Hampture 2020-04-11 07:42:59

I'll be the contrarian then and say I'm a meat eater but don't think doing so is morally neutral. The lives of the animals we eat have moral weight. Killing them for food is varying degrees of morally negative depending how it's done and for what purpose.

I eat meat anyway because that's true of basically anything in life. It is impossible to live a morally perfect life, we can only strive to do more good than bad and struggle to tilt that ratio as much in one direction as practical. Simply to live as a human is to cause some amount of harm to other living creatures, for example the trillions of bacteria killed when we clean our bathrooms and kitchens.

Vegans draw a line between the plant and animal kingdoms, concluding it's fine to eat anything on one side of the line but nothing from the other. But what of mushrooms? Technically animals, not plants. So "Yes to plants, no to animals" is already not precise enough.

They contend animals are conscious but plants aren't. Again, fungi pose a problem for this dichotomy. Consciousness is not a binary but a spectrum. There exist brains, and in the absence of brains, nervous systems of varying degrees of complexity. Plants certainly have some kind of awareness that vegans ignore because it's a problem for their narrative.

Personally I think all life has moral weight, but the amount depends upon their degree of awareness. This means there's no one valid place to draw the line, it depends on what individuals are comfortable with. Even most avowed carnivores feel uncomfortable about the idea of eating dolphins, chimps or elephants, whether or not they realize the reason for it.

I order species on a hierarchy of apparent cognitive capability based on the best currently available information and do my best to eat species as far down that hierarchy as possible without compromising too much on my enjoyment of life (eating only nutritionally complete but foul tasting algae pills for example).

In practice that amounts to fish and crustaceans, although this gets expensive quickly so I eat a lot of chicken and turkey as well. I feel the least morally conflicted about the fish and crustaceans, but slightly conflicted about the poultry. I feel guilt when I indulge myself in steak, bacon, etc. 2 or 3 times a month because of the complexity of cow and pig brains.

But nobody forces me to feel that guilt. I am not being manipulated, by appeals to my guilt, into eating the way I do. It is a result of my own contemplations on the topic. I don't know any other better approach than to decide my own values according to my own best reckoning, using the information available to me.

I don't think that means I'm totally in the clear, as it is in fact possible and increasingly practical to go vegan. I have just done enough, within my means, that I feel I've made a reasonable effort at devising logical values and living by them. That's the best I know how to do.

Tyler 2020-04-11 18:31:03

"Yeah I'm not gay but I suck dick sometimes, whatever"

Phronemophobia 2020-04-12 09:01:35

Happy Easter, Bertn! I fully expect a holiday special from you that has either nothing to do with today or everything to do with every other holiday and that you mistakenly added an egg or a pastel color in the background to kinda technically incorporate Easter into the mix, as well. May you spend your day thereafter figuratively drowning yourself in a pool of IBC Root Beer and puppy kisses or within the caramel filling of a human-sized Cadbury candy egg. Either way, calories don't exist on special occasions, so there's no reason to regret either option.

Stay sexy, Plok.

Chdonga 2020-04-12 12:46:44

I eat a lot of chicken. I eat salmon, duck, maybe tuna sparingly... I can't do beef or pork often though I always end up feeling bloated or unpleasant afterwards. I don't understand how people can eat meat without veggies to go along with it.