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Comment by jstoiko | Hacker News Reader

Until today, it is believed that self-awareness is what distinguishes humans from other species. If ever that gets debunked, I think that would be the start of the end of meat consumption.

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There are plenty of humans who are not self-aware, yet we do not eat them. And it looks like US meat consumption is trending downward at WWII rates (http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2012/highlights2...).

As it stands right now: yes, cannibalism is more-or-less universally considered abhorrent in a world where (a) all sources are more-or-less indisputably considered a pre-, current-, or post-person and (b) eating wild human flesh is a short trip to an entire fascinating category of otherwise-non-communicable diseases.

The cannibalism question may become a bit more complicated in a future that holds the potential of carefully-monitored and maintained cloned muscle tissue from a donor cell culture that is itself never hooked up to a brain. ;)

It's either the start of the end of meat consumption or the start of a morals framework built around how "person-like" another thinking organism is.

To be honest, that's a valid road, though fraught with the peril of declaring certain classifications of human non-person. There's evidence suggesting, though, that morals are a lot more about survival of our instinctual identification of "species" than they are about the inviolable rights of other sentient organisms (i.e. "Sure that cow has thoughts, but it's not a PERSON, so eat up").

Self-awareness is not either-or. There are degrees and qualities. Even humans can be more or less self-aware at various stages in development.

You would have to define self-awareness further for it to be useful as a rule.

Even if that gets debunked, given that other animals do consume meat, why shouldn't we? Is it OK for a wolf to kill a rabbit for food (typically in a much more painful way than a human would) but not OK for a human? Or maybe we should use our technology to make "justice" in the animal world, preventing wolves from eating other animals somehow?

Mind you, I'm not sure what the correct answers to some of these questions are. Maybe in a few hundred years we will find eating meat obnoxious after all. But I don't think the issue is as clear-cut as your comment implies.

Humans aren't obligatory carnivores like the example of the wolf you've used. From a physiological standpoint, it's more accurate to describe ourselves as "dedicated herbivores".

Disagree. We are neither obligatory carnivores nor herbivores. We do not have a sophisticated herbivore's gut with four chameras and colonies of specialist celulose breaking symbionts. We do not need to eat our own faeces again to obtain vitamins and we do not ruminate our food, something that is normal in herbivores. We do not have a sophisticated nose to detect alkaloids, Do not have evergrowing teeth. We can not even eat legumes like soy in a raw state, and eating grass for us is like eating razor blades.

From a physiological standpoint we are omnivores, and this is not a sin. Lots of other animals are omnivores also.

I could have used omnivores as well, the fact that they are obligatory carnivores is not relevant for my argument the way I see it. The fact is that, from the viewpoint of nature itself (supposing there is such a thing), it's probably OK to eat meat as animals do it.

By the way, now that you mention obligatory carnivores... another issue is that I don't think we can really sustain ourselves without killing animals one way or another. Agriculture starves animals by destroying natural habitats after all.

> from the viewpoint of nature itself (supposing there is such a thing), it's probably OK to eat meat as animals do it.

This is an appeal to nature logical fallacy. Animals in the wild also commit infanticide and practice cannibalism. As natural as these behaviors are, they're not an instruction manual for how we should behave.

> I don't think we can really sustain ourselves without killing animals one way or another.

This is technically true, but we can drastically reduce the number of other sentient animals which suffer and die for no good reason, by switching to a plant-based diet.

> Agriculture starves animals by destroying natural habitats after all.

Animal agriculture is especially egregious when it comes to destroying natural habitats. The leading causes of rainforest destruction are livestock and feedcrops (source: FAO Livestock's Long Shadow), for example.

Dogs and by extension wolves are capable of eating a vegetarian diet. They seem to only be carnivores because they lack the ability to cook their foods.

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