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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.

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.

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.

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