Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[James2014]

You blather on about animal "suffering" yet seem happy for such "suffering" to occur in the cause of vegetarianism to the point where other long term vegetarians have had enough of your whinging.

You also neglect the fact that the big four industries are pandering to you and your pathetic idealism to create the very thing your "ethical" choice is supposedly to prevent and you seem quite happy with this hypocrisy.

Veganism is an ethical choice but that does not preculde other ethical choices also having to be made. We know that vegan diets kill less animals than meat eating, with the letter necessarily killing farmed animals. Now some animals may die during farming crops but that is still less than those killed by farming. This is demonstrated in the following article which calculates that "to obtain the 20 kilograms of protein per year recommended for adults, a vegan-vegetarian would kill 0.3 wild animals annually, a lacto-vegetarian would kill 0.39 wild animals, while a Davis style omnivore [eating grass fed beef] would kill 1.5 wild animals." Veganism causes less harm and does not treat animals like property, while meat eating completely disregards the interests of animals for our own.

Sure there are other things which cause harm in the world, and we should support sustainable farming, pharmaceuticals etc. But that does not negate the fact that eating meat causes harm to our health, the environment and to the animals

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You keep forgetting two things.

a) Since my ethics is based on evolutionary principles, counter-claims are a matter of basic survival.

b) Since my ethics operates at the species level, it can't be used to support gender or race distinctions directly.

Your appeals continually violate these two basic facts.

I would agree that we should eliminate unnecessary animal suffering if it doesn't result in a drain on our survival. But if being altruistic involves sacrificing the goals of humans for the sake of animals, then your altruism is irrational. Altruism evolved to serve species goals, and when you take it outside of that, you are costing lives.

Regardless, if animal suffering is only partially a constraint on human behavior, it doesn't lead to an ethical mandate to eliminate the eating of meat. There are good, evolutionary reasons why we don't want to be insensitive to the suffering of creatures that remind us of ourselves. However, vegetarianism is a case of looking for an ethical principle to use to justify an ideological position, and holding fast to that rationalization in spite of the consequences. If I felt empathy were a sound basis for morals, they might be right, but so far all you've shown is that some people "want" it to be the basis of morals; not that it is. And mounting your ethics on the principle of "mere preference" guts your ethical stand more surely than any naturalistic basis can. If it's "just preference," then there's no argument you can make if I want to enslave blacks or oppress women; one preference is as good as another if that is all that it is.

What evolutionary principle are you basing your ethics on? Evolution DOES not care about the survival of species, indeed it will select for characteristics so that species evolve, and become new species. Nor has evolution specifically select us to develop empathy for our species as a whole. Rather it has select us for empathy towards our tribe, and with people we associate with being part of our group. That is why the history of humanity is filled with fighting between tribes, communities, countries, races, genders etc. Evolution does not select on the basis of species, it selects on the basis of individuals, and our ability to pass on genes. That is why many men want to just have lots of sex with as many women as possible, but with our problems with our population, this is actually counter productive for the survival of our species! Your ethics based on evolutionary principles therefore justifies actions against your principle that ethics should concern what is best for our survival.

Now, these are all reasons why basing ethics on evolution is wrong, but there are also reasons why just focusing on our species are also wrong. Consider some humans cells cultured in a petri dish. Do those cells have ethical value? Most people would say "No", as they do not have feelings etc. So just being part of the same species is not enough to have ethical value. It is the ability to feel and to suffer that confers ethical worth, rather than just being part of the same species.

Lastly, even if we are to accept that ethics primarily concerns the survival of our species, then as it has been shown that eating meat decreases survival (ie increases risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer), then it must still be wrong to eat meat.