Good article. I'm not a vegetarian, but I suspect that a hundred years from now humans will look back on our times as barbarous in their treatment of animals.
"…when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People...”
Secondly: our technology allow us a variety of diets and ways of life that the animal primitive way of living does not.
This does not mean you should be vegetarian. I am, and I would certainly not enforce it on anybody. But if you take the decision to be veggie or not, it should be from the perspective of a modern, educated human in the context of our science and society.
Oh, come on. The behavior of a hyena should totally be taken as normative for humans.
All too often people fall into the trap of viewing humans as distinctly separate from all other animals and not simply at one end of a continuum of development.
It shouldn't matter. Whether 7 billion people all kill and prepare their own animals, or most of them outsource it to the few running the meat industry, it's more-less the same amount of animals killed, for the very same purpose.
I submit that we would be much less sanguine about meat if we were more involved in its consumption than, "purchase, remove shrink-wrap, heat."
To quote one of my favorite sci-fi books:
"The difference between raman (human-like aliens) and varelse (mere animals, with whom we cannot relate) is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have."
But industrial farming is just horrific.
Let's not put our year 2015 Western ideas of 'right and wrong' on a pedestal as the objective moral truth. They may not have your understanding of right and wrong, but they do have an understanding of right and wrong.
To quote Nietzsche, morality is just herd instinct in the individual.
It's no coincidence that though human moralities have differed incredibly - you have everything from total pacifism to an obligation to perform ritual sacrifice on other human beings - it pretty much always reflects, to greater or lesser degree, the basic principle of in-group altrusim, which is probably genetically encoded at some level. (Interestingly, in the past few hundred years, Western societies have made the "in-group" increasingly inclusive. Perhaps we will one day include animals more than we do.)
Animals, particularly more social animals, certainly have 'moral' instincts (that is, a herd instinct.)
Instinct and thought are not opposites, they're just gradations on a scale.
Right, and I suppose I wasn't terribly clear in my wording, but I intended to communicate that all (or, most) animals have some sense of right and wrong, it's just that I believe we are capable of having a more "nuanced" one. Which, in my view, indicates that our actions should be held to a higher standard than that of animals. In the same sense that a person with mental disabilities that commits a crime might be held to a different standard than the average person, animals should be given some slack for similar reasons.
Anyway, I essentially agree with you, and I advocate for the idea you mentioned, of increasing the inclusivity of our ethics.
Really? I grew up in the country and I had friends who raised pigs and cows. Those animals had it way better than the typical factory farm.
I hope that with progress on synthetic meat this whole industry will go away.
If you didn't, why not?
Here's a more detailed breakdown for you: http://www.adaptt.org/killcounter.html
Also, is there a definition of 'level of cognition' that you can give which encompasses fish, rats, birds, etc. (everything on the link you provided), and does not include ants?
https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
The key is - "as far as is possible and practicable". It's entirely reasonable and quite easy to adhere to a plant-based diet, whereas avoiding stepping on ants is an impractical goal which detracts actual steps you could do to reduce harm.
Of course, there's no reason for veganism and your concern for ants to be mutually exclusive. Take Jain monks as an example.
> Jain monks and nuns represent the ideal of Jainism. These men and women try to separate themselves from the everyday world. They are not allowed to kill any living creature. They carry brooms to sweep all surfaces to avoid crushing insects accidentally. Monks may not own any property except a broom, simple robes, bowls for food, and walking sticks.
I would say that humanization is a prerequisite for treating anything humanely (and the inverse is true as well, see: dehumanization). IMO, the primary reason animals do not have a chance is because they are not universally (or sufficiently) humanized. This could be in large part due to our grossly insufficient or oversimplified understanding rather than intentional malice.
The fact that we don't treat actual humans humanely is an orthogonal issue.
Ultimately, it may not be that things that are sentient have inviolable rights; it may be that we simply draw a moral circle around ourselves and if you're close enough in the circle, you're protected; if not, you're not. There may be a good historical reason for that; there's anthropological evidence that our early ancestors shared the planet with creatures who were a lot closer to them in both look and behavior than anything living today and that were competing fiercely and in a zero-sum style for overlapping resources. It's not a large leap to imagine that our developed morality therefore accounts for creatures with every bit the cognitive capacity of your own that you cannot coexist peaceably with for risk that they'll end you and your entire bloodline by out-competing you.
Whether that's the way we should approach the world (in a modern era where our species dominates the planet's resource allocation and is threatened by functionally zero complex organisms) is a reasonable question; it may very well still be a framework that describes morality for a great deal of the planet's population.
So there's not much point to saying we should treat animals humanely by driving humans extinct.