Veganism

[The Grand Nudger]

It's harmful to the cow, we'd agree, regardless of whether or not the tree does or even can think so. Thus, mind independent in the manner intended. A term for that could be a natural evil. Suffering caused by processes or disasters independent of volition, of intent. The understanding there seeming to indicate that a thing is still bad for reasons outside of human (or any) opinion or intent, though we tend not to think of it as immoral in a full consideration because there is no moral agent doing it to be described as such. If deistic subjectivists ever followed through with their bullshit they wouldn't have that excuse, mind you, because we'd be talking about what GOD just did to that cow, man.

I'm open to the idea that alot of what we describe as immoral, implying that there is volitional intent, actually isn't. That it's a natural evil. Some amount of animal suffering and ecological damage is (or may be) the inevitable product of a world full of extremely resource intensive heterotrophs. That's informing my opinion that vegan dietary choices would not or might not actually produce the amount of harm mitigation or avoidance they hope for. You can kill animals because you eat them or you can kill animals and not even eat them.....and you probably already see the buds of a new moral dilemma sprouting up from the exclusively suboptimal ground of existential and ethical options as they present themselves to us.

There is something tragic, imo, in living on this rock as it is, as we are. I'm always calling it a meatgrinder. If we could arrange it so that it were kinder, less cruel, less random, less painful, less high stakes, we (or at least I) probably would. We do that in our own lives and for some animals insomuch as we can. We treat livestock better than just about anything else, we create little worlds for them - that's why humans and livestock combined are something like 96% of the planets remaining mamallian biomass. When you look at it like that, it's not the cattle we ought to be worried about.

If we dove deeper, and considered a possible (and once actual, here...still present and important) autotrophic world these concerns about things eating each other don't even obtain. Let that sink in. If there are moral concerns about things eating each other (and I think there are), there is a possible world in which they don't..we just don't live on that world, and in this way the evil of nature and ourselves is very literally a fact and product of the laws of nature.