Comment on Why is the consumption of Meat considered bad

• NeuralNerd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  you can’t prove plants aren’t sentient.

  And you can’t prove something is sentient. But scientists have criteria that help determine whether a species is sentient. See this review for example.

  even if you could, why should sentience matter?

  I already answered. If something can’t be harmed there no need to prevent harming it.

  what ethical system even accounts for sentience as a factor of right behavior?

  About all animal welfare:

  Respect for animal welfare is often based on the belief that nonhuman animals are sentient and that consideration should be given to their well-being or suffering, especially when they are under the care of humans.[4]

  source

  • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If something can’t be harmed there no need to prevent harming it.

    i don’t really like your use of harm here to exclude everything but sentient beings, but as a term of art, for the purposes of this discussion, i will indulge you.

    why does it matter if something CAN be harmed? what creates a duty to NOT HARM something?

    source

    • NeuralNerd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      what creates a duty to NOT HARM something?

      About all ethics is about reducing harm. If you don’t know that harming is bad I don’t think we can have a discussion.

      source

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        deontological ethics are explicitly not about that. divine command theory is unconcerned with that. can you name an ethical system that does concern itself with that?

        source

        • -> View More Comments
• max@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Even if plants were sentient, and I’m not saying they are, but if. Would you rather “kill” orders of magnitude more plants to feed them to animals, then kill the animals and eat them, or would you kill the plants and eat them directly? One of them causes a lot less harm (if any at all), and it’s not eating the animals.

  source

  • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    well, first, animals are mostly fed plants or parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat, so the scale of the difference you described is orders of magnitude less than you are suggesting.

    but, more importantly, why should sentience matter?

    finally, whether i buy food from a shelf or not, the creature (flora or fauna) it came from is already harmed, and my purchase causes no more harm to it, so eating it has exactly no impact.

    source

    • max@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Those plants still have to be cultivated. If there are no animals to feed those plants to (for instance, low quality corn or low quality soy), the lane can be used for cultivating food for humans or in the case of low quality soy, the rain forest doesn’t have to be mowed down for it. Sentience matters because ideally, one should strive to reduce harm as much as possible. Especially unnecessary harm. There is a reason why I don’t torture cats and dogs for fun, and it’s the same reason I don’t eat killed and tortured cows, pigs, chickens, etc. just because I like the flavour of them. And of course your purchasing behaviour has impact on the amount of harm caused. Maybe not instantaneously, because it is indeed on the shelves already, but just like with voting in elections, if you don’t buy products that cause harm, demand drops ever so slightly. Then when more people inevitably follow, demand drops further in a big enough quantity to matter. That’s why you see a lot more vegetarian or vegan options in your supermarket today: because people buy them.

      source

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        how do you know what is necessary for other people?

        source

        • -> View More Comments
      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        there are more vegetarian options and even more meat is produced now than ever before. the production hasn’t dropped.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        why should reducing harm be a goal? suggesting that eating meat is equivalent to torturing animals for fun is totally specious: almost everyone eats meat, almost no one tortures animals.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        the soy fed to livestock is almost entirely the industrial waste from making soybean oil.

        source

        • -> View More Comments