Veganism?

[reverendjeremiah]

i dont see anything wrong with vegans/vegeterians im one of them myselfe.
Meat is murder!
why should i kill to feed

No matter what you eat, something has died to provide your meal.

Just remember that everything dies, and everything gets eaten by something else.

For that is Natures way.

If you still think otherwise....

I guess that means that all animals are murderers as well....and bacteria and viruses not only murder animals and plants, but also devour the bodies and help spread themselves even more. Plants are also murderers because some have posions in them..

...and what about a venus fly trap. does it *know* when a fly lands in its jaws of death before it traps it and eats it? Either way it is still a murderer right? And how about all those plants they will gladly live off of your dead corpse?

[Minimalist]

Honestly, if people want to graze on grass and fungus it is no skin off my nose. I do get a little pissy when they start acting all high and mighty about it. At such times I love to point out that Hitler was a vegetarian.

No one likes to be in any club that Hitler was a member of.

[5thHorseman]

Veganism, not my cup of tea, but kudos for those who can stick to it.

I'm hardly the biggest meat eater(pun intended), but I do like to munch on some lamb or even a sausage or a burger every so often, but I do limit these indulgences.

[Rhizomorph13]

...kudos for those who can stick to it...

Why kudos?

What if they chose to eat only meat would they get kudos?

What if they chose to eat only purple foods?

I don't see any good reason to kudos someone because of what they choose to ingest. I also don't see any reason to vilify anyone for different gastric choices.

Being a true vegan would be extremely hard because there are animal products in most of the things we use. That doesn't warrent kudos though. It would be extremely difficult getting a full days nutrition by shoving food up one's ass but that doesn't somehow make it worth doing.

[genkaus]

I've been watching this thread for a while, hoping that someone would touch upon the underlying issue of this debate.

The thing one has to consider while deciding if being vegetarian or non-vegetarian is "good" or not, is deciding whether you actually have the right to the life of the organism you are eating.

On one extreme, you can say that you have the right to kill and eat any organism you can kill and eat. Which would mean it is morally justifiable to kill a person to eat him.

On the other extreme, you can say that you have no right over the life of any other living creature and you become an ovo-lacto-fruitarian. That is, you can eat unfertilized eggs, drink milk and eat fruits, since no live creature is being harmed here and much effort is put into raising the hens/cows/plants that provide the food.

The most common argument seen here is derived form "natural law", i.e. since it occurs in nature all the time, it is "good" or acceptable. That argument is not very sound, since humans are not bound to act according to nature's dictates and there are many other things that occur in nature that we consider immoral for humans to do.

As far as I can see, neither extreme is rationally justifiable and since natural law doesn't give a rational answer either, we must look elsewhere. As far as I can see, there are two criteria upon which we can decide whether it is morally justifiable to kill a creature to eat it or not.

1. You cannot claim the right to consume anything and everything you may desire. The only things you do have a right over are the products of your own efforts. That is, you should have an integral role in creating and cultivating the life you are about to consume.

That means, you can grow crops and breed animals and then you have the right to eat them. You do have the option of buying this right from someone else who happens to have done the necessary. This, however, excludes life that is not the result of your effort, i.e. you cannot kill and eat another person, or hunt down a wild animal, or take another man's food.

2. Whenever you are killing a creature for food, you are asserting your right over its life as greater than that creature's right to live. Basically, you are saying "Just because something is alive does not mean that it has a right to live" as well as "I have the right to that creature's life". For this, it is necessary to determine a basis on which we can deny something a right to live.

I think, at the very basic, sentience is a requirement, i.e. if something is not sentient, it has not inherent right to live. As the upper limit, we have "being human", since we don't allow people to eat other people.

However, I don't think that simply being a part of human species somehow magically grants us any rights. Rather, the qualities that are inherent to being a human is the basis for these rights. One such quality would be capacity for rationality. And since we don't let people eat babies or insane, we can add self-awareness, capacity for emotion and thoughts to the list. Then the creatures we have no right to eat would certainly include some of the other higher order mammals such as apes.


So, in order to decide if we have the right to kill and eat a creature, the said creature must not be self-aware, capable of emotion, thought or rationality and we should have put in effort to raise that life.

Also, these criteria only apply to creatures that are alive, so anything already dead is fair game. Which means, if a person happens to die of natural causes, I see no moral objection to eating his dead carcass.

Let me throw this out as a flame-bait. I'm pro-choice (since I don't consider a fetus to have any rights until its born or atleast born-able) and as I've just said I have no objection to any cannibalism done without murder. Therefore, I do not see any moral objection to eating dead fetuses.

[Rhizomorph13]

I think "rights" are imaginary things granted to us by default of them not being against the law. "Good" and "bad" are also imaginary. I think that as long as I am upholding the social contract of the nation I am living in, then all's well.

[frankiej]

I'm hardly the biggest meat eater

I have pictures that say otherwise.

[genkaus]

I think "rights" are imaginary things granted to us by default of them not being against the law. "Good" and "bad" are also imaginary. I think that as long as I am upholding the social contract of the nation I am living in, then all's well.

Rights are the recognition granted to a person's status as a moral being. Good and bad are identification of the nature of your actions. They are about as imaginary words we assign to objects.

[Anomalocaris]

I've been watching this thread for a while, hoping that someone would touch upon the underlying issue of this debate.

The thing one has to consider while deciding if being vegetarian or non-vegetarian is "good" or not, is deciding whether you actually have the right to the life of the organism you are eating.

On one extreme, you can say that you have the right to kill and eat any organism you can kill and eat. Which would mean it is morally justifiable to kill a person to eat him.

On the other extreme, you can say that you have no right over the life of any other living creature and you become an ovo-lacto-fruitarian. That is, you can eat unfertilized eggs, drink milk and eat fruits, since no live creature is being harmed here and much effort is put into raising the hens/cows/plants that provide the food.

The most common argument seen here is derived form "natural law", i.e. since it occurs in nature all the time, it is "good" or acceptable. That argument is not very sound, since humans are not bound to act according to nature's dictates and there are many other things that occur in nature that we consider immoral for humans to do.

As far as I can see, neither extreme is rationally justifiable and since natural law doesn't give a rational answer either, we must look elsewhere. As far as I can see, there are two criteria upon which we can decide whether it is morally justifiable to kill a creature to eat it or not.

1. You cannot claim the right to consume anything and everything you may desire. The only things you do have a right over are the products of your own efforts. That is, you should have an integral role in creating and cultivating the life you are about to consume.

That means, you can grow crops and breed animals and then you have the right to eat them. You do have the option of buying this right from someone else who happens to have done the necessary. This, however, excludes life that is not the result of your effort, i.e. you cannot kill and eat another person, or hunt down a wild animal, or take another man's food.

2. Whenever you are killing a creature for food, you are asserting your right over its life as greater than that creature's right to live. Basically, you are saying "Just because something is alive does not mean that it has a right to live" as well as "I have the right to that creature's life". For this, it is necessary to determine a basis on which we can deny something a right to live.

I think, at the very basic, sentience is a requirement, i.e. if something is not sentient, it has not inherent right to live. As the upper limit, we have "being human", since we don't allow people to eat other people.

However, I don't think that simply being a part of human species somehow magically grants us any rights. Rather, the qualities that are inherent to being a human is the basis for these rights. One such quality would be capacity for rationality. And since we don't let people eat babies or insane, we can add self-awareness, capacity for emotion and thoughts to the list. Then the creatures we have no right to eat would certainly include some of the other higher order mammals such as apes.


So, in order to decide if we have the right to kill and eat a creature, the said creature must not be self-aware, capable of emotion, thought or rationality and we should have put in effort to raise that life.

Also, these criteria only apply to creatures that are alive, so anything already dead is fair game. Which means, if a person happens to die of natural causes, I see no moral objection to eating his dead carcass.

Let me throw this out as a flame-bait. I'm pro-choice (since I don't consider a fetus to have any rights until its born or atleast born-able) and as I've just said I have no objection to any cannibalism done without murder. Therefore, I do not see any moral objection to eating dead fetuses.

Whether sentient creature should be killed an eaten for meat has nothing to do with any intrinsic right, just as whether fetus should be allowed to be aborted has nothing to do with any intrinsic right. There is no such thing as intrinsic right. What is determined to be appropriate for a particular purpose determines what is said to have any right, not the other way around.

[The Grand Nudger]

Interesting, and only slightly off topic....there has long been a tendency towards taboo with regards to what were considered "animals of a higher order" (as well as a market that caters to breaking those taboos). One of those quirks we seem to have with regards to food.

How many of you would eat a monkey?

How many a cow?

A dog?

Do you imagine the answers would be the same if I asked a Hindu? What if I asked someone from Korea?

Great Apes are currently the terminus of their line, but this is true of most species of plant we currently include in our diets. If "higher order" is going to be used as a smoke screen for "like us" that's fine, but lets be open about that. Then we can use much simpler language to describe our argument. "I do not feel comfortable eating things that remind me of some part or characteristic of myself". That's perfectly understandable, keep in mind that many pet lizard owners see something familiar in their lizards, or spiders, or fish, or any other animal one cares to imagine (and inanimate objects such as mountains, or tiny pebbles..really, everything). We have cultures who elevated certain animals to the "higher order" without any sort of scientific classification whatsoever, creating totems and taboos. Point is, the metrics you've used sound perfectly fine if one wishes to make a personal decision about what one's conscience can handle with regards to their food (and where it comes from/what it is). There's nothing in any of this that turns it into a question of morality that applies to us all.