Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure if this reply is timely, but I'll give it a go anyway. First, thanks for your considered response.

I'd like to point out, respectfully, that appeal to nature, or to evolutionary "purpose," is (especially vis. ethics) an argumentative fallacy (social Darwinism, anyone?). Animals (and, historically, humans) also rape each other. Some get mad and kill each other. So what? I don't see how this has any bearing on our capacity to reduce their suffering, especially given that with our neocortexes we've figured out how to subsist on nutritional sources that are not meat.

We've developed an entire slaughter system that is extremely unsanitary and wasteful from a water and energy perspective, and not to mention downright cruel, simply to satisfy what is increasingly looking like a human "taste" for meat. A pleasure. You talk about reducing food costs for the poor. Guaranteed that a food calorie from a vegan source is cheaper than one from the meat source. After all, where did the meat source derive its calorie?

I highly recommend following the audio podcast link in my original post and giving it a listen.

> I'd like to point out, respectfully, that appeal to nature, or to evolutionary "purpose," is (especially vis. ethics) an argumentative fallacy

Absolutely, but I've made no appeal to nature. The only part which may be confused as an appeal to nature is when I said that this issue is unlike slavery in that meat has played a crucial role in forming us. This is not to say that the moral question should be avoided, only that it's complicated. Calling human desire for meat "a taste" is like calling our desire for art or stories "a taste". Neither meat nor art is crucial to our survival, but they are both an important part of what has made us human.

You could say that, unlike art, eating meat causes suffering, to which I'd answer that our existence causes suffering. The crux of my argument is this: no matter what we do, as long as we live on this planet we will be killing animals, lots of them, and in very cruel ways. We might do it directly or indirectly, but there is no way to avoid it. When we approach the moral question this is something we must bear in mind. We might decide that it's better to grow tomatoes and slowly starve animals to death rather than slaughter them. But we cannot avoid killing them.

If your goal is to minimize suffering, then I'd say we should go back to being hunters-gatherers. But we can't, because technological progress is also an integral part of who we are. So we choose progress and death to animals. Now the question remains whether within these confines we should minimize animal suffering caused directly by humans wearing blood-stained clothes. Maybe. As I've said in the beginning of my original comment, human values change.

We might do it directly or indirectly, but there is no way to avoid it.

Sure, there's no way to avoid all of it, but we can avoid a heck of a lot of it. So why don't we? You seem to take a certain amount of carnism as a given, but I don't see for most people in the developed world why it should be a given, especially in light of the fact that meat isn't needed for subsistence.

If you agree that it is for taste and nothing essentially more, then we have to ask ourselves whether the suffering endured by slaughterhouse animals (in addition to the other environmental concerns I listed) is a worthy price for our pleasure. Without pointing to other irrelevant facts about nature or history.

> but we can avoid a heck of a lot of it.

I don't know that that's true even if we stop eating animals (what amount of land is required, etc.). But I don't have all the facts, so I can't argue.

> I don't see for most people in the developed world why it should be a given, especially in light of the fact that meat isn't needed for subsistence.

First of all, there aren't that many people in the developed world. What, a fifth from humanity? Second, not eating meat would place a heavy burden on composing a healthful diet for everyone.

> Guaranteed that a food calorie from a vegan source is cheaper than one from the meat source. After all, where did the meat source derive its calorie?

Meat derives its nutrition from insane amount of plant material eaten by animals. Herbivores do little more than eat all day, and most support an extremely limited brain. Meat offers concentrated nutrition. That's why it was necessary for our brains to evolve.

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