Food ethics: How do you choose what species are morally wrong to eat?

@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Ethical moral, I would respond.

From a logical perspective it doesn't make any difference to the fallacy. Your argument really centers on whether it "is still important today" and not whether it can be described as being 'natural'.

If we can really replace it without biological consequence is a good question but just because we evolved that way doesn't make it right as long as we really have the choice.

Some people clearly don't, so I think the most defensible vegetarian position is that less is ideal but that eating animals may be inevitable for some and is acceptable in the context of human survival.

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@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

I would say that in this case we evolved that we for good reason - to take advantage of high-energy density food sources, something which is still important today.

How is that morally relevant in the environment of today, when our dominant nutritional problem is that our food sources are too energy-dense?

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

joefromchicago wrote:
Well, that's simply wrong. I have no idea why you'd say that. I imagine that a cannibal absolutist would not end up in the same place as a non-cannibal utilitarian even if they implicitly assume the same facts.

This is where this particular subthread reaches a level of hair splitting where I get off.

Well, as the great philosopher Clint Eastwood said in Magnum Force, "a man's gotta' know his limitations."

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@Thomas,

I agree. We evolved to like sugar as well. But now that we can extract it and use it pure we are driven to consume much more of it than is healthy and much more than we would if we had to consume it through the mediums we evolved the taste for it (fruit etc).

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:
It has not been my experience that Vegetarianism is consistent with top physical performance, not in the slightest.

Do you remember Carl Lewis, the sprinter and long-jumper? He held several world records in his heyday -- and he was a vegan. I can believe that the particular vegetarian diet you tried didn't work you. But you cannot draw any broader conclusions than that. In particular, you cannot conclude that no vegetarian diet would work for you.

I figured when I wrote that, that the response would be a cherry-picking of one or two athletes who were in fact Veggie or Vegans; but that's hardly representative of the entire population, and so doesn't really provide meaningful evidence that this is something that would work for everyone.

I've never tried a Vegetarian diet - nor do I intend to. My sharp teeth are not for biting through carrots, they are for tearing meat apart - this is plainly obvious for an evolutionary standpoint. And that is entirely what I intend for them to continue to be used for.

I have yet to see a compelling case from anyone as to why meat should NOT be eaten, other than a personal decision to do so. Death of animals (and pain issues) are a natural part of life and not morally or ethically wrong in the slightest. And I don't exempt myself from this; if I were to be killed, I have no qualms about being eaten afterward. In fact, this has been my long-standing death wish: to be made into a fine, rich soup and enjoyed by my surviving friends and family, to become part of their essence.

My wife tells me not to count on that happening, but I'm putting it in the will.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:
I would say that in this case we evolved that we for good reason - to take advantage of high-energy density food sources, something which is still important today.

How is that morally relevant in the environment of today, when our dominant nutritional problem is that our food sources are too energy-dense?

Perhaps that is your dominant nutritional problem. It isn't mine. I have a lot of physical activity in my life, and I need all the energy I can get.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

I agree. We evolved to like sugar as well. But now that we can extract it and use it pure we are driven to consume much more of it than is healthy and much more than we would if we had to consume it through the mediums we evolved the taste for it (fruit etc).

This is a question of moderation and control, not morality or ethics. Or else the same argument could be used to say that we shouldn't be eating refined sugar at all.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

I figured when I wrote that, that the response would be a cherry-picking of one or two athletes who were in fact Veggie or Vegans; but that's hardly representative of the entire population, and so doesn't really provide meaningful evidence that this is something that would work for everyone.

Come now, it was in response to your own anecdotal evidence so you can't play the anecdotal card without examining that it was all that substantiated the original claim.

There actually are studies that make a strong case for vegetarianism being biologically viable that I'm sure someone can dig up if your evidence ever gets beyond the anecdotal.

Quote:

I've never tried a Vegetarian diet - nor do I intend to. My sharp teeth are not for biting through carrots, they are for tearing meat apart - this is plainly obvious for an evolutionary standpoint. And that is entirely what I intend for them to continue to be used for.

This is the naturalistic fallacy.

Quote:

I have yet to see a compelling case from anyone as to why meat should NOT be eaten, other than a personal decision to do so. Death of animals (and pain issues) are a natural part of life and not morally or ethically wrong in the slightest. And I don't exempt myself from this; if I were to be killed, I have no qualms about being eaten afterward. In fact, this has been my long-standing death wish: to be made into a fine, rich soup and enjoyed by my surviving friends and family, to become part of their essence.

That's a poor analogy. The animals don't die of natural causes and then get eaten, we kill them to eat them. So if you really don't exempt yourself you should not just be fine with being eaten after you die, but with being killed for that purpose.

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

This is a question of moderation and control, not morality or ethics. Or else the same argument could be used to say that we shouldn't be eating refined sugar at all.

It's not an argument that we should not eat sugar, it's an argument that counters your specific one that it's right to eat because we evolved the taste for it.

That point is that what we evolved to like may neither be healthy or ethical, not that we shouldn't eat refined sugar at all (which just happens to be a rule I grew up under and happily broke free from).

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@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

That's a poor analogy. The animals don't die of natural causes and then get eaten, we kill them to eat them

Being killed by another animal for food is an eminently natural way to die. It's pretty high up there on the cause of death for animals, I would figure.

Quote:

So if you really don't exempt yourself you should not just be fine with being eaten after you die, but with being killed for that purpose.

Other than the humanistic social mores and practical ethical concerns surrounding murder, I have no real objection to dying in this manner. All animals value their own life and fight to protect it and I would do no different, but that doesn't change the underlying facts of the situation at all.

If a hungry lion jumped on me, killed me and ate me - I would be upset for personal reasons, but I certainly wouldn't think the lion had done anything wrong at all. It's a perfectly normal way to die.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Other than the humanistic social mores and practical ethical concerns surrounding murder, I have no real objection to dying in this manner.

Those ethical concerns are the very subject we are discussing, disregarding them for the analogy makes it a poor one. Few people object to the consumption of meat if you remove the ethical choice of killing the animal to provide the meat.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:
Other than the humanistic social mores and practical ethical concerns surrounding murder, I have no real objection to dying in this manner.

Those ethical concerns are the very subject we are discussing, disregarding them for the analogy makes it a poor one. Few people object to the consumption of meat if you remove the ethical choice of killing the animal to provide the meat.

I suppose I meant animalistic morality; my desire not to be murdered for food is no different than any other creature who ever lived, and no more relevant, from a natural law point of view.

I have made an ethical and moral choice that my actions are no different than other animals, and that there's nothing wrong with them at all. As I said earlier, I still haven't seen what the convincing argument is for NOT eating meat - other than some discussion of the high amounts of energy it takes to produce said meat.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

I figured when I wrote that, that the response would be a cherry-picking of one or two athletes who were in fact Veggie or Vegans;

No cherry-picking about it. When you advance a general claim that vegetarianism is inconsistent with top physical performance, one counterexample is enough to conclusively rebut it. But I admit I don't have very broad statistics on the issue. Vegans make up only about two percent of the general population. The share of top athletes is even smaller. There simply aren't enough vegan top athletes in the world to allow for a solid statistical analysis.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Perhaps that is your dominant nutritional problem

Touche!

Cycloptichorn wrote:

It isn't mine. I have a lot of physical activity in my life, and I need all the energy I can get.

If total energy is the problem, as opposed to energy density, you could solve the problem by eating more. After all, noone disputes that you get more calories out of an acre's worth of nutrition if you eat the corn or wheat on it directly, without passing it through pigs and chicken first.

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

Well, as the great philosopher Clint Eastwood said in Magnum Force, "a man's gotta' know his limitations."

I know what you're thinking, pal.

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@Thomas,

Quote:

The biological function of our bodies wouldn't suffer the slightest inconvenience. The only thing that would suffer is our social traditions.

I'm not actually sure that is true.

I think it is incredibly difficult to get some proteins that are very important, especially during early development, without meat.

I'm not absolutely sure, so if anyone actually knows I'd happily bow to them.

I think it is quite difficult to replicate these proteins in a non-flesh diet.

1 Reply

@dlowan,

According to my book Living Vegetarian for Dummies, protein is no problem. The only serious problem is getting enough Vitamin B12. But even that only arises when you're Vegan, and you can easily compensate by with vitamin pills.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

According to my book Living Vegetarian for Dummies, protein is no problem. The only serious problem is getting enough Vitamin B12. But even that only arises when you're Vegan, and you can easily compensate by with vitamin pills.

I guess so, but who knows how accurate that is? It's just not the way the body was designed to work.

Vat grown meat - the answer!

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

as I sit her gnawing on a pork chop, (smothered in onion gravy...)

I gotta just say no to laboratory produced meat.

then what are we gonna do with all the farms? it's only cool to the tourists the first time...

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@Thomas,

It doesn't occur to you that those who produced the book have a motive for making assertions which they cannot necessarily substantiate?

This entire discussion is so narrowly focused as to descend into the absurd. If one is concerned about cruelty to animals, by all means outlaw veal (on the same principle as Joe says cannibalism should be outlawed, even when there are volunteers, outlaw veal, even if people claim they can raise calves for slaughter without cruelty, outlaw foie gras. But what about the cruelty which is part and parcel of the economic inequalities of the world? What about population issues? Is it not utilitarian for people in what is still called the third world to have large families, and will they not continue to do so unless their economic situations improve to the point at which it is no longer necessary?

If we don't have sufficient arable land to produce feed for feed lot animals, how is that we have sufficient arable land for the huge cut flowers industry, in which Holland and Poland are major players? Is it not just as environmentally irresponsible to burn fossil fuels and dump CO2 into the atmosphere to ship their cut flowers all over Europe and to North America as is any other wanton use of fossil fuels? Is it not criminal that good arable land is used to produce opium poppies and coca leaves the end purpose of which is to exploit the misery of drug addicts, and in the hopes of the producers, to create new drug addicts? Would not a serious international effort to eradicate the sources of heroine and cocaine, and to put that arable land to good use producing scarce grains be as effective an answer to questions about food production as anything else we could do, given the undoubted tragedies of drug addicts?

Is it not a squandering of the production of arable land to use it to produce ethanol to supplement or replace fossil fuels? Does that not only address the issue of peak oil, and not the issue of the production of greenhouse gases?

There are so many issues which are all tied together with regard to food production and consumption which are not touched upon at all in a discussion of whether or not it is "right" to eat meat.

1 Reply

i could never eat me

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Food ethics: How do you choose what species are morally wrong to eat?

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