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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated -- Mahatma Gandhi

We don't owe it. But we should treat animals with compassion all the same.

Many vegans & vegetarians aren't really opposed to meat, they are opposed to suffering, and American industrial meat production involves a lot of animal suffering.

If I think something deserving of compassion, then it is something I cannot kill simply for the sake of my palate.

I hold that conscious experience is likely the only thing that can matter morally. In the US, in fact, the vast majority of meat comes from factory farms - a place where sentient beings are living lives not worth living (roughly speaking torture). Buying meat thus results in market incentives to produce more meat in the future. So by buying meat, people are implicitly paying for more animal torture. Individual choices not to eat meat decrease the future supply*

It doesn't matter whether in the past things were different. It doesn't matter that other animals eat animals. What matters is that each of us has a choice when buying food in a restaurant or supermarket. A choice that directly results in less or more suffering of sentient beings.

* footnote in case you're curious: supermarkets are receptive to consumption patterns -- either at per-unit level, or at threshold they buy in bulk -- so you stand a chance of being the purchase that results in dozens more animal purchases. Factory farms are similarly responsive to market consumption patterns. Economists have studied the market elasticity of animal product sales and individual decision not to purchase does translate in decrease in future production.

If that was your primary point then maybe I misunderstood.

I otherwise wholeheartedly agree in the need for compassion, even in spite of eating meat. Thankfully for that reason I don't have as my only option meat farmed from the US, and I'm able to buy meat that is Canadian and can be sourced. I'm probably lucky in that I grew up not knowing a single farmer who would be okay with the kinds of processes you're speaking about.

Some cruel farms exist here, you can find news of them pretty easily—but it's thankfully not the norm—and typically those aren't even cases of factory farms, just sick people.

I kind of end up with the opposite position of the OP, but if you consider eating a whale or a dog barbaric but have no problem eating (say) an overfished white fish or a pig, you have to ask yourself why.

edit:

Took me a moment to think about what you were saying. I agree with you. Maybe that's what I was roughly getting at to begin with. I agree you should think about why, I suppose I already had and take it for granted that others may not have even approached the need to question.

---

I have asked myself why.

I have a problem eating any animal that is endangered or at risk of extinction.

I might not be against eating a whale. I've never had the opportunity. But I have a problem with hunting them in their current state of risk.

I've had what I would call relationships with various animals as pets—as such I wouldn't want to eat them. Similarly, if I'd had such a relationship with any other kind of animal I might feel the same, but I can't speak to that.

You seem to have missed OPs point. Many of us in the West find hunting wild whales, or dolphins to be repugnant. Meanwhile, we're perfectly happy to eat factory farmed pigs.

And, yes, we do morally owe it to nature not to eat animals. The natural corollary is human rights. Human rights is just a philosophy. Most of us adhere to it today, but we have not for most of our existence. The default has been to kill large numbers of fellow humans, across all societies.

Do people have a natural right to life? Humanity did not think so until relatively recently, but now we see it as obvious.

Do animals have a natural right not to be killed by humans, now that we have other options? Of course, for the same reasons.

> Do animals have a natural right not to be killed by humans, now that we have other options? Of course.

Well, why? It's equally consistent to simply say that no animal other than humans enjoys rights, whether it's a dolphin or a dog or a pig. You can certainly take the other position as your premise, but I don't see why I should follow you.

Do humans have the right not to be killed by humans? All humans, or just humans of the same nationality?

If so, where do you draw the line between, say, killing humans and killing fish? I'm not trying to suggest that the two are equivalent, but constructing a logical argument for the line being somewhere rather than elsewhere is non trivial.

Somewhere in here you inevitably take some intuitive stance, call it "self-evident," and use it as your premise. This is the problem with formal ethics, I guess; if you can't agree on the premises of the discussion you're just stuck.

I mean, what if we go the other way? Am I a murder for swatting a mosquito and killing it? OK, what makes that different from the fish? Is the fish more like a human or a mosquito? Is unintentional killing of animals the same as intentional? Surely we don't believe that stepping on a worm is equivalent to manslaughter. Well, you get the idea.

To me, the anthropocentric view seems completely natural. In a hypothetical trolley problem with a human and an animal I can't see a circumstance where I'd ever choose to save the animal and allow the human to die. From this thought experiment I appeal to intuition to say that human life is qualitatively different, and of more value, than animal life.

Can you or do you draw a line between fish and plants? How about plants and fungi? Fungi and bacteria?

Btw, if you're upset at the reductio ad absurdum asking to extend rights we've decided humans have to fish also has a similar flavor to it. I for example have a logical argument that includes people but doesn't include fish: humans have consciousness, experience, and others (like children) have potential for such and this consciousness usually is and can be at a markedly higher level than most animals.

I'm sympathetic to your view. I'd also add that human beings are moral agents while asking, for instance, if it's moral for a lion to kill a gazelle is incoherent. But the usual objection here is that surely we don't believe it's OK to harm infants or the mentally handicapped and none of the answers you can give there are great.

As I said, for children, there is the potential for life for consciousness, and for neurodivergent people, the "consciousness" at a higher level is paramount. Of course, how you define a higher level is a question, I admit. Once you draw the line, there should be a level of equality in that group, like a "more cognizant being" doesn't get more value than a "less cognizant being", for example, a child doesn't have more value than an adult, although sure, adults can make decisions children cannot.

That said, and this is something I don't think everyone will agree with, I think the rights of cognizant beings are more important than for beings which aren't. For example, I'm pro-choice personally, and I find the rights of a cognizant mother more important that that of a clog of cells even if they have potential to become a cognizant being eventually. Of course, once a child is born, it becomes another issue because an infant is more aware in some sense, has viability, and greater potential for becoming a cognizant being. Another opinion I have is, for example, I have no problem with say guardians deciding to pull the plug on individuals in a vegetative state with no hope of recovery. I personally, and call me all the names you want, value the rights of cognizant beings or beings with potential for cognition as more important that that of beings which aren't.

Finally, regardless of logical consistency of any sense of morality, I actually think that ultimately it isn't that important as material and social context, and I personally believe that whatever we decide will always be subject to that ultimately.

There are people who are not in a persistent vegetative state, though, who suffer severe mental handicaps and are nonverbal. It makes this question look a little less pat than I would like it to.

You're factually wrong: fish have conscious experience, most importantly, they feel pain https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fish-feel-pain...

They may feel pain, but they don't have thoughts like "it is a difficult life for a fish." Their quality of "consciousness" is on a different plane than ours.

> Many of us in the West find hunting wild whales, or dolphins to be repugnant. Meanwhile, we're perfectly happy to eat factory farmed pigs.

I would guess that the intersection of these two groups is much smaller than it seems. The anti-whaling community and the anti-meat-eating community are often aligned in their beliefs (one is a subset of the other). Otherwise for most I'd guess (hard to know), their only issue with whaling or dolphin hunting would be based on endangerment. I doubt many actual people you talk to on this issue would have inconsistent beliefs from whales to pigs based purely on species or familiarity. If the whale is not endangered, I doubt they would see whaling as any different than pig farming (for whichever side they fall on the issue).

I would think the anti-whaling group of people would be much larger, since it's an easier position to take. There are very few people who actually eat or otherwise use whales, the rest can freely disapprove of that without sacrificing anything.

Whereas being against eating pigs means a substantial change in diet for many people.

> There are very few people who actually eat or otherwise use whales, the rest can freely disapprove of that without sacrificing anything.

That's what I'm arguing against; the average person is less hypocritical than we label them. Now whether you think their justification in the difference is valid is another point. Most of these groups tend to be squeaky wheels and I would guess (yes, lots of guessing) that the vast majority of people don't have a very strong opinion outside of general species endangerment. Your average meat eater would have no problem with whale handled/consumed in the same way as they do pig. Similarly your average anti-meat eater would have the same problems with whale handling/consumption as they do with pig.

http://luna.pos.to/whale/icr_pub_pall_t1_3.html

According to these figures (apparently originally from Gallup: text here http://luna.pos.to/whale/icr_pub_pall.html), only 26.3% of Americans would agree that "non-endangered whales can be killed for human food."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#Unite...

According to this page, vegetarianism is at an all-time high in the US at 3.4%.

Assuming every single vegetarian takes the anti-whaling stance that still leaves you with the other 73% looking inconsistent.

I just have a hard time, especially after last election, taking these polls at face value. Not only is 1000 people difficult to base wide sweeping opinion on, I think a lot of people are answering about whether they would be in favor of it for themselves rather than believe it should be outlawed or are actually fervently against it like anti-whaling groups are.

The last election pollsters messed up, but not by a factor of 70%.

You seem to think that this is an insightful comment, as opposed to just vomiting rhetoric when people have already pointed out it's a false equivalence.

>Do people have a natural right to life? Humanity did not think so until relatively recently, but now we see it as obvious.

So first off, did all humans not have a natural right to life before and humanity didn't know it? "Did not think so"...what changed things?

In light of questions like these, I feel like it's easiest to go with the concept that ideas like "natural rights" are socially constructed, which I'm not sure you jive with but makes the most sense to me in light of what we know from history and how it's progressed.

That said, of course, we can decide that animals have natural rights too, as in we'd decide socially that they do. The only different thing to me is that for many animals, they will not be aware of this social construction we've placed them in, nor will they one day be aware. This is unlike women, races of people who aren't in the dominant group, children, as well as humans who are neurodivergent as well I'd say. In the case of people who are human, we ideally treat them as equals really due to their consciousness and awareness, while for most animals (although probably not all) we can say they are "equal" in some sense but they won't be.

I think there is also a strong instinct not to harm or kill our peers which only by exception can be over-ruled - by emotional trauma or threat. We can't detach destructive tendencies from dynamic cultural circumstances.

Fireside societies tens of thousands of years ago could have formed pacifist or even vegetarian morals, depending somewhat on how thriving and reflective their days managed to be. At the same time moral ideas communicated in these modern times are not assured to improve. Here is hoping they do.

"And, yes, we do morally owe it to nature not to eat animals." I think you're right about this, but you don't quite say why. We owe it because we're capable of not doing it, and still surviving as a species. We can't blame mountain lions for eating rabbits, because what the hell else are they going to do?

And this is coming from an omnivore. If meat were completely taken away as an option overnight, I probably wouldn't have a problem with it, in all honesty, but its ready availability and lack of the distinct association of its production makes me able to consume it without feeling the moral chaos of it.

Meaning most humans do not like their meat sources to be cute, or too smart. Ideal meat is dumb as a post, and ugly as sin.

They don't want their food to be too ugly. Ugly means there's something wrong with it, and if there's something wrong with it, they won't want to eat it. It's why most people gag when they think about eating bugs, because they've associated them with disease.

They want their food to look good enough to know it's safe, but not cute enough to trigger nurturing instincts.

> but ones at least intelligent enough to maintain the planet in good order

Bang up job we're doing, too!

Can't argue there

Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN.