Vegetarianism/Veganism

[Neopergoss]

Is it right to eat meat/animal products?

[Bloodshadow]

If it's wrong to eat animals, then you might as well stop eating plants. Don't give me the cr4p about how animals are conscious and sentient but plants are not. Consciousness does not exist, and all lifeforms are merely autonomous, self-sustaining biochemical machines capable of replication; the only thing different about animals is their increased level of complexity. Eating animals is just as wrong, or right, as eating plants. We enjoy the privilege of consuming other organisms simply because we are at the top of the food chain.

[OldTrees]

It can be.
P1) Ought implies can.
P2) There exist humans that cannot survive without protein from animal flesh.
P3) Some of such^ Humans are Moral Agents.
P4) Nothing ought to cease to exist solely due to a character of its existence.
C) It is morally permissible for Humans that require animal protein to survive to obtain such protein.

[Essence]

It's not only 'right', it's actually biologically necessary.  There is at least one essential amino acid (essential meaning 'you can't get it from any source besides your food') that doesn't exist at all in the plant kingdom: taurine.

Caveat: human bodies 'learn' to make taurine sometime during the late single-digit years.  For pre-teens and above, it's not essential anymore.  But unless you intend to breastfeed until you're 8 or 9 years old, you must eat meat (not eggs, and milk only if you drink enough of it that it is your primary source of nutrients).

QED: Humans, for at least a half-decade between the end of breastfeeding and the commencement of their body's ability to construct it's own taurine (which, BTW, it does very inefficiently: it's better to continue eating meat), require meat to survive.  Therefore, it is not wrong to eat meat.


On a more philosophical level, everything we do as living creatures has an impact on the environment around us.  As humans, we have the ability to critique that impact and ask if it's too extensive to be 'just'.  When we find that it is, we choose to reduce it -- but there are easy ways to more dramatically reduce that impact than by choosing to go vegetarian or vegan.  Someone interesting in minimizing their impact on the world would do much better to join a system like Polyface Farms (http://www.polyfacefarms.com/), which feeds the soil, raises happy animals, and provides quality, nutrient-dense organic food to humans, minimizing the amount they have to consume in order to get all of their daily nutrients.  Philosophically, there is no superior system that I've witnessed than Polyface.

[Jocko]

An animal wouldn't hesitate to eat you if it were hungry.

[Neopergoss]

Thanks for your responses. Don't feel particularly strongly about this issue myself but I've heard some very interesting arguments around this point.

[Chromatophore]

Personally i wouldn't object to my body being eaten when i'm dead so i think its okay.

But i think the conditions animals live in while they are being raised for slaughter needs some examination (see 'glass abattoir')

[EvaRia]

My general philosophy for everything basically says

"It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong or moral or necessary. There are people who choose to eat meat and they have their reasons, and their are people who choose not to eat meat and they have their reasons, and that's all we need to know."

[Astrocyte]

I don't know that it's "right" (as in, a moral imperative) so much as it is "not wrong."

An animal wouldn't hesitate to eat you if it were hungry.

This pretty much sums it up for me. But I do think we owe food animals humane treatment -- raising animals in boxes indoors, mutilating them for human convenience, and feeding them things they would never eat in nature DOES feel explicitly wrong to me. So I try to buy meat from humane sources whenever I can.
Unfortunately the world food industry is such that this is difficult or impossible for most people, which is sad.

Note also that "organic" does not necessarily mean "humanely raised."

And people who try to feed meat-eating pet animals vegetarian diets are sick people.

[Bloodshadow]

there are people who choose not to eat meat and they have their reasons

That's perfectly fine. But the problem arises if those people start trying to convert meat-eaters to vegetarianism. The problem always arises when someone tries to force his or her opinion on others.

[Belthus]

From a sustainability POV, the quantity of meat produced and consumed in the US is a bad model for the rest of the world. We are already seeing food shortages and rising prices. Land and other resources are being degraded or depleted. That's not to say that eating meat is categorically bad, but we have to moderate our desires and adopt agricultural practices that will preserve the ecological systems that we depend on.

[ninetyfools]

Me, viewing this religiously, say that Gad allowed us to kill what we need to survive.