Hacker News Reader

Comment by Faelon | Hacker News Reader

Abstaining from killing animals is about the sober realization that we can have perfectly healthy and happy lives without killing animals, who have feelings and a sense of perspective and experience, just like us. Living with my values and actions as one give me a strong sense of life, and I love cooking every day. Plants taste great when cooked well!

View on HN

  > Abstaining from killing animals is about the sober realization that we can have perfectly healthy and happy lives without killing animals,

Maybe, maybe not. If one is lacking a hobby and happy to spend much time learning and obsessing and fiddling with what they eat, while accepting that they may be missing some vital things that we don't yet know about, then sure.

But I have enough hobbies and I don't want to risk missing some things we don't yet know about. I just eat what I evolved to eat.

> I just eat what I evolved to eat

So do I: plants!

I'm an omnivore. all meat or no meat is not what i'm evolved to eat. Perhaps I eat too much meat, but zero meat isn't the right answer.

Just because you evolved to do something doesn't provide a moral justification to do that thing. Whether you evolved to or not, animals suffer extraordinarily in the farms of torture we've made for them. It is well accepted that you can eat healthily on a vegan diet, and it would only really take a couple articles to figure out how to have a healthy plant-based diet. You could do it at Walmart.

Who's moral justification? Yours?, My families?, my community?, my government? my god?

I maybe too much of a individualist, so I get a little triggered when I see claims from others about the moral justification of what I should eat, what job I should have, who I should vote for... When these things that I do are not hurting myself or other humans.

Now I'm sure you could take an example of each one of these and "butterfly affect" to some example of hurting another human, but I could do the exact same thing to any one of [your] lifestyle choices.

The moral justification comes from the understanding that the brain is an organ which integrates information to form this profound feeling of presence that you and I share. There is zero evidence to suggest that we don't share this feeling with animals. This is a scientific argument. I'm a professional neuroscientist working in brain simulation, and even the complexity of a ringworm is out of the grasp of the field. The complexity of the brain is unrivaled anywhere else in nature, and it has this wonderful emergent property that I feel like something. Animals feel like something. It feels like something to be a cow, a chicken, and a pig. They understand and relate to the world. That is why it is wrong to kill them unless you have to.

> no meat is not what i'm evolved to eat

why do you think this? I've lived seven healthy years with zero meat and am in superb physical shape. how many 30+ year olds do you know that can run a five minute mile? can you?

Yeah, I eat plenty of those too!

You could find the time to figure out what to eat on a plant-based diet in the space of a single Youtube video. The science that eating plant-based isn't just fine for you but also better for you is extremely solid. Just because we evolved to do something doesn't make it moral, and needlessly killing animals is clearly not moral. Humans did not evolve with the terrifyingly industrial scale farming we do now providing the unprecedented amount of meat global humans now consume.

I don't needlessly kill animals. I kill animals (well, they are killed on my behalf) to eat.

and there are mountains of evidence that prove you don't need to consume dead animals to have complete nutrition.

which makes the killing of animals to eat a needless act. because it's not needed.

Yes, if I want to read mountains of papers and meticulously watch and count what I eat and stay current on research and accept difficulty in deciding what and where to eat and treat the joyful act of eating as if it were a shameful act of desperation, then I could. But like I said, I have enough hobbies and I find no shame in recognising that my lineage evolved from a single cell organism to an apex predator.

And yet despite this self-assessed evolution to apex predator status, you probably accept the difficulty and self-restrain from killing other humans during a fit of road rage if you're cut off while driving.

However, some people have cultivated empathy for non-human beings to the point that killing an animal for an easier meal is morally equivalent to killing a human for an easier time on the road.

Some people have also recognized that a bit more difficulty in finding a place to eat is worth it to decrease the ecological impact of eating beef and cheese.

And some others still have realized that not everything should be hedonistic, and enjoy a plant-based diet that contributes to overall greater health even if it means a bit less (or rather, different - vegan food is delicious) sensory pleasure.

Shame can be a powerful motivator to be sure, but altruism and compassion are preferred, here.

Why the focus on "killing"?

Plenty of things you consume create suffering, in plants, in animals, but also in humans. Therefore, why just focus on killing certain animals?

Other ways can also be more beneficial overall, such as favoring local farms which respect animals. Those exist, although their products are more expensive. In the alpine mountains where I grew up, cows and goats had undoubtedly a better life than most humans on earth.

You can also change the way to work and consume - all of this vegan ethic isn't very coherent if, as a manager, you pressure your subordinates to the maximum, and fire your coworker who you suspect that she just got pregnant.

The focus is on killing because we understand that the brain is the organ which generates sensation and presence. Plants completely lack the machinery to integrate information on the level of even a ringworm. Once you get to the size of the animals we commonly eat for food, there is an immense amount of complexity, much more similar to ourselves than different. The ethics of veganism if very coherent. The brain generates subjective experience, the feeling of being something. To deprive one of that experience is wrong- most people would report preferring to be than not. Of course, to your point about subordinates, vegans should also treat humans with respect. Actually, veganism provides a framework that tells us WHY we should treat other humans with respect- because they feel, just like I do. So, if we can practically avoid causing suffering to those with brains, as most people on this website can easily do, it is best to do so. Most plants worldwide are grown to feed to animals, by the way, so even if plants suffered, we should prefer a plant-based world which minimizes this suffering. this would also minimize the human exploitation in the food industry and reduce our reliance on the monoculture which broadly produces the bevy of animal feed grown to feed the insatiable global appetite for animal flesh. One more comment on your alpine animals comment- those animals were slaughtered for their flesh. Could you "humanely" kill a human selectively bred to grow to the size of an adult in two years? How would you do it? Would the average person be ok if you painlessly killed them after two years of roaming through the mountains? I don't think so.

>Plants taste great when cooked well!

Maybe? But until we get to the point where this is universally true, or I forget how good a prime fillet tastes, I don't see a good reason to stop eating meat.

Some (many?) ethical, ecological, and healthy choices will require you to go beyond "does this taste good" or "does this feel good"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com