PrinceFortinbras said:
I am a vegetarian so I will outline the reasons why, while dealing with some of the arguments that have come up in this thread.
The argument I find the most problematic is the "it is natural therefore it is morally permissible" -argument, but The Almighty Aardvark has already debunked this argument convincingly.
I am a vegetarian because I think minimizing the suffering in the world is of moral value (I could also explain the reasoning behind this if someone is interested). That means that everything that has the capacity to suffer has moral relevance. I.e. we should care about how we treat those things. Modern science has shown that it is very likely that a lot of animals (mammals, birds, whales etc.) have this capacity for suffering. We also know that a lot of the animals we eat suffer a lot before they are killed and eaten. Therefore it seems logical to me, in a market economy where buying something incentivizes further or increased production, to not eat meat. Almost all the vegetarians I know think like this.
With this in mind the argument that "plants are also alive" is not valid. Yes they are alive, but they are not capable of suffering.
For those discussing nutrition I would like to point out that there are almost more vegetarians in India then there are people in the United States. Most of them are doing just fine. One of the groups called, the Jian, are one of the wealthier and more modern minorities in India. If they can do it, it is no reason why people in the western world cannot.
Finally, for people that have a particular interest in this subject (the writer of OP perhaps?), I would like to point you in the direction of a philosopher called Peter Singer who is famous for his well argued vegetarian position. His book "Animal Liberation" (don?t get put off by the title) is very good.
I don't think you or anyone can be an accurate judge of what can feel pain and what can't. Plants may not look like they react to damage, like what animals can since we have vocal chords and mouths to project noises, but if you cut off a tree's limbs, it take a really long time for them to grow back, and sometimes, they don't come back at all, the same with certain animals like octopi or like humans. If you set a living plant on ire, you are essentially causing it pain by taking away its ability to live. If you cut down a living plant, you are causing that plant to starve for sunlight, sure it may have stores saved up in its roots but that only lasts for so long. Just because it can't cry out that it's hurt doesn't mean it doesn't feel.
Sorry if that sounded all hippie-ish but I'm still going to eat meat and plants because I was born to do so and I find them almost equally appetizing. Saying you won't eat one because it has a face and can feel does not make it alright to think that the other side can't feel just because it lacks animalistic qualities.
And whoever said a while back that "the concept of natural" being an invalid argument - humans, like a lot of animals have evolved to need both meat and plants in our diet to receive the proper nutrients to survive. Not everything we do is a natural occurrence, or at least not by my definition. Natural, to me, means what your species is supposed to do to live - eat, sleep, crap, and reproduce, and survive both the elements and the environment. Because of our intelligence we are more than capable of putting off some of these necessities because of how we've progressed technology and practices to deal with these, treating them as though they barely existed. Someone going off and killing 12 people at a theater is not natural, that's insane. Killing an animal to eat its flesh because you are starving, that is natural. If you could somehow change humans to such a degree that our bodies did not need the nutrients that meat provided then all power to you, but as long as my body needs proteins and calcium, I'll continue to consume animal products.
Humans were not built to be herbivorous because our bodies are completely inefficient at extracting the nutrients, we can only do so from particular plants, not like say a cow can. That and our teeth would rapidly wear down from only eating plant matter due to the abundance of brittle molecules in the plants structure. And we were not meant to be completely carnivorous for the same reasons - meat is tender, so our teeth do not wear down as fast but rather, they grow soft, so we offset this by eating plants which build up our gums.
To everyone that thinks just because humans are smarter that we don't have to kill to eat - just because we are smarter that does not mean that we function physically any different from an animal because we are animals, we are not some magical species that do not need to eat meat to live.
