Should we do a meat-consumption thread?

HAPPY BURTHDAY TO NABISCUH!

UNLESS ANY OF YOU WANT A FITE THAT IS!!! (nb. joke!)

One of my so-called best friends constantly harps on at me for being a lapsed vegetarian (he told me when I became one aged 13 that I wouldn't keep it up and he is delighted at being 'proved right'.) This even though I tell him all the time that it was never a moral issue for me, so why should I have to justify deciding one day to start eating chicken again? So I think there is an argument for JUST SHUTTING UP ABOUT IT FOR GOD'S SAKE S***N!

Is Nitsuhs question "Is it good to ask questions that you KNOW will frustrate everyone"?

(sorry i can't link to the veggie threads; don't have time to find any as i'm going home now... hope i haven't ruined what i've written above by behaving badly on any of them ;))

Actually, the worst argument I ever had with a vegetarian had nothing to do with eating meat. Someone on a mailing list informed the group he was going to lay out in the sun and wanted to know if suntan lotion was toxic to grass. I think I said something along the lines of, "OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE, JUST DIE." I was a touchy teenager.

Now eat yer meat and shaddup!

although (morning all!) i'd like hamish to explain this further (cor i remember having some kind of tiff with hamish in the past BRING IT ON nah not really). do you mean it's a really white western middle- class guilt thing to do, in which case i'd agree with you up to a certain point, but i'd also point out that the Hindu religion, amoing others, has had vegetarianism among its tenets since it was invented! not that i want to get into the whole "oh is vegetarianism a religion then" but it's DEFINITELY more than a liberal western fad.

I think *this* is the more annoying thing for me, not the decapitating babies thing. It's not all that common but when animal rights people attempt to 'educate' me about stuff I already know about as though mere possession of the facts will suddenly turn me vegan I have a tendency to blow my top. Prime example of this: Calum on MSP thread.

what do you class as a "lecture", hamish? i've often heard you talk about this kind of "vegetarian" to me, when i'm simply asking you a few harmless questions about your beliefs. you should bear in mind here that people aren't mind-readers, people can't look inside your head and find out what you know or what you think. you can't deny there is an amount of novelty to someone who hardly ever eats meat but isn't a vegetarian, why do you blame people for being interetsed? (very different from the people who claim to be vegetarian who in fact eat white meat) also, i wonder why you feel the need to "prove" you aren't a vegetarian by eating flesh in front of evegtarians. i assume you have other reasons for eating meat!!

i wonder why you feel the need to "prove" you aren't a vegetarian by eating flesh in front of evegtarians

i don't set out to do it in front of other people; you just happened to be there last time i did it. and yes i do have other reasons for eating fish than the silly reason i posted further up the thread.

see, i kind of agree with this, IF you base your ethics on the economic/environmental aspects of going vegetarian - less so, however if you're basing them on a more spiritual level. my beliefs kind of encompass both - they're a big baggy monster. (and what is pakeha?) but it's also important to realise that eating meat itself is just as culturally-specific - people talk about it as it it's the norm, which it very much isn't. it's understandable that it's a huge breach of manners to refuse food in certain cultures - it's ALSO a huge breach to eat meat in certain other cultures! the argument works both ways, which is why whenver i go on holiday/go travelling (which isn't very often these days , chiz) i do my damndest to go self-catering ;)

This is culturally specific too. If someone communed with their whakapapa by eating muttonbirds they'd caught with their whanau, then deciding to not buy meat instead of not eating it could be the more spiritual decision.

Yes, it was the transubstantiation bit that I (with the priest and the vegan) was referring to.

I was largely joking about an "airtight justification" but the following, which might get really long, is what it comes down to for me. Obviously Josh will drop through to eviscerate my casually uninformed use of philsophy here, but eh.

As a non-religious person, I don't put much stock in "natural rights," which tend to be subjective and culturally constructed to suit a particular set of needs. I tend to think of the level of "rights" extended to a given entity as being more of a social contract, a utilitarian thing: i.e., the idea that we humans shouldn't kill or cage or otherwise mistreat one another is less some dictated-from-above moral imperative and more of a collective contract that is, on a theoretical level, beneficial to all.

The problem with extending those rights to animals as a whole is that they're incapable of entering into it reciprocally: we can agree not to kill or mistreat them, but they're simply not able to give us the same consideration. Given the opportunity and the inclination, they'll gladly harm us if it suits them: that's how they're designed to work within the environment. It strikes me as an act of extreme benevolence, and not a moral obligation, to suddenly stop thinking of them as actors in a food chain when it's not possible for them to extend that same privilege to us.

The two fuzzy edges in this are domesticated animals -- with whom we've worked out something of a rights contract -- and apes, which in certain senses seem to include us in their personal one. But in the end I just don't see why we have any obligation to take ourselves out of the carnivorous part of the food chain just because we've risen so far to the top of it. If the carnivorous food chain is immoral then we live on planet hell; and no matter how our diet takes us out of that chain, to every other animal on Earth we're still entirely a part of it.

Err so that's just why I don't buy say Peter Singer's explications of "speciesism." I'll spare you the corrolaries relating to the very Singerish examples of severely disabled humans and humans who violate the no-kill contract on their own.

singer's marginal cases like retarded or otherwise disabled humans aren't just corollaries, they're an important part of his objection to the kind of thinking about rights that you just gave. if we normally grant the protection of not being mistreated and killed for our pleasure of eating meat to humans who otherwise fail to meet the criteria for having the rights to that protection, then there's something wrong with using that kind of rights talk as a justification for meatatarianism.

even if that theoretical problem didn't exist, there's another one: the animals that we raise for food are so poorly treated that whether or not we have the "right" to do what we want with them, or an obligation to not do certain things to them like kill them and eat them, seems beside the point. aside from what we think we can and can't do in that regard, we also generally seem to think that people shouldn't be that cruel to animals, domesticated or not.

personally I think singer's arguments are very strong, but this doesn't stop me from eating meat. I don't try to justify it, though, with anything more than ignorance and apathy.

Intrinsic rights arguments (and there are contractarians who apply Kant-derived principles to the animal rights case) are going to commit you to different moral positions to sentience ones. Very broadly, the former would imply hardline veganism; the latter would tend to make for vegetarians who object mainly to 'inhumane' (heh) treatment and industrial meat production.

(I don't agree w/ Singer, btw, esp the recent stuff, but the knee-jerk reactions I see to his rhetoric generally don't understand enough about his argument to be much other than puffed up moral outrage).

And oddly, it's often deep ecological approaches that deal better with the issue of intrinsic value vs carnivorism, albeit because they simply recognise a difference between the right to life of all (autopoietic) biotic entities and the pragmatics of the food chain. They grant 'rights' on a very different basis to either yours, or Singer's, or various contractarians who've tried to address this issue, ie not on an essentialist basis, but on the basis of a holistic cosmology. Insofar as all biotic entities (individuals or systems) are inherently interrelated (not just some hippyshit 'I fell connected to the Whole Universe', but actually constituted in relationship to the bigger ecological 'Self'), so all are subjects of the right to flourishing and self-realisation in principle, whilst still being subject to the material necessities of that interconnection ie kill to live.

None of this is that relevant to the thorny question of applied ethics in subtle social and cultural contexts, tho', especially in the case of those who may apprehend certain moral stances/arguments but can't/don't translate them into everyday action.

I think you just said it. Not that this commits us (morally; it clearly hasn't, historically) to exercise that respect. But consciousness, and x years of 'progress' and, in the West at least, x years of instrumental exploitation of nonhuman nature legitimated by the consciousness and the 'progress' has put You might just as well say (in a world of misogyny) 'why do we have to be the ones to deconstruct patriarchy, just cos it happened to cross our minds?'? Or 'why do we have to think about the ethics of pacificism when everyone else is waging bloody war and doing alright?'. You might just as well fall into complete nihilism. Whether the respect for others/sentience is species-specific/genetic or political, I don't think it has that much bearing on the ethical debate. Or, as my mum would say, just cause everyone else is chewing gum, does that mean you have to? If they all threw themselves off a cliff, would you do that too?

ellie is right about the utilitarian thrust of singer's argument, too.

the biotic community stuff is interesting, I think, because it offers a way to think about acceptable ways of eating animals, and just generally benefitting from our relationship to them, in a more subtle way than just 'we're human, we can do whatever we want to animals.' I heard a talk by a big animal ethics guy, bernie rollin, and from what he said it seems that those who raise animals (when they're people, not corporations) are pretty sympathetic to this sort fo thinking, especially because of its affinities with traditional animal husbandry.

I think it's that plus the sentience argument -- i.e. that as an end point of the sentience argument -- that leads me to say "okay to eat it, but let's not go needlessly overboard about how." If it's a moral necessity to not eat it if one thinks the "how" has gone overboard, then I'm going to have to stop eating it now.

pigs aren't especially, and wild pigs are very dangerous indeed

if we decided not to eat meat as a species, would we still have any duty towards the survivors of breeds-bred-to-be-eaten? would they be culled? set free? allowed to die off gradually? kept exactly as now except never slaughtered?

Whatever it is I don't follow Tracer's contention that we've removed ourselves from it: in fact I can't think of anything humans can do that isn't a part of it. Ever-more-unusual parts of it, sure, but we're still just grubby little animals eating and reproducing. The only difference between the chimp sticking a twig down an ant hole and our using fossil fuels is a tremendous difference of scale, right?

(See now how the "airtight" above referred mostly to my own head? NB I largely eat fish, which I sometimes pretend is for impact reasons but is really because I just like fish. I do, however, feel a bit more comfortable eating it -- the process seems simpler and less offputting -- which might have to do with those impact arguments. I recall feeling the same way about eating a goat that had been bought and slaughtered in front of me: it was a lot simpler and cleaner.)