I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
This argument also implies that “dominionism” is wrong, i.e. all life has a right to not be killed or abused. Yet human life is impossible without killing and consuming other living organisms, be it plants, animals og fungi. Thus it is unethical to continue living.
This argument is bad, because for human life to be possible, you must draw the line between life that you consider ethical to kill and life that you consider unethical to kill.
It’s not about “all life” but about “all sentient life”. Only beings that are able have pleasant and unpleasant experience should be considered. If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition.
Sentience is studied scientifically. It cannot be stated with absolute certainty but scientists have good sets of criteria and experiences that helps identify it. With the current knowledge it’s almost certain that all mammals are sentient, like us. Fishes and birds are also very likely to be sentient. Some species of insects are probably sentient while others may not be. And plants are likely not sentient.
But even if all living things are sentient, it doesn’t change very much. Speciesism means treating beings differently only because they belong to some specific species. There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species (and studying sentience helps identifying these interests). It’s very likely that we do less harm by growing plants than by breeding animals. And even if it was the same amount of suffering we would still do less harm by avoiding eating animals because breeding them to eat them actually requires more plants than just eating plants. We should seek to minimise suffering and avoiding eating animal is a good way to do that.
I don’t agree on your analysis of sentience. The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this? Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.
This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.
And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence. If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
It does have a concrete meaning. Scientific papers usually define what they are studying. For example the Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans has a definition. It also has criteria to evaluate it.
Having reactions to external stimulus is different from having feelings. Feelings require consciousness, or sentience.
Even having nociceptors doesn’t mean you can experience pain (see the above review in the “Defining sentience” section).
Yes you can be harmed without knowing it, but it still must have a negative effect on you. If something can’t have negative (or positive) experience then how can you say it’s being harmed?
If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed. Being sentient is having this ability to experience being harmed. That’s why I meant it’s by definition that non sentient beings can’t be harmed. The word exists to distinguish what can and cannot experience harm (among other feelings).
But having food doesn’t necessarily mean harming something. And even if it does, different foods have different level of harm. We can choose the foods that minimize harm.
Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
When I say concrete meaning I mean that sentience is an abstract concept of which we can observe evidence of, but we cannot define clearly what it is. In the report you mentioned, you will see that they give 8 criteria for scientific evidence of sentience, i.e. these do not define what sentience is, but they are criteria that we presume sentient beings should satisfy. They even require several pages to explain the complications of how to define sentience and how to observe it.
I do admit that the extent of study on sentience of animals is greater than I initially thought, and I can see that one might have reasonably sufficient knowledge to judge, with some certainty, which life organism might be sentient (under definitions such as the one used in the report). But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of “some level of sentience”, I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?
But a rock is not alive, there is no evolutionary force driving its interest, as with all other living organisms. A sea cucumber has no proper nervous system (as I understand from a quick search), and thus could not “feel” pain. Yet, if you cut one in half, I would say that you have harmed it. But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word “harm”, the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.
Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.
Swatting a mosquito generally doesn’t induce suffering, if it’s done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won’t suffer from the loss.
But yes, if an animal is probably sentient you should avoid inflicting pain to it, for the same reason you should avoid inflicting pain to humans: because they can suffer.
Indeed, but going against natural interests or not is not the point. The point is about suffering. And more specifically the fact that the amount of suffering we inflict to animals to eat their meat would be inacceptable if it was done to humans.
That’s like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don’t look like them: racism.
This is like saying it is okay to kill a lonely person with no friends and family, as long as it is an instant death.
I don’t agree with you that suffering is the single center concept to base your moral judgement on these issues. Not all living things that i care about are able to suffer, and I do not care about all living things that do suffer. I do not care that i cause a mosquito suffering by killing it (wounding it), if it is sucking my blood, or even just being annoying when flying around me, because I value my comfort above its existence (and suffering). I expect you do the same? This is speciesism.
Except we both agree that racism is wrong. We do not both agree that speciesism is wrong.
No, it is more like saying it doesn’t cause suffering, which is true. Whether it’s ok or not is another matter, but some could argue can be.
I didn’t say suffering is the single center concept to base moral judgment on, although some moral philosophers argue it is (negative utilitarians). But suffering is the main problem with speciesism: we accept much more suffering on non-human animals than we do on on humans, for no good reason.
If you care about things that cannot suffer, then you do not care for their well being, since they can’t experience well being. It may be a semantic problem here, because I thought caring was about the other’s well being.
Anyway what you do care about is not really relevant unless you consider we should just follow our instinctive morality. What I was discussing is what we should care about.
No, I would avoid causing suffering to the mosquito (for example by moving it our of the room or protecting myself). And if killing it is the only practical way to make it stop being an unacceptable annoyance I would still try to minimize its suffering. It’s not speciesism because I would apply the same logic if it was a human or any other species.
And yet speciesism is very similar to racism. It’s the same mechanism. Racism is a discrimination on irrelevant characteristics like skin color, and speciesism is a discrimination on irrelevant characteristics like cognitive ability, cuteness, ability to talk, etc.
In both cases these characteristics are irrelevant when we try to decide whether we can cause suffering to these beings. The only relevant characteristic is whether they can suffer.
why should sentience matter at all?
Because if something is not sentient it cannot have negative experiences, so it can’t be harmed.
so?
The question was “why is eating meat bad?”, my answer is something like “because to have meat you must harm animals”, and someone answered that “we always harm something when we eat” and my answer is “no, there are foods that you can’t harm because they are not sentient”.
first, you can’t prove plants aren’t sentient. second even if you could, why should sentience matter? what ethical system even accounts for sentience as a factor of right behavior?
And you can’t prove something is sentient. But scientists have criteria that help determine whether a species is sentient. See this review for example.
I already answered. If something can’t be harmed there no need to prevent harming it.
About all animal welfare:
i don’t really like your use of harm here to exclude everything but sentient beings, but as a term of art, for the purposes of this discussion, i will indulge you.
why does it matter if something CAN be harmed? what creates a duty to NOT HARM something?
Even if plants were sentient, and I’m not saying they are, but if. Would you rather “kill” orders of magnitude more plants to feed them to animals, then kill the animals and eat them, or would you kill the plants and eat them directly? One of them causes a lot less harm (if any at all), and it’s not eating the animals.
well, first, animals are mostly fed plants or parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat, so the scale of the difference you described is orders of magnitude less than you are suggesting.
but, more importantly, why should sentience matter?
finally, whether i buy food from a shelf or not, the creature (flora or fauna) it came from is already harmed, and my purchase causes no more harm to it, so eating it has exactly no impact.
The line you mention is sentience, for many
Sure, so then they should instead be arguing that sentience is the morally correct line to draw.
You’ll find plenty of vegan debates about whether oysters are ethical to consume. It’s not some definite line in the sand drawn by a 2000 year old scripture, but rather it’s an ongoing debate that considers new evidence that results from advances in science and morality.
This is kind of a straw man argument. I don’t feel guilty at all eating a carrot I pulled out of the ground.
So we can all agree that it’s morally ok to eat a carrot, but not to eat a human. The difference is sentience. The hard part is where exactly to draw the line. Which side of the line is a cow on? A fish? A bug?
This guy thought about that question, if you wanted to see that perspective.
https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/#Summary
Yeah, I see he’s thought it through and generated numbers, but it’s counter-intuitive to say we should give up fish for beef, or that milk causes more suffering than beef
I’m not a meat eater personally.
But I don’t understand why people who like to eat meat don’t eat human.
I think there are, or have been, some who do. It’s seems cultural, and a bit of a luxury to be wasteful.
I don’t think there’s any socially agreed line between “good” and “bad”.
I reckon people mostly do what their culture prefers or tolerates.
Different cultures have different ranges of acceptable behavior from different people fulfilling different roles within them . Most people are members of many sub-cultures going right down to small family groups , professional associations, work-teams, sports teams and so on. There’ll be some sort of consequence for transgression, maybe verbal shaming, spitting in someone’s beer, withheld services, exclusion from jobs, or expulsion from the group.
Sometimes people (in power) agree to put in laws and expend resources on enforcement instead of cultural norms; probably because the clashes within or between (sub)cultures and the inconsistent treatment of transgressions becomes too costly or disruptive.
That’s when you get a “line” that says “wrong”, once its been put into an enforced law. Even then the law, and enforcement, is always still a bit blurry. partial, and biassed so it’s really just a formalisation of the process for administering the consequences of transgression.
i think it is possible to find things that look similar in other social animals too like, other apes, wild dogs, things with pecking orders , rats and so on. I wonder if there are even roles similar to " police" in some non-human cultures?
why should sentience matter?
We could certainly discuss that, but it appears to, regardless of whether there is a good reason.
I disagree that it matters in any obvious sense.
no. it’s not. the difference is that one of them is human.
I don’t believe this is a straw man argument, I never claim that they believe these conclusions. Quite the opposite, I am showing how their argument, not their conclusion, is not good. As I understand their argument, it is basically this:
(i) If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it. (ii) Animals do not want to be killed. Thus, it is morally wrong to kill animals.
I do not agree with (i), which I try to explain by reductio ad absurdum, arguing that if (i) is true it leads to obviously incorrect conclusions, thus (i) must be false.
The straw man argument comes from your point about combining plants and animals as food, and stating that they were both living. If you compare a cow to parsley, it is silly to say that we shouldn’t eat parsley for the sake of it being a living organism. With cows in the same argument, they get dismissed since they’re in the same group as plants.
Plants are the straw man in this case because it’s easy to dismiss the argument that we shouldn’t eat plants, for some reason. Animals are conscious creatures that experience suffering. Plants don’t experience the same pain.
A straw man argument is when the other person believes A and you act like they in fact believe B, so you argue against B.
I am not claiming they believe it immoral to kill plants. Quite the opposite, I don’t think anyone believes this in general. Therefore, it is not a straw man.
Not quite. From https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Strawman-Fallacy:
With this in mind:
You are misunderstanding my argument. I am not arguing against their conclusion, “it is morally wrong to kill animals”, I am arguing against the validity of their argument, “If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it”. Therefore, I am not restating their claim, I am saying that their argument leads to this absurd conclusion, thus it must be wrong. I have already explained this in a previous comment. You appear to be ignoring what I am writing.
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I’d call it a non sequitur.
I don’t feel guilty at all eating animals. Kind of a subjective point, no?
And others don’t feel guilty for eating meat. Than you for recognizing that people have different feelings.
Carrots are incapable of feeling anything: they can’t be affected in a morally relevant way. Animals have emotions, preferences, can experience suffering and can be deprived of positive/pleasurable experiences in their lives.
Obviously this isn’t a sufficient justification for harming others. “I don’t care about people with dark skin, please recognize that different people have different feelings.” The fact that I don’t care about the individuals I’m victimizing doesn’t mean victimizing them is okay.
Isn’t it funny how everyone becomes a subjectivist when trying to defend meat eating?