Comment by georgeecollins 2 days ago
Everything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.
>> Nature is cruel and uncaring
These are not the same thing. You're interpreting "uncaring" as inherently cruel, but it's not; just uncaring.
Nature is not cruel, don't anthropomorphize it. Nature has no free will or emotions or intelligence. It is indeed uncaring, because it doesn't have the capacity to care. Nature is neither good nor bad. It just is.
Whether or not it is moral or ethical to eat animals is an arbitrary decision made by emotional beings. There is no right or wrong there, only what people feel.
Someone who is vegetarian or vegan for moral reasons is making a choice, not living some sort of universal truth. Someone who eats meat is also making a choice.
Someone who eats meat but criticizes others for eating the "wrong" kind of meat is a hypocrite.
Certainly the way we farm animals for food can be sustainable or unsustainable. I wish people would focus more on that aspect than pointing fingers and making it a moral issue.
> Nature is not cruel, don't anthropomorphize it.
You're defining the word cruel to narrowly. Per Merriam-Webster "causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain" and Cambridge "(of an event) causing suffering". Natural forces can be cruel. So can fate and life.
What if it is? We transcend nature and evolution because of our culture and foresight.
We are the ultimate result of 4 billion years of evolution. Nature has made itself redundant in some ways.
Actually, transcend is the wrong word we are still a part of nature of course but we can literally leave the planet and have the ability to irradiate this globe to erase most macroscopic life.
We are an outside context problem as an Iain Banks Ship Mind would say.
It’s a huge responsibility and opportunity that we will almost certainly squander.
We are nowhere near being able to live outside this planet without significant struggle. It would be far easier to live in a submarine in the ocean than anywhere else in this solar system.
Our culture and foresight has brought us into such misalignment that 25% of the US population is on psychiatric drugs, you have a lot of homeless, a drug epidemic, there's a general crisis of meaning, males have given up on finding partners, women are all competing for a few men or think they're all animals and stay away from them. To be able to eat quality food costs a lot and few people have the time or energy to cook anyway because city life is so stressful to most.
We are living in a profoundly sick society and economy all over the world. WW3 is knocking on the door, one wrong move and we fuck up the only ecosystem we have in the galaxy.
I'd bet if people were given the choice between living in a small fishing village from 2000 years ago and modern lower middle class the choice would be obvious.
So to say we have mastered nature and we know better requires a lot of hubris.
I agree with you but think you miss that the common concern is with the farming process. The fact to eat another animal usually comes as
- a shortcut : “I don’t eat animals” instead of “I avoid encouraging the farming process by consuming the product of those farms: […]”
- and/or a following philosophic stance, that seems logical (debatable) when someone avoid encouraging the farming process.
Few are the vegans that claims that an animal eating another animal is not natural, or that they cats wouldn’t eat them in the condition you describe (which to be honest, rarely happens).
There are plenty of great moral arguments for why animals (or humans) shouldn't be eaten unless they died of purely natural causes. Factory farming is just the strongest to argue against and the main source of both suffering and death, so it's what people focus on. If factory farming were abolished overnight, vegans and vegetarians would (rightly) immediately move onto hunting and small farms.
(I personally think there's nothing wrong with home/farm egg laying as long as the animals are taken care of well and the male ones aren't killed. That's why I'm vegetarian rather than vegan.)
This seems like a category error. We don't typically assign moral agency to animals the same way we do to humans. No one is saying "one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical." Some people are saying it is unethical for humans, who we typically do believe have moral agency, to eat other animals. Just as no one would say it is unethical for a snake to kill someone with its venom, but we would say it is unethical for a human inject someone with snake venom in order to kill them.
What's wrong with indicting nature? Male animals regularly rape female animals. We shouldn't hold animals morally culpable, as they aren't moral agents, but humans are moral agents. There is no human act in this world for which "this is commonplace in nature" is a moral defense.
Nature can be harsh and cruel indeed.
I think we agree the term “natural” should almost always be questioned and unpacked. It often serves as a rhetorical device instead of a nugget of wisdom.
Dismissing an idea solely for being “unnatural” is premature. Or vice versa.
At the same time, there is wisdom in being curious about weirdness that seems nonsensical. Some weird things have a backstory and even rationale that is non-obvious. Or maybe their benefit is subtle or hidden to those who only look narrowly. (Chesterton’s Fence)
Slight topic shift, but conceptually related: I hope the slash and burn “reformers” we’re seeing have the humility to recognize that institutional knowledge is diffused in ways they do not understand as outsiders. It doesn’t grow back quickly. Just because Chaos Monkey works at Netflix doesn’t mean it works for Congressionally-authorized government agencies. Rapid destruction can be far worse than measured reprioritization.
I get it though — as a programmer I sometimes prefer to throw out a previous code base and start a-fresh, and this can help with clearing out technical debt. Such a rewrite is risky though, as is well known. Besides, technical abstractions are often orthogonal to domain knowledge and expertise.
I think the problem with this argument is the assumption that nature is inherently good. Nature is cruel and uncaring. Moving beyond it is a good thing imo. We’re just lucky that as a species by the roll of the dice we were given the power by nature to usurp it.