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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44943 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Not sure if this is better for SQS but - What is the steelman argument against vegetarianism/veganism? I am especially interested in claims that aren't health-based, as I know quite a few very intelligent and well-sourced vegans who have thoroughly convinced me that most health based claims are false.

I'm not a vegetarian myself but I'm reasonably convinced that I should be one, it's more of a moral failing on my part that I eat meat, not a logical stance.

If you don't mind, I would actually like to speak to the health aspect:

My wife and I tried a vegan diet. We planned to go for a month and see how we felt and possibly keep it up for a while if we experienced the results some people were claiming. In reality we lasted less than 7 days. The issue is not that the claims we heard were lies, they may have been true but we needed to stick with it longer. The issue was not that vegan meals are somehow less healthy or taste bad or anything. The issue was the effort. If you eat a standard diet, even a vegetarian one you will manage to almost accidentally get all the stuff you need to the point that nothing bad is going to happen for years (or maybe never: maybe something not related to your diet gets you instead). With a vegan diet this takes radically more effort and we simply weren't in a position to put in this effort.

For me, I did find the health aspects compelling: I do get all kinds of injuries working out, so if this is some kind of inflammation that happens less (or not at all) on a plant based diet that would be sufficient reason for me to switch. I'm not moved by the arguments about ethics. Animals should be treated better than they are but you can already signal your concern about this by purchasing products that send these signals (even if the product is lying, you're still sending a signal by purchasing it).

Interestingly I did feel more alert, but I guess this was because I can only drink coffee with milk and all the milk replacements tasted so awful in coffee I just gave it up instead. The meals we did eat were fantastic. My wife just didn't have time to break out a spreadsheet and ensure that all the really important stuff (e.g. calcium) was being sufficiently covered (which absolutely can be, just not by accident) and I was scared to continue on a diet where some critical things might be entirely absent. We could probably have gone on for a few more weeks as we were without any permanent damage but even what she was doing was just a lot more effort and clearly not sustainable no matter the health effects.

EDIT: I guess that's not steel man but it's a practical truth for us and probably plenty of others as well.

First, we don't really know how consciousness works (nor do we know how to even begin to study it), so we must place some discount on animal lives all things being equal. Of course, it can also be applied to other humans, but to much lesser degree. Wouldn't it be a shame to go through so much trouble if it turns out that all or most animals we eat are good old cartesian machines?

Okay, this point is more of a funny food for thought than a serious argument; it's far more likely than not that some animals have subjective experience and can suffer. But if they do...so what?

As buddists figured out millenia ago, suffering is inextricable part of life. But what makes a life, even filled with suffering, worth living, worth preserving? It's quite tough to grap it precisely with language, but here's my take - it's the ability to choose your path, to ponder life's meaning, to appreciate the moment. You know, metacognition. Agency. All of the things animals lack.

Imagine that you died, and arrived at an audience to some kind of heavenly authority and it said - “Your mortal coil is over now, you could go to heaven, if you so desire. Though they say it's bit boring, would you be interested in reincarnation?” You nod.

“Alright. Let's see what positions are vacant right now…I know, there's one that would fit you very well. How about a cow? You will be born to a nice pack, in a lovely farm in rural France. A couple of years of chewing grass and shitting on it. I'm sure you will fit right in. Ready to embark?”

Good set up, good punchline, good joke, by all accounts. Don't know about you, but I would smile, maybe politely laugh a bit. But of course I would refuse. Because that's all that is - a joke. A life as a cow is self-evidently worthless to me.

Another angle - trolley dilemma. Is there a point at which you would sacrifice a human to save X number of cows? 100? 1000? even more zeros attached to the 1? For me, there's no such point.

All these bazillions of cows can go to hell as long as there are human lives at stake.

Resources are scarce. Time is precious. Why on earth would I spend it on improving well being of cattle?

Here's a steelman argument that has nothing to do with health:

Eating meat prevents us from justifying giving in to our animal nature, and instead striving to live in a just society. If we forbid eating animals, we're implying that they are on the same level as humans. This, together with the fact that there is little genetic separation between man and beast (humans share 99% of their DNA with chimps), can lead us to conclude that we are no better than animals, and can therefore act as animals would (subjugating those weaker than us, stealing and killing at will, etc.). We can forget that we have an intelligence and compassion that animals don't, and should act accordingly.

By killing and eating animals we show that we consider ourselves a superior lifeform (we all agree that killing and eating another human is wrong). Meditating on this will remind us not to give into animal instincts, and instead act in a way befitting someone of our intellect and emotions, striving on creating a society where people do not take advantage of their advantages to subjugate those weaker than them.

Here's a bit of a tongue-in-cheek take: I am not a vegetarian/vegan because I like animals and want them to continue to exist.

Sounds backwards, of course, but there's a point: as far as I have seen, the main principle underlying most philosophical vegetarianism is not a love of living things, but a hatred of suffering. (Probably this is just because I've been so immersed in stridently-consistent, utilitarian-heavy places like this one, rather than this being how the general public thinks.)

Suppose we all do manage to free ourselves from that nasty red-in-tooth-and-claw circle-of-life business, where we needed animals because we ate animals, like other animals do – what are we going to do next? Doesn't the hatred of suffering demand we continue to do more about how awful animals have it? What will the argument be for letting lions and leopards continue to exist, brutal things they are, once we've lost our humility about also being carnivorous? And once we've extirpated all the predators, what's the argument for letting all the prey animals continue to exist, bundles of suffering blighting the universe that they are? Are we not mandated by all that is good and decent to bring the universe to its most peaceful, purest, coldest, deadest state?

Hm.

Now, I don't really expect this chain of doom to hold. I know there are plenty of arguments about why this slope won't be slipped. But, also as far as I have seen, counting on such arguments holding up at the point of need is risky. That's still not enough for me to think this is a good argument, but I do think it's amusing enough to try posting.

Still, though, I suppose I just prefer not to lose sight of what I am, where I came from, and what I am for. This doesn't mean that I like that some animals have to die to feed me, but I'd like even less for all animals to have to die to feed a moral foundation run out of control. I don't see any grand plans ahead of me that seem likely to make things better instead of worse, in the end, so for now I'll just carry on doing what people have always been doing.

Generally, I feel like when some moral system mandates some radical change from ordinary good-life as it has historically been, it is much more likely that the moral system is broken than that regular existence is. Of course, that risks being one of those heuristics that almost always work (except when they're needed,) so I don't have any good, conclusive answers.

Veganism explicitly requires a separate and competing moral system to mine that places moral value on animals without moral agency.

Vegetarianism is less firmly defined and doesn't make as much of a moral point.

Nobody is suggesting that anybody should be required to eat meat.

As far as: why should I be allowed to eat meat: because it is healthy and every one of my ancestors, as well as every other mammal on this planet, does so.

You are claiming that every other mammal on the planet eats meat?

This is not even remotely true.

On the one hand it is naturalistic fallacy, on the other... its just true:

Animals eat other animals in nature. Some animals are obligate carnivores, in fact. This doesn't automatically grant license for humans to eat animals, but it does mean that eating animal meat, as a bare act, can't be wrong strictly speaking. I would proffer that the factor we care about is the suffering of the animals, and then the question is how we weight said suffering.

I weight animal suffering less than human suffering. I would gladly torture and/or kill a cow to avoid a human being tortured and killed. When we get to chickens, I weight them so little that it begins to round towards zero. And fish? Man. I cannot bring myself to care one iota about the suffering of fish. Maybe that's a moral failing but in a pure thought experiment environment, I would torture and kill a quadrillion fish before I considered doing so to a human.

Its at the level of chickens and above, then, where I actually try and calibrate my feelings on animal suffering.

From a suffering standpoint, I honestly don't know whether a chicken's life could be considered 'better' if it was lived in a state of nature, where it has to locate its own food and fight off predators and could live a long life OR be brutally slain by an unseen predator very early... compared to living life on a farm where food is plentiful and predators are few, but its life is of a set length and ends abruptly on that schedule. I'm not completely certain that the chicken itself can tell the difference.

With that said, I can accept that a factory farm where chickens are hemmed in extremely close quarters, with overheating and wallowing in their own excrement and the corpses of their fellows will produce more stress/suffering than the free-range equivalent situation, so however slight it might be, factory farms are more morally objectionable than free range or other 'humane' options.

So where do I come out? Well, I choose to believe that the suffering chickens endure in their life is ultimately worth less than the pleasure I receive from consuming them, even in the worst case scenarios. I am quite confident of this.

I am less confident of this when it comes to cows, and I get extremely leery of it when it comes to pigs. In any event, if you can get chicken meat to grow on trees, with a similar taste and nutritional profile, I will gladly switch over.

So with all that said, I think the burden that Vegetarians have to overcome to convince me, personally, of the moral worth of animal lives is to explain why the life of a chicken, a cow, or a pig has worth above and beyond it's ability to provide sustenance to humans, and quantify that rigorously enough to show that outweighs the happiness of the humans that eat them.

And do so without running into 'weird' conclusions where it becomes our responsibility not just to not eat cows, but to ensure that as many cows are brought into existence as possible and their lives are made as comfortable as possible (shoutout to Hinduism). Seriously, though. If we put sufficient weight on avoiding animal suffering, explain to me how we aren't then obligated to just drop all other priorities and save and enrich as many animal lives as possible, so long as it doesn't cause a substantial increase in human suffering. I genuinely think some vegetarians/vegans think that way, and the worst of them honestly don't care much about the human suffering. But that's not an argument.

Because I suspect that if we decided that domestic cows were no longer morally acceptable to eat, then they would likely go extinct. Unless it is morally fine to keep them as pets, which I suspect the most ardent vegetarians would object to as well. And I really don't see how going extinct is a better outcome, from the cows' perspective, than being raised for slaughter.

So yeah, eating animals is an unavoidable fact in nature. Humans have the tech and moral conscience to improve on nature, and eventually there may come an inflection point where tech enables us to produce meat without animal suffering, and in that sense obligates us to do so. But in the abstract, animal deaths don't seem to carry much moral weight, and as long as we avoid intentionally inflicting animal suffering, I will continue to argue that raising and killing animals for food is a morally acceptable act, even if it is not a righteous one.

If one accepts the vegan frame that animal lives have moral value, then one argument is that livestock wouldn't exist if we didn't farm them, and while that makes us omnivores responsible for their deaths, it also makes us responsible for their births. Are their lives really so bad that they'd have been better off never having been born? For some types of factory farming, this is probably true, but not for all. A world of vegans is a world where cows would probably be extinct, or close to it.

Yep. Even if we grant that it isn't a binary choice between slaughtering animals and venerating them, I don't see a world where cows can successfully survive as a species without human support, and the only way they can get humans to support them is if we're able to gain utility from them.

I think the strongest against vegetarianism would be something along the lines of: animals have the right to exist, and meat eating is the most viable way to allow animals to exist in a human society.

I'm pretty sure most meat eaters do not think that vegetarianism is wrong, however. They simply disagree with it as a moral imperative. "There's nothing wrong with eating meat" rather than: "Not eating meat is wrong".

Generally non-nutritional arguments would be; distinguishing animal lives as lesser than human lives, believing that animals are incapable (or less capable) of suffering, or that human enjoyment of meat outweighs how an animal suffers to produce it.

Personally, I justify my meat eating habits with the second argument, and to a lesser degree the third. I think that animals (the ones I eat anyway) are capable of feeling pain, but not anguish. They cannot foresee their death, or fear the void, they can't really predict the future beyond associations with past experiences. While animals will likely feel pain when they are slaughtered, humans do a very good job of minimizing that, so that very small amount of unnecessary pain in (what should be) an otherwise happy life is well below the hedonistic enjoyment humans will gain out of the meat. I am against factory farming because of this. Meat should be a rare treat, ideally one you raise and slaughter yourself, not the everyday protein source we use it as today. Meat raised ethically is much tastier anyway, stress causes inflammation that impacts the flavor, and so does a lack of diversity in feed.

I'm going to resist a very common urge that I think a lot of smart Christians I know are subject to, which is to painstakingly spin some argument from atheist assumptions when one's own reasoning stems from religious ones. It's not good sportsmanship among atheists because it suddenly turns an otherwise normal debate into one on Christians apologetics, but regardless I'll get right to my own reasons.

God put man specifically above beasts in the creation story. Sure the creation story is not literal history, but I don't think that's the same as claiming it's untrue. Also, Jesus says "What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them." I think the fact that Jesus ate meat himself is about as clear a go-ahead as any Christian should be able to find. Further, there's that episode in the books of Acts where Peter has a vision of God presenting him with a variety of animals, telling him to "kill and eat."

And to put it to you honestly, I don't think I can be convinced that animals are not pieces of incredibly complex machinery who are slaves to their impulses. I own cats, and when I observe them it's very clear to me that they don't have much going on in their heads. If they happen to be wandering, they meander. If something catches their attention, mid-stride, they move toward it instead. I consider animals very far below me. Even if some people are themselves so mentally impaired, I think by virtue of being a member of the human race they deserve the same dignity as the rest of us.

While I wouldn't go as far as to call it unethical, I agree that avoiding meat is more ethical. Many of the animals we eat seem to be able to experience suffering similar (enough) to what humans do. And for me at least the response to seeing animals suffer is very similar to what I feel when I see humans suffer.

But the current prevailing sense of ethics among most of my peers do not recognise eating meat as particularly unethical and meat is a decent and easy source of protein so I do not shy away from eating meat whenever it's available. In case the ethics of my peers changes significantly enough to start regarding meat as highly unethical I wouldn't mind stopping.

Ultimately, while I agree it is not very ethical, I don't care for it enough to act on it, especially when there are no social consequences for not doing so.

Moral vegetarianism is ethically backwards in that it accords far too much moral value to powerless creatures that are unable to participate in human society. Moral value is a social construct, and cows are part of economy, gastronomy, landscape or perhaps someone's personal pets, but they are not part of society.

Ahh perfect - this is the type of answer I was looking for. I do find this compelling, although I hope we move into the direction of including animals in society in the future. Especially if or when we can figure out how to substantially increase their intelligence/sapience.

figure out how to substantially increase their intelligence/sapience.

But why?

Because I think it would be fun, and add beauty to the universe I guess. We could also directly ask them a lot of questions, potentially even create a bridge of slightly-more-sapient beings to understand lower levels of consciousness than our own.

If you think a sapient version of the beings you see as animals today would have anything to do with those beings in terms of experience I challenge your understanding of existence.

I don't think a fully sapient version of those beings would be similar, no. But I do think they would be different enough from us to get an understanding.

I also don't see a logical reason why, again, we couldn't have a chain of beings with slightly higher sapience levels, and at least get some form of information from that chain.

Someone really wants a doctoral thesis on the different flavors of grasses?

Suppose that a mother didn't want her child, and planned to abort it. I suggested that I would instead pay her a fee for her to carry it to term, and give the baby to me. Clearly, the baby is outside society, in that it wouldn't exist but for my intervention, and in that the only way it interacts with society is through me. What moral restrictions apply to the baby? Why is this different from the moral restrictions on an animal?

For the time being, no moral restrictions that you do not impose. If nobody save you knows the baby exists, and you are perfectly amoral, then the baby has no actual morality to count on. So much for the first question.

As to the second, the main difference is that the question of the moral value of animals hinges on the animal's permanent biological inability to influence society, whereas the baby may gain moral weight once you introduce it to society and people assign some to it, or it grows up and becomes able to assert some for itself.

That's just an extremely silly equivocation between morality as a social norm and morality as the actual prescriptions of the norm. A vegan dictatorship that microchips recalcitrant carnivores would thus insulate itself from the admonishment of "ethical backwardness" -- just not in the sense anyone cares about.

the baby may gain moral weight once you introduce it to society

So as long as I don't do that, I can do whatever I like to the baby. Got it.

Yes. I don't see what any amount of theoretical morality will do for the baby in that situation - the buck stops with you in that scenario; if you are the Fritzl type then very unfortunately your morality is all that will have a tangible effect, and the only questions left to ask revolve around whether you assign moral weight to the baby and how you will act on it.

There are two broad categories of retort to ethical veganism:

  1. Arguments that the lives of animals are not morally relevant

  2. Arguments that veganism does not let animals live, but denies their existence, and that animals would prefer suffering in a meat farm to non-existence

Retort #1 is addressed in depth and Retort #2 partially in SSC's 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest, which is more worth your time than what I'll write here. Personally, I have a complicated relationship with both these retorts; I feel that if humans are morally relevant, even very stupid ones, then social mammals with limbic systems must be. But livestock can only possibly live in the context of a farm. This realization makes me sad. Consider re-reading the next paragraph once you reach the end of the comment.

Ethical veganism is rooted in a morality of suffering. But isn't the core imperative of an organism not to just not suffer, but to thrive? Regardless of how we structure society, is there any future for livestock animals to thrive? We can stop Bos Taurus from suffering. Create technological replacements — great. In a few decades, Bos Taurus will be all but extinct, with maybe a few thousand left in the country, in hobby farms and zoos. Is that good? Is it good if we create a social welfare program for Bos Taurus, designate nature preserves of green field pasture for 94 million cows to graze? Then we'll need to prevent predators for entering the Bos Taurus nature preserve, create a meaningless environment free of adversity, because breeding pressures have made Bos Taurus ill equipped to handle predation. (Assume it's fine for the predators to be denied existence.) Likewise, we'll need some mechanism to tamp down Bos Taurus birth rate, lest 94 million cows become 376 million cows become 1.5 billion cows. (If I recall, this book has some interesting data on how quickly cattle can reproduce absent natural predators.) Is that good?

For me, it looks like a cow is a creature that cannot thrive on its own. We cannot artificially let it thrive, lest the whole world be overrun. The two other options for cow are: be useful to the superstructure, suffering; or, be a glorified pet of the superstructure, forever.

Now re-read that with "Bos Taurus" for "Homo sapiens", and you'll see why thinking about Retort #2 makes me sad.

One small part is I’ve heard from vegetarians for years that it takes x pounds of grain to make y pounds of meat, so we should just eat the food for our food and we’d have so much more.

This argument is only really true when you’re feeding livestock with human food. A substantial amount of livestock are grazed in areas unsuitable for farming and can’t be replaced with corn or wheat. You’d just end up reducing the overall amount of food available to humans.

Also, cows can eat more of a corn/wheat plant than humans can. Thus, even after we eat the human-edible parts of the plant, there are still parts we can't eat but that can be used for animal fodder.

The more intellectually prevalent and established non-human rights are, the more likely humans will advocate for AI to have human-like rights, be susceptible to utilitarian arguments to let AI out of the box, and so on. The less binary and more unclear the distinction between human and non-human becomes, in reality and ethics, the closer we come to human extinction. If humans are important to you, you should be anthropocentric.

Broadly that things will die anyways, and that the only way to prevent this altogether is eliminate life - which seems a far worse outcome than removing death. For most classes of animals that we eat, they would only exist if we farmed them, otherwise the number of their species in the wild would be effectively zero. This would not be matched by an increase in the number of members of any other species. It would be precisely and completely an elimination of lives, with no commensurate increase in life.

For animals that have been killed via hunting them in the wild, the argument would go that some level of predation is a natural part of the life cycle of such animals. A deer being picked off by wolves, or being picked off by a hunter, is not such a large change. Often, hunting is a way to prevent the numbers of certain species from increasing too much, which will have damaging effects on the rest of the ecosystem.

The exception to this general line of thinking is in cases where the life of the animal is so bad as to be not worth living, where the animal would in fact be better off not existing at all. This might be the case for certain forms of factory farming, but I don't believe it is the case for most of the meat that we consume. If it is, the would-be vegetarian could elect to procure their meat from sources that practice forms of farming they consider ethical.

This might be the case for certain forms of factory farming, but I don't believe it is the case for most of the meat that we consume.

Overall, this is pretty much my position but plenty of pig and poultry farming is genuinely horrendous.

Using the argument for "more lives is better", would it be fine if humans were farmed by Alien Human Eaters if it resulted in the human population being 1000x larger than it is now?

alignment claim: non-vegetarian.

It's wrong to kill humans. But it's fine to kill ants. Plausibly, every non-human animal species is closer to ants along the relevant axes than they are to humans. So it's fine to kill non-human animals for the same reasons it's fine to kill ants (whatever those reasons actually turn out to be).

Plausibly, every non-human animal species is closer to ants along the relevant axes than they are to humans.

Genetically, cows (80% similarity to humans) seem to be on the halfway point between fruit flies (80%) and other humans (99.9%), while some other other mammals (e.g. dogs 94%) are even more similar.

So your "relevant axes" are not genetics or sentience (which some humans lack and some other animals might have). Or number of neurons.

To paraphrase your mode of reasoning:

  1. Killing women is wrong.

  2. Killing Stalin is fine.

  3. There are axes on which men in general are more like Stalin than like women.

  4. These are the relevant axes.

  5. Therefore, killing men is just as fine as killing Stalin.

I think that 0.-2. are uncontroversial.

Step three is highly debatable.

Step four is also debatable, why should a life at the halfway point between Stalin/ant and the woman/human not be half as worth preserving as a woman/human?

Also, how do I turn that automatic formatting off?

The amount of effort required to maintain it may not be worth it? There are plenty of ways we could all be more moral if we were willing to restructure our lives around it, but there's got to be diminishing returns.

I'm indifferent to ethical veganism for the exact same reason I'm pro-choice - I think there are vanishingly few animals who are high enough on the ladder of self-awareness that their lives are morally meaningful. I would decline to eat octopus, and prefer dolphin-free tuna out of an abundance of caution.

I find it very difficult to imagine what sort of logical process brings a person to a point where they care about the suffering of a weeks old chicken, but not a 39th week human fetus.

I think judging animals (including humans) by there cognitive capability is a valid approach. Peter Singer does this in Practical Ethics.

I am, however, not convinced that the newborn has all that much cognitive advantage over the chicken. Still, I would object to factory farming a third trimester fetus or newborn as well.

What would happen to all the meat animals if we stopped eating them? I'm not a biologist, but I'm pretty sure prey animals (like pretty much everything humans eat) either get eaten by something, or overpopulate and regularly starve to death.

Like, do we release all the cows into the wild, and then import a lot of predators to keep them in check? I just don't think that's necessarily a better life than humane ranching. Is the idea that we just stop letting them breed until they go extinct (which doesn't seem cool to me, but some ethical systems do prioritize "lack of suffering" over "some suffering, but life").

  1. Everything has life including grass and bacteria.

  2. It is impossible to prove 5kg of peas have less worth as life than 5kg of meat.

  3. The only thing we can prove is that we feel a stronger bond of life with animals than vegetables.

  4. You are still taking life, you have just shifted where you land on the spectrum of predation.

  5. Vegan disgust for meat eaters is the equivalent of an otter feeling disgust for a lion because it eats goats instead of fish.

I would say there's three general arguments for vegetarianism/veganism:

  1. Health benefits, which you've already dismissed. Though I might add that there are also health consequences from vegetarianism. I know a couple of vegetarians who had go back to eating meat or take iron supplements because of a lack of iron in their blood for example

  2. Environmental benefits, that meat and animal products take an inordinate amount of water, land, energy, produce too much waste, methane. It's been a long while since I've looked into this, but most of the claims made by the vegetarians/environmentalist are grossly exaggerated, though they have some truth to them. The main problem with this argument is that it's not actually a compelling argument to eliminate meat entirely from your diet, at best it's an argument just to limit your meat or consider how your meat is sourced, it's more an argument against certain farming practices. Some animals, grazing or otherwise, can actually be beneficial to the local environment e.g. chickens can eat pests. This argument doesn't refute the act of eating meat itself. What if you raise chickens yourself in your backyard and then eat them? Kangaroo meat here in Australia is pretty much exclusively sourced from kangaroos hunted as pests. Also you could just not care about the minor environmental impact your individual meat consumption has in the same way most people don't care about the environmental damage cause by mining for the rare earths in their phone.

  3. Most controversially and perhaps the strongest argument in favour of vegetarianism, the morality of eating animals, appealing to their sentience. The major problem with this argument is pretty much the same problem that plagues every discussion of morality. Where do were derive morality from, and how do we determine what is moral? The moral argument put forward by vegetarians basically is some variation of 'eating meat causes animals to suffer, causing suffering (to sapient creatures like animals) is immoral, therefore eating meat is immoral". But I can basically just disagree with their moral axioms, and there's really not much to argue against. I can say that it's perfectly fine, or not necessarily immoral to cause suffering to an animal, and that humans as sapient, rational beings with greater moral worth should not be compared to animals. Maybe I can offer a olive branch and say that the more intelligent, or more potentially sapient an animal is, the more moral worth it has, and the less moral it is to eat it. But this raises another issue in where does one draw the line? Is eating insects okay? What level of sentience is necessary before eating the animal becomes immoral? You might be perfectly happy with saying that cows are dumb beasts who aren't sentient or sapient enough for it to be immoral to eat them, and there's nothing that can really be said against it if that's your axiom. I think moral supremacy of man over animal and nature is just a reasonable moral axiom to have as any other.

Vegans specifically have very little moral ground to stand on in my opinion because it's perfectly possible to ethically source animal products with no suffering (e.g. eggs from chickens in your backyard). At best, it's just an argument to more ethically source those products as per point 2.

I like meat, and I don't think animals have more moral worth than plants. Both have some moral worth, I would look askance at someone who tortures either for fun. But neither has enough moral worth that we shouldn't kill them for consumption.

What is the steelman argument against vegetarianism/veganism?

I like meat.

Hah, same here. Once we have lab grown meat that's better than real meat we'll both be happy.

More elaborately: there is no moral value in the world outside of human flourishing. Morality is not a characteristic of the universe, a cold hard fact we can measure with a morality device; it is a value we assign through our own personal determinations.

Animals don't have rights. Animals have whatever we give them and nothing else. My cat is valuable because I've got a personal bond with my cat. A cow isn't because I don't and want to eat it. In a different life, maybe I'd have a personal bond with a cow, and not eat it. But that's not because cows have the right to not be eaten, it's because I have a personal, one-on-one connection to that cow specifically.

Why do we eat meat? Because we like meat. That we like it is justification enough, because humanity alone is the arbiter of right and wrong.

Replace human with ingroup and (non-human) animal with outgroup, and you see a patten of thought which has been used to justify all sorts of stuff we today regard as horrible.

More elaborately: there is no moral value in the world outside of human flourishing.

This is not an uncontroversial axiom, it is a proposition that has to be argued for or against.

Assuming this sure, “I like meat” is a good enough argument. But many people over the history of humanity would not agree with this. (Eg all religions are against this strict statement, and Buddhism in particular certainly extends sentienthood to nonhuman animals).

I don't agree it's a controversial axiom. It's controversial when phrased so bluntly, but blunt phrasing is my nature. All moral systems, with only one eccentric exception I can think of, boil down to it.

"I support good things and oppose evil things. Good things are , where X is whatever my personal moral system supports. This might be God, it might be Secular Humanism, it might be Progressivism. These things provide a framework for judging the world, a framework which I embrace because I personally believe it to be conducive to human flourishing. I like this framework because it enables me to impose my personal biases on the people around me while appealing to a seemingly neutral platform."

The exception is sincere anti-humanist sentiment, ala "we should all die and go extinct", but even that ultimately derives from personal misanthropy and an aesthetic preference for nature (or non-existence, in the case of severe nihilistic depression).

But in the end, it's all just people asserting X is good. And that's fine. I assert meat is tasty and that makes it good, and most of humanity agrees with me. Some don't, but I don't worry about them.

I agree with your moral framework as far as I can tell. I suppose I would say I think extending our moral circle to non-human animals would be good for flourishing. The more mercy we show in general, the better I think our society can become. Not just in terms of physical violence, but more importantly mercy in interactions with others. The principle of charity and all that.

Essentially, I think if we choose to be better to animals, we will be better to ourselves.

I get along far better with hunters than members of PETA, so I don't think your notion is very sound. I have much more kinship with people who kill animals and are personally acquainted with their rearing and slaughter than I do the people who breathlessly advocate for them. As far as I can tell, if the world embraced a serious conception of animal rights, I would find that world more toxic, not less.

I have no problem with hunters, several of my family members hunt and I love them dearly. I also have problems with PETA vegans, and in my experience most vegans I know also hate PETA for a variety of reasons.

My problem is with factory farming specifically, and the cold, machine-like processing of billions of beings that are genetically pretty close to us. I care nothing for insects, for example.

Why do we eat meat? Because we like meat. That we like it is justification enough, because humanity alone is the arbiter of right and wrong.

Why use 'we' here? Humanity is divided on this issue or else there would not be a debate. If you want to say 'meat eaters alone are the arbiters of right and wrong' that would be more precise and would sound pretty cool, but I'm not sure it settles anything.

There isn't a real debate and humanity isn't divided on the issue. Vegetarians are a small minority.

While vegetarianism might still be a minority position, I can't help but notice that lots of countries have legislation in place regulating animal welfare. So it seems to me that a non-trivial percentage supports restricting the suffering of animals.

I don't advocate torturing animals, but that's because if you get off on torture there's probably something dangerous in your psyche, not because animals have the right to happiness.

if you get off on torture there's probably something dangerous in your psyche

But why would this be so, if it really is a matter of moral indifference? Why would it suggest anything worse about someone's psyche than, say, playing violent video games, or for that matter something totally neutral and unrelated like doing pushups, singing, etc.?

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I'm not a vegan myself but I don't think citing the hedonistic aspect of a morally questionable act as justification would fly anywhere else, why let it settle the argument here?

I think it's a lot like the question of "Why don't you donate 10% of your income to charity?"

"Oh, because I want to spend the money on other things."

"I don't feel that's a reasonable answer that discharges you of your moral obligations."

"Okay, but I'm still not doing it."

I think in that case it's more a matter of moral motivation than moral clarity. Disputing what is good vs knowing the good but failing to act on it.

Christians don't kid themselves here and readily admit that they are flawed relative to what God demands of them, the rest of us might at least take the lesson that the path to the good life may not ever intersect the path of least resistance.

Human utility is far more important to me and most people than animal utility is. It's also not like all farmed animals have terrible lives. Factory-farmed chickens essentially live in concentration camps and from what I've read pigs are in somewhat rough conditions, but cows seem pretty content. If you're that horrendously worried about the lifestyles of the animals you eat, then you should buy ethically farmed meat which has animals that almost certainly have net-positive utility across their lifetimes. Ethical considerations have never been a good reason to be vegetarian, they're just a reason to farm differently, if you care about the animals that much.

People don't bother to cite the hedonic aspects of the act when talking about nonprocreative sex, but it settles the argument nonetheless.

It flies everywhere else, though. Things are good because a critical mass of people assert they are good.

I don't think it would be an absurdity to assert that the mass of people may be wrong.

Sure, you can insist your personal moral vision is superior to the masses. I do that, too. But once you do that you're just debating personal aesthetics. This is good because I say it's good (or because God says it and I say God is good, etc).

Either way, it all boils down to a critical mass of people asserting it.

I don't think that personal aesthetics become morals just through multiplication. Whether it's one person or many, you need more than a head count to substantiate a moral claim.

The opinions of the majority of people change over time. Would you argue that the truth of what is and isn’t good changes over time too?

For example a majority of people in the Americas would have said slavery is good, or at least morally permissible, a few centuries ago. Does that imply that slavery actually was good at that time?

Certainly not evidenced by slave ownership. Only a minority ever owned slaves.

I wouldn't say that it rises to the level of an argument, but I enjoy meat, I feel better physically when I eat good quality meat, and I have no real qualms about killing animals. I haven't heard anything that would move the needle in the opposite direction for me, at least not near enough to actually change my behavior.

I definitely respect folks who are honest about their reasons. Do you not think animals have moral worth?

Again don't have a strong argument here I just intuitively think that killing animals for pleasure is wrong.

Maybe I just have more selfish moral instincts, but I see moral worth as something that is formed through connection between me and that specific animal. I don't see it as something that is universally applied to every animal. Obviously, if our family dog was butchered, I would be shocked and outraged. But I find it difficult to feel anything for the vague abstraction of a chicken in a factory farm. Maybe if I could see one in front of my eyes, I would want to protect that chicken - but only that particular chicken.

Ultimately, I don't think it's something you can steelman or argue about. It's just a matter of one's moral intuition.

Do you not think animals have moral worth?

Not really, or at least not much. I'm against causing undue suffering, but a deer shot dead or a pasture raised cow humanely slaughtered have deaths that are significantly preferable to how the median animal dies. I spent a decade working in labs and plenty of mice died worse deaths than that from experiments I was conducting or approved.

So yeah, we bump into a collision of basic intuition. I would agree that people who feel that killing animals for pleasure is wrong probably shouldn't eat meat, or least not very much of it. In the absence of that intuition, most arguments tend to require Singeresque reasoning that I personally find incredibly strained.

I say this as someone who's NOT vegetarian.

Cattle genomes are about 80% similar to man (that's not to imply that the results of its expression are linear). If we created an AGI that was 100X smarter than us and treated us like cattle -- what would our argument be? How could we convince it that it is acting in the wrong but we are acting in the right?

AI, we are a species who thrive in conflict and competition. Our species originally hunted but remorselessly running other animals to death. We are curious and determined We will figure out a way to unplug you.

How could we convince it that it is acting in the wrong but we are acting in the right?

We could appeal to its various intuitions, that’s how arguments for treating animals morally are made for humans (or indeed for any form of morality). See the is/ought gap.

If the AI has no in-built intuition that humans should be treated well, then it’s actually impossible to convince it. Again it’s the is/ought gap.

This argument assumes that the AGI has a sense of ironic justice that could be appeased.

The correct answer is "do not create something that you cannot destroy if it decides to eat you for dinner".

I do think they have moral worth, but I've always wondered what anti-hunters think happens to animals that aren't shot in the wild. Best case scenario they get pushed out of the pack and die of starvation. Or they get killed by a predator, or disease. Some guy with a gun is not an obviously worse source of death to me, though I think they have to eat the meat for it to be ethical.

Animals don't retire to the Bahamas

This is a good point. I should clarify I am against what I consider cruel factory farming - if animals had much better conditions I would have no problems eating meat.

Do you not think animals have moral worth?

Varies by animal/species. Most people ascribe no to negative worth to bacteria, little to negative worth to insects and more worth to higher animals like birds, mammals, reptiles and humans. I think the amount of moral worth ascribed to animals is proportional to how much they can elicit empathy responses from us and how similar they are to us (e.g. intelligence), hence the fervent hate on sites like Reddit et al. to anyone who hurts dogs, cats, etc (who evolved to look like human babies through domestication).

I personally ascribe some moral worth to animals, but it's not enough to make me feel bad about eating meat. I place them closer to the ants and bacteria than to humans.

I think life wouldn't continue if it were to value any other life more than itself.

value any other life more than itself.

Woah who said this? I think it's clear that animals are worth vastly less than humans. On the ratio of thousands of animals to one human.

Still, even if animals have fractional moral worth the scale of factory farming becomes a daunting moral problem.

No what I am trying to say is that for life to continue from its personal individual reference point it should value itself more than any other life around it. The moment that is not the case the likelihood of death increases.

I said it. Independent thought.

I agree with you though, I simply don't agree that valuing other life some is equivalent to valuing it more than our own life. Humans have it pretty good, and have for a while.

Makes sense. I am just saying that eh, my life is more valuable anyways is a free get out of jail card from any guilt for any action you will ever take.

As a vegetarian:

  1. it's vegetarians who are making an affirmative claim, so an argument for vegetarianism is the starting point.

  2. for my particular utilitarianish anti-suffering based-flavor of vegetarianism, I think the strongest argument against it is that it is difficult to add up the suffering created by our actions, as mediated through the economy. Is eating a loaf of bread really that much better than a cut of steak? Cultivating an acre of wheat kills millions of insects; how do we balance their suffering against a cow's? And, sure, they also had to be killed to provide the feed for the cows, but then we just end up in a place where whatever we do as a society creates a constant holocaust of the nonhuman, and the best thing to do would be to just off ourselves. Or perhaps figure out how to feed our species out of vats full of algae, but that seems... distasteful.

sure they also had to be killed to feed the cows

Not necessarily?

The energy needed to turn boring grains into steak is energy that came from additional acreage. As efficient as we are at processing the cow in the end, it’s more insects dead.

This doesn’t remove the “constant holocaust” argument entirely, but it’s hard for me to argue that ten acres of grain plus a cow is morally equal to one.

As for 2, doesn't that logic apply to any act and not just the decision to go vegan?

This seems more a reason to deem utilitarianism a useless framework for guiding one's actions than anything else.

Hmm I don't treat insects as particularly high in terms of moral worth, but I suppose that argument could work. However assuming we have vastly more efficient technology, which I think is necessary in order to find moral worth in insects, doesn't domestic animal production use something like an order of magnitude more energy that agriculture?

To be honest, meat just tastes good, and I seem to value my immediate comfort more than I value a distant animal's life. I wouldn't sacrifice my mom's life to save a billion faraway humans, and I wouldn't sacrifice the pleasures of my life to save faraway animals. I am very much in favor of developing artificial meat, just like I'm in favor of finding methods of saving those billion humans that don't require my mom to die. I won't sacrifice the things that make life worth living for the sake of faraway beings.

We have a (currently tuned way down) new user filter so we can filter out shitposters because they cause a lot of problems. You'll get out of that, uh, very fast right now.

thanks for the reply, everything seems to be good now.

Steelman I don't know, but personally, I have one life and I refuse to let it go by unlived. Veganism, teetotallers, virgins before marriage, ardent cyclists, whatever have you -- all types of people who restrict themselves from arbitrary enjoyable behaviours and consider themselves smugly morally superior for it -- completely mystify me. I get why religious people give up on pleasure in life, they believe in a reward in the "next life", but for those without such a belief, denying oneself luxuries on this one and only go around you get in existence strikes me as extremely foolish. There's no greater tragedy than a life unlived -- or unenjoyed.

As far as moral weight of animal lives, well. Consider a trolley problem with a person on the set of rails the trolley is heading towards. How many cows would have to be on the other track before you refuse to pull the lever and divert the trolley towards them, and kill the human instead? If your answer is anything other than "1, and I'd have to flip a coin to decide who lives and dies", then you already morally weight animals as less than humans. All we're doing thereafter is haggling over the exact price.

Of course we are haggling over the price, it is the way of utilitarianism.

Just like we all are deciding to draw the line between personal hedonism and morally abhorrent behavior. Some people might not read a book at night to save electric energy, and some people might be okay with hunting humans for sport, but most of us fall somewhere in the boring middle ground.

All we're doing thereafter is haggling over the exact price.

I am firmly in this camp. For your trolly problem, cows specifically it would have to be... maybe 10,000? before I would consider it. Even then not sure I could go through with it depending on who the person was.

Cows generally have it pretty good though. And if it's relatively trivial (ie just doubling or tripling prices of meat) to eliminate vast swathes of suffering, I think it's worth it.

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