Who wants to talk about the ethics of eating meat? thenewgreen started a dialog for that purpose and it is almost entirely about organicAnt. I would like to discuss the subject rather than discuss the discussion. Hubski has shared a few rich, detailed perspectives: Meriadoc celebrates hunting but also has "conflicted feelings on eating meat." pseydtonne suggests that we "Create a positive movement -- that diverse food high in fiber is cheaper, easier to spice, and feels good." nowaypablo should tell us the story of hunting a wild pig. elizabeth has been "making an effort to eat less meat lately." BLOB_CASTLE gives reasons for having "cut back significantly" on eating meat. organicAnt describes experiences leading to a vegan lifestyle. mknod points out that there is "very little choice except to eat meat" in Alaska. rob05c says "I don't eat much meat, and when I do, I feel bad." bioemerl feels "zero guilt about eating meat." caelum19 explains why "I've been vegan my entire life." b_b has mixed feelings about using animals to benefit humans, but has the good sense to stay out of a contentious debate. Most of the calmly-expressed opinions I have found seem to go against eating meat. Can anyone provide additional perspective for the other side? Here is my view, and the reasons I have been reducing my meat consumption: 1) Most of the meat that we eat today is produced in ways that causes significant suffering. 2) Choosing to eat less meat is a realistic way for most people to reduce suffering in the world. 3) Therefore, most of us should choose to eat less meat. 4) The logical end point is that most of us should not eat most animal products, except in unusual circumstances where making that choice would arguably cause human suffering outweighing the non-human suffering (such as people with little access to plant food, hunters who love their sport, perhaps also people who love the taste of meat and choose sources that minimize animal suffering). I will also mention that I think human suffering is more important than non-human suffering, and when a living thing has a primitive or no nervous system the word "suffering" may not even be meaningful. And I do not blame people who don't have the luxury of spending time online discussing this subject for making choices without weighing all the implications.
Off the top of my head, there are four reasons to "eat less meat": 1) Health. Lots of red meat is not healthy and many of the ways we prepare meat increase carcinogenic load. 2) Expense. Beans will always be cheaper than chicken or steak unless there are powerful subsidies at play. And there are powerful subsidies at play in the United States so this is a muddy one. 3) Social concerns. Meat has a higher impact on the environment than vegetables, from a greenspace perspective as well as a greenhouse gas perspective. Additionally, industrial agriculture produces pretty tremendous runoff waste. 4) Ethical concerns. If you're going to eat an animal someone had to kill it. The level of acceptable suffering caused by one's diet is certainly a contentious subject. These are four complex problems with many different solutions and nobody is going to come to the same conclusions as someone else. Someone may come to completely different answers at different times of the year. All my vegetarian friends gave up on eating vegetarian in Asia because it simply can't be done. Every time a person reads a little more about food, their perspective on the debate shifts. It's very much a moving target. And that's why my discussions with vegetarians tend to be nuanced and focused on recipes. I eat vegetarian. I eat vegan occasionally. But I also really cherish a good heritage turkey and even if I cut my bacon consumption way down, it's never going away. I'm fully aware of many different aspects of the issues with meat-eating and have come to my own conclusions. I am comfortable with them at the moment and when that changes, I know ways to return to my comfort levels, be that eating less meat, avoiding certain meat products, etc. There are many dimensions to the subject and a wide-ranging solution-space. "But have you thought about the ethics?" There will always be a vocal vegan or vegetarian on public forums that will ignore this dimensionality. They will presume that people who eat meat simply haven't considered the ethical impact of their choices, or are naive to the suffering that eating meat causes instead of recognizing that others have, to coin a term for pure shock value, a higher "threshold of evil". Thus, the discussion devolves into the righteous vegan berating everyone else for their moral failings and everyone else telling the vegan to fuck off. A tiny percentage of vegetarians wish to hit their conversational partners over the head with their moral choices. A less tiny percentage of vegans do but it's still a small number. An intelligent conversationalist quickly realizes that a conversation about whose lunch choices are more on the side of the angels only serves to piss everyone off and enjoys their salad in peace. So I'm not sure that an ethical discussion is all that useful - it's a tough conversation to have without debating who is more moral and why. The mechanism of exercising those morals falls by the wayside unless everyone is really careful to keep to the high road and I think this particular subject has been dragged through the mud too much at this point.
This is as sensible and balanced a perspective as one could ask for. Thanks. All four of those items are complex and worthy of discussion, but #4 seems to generate most of the vitriol. I suppose it is understandable. We can have a civil discussion on music piracy without implying that almost everyone is guilty, and the consequences to artists do not merit comparison to atrocities. With the meat issue, one side feels justified in using any means necessary to raise awareness, while the other side performs extraordinary contortions to avoid the question. It is a tough conversation to have, and I found it very difficult to enter without diving directly into the mud. (I even laid groundwork for a slam-dunk slavery analogy that would have settled the issue, in the alternate reality of my imagination.)
I agree. The animal kingdom, as such, is a completely agnostic in its definition toward sentience. I once asked my cousin, a vegetarian for twenty or so years, whether she had any moral qualms about eating an anemone, for example, a creature that likely can't feel pain in any way that we would describe as pain, given that it lacks the mechanisms to do so from a neurobiological point of view. She told me yes, but couldn't articulate why. Not that her opinion isn't valid, but it perhaps points to a critical lack of knowledge of how organisms interact with their environment, and how pain is processed. In my world view, the grey area is around birds and mammals. That is, I have no objection whatever to boiling a lobster.[W]hen a living thing has a primitive or no nervous system the word "suffering" may not even be meaningful.
I was with you up until your last sentence. My partner identifies as vegan and has done for more than a decade. By way of background, she has a PhD in animal ethics and has worked as an ethicist for research institutions. She and her vegan friends have no problem eating bivalves: mussels, oysters, abalone. There seems to be widespread agreement among vegans that they're about as sentient as a flower. I'm very happy to agree. *Edit: Updated the link because the DFW article is such a good read I decided it deserved its own Hubski entry.
Yes I threw that in to be intentionally provocative. The lobster obviously has a nervous system. It lacks, however, anything like the pain processing and memory mechanisms that mammals and birds possess. I shall respond more fully after reading your link.