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this seems relative (quokk.au)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/philosophymemes
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this seems relative
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[–] 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

So hurting animals (or even plants) for no reason is cruelty thus is wrong.

The entire point is that meat isn't necessary for the vast majority of people. Which thus makes it cruel and wrong.

This is before we get to all of the points about land use, pollutants, climate change, and the general inefficiency of getting calories from animals, which are all good reasons regardless of the above.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm not really swayed by the cruelty argument personally. I am much more open to the environmental damage arguments, but it's specifically the way vegans prefer to paint the issue in terms of a moral imperative which keeps me at arms length.

    There are legitimately places in the world where the only realistic way to extract nutrients from the land is to graze goats and eat them. That reduces the morality argument to agricultural privilege imo.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    97% of animals in the US are factory farmed. If you live in the US, it really is as simple as I stated. If you are one of the vanishingly few people that actually do live in places where the only option is pastoralism, then that's fine. But the vast majority of people do not. Judging Americans by the standards of a Sub-Saharan shepard is just as ridiculous as the other way around.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    The beauty of this logic is that the wrongness of something falls into what we define by "cruel" which fits better into our actual moral arguments and lets room for changes in opinion without changing all the logic.

    For instance for a person to move from not being vegan into being began only would need to consider that eating meat without need is indeed cruel, and then wrong. But the whole structure of trying to avoid cruelty stands.

    I find it more "elegant" that a moral solution that tries to give animal rights, because then you would need to move into big changes in logic to move from one position to another.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Enh. I don't personally see the issue with the rights argument - although I think the environmental damage/inefficiency argument is probably the most effective. Plenty of places have animal cruelty laws, often protecting cats/dogs/pets above farm animals. These are legal rights that these animals have been given. We can then point to research on animal cognition - e.g. that pigs have been shown to be as smart as many dog breeds - to demonstrate the hypocrisy.

    Personally, it boils down to this: being violent towards less powerful beings is almost universally considered to be evil. We have quite a lot of laws about this. Extending these rights to non-human beings is just as natural as extending it to your neighbors, and done for the same reason - a society that commits wanton acts of cruelty in one legal arena will be more willing to commit them in others. It is self-defense as much as goodwill towards others.

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