Depends on your morals.
A vegetarian diet isn’t much more ethical than an omnivore diet, anyway. Veganism has a much better argument.
If ethical = animal welfare, perhaps.
But when factoring in e.g. water consumption and CO2e per unit of food consumed, I would argue the average vegetarian diet to be significantly more ethical compared with the average omnivorous diet.
Obviously the type of animals involved, the way they are treated and killed, and religious views add more complexity to this case.
edit: the essence of my point is that this isn’t a black and white matter.
I think that’s a flawed argument. Cow milk production requires that cows get pregnant once a year, and the calves can’t all become milk cows, too - thus, cow milk production cannot exist without cow meat production. And IIRC milk products still have a worse environmental impact than chicken meat.
TBH I’m not sure about the environmental impact of eggs vs meat. But animal welfare is generally the main reason why people keep to vegetarian or vegan diets, and chicken farming is not great in terms of animal welfare.
The bottom line is: 1 cow birth per year (or let’s call it cow deaths, because that’s what is most relevant here) yields around 10.000L of milk. Out of which around 1000kg of cheese can be produced, plus of course the meat of that calf.
Does that make it ethical? I don’t think so. But I would say around 1.5-2x less unethical compared to eating meat, which is significant.
I read a book called “change of heart” by a vegan animal activist, which was all about research into what actually worked in terms of convincing people to reduce animal suffering. For him, it would be ideal if we reduced animal suffering to zero. But even encouraging someone to eat less meat (e.g. Meatless Mondays) reduced animal suffering, and was a win in his book. I kind of agree with that.
The way I see it is similar. If everyone stopped eating animal products today like turning off a faucet, literal millennia of selective breeding guarantees there will be animal suffering. A better option is to reduce overall consumption while also working towards reversing the changes we’ve made to the animals to turn them into products. At this time, dairy cows overproduce milk making milking a requirement for the animals health and safety. Poultry is a whole other discussion that isn’t quite as environmentally problematic but way more ethically problematic that requires a whole extra level of discussion towards improvement
I thought you were talking about environmental impact? Both cow milk and cow meat have a worse environmental footprint than chicken meat.
My point is: ethics should not be confused with a single dimension of ethics. Whether something I’d ethical, depends on your beliefs.
Simultaneously, if animal welfare is all we optimize for, vegetarianism is a step forward. And indeed, so is pollotarianism when optimizing for just environmental impact. Perfect is the enemy of good.
Whether something is moral or ethical doesn’t depend on the commercial benefit you can derive from it! What the actual fuck!!
Not OP, but I think the argument is more about nutritional benefit than commercial benefit.
Yes, thank you for clarifying this.
Not sure why anyone would assume monetary/commercial benefit here.
Do you think dairy farmers eat their 100lbs wheels of cheese? It’s the same thing.
In either case, you’re talking about harm reduction when it is so trivial to eliminate harm. It is in fact EASIER. But your attachment to the fruits of abuse won’t let you see it that way, and you’re looking for ways to make your abuse more emotionally palatable.
Treating a vulnerable individual as a means instead of as an end is fundamentally wrong. No amount of benefit to you short of saving your life can make it morally acceptable. In a famine we have to make hard choices and sometimes we have to sacrifice others. That’s not the situation right now. We grow more food each year than humanity could eat in two years without harvesting any vulnerable individuals.
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For water consumption and CO2, avoid beef, milk and cheese. Chicken and eggs are no issue, they cause less harm in that regard than many plant products (like almonds).
People seem to focus on the ills of the dairy industry when talking about vegetarians, but the egg industry is particularly egregious.
Eggregious*
Overall, most humans agree that it is morally wrong to make other creatures suffer. Eating meat, or dairy, definitely leads to animal suffering (it actual leads to human suffering too).
Eating meat, or diary
I hate it when people eat my diary. That is morally wrong.
If it’s possible and you’re capable to do it, then I think it’s a moral choice.
If it’s a matter of survival, health or inaccess to a variety of food, I don’t think it really is a choice one should have to make on grounds of morality.
Is it morally wrong to ask a bait question on a public forum?
It’s bait if it makes me angry
I guess you’re not going to bait stickly into examining the consequences their choices have on others who are powerless to protect themselves from those consequences. He’s too clever for that kind of bait.
I don’t understand wht you mean.
But I’m not baiting anyone. I wanted to see people’s personal opinions and get some insight from their arguments.
Yeah, the most ethical diet is plant based.
Why do you ask it?
the most ethical diet is
not a matter of objective fact
Yeah.
They would need to specify to which set of ethics are they talking about. And then we could compare to which ethics a vegan diet adhere more or less.
explain how you developed this idea it is more ethical. based on what exactly?
Minimizing harm to others and harm to the environment is more ethical than not minimizing harm to others and harm to the environment
Are you reducing the harm to others in a actually statically significant quantity though?
To others I suppose you refer to animals. By being vegan you mosly reduce harm to a few species of big animals.
Most animals by quantity are insects.
If you count by individuals a person who saves a few ant nest from the horrors of nature and give them a nice controlled habitat would reduce the number of harm happening to individual animals orders of magnitude over what a diet change could achieve.
As for environmental damage. It’s a way. But not the only way. The most effective way to control environmental control would be to reduce the number of humans on earth.
You have to take into account that animal agriculture is responsible for the vast majority (70%) of plants that we grow and we use pesticides for them. If we stop eating animals or stop using animal products all together we need tremendously less pesticides and harm less insects in turn.
First, agriculture made for animal consumption doesn’t have the same quality sanitarian standards as agriculture made for humans.
Second, not all animals require vast agriculture.
We could also war animals that do not requiere such agricultural measures. I have eaten cows, pigs and chickens that were raised traditionally, out of the natural fields and the parts of the plants that we humans do not want to eat.
In fact for a environmental perspective traditional farming is far better than vegan diet.
animal agriculture is responsible for the vast majority (70%) of plants that we grow
this isn’t true. humans consume about 2/3 of all crop calories.
It is not minimizing harm in the way you can’t hear a plant scream. That’s the same logic people had about fish. This is a foolish and irresponsible way to think of consciousness.
I will agree it is minimizing harm on environment however we have much room to improve even on that standard.
Like not burning crops simply because it doesn’t make money.
“Plants feel pain” is an argument that supports a plant-based diet because it is more efficient to consume plants directly than to feed them to animals.
i agree with the efficiency.
stick with that argument.
it works for you.
stepping into moral logic around consiousness around pain and suffering: that the shittier arguments vegans come up with to feel satisified with themselves over others with magical thinking and that shit needs to stop.
Vegans’ moral arguments are just fine, it’s just that most people don’t give a shit. When you realize how shitty most people are to other people, it makes the need to take a different approach very obvious.
Everyone requires a certain amount of mental gymnastics to consume any living plant or creature to continue to exist in a meat body.
You can pick and choose food but you don’t get to pick and choose who has consciousness.
Denying that is shittier.
A foolish and irresponsible way to think about consciousness would be to pretend we can actually define it, then go around professing things are either conscious or not without considering there might be a scale.
so you say you cant define it but you can throw something you dont know on a scale? so its only ok if you do it. uh huh. i see. that is some bullshit, fool.
I said “consider there might be” whereas you were all over the thread speaking in absolutes to support your weak hypothesis.
Nuance is obviously lost on you which is a shame as it’s kind of a prerequisite for the philosophical debates you keep attempting to engage in.
you certainly defend yourself in absolutes. pick a lane.
No.
Yeah I think so probably. The animal product industry seems pretty messed up. Very un-cool what we do to them. Inefficient too but that’s another argument.
Is it not morally wrong to drink the milk of an animal that was forcibly impregnated and whose child was murdered for said milk? Why stop at vegetarianism?
It’s a difficult question, so I hope some people who have interesting things to say about it will turn up here. All I can contribute is this link: Ancient Arguments For Vegetarianism
“eels that come when called”?
Depends on your morals. For mine it is.
morals are anecdotes that define your personal integrity. morals are arguable at best and carry little to no merit outside of personal experience.
I believe you mean ethical.
ethically, no, it’s not wrong. mostly because the animals we consume are bred and raised specifically to eat. however, the treatment of those animals in corporate factory farms is unethical, and so makes the consumption of the products from those establishments unethical.
Morals are subjective, I don’t consider myself the arbiter of truth and I also reject theistic positive claims stating otherwise such as objective morals or free will. Personally I know I can survive without eating animals, so I’d rather not be indirectly involved in the killing of other animals where it is reasonably possible and I don’t consider humans more important/superior to any other animals, generally.
I think you could get a lot of people to even admit to valuing very old trees over a lot of people too so even some plants are worth leaving alone, according to some of us. Like Red Wood giants in Cali, for example. All the land cleared of wildlife to grow food for billions of humans is disturbing stuff at least to me as well. The planet is actually kinda… small. I’ve come to realise. I fully reject humanity’s unearned superiority complex.
I acknowledge it’s hard/impossible to be absolute in the vegetarian ideal given all the ramifications of industrial overpopulation and just casually participating in the society I was born into. Best I can do on this suffering planet, that I never consented to being born to live temporarily upon pointlessly, is to minimize (elimination is unrealistic) the suffering my life inflicts on others.
In other words, I don’t owe anyone jack shit, not even Mommy Dearest. Yet I still stand by this moral position. Although I’d argue this is just who I am and always was. The justications put into words and labels applied came later. You’ll notice I didn’t condemn meat eating in this comment and that’s quite deliberate. You are not me. I just explain my position when asked and it’s up to others to adopt it or not.
We are social animals. We all owe each other our entire survival.
Anything that offends you gets the thought terminating edgy label applied, I see you bud. Username checks out.
“I don’t owe anyone jack shit, not even Mommy Dearest,” is a decidedly edgelord thing to say. Other parts of what you were saying are not trying to be edgy, and I think I get that you were trying to create some kind of rhetorical contrast, but that’s just objectively an edgelord comment. I edited my comment to tone it down, but not before you saw it, so I guess I have to stand by that.
probably not.
No.
Sincerely, A lifelong vegetarian.
Vegetarians are the worst kind of carnist. Would take so little, still don’t give a shit.
