[philips]

I think this is the same ethical questions of veganism and our use/abuse of biological systems. This is an excerpt from "The Pig that Wants to be Eaten" by Julian Baggini

> After forty years of vegetarianism, Max Berger was about to sit down to a feast of pork sausages, crispy bacon and pan-fried chicken breast. Max had always missed the taste of meat, but his principles were stronger than his culinary cravings. But now he was able to eat meat with a clear conscience.

> The sausages and bacon had come from a pig called Priscilla he had met the week before. The pig had been genetically engineered to be able to speak and, more importantly, to want to be eaten. Ending up on a human’s table was Priscilla’s lifetime ambition and she woke up on the day of her slaughter with a keen sense of anticipation. She had told all this to Max just before rushing off to the comfortable and humane slaughterhouse. Having heard her story, Max thought it would be disrespectful not to eat her.

> The chicken had come from a genetically modified bird which had been ‘decerebrated’. In other words, it lived the life of a vegetable, with no awareness of self, environment, pain or pleasure. Killing it was therefore no more barbarous than uprooting a carrot.

> Yet as the plate was placed before him, Max felt a twinge of nausea. Was this just a reflex reaction, caused by a lifetime of vegetarianism? Or was it the physical sign of a justifiable psychic distress? Collecting himself, he picked up his knife and fork . . .

> Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams (Pan Books, 1980)

[dasyatidprime]

What is the source line at the end representing there? I've read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and while it definitely contains (and I see it as a major cultural anchor for) animals bred to desire being eaten and be able to say so, it doesn't contain that particular scene (at least in the version I read). Is that line Baggini noting that his scene was inspired by the Adams book?

[philips]

Baggini is the source of the quote he just references the concept was from Adams at the end. I copy/pasted this from the book.

[mrsvanwinkle]

This is the third time in the same week I observed an HHGG quote going whoosh in an age where reading books is long dead as the tech industry twitches to dying anytime soon from the moment Jeff sold godelescherbach online

[DennisP]

Ironically, it seems you may not have read past the first sentence of your GP comment.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

Did Priscilla also want to be living in absolute misery every single day of her life? The way animals are treated while they are alive is my main objection to our farming practices and the reason why i don’t eat meat.

[JK-Swizzle]

I believe you are missing the forest for the trees. It is bringing up the question of what defines self will. It is unrelated to veganism in all but text.

An easy example is dogs. We have bred dogs for centuries to love doing work for us. If they hated doing the work, it would be easy to call it cruel. If they loved it by nature, it would be easy to call it kind. But since we created them into a thing that loves the work we need them for, where do the ethics fall?

Should we prevent them from doing what brings them joy? Should we make use of this win-win situation? If it is the latter, we are quickly approaching the ability to morph every species into something that gets joy from doing our work.

Dogs we changed by accident. The next one will not be an accident. Is it still a beings free will if the game was rigged from the start?

[HerbManic]

This is why I also like cats. The only reason they don't eat me is that I am 10 times bigger than they are. Other than that, they still seem to be running Lion software on miniature hardware.

[fragmede]

If you die and they run out of food, guess what they'll eat?

[billynomates]

OK but If I'm dead I won't care

[the_af]

> Dogs we changed by accident

(I know your point wasn't about dogs either, it just reminded me of something).

I love Neil de Grasse Tyson's line in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey:

"This wolf has discovered what a branch of its ancestors figured out some 15.000 years ago... an excellent survival strategy: the domestication of humans."

[oooyay]

There's also another animal/dog documentary that I've watched recently that puts a finer point on this realization. The secret to survival and evolution is cooperation. For instance, not all dogs evolved the same way in this documentary. Some were more nuturing, some were more problem solving. For the focus of the documentary the challenge was to match the dog with a human that had a need they could address.

I think somewhat egotistically humans underappreciate how we have also been goaded by our "pets" into our own evolutionary journey. Most of the subjects of that documentary would not be alive if it were not for those dogs.

[rcxdude]

It's much like how many plants have accidentally found that a great means of propagation is to produce a compound that is both a great chemical warfare agent against other plants and microbes and also tastes interesting to humans or makes them feel funny.

[JK-Swizzle]

That just makes it even more interesting. Have we been selectively modified to think dogs are cute? If I showed a toy poodle to a caveman, would he also want to put it in a little bag with only its head poking out?

[moondance]

An amusing quip, but since you brought Neil up- his takes on veganism are generally disappointing and facile.

[rjh29]

As are his takes on almost everything.

[dennis_jeeves2]

True, the guy is has somewhat banal views. Guess he still has an audience.

[the_af]

That's a very broad claim. Can you elaborate?

[protocolture]

Depends on the dog tbh. Keshonds are bred to yell at anyone getting on your barge. A lot of humans would probably like that job if it paid enough. Just chilling out and yelling at anyone you dont recognise.

[noosphr]

We can easily blast pure pleasure every second of every day of her life with direct brain stimulation. She would be so deliriously happy our lives will be inhumane by comparison.

[krater23]

Just thing about, whats better, being treated the way some of the animals treated or being locked up in a server room all your life, seeing only doom dungeons and run to not get killed ingame? I would be happy to be the animal when I need to choose between Priscilla and the brain tissue in a biological computer.

[Gravityloss]

Organic farming, at least over here, has also wellbeing criteria besides just controlling the food. For example a lot more space per animal, ability to go out and so on. Organic meat is a bit more expensive, but not hugely. So it shows it can be done.

[kjkjadksj]

At the end of the day vegans play the same game as meat eaters where some line is drawn. For meat eaters it is with livestock meats and for pescatarians that is no go, but fish are alright. And for vegans that is all off limits. Except of course the life we deem base enough to not care it is being eaten alive. Slaughter all the lettuce you want. There are no lettuce advocates.

All this to say the moral arguments are sort of silly and illogical. Unfortunately for us all, we exist where we do in the food chain, having to consume life to live, unable to secure our resources from the sun and inorganic resources which would be more morally righteous by all measures. Things could be better but they also could be worse. At least much of our prey receives veterinary care and is killed via airgun vs having to rough it and be eaten alive.

[virgildotcodes]

This is not a good argument.

Vegans base their line on a very easily defensible ability on behalf of the victim - sentience.

If there’s no sentience, there’s nobody within to experience the pain and fear, and there is no victim.

That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.

Finally, to your other point, many humans die horrible deaths - whether in global poverty, war or of various types of disease, cancer and dementia in the wealthier countries. That of course does not justify serial killer cannibals who put a bullet in the back of their victims’ heads on the basis that they’re giving them a “humane” end and likely saving them a large amount of future suffering.

[butlike]

What if everything's sentient, just not operating on a level that's understandable by us?

[virgildotcodes]

That’s already addressed here -

> That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.

[kjkjadksj]

Once again it is a moral value judgement to put sentient life on such a pedestal above other life not blessed with such a mutation.

[virgildotcodes]

An insensate plant is morally equivalent to a rock. Neither is conscious, neither has anybody home.

It’s not a value judgement, it’s establishing the basis for what constitutes an “other”.

There is no “other” within unconscious entities.

Regardless, once again, even if you felt the grass was objectively as conscious or “valuable” (what does value even mean in this context?) as much as your children or your dog (and of course you don't, if we’re being honest, this entire line of reasoning is not in good faith) - then again:

> That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.

[kjkjadksj]

It is a value judgement. It is life. It is not a rock. It merely lacks sentience, as far as we are aware at least. May I ask what you think of a human in a coma? Are they also no different than a rock to you?

[virgildotcodes]

Is observing that a certain car lacks wheels a value judgement?

Something being alive has no more to do with it being sentient than it does with it having the capacity of sight.

You need an organism to actually develop all the components necessary to capture the photons, turn them into a signal, and transmit that signal to something like a brain that can process that into a vision. All living things, single celled organisms, do not just have the capacity of sight granted by virtue of being living.

Even in humans, which have all that machinery for sight, a slight disruption (trauma to the eye, retinal detachment, genetic disorders) can completely eliminate their ability to see.

It's the same for any number of capabilities, including consciousness. We know humans have the capacity for consciousness, and yet extremely subtle disruptions (a tiny amount of propofol, trauma to the brain, sleep itself) is enough to turn off consciousness, despite all that machinery still being in place and it being quite difficult from the outside to see anything awry.

That said, again and again, even if you want to pretend that every blade of grass, every life form down to the single celled, (and even every rock!) is as sentient as a human being, you will kill fewer plants, fewer microbial beings, clear less land (destroying fewer rocks, displacing and killing fewer people, animals, microbes etc.) by eating as low on the food chain as is feasible, and eliminating the inefficiencies of jumping up the trophic levels, which requires greater and greater inputs and destruction all the way up the chain to produce a given number of calories at the top.

A human is capable of sentience, a plant is not, nor is a rock. There's a plethora of evidence of humans coming out of comas and regaining sentience, and even of them dreaming/maintaining bits of awareness while from the outside appearing to be in a coma.

That said, there are also cases of clear brain death, in which case the human themselves is no longer capable of sentience, and so then their family unplugging them is not guilty of murder.

I value my own life (defined fundamentally by my ability to experience said life) and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the majority of other sentient beings do as well, humans (in temporary comas or not) and animals included, which is why I do not try to justify them being mass murdered for my personal hedonistic pleasure and try to work backwards from that end desire to find a way to justify the unjustifiable.

A value judgement would be saying that some sentient beings are more valuable than others. A statement of fact is that these living beings are capable of sentience, sight, hearing, flight, sexual reproduction, asexual reproduction, growing fur, breathing water, etc etc. and these other ones are not.

[jakkos]

> play the same game .. where some line is drawn

> Things could be better but they also could be worse

> the moral arguments are sort of silly and illogical

You can use these to justify literally anything

> Slaughter all the lettuce you want

Yeah because we don't have compelling evidence that lettuce experiences anything comparable to conscious suffering, and the only alternative to not eating plants is dying

[kjkjadksj]

Yet, we don’t, is the key qualifier. The idea that babies feel pain is only somewhat recently accepted for example. What happens in a future if we determine plants also have pain signals? Would you feel some way, or would you chew that lettuce with the indifference a carnivore has towards its prey?

[jakkos]

> The idea that babies feel pain is only somewhat recently accepted

This is crazy to me, but I still believe it's very unlikely plants experience conscious suffering

> Would you feel some way, or [...] chew [...] with the indifference

I'd probably be upset, accept that I needed to eat plants or starve, try to minimize the pain I did cause, and then grow numb to the knowledge over time because I couldn't practically do anything about it

I think you can pose many hypothetical scenarios where I'd be unsure what to do or do the selfish thing, but to me the important thing is that the world we do exist in has lots of "bang for your buck" choices like: trading getting to taste meat for animals not having to go through factory farms

[0dayz]

AFAIK vegans base their argument on the degree of consciousness a living being had and compromise on the least evil.

Most meat eaters base it on closeness to said living thing.

It'll be interesting to see if the veganism movement survives lab grown meat that is ethically produced.

[adamsmark]

It wouldn't continue in any real form. Maybe cholesterol conscious and devout buddhists will still try to adhere, but beyond that I don't see what the point would be.

It would be like how Ozempic lead to a mysterious quieting of Body Positivity/Health at Every Size advocates. They were a vocal minority, there was much "debate" and cri de couer from many sides and now its all evaporated without a farewell or explicit winding down.

[virgildotcodes]

There is already massive industry lobbying against lab grown meat, resulting in bans in states like Florida[0] accompanied with propaganda about "processed" vs "natural" food.

Were lab grown meat to be available today at a cost lower than regular meat, it is apparent that there would still be huge amounts of animal ag dollars spent on lobbying against and demonizing these things, and millions of people who would fall for the propaganda.

You can compare this to renewables now, even though they may be far cheaper per kwH, and the Trump admin's push to halt all renewable projects and do everything they can to prop up the viability of fossil fuels.

This means the vegan movement would need to continue to exist as does the environmental movement.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/federal-appeals-court-uph...

[constantius]

Your mental hoops being on full display doesn't make them true. Nothing new or profound in these arguments and analogies, and stating them with this pretend wise tone just sounds childish.

[kjkjadksj]

Nothing of substance in this reply either then

[butlike]

To your last point, I still think slaughtering with a <sharp> knife is more humane. You slit the animals throat, it's traumatizing, it's painful, but you've started the "bleed-out timer." The bodily processes know that's NOT GOOD, and plan accordingly. If it's anything like humans, perhaps the animal's body will dump large amounts of feel good chemicals near the end.

Juxtapose that against the airgun, a sudden impulse to the central processing unit of the animal. Chemicals and neuron activity get disrupted immediately, the animal may be comatose but not necessarily dead for some amount of time as the signal processing is just obliterated. Chaotic disruption of the system seems more unpleasant/inhumane than the more outwardly barbaric but ostensibly better slicing of the throat.

[Centigonal]

is this from Baggini or Adams?

[philips]

Baggini is the source of the quote he just references the concept was from Adams at the end. I copy/pasted this from the book.

[mrsvanwinkle]

I was almost too sure I had never heard of Julian Baggini and I almost celebrated the first in history when neither the Onion nor the Simpsons nor Idiocracy predicted the future by assumed funniness of assumed impossibility of unfathomable human stupidity AND that it still was kinda funny instead of depressing discovery of frontier Authentic Idiocy (TM) I believe this is one of many scenes in HHGG where I super shy in public tried to suppress convolutions of my soul and contortions of face and bone only to fail audibly and visibly

[boogieknite]

as an unintentional and perhaps unethical vegetarian of many years who hasn't read this book: eating dead things gives me the creeps because it makes me consider my own death and consumption which is unappetizing

[cassianoleal]

So you only eat living things?

[boogieknite]

only eat live pikmin

[cassianoleal]

How do feel about the live pikmin dying as it reaches your stomach? I'm assuming you swallow them whole rather than killing them with your teeth.

[Groxx]

None of their natural predators seem to have teeth for chewing. So, yes, I think swallowing them whole is the most natural thing to do.

[taneq]

As a fellow ‘unethical’ vegetarian, eating dead animals just seems yucky. I imagine it’s a similar feeling to what most non-vegetarians feel when contemplating eating dog or cat meat.

[boogieknite]

exactly. welcome to downvote town

[taneq]

Give it time, I find the initial “ew you made me think a thought I don’t like” downvotes tend to be counteracted by the long tail of “huh actually that makes sense” upvotes. :)

[fhn]

plants have cells and they are alive!

[DoctorOetker]

and genetically related to us