Hehe, I love serious and civil discussion too and it's some of what I like to do the most here
It's appearant you've obviously thought about this a lot because there's validity to every point. I still see some points where I disagree a little, so :
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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
(1) Many natural behaviors are ones that most people would not feel are ethical (would not want people to emulate).
If we are to look to nature as a guide for what we feel is ethical behavior, and therefore conclude that it is ethical for humans to kill other animals, then shouldn't we also be emulating the male lion's actions when he takes over a pride after killing or driving off the previous lead male? The new male lion typically kills and eats the children of the predecessor, and then impregnates all the females. If we aren't going to emulate the lion in its child-killing behavior, then why should we emulate it in its antelope-killing behavior?
This is an example of why people may not want to use nature as a guide for what they wish to consider as ethical, unless we wish to condone and support murder, infanticide, rape, male domination over female, etc. etc.
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Of course I never meant that we should emulate lions, only that from some point and up until recently in the course of our evolutionary history, we relied on animals for food - just like lions or wolves. It was a comparison.
I think a lot of our morals come from our own biology as social animals. Humans have great care for eachother, especially those they consider part of "us" and not "them". We've evolved for living in groups who cooperated and made it together, no doubt with a lot of family relations. If you could look at very primitive societies and their culture, I don't think child killing, murder and rape would be as dominant and accepted as you insinuate and it's our own primitive behaviour, not that of the lion, that we would "emulate" through hunting.
Though you could for good reason say it's not really "emulation" because we haven't changed that much biologically since then. I know it's a popular myth that humans are an awful, hateful species but I don't agree. I think it's up to the "us" (meaning people whom your fitness is partially dependent on - or that you treat as such) and "them" (the people you are in a competition for resources against, such as those from another tribe or social group). I think generally, most treat those they consider "us" very well.
Of course, there are exploitation strategies in nature (rape, vampire bats only taking and not sharing blood, sneaky f*cker fish that infiltrate dominant males harems and look like females), but no animals except the exploiters benefit from those and counter-strategies usually evolve, so I think those are besides the point. A population that only had exploiters would do much worse and might die out completely and generally, they do better the less exploitation there is. That's also a "moral" lesson one could learn from nature.
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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
(2) Humans generally develop a greater capacity for complex moral reasoning than other animals, as best we can tell, and so it is fair to hold humans to a different standard.
For example, when a lion kills an antelope, I agree with you that the lion is not acting immorally because as far as I know the lion is not capable of thinking about its food, which it must eat to survive, in ethical terms. This is not to say lions don't feel affection, love, devotion, kindness, etc. (for other lions, for example), but they probably do not have these feelings for their prey. Humans, meanwhile, naturally can have feelings for other animals, and have the capacity to care about them, and so if a human were to go out and kill an antelope I would not judge that using the same ethical ruler I use when observing the lion's behavior.
Similarly, with human children, we do not expect them to have learned or developed the moral capacities of older adults. This is reflected in the legal repercussions that result when children vs. adults break a law: the punishment is usually lighter for a child. It is not as unethical when a child hits me on the leg as it is when a full adult, whom we expect to have developed the ability for speech and self-control, punches me. So, if a dog goes out and kills a cat, I will be less upset with the dog than if a teenage son goes out and kills a cat, because the latter behavior suggests a scary lack of compassion for another being...(unless the animal is a pig..then most people condone it...but why the difference?). I will feel equally sad for the cat, in both scenarios.
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I agree that we have more capacity for moralistic concern, at least intellectually, than other animals. And also your points about children!
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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
(3) A third problem I see with using nature as a guide for ethics: When something occurs in nature (such as predation), this does not mean it is "good" or "bad"...it could be both.
For example, whenever my child and I watch a nature show and we see a lion killing an antelope, I explain the situation (the lion needs to eat other animals in order to survive), and I say, "When the lion kills the antelope, this is good for the lion and bad for the antelope." Whether something is ethical usually depends on whose viewpoint one is taking :-).
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I agree that good or bad is entirely relative .. Unless you were out in nature and starving and could catch and eat a salmon. Then catching and killing the salmon would be a good thing, at least most people should agree
However, of course I do know that most of us are not out there starving in nature.
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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
Tore, I feel you make the very valid point...which is one of the strongest arguments in support of people eating animals products...that for many people in the world where the land is not suitable for agriculture, given that people live there, then their only current option may be to eat animal products they get from grazing animals.
Like you note, though, in Norway presumably much food can be imported (vegetables, fruits), and so one *could* import more beans/grains if people wished to be vegan. I am thinking more of the developing countries where due to poverty people can afford to buy very little and may depend on cattle for their survival. That situation is much more similar to the lion and the antelope.
It is true that I would feel more likely to drink a domesticated cow's milk or eat eggs if I were assured the animals were happy, able to express their natural desires, form family and friendships, etc....plus be allowed to live out their lives in full. I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian for such a long time because I didn't realize that people kill all male chicks of egg-laying breeds, or kill the male calves of dairy cows, etc.
I've enjoyed discussing with you the age-old topic of humanity's relationship with, and responsiblity for, other animals!
--Erica
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I don't think it would be good for Norway to stop animal farming because then those farmers would go out of business or do something else, Norway would lose some of it's autonomy and there's
a lot of culture tied up in animal farming. Norway is not part of the EU and a big part of that is because we want to protect our agriculture from the outside markets from which they can't compete with. We all agree to pay a little more for our typical farm products so that it's possible to make a living being a farmer. It may sound ironic, but hundreds and hundreds of years of animal farming also has created some of our rarest habitats (particularly sheep grazed mountaineous areas and islands in the west) and these are in danger of getting lost to reforestation and other successive events taking place when you remove grazers, so you could say from a point of view, there's even an ecological concern.
There are of course a lot of factors playing in how we view things. I'm guessing that for you, being a vegan is a very emotional choice - examplified by the story about when you were 5. When I was a kid, my father taught me how to fish and gut fish, how to fish crabs and so on so all this is, for me, entirely natural. However, I'm not entirely sure what else it means to be a vegan. For example, vegans are against milk - but as you know, breeding has turned cows into animals that produce a lot of milk and if you don't milk them, they are not happy (which is why the automated barn works, the animals choose to get milked). You then have to admit that you using milk doesn't
have to go hand in hand with animal suffering, there are exceptions. As long as there are cows, there's milk so we won't get rid of it until there are no more cows and if we do get rid of it, that would have a massive impact on culture such as cooking or even religion.
Now I'm extrapolating to the point where it's ridiculous of course
but I guess what I'm wondering is are you against milk when you think it causes suffering or are you always against it? If you had one industry which caused suffering to cows and one that had happy cows, could you as a vegan support the good one?