RE: are vegetarians more ethical by not eating meat?
May 19, 2013 at 11:49 am
(This post was last modified: May 19, 2013 at 11:57 am by littleendian.)
(May 19, 2013 at 10:01 am)Creed of Heresy Wrote: So in other words you live by an undefined double standard where the only morality involved is your own subjective one. Well, at least you have openly admitted to having no basis in any kind of truth in reality that anyone here should take on face value, then!It's not subjective that it requires a central nervous system to feel pain. Actually it is one of the functions of our brain to create painful stimuli based on sensory data arriving through the sense organs. There is no such thing as "objective" pain, it is always subjectively produced by an organism to react to a threat to its well-being. This only makes sense in relation to an organism that can actually change something about this situation, in every other case as for example with plants this expensive processing of stimuli would be a waste because the plant couldn't do anything about the threat anyway, and evolution would not allow for such waste. Of course this is not about hard-set truths, because we also could never prove that all the people around us aren't in fact only robots without emotions in them, it is impossible to prove or disprove because of the subjective nature of the problem. This is all about likelihoods, as with all of science. If you have ever seen a hurt animal you can have no more doubt about its pain than about the pain of those poor children you so feverishly posted images of.
(May 19, 2013 at 10:01 am)Creed of Heresy Wrote: I don't think there's anything wrong with eating plants OR animals but I DO think there's something wrong with someone who turns his nose up at particular types of food WHEN THERE'S CHILDREN FUCKING STARVING TO DEATH ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD,You are deliberately misunderstanding me. As I have repeatedly said (do you read?), anything anyone has to do to survive is never immoral, so neither would it be to give those children meat to eat.
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Ok...so...you're trying to say...that if these children were to be eating meat, to be fed meat, or otherwise consume meat...it'd be...immoral.
(May 19, 2013 at 10:01 am)Creed of Heresy Wrote: Death. Comes. From Life. Deal with it.True, I don't advertise a romanticised view on nature and its cruelty. However, we're not talking about nature, we're talking about our human system of ethics, and there is a clear inconsistency in a system of ethics that sees it as immoral to kill people and doesn't see it as immoral to kill animals because there is no significant difference between the two.
(May 19, 2013 at 10:05 am)NoraBrimstone Wrote:Regardless of whether vegetables suffer or not (and there is a good argument for that they don't suffer or at least not to the same extent as animals, see above), it is a necessity for me to eat plants or otherwise I die. Therefore, this is no more a moral question than it would be to ask whether anti-biotics are immoral because they kill bacteria which invade our body. This all serves self-preservation which is never immoral. What is immoral, however, is to kill someone for ones selfish indulgance.(May 19, 2013 at 9:40 am)littleendian Wrote: No, its not harmless only because the victim who suffers and dies is non-human.By that logic, domestos is harmful because bacteria suffer and die. Or eating carrots is harmful because vegetables suffer and die.
"Men see clearly enough the barbarity of all ages — except their own!" — Ernest Crosby.