Hi! Hello. In legal philosophy, ethics is considered to be deontological. This means that the validity of an action depends on its own foundation, not on the consequences that its exercise produces.
Veganism, as the basis of Animal Rights, rejects animal exploitation because sentience implies that an animal (like ourselves) has its own desires and interests that must be respected. Suffering is a consequence of exploitation; just as violence is also a consequence of someone treating a subject as if it were an object. If we said that veganism should avoid suffering, then we would be validating those forms of animal exploitation that do not âalwaysâ generate suffering (murder by anesthesia, bestiality, bareback riding, etc.). In other words, what is wrong is to treat a subject as a resource, regardless of the consequences.
We can only judge the consequences of an action when it is committed by a moral agent. Other animals are not moral agents. A herbivorous animal does not want to be hunted like we do, but we cannot condemn a lion or judge it. We can defend ourselves and avoid it, but nothing more. Our intervention in nature should be as light and fair as possible for all animals involved.
As I have tried to point out to the other user, science can evolve and change, of course. Plants would deserve respect if they would feel. If someone wants to be consistent, then they should avoid their exploitation and eat seeds, algae and fungi.
However, it is unreasonable, in any case, to rely on hypotheses to deny or reject logical reasoning based on accepted facts. If we know that animals feel and suffer, it doesnât matter that plants feel or not: that is irrelevant for animals. If animals feel and suffer, they deserve respect like human beings because they also want to be free, they do not want to be manipulated, confined or killed.
For everyone present, I would like to clarify that, as a biologist, I have studied plant physiology. I am not interpreting plants according to animal physiology. It happens that we do not know that in plants there is any mechanism equivalent to sentience in animals.
Scientifically it would be nonsense to say that a plant could feel. Sentience arose evolutionarily to modulate the locomotion of free-living organisms. Sintience is adaptive because it induces an animal to flee from danger or a predator, learn to recognize food, etc. Instead, a plant is a sessile being; does not move from their site. If there is a fire in the forest, the tree burns. It makes no sense for their body to alert them to danger or to suffer for it.
This fact is empirically proven: animals that abandon free life and become parasites (such as intestinal tapeworms) have been losing their sintience to feel over time. In theory, within millions of years they could lose virtually any memory or consciousness.
But you donât have any problem with the same animal being exploited by another animal, even if you put it knowingly in this situation (âreintegrate into natural habitatsâ), together with other parts of its natural ecosystem (reintroducing âexterminated carnivorous animalsâ), completely ignoring its desire to live unharmed.
That makes no sense to me. Either there is suffering or not, and if there is (even a little bit, or sometimes), shouldnât you try to stop it?
To be fair, it also would be really bad news in regards to your menu. Itâs literally a question of life and death at this point. Your or the carrot. And the carrot needs to die if this is to end well.
Hi! I will try to cite your texts, as you do, to make it easier to read.
I try to adjust, as much as possible, to the meaning of things to offer an understandable context. Ethics, like mathematics itself, starts from an axiom. By definition, the logical is what does not lead to contradiction and the illogical is what it does lead to. Humans are illogical, but it is sought that ethics is not.
There are only two options: that an animal is free or that it is not. If we understand that an animal deserves to be free, then we cannot deprive it of freedom. In nature there are dangers and suffering. We must intervene when something happens due to human causes (for example, a fire caused by human beings), but we do not have the legitimacy to interfere in their lives because that would lead to dependency and they would not be able to survive on their own.
The other option would be to have them deprived of their liberty, but not to be exploited. This is the option that we consider acceptable in the short term with millions of domesticated animals. It is the option that we practice in shelters and with our rescued animals. However, it is not ideal for humans to be master of animals forever.
The reason for my insistence on âunderestimating sufferingâ is because there are postmodern movements that claim to defend animals when, in reality, they defend extreme welfarism. This is the case of âpainismâ:
Painism denies science and advocates that the only interest of animals is ânot to sufferâ and that the duty of humans lies in âgiving pleasureâ to them. In this way, pananimists defend domestication, genetic manipulation of animals and the extermination of all carnivorous animals to âeliminate suffering in nature.â This is totally opposed to Animal Rights.
Yes, it would be bad news if it was real. Even so, ethics tells us that it is better to avoid all possible harm than to commit all possible harm when it is impossible to avoid it. It is called the ânirvana fallacyâ to the belief or justification that, since we cannot avoid damage in its entirety, then we have no responsibility for it. I try to combat this fallacious reasoning to point out that our small daily actions can go a long way.
The other user said that he was a vegetarian and replied that he âcompletely disagreedâ with me. Agreeing or disagreeing requires expressing an argument (as you are doing in this conversation). However, on a day-to-day basis, one realizes that the majority of society agrees with you when your arguments agree with their beliefs and interests, however, most people begin to reject your arguments (even violently) when it is pointed out that their beliefs or actions arenât coherent. In short, if someone cares about animals, going vegan is the first step. We cannot avoid all damage or be consistent, but discriminate between animals or their products (milk, honey, eggs, etc.) and making excuses for it is inherently irrational.
Not all animals feel. Sponges and bryozoans (microscopic marine organisms) are not supposed to feel. However, jellyfish do. We have a duty not to exploit those who feel and to give the benefit of the doubt to those who find themselves in an extreme situation. Painismists advocate the consumption of bivalves. For them it is an obsession to justify the exploitation of any animal that does not have a centralized nervous system.
To finish I would like to recommend a very inspiring documentary (without explicit violence). Itâs about âPeaceable Kingdomâ, a documentary about a family of ranchers who turns their farm into an animal sanctuary:
You can watch it for free on the authorsâ website.
If those ethics are applied selectively, they donât matter much anyways. Iâll explain later in this post.
Well, if theyâre going to die in that fire anyways, three things are for certain: 1) they donât care who caused the fire, 2) they feel really bad and 3) their survival ends right there.
Which leads us to the following imaginary situation, if taken literally: You, the animal-activist, stand next to it and shrug (âNature⊠crazy, huh?â) while I, the meat-eater, am running for the hose.
Even worse: If you think this through to the end, the only ethical conclusion would be to condemn all of those animals (the descendants of those animals to be precise) to a certain death. All of them. Not tomorrow, but inevitably. We might be able to leave this planet before the sun starts to swallow it, they donât.
If you (not you, generally speaking) could prevent that, but donât, because interference and stuff⊠That doesnât sound super ethical, to be honest. You might as well eat them.
I was about to ask this. We might be able to find some common ground right there.
No only that, but itâs also a weird concept to eliminate animal suffering by killing a looot of animals. I mean, technically all suffering ends once everything is dead, but⊠No. Usually I try to stay away from -ists.
All possible harm is quite a lot. You donât have to torture animals for years to eat them, itâs sufficient to kill them once. The question is: Does âdeathâ count as an avoidable harm?
Thatâs not my belief. Iâm totally responsible for my food. And I like it as happy as possible.
Now thatâs kind of good news. I never enjoyed jellyfish. Are there two kinds of placoderms? I always thought thatâs a prehistoric fish (like that one).
Iâm not one of those crazies. If itâs tasty, Iâm not opposed to eating it, nervous system or not. Not a huge fan of clams, though.
This claim requires some support. Atomic-scale deposition is something I know quite a bit about, and I would not describe it as either âfastâ or âcheap.â
True, if we choose to stop this development (or hit a hard technological wall), it will stay slow and expensive. All I can offer is the 20th century with all of those crazy, big, expensive inventions, that are now everywhere and cheap.
One of the reasons why transistors (for instance) are everywhere and cheap is that making them smaller reduces the cost of each one. That is, the unit cost of making a silicon wafer stays (more or less) constant, but that cost is spread among more and more transistors.
The problem with chemical synthesis generally, and chemical synthesis of food in particular, is that the same economics donât apply. To get 100 grams of protein, you need a fixed quantity of carbon molecules, which are bound together with a fixed quantity of energy. PLUS whatever energy is lost during the synthesis. You can make the synthesis more efficient (to a point), but you canât change the constituents of the protein itself.
I get your point. But even if we assume energy to be the only changing part in this picture, the price of energy isnât fixed (it will decrease dramatically by midcentury and beyond if we keep on track with fusion; and if not, thatâs a huge problem in itself).
Hi! It may have been misunderstood, but when I talk about veganism I try to differentiate its definition from what a human being could do. By this I mean that the fact that veganism does not refer to suffering (because it refers to exploitation by definition of its authors: Donald Watson and Leslie Cross), does not mean that a vegan does not have sensitivity towards animals or does not seek save them.
To understand this nuance, it is necessary to distinguish between moral actions and virtuous actions. A moral action is one that conforms to ethics and one that we must comply with to be fair. A virtuous action, on the other hand, is an action that we do not have the obligation to comply with but it is fair and positive if it is carried out.
For example, a human being does not have a moral obligation to adopt other humans or animals for whose origin they were not responsible. However, adopting is a virtuous action because it is positive for the victims.
In the case you raise, a vegan would save animals from a fire and other events. But there is a crucial difference between considering it a virtuous action and a moral action. In fact, as I said, extreme welfarists tend to deny this difference and assume that humans have an obligation to make carnivorous animals extinct in order to avoid suffering in the world.
Ethically, our duty would be to avoid the suffering that we cause. We can avoid the suffering of others whenever we want, but this does not become a moral duty; because we are not responsible for the evils that occur in the world and we cannot have an obligation if there is no responsibility for a subject or an object. Moral duty is always subject to a responsibility incurred through previous actions.
The ultimate goal of welfarism is the extinction of sentient life. During black slavery, staunch welfarists assumed or accepted that it was best for black people to go extinct, as they would never be able to integrate into âwhiteâ civilization or be independent. Note that, at the time, a ânaturalâ difference between human races was assumed by divine design.
You are responsible for the animals that are raised and killed to feed you, of course. Based on the arguments put forward, you should stop seeing animals as food just like our parents and grandparents stopped seeing blacks as chattel property.
That a master seeks the happiness of slaves has the sole purpose of reassuring his conscience in the face of the tendency and management of slaves.
Yes, youâre right. I got confused with the names because I was reading zoology papers. I was thinking of bryozoans:
That a master seeks the happiness of slaves has the sole purpose of reassuring his conscience in the face of the tendency and management of slaves.
The taste or pleasure does not justify any action. I think it is unnecessary to remember that a rapist or a pedophile enjoys what they do. If you understand that an animal does not want to be hunted by another, is it possible to deny that it did not want to be enslaved or killed by you?
Hi! Regarding Peter Singer, I would just like to comment that he is the modern reference of welfarism. Often there are those who affirm that this gentleman is the âfather of Animal Rightsâ. That leads to confusion because Peter Singer does not defend Animal Rights. He only proposes that animals be raised as âhumanelyâ as possible before being killed.
The general society usually only remembers the death of animals, but most of the life of an enslaved animal is equally unfair and painful. The enslaved animals (depending on the species) are branded, castrated, ripped off their horns, forced to eat, separated from their young, tamed or trained (phenomenon of learned helplessness) until, when they are no longer useful, they are killed.
Death, then, is only the peak of an oppressive system. Nothing that makes up said system can make it ethical.
Yes, that was indeed the case for decades. But weâre past âit should workâ (soonâą) and achieving energy excess. Thereâs even a solution for the âTritium-bottleneckâ (basically the reactor breeds its own fuel, which sounds counter-intuitive at first).
Although the latest experiment produced a net energy gain compared to the energy of the 2.05 megajoules in the incoming laser beams, NIF needed to pull 300 megajoules of energy from the electrical grid in order to generate the brief laser pulse. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html
I still donât understand what they try to achieve, since this brilliant idea would likely kill all other animals (later), too.
How is this not a suicide mission for the welfarists?
Maybe Iâm stupid, but sometimes these nuances seem to get in the way of understanding what is actually meant⊠It sounds like a really stupid idea. Or itâs me. What did I miss?
Even if one holds this belief, itâs quite a stretch to jump from âthey have a miserable lifeâ to âwhy not just kill them allâ. I mean. What?!
My parents and grandparents had other problems than thinking about slavery. But okay. If animals stop looking like food, I stop seeing them as food.
This kind of makes sense in the context of enslaving humans, but I donât think the chickens are going to rebel or something. And I donât care if donât like me. Theyâre dead at this point anyways.
But Iâm not raping underaged animals. I can only speak for myself, though.
And I intend to leave it standing there. (But I see what you mean; based on the wording of this article âgainâ looks like an euphemism, to say the least.)
If Iâm wrong, and by end of this decade thereâs not a single reactor continuously and over an extended period of time (at least weeks) pumping energy into the grid, without consuming the last available crumbs of Tritium, you can officially assign me a badge titled âstupid prophetâ or something. I will not complain.
