Comment on Time to grow up.
biddy@feddit.nl 8 months agoBut you do exploit humans. The food you eat, the clothes you wear, actually pretty much everything you use was made with exploitation. The fact you can choose to go vegan and complain about it on the internet means you are incredibly privledged. As am I.
You talk about rational discussion but all I’m seeing from you is the opposite, “all meat eaters are evil”.
The world is complicated and there’s a lot of things wrong with it. You chose one problem to focus on, and that’s great. But just because other people have other things that they prioritize doesn’t mean they are bad people.
dx1@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I did not choose one problem to focus on. This whole comment is a big “tu quoque” based on assumptions about me that aren’t even true. I buy local food, I get clothes from thrift stores, etc. And I made no claim about “all meat eaters are evil”, this is just the classic “take a vegan saying that eating meat is unethical and interpret it as an attack on your character”, which is another pattern I’ve had just about enough of.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 8 months ago
I have a problem with your choice of words
pick one. Ethics by their very nature are subjective. Anything relating to them as a basis is therefore also subjective. There is no such thing as objective ethics. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you did not write what you meant but as written this is contradictory in itself.
dx1@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Well, this is the crux of it, isn’t it. The principles you establish an ethical system with are indeed arbitrary (not exactly “subjective”) but the actual answers you derive from any such system have a remarkable way of showing that basic recognition of rights we afford to humans (FOR SOME REASON) also extend to animals. E.g., right to life, some basic degree of bodily autonomy, consideration of wellbeing, etc. Basically the only way to construct an “ethical system” that actually “justifies” animal agriculture beyond actual life or death scenarios is one that’s oriented purely around one individuals’ selfish desires (commonly called “evil”) or one that just axiomatically presupposes human supremacy. If you base it on something actually reasonable like, beings experiencing joy is an ideal and beings experiencing suffering is to be avoided, you rapidly end up with an incongruency between what’s right and what’s happening in the world today.
biddy@feddit.nl 8 months ago
You don’t axiomatically presuppose human supremacy? I don’t understand how that moral position works, and I want to hear more.
In general, we empathize more with creatures that are more similar to ourselves, and creatures that are cute. Given that, human supremacy follows logically for me. Humans are top of the heirachy, followed by similar mammals, then birds, then fish, then insects. It’s sad that’s there’s a heirachy, but the alternative is considering the life of an insect equal in value to the life of a human. I think that’s a less moral position, but it would also drive you insane because we murder so many insects in our lives.
I don’t believe it’s possible to have a consistent and non-hypocrytical ethical system, and if it was that wouldn’t be desirable. Every meat eater I’ve ever met agrees that agriculture kinda sucks, but they have other priorities.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 8 months ago
not very hard to do. All it requires is a factor that excludes almost all animals and voila. For example: only being capable of communicating abstract concepts (for example: crafting) should be afforded these rights. Since the list of animals we have observed that in is also pretty much the list of animals we don’t eat there is no moral dilemma anymore.
Granted I’m an unapologetic human supremacist so this is a biased take but concluding some sort of human supremacy in the animal kingdom is not hard given that we pretty much rule earth. There is undeniable proof that by simply being present humans influence biospheres harder than an apex predator suddenly showing up, so we have some form of elevation above other animals pretty much proven (whether that influence is “good” is another discussion). All that’s needed then is to find anything that separates humans from animals and you have your human supremacist theory. Given our rather distinct evolutionary path that is not really a difficult exercise.
Without deeper thought I agree with the rest of your statement though.
federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world 8 months ago
pick one?
federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world 8 months ago
it might be a tu quoque if it weren’t for the fact that you set yourself up as the standard, and you’re standing on a lie.