It really boils down to: "Is humans acting as their squishy biology dictates" good or does our "goodness" derive from striving to be more than that biology?
I'm on the "accept that we are made to eat meat and probably should on occasion" end of the spectrum, but that doesn't make the current state of how we make and consume meat an ok thing. Factory farming isn't a necessary evil, and the level at which we eat meat (and the animals we choose to eat) are evil not just on method, but in costs to our descendants.
We aren't really "made to eat meat" though. Humans have evolved to be omnivores because it is the most efficient way to get the nutrients that our bodies need. With a varied diet, we can get all of the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that we need from the food we eat. That may or may not include meat, and in a modern society you can easily get by without ever eating meat, from a pure nutritional standpoint.
We very much are "made to be able to eat meat". I will point out that long term vegetarians often have trouble when they eat meat (by accident or intent) because the population gut flora don't support it anymore. I'd argue maintain the capacity is of intrinsic value because `modern society` is not something I take for granted in the long term, but I'm a crazy doom-saying prepper so feel free to disregard my concerns.
We're made to have sex too, that doesn't justify rape. We make choices and are responsible for our actions.
We can clearly survive without eating meat without any adverse effects. That makes it just another choice we make. We're responsible for our choices and can't get away with vague claims about biological dictates.
`> biological dictates` Note that the point of my response was not the present the decision as a binary but a spectrum.
Should we have meat as part of the daily diet, probably not. Should we never eat meat for moral reasons? I don't think that is true. In the most extreme case, I'd argue things like auto-cannibalism are always ethical (You can know that you consent, especially when meat is produced via hypothetical vegan cloning methods)
My personal belief is that people are responsible for their own choices, I'm not going to tell them what to do (within reason).
I'm just saying that pointing at our biology as a justification for eating meat and acting like it's not a choice is not taking responsibility. And that's something I don't like in adults.
Sure, but what meaning is derived by causing the unbearable suffering, mutilation, and murder of billions of fellow conscious beings on this planet just for the sake of pleasing your taste buds?
While certainly not the majority, some livestock are actually treated quite well until the point of slaughter.
On the other side, many wild herbivores and prey animals live lives in an almost perpetual state of alertness and fear, just a moment away from being viciously torn apart and eaten alive.
According to the Humane Society of the United States, approximately 99% of chickens used for meat in the United States are raised in factory farms.
According to the National Council for Animal Protection, over 99% of beef farmed for meat comes from cows that live in horrific factory farm environments.
This doesn't necessarily clash with what you said, but I feel it bares pointing out that less than 1% of feedstock is NOT kept in conditions that perpetuate a state of fear and alertness (basically all factory farming is like that).
Actually they refer to suffering as one alternative a few times:
"Even if, on net, the humans in the alien world suffer, is oblivion really the preferable alternative to net suffering? Especially if you could alleviate that suffering through action?"
becoming a prey item or a pet is an excellent strategy for human survival in the world dominated by extra terrestial intelligence. As OP mentions, there is vested interest in keeping us around, albeit in some form of domesticated state.
the alternative would be to battle the enemy on equal terms and be inevitably exterminated (i.e, predators in todays world), or exist in some way at the margins of the system our new alien overlords have created and find a way to grift off of it (i.e pests in todays world)
Most humans on earth are essentially already being treated as livestock by other humans... The only difference is that the product is not their meat or their milk, but their "blood, sweat and tears". So the scenario outlined at the start of the article is not exactly hypothetical.
from the first paragraph: "Imagine a dystopian future in which aliens with a taste for human flesh kidnapped a bunch of people from Earth and raised them as livestock on their alien planet. Humans on the alien planet are kept alive “free-range,” able to interact and live their life, but only for their first 20 years. Then they are harvested for food."
Are animals people? For most of human history, the answer has been no.
I'm sure that there have always been humans that thought of their favorite animals as people (or similar), but the scientific and social acceptance of animals having consciousness and emotions similar to humans is VERY recent. Look at the pushback that Jane Goodall got for her research for context.
Anyway, I don't have a good ethical argument in favor of eating animal, other than history and my personal rights. This is similar to my feelings on abortion - women have personal rights, but other than that, abortion is not good.
I'm sure people will have problems with these statements, but please consider that I am not trying to change your mind or morality.
Some humans treat some dogs like they treat people, or even better than they treat people. It's very normal and common to treat a pet dog better than a human stranger. Many animals are at least as smart as dogs; however dogs seem to have distinct abilities in understanding and empathising with humans (because they have been bred to do so).
Animals have some of the same rights as humans - it's illegal to torture animals for instance.
I'm not making a strong argument that animals ARE people, because I don't have a strong belief that animals are people; but some people do have that strong belief, and I feel like history will be on their side.
I didn't mean to say that "people are animals" in the sense that they are mean, or bad; just that humans are one species among many other species. People are one kind of animal, as are all other species.
Animals certainly aren't people; cows are cows, people are people, and we are all animals.
Also, it's not actually illegal to torture animals. It's illegal to torture some animals, sometimes. It's not illegal to pile up lobsters, a non-social and fiercely territorial creature, in small tanks, for months, and eventually boiling them alive, or to keep sows in confined spaces where they spend their whole life giving birth from constant artificial insemination, and crushing their pups because there's no room. Etc.
Debates like this are a waste of time and this one even has a clickbait title. They ignore the obvious animal suffering today and instead offer a "what if we just stopped over night, what then?".
This essay gets worse as it goes.
This will never happen. So instead we should focus on limiting or entirely removing the consumption of animals and animal products in our lifestyle which will gradually reduce the number of animals bred for premature death.
Most won't and will cling to clickbait essays like this and the distant hope of widespread, affordable, lab-grown meat while continuing to ignore the obvious abuse to animals in their day to day life today.
I agree, but that's kind of what we do to resolve moral cognitive dissonance all the time, with varying results. Personally it's something I really struggle with, and the questions usually boil down to whether I would be fine living my life wrongly, or if I'll give up enjoyment of my already sad life just to feel good about myself for being moral.
I just can't picture it. 9 hours a day in the office, then I come back home and I just want to hedonistically enjoy all that I can until I sleep. Of course I'm going to want to eat a big steak, watch porn, and listen to pirated music, morality be damned, and I know it makes me a bad person.
Meat substitutes taste great, you can still have that cheeseburger with something like beyond meat. Yes I'm biased but seriously give it a try.
As for porn, I wouldn't even put it in the same ballpark as eating meat (if you're watching some free porn somewhere your contribution to the industry is negligent) , but anyways it might be overwhelming to try to change everything at once so I wouldn't even try.
Pick one thing and commit to it. Maybe after that you'll pick another thing - and maybe not. None of us is perfect.
I expected that, but it's highly likely that Neanderthals and/or Habilis would also qualify as sentient (old definition), whereas it would be confusing to say that they are both "sapient".
Agreed, it's hard to imagine voluntarily embarrassing yourself in public as badly as the author has done here.
"When I went to college and met for the first time a good number of vegetarians and vegans, I used to blow their minds with this argument"
Indeed. That must have really been something. Well, he won't say anything to make us thinks he's positioning this in less than good faith, then?
"Honestly, fuck crabs"
Ok. but...
" but really octopuses are pretty horrible too. Oh, they’re smart, but, similar to crabs, they’re cannibals. They spend most of their time cavorting in a midden pile of prey bones."
Midden pile?
"If your cats were big enough, they’d eat you. Feline fillets are simply turnabout as fair play."
The author says, in the introduction, "this entire essay is ridiculous." You are taking it much too seriously. It's all meant in a joking way just to explore some sillier ideas around animal ethics that may or may not have a kernel of value hidden in them.
Nothing about this article is embarrassing, unless you intentionally misconstrue the tone and intentions of the author.
The entire pieces is extremely embarrassing. It frames itself as ridiculous and then goes on to take itself entirely seriously. The author clearly thinks it is quite clever. I won't give it a pass.
The "one bad day" movement in the meat industry is a rounding error overall production It isn't that funny when 1) wild caught seafood is crushing wild populations of fish, cephalopods, and shellfish 2) nearly all meat is raised industrially and the livestock live in inhumane conditions 3) most animals are processed well before their first years.
The essay isn't provocative and cute, it is logically flawed and glaringly incomplete, which is the embarrassing part. The closest thing to a kernel of truth is at the end, when he talks about "one bad day" philosophy and he ruins that part by talking about eating only old animals, too (ignorance of what that means for farming ROI and also the impact of the taste/texture of the product).
This essay is a steaming pile from someone that is - based on their other accomplishments - clearly smart and capable of much better, and that pisses me off.
We also dramatically increase the amount of plants we need to grow by feeding so much grass and grain to live stock. We can reduce the footprint of eating plants and hurting animals by not farming livestock for meat at all. It would be a net win, even with the incidental damage done by farming vegetables/grains/etc.
That's a common and unimpressive argument around plant based diets. Short of suicide, is it a choice that causes the least possible harm? Surely it causes less suffering that farming all of those plants anyway, feeding them to other animals that take up more land and cause more pollution, and then killing those animals and eating them?
> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.
That is certainly true, but livestock is often eating row crops. A significant chunk of soybean meal and corn goes to feed livestock [1] [2]. If those row crops were consumed directly by humans instead, it would require a lot less land. [3]
You could get about 500 pounds of that raising a cow for a couple of years and slaughtering it.
What inputs would you need? Not too much, if you have grass, which a lot of the earth does. Let the cow graze, find it water. Optionally fatten it up at the end w/ some grain -- probably a better use than making ethanol out of it, at least.
We used to have millions of wild buffalo roaming North America. They were a dietary stable for many Native American tribes.
Were they really living in a less sustainable way than modern vegans picking up Impossible Burgers from Whole Foods?
My understanding is that similar benefits of access to meat were gained from learning to cook in general, as well. While meat likely contributed to humans being able to advance as a civilization and perhaps conferred various physiological benefits, the skill of cooking in general allowed us to extract more nutrition from a lot of foods we'd otherwise spend a lot more time chewing and digesting.
Getting nutrition from food faster, with less energy, is a huge deal. Whether it's meat or not, being able to feed young children easily digested, high-calorie food is a huge advantage. Being able to feed anyone is a huge advantage, but in particular weening children earlier would have freed up mothers to reproduce more and/or do other work. Humans becoming more independent earlier is a major factor in humans being more productive in many of these studies.
I haven't read about this for a few years, but as I recall it doesn't seem that the protein/fat components of this development were the essential factor for moving people forward. We're able to get plenty of calories and nutrition (including protein) from plants, but only if we cook it. Meat certainly helps, but isn't required in the equation.
I'm opened to being corrected – like I say, I'm probably out of date here. I'm not sure what evidence could have changed this, though.
Matthias is arguing the metaphor. Which is a little fair in this case because the metaphor is the meat of the thing, but still, his response is basically "Ok, but imagine a completely different scenario. Isn't it different now?"
Not to mention he has a very, very low opinion of animals. Animals do engage in creativity and play. That we've been able to observe. We honestly don't know if they engage in philosophizing or other sorts of abstract thoughts because we don't speak dolphin. Matthias is basically basing his rebuttal on animals not being sentient. Or at the very least, minimally sentient.
So cows can't tell us if they'd rather go extinct or continue as they are. And I'd imagine that whatever way you formulate the thought, you'd find people who would prefer one or the other. If the people were only as aware as cows; if the people were as aware as normal but treated as cows; a third scenario I haven't thought of.
And there's the question of whether or not we have an obligation on how to treat them. If someone disagrees with that obligation, you have to get over that hump first. Kind of on their terms. Because if they believe we don't have an obligation because cows have hooves, you're not going to convince him that cows don't have hooves. You have to find out why hooves matter to him then find an argument along those lines. Arguing from the sentience of a cow isn't going to cut it. Arguing we have a moral imperative as the most abstract thinkers isn't going to cut it. You have got to argue hooves.
And if you can't do that because his position is so nonsensical there's no way to rationally argue against it, you have to accept he's just not going to understand.
If our meat animals didn't exist, a lot of other animals would. Animals eat a lot of food that would be available calories for other animals instead, after all.
Also, never existing at all is not a negative, it is null. There is nobody to experience a negative effect of not existing.
The reasonable counterargument to this is that you are comparing the actual pain and suffering of real, existing animals, to the potential life of animals who do not currently exist. "What happens if we stop raising livestock?" means that no further cows will be born to a life of suffering. That's...really it. Those hypothetical animals aren't floating around in the aether wishing someone would just have let them be born.
Slavery is good, says the philosopher. Think of those millions of slave children that would have not existed if not for the slave trade. Sure, had their predecessors remained in Africa they would have had different progeny, but that is an abstraction; those children didn't exist. We are considering actual children who lived, and of course tens of millions of their offspring that resulted, many of them alive today. If you could wave a magic wand and get rid of slavery, would you? What kind of monster would you be to vanish and nullify millions of people who are currently living meaningful lives?
Would anyone actually agree with the above sentiment? How is it different than what this thinkpiece is putting forth? It is a post-hoc justification for the status quo.
I've stumbled upon some of the same thoughts: cows would be fucked if we stopped eating beef; animals wouldn't give two shits about devouring my ass if the conditions were right, turnabout is fair play; fuck crabs; etc.
But I also recognize some the points raised by vegetarians/vegans: we do eat way too much meat; we do treat livestock horribly; fuck crabs; etc.
And I think the answer is closer to vegetarianism than it is to all meat all day. We should eat less meat and probably far less beef, but we eating some is fine. Especially due to the B12 issue. It's something our bodies don't synthesize and our best source is animal products.
It would also let us slowly cut down the cattle livestock as we wean off of beef to lower levels.
Of course, the problem, as always, is "the growth mindset". That we always need to be improving everything quarter after quarter. If you sold 100 hamburgers today, you need to sell 200 tomorrow. How about we sell enough to be profitable and you know, just like chill the fuck out for once.
Excessive consumption of red meat is not that great for our health. Heart disease and colorectal cancer are both linked to diets high in red meat. Beef is just the chief red meat people eat.
I think in terms of "good for you", it goes from worst to best: beef, pork, poultry, then fish/seafood.
Ruminates like cows produce B12 through their gut bacteria. That's synthesis.
And before you say "that's the bacteria, not them", then we technically digest anything because gut bacteria is essential for digestion. We are gestalt organisms. Always have been.
> I’ve written before about longtermism, the idea that future lives carry moral weight—in this case, there will be millions of humans on this alien world that never exist if you choose (b) and abandon them to their fate on the hostile planet.
The idea of it automatically being better to choose the outcome where more future lives will exist seems problematic to me.
If it is better to have animals living miserably in factory farms if it means more future animals will be born (even if those animals will live miserably in factory farms) and that has moral weight, is there also a moral obligation to give birth to as many children as possible even if you are going to mistreat, neglect or abuse them?
I think most people would agree that it is better not to have children unless you will be able to avoid mistreating, neglecting, or abusing them, so wouldn't the same apply to animals?
> The basic claim, to put it crudely at first, is that eating meat is morally good primarily because it benefits animals.
What is the definition benefit here? Would not being able to live freely, freely choose your food, choose your mate, choose (or chosen by nature) when you die, is benefit?
I'm usually right leaning, but in the issue of the environment, like clean energy and the meat industry, the wood industry, I'm left leaning.
Still not vegan yet though. Really hard to be vegan.
The first two paragraphs present such a blatant false dichotomy that I won't be doing myself the disservice of reading any further. If you're going to announce yourself as a philosopher in the title of your blog post, the least you can do is avoid basic fallacies.
> is oblivion really the preferable alternative to net suffering?
Well, here's another thought experiment: you are being tortured, very slowly, but kept alive, well fed and sentient. There is nowhere to go. In the end you will be killed, and you know it. You have watched all your siblings be killed, your parents, your children.
You have a button next to you. If you press it, you will die instantly and with no pain. You will be sent into "oblivion", but you will end your suffering.
Seems like a stretch to justify meat eating with species preservation.
Maybe in 100 years you can bring up this argument when plant- and lab-based substitutes are widely available and the cows are at the brink of extinction. But at this point of human history, the vegetarian can credibly argue that they want to reduce animal suffering while meat eater can not similarly counter that they eat meat to preserve the species.
I know the argument is supposed to be on a philosophical level, but I just can't suspend my disbelief to an extent required to seriously engage with the argumentation.
Will be interesting to revisit this in 50-100 years perhaps. But one would hope that humanity then has created nature reserves for wild cattle and so on.
> If you were an alien politician concerned about the ethical mistreatment of humans, would you advocate for (a) the continuation of the system but with better treatment for humans (quicker death, better living conditions, longer life), or (b) to stop the system entirely, although this would mean that humans would soon die out in one generation as they’d be unable to survive on the alien planet. Quick, which would you advocate: (a) or (b)?
Am I missing something or is the obvious quick answer to this, the opposite of what he expects?
And that's even giving the benefit of the doubt to the setup, like, how can you be raised 'free range' on a planet that you'll instanttly die on if people stop eating you?
- "For many of the animals we eat, we’d be consigning their species to oblivion if we stopped eating them."
- "[In college] I used to blow [veg and vegans'] minds with this argument—“Oh, so you say you love cows, but you also want to consign their species to oblivion?”"
First, with that level of discourse, that is one college to avoid.
But why does he keep suggesting that a species would disappear just because we stopped farming it? By his own analogy, humans would continue populating the earth if aliens chose that option. Even in the same paragraph he argues it would just mean fewer animals but then proceeds to presume their extinction.
What's wrong with only 1 billion chickens instead of 25? By his future-lives-carry-moral-weight logic we should still be vegetarian, breeding but not eating them, because 250 billion is even better.
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[ 21.0 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadI'm on the "accept that we are made to eat meat and probably should on occasion" end of the spectrum, but that doesn't make the current state of how we make and consume meat an ok thing. Factory farming isn't a necessary evil, and the level at which we eat meat (and the animals we choose to eat) are evil not just on method, but in costs to our descendants.
We can clearly survive without eating meat without any adverse effects. That makes it just another choice we make. We're responsible for our choices and can't get away with vague claims about biological dictates.
Should we have meat as part of the daily diet, probably not. Should we never eat meat for moral reasons? I don't think that is true. In the most extreme case, I'd argue things like auto-cannibalism are always ethical (You can know that you consent, especially when meat is produced via hypothetical vegan cloning methods)
I'm just saying that pointing at our biology as a justification for eating meat and acting like it's not a choice is not taking responsibility. And that's something I don't like in adults.
On the other side, many wild herbivores and prey animals live lives in an almost perpetual state of alertness and fear, just a moment away from being viciously torn apart and eaten alive.
According to the National Council for Animal Protection, over 99% of beef farmed for meat comes from cows that live in horrific factory farm environments.
This doesn't necessarily clash with what you said, but I feel it bares pointing out that less than 1% of feedstock is NOT kept in conditions that perpetuate a state of fear and alertness (basically all factory farming is like that).
"Even if, on net, the humans in the alien world suffer, is oblivion really the preferable alternative to net suffering? Especially if you could alleviate that suffering through action?"
the alternative would be to battle the enemy on equal terms and be inevitably exterminated (i.e, predators in todays world), or exist in some way at the margins of the system our new alien overlords have created and find a way to grift off of it (i.e pests in todays world)
yeah, its "The Promised Neverland"
I'm sure that there have always been humans that thought of their favorite animals as people (or similar), but the scientific and social acceptance of animals having consciousness and emotions similar to humans is VERY recent. Look at the pushback that Jane Goodall got for her research for context.
Anyway, I don't have a good ethical argument in favor of eating animal, other than history and my personal rights. This is similar to my feelings on abortion - women have personal rights, but other than that, abortion is not good.
I'm sure people will have problems with these statements, but please consider that I am not trying to change your mind or morality.
Animals have some of the same rights as humans - it's illegal to torture animals for instance.
I'm not making a strong argument that animals ARE people, because I don't have a strong belief that animals are people; but some people do have that strong belief, and I feel like history will be on their side.
Animals certainly aren't people; cows are cows, people are people, and we are all animals.
Also, it's not actually illegal to torture animals. It's illegal to torture some animals, sometimes. It's not illegal to pile up lobsters, a non-social and fiercely territorial creature, in small tanks, for months, and eventually boiling them alive, or to keep sows in confined spaces where they spend their whole life giving birth from constant artificial insemination, and crushing their pups because there's no room. Etc.
This essay gets worse as it goes.
This will never happen. So instead we should focus on limiting or entirely removing the consumption of animals and animal products in our lifestyle which will gradually reduce the number of animals bred for premature death.
Most won't and will cling to clickbait essays like this and the distant hope of widespread, affordable, lab-grown meat while continuing to ignore the obvious abuse to animals in their day to day life today.
So you can argue in circles or just move on.
(The obvious exception being Stoicism which is quite well provable and really more of an approach to life than a philosophy)
1. Plant-based diets are good for the environment. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6316289/
2. Animals are sentient. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4494450/
3. The "thought experiment" is flawed. See https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/eating-meat-is-good-says-the... - good rebuttal here
Keeping animals alive in the worst possible conditions on the promise that "we'll do better!" just so the species don't die out is utterly ridiculous.
I just can't picture it. 9 hours a day in the office, then I come back home and I just want to hedonistically enjoy all that I can until I sleep. Of course I'm going to want to eat a big steak, watch porn, and listen to pirated music, morality be damned, and I know it makes me a bad person.
"When I went to college and met for the first time a good number of vegetarians and vegans, I used to blow their minds with this argument"
Indeed. That must have really been something. Well, he won't say anything to make us thinks he's positioning this in less than good faith, then?
"Honestly, fuck crabs"
Ok. but...
" but really octopuses are pretty horrible too. Oh, they’re smart, but, similar to crabs, they’re cannibals. They spend most of their time cavorting in a midden pile of prey bones."
Midden pile?
"If your cats were big enough, they’d eat you. Feline fillets are simply turnabout as fair play."
Cats?
"we should obviously be eating hyenas"
I'm done. Seriously, it's this guy https://as.tufts.edu/biology/people/faculty/erik-hoel ? what a waste of intellect.
Nothing about this article is embarrassing, unless you intentionally misconstrue the tone and intentions of the author.
The "one bad day" movement in the meat industry is a rounding error overall production It isn't that funny when 1) wild caught seafood is crushing wild populations of fish, cephalopods, and shellfish 2) nearly all meat is raised industrially and the livestock live in inhumane conditions 3) most animals are processed well before their first years.
The essay isn't provocative and cute, it is logically flawed and glaringly incomplete, which is the embarrassing part. The closest thing to a kernel of truth is at the end, when he talks about "one bad day" philosophy and he ruins that part by talking about eating only old animals, too (ignorance of what that means for farming ROI and also the impact of the taste/texture of the product).
This essay is a steaming pile from someone that is - based on their other accomplishments - clearly smart and capable of much better, and that pisses me off.
That's a common problem on Substack, it seems. Lots of people writing long "essays" on topics they don't quite understand, but think they do.
— The Vegan Society, Definition of veganism
Emphasis mine.
[1] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/where_do_all_these_soybeans_go [2] https://www.iowacorn.org/corn-uses/ [3] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
https://imgur.com/a/8zzvcrq
So that's just 1 pound of beef.
You could get about 500 pounds of that raising a cow for a couple of years and slaughtering it.
What inputs would you need? Not too much, if you have grass, which a lot of the earth does. Let the cow graze, find it water. Optionally fatten it up at the end w/ some grain -- probably a better use than making ethanol out of it, at least.
We used to have millions of wild buffalo roaming North America. They were a dietary stable for many Native American tribes.
Were they really living in a less sustainable way than modern vegans picking up Impossible Burgers from Whole Foods?
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> At a mean age of 40 days, over 27.6% of birds in our study showed poor locomotion and 3.3% were almost unable to walk.
And keep in mind we're talking about 60 billion chickens annually.
https://www.humanesociety.org/news/super-size-problem-broile...
Getting nutrition from food faster, with less energy, is a huge deal. Whether it's meat or not, being able to feed young children easily digested, high-calorie food is a huge advantage. Being able to feed anyone is a huge advantage, but in particular weening children earlier would have freed up mothers to reproduce more and/or do other work. Humans becoming more independent earlier is a major factor in humans being more productive in many of these studies.
I haven't read about this for a few years, but as I recall it doesn't seem that the protein/fat components of this development were the essential factor for moving people forward. We're able to get plenty of calories and nutrition (including protein) from plants, but only if we cook it. Meat certainly helps, but isn't required in the equation.
I'm opened to being corrected – like I say, I'm probably out of date here. I'm not sure what evidence could have changed this, though.
Not to mention he has a very, very low opinion of animals. Animals do engage in creativity and play. That we've been able to observe. We honestly don't know if they engage in philosophizing or other sorts of abstract thoughts because we don't speak dolphin. Matthias is basically basing his rebuttal on animals not being sentient. Or at the very least, minimally sentient.
So cows can't tell us if they'd rather go extinct or continue as they are. And I'd imagine that whatever way you formulate the thought, you'd find people who would prefer one or the other. If the people were only as aware as cows; if the people were as aware as normal but treated as cows; a third scenario I haven't thought of.
And there's the question of whether or not we have an obligation on how to treat them. If someone disagrees with that obligation, you have to get over that hump first. Kind of on their terms. Because if they believe we don't have an obligation because cows have hooves, you're not going to convince him that cows don't have hooves. You have to find out why hooves matter to him then find an argument along those lines. Arguing from the sentience of a cow isn't going to cut it. Arguing we have a moral imperative as the most abstract thinkers isn't going to cut it. You have got to argue hooves.
And if you can't do that because his position is so nonsensical there's no way to rationally argue against it, you have to accept he's just not going to understand.
Also, never existing at all is not a negative, it is null. There is nobody to experience a negative effect of not existing.
So I don't think this is a very good argument.
Would anyone actually agree with the above sentiment? How is it different than what this thinkpiece is putting forth? It is a post-hoc justification for the status quo.
Seems logical..
But I also recognize some the points raised by vegetarians/vegans: we do eat way too much meat; we do treat livestock horribly; fuck crabs; etc.
And I think the answer is closer to vegetarianism than it is to all meat all day. We should eat less meat and probably far less beef, but we eating some is fine. Especially due to the B12 issue. It's something our bodies don't synthesize and our best source is animal products.
It would also let us slowly cut down the cattle livestock as we wean off of beef to lower levels.
Of course, the problem, as always, is "the growth mindset". That we always need to be improving everything quarter after quarter. If you sold 100 hamburgers today, you need to sell 200 tomorrow. How about we sell enough to be profitable and you know, just like chill the fuck out for once.
Why beef specifically?
I think in terms of "good for you", it goes from worst to best: beef, pork, poultry, then fish/seafood.
And before you say "that's the bacteria, not them", then we technically digest anything because gut bacteria is essential for digestion. We are gestalt organisms. Always have been.
The idea of it automatically being better to choose the outcome where more future lives will exist seems problematic to me.
If it is better to have animals living miserably in factory farms if it means more future animals will be born (even if those animals will live miserably in factory farms) and that has moral weight, is there also a moral obligation to give birth to as many children as possible even if you are going to mistreat, neglect or abuse them?
I think most people would agree that it is better not to have children unless you will be able to avoid mistreating, neglecting, or abusing them, so wouldn't the same apply to animals?
What is the definition benefit here? Would not being able to live freely, freely choose your food, choose your mate, choose (or chosen by nature) when you die, is benefit?
I'm usually right leaning, but in the issue of the environment, like clean energy and the meat industry, the wood industry, I'm left leaning.
Still not vegan yet though. Really hard to be vegan.
but overall I enjoyed the article.
Well, here's another thought experiment: you are being tortured, very slowly, but kept alive, well fed and sentient. There is nowhere to go. In the end you will be killed, and you know it. You have watched all your siblings be killed, your parents, your children.
You have a button next to you. If you press it, you will die instantly and with no pain. You will be sent into "oblivion", but you will end your suffering.
How long will you resist pressing the button?
Maybe in 100 years you can bring up this argument when plant- and lab-based substitutes are widely available and the cows are at the brink of extinction. But at this point of human history, the vegetarian can credibly argue that they want to reduce animal suffering while meat eater can not similarly counter that they eat meat to preserve the species.
I know the argument is supposed to be on a philosophical level, but I just can't suspend my disbelief to an extent required to seriously engage with the argumentation.
Will be interesting to revisit this in 50-100 years perhaps. But one would hope that humanity then has created nature reserves for wild cattle and so on.
Am I missing something or is the obvious quick answer to this, the opposite of what he expects?
And that's even giving the benefit of the doubt to the setup, like, how can you be raised 'free range' on a planet that you'll instanttly die on if people stop eating you?
- "[In college] I used to blow [veg and vegans'] minds with this argument—“Oh, so you say you love cows, but you also want to consign their species to oblivion?”"
First, with that level of discourse, that is one college to avoid. But why does he keep suggesting that a species would disappear just because we stopped farming it? By his own analogy, humans would continue populating the earth if aliens chose that option. Even in the same paragraph he argues it would just mean fewer animals but then proceeds to presume their extinction.
What's wrong with only 1 billion chickens instead of 25? By his future-lives-carry-moral-weight logic we should still be vegetarian, breeding but not eating them, because 250 billion is even better.
Just dumb.