I just wrote a long, long post and somehow deleted it.

Blake, you said rejecting rape and not rejecting the animal suffering connected with eating meat was hypocrisy -  you said both were natural and I disputed that rape was natural and suggested the protective instincts men have for women are old and that our social morality has evolved to reflect those things that are good for the group - rape not being one of those things.

You've rejected this non natural rape contention as not being a 'possible viable argument' and implied conclusive/significant evidence supports your view rape is natural. I'd argue that protecting women is more natural. No husband wants his wife or daughter raped. When was this ever a non-issue for men? What part of the intense male protective instinct for women and children, particularly his own woman and children, is not natural? How can such a fundamental thing have been recently developed?

If I am rejecting historical support for the naturalness of rape, you are rejecting historical evidence for men's overwhelming natural urge to protect their wives and families - a drive that led to the development of walled cities, of laws and courts, the institution of a police force. What is more important than a safe and secure environment for families? We are extinct without such an environment. How much of human mythology is tied to rescuing the women, to sacrificing for the family? Having thrown that up I guess both rape and the protective instinct are colours on the palette of male behaviour.

Anyway, this jag is not meant to be an attempt to make you look absurd or go off topic. This is simply a very challenging area and I am being honest in my reaction to what you are saying - some of it is pointy. I'm sure most the folks on the threads have eaten meat this week and not linked the suffering caused to animals in its production to rape. It's a highly emotive connection and in your earlier argument with LatinC you were vociferous about it. I agree you were arguing against natural is right.  And yes, sure, I do see and comprehend your argument that natural is not necessarily always right. That's true.

Pretty obviously, this animal rights stuff is highly charged for you - charged in a way most of us have never considered it to be. I can't help feeling you are suggesting that animal suffering and rape are equally unethical and equally to be condemned. And of course, most all of us naturally eat meat when it's in front of us and by extension are as unethical as rapists. This is my extrapolation, mind. Maybe I'm projecting my disquiet over my involvement in animal suffering.

I know you will defend your position in your usual way but there's nothing abnormal about any of us questioning some of the things you say. This is a learning experience for the omnivores. And don't feel the need to be nice. I'm not going to be genuinely offended by any discussions we have here, no matter how heated they get. Like Melles and others, I see your position as novel and challenging, a little too challenging perhaps.

Yeah, whatever, let's move on. I'm not adding to the discussion in getting stuck on this particular hook. Having written all this I'm not even sure why I'm arguing about it. 

 

 

The only potential problem I see is this lets you do other things as well.  Since we seem to enjoy taking things to the extreme, you could devote your life to stopping child trafficking and if you did enough good you could have your own sex slaves, just as long as you kept your ratio even or better.

 

I don't see that as a problem- I never said this was *good*, it's just not bad either.  Breaking even is a wash.  Technically, if you did just a tiny bit more, then you'd be in the positive (by a variable amount, depending on how much more you  did).

The feeling we would get from somebody doing something terrible after doing so much good is almost similar to the feeling of an artist spending years to make the most amazing piece of art, and then smashing it to bits in a moment for no good reason. 

The fact is, that hypothetical person who spent his lifetime doing so much good just ruined it all, and left alone it could have been a life achievement like a great work of moral art.  He was kind of a jack ass for f*cking that up.  Which gets us to the subjective factor:

 

When doing something very good is quite easy, you kind of have to be a bit of a jerk not to do it if you are aware of it.
When you have to go out of your way to do something bad, likewise, you have to be kind of a jerk to take the effort.

 

If you want to go there, it's a perfectly tenable metric (although perhaps vulnerable to your 'slippery slope'- though I think it's a *good* slope to be on).

 

In that sense, we're all just varying degrees of jerks, depending on where you place that bar of "worth the effort" in each case- lets say, goodness units per unit of effort.

Veganism or vegetarianism may be pretty easy and have a pretty big payoff, but there are of course other things I could do, like toting around a bicycle and riding that around everywhere instead of taking taxis, which are actually substantially more effort with a pretty minimal payoff in reduced suffering.  I'd feel like a jerk if I didn't take the small effort to be vegan, but I don't feel too bad about not going out of my way to carry around a bike and ride it everywhere around town because the goodness per unit of effort is not so high (I'm also a bit concerned that I would get hit by a car, but that's another matter).

 

So, firstly, and most objectively, I just try to break even- and then beyond that I do as much good as I can that's reasonably worth the effort to do.

As such, one can set that bar at X value, and then one would be free to criticize anybody who set the bar lower, but unable to be critical of those who set the bar higher- that is, able to criticize even independent actions that are below one's moral standard.  Criticize rich people for not donating millions to charity?  Well, yes, you could- it would be very easy for them to do so, and do quite a bit of good.  Criticize the pedophile for not resisting his urges to molest children?  The same, he could make an effort (though sexual urges could arguably take an enormous effort to resist) and avert quite a bit of suffering.  Criticize the eater of meats for not being vegetarian?  Well, yes, not a big effort at all, but a pretty big payoff.

As long as somebody is breaking even, one can't really say that said person is bad overall, but one could criticize him or her for not doing better where it would be particularly easy.

So, for the person who spent his or her life stopping child trafficking- that's awesome- but how much effort would it really be to also *not* undo all of that good by keeping sex slaves?

Again, it's almost impossible to say that this person was a net bad for the world, but he or she is kind of a jerk for screwing up all the good he or she did when it would have been so easy not to.

Questions of values like this, including how 'objective' they are, are ultimately subjective.

That opinion of mine also has an irreducible level of subjectivity.

I have pretty much described my attitudes to this, which I will freely admit have actually changed somewhat from considering the points raised.

It is extremely subjective, ie highly dependent on personal 'values', just how much 'value' you ascribe to 'self-actualization' of living creatures of all kinds.

I have come away from this actually being more comfortable in eating meat, from a moral PoV of the creature, than before.

I will still only partake occasionally, and give some thought to where I purchase it. As much from personal health issues as anything, based on the balance of what I hear from credible sources.

My issues are more on the resource wastage of most animal protein sources. There can be an advantage in using animals to gather nutrition from sparse vegetation which would be unsuitable as a human food source itself, as well as being very uneconomic to harvest directly. But this may not be overall more efficient than bringing in higher quality vegetable food from more productive land, rather than risking further stress an already fragile environment.

And , of course, the issue of methane production and its impact on Global Warming.

I have no problem in judging it far less feasible to 'cultivate' more intelligent and self-aware entities in a manner which did not constrain their potential quality of life-experience than creatures with much lower-level manifestation of such qualities.

This is separate from my 'gut' repugnance to the idea of using conscious and self-aware animals as a food source.

I say I have become a little more relaxed about meat consumption as such, as a result of actually thinking my way through such issues more deeply that I can remember doing for some time, if ever.

The main point is that I think I have broken the intuitive association between actually eating a piece of meat and the process of raising and in particular the necessary act of killing involved.

The more indirect is the connection between my action or choice and some possible act that I could see as having some moral negative, the less justified do I feel letting myself get concerned over it. Since in such cases, my individual choice may or may not have any bearing on whether a particular instance of moral harm occurs or not. Unless I eat a significant fraction of the amount of meat of that can be got from one individual animal, I will not likely lead to any extra killing over the corresponding period.

Assuming one can realistically assess the impact of some external imposition on a creature, relative to its valuation of its own continued existence, that still leaves the task of relating that to what a human may feel, our scale of value. I don't see it as valid to assign an equal value to life across a wide range of creatures. I think that varies quite a bit even among individual humans, and for one individual at different points in their life, and even from moment to moment. All those uncertainties and possibly arbitrary and/or subjective weighting of whatever we can objectively measure seem to me to make the detailed analysis you describe somewhat futile, beyond the broadest assessments, especially in any quantitative sense.

Another issue is that checking into the current nutrition analysis suggest to me that their may be more ready availability of some nutrients in some animal protein than I had allowed for.

I get the basics. I have no intention of knowingly eating monkey, dog, elephant, parrot, crow, whale, dolphin, etc or 'higher'. I have no intention of making anything much higher than pilchards or chicken a regular part of my diet. I just don't see as much point as you do, Blake, in going into such detailed analysis because of all the uncertainties and subjectivism involved.

And I do not put zero value on my own 'life-actualization' and health, so shunning the slightest possibility of 'harm', like Jaines going to great lengths to avoid stepping on even one ant, is not something I give great weight to, if it is likely to impact on my own activities significantly. Although, seriously, I do not like gratuitous killing of even ants.

I am not going to pretend I am fully consistent here, maybe more consistent than when I first started reading this thread.

I do have other things to worry about and agonize over...

 

Bob, unless you are freegan, your relationship really could not be more direct than market forces.

That's like saying that if I choose to build a patio out of cement (instead of wood, for example) that I'm not responsible for the massive amount of CO2 released in the manufacture of that cement because I didn't manufacture it, I just bought it and/or used it.





Now that's like saying "It's O.K. that I used a tonne of cement, because it wasn't enough to justify starting up and running the cement plant."  Bwuh??

This reasoning is only even remotely applicable to biproducts- such as gelatin- which have cheap plant replacements, and are only used because the animals are going to be killed for the primary products for market, and those left overs are *very* cheap.  Usually the same with products used in cosmetics, tires, making roads- there are replacements, but the slaughter houses have to figure out how to get rid of it so they practically give it away.

It's reasoning that would allow you to ignore the tiny micrograms of biproducts- as even PETA argues- but it does not allow one to ignore consumption of primary products.

If you eat ten percent, or even one percent of a cow, you are very much fractionally responsible for the suffering and death of a cow (doesn't matter if they were mixed up together, or however the pieces were delivered).


Freegan reasoning is *very* valid.  That is, if the bits you were eating were legitimately going to be thrown out and/or wasted otherwise, those don't weigh in as the reason the animal was killed.

Freegans, of course, who give a friend $5 and ask said friend to buy and throw out a hamburger aren't being legitimately freegan.


If you're partaking of part, no matter how small the fraction, of the primary product, that is a measure of moral responsibility- and that adds up over time.






Pleasure and pain are defining metrics of intelligence- they are the motive forces that prune adaptive information systems, intelligent self interest being that force of adaptation itself.  Whether it's on a computer, in a living brain, or possibly even over a longer scale in the evolution of societies, memes, or an entire gene pool- these things represent intelligences of a kind in that they are all adaptive systems of organized information, responding to pressures of pleasure and pain in their own ways, and the extent to which the motive forces give weight (the extent to which the pain and pleasure are real and significant) is very much the extent to which the being is intelligent.

We can compare the intelligence of an ant to the intelligence of a computer program, a human, or a society functioning as a single and abstract creature by its capacity to adapt and learn (it may turn out that any given religion, as a creature, is about half as bright as a fruit fly).

Yes, this is practically difficult, but it is neither arbitrary nor subjective.  Intelligence defines capacity for pain, because pain is a tool of intelligence, and while expression of intelligence is diverse, the core of what it is remains very basic.

A detailed analysis being practically difficult does not discount the moral weight of that potential analysis, nor mean that we should do anything less than act in accordance to our best estimates of that analysis if denied the appropriate information to carry it out.





These are generally minerals, the bioavailability of which in plants is highly contingent on preparation (particularly the neutralization of anti-nutrients and such things that can bind them). 

Funny thing about minerals, though, is that they are dirt cheap- multivitamins are marked up to an extreme degree- there's no economic/health argument for eating meat over just buying the minerals you want to top off on in bioavailable forms. 

And in all likelihood, you'd be getting all you need from plants anyway (even if you didn't pay any attention to preparation)- why fix a diet that isn't broken to begin with?  People do live as vegetarians, healthfully and without supplementing anything or being obsessive about balancing their diets.







Pig is conspicuously absent from the list, despite all testing indicating that they are higher than dogs.  I wonder if that was conscious.  I would admit the consistency of this line in the sand (though it is arbitrary) if not for that.  Not necessarily the morality (which would be better put at some 'breaking even' or other relative metric) but the arbitrary consistency.




Uncertain- yes, for some things.  That's why we have behavioral and neural science to look forward to.  In the mean time, though, we can still make our best guesses, and some things aren't so uncertain (e.g. pig > dog).

Subjectivity, though?  I'm not so sure about that.  I used to think so, but I'm dubious that there's much subjectivity to it at all anymore.  Subjectivity seems to come in more with regards to the degrees and ways we fall short of morality, rather than morality itself.





Nobody living does, and our own selves deserve some moral consideration- but those actions that are revealed which would not harm yourself and would reduce suffering for others seem to be inherently moral prerogatives.  Mellestad pointed out the slippery slope of it all earlier, and I think the "no net harm" plateau we discussed is one worth consideration.  It's very easy to offset the harm done by stepping on a few ants with just the slightest effort in good works.  We don't have to be obsessive to come out ahead of the curve.






I know this was to Bob, but from what I gathered- not at all.  I own my moral responsibility (instead of discounting it as non-existent) and aim to make up for it (it's just very easy to make up for, because it is very small).  Even a small immoral act doesn't vanish, but adds up (particularly small ones, because we aren't inclined to notice them).




Or the person who only eats whales.

If the moral arithmetic worked out like that, such would be the case.  In practice it seems that intelligence usually reduces faster than size, but that's a difficult metric to nail down without more testing and better standards.  I'm sure there are many obvious counterexamples too- ravens are probably more intelligent than cows, for example- big size difference there.  You could probably find a few common outliers like that which were certain (bigger size and less intelligence both).




Right, probably would be.  Figure out the relative moral value and volume of each animal, and encourage people to eat those with less moral weight per meal (find something along the lines of health reasons?).  Something like tuna, which is a *very* large fish, might be applicable here.  You might have to convert quite a few people to the lower moral impact diet to add up to one vegan, but it could be morally equivalent with regards to the total you cash in on.

One screw in the works, though, is that the environmental impact scales with size, and sometimes exponentially- which is also another major element- so that wouldn't be reduced at all.  However, with that you could purchase carbon credits from a carbon capture plant in the near future and just not use them for anything.  It would not be difficult or very expensive to buy your own carbon.

 

There's another way that might be an even greater return on your investment, though, and that is devoting the time/money to research and promotion of bioreacted meats.  If your efforts got them accepted by consumers and on the market a month sooner, or even a week sooner, you'd save more animals than you could ever possibly eat.

Of course, that's a risk because if it turns out that the company you supported fell through and somebody comes in with another method that was better, you kind of wasted your time/money on the wrong bet.  Tricky to gamble on the future like that.  Maybe just invest a little in everybody who's working on it; one of them has to pay off.  Although with research and government the way it is, it can take a significant amount of money just to speed things up the tiniest bit (likely at least tens of thousands of dollars to each major research endeavor).

Getting a few people to stop eating meat, or more than a few to eat less meat or to eat meat with less moral weight, might be a more practical and certain solution.  Even easier, you could reduce your meat consumption yourself, and when you do consume it, consume that which less moral weight such that you can pay it off more easily with minimal expense/effort.

This is good to hear

 

This is true, but recent studies and more extensive "extreme diets" (like 100% potato diets) have demonstrated that in practice this is good, but not really necessary for most foods.  Even those foods relatively short on certain amino acids contain some of them (gelatin is the only known food that is completely lacking in some essential amino acids)- if you'll compare the nutrition tables, you'll see the shortage vs. the RDA isn't really huge (usually by 10% -20%).  Eat a little more protein than would be needed if balanced (by 25% or so) and you're usually covered because you have enough of the limiting factor to reach your quota. 

Lack of adequate protein is mostly a concern for people who are dieting or restricting caloric intake to below 2000 calories a day.

That said, mixing food sources and having a balanced diet is still a good idea in general.

 

Mixed nuts are excellent, provided they aren't fried/covered in oil (I go for 'raw' nuts when I can, which aren't raw but are partially steamed).  An interesting evolutionary quirk, as I understand it (this isn't my theory, but as relayed to me):  Many nuts contain overloads in certain vitamins and minerals in 'attempt' to harm the health of those animals feeding on them (since they are seeds)- eating very large amounts (e.g. as a staple) of some nuts can be hazardous because they can cause an overdose in vitamins or minerals- I suppose that unlike poisons, vitamins and minerals can't be blocked or enzymatically defeated as easily because they are needed.  A side effect of this is that mixing nuts and eating in moderation serves as an excellent bioavailable multivitamin.

Usually around 25% of my calories come from a variety of bulk nuts and seeds (like sesame and flax- use a blender or coffee grinder to make a crushed powder that's great on almost anything, from cereal to pasta and steamed or sauteed veggies or salads) as opposed to standard grains, which make up another 50% or so.

 

That's understandable.

 

Yes, it would seem that eating lower on the food chain is inherently better regardless of the intelligence of the carnivore.

 

But assuming they both ate plankton, comparing their intelligences, I'd add up the sardines' intelligences as though they were simple processors in parallel against the more powerful processor of the tuna's intelligence.

 

One sardine 38 g

One Bluefin tuna 250,000 g

6579 sardines = 1 tuna

The processing power of 6,579 sardines' intelligence in parallel (not adding motor control reflexes of the brain) vs. the intelligence of one tuna.

Lacking studies on the IQs of tuna and sardines, I couldn't really say for sure.  If I had numbers on the brain mass of the animals I could make a better estimate, but in general, larger size allows more efficient allocation of cognitive resources (like motor control, which has to be repeated for every single Sardine) which is going to account for the majority of their cumulative brain size, leaving very little left over for net intelligence.  A tuna is almost certainly hundreds of times more intelligent, but it's hard to say if they are thousands of times more so.

 

PETA seems to think Tuna are fairly intelligent:

http://www.peta.org/living/vegetarian-living/Top-10-Reasons-Not-to-Eat-Tuna.aspx

 

Reason #1 and #3 are kind of the same, and #2 doesn't really make sense.  Actually, most of the reasons are the same.  Anyway...

 

It would be interesting to follow up on this Dr. Theresa Burt de Perera's research.  I wonder what species these are- it wouldn't be surprising if they were the larger species, though.  Each individual represents a greater resource investment for the species in larger animals, so a little investment into intelligence is more evolutionarily beneficial to protect that investment.

 

Anyway, as said earlier, it would seem that eating lower on the food chain is inherently better regardless of the intelligence of the carnivore, so the difference is kind of moot.  Of course, eating plants is even lower on the food chain, if we're capable of doing it healthfully (which, with overwhelming evidence, seems to be the case).

 

 

I don't think direct addition is necessarily correct.  Two processors with half the power don't amount to one whole; there is some small inherent overhead to distributed computing and parallel processing- whatever that theoretically ideal overhead is, I think, precisely defines the curve at which quantity compares to quality in an objective sense.

 

 

When we begin using uncertainties to justify our actions, they become all the more suspect because we will inevitably be stretching them beyond their rational bounds.  Not unlike the extent to which theists will justify increasingly absurd deities due to what they claim are uncertainties in science.  This is an unjustified rationalization, and a slippery slope. 

Somebody with no interest either way may be able to make a more objective analysis, but short that, when we have an interest in that interpretation, it's all the more reason not to trust it, and to stay in the safe (and rational) ground of abstaining for something more objectively certain.

 

Low is still very much real, though.  We could excuse anything based on the idea that other people are doing worse; that's not really a moral benchmark.  "Well, I only molested two kids today; all the other priests molested four or more, so I'm a good person"  I don't think that's really tenable as anything short of a rationalization.

The social norm is pretty bad, and while that might make you a better person than average, you may still be causing some very real net harm.  It seems like the "no net harm" route is the only objective starting point for being a net good for the world.

 

Regarding diametric good/bad; I think they can be, and have been, consistently misused and abused for the entirety of human history.  That doesn't mean that there isn't something more intelligent and objective we should be striving for, though.

 

 

There are some very convincing mock meats (particularly spiced).  While the texture can only reach processed meats (that would require emulating all of the tendons and muscle structure, which wouldn't be very economical), the recent advances in food science have created such artificial flavors as pork and bacon that are very nearly indistinguishable from the real thing (especially when there are other spices involved to distract from the tiny differences). 

I won't eat fake pork, because it tastes too much like pork.

You should try out some of the fake meats on the market.  They won't be able to copy the exact texture, except for as compared to processed meats, but particularly for pork, bacon bits and the like, it can be very close.  One of the primary differences is that they tend to be fat free, or free of saturated fat, which does make a flavor difference (because people who buy them are usually looking for healthier meats).  If you produced it yourself, though, you could likely use coconut or palm oil to contribute the saturated fats and get the flavor profile closer to a complete copy (granted, this wouldn't be much healthier, short of the lack of cholesterol- but saturated fat metabolism itself can contribute to cholesterol levels, so *almost* identical health-wise).

Not quantum uncertainty, because we are ultimately talking about statistical effects, but there is an uncertainty in some cases that comes from simple unknowns.

For example, fair trade goods: really 'fair' trade, or inflated values that disrupt the economics of the countries they come from causing farmers to grow surpluses of inedible goods and starve when they find out that the demand is limited and they can't eat coffee beans?

The cases of uncertainty stem from complex social dynamics, not from quantum effects or even chaos.

Those cases don't apply to the very simple and well understood economics of the meat industry.  If you buy more meat, more animals will be inseminated, born, raised in those conditions, and killed.  It's quite simple and linear, with few outside effects that could even come close in magnitude to the primary issue, and which don't add up to enough to even remotely obfuscate the issue.

This 'uncertainty' you're talking about really sounds more like rationalization.  You sound almost line Jean Chauvin here, that's bad news

Any legitimate morality, like any field of legitimate human knowledge, is based on probability; when it's so overwhelming, just because there might be a chance that something unexpected comes up doesn't nullify the knowledge of the probable or our responsibility to act in accordance to it.

There may be genuine grey areas that need more investigation, but their presence isn't an argument against those which are more certain, and consumption of primary animal products like farmed meat isn't one of those grey areas by a long shot.

 

 

This sounds very much like faith playing up against reason.  The religious certainly prefer their 'fuzzy' god intuitions over science.  How can we justify preferring a fuzzy moral intuition over a coherent form of what amounts to a moral science?

 

I think if you are going to insist on eating vegan you are much better off buying beans, lentils, peas and grains in bulk then stopping by your local farmers market for some fresh produce and cooking it yourself. It will be cheaper and taste much better. I think the fake meats are a waste of time. They taste nothing like meat and barely get an approximation of the texture. Just buy yourself some decent quality tofu.  

I probably wouldn't.  I am a snob with my real meat; I only buy from a trusted butcher or more often than not, kill and butcher the animal myself. So I doubt I would be impressed with any fake meat. I don't mind tofu and have used it in a variety of dishes instead of meat, but when cooking I treat it like tofu and don't pretend it is a steak.

 

Most of the fake meats I have had are simply ground tofu with spices and flavorings. I haven't tried the Match brand but I suspect that if one was so motivated you could get some really high quality tofu from your local Whole Foods and flavor it to your preference much cheaper.

 

I don't know, there just is so much really good tasting stuff you can make that is vegan I don't see a need to try to imitate meat. If you really want that meat flavor go to a butcher. But I am willing to try absolutely anything edible at least once so maybe I will try it. What flavor do you recommend?

 

edit: wow shipping is expensive, I will try it if I can find it somewhere locally. 

I am totally new here but very interested in this discussion.

 

 I am mostly vegan (cheese sometimes still) and staunchly atheist.  I think the moral issues are connected in some ways.  I don't want to cause the suffering of other people (not sardines) so I stay away from meat.

So much pollution is caused by the CAFO meat system that it is just devastating to the environment in many ways.

But maybe my biggest issues with our CAFO meat system is that is contributes to worldwide hunger.  We typically (although that is changing currently) have enough food to feed the world.  The problem is usually distributing it.  We feed so much grain to our animals to produce very inefficient meat for the richer part of the world to eat.  While many more people could have been fed on the grains.

If you put any thought into it all, it is hard to continue to support the CAFO in good conscience.  That is the biggest parallel I see to religion.  You do a little bit of learning about how it really works and you realize it is a harmful scam that is hard to support.  The only problem is most of us are addicting to the meat and diary industry in a physiological way.  That makes leaving it behind even more difficult.