bungalow

what sort of advice is this? you admit in the preceding clause that this is something within our control, why should someone who wants to make a difference devote their energy elsewhere? and what are these far greater ethical concerns? the way humans treat the living beings with whom we share this planet seems like a rather large, valid concern. sure there are others, perhaps a few you might consider "greater" but i don't see how that means we should divert attention from this issue.

Arya Stark

This is my favourite. I have it on my guitar case.

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noise

i recall a discussion i had with my vegetarian cousin last year. she was shoe shopping, and was adamant about not buying anything made from animal products. it was a major driving force that completely shaped the shopping event.

once she chose a pair, i asked her if she was also concerned about the possibility that the non-leather designer shoes she was about to buy were produced in sweat shops by children. she hadn't thought of that...

as we spoke about it, i realized her behavior was a trend. she always stopped to check the ingredients of the food stuffs she bought, but never once thought about who was picking her Starbucks coffee beans.

my point is that vegetarians are a so passionate about their little fight, but they are often oblivious to other, more pressing issues.

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my flac collection

boo boo

I disagree, looks like a tasty nugget to me.

Also what kind of guitar do you have?

Meh. I'm not big on beans at all.

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It's only knock n' knowall, but I like it

http://www.last.fm/user/kingboobs

boo boo

I already don't like you.

Everyone has seen these videos and no one is oblivious to what meat industries do. But for you to think anyone can be swayed to your point of view from watching a PETA video is incredibly insulting.

If you don't support the meat industry solely because of their treatment of animals, then you could easily look for organic meat products, which is what I'd recommend to anyone who only has a problem with meat because of the treatment of animals and issues like steroids and so on.

A f*cking PETA video isn't gonna convince anyone that ALL meat eating is bad under any circumstances, if you were swayed into believing that, you're easily swayable.

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It's only knock n' knowall, but I like it

http://www.last.fm/user/kingboobs

VEGANGELICA

I agree with you, Tore, that compassion for non-human animals is mostly an evolutionary byproduct of our ability to have compassion (for certain) people. My observation is that humans have the innate ability to feel empathy and caring for others, both human and non-human animals, but environment has a big hand in shaping whom we include within the circle of compassion.

Evidence that whom we care about, and don't want to eat, is primarily learned rather than inherited:

(1) Some people truly love their pets, wanting these individual animals to have full, long and happy lives for the pets' sake, and they would adamantly refuse to eat their pets. This shows that people, even meat-eaters, *can* feel great compassion for animals. If people can feel compassion for one animal, two animals, three animals, etc., then they have the capacity to feel it for more.

(2) People who are meat-eaters sometimes convert to vegetarianism for emotional, ethical reasons: they begin to feel regret about killing and eating an animal...just like you would feel regret about killing and eating a human. People's emotions toward animals can change and are *not* fixed.

(3) People's compassion for other humans is *very* much shaped by their environment/culture...and so it is logical to conclude that the degree to which they value animals' lives is also greatly affected by experiences/culture.

If you have not done so, I recommend you read some Holocaust concentration camp survivors' accounts of people's brutality and callousness toward other humans, for example Ana Novac's The Beautiful Days of My Youth, or Schoschana Rabinovici's Thanks to My Mother. Also, observe the development of genocides (common around the world) and the policies that exacerbated them. For example, the U.S. intentionally limited the number of Jewish people who could come here during WWII, even after the U.S. government knew of the Holocaust and what such limitations would cause: more deaths.

History and the present show that people are very capable of feeling other humans' lives have little or no value, just as people are capable of feeling animals' lives are of little or no value.

I agree with you that people are not meat-eating machines: many thoughts are involved in the process by which people learn to feel that some other individual, whether human or non-human animal, has no inherent worth and is expendable. However, I feel people do sometimes end up as meat-eating machines, lacking feelings and thoughts as they eat animals as if those animals were no different than oranges. Remorseless. Unperturbed. Unable to comprehend or be affected by the fact that the victim's life had value to her.

Because people feed massive quantities of grain to livestock animals, removing meat from the human diet would in fact free up more food (protein, carbohydrates, vitamins) as grain, vegetables, and beans to feed to people...and it would reduce the use of resources such as fresh water and petroleum, which are guzzled by the animal industry.

If humanity right now tried to raise all livestock "free-range," the quantity of meat that people could consume would plummet...either that, or the human population would have to be severely reduced to maintain (or achieve) the current per capita level of meat consumption.

I agree with you, Freebase, that my vegan wishes are far from the values of most humans. I am not trying to get compromise by asking just for compromise; I am trying to show that people can go farther than compromise, and that the benefits of doing so outweigh the negatives some feel exist.

I agree with you that people are naive when they believe this easy-get developed, industrialized life (in the developed world) is forever. Eventually, when petroleum and coal runs out (in the not-to-distant future), our standard of living by some measures will decrease. Hopefully during that time we will work to help raise the standards of living of the billions of people living on a few dollars a day...and not decimate what remains of natural ecosystems through direct destruction and climate change.

I do not "look to nature" to support humans eating meat because (1) people do not require meat in their diets to live healthful lives, (2) efficiency in nature can be cruel and undesirable.

Freebase, do you feel justified in feeling any set of values is better than another, or do you follow relativism?

I feel the Nazi ideal of killing Jewish people was wrong, and assume you do, too. I feel it was wrong when the U.S. military exploded women and a child in Iraq to capture al-Zaqawi USATODAY.com - Military says bomb killed Zarqawi. (I wrote the newspapers about my horror at this "U.S. success.") I assume you also dislike it when the U.S. accepts killing people as "collateral damage" to achieve goals. Finally, I feel it is wrong to raise animals to kill them and "harvest" their parts, even though doing so has some benefits for people.

All my moral stands have the same basis: I have the ideal that it is good to let sentient beings live and enjoy their lives, and I feel this is a better ideal than wanting to kill others and take pleasure from their deaths. I do not feel I am "better" overall than you, Freebase (I know you know I quite like you despite...or maybe because of ...our chafing) but I do feel my ideal for how people should treat animals is kinder than yours.

DeathBreath, I think many people who feel eating animals is acceptable simply don't *feel* empathy for animals, and so such movies don't stir them...as you can see from responses in this thread. When people feel another individual's life is of little value (not worth saving, for that individual's sake), then the movies that affect you and me will not have an effect on them.

Here's a short movie I'd like people to watch so they can share their reactions: a young man and some friends surround a frightened lamb (they call it "Jumpy"), preparing to decapitate it, and the movie shows the "hilarious" decapitation. I am revolted by their lack of concern for this animal...they reduce its life and death to a joke. My guess is DeathBreath and other vegetarians feel the same. I wonder what most meat-eaters feel when they watch this movie and hear the giddy laughter of the videographer?
Lamb Slaughter: the decapitation

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Arya Stark

Hahaha it does NOT look like a tasty nugget! xD
I have a Jasmine Takamine, lemme find it.

I doesn't look like much, in the picture.
But I liked that it didn't have a glossy finish like a lot of acoustic guitars do.



Also, I meant I have it on my guitar case, I don't keep stickers on my guitar. Hehe.
I have a bunch of stickers on it, and all of the vegan and vegetarian ones were from some concert., you know how they hand those out, I'm sure.
Most of them are bands and such, though.

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Guybrush

I think I should've written that edit a bit better perhaps. I didn't mean to say your compassion for non-humans is completely wired.

When it comes to human social interactions (like cannibalism), my point was more that as a highly social species, I think we favour strategies that are likely to result in peaceful interactions with other people. I don't think most of us extend that sort of concern to animals. Basically, at some level there is a difference between humans and other animals that is important which has nothing to do with intelligence or capacity for pain. At some point, I think most of us have more concern for humans than other species animals simply because they are humans. This is what I think is wired as in it's been a general adaptive trait in our evolutionary history.

Culture can of course turn everything upside down and play havoc with what I just wrote, for example by the way it defines the "us" and "them" as you point out. This is something I of course am well aware of but chose to disregard as I don't think it falsifies my original assumption that we in general tend to elevate humans over other animals when it comes to moral considerations. I think holocaust and so on are examples that took place despite this capacity.

The whole point of my edit was really just to suggest that to humans in general, other humans are not simply animals like a cow or pig. Although it can be explained by culture, I think it's also part explained by our biology. If you accept that, using logic as a way to say we could just as well eat humans as non-human animals then fails (we're not machines, we're humans!).

edit :

I'm talking about general trends here - averages - which I tend to assume is a given! Certainly there are cultures who treat certain people "worse" than animals and cultures that eat other humans, though I'm not sure in the latter if the role of humans in the diet is normally explained by them being regarded as food. There may be other cultural reasons why people want to be cannibals.

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Freebase Dali

I'd say that at the heart of matters I adhere to variants of relativism with personal caveats. But for practicality, I'm far more flexible.

Ultimately, I don't think anything is sacred at all, but there are many reasons why one should believe the opposite. Civilization depends on it. But stripping away all the societal obligations, the illusion of unity for anything other than survival, the technology, the politics, the religion, the morality, the ideals and the "intelligence" to understand it all.. we're just animals like the rest of nature's beasts.
But since we are who we are, my accepted man-made morality includes only the simple rule of regarding other human life like you would your own.
If I were an animal out in nature with no better sense, I'd generally be doing the same.

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VEGANGELICA

I pretty much agree with your whole post, Tore. I think, though, that I feel people have a greater ability than you think to see other humans as useful, exploitable beings rather than as beings with inherent worth.

I've read that tribal humans (during our hunter-gatherer phase) would meet a person from another tribe, sit down and figure out if they were distant relatives, and, if not, try to kill (and eat) each other. I think humans generally care most strongly about close family...and sometimes even that breaks down.

People like to eat. Sometimes that just seems to be more important to them than almost all other concerns. The Neandertals' bones have a lot of cut marks in them...suggesting humans ate them, regardless of how similar they were to our human ancestors. I often think that if people could bring back the dinosaurs, people would just eat them, too.

Sometimes I feel we humans can be very selfish and self-centered and that bothers me when the result of our self-centered actions is to cause others to suffer.

Everything you said, Freebase, is almost exactly what I would say about myself. I also don't think anything, ultimately, is sacred, but I have many reasons for my self-created morality. I do feel very much that I'm just an animal like the rest of nature's beasts. And I do try to treat other human life as I would my own. Thanks for answering!

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