Vegan_Doodler said:
CrystalShadow said:
Jammy2003 said:
CrystalShadow said:
Mmm. The plant issue is a tricky one. Because it betrays the fact that vegans essentially seem to be anthropocentric.
Who says a plant doesn't feel pain? On what grounds can this be asserted other than an inference based on biology and the nature of how human beings feel pain.
To be honest, can you even say breaking a rock into pieces to build a house doesn't hurt the rock?
Pretty much everything we eat was raised for that sole purpose.
Animals just happen to be cuter, and easier to understand because we are animals ourselves.
That doesn't mean plants, (or indeed inanimate objects) don't suffer as a result of what we do to them. Merely that if they do, we are less capable of recognising the suffering.
Still... I thought this through myself and came to the conclusion that being vegetarian or vegan for those reasons was problematic, and, honestly, a little egocentric.
I don't like causing suffering, but the fact remains that me being alive comes at the expense of other living and non-living things. There's no way around this, and presuming the suffering of animals is more important than that of anything else doesn't make sense to me.
That's not to say nothing can be done at all, just that I think vegetarianism doesn't really solve much in that regard.
Oh come now, with that logic there is no point in doing anything at all. That's a ridiculous extrapolation and can be done in reverse, to suggest that if living causes suffering then why be compassionate to anything? Why have a dog, cat or family? Why not eat them?
Of course it's extreme. But following things through to their logical conclusion is almost inevitably absurd.
That's one of the problems with logic.
The reverse case that you are pointing out is just as true, but does not negate the point.
Either way, what you choose to show compassion for, and what you don't is pretty arbitrary.
I mean, why is it OK to cause obvious harm to one thing, but not another?
Who decided that?
Well, as it happens, when you look at it, there may be a few exceptions here and there, but at the end of the day it seems to come down to compassion being proportional to how similar something is to you personally.
I can't argue with the feelings behind that, but it hardly seems a particularly fair way to judge what gets to live and what gets to die.
Got to say this is probably one of my favourite posts, someone who is using pure logic, and they disagrees with me *squeeeeel* this is going to be fun.
Ok, I do see a logical flaw in your extreme situation, it's that just because it would be nearly impossible to to execute such ideology practically then you abandon it completely, while compromise is the braking of a logical chain drawing your line in the sand isn't always a bad thing, at least you can be near or even just halfway toward the logical ideal rather than saying screw it and abandoning that path all together. Alternatively people could take a que from Rorschach an "Never compromise, even in the face of Armageddon" and keep striving for the ideal rather than abandoning it, which is what I try to do in life, not always successfully, but still.
A line I think I first heard for a Karate Kid movie was,
"when do I get to smash rocks"
"why do you what to smash rocks? what have they ever done to you?"
from that day I haven't caused intentional damage to any inanimate objects.
Sorry for the windedness at the beginning of the post. It just seems increasingly rare to find logical people on the internet.
Sorry it took so long to respond here. I've been known to get a little apprehensive of reading things that could turn into huge arguments.
I guess I shouldn't have worried though.
I don't know why finding logic in the internet would be so difficult, but in my experience logic is a fairly fragile tool. Not very useful in isolation, and easy to break by introducing factors that can't really be broken down on a logical basis anyway.
In any event, while it's certainly possible to strive for an ideal, or indeed to draw a line in the sand, it matters what that ideal is.
And when that ideal has to do with not causing harm to anything else, you unfortunately run into the issue that this is impossible. The only way you could accomplish it would be to kill yourself. Although even that isn't strictly speaking true when you consider all the implications.
And a lot of things happen regardless of your conscious involvement. The amount of bacteria and viruses my body destroys on a daily basis would be quite disturbing if I were to contemplate that they have as much right to exist as I do.
But given the knowledge that my continued existence
will cause harm to something, the question arises as to whether there is anything I can do about this.
And if so, what?
If you look through this discussion a common bias does seem to repeat itself though. I recall someone pointing out that growing food crops causes a lot of harm as well.
That in itself would be kind of self-evident, except that the comment had nothing to do with the welfare of the plants we eat, and was in fact a comment about the amount of insects that die as a result of various things we do to grow plants we can eat.
It might not seem much, but framing a comment in that way exposes the implicit idea that the value of an insect's life is greater than that of a plant.
This seems especially evident given that no mention was even made of the plant's welfare.
Now, that's just an example, but when I consider my own behaviour it becomes obvious that unless I stop to think about it I do exactly the same thing.
And it seems quite selfish a lot of the time.
Now, if I have to eat something, why not my pets? Or my family? Well, the answer to that is also very selfish and egotistical.
I value my family and pets for other reasons. They are simply worth more to me alive than what it would gain me to eat them.
Eating other people in general... Well, I see no particular fundamental reason why that's any better or worse than eating anything else, but it's frowned upon as an idea, and aside from which, being human myself, accepting a situation in which other human beings would be an acceptable source of food means having to decide who gets eaten. (And of course, creates the risk that it just might be
you).
Now, as to being a vegan, there may well be quite a few reasons why that would in fact be better. I'm just not particularly convinced by the typical 'animal welfare' arguments. You could easily make the same argument about plants, except plants are even less capable of defending themselves. Nor can they communicate or even express themselves in any way we really understand.
I can empathise with a cow, sure. But that's because I recognise aspects of it's behaviour, and can relate them to my own.
Empathising with a plant or a tree requires a lot more effort, and I have to cast aside several pre-conceived biases...
Can a plant feel pain? Not as far as I can tell, but that's because what I know about pain is defined by how my own body behaves. Since a plant has a different structure, and lacks the features necessary to feel pain the way I do, one possible conclusion would be that it has no feelings at all, and what I do to it doesn't matter.
Or... I could assume that saying something can only suffer insofar as it feels the same kind of things I do is arrogant, and egocentric.
Either way, it doesn't really solve the problem of what I'm going to eat tomorrow, it just raises the question of what assumptions underlie my choices.
If I am concerned about the welfare of the things I use for my own selfish purposes, then it does leave me to wonder what I consider to be more important, and why.
