- driving a car 1 mile to school is not ethical: who mined that ore? drilled for that oil?
- buying mass produced clothes is not ethical: who slaved for pennies to make that shirt?
- having a smart phone is unethical: cheap laborers build the components in arrangements they can’t exit
living in the 1st world is a world of hypocrisy. everything we do is possible because we have built on the backs of those less developed and outsource our costs so our living standard is high.
i accept this, do all the things above, and eat meat
agreed. We have enough nihilistic, "all or nothing" thinking. There are almost ALWAYS ways to improve incrementally and the magnification of those improvements by many people cannot be ignored.
I think it's important to keep in mind that people can improve the situations you allude to without extreme measures and/or complete cutoff.
- if you're driving a car 1 mile each way, consider biking. consider biking one or more days a week, and use your car for the days you need to go on longer trips like for errands.
- buy higher quality clothing from reputable dealers that try to balance out externalities. learn how to repair clothing that fails, or pay someone who specializes in it. bonus opportunity to support a local business and a worthwhile trade/specialty.
- don't upgrade your smartphone every year. Apple iPhones can receive software/security updates for ~5 years.
- try cooking or purchasing a vegetarian meal once a week. try a vegetable you've never tried before. try to find a way to prepare a vegetable you traditionally dislike until you find a way that is palatable to you. (edit to add: try growing some vegetables, even just a basil plant or sprouts on your windowsill)
It sounds like your position is "everything in the 1st world has a downside so why bother". It is certainly possible to live in a first world in a more conscious, less impactful way.
Others bear the cost, only if the meat consumption supports the producers of externalities aka factory farms and CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). If the meat you consume comes from small-scale, grass fed, local producers, there are no externalities (or fewer than cultured meat could produce) and thus eating meat can still be ethical.
Most people who choose not to eat meat for the ethical reasons do so based on the foundational belief that killing another conscious animal for food is unethical. "small-scale, grass fed, local producers" do not negate that belief.
If you mean carbon footprint, Beyond Meat appears to be on par with chicken and not much better than pork. Beef and lamb are worse, but I don't think this is the main ethics angle they're on.
Most don't agree with because for many it's part of their identity, it's what they grew up eating every day with their parents. To find their way of life being classified as unethical is jarring to say the least, so they put up a barrier to doing so.
I do not find fault in that attitude either, to be human is to have emotion, and to feel a sense of belonging. For someone who grew up on barbecue that's hard to reconcile.
However, a rigorous impartial analysis always categories eating meat as not ideal on both moral and ethical grounds. It probably has higher consensus among philosophers than climate change does with climate scientists. The irony is that I doubt all philosophers are vegetarian/vegan, so they themselves are probably the biggest hypocrites (or they have built up some system of ethics where being unethical on this is okay).
I come from a country where even if you're not vegetarian, your dose of meat is a few pieces of chicken once a week. It was very straightforward for me to choose vegetarianism and even then I struggled with it. I have nothing but respect for someone from rural Texas who chooses to be vegetarian though; that is just infinitely harder.
> Most don't agree with because for many it's part of their identity, it's what they grew up eating every day with their parents. To find their way of life being classified as unethical is jarring to say the least, so they put up a barrier to doing so.
When you make up a reason for someone to believe something, sure it's easy to argue against it. Many people balk at finding eating meat unethical because it simply isn't. There is no consistent system of ethics that finds it unethical.
Deciding that some forms of life are "conscious" and should be protected and other forms of life are not is completely arbitrary. Living things consume other living things to survive. Surviving is not unethical, or if it is your system of ethics is self-defeating and will lead to your own extinction, which makes it useless.
Can you cite a single acceptable literary citation that says eating meat is not unethical? What's acceptable? Probably not a blog post, ideally a work by an academic philosopher. Something in between can be murky for sure.
If you're going to go by whatever "academic philosophers"[1] say instead of thinking for yourself, I really don't know what to tell you.
[1] By and large, over-privileged people who've never done anything useful in their lives. It's easy to preach to people about what they should eat when you've always had plenty of food.
Here's a question: Is it immoral for lions to eat zebras?
Here's another question: Imagine the entire Earth is actually a factory farm for aliens. Every time someone dies, their body is actually secretly used for alien food. Would you want Earth to cease to exist?
Or perhaps a closer analogy, imagine super-powerful aliens take over Earth and terraform Mars and Venus, which they use as human farms. Maybe 30 billion humans live on Earth, Mars, and Venus, leading full lives with everything provided to them that a human wants, but killed at 18 years of age.
Alien human-rights activists wish to stop the humans from breeding, and let the population fall to several thousand. They will devote the planets to instead growing Alien Corn.
Have you seen how an industrial farm looks from the inside? I'm a meat eater and I love the taste and stuff, but you need to admit that many animals didn't have a great life at all. So beyond meat solves a real problem. Some folks want all meat production to be banned, I disagree. There are forms of farming which are better for animals, make their lives worth living. They are just more expensive regarding resources as well as money, so can't scale as well as industrial meat production. In the ideal world we've done away with industrial meat production but still keep a limited number of animals for meat production, real meat still being available but most people don't buy it for everyday consumption because it's expensive.
> Here's a question: Is it immoral for lions to eat zebras?
Lions must eat meat to survive. We can choose not to eat meat and still survive. That's a morally relevant distinction. If you are arguing that because meat-eating is natural then it must be moral, I would direct you to the appeal to nature fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
> Here's another question: Imagine the entire Earth is actually a factory farm for aliens. Every time someone dies, their body is actually secretly used for alien food. Would you want Earth to cease to exist?
No, but I fail to see how this runs counter to the moral claim that humans eating meat is bad. The correct analogy to your hypothetical would be to imagine that all animals live their full lives and are only consumed upon their death. It would not be morally wrong to eat them then.
> Or perhaps a closer analogy, imagine super-powerful aliens take over Earth and terraform Mars and Venus, which they use as human farms. Maybe 30 billion humans live on Earth, Mars, and Venus, leading full lives with everything provided to them that a human wants, but killed at 18 years of age. Alien human-rights activists wish to stop the humans from breeding, and let the population fall to several thousand. They will devote the planets to instead growing Alien Corn.
This analogy is not close at all. Animals do not lead full lives with everything provided to them that they could want. The vast majority of farmed animals live horrific lives that are not worth living and are killed very young. Chickens, for example, are artificially grown to reach a large size very quickly and then slaughtered shortly after.
The correct analogy to this hypothetical would be a so-called "humane" or "ethical" farm where the animals are free to live in a close-to-natural environment before being slaughtered. I would agree that that is much better than factory farms, and perhaps even morally acceptable if the animals' lives are worth living and they would not have existed otherwise. But, this is not how most farmed animals live. Not even close.
I don’t think lions eating zebras is a good comparison.
We have evolved and flourished with agriculture and so we don’t have to consume meat unless the agricultural produce has gone way down.
I also think the general argument is how animals are treated with so many horrific videos out there which are just torture in my opinion and not a clean kill.
If someone is doing a clean kill without the animal suffering and making sure it’s living in good conditions, that’s a right step in many ways.
We can't survive without Vitamin B in various forms, which is not found in plants at all (some fermented soy products do contain some, but it's incorrect to say we evolved to not eat meat).
That’s fair. One of the hardest parts is being conscious and cognizant when shopping for food what we’re buying-ways to do this could include actively reading nutrition tables on food packaging and through this you start to get an idea of what certain foods do for you and you begin shopping with a purpose versus shopping to make the fridge look full.
Strategically Replacing meat with certain veggies and legumes for example can get you that protein and carb kick but also are a great source of fiber while being easier to digest. Depending on your personal diet choices you might find a bag of beans not only costs less but can get you the same amount of carbs and proteins per serving across multiple servings than a single serving cut of meat.
I agree with you that eating meat is fine and ethical, but I also think that finding new alternatives that compete with existing supply chains on sustainability and efficiency is also an ethical imperative.
Hurting animals unnecessarily is unethical. And since we don't need to eat meat to survive or even to be healthy, then we are just killing and hurting other beings for our own pleasure.
Most people are wrong! By any defensible ethical system, it's wrong to kill sentient beings when you don't have to. This goes double when it's terrible for the environment.
Why is it wrong to kill animals (humanely) if you don't have to? A cow will live and die blissfully unaware that it's purpose is to be eaten by humans. Is a death by a captive bolt gun worse than death by coyote or disease?
Of course the discussion should be around the conditions that livestock spend their time living in because animals obviously are "happier" when living in natural conditions, but as far as I am aware animals do not have any preference on when or how they die (as long as it is not painful and drawn out).
it's very interesting to me how many people seem to have all of the sudden become very concerned about the perceived consciousness of plants.
My question usually is: "Your interpretation of 'plant consciousness' and consciousness in general aside - do you personally see no difference between a flower and a cow?"
Are you saying that you actually believe it is by definition ethical to do things that society agrees is good for people (regardless of what actually is good for people or for animals)?
Or are you saying that what society deems ethical (regardless of what actually is, in fact, ethical) tends to align with actions that are good for people?
Cows are more like me. A flowers are less like me. So I'm biased against flowers because they are less like me. But I don't know if it's more ethical to act based on my bias.
It's useful to distinguish eating meat from the way most livestock is raised in the US.
My understanding is that most livestock are raised in small pens, never get to go outside, and are physically debilitated in one way or another. In what would amount to animal cruelty if they were pets. I'd love to see statistics on the matter, though no one involved is incentivized to share information so I doubt there's much to find.
Merely eating meat is one thing; participating in the factory farming system that produces the meat you find at the grocery store is quite another.
It is pretty clearly not. This is clearly a piece on marketing, and it seems abundantly clear that it's written from a detached perspective. "Ethics" is presented as an issue of opinion only, and the focus is on how Beyond Meat harnessed changes in that conventional wisdom to sell a product. In fact, I'd say someone who actually believes in ethical vegetarianism has more to complain about in this piece than you do.
Another implication is that ethical consumerism is profitable, which is debatable. Most "ethical" products are chosen because they are healthier, such as organic food or green cosmetics, not because they are more ethical. Remember Toms shoes? I doubt that "synthetic" meat will be proven to be more healthy than regular meat any time soon given that there is still a lot of debate over whether or not meat itself is healthy.
The implication is that plant-based meat substitutes are seen by some consumers as a choice that fulfills their desires for ethical consumption; therefore, the lessons learned from the market fit and economics of plant-based meat substitutes are relevant to the larger context of ethical consumption.
Shrug. Are ethics decided by popular opinion? Many folks regard vegetarianism as an issue of morality. The omnivore who looks deeply at our methods of meat production may well gain much to think on.
Their phrasing is a response to your something most don't agree with, this comment doesn't reply to their meaning.
What they mean is, historically, the majority has not always been correct when it comes to ethical issues. That's different than arguing that majorities have always been wrong.
Going to look back on modern factory farming (the source of the VAST majority of meat eaten in America) as something so abhorrent (Both for the process of it and the external costs) we’ll be embarrassed to tell our grandkids about it. Although as I’ve been downvoted for saying here before, if you’re having kids and grandkids, you’ve already done uncorrectable damage to the environment so go ahead and eat meat or whatever. Doesn’t matter at that point.
I hope (but doubt) that killing animals for food (whether by hunting or smaller-scale farming) will also become completely unacceptable outside of very specific situations.
So I Believe I understand where you are going with the kids comment. At some point as a species we need to procreate, so what method / system would you recommend?
If you’re alive today and care about doing something significant for the environment, don’t have a kid. That’s all there is to it.
There’s absolutely no shortage of people who a) will think this is bad advice that doesn’t apply to them because they are very smart, b) just don’t care, c) don’t have access to birth control, d) just really want a kid, etc.
Others bear the cost. This is not ethical.