Comment on Why is the consumption of Meat considered bad

• NeuralNerd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s not about “all life” but about “all sentient life”. Only beings that are able have pleasant and unpleasant experience should be considered. If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition.

  Sentience is studied scientifically. It cannot be stated with absolute certainty but scientists have good sets of criteria and experiences that helps identify it. With the current knowledge it’s almost certain that all mammals are sentient, like us. Fishes and birds are also very likely to be sentient. Some species of insects are probably sentient while others may not be. And plants are likely not sentient.

  But even if all living things are sentient, it doesn’t change very much. Speciesism means treating beings differently only because they belong to some specific species. There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species (and studying sentience helps identifying these interests). It’s very likely that we do less harm by growing plants than by breeding animals. And even if it was the same amount of suffering we would still do less harm by avoiding eating animals because breeding them to eat them actually requires more plants than just eating plants. We should seek to minimise suffering and avoiding eating animal is a good way to do that.

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  • ragusa@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t agree on your analysis of sentience. The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this? Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.

    If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition

    This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.

    There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species

    And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence. If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.

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    • 4lan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ve heard this tired argument that plants and sentient mammals have the same capacity for suffering so many times. I think it is a disingenuous way of excusing the suffering your choices support.

      A plant does not grieve when it’s offspring is removed from it. It does not have fear, or joy. Plants don’t play with each other and bond.

      Yes. They communicate, and react to stimuli. So does a computer, but neither are sentient

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      • ragusa@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I don’t think it is disingenuous at all. You may draw the line at sentience, but you have provided no argument for why this is correct. Why must we consider the harm exactly up to sentience? Why must we only consider conscious pain resulting from harm, and not nociception? It is easy to dismiss people as disingenuous, especially if you don’t really have any arguments for your case.

        I don’t see how there can exist any good arguments for where to draw the line, which is why it bothers me when people claim the moral high ground, but cannot offer any arguments on why their behaviour is most morally correct. You can say “reduce suffering of sentient beings”, and most people probably agree, but I think it is completely natural to prioritise yourself, your family and friends and your species above other animals. So how much suffering of yourself is as important as the suffering of a chicken. Probably substantially less. I don’t think you will ever convince anyone of your beliefs by simply denying that their weightings of human-to-animal suffering is wrong and yours is right.

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    • NeuralNerd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this?

      It does have a concrete meaning. Scientific papers usually define what they are studying. For example the Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans has a definition. It also has criteria to evaluate it.

      Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.

      Having reactions to external stimulus is different from having feelings. Feelings require consciousness, or sentience.

      Even having nociceptors doesn’t mean you can experience pain (see the above review in the “Defining sentience” section).

      If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition

      This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.

      Yes you can be harmed without knowing it, but it still must have a negative effect on you. If something can’t have negative (or positive) experience then how can you say it’s being harmed?

      If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed. Being sentient is having this ability to experience being harmed. That’s why I meant it’s by definition that non sentient beings can’t be harmed. The word exists to distinguish what can and cannot experience harm (among other feelings).

      There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species

      And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence.

      But having food doesn’t necessarily mean harming something. And even if it does, different foods have different level of harm. We can choose the foods that minimize harm.

      If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.

      Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.

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      • ragusa@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Scientific papers usually define what they are studying.

        When I say concrete meaning I mean that sentience is an abstract concept of which we can observe evidence of, but we cannot define clearly what it is. In the report you mentioned, you will see that they give 8 criteria for scientific evidence of sentience, i.e. these do not define what sentience is, but they are criteria that we presume sentient beings should satisfy. They even require several pages to explain the complications of how to define sentience and how to observe it.

        I do admit that the extent of study on sentience of animals is greater than I initially thought, and I can see that one might have reasonably sufficient knowledge to judge, with some certainty, which life organism might be sentient (under definitions such as the one used in the report). But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of “some level of sentience”, I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?

        If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed

        But a rock is not alive, there is no evolutionary force driving its interest, as with all other living organisms. A sea cucumber has no proper nervous system (as I understand from a quick search), and thus could not “feel” pain. Yet, if you cut one in half, I would say that you have harmed it. But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word “harm”, the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.

        If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans. Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.

        Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.

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  • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    why should sentience matter at all?

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    • NeuralNerd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Because if something is not sentient it cannot have negative experiences, so you can’t be harmed.

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      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        so?

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• Synthead@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is kind of a straw man argument. I don’t feel guilty at all eating a carrot I pulled out of the ground.

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  • AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So we can all agree that it’s morally ok to eat a carrot, but not to eat a human. The difference is sentience. The hard part is where exactly to draw the line. Which side of the line is a cow on? A fish? A bug?

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    • beeple@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This guy thought about that question, if you wanted to see that perspective.

      reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-…

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      • AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yeah, I see he’s thought it through and generated numbers, but it’s counter-intuitive to say we should give up fish for beef, or that milk causes more suffering than beef

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    • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The difference is sentience

      no. it’s not. the difference is that one of them is human.

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    • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      why should sentience matter?

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      • AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        We could certainly discuss that, but it appears to, regardless of whether there is a good reason.

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    • oo1@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I'm not a meat eater personally.
      But I don't understand why people who like to eat meat don't eat human.
      I think there are, or have been, some who do. It's seems cultural, and a bit of a luxury to be wasteful.

      I don't think there's any socially agreed line between "good" and "bad".

      I reckon people mostly do what their culture prefers or tolerates.
      Different cultures have different ranges of acceptable behavior from different people fulfilling different roles within them . Most people are members of many sub-cultures going right down to small family groups , professional associations, work-teams, sports teams and so on. There'll be some sort of consequence for transgression, maybe verbal shaming, spitting in someone's beer, withheld services, exclusion from jobs, or expulsion from the group.

      Sometimes people (in power) agree to put in laws and expend resources on enforcement instead of cultural norms; probably because the clashes within or between (sub)cultures and the inconsistent treatment of transgressions becomes too costly or disruptive.
      That's when you get a "line" that says "wrong", once its been put into an enforced law. Even then the law, and enforcement, is always still a bit blurry. partial, and biassed so it's really just a formalisation of the process for administering the consequences of transgression.

      i think it is possible to find things that look similar in other social animals too like, other apes, wild dogs, things with pecking orders , rats and so on. I wonder if there are even roles similar to " police" in some non-human cultures?

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  • ragusa@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t believe this is a straw man argument, I never claim that they believe these conclusions. Quite the opposite, I am showing how their argument, not their conclusion, is not good. As I understand their argument, it is basically this:

    (i) If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it. (ii) Animals do not want to be killed. Thus, it is morally wrong to kill animals.

    I do not agree with (i), which I try to explain by reductio ad absurdum, arguing that if (i) is true it leads to obviously incorrect conclusions, thus (i) must be false.

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    • Synthead@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The straw man argument comes from your point about combining plants and animals as food, and stating that they were both living. If you compare a cow to parsley, it is silly to say that we shouldn’t eat parsley for the sake of it being a living organism. With cows in the same argument, they get dismissed since they’re in the same group as plants.

      Plants are the straw man in this case because it’s easy to dismiss the argument that we shouldn’t eat plants, for some reason. Animals are conscious creatures that experience suffering. Plants don’t experience the same pain.

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      • ragusa@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        A straw man argument is when the other person believes A and you act like they in fact believe B, so you argue against B.

        I am not claiming they believe it immoral to kill plants. Quite the opposite, I don’t think anyone believes this in general. Therefore, it is not a straw man.

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  • EhList@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That is not an example of a straw man argument as that consists of them creating a point tangential to the ones you are making but did not make, and then arguing against that falsely constructed position.

    It could be a false equivalence. That would be the more apt fallacy.

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    • Anamnesis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’d call it a non sequitur.

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  • mapro@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And others don’t feel guilty for eating meat. Than you for recognizing that people have different feelings.

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    • Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      And others don’t feel guilty for eating meat.

      Carrots are incapable of feeling anything: they can’t be affected in a morally relevant way. Animals have emotions, preferences, can experience suffering and can be deprived of positive/pleasurable experiences in their lives.

      Than you for recognizing that people have different feelings.

      Obviously this isn’t a sufficient justification for harming others. “I don’t care about people with dark skin, please recognize that different people have different feelings.” The fact that I don’t care about the individuals I’m victimizing doesn’t mean victimizing them is okay.

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      • Anamnesis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Isn’t it funny how everyone becomes a subjectivist when trying to defend meat eating?

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  • hark@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t feel guilty at all eating animals. Kind of a subjective point, no?

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• RobbieGM@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The line you mention is sentience, for many

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  • ragusa@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Sure, so then they should instead be arguing that sentience is the morally correct line to draw.

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