If eating meat is unethical, why is it ok to kill babies?

You should have focused on the first paragraph. (Point A to point B)

Everyone does have to believe in something, even the people that say they believe in nothing. I think my beliefs are more rational than religious people that believe there is a god in the sky?

It is obvious that logic can be subjective. Like I said before, we are controlled by our emotions. That is why I want to have an internal computer program assisting me with my decisions. (Evolutionay algorithms)

And I don’t like to have conversations about semantics. We could spend days arguing with each other. What is logic? It is this or is it that????

 

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Yeah id agree that your beliefs are more rational than that. But everyone doesnt have to believe in something, i think thats a falsehood, yes its not easy but it can be done, i dont have any beliefs like that and i know and have spoken to plenty of nihilists on here who can confirm that they dont either.

I wasnt trying to argue of semantics, you were just comming across like for someone who had chosen to live by logic you didnt know very much about it.
I.e. things like..everyday 'commonsense' is light years apart from the actual various disciplines of logic.
No offense intended...peas

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http://web.archive.org/web/20041107084521/http://eesc.orst.edu/agcomwebfile/news/food/vegan.html

 

I think nihilism is a belief in something. A person would have to not exist to believe in nothing. (This applies to the people that have normal functional brains)

 

Not true. Humans are also animals, but would you define humans as stupid?

 

This is not conclusive, although it does raise valid points regarding modern farming methods. It doesn't mention for instance, that a lot of the crops go towards making animal feed for the meat industry. Humans produce far more food than we can possibly eat, so there is no reason to tear down more forests to create areas for growing soya beans, etc.
Like I said before, humans must have some impact on the rest of the natural world for us to survive, just the same as any other animal. Unfortunatley a combination of our vast numbers and lack of humanity when it comes to farming animals results in terrible waste.

 

Quite a few of the vegans I know certainly consider the animals killed in the process of induistrialized farming and crop production tecniques, which is why they only eat food grown on small farms that are harvested by hand, food they grow themselves or, (in the most extreme cases) only food that is artificially produced.

And, I would most certainly agree with "killing less is better than killing more".
It is absolutely impossible to live live, even having the strictest of aware vegan, fruitarian diets, without being complicitly and directly, responsible for death.
With that in mind, why is it not better to strive to have less of a negative impact than to ignore the results of your action and be complicitly responsible for the deaths of millions of animals that go to waste each year uneaten, due to modern, industrialized farming techniques practices by corporate farms that are concerned more with limiting waste of profits than limiting waste of life and suffering?

I am not a vegetarian, nor do I have any definite plans to be one (though it does ramble around in the back of my mind from time to time), but I certainly see the noble aspect of hunting your own food and using every bit of the meat, over simply going to the supermarket and buying a steak, willfully ignorant of the rest of the cow that is rotting in the back room, which will eventually end up in the trashbin.
You don't have to be a vegetarian to respect all life, but to partcicpate in the wholesale farming, slaughter and waste of animals, you have to either have no respect for the life you are taking, or turn a blind eye to it.

My ideal is the return of the family/community subsistence farm, and elimination of the farming "industry".
My goal is to have my own family subsistence farm within the next 10 years.
If you want meat, go outside and kill the pig you fed and raised, or go hunting.
If you wate any of it, it is your family that directly suffers from that waste.
The removal of "modern" man from the agrarian process is a big part of the disgusting waste that occurrs.

 

I have no idea what your veiws are city, You beleive that it is aleight to kill insects and plants, but not ?mammals? Of course insects have feelings. That's why when you pick up an ant and put it on your hand, it tries to get away. Fear. You can see these actions in many invertabrates. Chase a spider, it will definitely run. Or hold it's web and slowly work your way down it while the spider is hanging on it. The spider will keep making more web in an attempt to escape. Swat a bee, it will sting(or sometimes bite) you. Anger? We have emotions primarily for survival purposes imo. But we have created a false sense of leisure causing us, as a species to evolve with more emphasis on emotions, because social interactions are what allow us to survive. And...You can't kill animals to eat, but you can kill flowers just to give them to someone? That sounds ridiculously selfish to me. You can't say that plants have sense of pain just because they can't express it. Our nature is to worry about surviving, not selfish materialistic goals, society brainwashes us to worry about that. Insects are animals by the way.

 

As a professional killer of animals (scientist) I have had the experience that after a certain point killing one more mouse isn't really going to shake you morally anymore. There is a critical point, it's very low, where you could say: 'now it is enough, and when I stop now I can stop with a semi-blank moral slate'. That would be after 1 mouse. Or maybe 5.

But if you have butchered 50 pregnant mice (and 50 x 12= 600 fetuses), does it really matter if you butcher 50 more? What if you killed a 1000? Does it matter if you stop there?

No. Not on a moral level.

Does it matter if Hitler gassed 1 million jews, or 3 million, or 100 million before the act becomes unethical or immoral?

No. Not on a moral level.

If you are responsible for the slaughter of 599 voles and fieldmice (vegetarians), does 1 single cow make a difference? Especially if you can save 155 voles and fieldmice by eating a single cow?

No. Not on a moral level.

 

Anthropomorphization.
Because beings flee death and danger does not mean they "experince emotions", nevermind experience it in the same way humans do.
They flee for the same reasons all beings flee, survival instinct.
Most fear in humans comes from learned responses and social neuroses.
It is fake.
Fear is our emotional response to the chemical rush of adrenaline.
Adrenaline is created in dangerous situations to give us the boost of strangth and energy to escape danger.
The results of the adrenaline rush cause things like heart plapatations, heightened awareness, increased energy, greater blood pressure, increased heart rate, etc.
A healthy respnse to these stimuli is to take advantage of the greater abilities it affords us, and fight or flee.
These instincts have been dumbed down, dulled and confused over years of living withing our own manmade habitats, away from the "normal" situations in the wild that honed these instincts over many aeons.
As a result, humans have irrational mental reactions to the chemical and physical reactions to dangerous situations.
There is no reason to believe that animals react in the same way, menatally.
Perhaps you think it is a pedantic point to make, but I think it is a significant one.

Ummm...
Bees don't bite.
Yes, that was simply a pedantic point.

 

Are not emotions derived from instincts? Meant insects-ants, ect. If no animal experiences emotionsthe same as humans, that voids the argument anyway.

 

Yes.
I already said that.
That does not mean that animals experience "fear".
There is certainly no reason, in my opinon, to believe they experience "fear" in the same way we do.
To make that assumption is simple anthropomorphization.

They seem to experience similar physical and chemical responses to stressful situations to afford them the greater ability to fight or flee, but our "emotions" are a layer on top of that.
"Emotions", at least the way we experience them, are man-made, and, in all likelihood, exclusive to man.

That doesn't mean I think it is justification to wantonly kill animals, mind you.

Is that so?
Which ones?

 

Nah looked it up, that's why I changed the post. Also why I hate public schools.

 

Also I realize your point about the way that we experience emotions, but city was implying that animals such as cows have emotions and insects dont.

 

Presumably your job title isn't 'professional animal killer'? What experiments do you do and what for?

 

Eating meat might be unethical for ecological reasons, since farm animals must consume so much more grains which otherwise could be fed to people. Abortion might also be considered ethical for ecological reasons, since people are consuming the Earth's resources which previously belonged to other animals.

 

In my definition there are 4 types of lifeforms in the universe, this is how I define them:

Matter is conscious on material level (it can attract and repel etc), plants are conscious on vegetative level (they can find and eat food etc).
Animals are conscious on emotional level, humans are conscious on mental level.

Matter and plants can't move but animals and humans can.

Plants include [the characteristics of] matter. Animals include plants and matter. Humans include animals, plants and matter.

How conscious something is defines what category it is. To know how selfaware something is, you just need to watch how much it can express itself.

Besides these 4 lifeforms there are 3 more spiritual levels which humans can reach. The 7th state is the rest state (god)

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I'm not sure what you meant with: "but would you define humans as stupid?"

I guess you misunderstood me and thought I meant that animals are stupid. I just meant that the definition is stupid because it only looks at the outside (body), not the inside (consciousness)

 

So, are you saying that animals can not think?

Don't you think that it awfully arrogant and presumptuous?
Besides, even going by your flawed criterion, then Chimpanzees are self aware and contemplative, so that makes them humans, as opposed to animals?

 

sure they can, but they're not conscious in the sense that they think about why they exist, philosophy and stuff you know.

and we can't communicate with chimps or dolphines in any way to know their thoughts.

it's obvious to anyone with common sense to see that we're a lot more intelligent than apes. if apes could think like we, they could write here and express their opinion.

No.

all things are selfaware at some level, even plants and matter (like i said), but no other lifeform is aware of itself as much as a human.