Are you against eating all animals or is there a cut off point of intelligence after which it stops being okay?
Most of what is/isn't acceptable to eat is based on history and popular socially accepted practices, not whether people think their prospective dinner is intelligent. Pigs are more intelligent than dogs yet the latter are not eaten in the western world and I wouldn't want to live in a world without the (delicious) former.
As a non-vegetarian (for now), my standpoint is that I/we should try as hard as possible to ensure that the sourcing of food is sustainable, humane and ethical for the animals involved. In the usual agricultural animals this is usually straightforward and easy as a consumer — think organically-fed, free-range chickens.
I agree with you that social norms (esp. in your dog/pig example) put irrational values on propensity to use certain animals for meat, when we use intelligence as a deciding factor. But my point was less about intelligence of an animal being the deciding factor of whether or not I eat it, but really about how my grief for that animal intensifies when I find out it has been mistreated, and especially when used in 'delicacy' cooking (my sushi example where the mistreatment of squid can be painful to watch).[0]
There's something inherently saddening in thinking that an animal who has the ability to 'escape' from its tank and slide down a drain pipe back into its habitat could be re-caught and sliced up into little bits in front of tourists. If we know it's that intelligent, then what is going through its mind? — Perhaps we should wait for better AI so we can run a neural net and figure it out! ...But would that be unethical, too?... Uh oh, I'm not going down this rabbit hole tonight. ;)
So, if we're willing to grant that non-human animals are worthy of ethical consideration and accept that we don't need meat to be healthy or happy, how can slaughtering them for food be considered ethical?
>In the usual agricultural animals this is usually straightforward and easy as a consumer — think organically-fed, free-range chickens.
I'd counter that it's incredibly not straight forward for consumers. In the US (which I'm the most familiar with), organic has no bearing on the treatment of the animal and qualifiers like "free-range" are either loosely defined or undefined with no third-party oversight. Top that off with ubiquitous practices that most people are surprised by (such as chickens reaching slaughter age in just 6 weeks), I think it's incredibly difficult for people to find products that they can confirm and agree with the ethics of.
> how can slaughtering them
> for food be considered
> ethical
Humane slaughter that they don't see coming ... what's the issue? I would be more, rather than less, comforted to find out that one day I'll suddenly die painlessly, instantly and unawares, and am not too bothered if it's because someone plans to eat me
Even if that someday is an incredibly small fraction of your natural life? Even as little as 1/100 of what you could live if you were well cared for? I take it that's not what you meant by "one day".
If we accept that animals are worthy of moral consideration, then unnecessarily harming them is unequivocally immoral.
I think if I wasn't going to see it coming, it wouldn't bother me while I was alive, and I'm not the kind of person who believes something will bother me when I'm dead.
You're saying that if you knew someone was going to kill you sometime in the near future, as long as you wouldn't see it coming, it wouldn't bother you? I expect you're in the minority on that.
> how can slaughtering [animals] for food be considered ethical?
Life begets life.
Death is part of life.
Where necessary, living requires killing.
Where people cultivate The Golden Rule, life will get better and death will get fewer.
I definitely believe humans can live very well without killing. Mushrooms, cannabis seed pomace, spirulina, beans with grains, etc provide great nutrient sources. Still, some people depend on hunting and farm animals now, and it will take a challenging cultural shift and some resources to bootstrap an economically advantageous and (here, commonly viewed) ethical lifestyle change. For myself, I eventually want to sustain dogs, so I hope fermentation\pre-digestion would allow them to live well with these nutrient sources, but as of now, I believe I will need to start them with farmed prey animals that lived well first.
Yes it is not easy currently but possible. Especially for humans: I can live off my garden mostly and I do eat eggs of my own chickens (most of which too old to lay). My dogs eat the leftovers of a bar in the village which is cheating but as humans we do not kill (Also not indirectly). I am not opposed to eating meat though but I am and against discrimenation as well; I cannot eat bacon if I cannot eat dog and my chickens are nice; I cannot spare them and eat others. So I abstain.
Animals eating pray is different; we humans however can choose and we do not need to. Even if I think if you (or someone else but not some bio factory) get up in the morning and chase your own boar, hang it and slaughter it then it is ok but buying some packet in the shop should at least give you pause.
Let me know how the dogfood works out that would be good.
Sentience is where we draw the line. You're not replying to anyone who said "killing" is wrong. We're talking specifically about the slaughter of animals. Reducing it all down to just "life" is fallacious.
The word originates from the Latin verb sentire, "to feel". Plants feel their environment. The Venus Fly Trap feels when an insect is on it, for example.
>Plants are sessile, highly sensitive organisms that actively compete for environmental resources both above and below the ground. They assess their surroundings, estimate how much energy they need for particular goals, and then realise the optimum variant. They take measures to control certain environmental resources. They perceive themselves and can distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’. They process and evaluate information and then modify their behaviour accordingly.
A more valid argument is that the sound or sight of killing an animal is more off-putting than killing a plant, which is of course a purely subjective sentiment, hence the deeming of "right vs wrong" which is itself a purely subjective sentiment.
Plants don't feel their environment. They react to stimuli as all life does.
Sentience is defined as the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Since we have very little understanding of how consciousness works and how to test discern whether an entity is conscious or not, I realize this is a sticking point for a lot of people. But I think you'll agree that there's a very real difference between killing a plant and killing a member of your family. And that distinction applies to many animals as well.
All food is killing. That mushroom that you pick dies earlier. Same for the lettuce, cabbage and carrots. Apparently there is a line somewhere near locomotion that says where to stop killing?
I see eating those as more akin to part of its sexual reproduction and continuation of life, like a bee taking nectar from a flower. As far as I understand it, Natural order works where a "food" matures, falls, and an "animal" eats it and passes its seeds through its digestive system. This process deposits the seeds in a fertilized position to grow its next generation. In a more poetic form, you can hear this in the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra[0,1] (Great Death-conquering Mantra), ~"...like a good gardener releases the cucumber from captivity (of its stem), free me from death but not from immortality."
That's true for fruits (in the botanical sense), not roots (carrots), fungi (mushrooms), or cabbage and lettuce. You're killing or injuring the organism and not helping perpetuate it in any way.
When a human harvests those organisms and replants their seeds among compost, it seems awfully similar to me. (Yes, I understand they each have some level of awareness similar to a mammal and bird. Here, we seem to focus on the meaning of killing. Perhaps our frame of reference which would call one yes and one no limits our ability to understand what happens in these processes.)
Tangent hidden in Mahamrityunjaya: If your unit of analysis of Life consists of one body of directly wired cells, then death for it would seem to occur when it stops nourishing itself or starts nourishing another body of directly wired cells. If on the other hand your unit of analysis for Life is Life, then replanting its seed is its continuation, afaict. This opens a paradox... If eating a head of lettuce seems fine while a new crop grows, then why not a head of cow while its calves grow too?
People can get trapped in their heads by paradoxes, so I like to go by my gut and my heart (don't worry, they're connected to my brain and they have a lot of neurons, see peripheral nervous system[0]) and econophysics[1](?linked document seems to have changed a lot). So, basically cold, hard calculation in a warm, soft body. If I can run my home on cow meat and feel good about it then bravo, but I can't for two reasons: 1) I love Life and want to maximize and respect it 2) eating cows is horrendously inefficient, for example you can get 6x as much meat from the same exact inputs of feed and water from meat rabbits.
Meat rabbit production seem like a very good investment right now and a potential focal point for planning my near-term food sources. They can also eat the grain stalks and inedible carrot leaves etc, and their poop works extremely well for compost. I want simply to figure out how to make the most of my available inputs, so if I can turn those green leaves into mushroom food instead and still grow enough grain while I use those stalks for construction projects etc, then great. We're talking about living here, so it's a matter of costs and benefits, right?.. what's Life worth?
None of those foods have seeds. You're not going to get anything out of the compost except rot. You're not helping them reproduce. The only maybe exception is mushrooms, since when they get plucked up you might spread spores.
Mushrooms are the fruiting body of a much larger fungal complex. Many fungi use the fact that animals carry the mushrooms (and their spores) off to eat as a reproductive strategy.
Let's assume a purely materialistic view of reality. In such a system all truths will be defined from nature.
1) Animals in nature kill each other all the time for food and sport.
2) All eating after a certain cell count for a creature requires death in some way.
3) Death is inevitable; life is not.
4) Force is the determinate factor for making something happen.
5) The universe does not care for life or death. It is merely a thing. It too will die taking all life within it with it.
Construct a moral set from those points (add more if necessary). I contend that you can't seat any ethics on it except might makes right. Anything other than that is merely a personal preference with no justification outside of the amount of force one can apply.
As a result I see no distinction between what is food and what is friend. It is merely personal preference. Sentience does not provide any actual force. It might cause your force to act, but it does not, in and of itself, mean anything.
To get out a head of it since it's been bandied about: cannibalism is impractical because it leads to the destruction of society when applied to the general population. I did not say it's wrong, for it is only death, which as we've seen is just part of nature. I say it makes commerce and society difficult if applied internally as well as outwardly. We, as a society, have a preference for this stability. We, as a group of actors, have the ability to force this view by our combined strength such as police and other law enforcement institutions.
Of course, you have a valid point. But what you're ultimately arguing against is any form of moral reasoning.
While I find the theoretical discussion of morality interesting, I'm far more driven by the practical discussions. People generally accept a moral axiom, explicitly or implicitly, something along the lines of "Harming other individuals unnecessarily is wrong". If that is the case, I'm going to argue for the consistent application of that principle, which is also where sentience enters the conversation. If they don't hold a similar moral axiom (which I've found is fairly rare), then I don't really have any ground to stand on in this debate. I'm certainly not equipped, if it's even possible, to make a moral argument from first principles.
Also, that cow's ancestors made our lives possible. Someone had to sow those amber waves of grain, and they needed help. If a human would look at a life giving animal and immediately a knife or a meat grinder comes to mind, then both need help. Perhaps some animals could step up to it, hopefully of the human kind.
It's hard to escape the fact that, on average, our ethical circle has only expanded and not contracted. That animals should one day be inside this circle seems inevitable.
If ventures like Memphis Meats[0] (meat without the animals) get off the ground the whole matter could become a non-issue.
>It's hard to escape the fact that, on average, our ethical circle has only expanded and not contracted. That animals should one day be inside this circle seems inevitable.
I'd say it has mostly changed with added hypocrisy. The 20th century saw more bloodshed (and from supposedly developed western countries) than any other century in history. And the 21st is off to a good start, sarcastically speaking.
There's no reason we, as humans, have to eat animals to survive. There are animals which need it for their organisms to functions properly or they would die. Think difference of cats and dogs. Dogs can survive without meat but cats not so much. Humans can survive, but it's just missing marketing and educations and related mass production of alternatives that's still fueling farming of animals as an energy source. I'm not a vegetarian as I don't reject meat when it's on my plate, but I don't actively seek the meat.
I mean, if you hunt an animal for sport, then you better eat it as well, or just leave hunting to park rangers who do it for ecological reasons.
> dogs yet the latter are not eaten
Yes, it's a huge hypocrisy that we condemn those who eat dogs, but I like to think it's because dogs have been man's best friend for so long that we have an emotional attachment too strong to break.
Although not the OP, I have a fairly strong opinion on this. In order of importance everyone should
* Make their own decisions on what to eat.
* Understand the externalities, exogenous, and endogenous process and consequences of their decisions.
* Take full personal, civic, and environmental responsibility for those decisions.
Essentially, as long as people are forthright, honest, and accountable about what they eat, where it comes from, and the ecological footprints their choices implicate, then have at it, eat whatever.
If we're going to try to come up with a system, mine is simply (borrowed[1]): I like beef and broccoli, mind your business. I readily admit this doesn't cover every corner case, but I don't think there can be a satisfactory system that does. Many things have to be determined by context and taste, and usually aren't even worth thinking about if you're not in a position of power and responsibility over the lives of others.
What if it is the actual wish of the people involved?
What if a person whose fantasy was to kill and cook another person met a person who fantasy was to be killed and cooked? Then this happened. What penalty should ensue for the (well-fed) survivor?
Well, I'm controversial with some - it's still against the law in many jurisdictions so it's murder. But I consider euthanasia to be hugely unethical, so I'd consider it manslaughter.
That will happen. There will be two aspects to it.
Firstly, the wealthy (and then the middle classes) will have meat prepared that is genetically identical to themselves, and will serve it to dinner guests.
Secondly, one will be able to buy celebrity meat at the supermarket. The future equivalent of a Tom Cruise burger, or a Scarlett Johansson steak.
The third one, "full personal, civic, and environmental responsibility for those decisions" would include criminal charges and jail-time for the decision to eat a human as it would constitute murder.
If someone said "I'm comfortable with the legal consequences of cannibalism and murder along with the possibility that the person may actually kill me before I get to them" and they actually are held to those postulations, including say, life-imprisonment AND they still want to do it all just so they can eat human for supper, then sure, go for it!
In that case, your first and third statements certainly seem in conflict. You don't actually believe in any practical sense that people should be able to make their own (unhindered) decision on what to eat if you're going to punish them for it and prevent them from doing it again.
Why would we care if someone accepts the costs or not? I find our justice system to be incredibly flawed, but ultimately we jail people because we (as a society) don't want the action they committed to take place. The mentality you seem to be espousing seems to ignore that for... reasons?
So if we're willing to say a specific action is worth jailing someone for the rest of their life, why shouldn't we say "This action is not okay and we're going to do our best to prevent it"?
What you're describing is an extended version of the Problem of Evil. Also related is the moral and limitation of government itself (human chose to give up certain liberty for government).
Basically, free will (and the physical manifestation of it: liberty) is argued to be more important than the lack of evil. And you can't have realistic free will and liberty without accepting that bad things will happen.
No. I'm merely pointing out the absurdity of saying describing something as "okay" when it's anything but. The word has become meaningless in this conversation.
So eating human is OK? Killing humans in order to eat them is OK?
What some people are asking is if we should extend this to some other species, typically other apes (which share 90% of our genes etc...) and now animals with high intelligence (elephant, dolphin, octopus).
Our society has decided that there are a number of drastic consequences for cannibalism and murder. If someone honestly was ok with all of them including things like telling the persons' family and spending their life in jail for the cost of a meal, then that's fine.
Note that my conditions make people on the hook for everything - the treatment of the workers that prepared the food, the environmental impact of delivering it, the treatment of the animals constituting the food, the health effects of choosing what to eat ... all of that.
I think that if someone was forced to have a pet pig for a while they'd probably stop eating pork or if they were forced to be a single mother living on minimum wage they'd probably fight on behalf of fast food workers.
My supposition is that people shouldn't voluntarily shroud themselves in ignorance for culinary delight but instead, should take full responsibility for all of their actions, at the dinner table and in all aspects of life.
>I think that if someone was forced to have a pet pig for a while they'd probably stop eating pork
Unfortunately, this is often not the case in my own experience. It certainly does for some people, but that course is by no means universal. And when the well-being of other thinking, feeling individuals is at stake, I'd rather not rely on this kind of approach.
In my family we often used to eat chicken and while eating them the only thing on mind was how it tasted and how it was cooked etc. Then my parents started rearing some chickens in their backyard. That changed everything. There were about 7 or 8 of them. As the chicks grew up, they could identify each of them and know about individual treats. They would call some of them by names and slowly their nature was becoming more evident. They still eat eggs but they eat chicken meat rarely at some social event. They cannot even think about killing one of the chickens that they have. Its just emotionally too painful for just food!
This really works i think. But you have to rear them in small numbers to get connected to animals and then observe the changes in your thinking. You may still have them for food but it would be a conscious decision which you would not take lightly, like considering it as some food lying around.
I definitely acknowledge it works sometimes.
But it often does not. Even in your example, your family hasn't actually stopped eating chicken. So it really only proves my point. People continue to cling to their dissonance.
I actually have neighbors who treat their chickens like pets for several years then give them to someone to slaughter. They don't eat them but they're fine with other people eating them and they're fine with eating other chickens.
To offer a different perspective...
I keep a handful dual purpose laying hens, primarily for eggs but after a few years when their egg production slows down I use them for soup.
My kids come up with names for all of them and we enjoy interacting with them in different ways, but at the end of the day we all understand that the reason we keep them is for food. I don't get attached to them because I know that some day I'm going to be the one putting them down.
I like knowing where my food comes from and being involved in the harvest. It would feel wasteful to me if I didn't eat the chickens.
Yeah, I'm totally cool with that. Diversity is wonderful.
The thing I'm not ok with is people who pretend like they are the modern incarnation of St. Francis of Assisi while eating animals for every meal and having a bunch of leather goods.
Such people aren't saintly patrons of the animals and they should come to terms with it. It's really just about honesty.
Would you be ok with changing legislation so that it is ok to kill humans as long as it is to eat them.
This is what people are discussing here, should we legislate against killilling animals with "high intelligence" and those who share more genes with us than with any other animal, as long as it is for food?
I am not trying to be snarky, and honestly don't know what you mean. Does "In order of importance" mean "from most to least important", or "from least to most important"? (Probably it's just my deficiency; I am so used to seeing 'increasing' or 'decreasing' that I don't know which one is implicitly meant.)
If I understand OP correctly, he was specifically concerned about eating them while they are still alive and made no judgement in their comment on eating them while they are already dead.
Most carnivores would probably agree that it's cruel to cut your bacon from a live pig, yet would eat bacon cut from a dead one.
I believe that people are not animals (and that computers are not people), both may be controversial beliefs for some but are rather widely shared.
In particular, nothing constitutes an ethical problem for animals, computers, plants, and other non-human entities, while some things are unethical for people.
Firstly, it doesn't even need to have anything to do with "ethics", it's just ridiculous to argue that "lions eat their prey alive, hence I find it fine to do so." Lions will lick their balls in the presence of, well, pretty much any other organism. Do you suggest that we do the same?
I'm not saying that people are "inherently more moral" than animals, or "far superior", I'm saying that they're inherently people while animals inherently aren't people. A lion will never compare its own behavior to the behavior of a toad or an elephant or a human in order to judge its propriety, but you do this sort of thing, and you doing so is inherently human. A lion doesn't argue that it's superior to its prey and hence it's OK to eat it alive, but you do make this argument (or a different argument, the point is you're arguing about this on the Internet) and this is inherently a human thing.
You being a human makes it possible for me to ask you, why would you want to eat an animal alive, why not kill it first? What's in it for you? It's obviously painful for the animal and the vast majority of humans derive a certain degree of displeasure from observing the suffering of living organisms that they don't have a particular reason to harm. Perhaps the desire for philosophical consistency is the inherently human trait causing you to argue in favor of eating animals alive ("since most of us would kill an animal to save a human's life, it must also be OK to cause animals suffering for a near-zero gain or even just to derive pleasure from it, otherwise it's a slippery slope at the end of which we grant animals voting rights")?
Agreed with everything up until your last sentiment. I assume it was hyperbole, but it's still a ridiculous notion that without this specific food item (that currently requires harming other sentient, intelligent individuals), that life would not be worth living.
> Agreed with everything up until your last sentiment. I assume it was hyperbole, but it's still a ridiculous notion that without this specific food item (that currently requires harming other sentient, intelligent individuals), that life would not be worth living.
I didn't say it wouldn't be worth living. I said that, given the choice, I'd rather live in a world with ham, bacon, and baby back ribs.
There is a cut off point as most people here would not eat humans (come on, how are human babies intelligent?) dolpins or dogs. Eating pigs just makes people hypocrites; people just ignore it and stuff it away as you need bacon and it is too annoying to face all this pesky stuff.
And 'would not want to live in a world without'? That is a strange remark on many levels; if pigs are deamed sentient tomorrow and hence offlimits like humans you go for suicide or become a criminal?
Are they? That makes people even weirder for doing what they do. Like said I am not against eating meat; if I known the animal was not tortured then I would eat it, completely by the way (brain and organs included). But buying some bacon in plastic from a factory where torture is the norm makes you rather a sick puppy if you know these animals are sentient. But I know people just don't want to think about it. Especially here it is strange: the HN reader is rich so can actually go to a farm and pay something more for well treated eggs and bacon. And yet...
Try serving them a pig with the head still attached, similar reaction, next day bacon for breakfast. Don't want to think about that real animal stuff, I doubt the line has much to do with the intelligence of the species.
I actually have had suckling pig; it still smells like bacon so people get over it pretty quickly. I also bet people don't consider pigs to be as smart as they are.
Most of what is/isn't acceptable to eat is based on history and popular socially accepted practices, not whether people think their prospective dinner is intelligent. Pigs are more intelligent than dogs yet the latter are not eaten in the western world and I wouldn't want to live in a world without the (delicious) former.