without a strong opinion on it's level of good.
Your argument is that we should re-write the the laws governing our reality, something we have only recently become able to accomplish, and something we can't necessarily predict the consequences of.
In a discussion of ethics (and physics) our bodies desire amino acids that exist in animal flesh and will provide us with reproductive advantage for acquiring them, something we (up until recently) must have killed animals to acquire. If you want to have an ethical discussion (I do because they're interesting) the physics of the matter must be spoken to or accounted for.
Pain is a physical concept. Social relationships are a physical concept (there are physical forces governing these relationships in our brains). There's research that plants can communicate damage or danger, is that a pain analogue? Is the fundemental ethical issue suffereing, suffering of those left behind (in social creatures), "theft" of future?
Then there's the equally (to me) compelling question that an animal would eat me if it could, from an ethical point of view, I think that gives me a right to eat it. Why does that fail under your reasoning system?
So far it seems like your axioms are that:
We have power
That power makes us responsibile
I am not clear on what you think we are responsible for
If we are responsible to minimize total suffering in a pragmatic way, why is it then not our responisbility to wipe out other creatures that cause torturous deaths?
When I think about these problems it seems to fall into this uncomfortable category where conclusions more or less depend on your perceived meaning of life and corresponding priorities.
You can look at the universe as this absurd physical machine just banging away where the suffering of another sentient being simply “is”. Yes, of course it is.
You can also look at the same absurd universe and realize that, to some degree, consciousness seems to confer some amount of agency. You get to decide what matters to you. You get to decide on what life means to you. As you go, you can construct your part of the universe to some extent.
For me, I see it as meaningful to reduce suffering as much as it’s practicable. I recognize that death, suffering, and the messy reality of nature is part of what generated my own life. I recognize that I can’t end that cycle, nor should I because most of nature relies on it.
However, within the realm of the universe that I have this agency, I can choose to try to reduce that suffering. I can try to make this corner of the universe slightly less painful. I can respect and admire the bizarre miracle of sentience, and do my best to sustain it rather than destroy it.
Perhaps that’s meaningless. I don’t have any amazing expectations.
Similar to climate change though, I ask myself “what is the harm in taking action”? What do I lose by caring enough to change?
The answer has been a dramatic improvement to my well-being, and much more peaceful and content outlook on nature and life.
It doesn’t make sense for everyone, but I urge people to consider that complacency with the natural order of things isn’t necessary or inherently wise. Eating celery is as natural as killing a deer or as eating a lentil or catching a fish. Some of these end lives we recognize as very similar to our own, others seem less destructive. We can choose to do less harm, as we wouldn’t want harm done to us. Perhaps that’s worth something. Perhaps it’s not.
> I don't think it is an appeal to nature fallacy because I have no implicit axiom that "what is natural is good." The statement I made seems, to me, closer to "what is natural is." without a strong opinion on it's level of good.
I did take your first comment, and this one, to be implicit, if not explicit, arguments that because these things happen in nature, it is okay (good) for us to do it as well. Apologies if that's not what you're saying!
>Your argument is that we should re-write the the laws governing our reality, something we have only recently become able to accomplish, and something we can't necessarily predict the consequences of.
My argument is simply that we should have compassion for others, humans and all other sentient beings included, and work to relieve suffering as much as we can. I think this is not too far off from how most people feel about humanity, but that we are only (historically recently) beginning to apply this way of thinking on a larger scale to the rest of the living beings who share this world with us.
>In a discussion of ethics (and physics) our bodies desire amino acids that exist in animal flesh and will provide us with reproductive advantage for acquiring them, something we (up until recently) must have killed animals to acquire. If you want to have an ethical discussion (I do because they're interesting) the physics of the matter must be spoken to or accounted for.
Sure, but I think you are agreeing here that as of recently, we no longer must kill these animals to acquire these nutrients?
>Pain is a physical concept. Social relationships are a physical concept (there are physical forces governing these relationships in our brains). There's research that plants can communicate damage or danger, is that a pain analogue? Is the fundemental ethical issue suffereing, suffering of those left behind (in social creatures), "theft" of future?
Whether or not plants can react to stimuli and communicate amongst themselves is a different question from whether they are sentient. For example, we have billions of cells within our body, each reacting to their environments, communicating with one another, being born and dying in countless numbers as we sit here typing. Are we conscious of any of that?
Consciousness in my mind is much like sight, it's not a given that every living organism can see, you have to have the biological structures whose explicit purpose is to create that sensation of sight. Take away the eyes, sever the nerves, or take an organism who has never evolved those eyes or optic nerves (or their analogues), and there is no sight.
Consciousness beyond not being a given for all living things, also seems extremely fragile. Administering only a few mg of a drug to a person will eliminate their consciousness during e.g. general anesthesia. Only a relatively small amount of damage to the brain can similarly end it, even though we still have all those structures that consciousness requires and they're largely still functional!
So in short, I don't think we see any sort of way that plants could actually be conscious, as we understand consciousness, they just don't have the necessary parts. Further, even if each blade of grass were as fully conscious as a human being, it would still be more ethical to consume plants directly rather than animals, because for every 10 calories of plants we feed to a cow, we get roughly 1 calorie out. So we are killing roughly 10x as many plants by eating a steak, calorie for calorie, than we are by eating those plants directly.
This is without even accounting for all the plant, animal, and human life destroyed in the act of clearing rainforests to create more grazing area for cattle, and to grow more soy (of which over 80% of global production goes to animal feed) to feed those cattle.
And further without accounting for all the plant, animal, and human life that is being and will be destroyed by climate change, to which the raising of those cows is a major contributor.
The fundamental ethical issue is in causing unnecessary suffering. We do not have to torture others to survive, so why would we, just because it feels good? That seems like a clear ethical issue.
>Then there's the equally (to me) compelling question that an animal would eat me if it could, from an ethical point of view, I think that gives me a right to eat it. Why does that fail under your reasoning system?
I mean, if a rapist would rape you, does that give you the right to rape them?
> I am not clear on what you think we are responsible for
The consequences of our actions, especially as far as our actions cause other sentient beings, including humans and animals, to suffer and die.
> If we are responsible to minimize total suffering in a pragmatic way, why is it then not our responsibility to wipe out other creatures that cause torturous deaths?
This question is probably a good test of utilitarianism. The creatures that cause by far the most suffering and death on Earth are humans, but I would not be comfortable wiping out humans, any more so that I would be comfortable wiping out any other sentient species.
Would you flip the lever on a trolley to run over 10,000 people to save 100,000? In the abstract someone might easily say yes, that it's the reasonable course of action to minimize the amount of suffering and death, which must unavoidably happen in one way or another.
While I don't have a perfect answer to that, I can say with certainty that in the non-hypothetical we can dramatically reduce the amount of suffering that we cause to other people and animals, and in so doing not only not have to kill ourselves, but actually benefit our environment, and by extension all of humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom simultaneously. It's a win win for all, the only cost would be to our palate pleasure, a fleeting sensation that we enjoy for only a few minutes a day.
The thing is, there are a lot of horrible ways that people die. Cancer, alzheimer's, violence, crippling injuries, chronic pain and depression leading to suicide, war, etc. etc.
Does this justify us enslaving people and torturing them (debatedly) less in a factory farm and slaughtering them at a young age?
If we were truly logically consistent creatures then yes but that's not really how it works. We carve out an exception for ourselves because some combination of not wanting this to happen to us and not doing it to others is the trade and because species that don't kill their own probably did better so it's a deeply ingrained evolutionary instinct.
Which by the way is why "othering" is such a powerful and dangerous thing. We can short circuit that evolutionary safeguard by getting people to see a group as "not their own." And the reverse actually works too which is why we have much much stronger feelings about people killing dogs -- "they're with us."
We're pack animals, this is pretty much expected. I doubt wolves feel any remorse killing a deer despite not hunting other wolves. And any other species on earth would view us the same way. And hell, we actually feel like we've done good by introducing predators into ecosystems who are going to brutally murder game we've deemed is overpopulated.
So look I don't know man this shit is complicated. The ethics of predators killing for food is weird. We're the only animal I know that grows other life with intention. It feels like really uncharted territory. The fact that we do it for plants too is also deeply fucked up even more than what we do to animals. Imagine chilling in a field with the body parts of thousands of your clones grafted into some other person's clones just to have your genitals harvested. Imagine being grown specifically for your corpse to be put on display.
Regarding plants, I replied elsewhere in this thread as to why I think they aren't conscious, but even if each kernel of corn were as fully conscious as a human being, it would still be more ethical to eat them directly than to feed that corn to a cow and then eat it. The reason for this is because for every 10 calories of plant matter we feed to a cow, we get ~1 calorie of meat out of it. So by eating the crops directly we are killing 90% fewer plants, without even taking into account all the plant, animal, and human life being destroyed in clearing rainforests for cattle. Without even accounting for all the plant, animal, and human life that is being and will be destroyed by the climate change to which the rearing of these cattle is a major contributor.
Otherwise I appreciate that you can see that it's all largely arbitrary, self-serving, and this way of thinking is what has lead to every other atrocity in our history. I think we are capable of being better.
"Othering" is itself an evolutionary development. Innate human altruism is deeply parochial, which comes out in many experiments, but especially those with young children. And it makes perfect sense when you think about it from the "selfish gene" perspective. We also know from observation that genocidal wars are something that other apes practice occasionally, so "othering" within species is likely something that predates our speciation as humans.
If you look at the statistics, in the developed world factory farming makes up about 98% of all meat produced commercially.
Before I stopped eating meat, I thought the meat I was buying came from good sources. The farms were nearby, conditions seemed okay, it was organic, etc.
The reality is that all of these animals don’t have good lives. They don’t eat well. They live in bizarre conditions. The vast majority (nearly 100%, again) end up in feed lots if they’re cattle. They’re fattened and then killed essentially as adolescents of their species. Forcefully inseminated, taken from their mothers, killed as babies for veal, fed absurd amounts of antibiotics in some cases, many die in their pens, etc.
This is normal. It’s how we farm. Industry is good at putting a smile on it, talking about values and generations of farmers and doing it right… But these animals are bred and killed for cash, no one gives much of a shit about them, and it’s all very grim.
The excelsior pig farm near me in Abbotsford, British Columbia is a great example. This farm wasn’t exceptional. It’s just another pig farm. But pigs were dead in their pens, cannibalizing each other, dead in trash bins, dead in dumpsters, covered in feces, sores, and wounds.
You’re not going to get rid of that. Meat as we know it doesn’t exist without this race to the bottom circus of torture. People are eager to believe their meat habit isn’t based around this or that something better is around the corner, but it’s simply not the case. These animals are here for profit, yet no one is willing to pay enough for them to live comfortably. So they will suffer.
Most of the meat I buy is from a local farmer in the Midwest. We buy an entire cow at a time and some pork. Yes we eat meat outside of this, but it's not often. I don't need to solve the entire industry to take a different path myself.
Frankly, meat tastes a lot better when the animal is treated better.
I personally think your argument is really twisting the data in your favor, but it's not a debate I am really interested in having. I've researched this extensively.
If you're talking about it from an animal rights angle, even animals raised on small idyllic farms have their throats slit at an early age. Would we want our throats slit?
Would we want to be funneled down a chute with our family members, watching them disappear behind a metal sheet and then get shot in the head one by one in front of us, until our turn comes?
If you're talking about it from an environmental angle, moving from CAFOs to grass-feeding small farms for e.g. cattle would necessitate more land, the animals would grow more slowly, they would produce more methane due to digestion of grass vs feed, we would subsequently have to raise larger herds of animals to supply the same amount of meat, and all of this would actually result in a worse impact on the environment.
Factory farming is actually largely the result of the industry optimizing animal rearing to produce the most meat for the least amount of inputs.
What is the ethical problem? What kind of solution would there be?
How would that philosophical thinking apply to other apex predators, such as spiders who poison and wrap their prey while they hopeless wriggle to death for minutes or snakes who suffocate their prey to death sometimes breaking major bones, or a cat killing a rodent for fun? Do we have a responsibility to intervene against other torturous predators, why or why not?
I am curious about your philosophical reasoning on the topic, I am not asking rhetorically.
Other apex predators don't have the intellectual capacity to develop abstract ethics, so they can't be held responsible for the suffering they instictively cause. But we do have the capacity, we have used it to develop our ethics, and now we're responsible for the conclusions that stem from it.
If you mean it in a sense of whether we're morally obligated to prevent predation in general - I actually think that we are in the (very, very, very) long term, but the limiting factor is the ability to do so without collapsing the ecosystem. If there were a magic wand that you could waive and make "the lion lie down with the lamb" - with full knowledge that both species would still do fine in this new arrangement - I think it would be highly unethical to not use it.
The ethical problem is in causing unnecessary harm to others.
The philosophical thinking would apply to those who are capable of entertaining and acting upon it. The spiders are obligate carnivores, so have no choice in the matter, and likely no concept of the issue.
That said, I think your point about responsibility to intervene is actually interesting. There's a whole ethical matter concerned with this question.[1] My personal take on it is that we have a responsibility insofar as we have power over the matter.
We have the power to control our own actions, but I don't see any way we could reasonably resolve the issue of wild animal suffering, at least in the near term with our current technological capacity. If hypothetically we did have a way to end all suffering on Earth without fucking it all up, I don't see how we couldn't feel an ethical responsibility to do so. Were we the ones suffering we would hope others would do it for us.
> The ethical problem is in causing unnecessary harm to others.
What is a strong definition or test for necessity?
> My personal take on it is that we have a responsibility insofar as we have power over the matter.
Our ability to have power and therefore responsibility is a result of incredible amounts of time undergoing evolution that resulted in us being the beings we are today. Our interventions could rob other creatures from achieving similar levels of power, responsibility, or understanding. How does that fit in with your ethics beliefs?
What if we created interventions to accelerate other animals abilities to "think empathetically." Do we have a responsibility to do that? What if it requires a natural process (applying natural selection to animals that do not display empathy/do not have empathy genes).
> If hypothetically we did have a way to end all suffering on Earth without fucking it all up, I don't see how we couldn't feel an ethical responsibility to do so.
What about the flip side, what if we could cause pleasure. Do we have a responsibility to cause pleasure?
What if we started taking animals and hooking electrodes up to the pleasure centers of their brains, and turned the machine on for the rest of their natural lives, while feeding them ethical nutrients via IV. Is that a philosophically good thing to do?
If there are no beings, there is no suffering. That's an easy answer. If we had a theoretical hyper-heroin that would function against all animals, we could drug every creature into a happy ending. Is that a philosophically satisfying intervention?
>What is a strong definition or test for necessity?
In this context I'm defining it as whether we need to do it to survive.
> Our ability to have power and therefore responsibility is a result of incredible amounts of time undergoing evolution that resulted in us being the beings we are today. Our interventions could rob other creatures from achieving similar levels of power, responsibility, or understanding. How does that fit in with your ethics beliefs? What if we created interventions to accelerate other animals abilities to "think empathetically." Do we have a responsibility to do that? What if it requires a natural process (applying natural selection to animals that do not display empathy/do not have empathy genes).
If we're talking about the current state of the world, our interventions are actually resulting in the deaths of countless individuals as well as the extinction of the majority of nonhuman life on Earth. Arguably what comes after environmental collapse may very well be the death of a large number, if not the majority of humans as well.
Animal industry is directly responsible for a lot of this in the form of the direct killing of wild animals for food and other products, as well as indirectly in the form of environmental destruction from farming animals.
An argument to end animal industry is in fact an argument to allow the most nonhuman life to proliferate, which serves your hypothetical about allowing others to survive and evolve.
If we're talking about my hypothetical of ending all suffering, that could go any which way. Are we ending suffering just by neurally neutering all creatures and allowing them to only experience pleasure, even as they're being devoured alive? Are we somehow genetically modifying all carnivores and omnivores to become herbivores, and then modifying plant life to be able to supply the global population, and then again ensuring that their fertility rates and lifespans are such that their populations remain static? Are we leaving everything as it is and then just segregating all herbivores from the carnivores and then airdropping in packages of Beyond Antelope to all those carnivores on a weekly basis?
Who knows man, depending on how you choose to go about it you could still allow nonhuman life to go on existing and evolving. Although granted, the course of their evolution would be altered by our actions, just as the course of their evolution is inevitably being altered by our current actions, and as they will be regardless of what we do or don't do just based on our dominance of the planet and inevitable influence upon all life on it.
My argument is simply that in the real world, we stop torturing and killing fellow sentient beings when we don't have to. I think it's not an unreasonable position to hold, and it seems as if it would benefit the majority of life on Earth, humans included, as opposed to harming it.
> What about the flip side, what if we could cause pleasure. Do we have a responsibility to cause pleasure?
> What if we started taking animals and hooking electrodes up to the pleasure centers of their brains, and turned the machine on for the rest of their natural lives, while feeding them ethical nutrients via IV. Is that a philosophically good thing to do?
> If there are no beings, there is no suffering. That's an easy answer. If we had a theoretical hyper-heroin that would function against all animals, we could drug every creature into a happy ending. Is that a philosophically satisfying intervention?
Fully automated luxury Earth dildos for all animals and insects, at work 24/7.
Who knows? If we could ascertain consent that would probably be the guiding principle. Some people would want some sort of existence consisting of pure pleasure, some would not. If we really want to get into it I would argue that even those who would not have never experienced absolutely all encompassing drug induced euphoria, it's hard to not want something that every neuron in your brain is telling you is nirvana.
I'm not arguing we should do this, I frankly don't know whether it's more dystopian to submit all living things to nonconsensual pleasure comas or to simply let them live out their lives with all the agony that may entail.
However what I will say is that all this is pretty far off the rails, and unattached to the reality we currently inhabit and the abilities we currently possess within it.
The reality we currently inhabit is one in which we are exterminating all nonhuman life on Earth, and torturing billions of animals to death per year in the most horrific ways imaginable, simultaneously destroying the environment which will result in unimaginable amounts of human suffering and death, just because we enjoy the taste. We can instead choose to be kind to those who share this world with us, they and we would be better off for it.
