My answer is very short. The only reason why I could justify eating meat was that my pleasure from eating meat outweighed the suffering of the animals. I knew this wasn't true but carried on eating meat. Reading Peter Singer stopped me from ignoring the issue.
I know there are good environmental reasons, but they didn't influence me.
7 comments:
You both cite the suffering of animals as a major part of your reasons for being vegetarian (in Stuart's case it's the only consideration).
Just out of interest...if there was no suffering involved, either during the animals' lives or at the point of killing them for human consumption, would that change things?
I know this is an abstract point because in practice this isn't possible, but the philosopical difference between the two positions (i.e. killing animals for human consumption is wrong per se vs. it is wrong only if the animals suffer) seems very significant to me.
i think it is an important point. i think its defensible (if strict precautions are taken). the VSI on animal rights deals with it and i find each side plausible.
my response is to ask your opinion on painlessly killing iris for convienience. not to piss you off though... mandy's waiting gotta go
Who's this Iris you're talking about? You must have mistaken me for someone else.
I'm afraid I find your response quite ridiculous. This is obviously a question of balancing the suffering of animals (which can vary from minimal to terrible) against the benefits to the individual of eating meat (for some people, presumably, it's not all just about pleasure). Since I clearly, on balance, would not benefit from killing Iris, there is no need to balance anything and the right course of action is obvious.
What was that supposed to be a response to anyway? I was just trying to understand your position, and you didn't actually enlighten me on this. Let me ask the question again, in a slightly different form. You say "the only reason why I could justify eating meat was that my pleasure from eating meat outweighed the suffering of the animals". This implies that if the suffering of animals was small, you wouldn't necessarily be a vegetarian. Is that correct?
I think the reference to how we feel about our pets is a way of changing our frame of reference and usual perspective on animals.
What I can gather from Stuart's reference is that if it is possible to value the intrisic life of one or two little cats and dogs, why can we not extend that basic value to other animals? The only difference between our pets and all the cows, pigs, sheep and chickens out there, is that we don't know them. Which is basically the same as me not knowing all the billions of people in the world. This does not mean that I am indifferent to the mass slaughtering of other human beings I don't know.
This analogy doesn't work of course if you don't value your pet's life for her own sake, but as source of pleasure for you.
umm... my point was that it is debateable if killing animals harms them. if it does harm them then that would count when considering suffering. i think it is defensible to take the view that death itself doesn't harm animals. if you do take this view, then i can see no reason in principle not to eat meat.
i dont take this view and was using a pet example to try and make it intuitively plausible. i dont think the only reason why my pet dying is bad is because it would make me sad.
please let me know if this is an appropriate answer to your query.
The question was not so much about what gets classified as suffering. I was more interested in confirming, as I think your original post suggests, that your decision to be a vegetarian depends on some sort of weighing up of the interests of animals against the potential benefits to humans of killing them, rather than a judgement that it is always wrong to kill animals for human consumption, and any assessment of the relative levels of suffering and human benefits is therefore irrelevant. This question remains even if you add the additional judgement that death itself constitutes harm i.e. the lives of animals have intrinsic value.
If this is indeed your framework, then it opens up lots of issues that I would have thought you would have to address in your explanation of why you are a vegetarian (e.g. how should we strike this balance? how much do animals suffer? how valuable is the life of an animal? what benefits do we get from eating meat?). Your original answer about why you are a vegetarian offered no insight into how you tackled these issues, and what the key factors were that led you to strike the balance you did.
there is a difference between why i became a vegetarian (which is what the post discusses) and what i believe now. i dont particularly expect my post to resonate very strongly with readers. i think the benefits of eating meat are relatively trivial, deliciousness and convienience, which means the damage to animal interests doesn't have to be that great for it to outweigh those interests. again, i dont really expect this to sway anyone, its a personal value judgement. this post was not an argument for vegetarianism. just why i became one (it may have been for a stupid reason)
i agree that its important to determine more precisely what animal interests are, i spoke about that here, but even if we do people could always think of new ways in which our interests are more important. i'm not really interested in establishing a moral calculus, i dont see that as being usefull, so i'm definately not advocating strict utilitarianism here.
so, what i'm interested in is establishing a principle of equal consideration of interests, and encouraging investigation into what animal interest actually are.
is this any better than my other responses?
Post a Comment