I feel certain that in the near future we will discover animals are a lot smarter and more emotionally developed than we currently realize, and future generations will look back on our treatment of them with disgust.
It is interesting to ponder what the nature of other animals is; discover what possibilities we have in common with them. That doesn't change that humans are capable of self examination and choosing between cruelty and tenderness, empathy and callousness.
There is no boundary between nature and other things, nature is all encompassing. There is nothing in nature that can be indifferent because nature can't be different from anything.
The point isn't how they treat each other necessarily, but how we treat them in light of the knowledge of their "individual" characteristics, not unlike human beings. So we humans then extend the gift of life to other species.
Those animals treat each other as a matter of survival, is it necessary for us to do the same?
Any cat owner has observed this behavior.
But, yes, animals often produce suffering. In fact, they've been doing it for a while before we got here. But animals are largely doing it out of instinct, not because they've reasoned out and concluded that it was the "right" thing to do.
a) that which justifies doing as their instincts say
and
b) that which justifies acting in their interest as determined by their instincts.
Humans are animals. We happen to possess an extraordinarily tool for abstract reasoning. That tool is mostly used for rationalization and not as an oracle of truth. We are all creatures of biology. Most everything we do is about getting food, shelter, performing sexual displays, and various forms of social signalling and jockeying.
We have all sorts of conmen that market it all sorts of bogus ideas, even the ideas of food is bogus, and entirely irrelevant to the survival of this body.
It is the attachment to the pleasure movements that motivate us, but more fundamentally the attachment to the thought structure, and demand the repetition of various kinds of thought that has produced the human being, and at a very basic sense our selves as we know it.
So it is the thought there that has demanded continuity, and in that continuity you have a plethora of varieties that add to the momentum of that thought, and this is the case with all things, from scientific, to the so called "artistic", to the religious.
What is religious thought other than the demand for ultimate pleasure without a moment of pain, to have compete happiness, bliss, without a moment of another, which is in itself a bogus idea.
So the ultimate question then isn't really a question at all it is really an answer, as then the only thing left is what we demand in thought.
So then what is it that you demand?
I personally see no reason to kill anything at all for the satisfaction of this body, nor do I see any motivation to purposefully torture animals, but if that is what you do then it is up to you, but basically it is not required, and is only demanded by that repetition of thought.
Sounds like we could use some rats
I think that all this time, human beings have been watched by creatures whose perceptions and understanding have been so far in advance of anything we have been able to accept, because of our vanity, that we would be appalled if we were able to know, would be humiliated. We have been living with them as blundering, blind, callous, cruel murderers and torturers, and they have watched and known us. And this is the reason we refuse to acknowledge the intelligence of the creatures that surround us: the shock to our amour propre would be too much, the judgement we would have to make on ourselves too horrible: it is exactly the same process that can make someone go on and on committing a crime, or a cruelty, knowing it: the stopping and having to see what has been done would be too painful, one cannot face it. -- Doris Lessing
its beyond unlikely that we, as the human race, become vegetarian. as such, we'll never stop abusing other animals beside us. on that note: i'm not a vegetarian either, nor am i planning to become one.
I watched a video of a guy jabbing a cow with a pitchfork. It was pretty shitty. I think you could withhold any violence until the animal's final moments. That gets into realities of industrial efficiency and not the eating of meat. Things die. Should we cremate them? I realize going vegetarian solves the problem right now. That doesn't mean that eating meat is necessarily a part of the problem. I eat out a lot so I don't get all my meat from one source. But the meat I use at home I buy from a friend of my family. He raises the cows himself and "loves" them. My sister likes to go out there and feed them. It's a bit too mushy for me but I still like to think their happiness makes them taste better.
Humans and many other great apes are opportunistic carnivores. The idea that we should have moral compunctions about biological reality seems absurd to me, and I have yet heard any argument than "suffering is evil; animals experience suffering; killing animals necessitates their suffering; therefore eating animals is evil." I don't deny the second proposition, I deny the first, and my personal feeling is the reason some of us now feel differently has much to do with the enormously sheltered and privileged lives modernity has afforded us.
This 'herd instinct', by evolutionary necessity, will tend towards in-group altruism in any social animal, but the details, the bylaws, and everything else will be driven by accidents of history and by fashion. It may be that one day that the great human herd of western civilization will collectively decide that eating meat is evil; I sure hope not, I prefer our current fashions (but then I would, having grown up with them.)
In fact, I actually think that would be a very dangerous attitude to take, since I would believe that the only person who would be suffering by my taking any means necessary to change the world however I like it would be me, who would of course be perfectly willing to do so.
Even if morality was just herd instinct, what you were saying previously is that suffering for you is not immoral. And even though, many intelligent people saw absolutely nothing wrong with torture, what about you, right now?
What I'm getting at is that your original statement which basically said "suffering is OK" (you didn't indicate any restrictions or conditions) is just bullshit.
When someone says that something is not immoral (or evil), they can be arguing to things: either it is moral, or it is amoral (i.e. is not affected by qualifications of morality). The GP is arguing the latter: that, in the context of nature, suffering is an unavoidable consequence of competition for life. Is the lion evil for targeting the weakest wildebeest? Is toxoplasmosis evil for disrupting the fight-or-flight response of its host?
Now it seems the next argument that will come is that we as human beings are also animals and part of nature, and therefore we can also kill other animals as e.g. lions do.
Well, a female mantis occasionally decapitates its male mates after copulation. Does that mean that it is moral for women to do the same to men? Amezarak's original statement is just too broad.
No one is arguing that nature is moral.
Your argument as seen by me, ends on a cliff-hanger: Because great apes are omnivores they eat meat which is a biological reality. It is biological reality for humans to eat meat so it is okay to eat meat...
Question: Why does biological reality make things ok in a way that does not boil down to an appeal to nature?
I feel that there's nothing inherently wicked about eating meat, but it seems obvious that we should make an effort to avoid inflicting undue suffering in the process.
Done that on several occasions.
> Do you realize you pay people to do this every time you buy meat?
Yes.
> Are you cool with that?
Yes. Because, essentially, we are animals.
It is interesting that personally I find more disgusting the mutilation of animals (castration for example) than actually killing them for food.
The science is happening as we speak.
Where would we draw the line? Should we quit eating and die of starvation? It seems like there needs to be some acknowledgement that one form of life has to die in order that we may live. What gives us the right to declare that animals are the "higher" form of life simply because they're less alien than plants?
Replace animals by "slaves" or whatever human race we considered inferior in the past and you could write the same thing about a couple of hundred years ago.
But the idea that humans are at the acme of evolution is going to be harder to kill.
I think the vast majority of people are actually in the opposite situation. Animals have been humanized by cartoons. So when birds start pushing each other from nests, when Eagles start feeding cats to their eaglets, when Kangaroos attempt to mate on dead corpses...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/14/photos-griev...
People don't really believe it. Animals are vicious.
Until then it's just instinct.
And if the day ever arrives, it can just be seen as an evolutionary step for the species, and not as proof that they where intelligent all along.
I liked the experience vs awareness model presented in Stumbling Upon Happiness where people think about the future (awareness of what's happening to them/others) and animals simply operate in the moment based on instincts and being informed by memories (experience). I think that is a pretty good model for the difference.
The deaf and blind can communicate. And even in the case of a human vegetable, a broken table is still a table.
What your limitations seem to ignore is that not only does most of our day-to-day behaviour fall under what you consider instinctive, but also that you seem to be ignoring the fact that many animals communicate in languages you might not necessarily be able to understand (Dogs, for example, communicate mostly in body language, looks, etc.).
Can you state an example of a complex thought? I can think of a fair amount of thoughts I would use to denote intelligence that would fall under what you consider 'instinctual'.
I see this as the only plausible way to prevent the disappearance of Rhino, Elephant, Cheetah and many other animals that you had plastic toys of when you were a child. Those animals are going to be as extinct as the dinosaurs toys you played with in our lifetime.
We have very little biodiversity in Europe, outside of our domestic animals the typical country has nothing much larger than foxes or squirrels running around. Conservation is a patriotic planet wide duty for humans and it is one of the few things that ought to go over traditional rivalries. I do not accept for example, that Africans, South Americans or Southeast Asians have the right to demolish important species because they are within their political territories. There is no moral reason not to simply extract them from there using a combination of carrot and stick since they are clearly incapable of handling the problem themselves at this stage of development, just as Europeans were back in the 1700s not exactly looking out for the plight of endangered wolves, boars or bears.
Most major insights into biology and medicine come from having a variety of species around. So it is not as if we have no self interest. Ultimately any 'Arks' would be easily repaid for millions of times over in a variety of ways, even if just because you would ultimately be the only available source of rare biomaterials.
To be serious, there is no real plan to prevent the level of poaching from killing off most large land mammals. I've been helping the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre and the Pangolin Specialist Group but most people in the field don't really believe this is a sustainable long term objective for conservation. The scale of predation by humans is simply too high for anything less than drastic action to prevent the extinction of most large land mammals.
The narcissism is real.