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Just because they're annoying doesn't mean they're wrong - a meta-discussion
A few months ago a wild vegan appeared. He was almost self-parodically stereotypical: short, mid thirties, college-educated, and into endurance sports. He posted a reasonably well-argued case that veganism was not harmful to sporting performance, with the usual smug boasting of his numbers in endurance sports. At the end of his post, he finished with "what's your excuse?"
The entirety of his well-reasoned post was ignored, and he was dogpiled for that one final sentence.
Mottizens could immediately detect what was going on - he actually found the killing and eating of animals to be immoral, but didn't think that would be a convincing argument, so he tried to achieve his goal with another argument.
Both positions are actually worth considering. I'm open to the possibility that killing animals for food is wrong, and I'm open to the possibility that a vegan diet is not harmful to athletic performance. Hiding behind one to advance another, however, is deceitful.
I've actually tried to engage seriously with these ideas, and in my desire to see their own steelmen, I have tried to read some vegan sites. Usually I give up quickly, as they are full of the above argumentation - shifting goalposts, emotional appeals, hiding behind one argument to advance another, etc.
I wish I could say I have rejected vegetarianism because I engaged with their best arguments and found them wanting. Instead, I found their argumentation so annoying I ceased to engage with them.
I've had similar experiences with people who hate cars. Like anyone else who can do math, I have often found it absurd to use two tons of car and two liters of fuel to get two bags of groceries. I've also tried to mitigate some of these by moving to a New Urbanist development (with an unpleasant HOA, sadly), and I've got an electric car and solar panels on my roof. Sadly, this doesn't lead to any productive discussion, as I've discussed before.
Years ago, I remember a similar circular argumentative style among supporters of the ACA. They would say that people are afraid to start companies because they won't have health care, to which I'd reply "sure, how about two years of subsidized COBRA?". Then they'd point to catastrophic expenses, to which I'd say "sure, how about a subsidized backstop for all 1MM+ expenses for anyone who has a 1MM plan?", to which they'd change the argument again.
Of course, there's a pattern here. From what I can tell, many vegetarians have an (understandable) response to the raising, killing, and eating of animals. Some people seem to be terrified of owning and operating large machines, and they find private cars and single family housing to be socially alienating. Some people are emotionally disturbed by other people suffering from the health consequences of a lifetime of bad choices.
What these groups all have in common is a strong ability to signal these things emotionally to people similar to them and form a consensus, but also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.
We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style. On the flip side, we have plenty of white nationalists, who seem to be able to adapt.
I'm confident that white nationalists are wrong. I have engaged with their best arguments, and found them wanting.
I'm only confident that vegans are annoying, because they are so annoying that I find it hard to engage with their arguments.
I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.
Since this thread is has devolved into discussing veganism instead of the meta point, I'll jump into that fray.
I think humans have infinite moral worth compared to animals, and I would save one human child at the expense of, say, 10,000 endangered orcas or whatever. Humans have dominion over animals and have the right to use them how we see fit. Abusing animals is not the same as abusing people, it's morally wrong in the similar way that dumping garbage in a public park is wrong or how dumping perfectly good milk down the drain is wrong. It's a waste of common resources and a poor use of them, it's disrespectful and reflects poorly on humanity.
One mental block I have against listening to vegans is that so many of them seem to have a heavy outgroup bias against their fellow human beings (though in practice this can really be further reduced to "that shithole flyover state I went to school in," it doesn't really include their like-minded friends). I cannot relate at all to people who think we should drastically reduce the population to avoid "harming the planet, "or that having children is selfish/evil, or that "humans suck." I like humans. I think we're pretty great. I think that human suffering is an infinitely greater problem than chickens in cages, and any cent spent on stopping the latter instead of the former is a travesty. So when someone tells me about the evils of cattle farming I want to pull up a list of neglected tropical diseases or statistics on opiate deaths and ask why I should care about chickens when we haven't solved these other (solvable!) problems, and then have them lay their cards on the table and admit that they simply hate people.
When you say 'dominion' is this a strictly religious interpretation, or is it meant to be based on some set of empirical factors?
In either case, if we contacted aliens who had either the same revealed religious/empirical factor-based relationship to us that we have to animals, would you be happy to admit that they also have infinite moral worth compared to us, and walk happily into the thresher for their most minor benefit?
Also, generally speaking: Questions of the form 'why should I care about X when Y exists' are ussually not very meaningful. The people and resources being devoted to X are generally not easily translatable to Y, or at any rate you caring about X does not conflict with you caring about Y unless you are already devoting so much time and effort to personally solving Y that you have no time in the day for X.
No, it's not empirical. Not everything has to be, IMO.
I don't really understand your alien example. If they believed in a god that said humans were cattle to be exploited, I think I would just... disagree? Unless I were somehow converted to their human-hating alien religion? Which I think would be a really hard sell?
Re. caring about X while Y exists, nah, I reject your general point. This always smells like a motte and bailey to me that relies on conflating "nonzero" moral weight with "significant" moral weight.
The motte for this usually imagines a framing like "Why help starving children in famine-stricken Gondwanaland when there are plenty of starving Laurasian war orphans to feed?!" Starving children from any foreign country can be assigned roughly equal moral weight, so it's easy to say "we can care about both without neglecting either." The ratio of caring might be close to 1:1.
A less clear-cut example is "We can care about starving Gondwanan children AND the opiate crisis at home." It's a bit murkier -- who do we have a duty to first? Children overseas? Our own citizens? What about the children of our opiate-addicted citizens? Are they more or less important than starving children overseas? It's debatable, but the ratio her might be 1:2, or 2:3, or 1:4, or something similar. Both are serious problems.
The bailey usually smuggles in some problem of dubious moral weight, e.g. "We can care about both starving Laurasian orphans AND reducing plastic straw usage, you know!" It's impossible to just totally reject doing something about plastic straws, because their impact isn't zero, but it's hard to articulate exactly how much less important reducing plastic straw usage is than feeding starving children (in the opinion of most people outside the Motte, at least). Maybe for most folks the ratio would be something like 1:100, or 1:10,000.
So tl;dr while it's strictly true that you can care about X and Y at the same time, I find that a lot of people who make that argument are trying to steal some of the gravity of (actual) problem X to bolster their pet problem Y.
And so it is with human and animal suffering. Animal suffering is so unimportant to me compared to human suffering that I'd rather round the ratio off to zero rather than have to calculate some absurd number of bovine lives I'd need to save in exchange for the life of a single human.
What I meant was, what if whichever religious figure you respect said they had a revelation from the same God you believe in saying that the aliens had dominion over you?
For the sake of argument, whatever series of factors make you believe that you have dominion over animals on religious grounds, the same factors happened within your own religion, saying the aliens have dominion over you.
Sure, but my point is more about the fungability of efforts to address problems.
There already exists a regulatory body in charge of passing regulations on restaurants, and they have free time. That legislative body can easily pass a plastic straw ban; it is not clear how they would direct that effort instead towards feeding children in foreign nations. They have neither the authority nor the mechanisms nor the expertise to do that.
Perhaps you can imagine firing half the people who work in that regulatory body, re-training them on international diplomacy and supply chains, and assigning them to figure out how to feed those starving foreign children. But there's going to be huge costs to that transition that probably the benefits to those children, those people probably don't want to do that kind of work and wouldn't be good at it anyway (there are reasons people have the jobs/interests they do), and theoretically the regulatory body shouldn't have a lot more staff than it needs anyway to begin with.
So I'm not arguing about the ratio of importance between the two things, I'm challenging the idea that all issues are in competition with each other for resources, and that ignoring one means you are definitely making more progress on another one. Society as a whole isn't perfectly efficient and friction-less like that.
If a straw ban is good and you have a mechanism by which to issue it, but no mechanism by which to transfer the resources for a straw ban into food in the mouths of starving foreign children, you might as well do the straw ban. Saying 'what about the starving children' as a way to oppose the straw ban is disingenuous, if the resources saved by not doing the ban won't actually be used to materially aid teh children instead.
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