The Case For Abolishing Meat Consumption

MayCaesar

Shadowtongue said:

@MayCaesar

Well, let’s dissect this. Do we both agree that an action that is in our control is necessarily done on the basis of something being strived for to cause the action to occur to begin with, whether the thing is directly or indirectly known? Let’s start here. Yes or no?

Sure, we aren’t just pure logic machines, nor should we, since emotions are what give us the desire to embark on things to begin with, but you do realize that emotions do not create facts, right? One can easily have the position of recognizing how reality works with logic and empirical observation and acting upon this with emotional ambitions.

As for your life versus another person’s life, how are you objectively being consistent when you act to preserve your own life and bring prosperity to yourself but not protect or aid another person?

This is a fairly sophisticated claim, so I would say "Probably yes, but I am not 100% sure". There are some actions we take that are hard to explain logically, and while they might have some underlying reasoning, that reasoning may be hard, if not impossible, to derive directly.

Emotions do not create facts, but facts may not be what ultimately drives us. My emotions might suggest that I do something that runs contrary to the facts I know, and I might be able to rationalise that with pseudo-logical thinking - and, perhaps, I will end up acting in a more efficient way as a result.

Well, my life obviously has more value to me, than, say, yours (and you indirectly agreed with it above, when you claimed that death is objectively bad, as it devoids me of any control over reality). I do think that your life is valuable to me as well, but I fail to see why objectively it should have a similar value to me as mine. It certainly does not subjectively; I do not know you very well, and if I were to choose whether to save my life or yours, I would save mine. Now, if, say, I were to choose whether to save life of the person I deeply love or mine, then it will not be as obvious, and I might choose to say theirs, knowing how much I will suffer otherwise.
In principle, valuing your own life does not have to translate to valuing any other creature's life.

Happy_Killbot

@Shadowtongue

Shadowtongue said:

@Happy_Killbot

Greater capacities and mental faculties determine whether or not we can kill and eat something? Can we kill and eat mentally challenged or comatose people since we can enact our will to a greater degree upon them?

Whether or not man invented morality depends on what the morality is predicated upon. Morality can be a mere invention by man if it is predicated upon subjective presuppositions or emotions, but it can exist in an objective sense if we understand objective rules and principles. For example, we have the intellectual capacity to realize that if we forge a social contract to sanctify human life, then there’s no objective consistency if we also allow ourselves to consume sentient non-human life. This is factual and thus an objectively moral statement, and therefore such an objective principle will exist even if humans are gone by nature of it being a rule of reality. It’s true that nature doesn’t abide by morality and isn’t governable, but this is because nature is flawed in this right and this observation does not contradict the prospects of objective morality.

An animal can neither give consent nor be informed so this means they are exempted from moral codes? Can we kill and eat comatose people since they can’t give consent or be informed, now?

As for your Douglas Adam case, no, that does not mean it is justified to kill and eat the cow. If a person comes up to me and says they want me to molest them out of mental disturbance, can I now molest them and should I not suffer legal penalty for my actions? Of course not, because, whether or not an entity wants harm inflicted upon itself, we can still understand how we should act from the perspective of objective principles and not just how an entity thinks or acts. Not to mention that that would set a very unstable foundation for a social contract.

Seems like your entire premise is founded on the idea that morality is objective, but to then claim that this implies that eating non-sapient life should not be allowed is a non-sequitur. Suppose our objective morality was based on sapience rather than sentience. Then eating animals would be allowed again. Thus there is no real basis for stating that morality being objective forbids us from eating animals.

The hard problem of objective morality and the reason I can't take the idea seriously, is that there has to be some consistency in determining what is and is not moral. Morality has changed drastically over the years and varies greatly from culture to culture. This is why I have this idea of informed consent as the quantum of morality, because it is the only thing that is consistently true. Whatever people decide and agree upon is moral. Any immoral action always includes some party that either is unaware of what is going on or didn't agree to it. Thus it is a simple and intuitive way to determine if something is morally right or not.

I guess you have never heard of BDSM then. There are some people that do actually want to be molested, (and even eaten) and if they have a contract that is, a written legal agreement between the two parties that serves as a medium for documenting the informed consent, then this is 100% legal and I would not say immoral in the slightest. The problem with objective principals is that they have no room for growth or change, if they don't suit our needs, then they are no good. There is nothing objectively wrong with eating meat, or even killing a non-sapient creature specifically for it's meat.

The empathy that is felt for animals is misplaced, because most animals don't feel that empathy back. There are some higher order lifeforms that can, such as dogs, dolphins, chimps, and some birds which can empathize, but these are rare exceptions. The way I see it there is nothing intrinsically special about an animal, they are composed of cells same as plants and bacteria, which we kill without a second thought if we are even aware of it. Animals are much more complex and enough so that someone might have feelings for them. I think this is something you will need to confront as the motivation for deciding not to eat meat, and I encourage you to think of why exactly you should feel that way for animals given they will never and many can not feel that way about you.

Shadowtongue

@MayCaesar

Okay, so we agree that, whether decipherable or not, all actions that we willingly partake in are necessarily predicated upon the pursuit of an end goal that inspires the action. Now, if one commits suicide, they will be objectively destroyed upon this action. Therefore, it is objectively an error to pursue suicide since no end goal exists in the advent of the being’s demise, since it will no longer live to receive any end goal. Therefore, it is objectively an error to commit suicide, meaning that the only logical alternative is to avoid death.

Then, if we are to continue being objective, there is nothing which creates difference in how we should regard ourselves and how we should regard others. If I am to pursue life to avoid death, I should strive to protect the lives of others as well as this is the only logical way to be consistent- mutual benefit under a social contract predicated upon objective moral understanding.

Now, we cannot treat non-human lives in the same manner as humans in social contracts because nature is ungovernable and unable to conceive of or act upon moral understanding due to the flaws of nature in this respect, but we should minimize our harm to nature as much as possible, which means we must necessarily avoid meat consumption in order to be objectively moral.

Happy_Killbot

@Shadowtongue ;

 Therefore, it is objectively an error to pursue suicide since no end goal exists in the advent of the being’s demise, since it will no longer live to receive any end goal. 

This isn't true at all, there are in fact many end goals which contain suicide as a necessary part of accomplishing that goal.

They come it two varieties:

• Goals in which self-destruction is the goal
• Goals in which the goal can not be achieved without self destruction

Some examples would be:

• A cruise missile
• Any self-destructive entity, such as a terrorist
• any entity which seeks to maximize a certain substance (paperclip maximizers for example, will at some point have to turn themselves into paperclips)

Shadowtongue

@Happy_Killbot

I disagree, for we can logically deduce that both sapience and non-sapient sentience are both manifestations which create the experiencing of life, meaning that the experiencing of life is a baseline quality for all sentient organisms and so the way we regard our experiencing of life should be equal as much as possible to the way we regard the experiencing of life of non-humans. This is purely objective.

If I’m reading correctly, your second paragraph is a real non-sequitur. On one hand, you claim that there is no objective basis for morality, but then you speak that immorality is predicated upon actions that lack consent on the receiving party’s end as though it is an objective rule. Which is it?

Consent alone is what creates morality in your eyes? So, if one is suicidal and gives another person consent to kill them, is this type of murder now justified in society by your standards? Also, how can you determine whether or not something is immoral if you also proclaim that morality is subjective and thus cannot be determined in any objective fashion? After all, we could never condemn actions by people like Hitler who genocided Jewish people because that’s his morality and we don’t have the objective basis to say his morality is invalid to be acted upon.

As for your last point, if whether or not animals feel empathy is how you inform your actions, can we kill and eat people who are born unable to feel empathy, now? In regard to plants and bacteria, these are manifestations of living matter and we too have cells, but the difference between killing a dog and killing a plant is that, while both are living and have complexity, the dog is actually experiencing life and wouldn’t just react on a mechanical level like a plant would. This is a clear and foundational distinction; it’s the same in this right if I were to stab a tree or a basketball, for both don’t actually experience life to truly experience pain.

Happy_Killbot

@Shadowtongue

I disagree, for we can logically deduce that both sapience and non-sapient sentience are both manifestations which create the experiencing of life, meaning that the experiencing of life is a baseline quality for all sentient organisms and so the way we regard our experiencing of life should be equal as much as possible to the way we regard the experiencing of life of non-humans. This is purely objective.

Here is a deep question for you:

How do you know that you have an experience of life?

You might think this is self evident, by I assure you it is not. How can we prove it? We have no magic qualia detector, to check a living thing for a subjective experience.

If I’m reading correctly, your second paragraph is a real non-sequitur. On one hand, you claim that there is no objective basis for morality, but then you speak that immorality is predicated upon actions that lack consent on the receiving party’s end as though it is an objective rule. Which is it?

When we are talking about subjective morality, what we mean is that everyone has their own idea of what morality is. "informed consent" is just a shorthand way of saying this, it isn't an objective rule but the simplest definition of subjective morality. Everyone has their own wants and desires, everyone has their own things they are willing to do for someone else. If everyone agrees, then it is a moral action, otherwise it is immoral.

Consent alone is what creates morality in your eyes? 

No I do not think that consent alone makes things moral, information is important too.

 So, if one is suicidal and gives another person consent to kill them, is this type of murder now justified in society by your standards? Also, how can you determine whether or not something is immoral if you also proclaim that morality is subjective and thus cannot be determined in any objective fashion?

Yes euthanasia is moral so long as everyone effected by that person's death is aware that it is happening, so for example if the person has a wife and kids (or insurance) who object to that euthanasia, it is much harder to argue it is moral since so many effected did not consent to it.

After all, we could never condemn actions by people like Hitler who genocided Jewish people because that’s his morality and we don’t have the objective basis to say his morality is invalid to be acted upon.

Actions by Hitler are very, very, very, immoral under my moral framework, because none of the Jewish people consented to their deaths, and most were not informed about it happening.

As for your last point, if whether or not animals feel empathy is how you inform your actions, can we kill and eat people who are born unable to feel empathy, now? In regard to plants and bacteria, these are manifestations of living matter and we too have cells, but the difference between killing a dog and killing a plant is that, while both are living and have complexity, the dog is actually experiencing life and wouldn’t just react on a mechanical level like a plant would. This is a clear and foundational distinction; it’s the same in this right if I were to stab a tree or a basketball, for both don’t actually experience life to truly experience pain.

No, you miss my point. My point is about you not the debate. You empathize with animals. You think that animals experience life and plants and bacteria do not. Do you have any evidence to support either of these claims? Do you have any evidence that you experience life?

That being said, I have never deliberately eaten a living animal, only dead animals who do not have an experience. With this in mind, why would eating meat violate the principal you have laid out, since you are not eating a living thing but a dead mass of protein?

ZeusAres42

Shadowtongue said:

If we cannot kill or eat humans, as should be the case regarding social contracts, then the same principle must be applied to non-human sentient life in order to be objectively consistent.

I think the problem with this argument is that it implies that not killing other humans must be based on objective morality when in fact that this is not the case. The idea of not killing other human beings is based on subjective morality.

MayCaesar

Shadowtongue said:

@MayCaesar

Okay, so we agree that, whether decipherable or not, all actions that we willingly partake in are necessarily predicated upon the pursuit of an end goal that inspires the action. Now, if one commits suicide, they will be objectively destroyed upon this action. Therefore, it is objectively an error to pursue suicide since no end goal exists in the advent of the being’s demise, since it will no longer live to receive any end goal. Therefore, it is objectively an error to commit suicide, meaning that the only logical alternative is to avoid death.

Then, if we are to continue being objective, there is nothing which creates difference in how we should regard ourselves and how we should regard others. If I am to pursue life to avoid death, I should strive to protect the lives of others as well as this is the only logical way to be consistent- mutual benefit under a social contract predicated upon objective moral understanding.

Now, we cannot treat non-human lives in the same manner as humans in social contracts because nature is ungovernable and unable to conceive of or act upon moral understanding due to the flaws of nature in this respect, but we should minimize our harm to nature as much as possible, which means we must necessarily avoid meat consumption in order to be objectively moral.

It depends on what the person's end goal is. Perhaps they believe that after suicide they will end up in the afterlife, which is preferable to their current situation in their eyes. Or maybe their end goal is to maximise happiness, and right now they have some chronic pains (physical or emotional) that make oblivion a happier state in their eyes than these pains.
It is not objectively an error to commit suicide, albeit, I would argue, it is a very poor life choice, no matter what situation you are in: there may be a way out of any situation, and going down without a fight is a mistake. But that is my subjective opinion.

Not at all: you in your eyes are a very different entity from others in your eyes. For example, you can feel pain, but you cannot directly feel others' pain. Social contract, first, is subjective, second, does not have to be accepted unconditionally by you, and third, does not have to determine your values.

I do not see why we should minimise our harm to nature based on just the arguments you have provided so far. I do think that we should treat nature with respect, but for a variety of other reasons.

Shadowtongue

@Happy_Killbot

I could respond to all your responses regarding morality itself, but almost all of your replies will warrant the same kind of underlying response from me so I’m going to condense it into a singular line of argumentation. You seem to not fully register what you’re saying. At first, you’ll claim that morality is up to the individual to determine as it is supposedly only subjective, but then you’ll go about making universal and thus objective claims about what constitutes morality. For instance, you cannot claim that morality is subjective and, at the same time, claim that things like informed consent create morality because now you’re making a universal moral claim. It either has to be that consent and a lack of consent both are equally moral or there’s a universal and thus objective distinction which makes one a moral action and the other an immoral action. Which claim are you choosing? If morality is not objective in any fashion, then you have no objective information to state that Hitler’s genocide was a moral wrongdoing nor can you condemn rapists, baby eaters, cannibals, bombers, imperialists, et cetera because their actions are just as lacking in moral value as the actions of one who tries to bring about benefit and well-being to others, your views would just be opinions only.

For your point on animals, what is my evidence that animals and I experience life and that plants and bacteria do not? Here are my answers. Firstly, I necessarily must experience life because I’m necessarily actively experiencing thought, sound, vision, et cetera because this active experience is necessarily happening right now. I couldn’t experience these things by definition if I wasn’t experiencing life. Secondly, I can infer that since I necessarily experience life and that such experience is linked to complex cognitive processes, then other humans and other animals are far more likely than not to be experiencing life as well because they too have brains, and since cells like bacteria and brainless organisms like plants and fungi do not have brains, I can strongly infer that, like rocks, they do not actively experience things but rather function as mere awareless, living matter.

For your point on eating meat alone instead of doing the killing and eating. This could both violate and not violate my principles,depending on the circumstance. If you buy meat from a market, you’re still violating this principle because, via commerce, you know you're incentivizing and encouraging the known continuation of animal killing by others, meaning you’re indirectly involved in killing them. As an example, if a person hears a classmate say he wants to shoot up the school you both attend to and you tell him where to easily acquire firearms and he ends up shooting up your school with a firearm acquired from that location, even though you didn't directly do the killing, you're still responsible in the sense that you knowingly gave him the information to easily commit this action while knowing what would happen afterward. Now, if you’re lost in a forest and come across meat at a camp that was abandoned by a hunter for some reason, it’s not immoral since you neither killed the animal nor are you actively incentivizing or encouraging the hunter’s continued killing of animals.

Shadowtongue

@MayCaesar

I’ll actually put aside my moral claims because it is diverting into more of a debate about the essence of moral foundation itself as opposed to specifically the eating of meat, which is what this debate is uniquely about. So, I’m not conceding out of my mind being changed but so that I can shift the discussion back to its appropriate topic.

Let’s instead go about a sequence of thought processes. Let’s first start with this question: in an ordinary circumstance, would you want someone to kill and eat you out of hunger? If not, why would you not want to be killed and eaten?

Shadowtongue

@ZeusAres42

I could go the route of arguing the case of my claim on objective morality, but I want to keep this discussion more focused on the specific topic of eating meat and so I’ll avoid it, at least for this debate. I’ll instead start by asking you a series of questions. For the first question, do you want someone to kill and eat you? If the answer is no, then explain why you personally do not want to be eaten.

MayCaesar

@Shadowtongue

I think I can foresee your train of thought: since none of us wants to be killed, it is reasonable to create a society in which killing is frowned upon, and in which people value each other's lives.

I do not dispute that. What I dispute is that, first, this has to be generalised to valuing life in general, including life of other animals, and second, that having such societal value means that every individual should espouse it.

In addition, in principle it is possible to have a society in which a large group of people values lives of its members, but does not value lives of the rest of the society. This is the case, for example, in societies allowing slavery, where lives of slaves are valued much less, if at all, than lives of free individuals.

This is a pretty complex discussion, with a lot of sides to each of its aspects. I do not see your case for abolishing meat as necessarily wrong or fallacious; I am just saying that I can make a similar argument against abolishing meat consumption, and it will also be valid. Whether meat consumption should be abolished or not is highly subjective, and I argue that, at least, at the current stage of our technological evolution it would be a mistake from the pragmatic perspective, depriving us of a very valuable nutritional source.

Happy_Killbot

@Shadowtongue I do understand what you are saying, and I'm trying to explain why it isn't an issue. "informed consent" is not an objective principal, it is a shorthand that I just made up, which when understood as a quantum is very effective at determining what things are and are not moral, and most importantly, can be encoded into an algorithm.

We could just as easily decide the opposite is true and the uninformed non-consent is the standard, if we so decided. In fact, if you live in an authoritarian state this is more or less how things are.

Can you prove that you have a subjective experience? Can you prove that I do? How do I know you are not just saying things that make it seem like you do when in reality you are just a "smart zombie" and have no experience? Suppose you are the only person with a conscious experience, the solipsistic world view. Can you ever know this isn't the case? Maybe what you think is conscious experience is not special and one other person who is not you is the only truly aware person. Can you prove any of these statements true or false?

I am convinced that most animals do not have a conscious experience the way that humans do because they lack the neural architecture to do so. An animal can not understand that it's living conditions are sub par or for that matter imagine anything better. These things happen automatically for an animal, and even to a lesser extent in humans. Have you even noticed how you have no conscious control over your own emotions, but changing the emotions of others is relatively easy with the right understanding? This should give you pause, because it implies that even humans have a limit to our own conscious experience, that is inaccessible to ourselves but is accessible in others.

piloteer

@Shadowtongue

If it is true that you cannot necessarily prove absolutely that plants don’t experience, then your limited standard for egalitarian ideals are pretty much as arbitrary as it gets. The only consistency where your egalitarianism is applied is that you just happen to be within that group that is labeled as valued. Since when have we as humans been striving to protect our kind from death, as opposed to being a part of and living among all the other species that live on this earth and acknowledging that we are only but a part of the living community? Are we all not born from this earth and made of all the same elements that all other lifeforms are made of? 

Your scenario of the unconscious being may just be a miscategorization of consciousness. The only thing that happens if someone is stabbed that occurs outside of, or regardless of the human body is the stab itself. But all the other signals, reactions (or lack of), or emotions, are just as much a part of us as the deciphering of the message that we've been stabbed, and the decision to react (or not). It is all a part of us and is not secondary, or outside of the body. We are just as much the experience itself as we are the emotions and the reactions that accompany the experience. If someone is in a coma, they may still feel pain and have emotions. Even if they slip into a "vegetative" state, that is considered a minimally conscious state. That means that there is still some semblance of consciousness, and they would realize that the pain took place, and they would remember it if they awoke.   

This all hinges to your biased interpretation of what consciousness consists of though. You ( and all of us for that matter) can only put your stamp of approval on what you consider sentience to be from your own perspective. Obviously we cannot decipher what our pets sentient experience is like, because we are not them. We can also not understand what the experience of a tomato is like either. You can't actually truly know that you are not the only sentient being in this life and all other beings that you think are sentient are just an elaborate computer generated simulation. Where would your standards of sentience fall in that scenario. All we have to go by is our biased senses, and from those senses you can only gather minimal information that will never actually ad up to a real truth, let alone a simple evidence. Unfortunately, whether this is an elaborate computer generated simulation or not, the biased interpretation of your senses is still biased, and you can never make a truly reliable assessment of whether asparagus is having an experience.

   I've presented studies that run contrary to what we thought was true for plants and their lack of consciousness, and those studies (more than one) at least have enough evidence for us to reconsider our thoughts on whether plants experience. All you can muster as a retort has yet to be backed by any scientific claims, or any authority whatsoever. It is merely your conjecture which most of, if not all of your argument is based on and you freely admit no less. Your argument is not based on true egalitarian ideals or objective, or empirical evidence. It is ALL conjecture. 

Sorry I took so long  to get back to you. It must have been difficult waiting for the only person with a solid counterargument against you here. I'll try not to let it happen again.     

Shadowtongue

@Happy_Killbot

I missed your response to my moral claim. If an entity is engaging in an action and is thus striving for an end goal, then it must be alive to acquire the end goal of which is being strived for, or else it is illogical because an action is voluntarily being done to achieve something while nothing will be achieved for the entity. The result of suicide will just be death, so the entity will necessarily not live on to attain the end goal of suicide. This is why suicide does not constitute as an end goal; nothing can possibly be attained by the being in order for it to constitute as an end goal.

[Edited for slight grammatical clarity.]

Happy_Killbot

@Shadowtongue

I did mention this above, but it is a little abstract and unless you have a few hours to waste and enjoy mind f*** philosophy,  chances are you might miss the final point.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

There are instances when suicide is required to achieve an end goal, and even a very intelligent agent, acting in a logical way to achieve this goal, will commit suicide.

Shadowtongue

@Happy_Killbot
What I'm stating isn't some sort of mind- philosophy but rather basic objectivity. Voluntary actions are necessarily done to achieve something, whether the endgame is directly or indirectly known. Even something as simple as walking randomly has an end goal in mind to some extent because some kind of desire has inspired the walking, as opposed to no action or another type of action, to occur. So, if one is engaging in a voluntary action of any kind, then it is necessarily predicated upon some kind of objective, and in order for an end goal to exist for the entity, the entity must exist not only during the process but afterward so that they will be in the state of having achieved the end goal. Therefore, suicide does not objectively constitute an end goal because the entity will not have attained anything since the entity will be destroyed upon the act of self-destruction. This, therefore, means there's an objective error in the suicidal entity's mind because it is acting to achieve something for itself despite the fact that it will not be achieving anything for itself since it will not be alive afterward to actualize a state of achievement. Now, you're free to make a reply to this but I won't be responding further on this particular topic since I'm trying to keep the debate as focused around meat-eating as opposed to broader claims on morality's subjectivity or objectivity.

Shadowtongue

@MayCaesar

There may be something you foresaw, but I need you to follow my specific sequence of questions and answers so that I can best deliver you to my point of view. So, since you said you do not want to be killed, why is it you do not want to be killed?

Shadowtongue

[For all of whom it may concern, I'm ending this particular debate here. You can decide who is in the factual right on the basis of what has been stated so far.]

ZeusAres42

Shadowtongue said:

@ZeusAres42

I could go the route of arguing the case of my claim on objective morality, but I want to keep this discussion more focused on the specific topic of eating meat and so I’ll avoid it, at least for this debate. I’ll instead start by asking you a series of questions. For the first question, do you want someone to kill and eat you? If the answer is no, then explain why you personally do not want to be eaten.

@Shadowtongue Fair enough. My answer is that I cannot see any reason as to why I would want to be killed or eaten. And that is my reason for not wanting to be killed or eaten.

MayCaesar

Shadowtongue said:

@MayCaesar

There may be something you foresaw, but I need you to follow my specific sequence of questions and answers so that I can best deliver you to my point of view. So, since you said you do not want to be killed, why is it you do not want to be killed?

I am quite happy with my life and do not want it to end just yet; there is a lot of things I want to experience still.

Granted, if it suddenly ends tomorrow, obviously there will be no me left to weep over it. So, while I certainly do not want to be killed, if it does happen somehow, I will be fine as well.

Sharky

I don't know how this quickly became a religious issue. Humans are, and always have been, omnivores. Food wasn't always plentiful and easy to access. We ate what we could hunt or gather. Agriculture and animal husbandry grew out of this. Today, countless animals worldwide are raised strictly for the purpose of providing food for humans. So, for the sake of argument, let's just say we all suddenly had a moral epiphany and decided consumption of animals was immoral. What would you then do with the millions upon millions of domesticated farm animals worldwide that suddenly no longer had any value? I don't see a moral way of ending that link in the food chain. 

Nope

Sharky A perfect or ideal solution won't always be available for every problem. Instead one should look for what they perceive as an optimal solution. If we assume that we do wan't to end meat production simply not producing any new agricultural animals would be more optimal then continuing the practice. If we wanted to stop meat production and take good care of animals immediately (because somehow everyone in the developed world just change the moral code) we could take care of the animals tell they die of old age. Of course this would also require better food management as we wait for that animals land to become free for growing plants and the animals are already not being treated well. So if we want to do that we would also have to spend more resources to take care of the animals (also technically possible if all of us just change how we mange resources). Of course all of this is not realistically possible but I suppose the question is theoretical and philosophical.