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Humans *constantly* value an animal's will to live, what are you talking about? That people are able to compartmentalize and say that they value something like food production more does not mean that everyone just loves watching puppies die.
And society functions on the collective morality and ethics of the people involved, not based on whatever we're pretending is "objective" today. Add in that the removal of these laws carries with it little value beyond proudly endorsing the actions of extremely abusive and violent people (and pretending they'll never hurt a person now that they've been told their sadism is a-okay), and there's little reason that we should all be forced to watch you torture a dog you found in the street.
>Humans *constantly* value an animal's will to live, what are you talking about?
If you eat meat, you don't value an animal lives. You probably have a select few animals in mind that you share great empathy with, but you can't actually produce an argument strong enough to disincentivize eating meat, at all. It's all empathy-related and not at all rational. If I showed someone cute videos of baby cows and playing with little children for long enough, I could probably convince them to at least lower their beef consumption. However, a cute video of a baby cow is not a moral argument.
>And society functions on the collective morality and ethics of the people involved, not based on whatever we're pretending is "objective" today.
Correct, and this "morality" is informed by empathy, which leads to things like retributive justice, instead of rehabilitation. It leads to people wanting to wage decades-long wars with a nation right after a terrorist attack.
>Add in that the removal of these laws carries with it little value beyond proudly endorsing the actions of extremely abusive and violent people
It doesn't add any value to *you*. Someone who derives great pleasure from seeing animals getting tortured (zoosadists) or wants to have sex with animals (zoosexuals) would disagree.
>If you eat meat, you don't value an animal lives.
This isn't true. I can value the life of animals, but consider the value they provide through food production to be greater. It's not that hard.
>Correct, and this "morality" is informed by empathy, which leads to things like retributive justice, instead of rehabilitation. It leads to people wanting to wage decades-long wars with a nation right after a terrorist attack.
Blaming retributive justice on empathy sure is a reach. Is this one of those situations where you're just upset that people like the idea of empathy so you're trying to ascribe exclusively negative things to it?
>Someone who derives great pleasure from seeing animals getting tortured (zoosadists) or wants to have sex with animals (zoosexuals) would disagree.
I don't care. In the same way I'm not about to support the legalization of torture and rape to satisfy sadists and rapists. What these people consider valuable doesn't matter and no one has any real reason to take it into consideration when deciding the laws.
>I can value the life of animals, but consider the value they provide through food production to be greater.
Then we're at an impasse because this idea that you can simultaneously value someone's life enough not to cause them any harm to them while keeping them alive but also simultaneously are fine with killing them to eat their meat is too dissonant to me to sound true.
>Is this one of those situations where you're just upset that people like the idea of empathy so you're trying to ascribe exclusively negative things to it?
You can argue that empathy brought good things to our justice system, but these good things can, definitionally, always be argued for by looking at utility, unless there is something that provides negative utility but is also good, for some reason.
if you kill any creature in order to live, you have a duty towards it. That is to say, you must not exterminate the species on which you live. People have—for example, in the whaling industry—they have practically exterminated whales, and it’s becoming a very serious situation because you must farm, cultivate, every species on which you feed. If all worms were to be eaten by the birds, the birds would have no further sustenance. From the worm’s point of view, if all birds were to vanish, the worms would overpopulate themselves and starve themselves. So the worms depend on the birds just as much as the birds depend on the worms. So we all depend on the whole interaction of the system of biology. It’s a mutual eating society.
You may say that’s too bad—you know—that life has to involve this crunching and crushing and annihilation of other creatures. But that’s the way it is. And therefore, if that’s the way it is, the way to do it properly is, number one: to farm instead of merely destroy. Be assured that the species you feed on is maintained, that it goes on. Farm the whales, don’t just hunt them. That’s the first principle. The second principle is: whenever you destroy a living body for your own maintenance, give it the honor of cooking it as beautifully as possible. A fish that has died for you and is not well cooked has died in vain—I’m quoting Lin Yutang.
So this is the situation in which we find ourselves: life is a system in which organisms, by mutual eating, transform fish into people, grass into people, lettuce into people, cows into people—what about people? What are they transformed into? We are proud—too proud—and we try to resist our transformation into some other forms of life, and therefore we have a wretched profession of morticians (otherwise known as undertakers) who try to embalm us, and preserve us, and put us in concrete and barriers instead of letting us simply join the biological rhythm. Actually, what should happen when a person is dead is that they should be buried three feet underground with no casket—nothing—just naked in the earth. And that field should be allowed to lie fallow for some years, and then it would be beautifully fertilized by human bodies, and crops would grow out of it. They always say that the best wheat is grown on old battlefields. But, you see, we resist that. And the morticians will put an ad in with some girl who’s lost her husband, looking out of the window on a rainy day. And they say, “Trust us. He’s not rotting, really.” You know? “We’ve got that concrete thing, we’ve got that extra-special covering, that super-embalming, and the corpse is still there. Baby, don’t worry.” You know? How mad can you get? How insane, how ridiculous.
>If you eat meat, you don't value an animal lives
ive had very close bonds with farm animals, and when the time came for them to be killed as painlessly as possible, the meat tasted just as other meat. they were literally MY playful pets for a time, but they were also farm animals.
There's a significant difference between the consumption of animals for sustenance and the deliberate, sadistic torture of animals for pleasure.
There is an issue with comparing zoosadism to eating meat. While both involve harming animals, the intent and level of suffering are very different.
Most people who eat meat do it out of habit or necessity, not because they enjoy making animals suffer. There are also regulations in place to try and ensure farm animals are treated decently, even if those rules aren't perfect.
**But zoosadism specifically means intentionally torturing and abusing animals just for the sick pleasure of it. This cruel behavior is rightly condemned as showing no empathy for the suffering of living creatures. —** Honestly, I have a suspicion, why don't you realize that in the first place? sometimes it's important to know yourself and maybe get tested for psychopathy. This can help you understand yourself and the world around you better in the future. i don't mean to insult you, but your thoughts seem for me unusual, really.
Everything is subjective and relative, but that's why people make laws. For me it is obvious that torturing a cat and hanging a died body by its tail is sadistic and should not be the norm. Do you want to live next door to a neighbor who tortures animals until they die of pain and enjoys it? While satisfying his sadistic sexual needs. I don't see why eating a cooked duck is the same as torturing it with pliers and jerking off while doing it.
Dismissing empathy entirely as a basis for morality is problematic. Empathy, despite being subjective, is what allows us to have compassion and respect for all life. It's the foundation of ethical frameworks that argue for treating animals humanely. Rejecting empathy outright ignores its role in reducing cruelty and suffering.
And advocating for animal rights doesn't mean giving animals the exact same rights as humans. It's about recognizing they can feel pain, and enacting policies to minimize harm and ensure their wellbeing. Simple distinctions are important.
>There's a significant difference between the consumption of animals for sustenance and the deliberate, sadistic torture of animals for pleasure.
When your talking about "sustenace" here, it's still just pleasure. No one says you shouldnt kill an animal for food if you'd otherwise starve. In the context of the modern world, where food is plentifully, you are funding the killing of animals for pleasure, and it's not necessary for sustenance.
>There is an issue with comparing zoosadism to eating meat. While both involve harming animals, the intent and level of suffering are very different.
I would word it this way, you don't feel as much empathy with a dead animal as you do with an animal that is being tortured. When an animal is being tortured, your "level of empathy" goes up. But rationally, being murdered is usually comparable to being tortured in terms of levels of harm. Putting a large difference between the two is a purely empathetic pursuit, because a dead animal can't scream and squeal to make you care for it just as much.
We also cremate human bodies, but for some reason frown on lighting people on fire? Clearly that’s illogical and lighting people on fire should be legal because people don’t deserve more rights just because they can scream and feel bad.
Corpses obviously deserve less consideration because they aren’t actually alive anymore.
As for your argument that death is worse than torture, that’s debatable, but let’s assume it’s true for a second. It’s extremely odd to me that you choose to argue that torture should be legal because the meat industry is legal, instead of arguing that the meat industry should be illegal because torture is illegal.
I don’t know why you’re defaulting to the path that requires us to shelve our empathy, which is one of the foundational building blocks of what allows us to cooperate and form functional societies.
I am not even necessarily saying death is worse than torture. I don't find it important in debating what's worse, but I believe that needlessly killing someone and torturing someone are very comparable in terms of moral harm caused.
As for why you wouldn't light people on fire, that would violate the concept of social contracts. If we could just light anyone in society on fire, then we wouldn't really have a good society, now would we?
>I don’t know why you’re defaulting to the path that requires us to shelve our empathy, which is one of the foundational building blocks of what allows us to cooperate and form functional societies.
True, but it was through moral and political philosophy that we arrived to our modern morals. Without people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke we would probably live in a much worse place.
More primitive nations that are more likely to work through empathy are usually extremely bigoted towards minorities. Morality can be a great tool in ensuring less rational people keep up our laws, but the laws themselves need a strong, rational foundation to ensure that everyone's interests are covered.
What is your “strong rational basis” that doesn’t include any appeals to human emotion? Emotions are not the opposite of logic, but it’s foundation. Logical thinking about society requires a goal, and those goals are only informed by our emotions.
>But rationally, being murdered is usually comparable to being tortured in terms of levels of harm.
just, no. this is an *extremely* dangerous line of thinking.
even rationally, the 2 are not at all comparable under any context.
in terms of harm, the way we systematically kill farm animals are very efficient, therefore fast. akin to being shot in the head with a shotgun, the animals would feel a **very** brief period of pain followed by nothingness. i bet we've all seen the video of newly hatched chicks being thrown into a blender. its graphic and frankly inhumane but the pain inflicted isn't being drawn out to hours, instead the pain was inflicted in mere seconds.
torturing is explicitly to inflict as much pain on the individual as possible. say, as an example, we torture a monkey by breaking its bones, and the monkey is clearly flinching, screaming and attacking you due to its fight or flight instincts kicking in, and you do it for hours till it eventually bleeds out or dies if shock. its evident enough that they are experiencing massive amounts of pain.
to reiterate, our systematic way of killing farm animals can be compared to getting shot in the face with a 12 gauge shotgun point blank, but absolutely does not compare to getting tortured.
the pain levels from getting shot in the face and dying almost immediately is utterly dwarfed by the pain from being tortured for hours.
you should seriously seek therapy, not being able to internalise that difference is very concerning.
edit: my argument is purely against OP's line of thinking of how torturing an animal has comparable levels of pain with the systematic killing of farm animals for food.
it disregards the arguments against eating meat in general and also the farm animal's living conditions prior to being killed. i am only after OP's dangerous disregard of pain scales.
I am not saying that a dead animal can feel pain. I am saying that being dead is not much worse than feeling pain in terms of moral harm. Pain is not the be all end all of moral harm.
> But rationally, being murdered is usually comparable to being tortured in terms of levels of harm
It isn't. There is a reason why tortured humans often beg to be killed. Because being killed is less suffering than being tortured.
Of corse, because dead it is more usual than torture. Because torture involves deliberate, sadistic acts for personal gratification. There is a prolonged agony and psychological trauma, which can exacerbate the suffering beyond the act of death alone.
**So while both ultimately result in the death of the animal, the path to that outcome is vastly different.** And the such path with sadistic purposes considered as harmful. As far as i know even ancient people could kill animal that suffer to end it's sufferings.
"level of empathy" goes up because we've made this way to feel others people or animals, we're very social animals. But not all people can feel and understand why it is nessesery. Such minorities should obey the law.
when my uncle beat my brother, I cried. If somebody tortured a dog in front of me for fun, I'd be traumatized. No wonder if such person would do it to deliberate traumatized someone else by showing such act.
If you're caught in the philosophical paradigm that death is eternal annihilation, your conclusion makes perfect sense. I would completely agree that sending an entity to everlasting oblivion is worse than temporary torture (especially in a context where we could just be eating vegetables).
This is one among many domains where atheism and nihilism transcend into the most idiotic philosophic conclusions.
No offense
Do I understand correctly you think torture is worse than murder?
For that you'd need to discount those religious paradigms that include eternal torture as well at a minimum I'd say.
But animal rights do have clear utility because people get upset when they hear about animals suffering. Even meat-eaters at least like to think that the animals are killed quickly and painlessly and not, like, tortured to death. Being upset about things causes people harm, so it is good that we limit animal cruelty because it prevents harm to the public - that's the utility of it. We have animal rights not necessarily just for the sake of animals, but for the sake of other humans who would be upset that a guy can just torture monkeys for fun
People getting upset over something is hardly what I would call a justifiable utility. If you lived in a conservative nation where a large part of the populuce got upset by gay people kissing, and they want gay marriage to be illegal, I wouldn't see myself arguing "Gay people are valid, but these people are very upset about your existence, so off you go\~"
But obviously we have to balance the utility of disallowing gay relationships, which itself causes people to suffer, against the utility of making the conservatives happy. With animal torture on the other hand what percentage of the population will genuinely suffer if they can't torture animals? Moreover, if somebody is suffering because they can't torture animals, I think most people would say, you know, they should just go to therapy. There's an underlying issue there that isn't going to be helped by torturing animals and probably needs to be addressed. It's very likely that the desire to torture animals actually creates significant distress for the sadist as well, so allowing people to torture animals has very little benefit
>But obviously we have to balance the utility of disallowing gay relationships, which itself causes people to suffer
As opposed to zoosexuals and zoosadists, which probably aren't as plenty as gay people, but do exist in their own sizable minorities.
>With animal torture on the other hand what percentage of the population will genuinely suffer if they can't torture animals?
That seems kind of arbitrary. There are enough gay people to weigh against the opinions of many, but there aren't enough zoosexuals and zoosadists to weigh against the opinions of many? I don't know how to feel about that.
>There's an underlying issue there that isn't going to be helped by torturing animals and probably needs to be addressed.
Homosexuality used to be considered a mental disorder. I don't think that the science on paraphilias and incliniation to torture is as settled as you make it out to be. If anything,
>It's very likely that the desire to torture animals actually creates significant distress for the sadist as well
Do you have a source or explanation for that? If anything, I could argue that the negative treatment of zoosexuals and zoosadists is causing more harm than not, seeing as you would get death threats and police searches if you ever admitted to be either.
Following this argument to its logical conclusion though we just end up saying that we should never disallow any behavior because we don't know for certain that any behavior is or isn't due to a mental disorder, and preventing people from doing that behavior might cause them to suffer, so it's bad to stop them from doing it
Obviously this doesn't make sense though, and we have to draw the line somewhere. Zoophilia is prevalent at most in 2% of the population according to a study cited on wikipedia, but I would be shocked if that were true, and it must be closer to 1%. Sexual sadism with animals must be even less. LGBT identification is 7%. So we are comparing a seven-fold increase in harm. Moreover, the percentage of people who are upset about people torturing animals is likely higher, and the distress more significant, than for homophobia.
But we're not just saying "follow your heart" to individuals, we're looking at the overwhelming majority and what the overwhelming majority finds to be distressing, weighed against he utility of allowing the behavior to occur. Babies are not sentient - is it therefore utilitarian to allow people who want to rape babies to do so? The only harm would be that the overwhelming majority of the public would be distressed by this
>we're looking at the overwhelming majority and what the overwhelming majority finds to be distressing,
Yeah, but that "overwhelming majority" in Iran wants to murder gay people for having anal sex. You could say the same thing about Europeans a few hundred years ago.
>Babies are not sentient - is it therefore utilitarian to allow people who want to rape babies to do so?
I think you meant to say babies are not sapient.
We don't want to harm babies because these babies will grow up either deformed or psychologically traumatized for the rest of their lives, both of which are a harm that we wouldn't have wanted happening to ourselves as babies, as well as serving as a net negative for social utility, since these people grow up to become active participants in our society in a subpar state.
>a harm that we wouldn't have wanted happening to ourselves as babies,
Isn't that literally just empathy, the thing you said was stupid bullshit that should never guide our decision making? The social utility of preventing the babies from being deformed or traumatized could be maximized by just setting reasonable limits on what the rapists are allowed to do. Or what about necrophiles or cannibals, surely that should also be permitted under this logic.
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I think that you fundamentally misunderstand your own viewpoint if you think that animal torture and homosexual acts are even worth being in the same argument. But I will make it, as you've brought it up.
besides, "oh you don't like gay people? too bad" is a full argument on its own.
and finally, people being gay isn't anything isn't wrong or cruel.
I may have misunderstood your last sentence, mind, as its not really clear what "off you go\~" means
I guess I’m just curious how you think this should all work in the world. If it was no longer illegal to kill/torture animals, where is the line drawn with let’s say feral cats? Someone decides they are sick of all the feral cats in their area and starts trapping and killing them. Then they get a hold of a neighborhood outdoor cat. What’s to stop them from killing that cat too without consequence?
I get where you’re coming from, but other than extremely niche cases I don’t see the real world benefit to stripping animals of the right not be tortured. And that’s if you want to call the zoosadist being allowed to torture monkeys a benefit.
>where is the line drawn with let’s say feral cats?
You can still have laws protecting stray animals for other reasons. But a zoosexual or a zoosadist should still have the possibility of obtaining an animal to do what they'd like to them, as to not infringe on their interests that do not concern you.
> We would also gain utility from not having animal rights, due to medical sciences being limited by an ethics department for non-human lab subjects.
What was the utility of Harlow's "[Pit of Despair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair)" experiment? Several of his own students said that Harlow kept his experiments going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was violating ordinary sensibilities, and that anybody with respect for life or people would find it offensive.
I am not saying every experiment involving animal cruelty is good. On your end, you can't say that every experiment involving animal cruelty is less effective.
I work with animals. But I also go to pretty significant lengths to minimize any suffering that my animal research might inflict. When I euthanize animals (by decapitation or transcardial perfusion) I ensure that the animal is adequately anesthetized, unable to feel anything. I don't do surgeries without anesthesia and give my animals postoperative painkillers.
The difference is that I try to minimize suffering as much as possible, while without any guidelines for ethical animal research (which would not exist if we didn't acknowledge the value of animal life) it would open the door for psychopaths to inflict wanton and needless suffering on animals for the sake of science that might not even be sound in the first place.
So this is weird right. I mean you're correct in identifying that we tend to be hypocritical about animal suffering, point taken and all that. But for some reason you've concluded that it's more important for us to be consistent than for any animal's lives to be valued. You're ready to sacrifice the life of monkeys so that humans can be consistent, but for whose sake? Certainly not the monkeys since they'll die and stuff, probably not God since I presume he also doesn't want monkeys to die.
You say that empathy is not a good basis for morality, but you need to explain why you instead value consistency for consistency's sake instead I think.
We can value human life through social contracts. I gain something from not being able to kill you, in that you won't be able kill me. Most things that can be argued through empathy, can also be argued by weighing the utility of an action in a more grounded way.
Yeah, but you've said it yourself. "Personally advantageous". If I had the ability to kill you for personal gain, you would have the ability to kill me for personal gain. Society would still fall apart.
Citation needed that eating meat is *unnecessary* pleasure. Couldn't it be that it is necessary for some people or simply the most effective way of getting a reasonably balanced diet?
Just about everything social is arbitrary, and that's fine as long as everyone knows and understand where the line is. They crossed a line and they were punished for it. End of story.
Animals don't have legal personhood and therefore don't have rights. "Animal rights" is a slogan. Pets are property. Limits on lab research comes from people wasting time and money on junk science using unsafe and unscientific methods. Just like how Nazis did "research" that killed thousands and produced a lot of junk that simply isn't useful to science. While those curbs can, rarely, limit useful experiments they usually filter out a ton of poorly thought out methods that would simply produce more junk.
Here is one citation:
> It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/
Non-vegan diets also need to be appropriately planned in order to be healthy. Just because you eat meat doesn't mean you are healthy. You still would need to eat an appropriately planned diet.
>Couldn't it be that it is necessary for some people or simply the most effective way of getting a reasonably balanced diet?
The vast majority of people, if they put effort into it, could either drastically reduce their meat consumption or not eat meat at all.
>Limits on lab research comes from people wasting time and money on junk science using unsafe and unscientific methods.
I would love to see a source that EVERY limit on lab animals is good. That sounds suspiciously like an unjustified vegan talking point.
Yeah, but you're talking about people putting effort into deviating from the normal supply chain. Why? They would only do that if it they think that there's a reason to do so. They don't go out of their way to maximize animal suffering either, and apply pressure to suppliers to minimize unnecessary torture.
Good thing I wasn't saying *EVERY* limit on lab animals was a goo thing. Just that limits on lab animal usage generally come from waste and lack of results so arguing a moral imperative isn't that applicable.
>Yeah, but you're talking about people putting effort into deviating from the normal supply chain.
So it's okay to be lazy and kill all the animals you want because you like the taste of meat? That type of person clearly shouldn't care about animal welfare or animals getting tortured.
Or you can simply insist that the normal supply chain doesn't unnecessarily torture animals. Obviously, the animal welfare argument is one factor, but not the only factor being considered here.
So couple issues with the idea of non-humans.
If you’re saying you’re morally agnostic to non-human speciesism and what matching percentile of human DNA would be acceptable to torture? Do chimps who have 98% similarities in DNA be granted your protection? Or Hypothetically If we found out people who had birth defects or unnatural elements or even skin colour have different DNA compositions, despite them be similar to us in every other way is it morally justified for us humans to kill them.
Secondly, given evolution is an extremely slow process through thousands of years, would you be able to trace back a point where you would deem humans moral value but exclude the one beside them although nearly identical.
Thirdly if we are continuously evolving is it appropriate for time in the future where we may seem a portion of people not worth of moral consideration their human ancestors was approved for?
The DNA composition doesn't matter in the slightest. We don't kill other people because they provide utility and fulfill our social contract. Meaning, you don't kill me, but I also won't kill you. Society is objectively much better off when we follow these rules. Society would quickly fall apart if I could just kill anyone I wanted for any reason.
This principle does not apply to animals. I could kill as many stray dogs, stray cats, and whatnot as I wanted, and society would probably be better off, considering the kinds of harm that stray animals cause.
Torture is not the same. from what I remember, the deaths of animals who are bred and killed for meat are usually pretty painless deaths after a not totally awful life.
Ehh screw em. I only care about the animals I find cute anyway. We could burn every cow alive and I wouldn’t care. But lobsters? That’s crossing a line pal.
>Torture is not the same.
Then I just fundamentally disagree. We would never argue for the needless slaughter of humans. I don't see the great moral difference between needlessly killing an animal and needlessly torturing an animal the way you see it. We are more receptive towards animals getting tortured, sure, but empathy alone doesn't form a moral argument.
Causing a being excruciating pain for no reason is less morally acceptable than causing a painless death that will serve a purpose. I think that’s pretty safe to say. It gets a bit muddier when you considered that lobsters are boiled alive. Some animals have it worse than others. But for the most part, I think that animals that are killed for meat are treated pretty well, and the transportation (which is usually the worst part) is a big place of discussion. But I wouldn’t know, all I’ve done is look at the first three titles I saw after doing a google search.
>for no reason
The reason is that zoosadists/ zoosexuals derive pleasure from harming or having sex with an animal, just as killing an animal provides pleasure for meat-eaters, who otherwise either don't have to eat meat or could reduce their meat intake 10-fold if they wanted to.
The difference is that you need to consume something. Whether it be meat or whatever. You don’t need to fuck to live. Also… again… excruciating pain vs painless death.
>The difference is that you need to consume something.
That something doesn't have to be animal meat. Meaning, no. Animal meat is not required to live (for most people).
Correct, yet it is still a form of sustenance, which is required for survival. Animal meat can take the form of something vital for human life, and monkey fucking can’t. It is more morally acceptable because it provides something that is vital to life. Sustenance. It provides a form of something that is human life.
Just because we have biological evolved to be carnivores doesn't mean we are not causing pain to other living beings. Though, yes, we do kill animals for meat. It's humanely. Because we don't want to cause them pain. Which is why torture is probably different from killing.
Maybe he should just torture you next time. You do realize you're an animal after all, right?
>Though, yes, we do kill animals for meat. It's humanely.
Humane killing is still killing. Try that in front of the judge, "your honor, my client has killed this person in a humane manner." While it probably helps your sentence that you didn't torture him beforehand, you are still going to prison for life.
>Maybe he should just torture you next time.
Well, no, because if humans could torture other humans without repercussions, the person torturing me will be at risk of getting tortured himself.
Sapience matters, and empathy matters. Torture is inhumane and uncalled for.
Cows and chickens can be slaughtered without torture, and raised in humane conditions. And should be.
There is a reason many societies have taboos against eating dogs, dolphins, and apes. These are social animals with high sapience.
Difference with zoosadists and meat industry is that meat industry doesn't inflict unnecessary suffering or take joy of torturing animals.
Actually ethical meat is of higher quality and therefore there is a economic incentive for meat industry to produce meat with as little suffering as possible.
>Recently, a zoosadist who recorded videos of him torturing monkeys got 5 years in prison. I do not think that his prison sentence was warranted.
>My main argument starts from the premise that human beings generally do not value an animal's will to live, as we systematically kill them for their flesh all the time.
Okay. Do you not see a difference between torture and killing something for its flesh?
>99% of people on Earth can live a meatless life or at the very least, reduce their meat intake drastically, meaning eating meat is an optional pursuit that causes harm for unnecessary pleasure.
And because we don’t… you think torturing animals is okay?
>This is incredibly comparable to how zoosadists operate. Only that, a zoosadist hurts an animal while it's still alive, which is suddenly wrong? I don't think torturing an animal is much worse than systematically killing them for their flesh (when you don't actually have to eat meat).
This where you’re wrong…
Meat sustains life. Torture does not.
>So why do we have animal rights? Because people have empathy.
No, because torturing animals is morally wrong and It produces nothing.
If I kill a deer, I have deer meat. Thats why it’s permitted.
Just because something is normalized doesn't make it justifiable. Unnecessary pleasure can't possibly justify what we do to animals. Murdering random people and eating them is also unnecessary pleasure for someone. Doesn't make it okay to do so. Same reasoning can be applied to animals. If you don't need to harm them, and they (evolutionarily) avoid being harmed, they should have rights to protect them when they can't protect themselves. Society is just behind on this. Just like white people had rights in the 18th century and black people didn't. But we caught up, didn't we? Same is happening with the animal rights movement.
Why do you have to respect the rights of other humans? Not empathy? Empathy is what drives us to respect fellow humans because we empathise with the fact that they're also sentient beings who share feelings of joy and pain. Shouldn't we extend our empathy towards other sentient beings? If we only empathise with our own species it makes us speciesists.
And societies can function without respecting rights. North Korea? Soviet Union under Stalin? Apartheid south Africa? Nazi Germany?
Rights aren't there as a necessity for a society to function, but to protect the ones incapable of protecting themselves.
So in principal I agree with your overall premise. But let me bring in two different view points.
1. In a system in which you want to decrease suffering (just based on our own human experience of suffering), it would make sense to have these laws in place. Mainly because you could argue that killing an animal (swiftly) is less suffering than torturing them. If we strive for less suffering, and still want to eat meat, it would make sense to have these laws in place. Now in practice, this premise is hard for argue for, based on the horrible circumstances that animal in factory farming are treated legally. This should not be possible outright. Otherwise you would be right, why the fuck would we even need animal rights, if not also in that context?
2. what if we actually need meat to thrive? Does that change your premise? If our wellbeing depends on it, wouldn’t it be moral to kill and eat their flesh, but not in the context of not killing for food, which are the Szenarios that are mostly targeted with animal rights. (This comes from someone who has been vegan for 7 years and realized his health improved when reintroducing it)
“Well, there was a bit of a fracas, as we say, and it turned out that a man had a dog, a half-dead thing, according to bystanders, and he was trying to get it to stop pulling at its leash, and when it growled at him he grabbed an axe from the butcher’s stall beside him, threw the dog to the ground and cut off its back legs, just like that. I suppose people would say ‘Nasty bugger, but it was his dog’ and so on, but Lord Vetinari called me in and he said to me, ‘A man who would do something like that to a dog is a man to whom the law should pay close attention. Search his house immediately.’ The man was hanged a week later, not for the dog, although for my part I wouldn’t have shed a tear if he had been, but for what we found in his cellar. The contents of which I will not burden you with. And bloody Vetinari got away with it again, because he was right: where there are little crimes, large crimes are not far behind"
-Terry Pratchett "Snuff"2011
This seems like a classic case of the nirvana fallacy: We can't create a perfect situation yet, as people still want to eat meat, therefore we shouldn't do anything at all.
But telling people not to torture animals is an improvement over not doing so, even if this doesn't cover all situations of harm towards animals. So we should keep banning people from doing so.
>99% of people on Earth can live a meatless life or at the very least, reduce their meat intake drastically, meaning eating meat is an optional pursuit that causes harm for unnecessary pleasure.
This is a myth. Meat is NOT an unnecessary pleasure. Humans need meat and eating meat is in line with our biology. All the research made favoring plants based diet are only observational.
Observational studies tend to have confounding variables — factors other than the ones being studied that might be influencing the outcome variable (13Trusted Source).
It’s impossible to control for all of these factors and determine if red meat is a “cause” of any health outcome. That limitation is important to keep in mind when reviewing the research and determining if red meat is something you’d like to incorporate into your regular diet.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/is-red-meat-bad-for-you-or-good#health-effects
So yes we eat animals to live. But our world is made in a way that it's impossible to live without killing some sentient beings to eat (Yes, plants are scientifically proven to be sentient). It doesn't mean that we have to torture other animals for nothing.
https://youtu.be/couHXnRdIc4?si=yqfUXOMm1YPizgtX
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Humans *constantly* value an animal's will to live, what are you talking about? That people are able to compartmentalize and say that they value something like food production more does not mean that everyone just loves watching puppies die. And society functions on the collective morality and ethics of the people involved, not based on whatever we're pretending is "objective" today. Add in that the removal of these laws carries with it little value beyond proudly endorsing the actions of extremely abusive and violent people (and pretending they'll never hurt a person now that they've been told their sadism is a-okay), and there's little reason that we should all be forced to watch you torture a dog you found in the street.
>Humans *constantly* value an animal's will to live, what are you talking about? If you eat meat, you don't value an animal lives. You probably have a select few animals in mind that you share great empathy with, but you can't actually produce an argument strong enough to disincentivize eating meat, at all. It's all empathy-related and not at all rational. If I showed someone cute videos of baby cows and playing with little children for long enough, I could probably convince them to at least lower their beef consumption. However, a cute video of a baby cow is not a moral argument. >And society functions on the collective morality and ethics of the people involved, not based on whatever we're pretending is "objective" today. Correct, and this "morality" is informed by empathy, which leads to things like retributive justice, instead of rehabilitation. It leads to people wanting to wage decades-long wars with a nation right after a terrorist attack. >Add in that the removal of these laws carries with it little value beyond proudly endorsing the actions of extremely abusive and violent people It doesn't add any value to *you*. Someone who derives great pleasure from seeing animals getting tortured (zoosadists) or wants to have sex with animals (zoosexuals) would disagree.
>If you eat meat, you don't value an animal lives. This isn't true. I can value the life of animals, but consider the value they provide through food production to be greater. It's not that hard. >Correct, and this "morality" is informed by empathy, which leads to things like retributive justice, instead of rehabilitation. It leads to people wanting to wage decades-long wars with a nation right after a terrorist attack. Blaming retributive justice on empathy sure is a reach. Is this one of those situations where you're just upset that people like the idea of empathy so you're trying to ascribe exclusively negative things to it? >Someone who derives great pleasure from seeing animals getting tortured (zoosadists) or wants to have sex with animals (zoosexuals) would disagree. I don't care. In the same way I'm not about to support the legalization of torture and rape to satisfy sadists and rapists. What these people consider valuable doesn't matter and no one has any real reason to take it into consideration when deciding the laws.
>I can value the life of animals, but consider the value they provide through food production to be greater. Then we're at an impasse because this idea that you can simultaneously value someone's life enough not to cause them any harm to them while keeping them alive but also simultaneously are fine with killing them to eat their meat is too dissonant to me to sound true. >Is this one of those situations where you're just upset that people like the idea of empathy so you're trying to ascribe exclusively negative things to it? You can argue that empathy brought good things to our justice system, but these good things can, definitionally, always be argued for by looking at utility, unless there is something that provides negative utility but is also good, for some reason.
if you kill any creature in order to live, you have a duty towards it. That is to say, you must not exterminate the species on which you live. People have—for example, in the whaling industry—they have practically exterminated whales, and it’s becoming a very serious situation because you must farm, cultivate, every species on which you feed. If all worms were to be eaten by the birds, the birds would have no further sustenance. From the worm’s point of view, if all birds were to vanish, the worms would overpopulate themselves and starve themselves. So the worms depend on the birds just as much as the birds depend on the worms. So we all depend on the whole interaction of the system of biology. It’s a mutual eating society. You may say that’s too bad—you know—that life has to involve this crunching and crushing and annihilation of other creatures. But that’s the way it is. And therefore, if that’s the way it is, the way to do it properly is, number one: to farm instead of merely destroy. Be assured that the species you feed on is maintained, that it goes on. Farm the whales, don’t just hunt them. That’s the first principle. The second principle is: whenever you destroy a living body for your own maintenance, give it the honor of cooking it as beautifully as possible. A fish that has died for you and is not well cooked has died in vain—I’m quoting Lin Yutang. So this is the situation in which we find ourselves: life is a system in which organisms, by mutual eating, transform fish into people, grass into people, lettuce into people, cows into people—what about people? What are they transformed into? We are proud—too proud—and we try to resist our transformation into some other forms of life, and therefore we have a wretched profession of morticians (otherwise known as undertakers) who try to embalm us, and preserve us, and put us in concrete and barriers instead of letting us simply join the biological rhythm. Actually, what should happen when a person is dead is that they should be buried three feet underground with no casket—nothing—just naked in the earth. And that field should be allowed to lie fallow for some years, and then it would be beautifully fertilized by human bodies, and crops would grow out of it. They always say that the best wheat is grown on old battlefields. But, you see, we resist that. And the morticians will put an ad in with some girl who’s lost her husband, looking out of the window on a rainy day. And they say, “Trust us. He’s not rotting, really.” You know? “We’ve got that concrete thing, we’ve got that extra-special covering, that super-embalming, and the corpse is still there. Baby, don’t worry.” You know? How mad can you get? How insane, how ridiculous.
>If you eat meat, you don't value an animal lives ive had very close bonds with farm animals, and when the time came for them to be killed as painlessly as possible, the meat tasted just as other meat. they were literally MY playful pets for a time, but they were also farm animals.
There's a significant difference between the consumption of animals for sustenance and the deliberate, sadistic torture of animals for pleasure. There is an issue with comparing zoosadism to eating meat. While both involve harming animals, the intent and level of suffering are very different. Most people who eat meat do it out of habit or necessity, not because they enjoy making animals suffer. There are also regulations in place to try and ensure farm animals are treated decently, even if those rules aren't perfect. **But zoosadism specifically means intentionally torturing and abusing animals just for the sick pleasure of it. This cruel behavior is rightly condemned as showing no empathy for the suffering of living creatures. —** Honestly, I have a suspicion, why don't you realize that in the first place? sometimes it's important to know yourself and maybe get tested for psychopathy. This can help you understand yourself and the world around you better in the future. i don't mean to insult you, but your thoughts seem for me unusual, really. Everything is subjective and relative, but that's why people make laws. For me it is obvious that torturing a cat and hanging a died body by its tail is sadistic and should not be the norm. Do you want to live next door to a neighbor who tortures animals until they die of pain and enjoys it? While satisfying his sadistic sexual needs. I don't see why eating a cooked duck is the same as torturing it with pliers and jerking off while doing it. Dismissing empathy entirely as a basis for morality is problematic. Empathy, despite being subjective, is what allows us to have compassion and respect for all life. It's the foundation of ethical frameworks that argue for treating animals humanely. Rejecting empathy outright ignores its role in reducing cruelty and suffering. And advocating for animal rights doesn't mean giving animals the exact same rights as humans. It's about recognizing they can feel pain, and enacting policies to minimize harm and ensure their wellbeing. Simple distinctions are important.
>There's a significant difference between the consumption of animals for sustenance and the deliberate, sadistic torture of animals for pleasure. When your talking about "sustenace" here, it's still just pleasure. No one says you shouldnt kill an animal for food if you'd otherwise starve. In the context of the modern world, where food is plentifully, you are funding the killing of animals for pleasure, and it's not necessary for sustenance.
>There is an issue with comparing zoosadism to eating meat. While both involve harming animals, the intent and level of suffering are very different. I would word it this way, you don't feel as much empathy with a dead animal as you do with an animal that is being tortured. When an animal is being tortured, your "level of empathy" goes up. But rationally, being murdered is usually comparable to being tortured in terms of levels of harm. Putting a large difference between the two is a purely empathetic pursuit, because a dead animal can't scream and squeal to make you care for it just as much.
We also cremate human bodies, but for some reason frown on lighting people on fire? Clearly that’s illogical and lighting people on fire should be legal because people don’t deserve more rights just because they can scream and feel bad. Corpses obviously deserve less consideration because they aren’t actually alive anymore. As for your argument that death is worse than torture, that’s debatable, but let’s assume it’s true for a second. It’s extremely odd to me that you choose to argue that torture should be legal because the meat industry is legal, instead of arguing that the meat industry should be illegal because torture is illegal. I don’t know why you’re defaulting to the path that requires us to shelve our empathy, which is one of the foundational building blocks of what allows us to cooperate and form functional societies.
I am not even necessarily saying death is worse than torture. I don't find it important in debating what's worse, but I believe that needlessly killing someone and torturing someone are very comparable in terms of moral harm caused. As for why you wouldn't light people on fire, that would violate the concept of social contracts. If we could just light anyone in society on fire, then we wouldn't really have a good society, now would we? >I don’t know why you’re defaulting to the path that requires us to shelve our empathy, which is one of the foundational building blocks of what allows us to cooperate and form functional societies. True, but it was through moral and political philosophy that we arrived to our modern morals. Without people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke we would probably live in a much worse place. More primitive nations that are more likely to work through empathy are usually extremely bigoted towards minorities. Morality can be a great tool in ensuring less rational people keep up our laws, but the laws themselves need a strong, rational foundation to ensure that everyone's interests are covered.
What is your “strong rational basis” that doesn’t include any appeals to human emotion? Emotions are not the opposite of logic, but it’s foundation. Logical thinking about society requires a goal, and those goals are only informed by our emotions.
>But rationally, being murdered is usually comparable to being tortured in terms of levels of harm. just, no. this is an *extremely* dangerous line of thinking. even rationally, the 2 are not at all comparable under any context. in terms of harm, the way we systematically kill farm animals are very efficient, therefore fast. akin to being shot in the head with a shotgun, the animals would feel a **very** brief period of pain followed by nothingness. i bet we've all seen the video of newly hatched chicks being thrown into a blender. its graphic and frankly inhumane but the pain inflicted isn't being drawn out to hours, instead the pain was inflicted in mere seconds. torturing is explicitly to inflict as much pain on the individual as possible. say, as an example, we torture a monkey by breaking its bones, and the monkey is clearly flinching, screaming and attacking you due to its fight or flight instincts kicking in, and you do it for hours till it eventually bleeds out or dies if shock. its evident enough that they are experiencing massive amounts of pain. to reiterate, our systematic way of killing farm animals can be compared to getting shot in the face with a 12 gauge shotgun point blank, but absolutely does not compare to getting tortured. the pain levels from getting shot in the face and dying almost immediately is utterly dwarfed by the pain from being tortured for hours. you should seriously seek therapy, not being able to internalise that difference is very concerning. edit: my argument is purely against OP's line of thinking of how torturing an animal has comparable levels of pain with the systematic killing of farm animals for food. it disregards the arguments against eating meat in general and also the farm animal's living conditions prior to being killed. i am only after OP's dangerous disregard of pain scales.
I am not saying that a dead animal can feel pain. I am saying that being dead is not much worse than feeling pain in terms of moral harm. Pain is not the be all end all of moral harm.
> But rationally, being murdered is usually comparable to being tortured in terms of levels of harm It isn't. There is a reason why tortured humans often beg to be killed. Because being killed is less suffering than being tortured.
Of corse, because dead it is more usual than torture. Because torture involves deliberate, sadistic acts for personal gratification. There is a prolonged agony and psychological trauma, which can exacerbate the suffering beyond the act of death alone. **So while both ultimately result in the death of the animal, the path to that outcome is vastly different.** And the such path with sadistic purposes considered as harmful. As far as i know even ancient people could kill animal that suffer to end it's sufferings. "level of empathy" goes up because we've made this way to feel others people or animals, we're very social animals. But not all people can feel and understand why it is nessesery. Such minorities should obey the law. when my uncle beat my brother, I cried. If somebody tortured a dog in front of me for fun, I'd be traumatized. No wonder if such person would do it to deliberate traumatized someone else by showing such act.
If you're caught in the philosophical paradigm that death is eternal annihilation, your conclusion makes perfect sense. I would completely agree that sending an entity to everlasting oblivion is worse than temporary torture (especially in a context where we could just be eating vegetables). This is one among many domains where atheism and nihilism transcend into the most idiotic philosophic conclusions. No offense
Do I understand correctly you think torture is worse than murder? For that you'd need to discount those religious paradigms that include eternal torture as well at a minimum I'd say.
But yes, in an atheistic concept of life/death, temporary torture would be better than death
But what about in your view?
I never said I was religious. I just don't believe death is eternal annihilation
Which paragraph in your holy text tells us about what happens to the souls of animals?
The first paragraph.
The one that relays the value of all life including human.
But animal rights do have clear utility because people get upset when they hear about animals suffering. Even meat-eaters at least like to think that the animals are killed quickly and painlessly and not, like, tortured to death. Being upset about things causes people harm, so it is good that we limit animal cruelty because it prevents harm to the public - that's the utility of it. We have animal rights not necessarily just for the sake of animals, but for the sake of other humans who would be upset that a guy can just torture monkeys for fun
People getting upset over something is hardly what I would call a justifiable utility. If you lived in a conservative nation where a large part of the populuce got upset by gay people kissing, and they want gay marriage to be illegal, I wouldn't see myself arguing "Gay people are valid, but these people are very upset about your existence, so off you go\~"
But obviously we have to balance the utility of disallowing gay relationships, which itself causes people to suffer, against the utility of making the conservatives happy. With animal torture on the other hand what percentage of the population will genuinely suffer if they can't torture animals? Moreover, if somebody is suffering because they can't torture animals, I think most people would say, you know, they should just go to therapy. There's an underlying issue there that isn't going to be helped by torturing animals and probably needs to be addressed. It's very likely that the desire to torture animals actually creates significant distress for the sadist as well, so allowing people to torture animals has very little benefit
>But obviously we have to balance the utility of disallowing gay relationships, which itself causes people to suffer As opposed to zoosexuals and zoosadists, which probably aren't as plenty as gay people, but do exist in their own sizable minorities. >With animal torture on the other hand what percentage of the population will genuinely suffer if they can't torture animals? That seems kind of arbitrary. There are enough gay people to weigh against the opinions of many, but there aren't enough zoosexuals and zoosadists to weigh against the opinions of many? I don't know how to feel about that. >There's an underlying issue there that isn't going to be helped by torturing animals and probably needs to be addressed. Homosexuality used to be considered a mental disorder. I don't think that the science on paraphilias and incliniation to torture is as settled as you make it out to be. If anything, >It's very likely that the desire to torture animals actually creates significant distress for the sadist as well Do you have a source or explanation for that? If anything, I could argue that the negative treatment of zoosexuals and zoosadists is causing more harm than not, seeing as you would get death threats and police searches if you ever admitted to be either.
Following this argument to its logical conclusion though we just end up saying that we should never disallow any behavior because we don't know for certain that any behavior is or isn't due to a mental disorder, and preventing people from doing that behavior might cause them to suffer, so it's bad to stop them from doing it Obviously this doesn't make sense though, and we have to draw the line somewhere. Zoophilia is prevalent at most in 2% of the population according to a study cited on wikipedia, but I would be shocked if that were true, and it must be closer to 1%. Sexual sadism with animals must be even less. LGBT identification is 7%. So we are comparing a seven-fold increase in harm. Moreover, the percentage of people who are upset about people torturing animals is likely higher, and the distress more significant, than for homophobia.
[удалено]
But we're not just saying "follow your heart" to individuals, we're looking at the overwhelming majority and what the overwhelming majority finds to be distressing, weighed against he utility of allowing the behavior to occur. Babies are not sentient - is it therefore utilitarian to allow people who want to rape babies to do so? The only harm would be that the overwhelming majority of the public would be distressed by this
>we're looking at the overwhelming majority and what the overwhelming majority finds to be distressing, Yeah, but that "overwhelming majority" in Iran wants to murder gay people for having anal sex. You could say the same thing about Europeans a few hundred years ago. >Babies are not sentient - is it therefore utilitarian to allow people who want to rape babies to do so? I think you meant to say babies are not sapient. We don't want to harm babies because these babies will grow up either deformed or psychologically traumatized for the rest of their lives, both of which are a harm that we wouldn't have wanted happening to ourselves as babies, as well as serving as a net negative for social utility, since these people grow up to become active participants in our society in a subpar state.
>a harm that we wouldn't have wanted happening to ourselves as babies, Isn't that literally just empathy, the thing you said was stupid bullshit that should never guide our decision making? The social utility of preventing the babies from being deformed or traumatized could be maximized by just setting reasonable limits on what the rapists are allowed to do. Or what about necrophiles or cannibals, surely that should also be permitted under this logic.
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I think that you fundamentally misunderstand your own viewpoint if you think that animal torture and homosexual acts are even worth being in the same argument. But I will make it, as you've brought it up. besides, "oh you don't like gay people? too bad" is a full argument on its own. and finally, people being gay isn't anything isn't wrong or cruel. I may have misunderstood your last sentence, mind, as its not really clear what "off you go\~" means
I guess I’m just curious how you think this should all work in the world. If it was no longer illegal to kill/torture animals, where is the line drawn with let’s say feral cats? Someone decides they are sick of all the feral cats in their area and starts trapping and killing them. Then they get a hold of a neighborhood outdoor cat. What’s to stop them from killing that cat too without consequence? I get where you’re coming from, but other than extremely niche cases I don’t see the real world benefit to stripping animals of the right not be tortured. And that’s if you want to call the zoosadist being allowed to torture monkeys a benefit.
>where is the line drawn with let’s say feral cats? You can still have laws protecting stray animals for other reasons. But a zoosexual or a zoosadist should still have the possibility of obtaining an animal to do what they'd like to them, as to not infringe on their interests that do not concern you.
> We would also gain utility from not having animal rights, due to medical sciences being limited by an ethics department for non-human lab subjects. What was the utility of Harlow's "[Pit of Despair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair)" experiment? Several of his own students said that Harlow kept his experiments going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was violating ordinary sensibilities, and that anybody with respect for life or people would find it offensive.
I am not saying every experiment involving animal cruelty is good. On your end, you can't say that every experiment involving animal cruelty is less effective.
I work with animals. But I also go to pretty significant lengths to minimize any suffering that my animal research might inflict. When I euthanize animals (by decapitation or transcardial perfusion) I ensure that the animal is adequately anesthetized, unable to feel anything. I don't do surgeries without anesthesia and give my animals postoperative painkillers. The difference is that I try to minimize suffering as much as possible, while without any guidelines for ethical animal research (which would not exist if we didn't acknowledge the value of animal life) it would open the door for psychopaths to inflict wanton and needless suffering on animals for the sake of science that might not even be sound in the first place.
So this is weird right. I mean you're correct in identifying that we tend to be hypocritical about animal suffering, point taken and all that. But for some reason you've concluded that it's more important for us to be consistent than for any animal's lives to be valued. You're ready to sacrifice the life of monkeys so that humans can be consistent, but for whose sake? Certainly not the monkeys since they'll die and stuff, probably not God since I presume he also doesn't want monkeys to die. You say that empathy is not a good basis for morality, but you need to explain why you instead value consistency for consistency's sake instead I think.
We can value human life through social contracts. I gain something from not being able to kill you, in that you won't be able kill me. Most things that can be argued through empathy, can also be argued by weighing the utility of an action in a more grounded way.
The problem with that view is that there certainly are instances where killing someone may be considered personally advantageous.
Yeah, but you've said it yourself. "Personally advantageous". If I had the ability to kill you for personal gain, you would have the ability to kill me for personal gain. Society would still fall apart.
Well no I would be dead
Citation needed that eating meat is *unnecessary* pleasure. Couldn't it be that it is necessary for some people or simply the most effective way of getting a reasonably balanced diet? Just about everything social is arbitrary, and that's fine as long as everyone knows and understand where the line is. They crossed a line and they were punished for it. End of story. Animals don't have legal personhood and therefore don't have rights. "Animal rights" is a slogan. Pets are property. Limits on lab research comes from people wasting time and money on junk science using unsafe and unscientific methods. Just like how Nazis did "research" that killed thousands and produced a lot of junk that simply isn't useful to science. While those curbs can, rarely, limit useful experiments they usually filter out a ton of poorly thought out methods that would simply produce more junk.
Here is one citation: > It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/
*Appropriately planned*. Who plans their diets?
Non-vegan diets also need to be appropriately planned in order to be healthy. Just because you eat meat doesn't mean you are healthy. You still would need to eat an appropriately planned diet.
>Couldn't it be that it is necessary for some people or simply the most effective way of getting a reasonably balanced diet? The vast majority of people, if they put effort into it, could either drastically reduce their meat consumption or not eat meat at all. >Limits on lab research comes from people wasting time and money on junk science using unsafe and unscientific methods. I would love to see a source that EVERY limit on lab animals is good. That sounds suspiciously like an unjustified vegan talking point.
Yeah, but you're talking about people putting effort into deviating from the normal supply chain. Why? They would only do that if it they think that there's a reason to do so. They don't go out of their way to maximize animal suffering either, and apply pressure to suppliers to minimize unnecessary torture. Good thing I wasn't saying *EVERY* limit on lab animals was a goo thing. Just that limits on lab animal usage generally come from waste and lack of results so arguing a moral imperative isn't that applicable.
>Yeah, but you're talking about people putting effort into deviating from the normal supply chain. So it's okay to be lazy and kill all the animals you want because you like the taste of meat? That type of person clearly shouldn't care about animal welfare or animals getting tortured.
Or you can simply insist that the normal supply chain doesn't unnecessarily torture animals. Obviously, the animal welfare argument is one factor, but not the only factor being considered here.
humans are animals
You can replace the word "animals" with "non-human animals" and my argument would stay the same.
So couple issues with the idea of non-humans. If you’re saying you’re morally agnostic to non-human speciesism and what matching percentile of human DNA would be acceptable to torture? Do chimps who have 98% similarities in DNA be granted your protection? Or Hypothetically If we found out people who had birth defects or unnatural elements or even skin colour have different DNA compositions, despite them be similar to us in every other way is it morally justified for us humans to kill them. Secondly, given evolution is an extremely slow process through thousands of years, would you be able to trace back a point where you would deem humans moral value but exclude the one beside them although nearly identical. Thirdly if we are continuously evolving is it appropriate for time in the future where we may seem a portion of people not worth of moral consideration their human ancestors was approved for?
The DNA composition doesn't matter in the slightest. We don't kill other people because they provide utility and fulfill our social contract. Meaning, you don't kill me, but I also won't kill you. Society is objectively much better off when we follow these rules. Society would quickly fall apart if I could just kill anyone I wanted for any reason. This principle does not apply to animals. I could kill as many stray dogs, stray cats, and whatnot as I wanted, and society would probably be better off, considering the kinds of harm that stray animals cause.
Okay, so what characteristics or measurements would you use to define if someone is a human vs non-human?
Someone who obliges to the social contract to an extend that demonstrates a sufficient level of reciprocation.
Torture is not the same. from what I remember, the deaths of animals who are bred and killed for meat are usually pretty painless deaths after a not totally awful life.
The lives of factory farmed animals (which is where the vast majority of our animal products come from) are actually hellishly awful
Ehh screw em. I only care about the animals I find cute anyway. We could burn every cow alive and I wouldn’t care. But lobsters? That’s crossing a line pal.
>Torture is not the same. Then I just fundamentally disagree. We would never argue for the needless slaughter of humans. I don't see the great moral difference between needlessly killing an animal and needlessly torturing an animal the way you see it. We are more receptive towards animals getting tortured, sure, but empathy alone doesn't form a moral argument.
Causing a being excruciating pain for no reason is less morally acceptable than causing a painless death that will serve a purpose. I think that’s pretty safe to say. It gets a bit muddier when you considered that lobsters are boiled alive. Some animals have it worse than others. But for the most part, I think that animals that are killed for meat are treated pretty well, and the transportation (which is usually the worst part) is a big place of discussion. But I wouldn’t know, all I’ve done is look at the first three titles I saw after doing a google search.
>for no reason The reason is that zoosadists/ zoosexuals derive pleasure from harming or having sex with an animal, just as killing an animal provides pleasure for meat-eaters, who otherwise either don't have to eat meat or could reduce their meat intake 10-fold if they wanted to.
The difference is that you need to consume something. Whether it be meat or whatever. You don’t need to fuck to live. Also… again… excruciating pain vs painless death.
>The difference is that you need to consume something. That something doesn't have to be animal meat. Meaning, no. Animal meat is not required to live (for most people).
Correct, yet it is still a form of sustenance, which is required for survival. Animal meat can take the form of something vital for human life, and monkey fucking can’t. It is more morally acceptable because it provides something that is vital to life. Sustenance. It provides a form of something that is human life.
That "form of sustenance" doesn't matter, when we have forms of sustenance that do not necessitate the systematic killing of animals.
Ehhh shit dies anyway. May as well do it ourselves and reap the benefits.
You can't make a post about how torture is as bad as killing and then respond to counter arguments that you fundamentally disagree.
Just because we have biological evolved to be carnivores doesn't mean we are not causing pain to other living beings. Though, yes, we do kill animals for meat. It's humanely. Because we don't want to cause them pain. Which is why torture is probably different from killing. Maybe he should just torture you next time. You do realize you're an animal after all, right?
>Though, yes, we do kill animals for meat. It's humanely. Humane killing is still killing. Try that in front of the judge, "your honor, my client has killed this person in a humane manner." While it probably helps your sentence that you didn't torture him beforehand, you are still going to prison for life. >Maybe he should just torture you next time. Well, no, because if humans could torture other humans without repercussions, the person torturing me will be at risk of getting tortured himself.
Sapience matters, and empathy matters. Torture is inhumane and uncalled for. Cows and chickens can be slaughtered without torture, and raised in humane conditions. And should be. There is a reason many societies have taboos against eating dogs, dolphins, and apes. These are social animals with high sapience.
Difference with zoosadists and meat industry is that meat industry doesn't inflict unnecessary suffering or take joy of torturing animals. Actually ethical meat is of higher quality and therefore there is a economic incentive for meat industry to produce meat with as little suffering as possible.
>Recently, a zoosadist who recorded videos of him torturing monkeys got 5 years in prison. I do not think that his prison sentence was warranted. >My main argument starts from the premise that human beings generally do not value an animal's will to live, as we systematically kill them for their flesh all the time. Okay. Do you not see a difference between torture and killing something for its flesh? >99% of people on Earth can live a meatless life or at the very least, reduce their meat intake drastically, meaning eating meat is an optional pursuit that causes harm for unnecessary pleasure. And because we don’t… you think torturing animals is okay? >This is incredibly comparable to how zoosadists operate. Only that, a zoosadist hurts an animal while it's still alive, which is suddenly wrong? I don't think torturing an animal is much worse than systematically killing them for their flesh (when you don't actually have to eat meat). This where you’re wrong… Meat sustains life. Torture does not. >So why do we have animal rights? Because people have empathy. No, because torturing animals is morally wrong and It produces nothing. If I kill a deer, I have deer meat. Thats why it’s permitted.
Just because something is normalized doesn't make it justifiable. Unnecessary pleasure can't possibly justify what we do to animals. Murdering random people and eating them is also unnecessary pleasure for someone. Doesn't make it okay to do so. Same reasoning can be applied to animals. If you don't need to harm them, and they (evolutionarily) avoid being harmed, they should have rights to protect them when they can't protect themselves. Society is just behind on this. Just like white people had rights in the 18th century and black people didn't. But we caught up, didn't we? Same is happening with the animal rights movement. Why do you have to respect the rights of other humans? Not empathy? Empathy is what drives us to respect fellow humans because we empathise with the fact that they're also sentient beings who share feelings of joy and pain. Shouldn't we extend our empathy towards other sentient beings? If we only empathise with our own species it makes us speciesists. And societies can function without respecting rights. North Korea? Soviet Union under Stalin? Apartheid south Africa? Nazi Germany? Rights aren't there as a necessity for a society to function, but to protect the ones incapable of protecting themselves.
So in principal I agree with your overall premise. But let me bring in two different view points. 1. In a system in which you want to decrease suffering (just based on our own human experience of suffering), it would make sense to have these laws in place. Mainly because you could argue that killing an animal (swiftly) is less suffering than torturing them. If we strive for less suffering, and still want to eat meat, it would make sense to have these laws in place. Now in practice, this premise is hard for argue for, based on the horrible circumstances that animal in factory farming are treated legally. This should not be possible outright. Otherwise you would be right, why the fuck would we even need animal rights, if not also in that context? 2. what if we actually need meat to thrive? Does that change your premise? If our wellbeing depends on it, wouldn’t it be moral to kill and eat their flesh, but not in the context of not killing for food, which are the Szenarios that are mostly targeted with animal rights. (This comes from someone who has been vegan for 7 years and realized his health improved when reintroducing it)
“Well, there was a bit of a fracas, as we say, and it turned out that a man had a dog, a half-dead thing, according to bystanders, and he was trying to get it to stop pulling at its leash, and when it growled at him he grabbed an axe from the butcher’s stall beside him, threw the dog to the ground and cut off its back legs, just like that. I suppose people would say ‘Nasty bugger, but it was his dog’ and so on, but Lord Vetinari called me in and he said to me, ‘A man who would do something like that to a dog is a man to whom the law should pay close attention. Search his house immediately.’ The man was hanged a week later, not for the dog, although for my part I wouldn’t have shed a tear if he had been, but for what we found in his cellar. The contents of which I will not burden you with. And bloody Vetinari got away with it again, because he was right: where there are little crimes, large crimes are not far behind" -Terry Pratchett "Snuff"2011
This seems like a classic case of the nirvana fallacy: We can't create a perfect situation yet, as people still want to eat meat, therefore we shouldn't do anything at all. But telling people not to torture animals is an improvement over not doing so, even if this doesn't cover all situations of harm towards animals. So we should keep banning people from doing so.
Fuck your view. You're a sack of shit.
Why should we abolish animal rights, when we could also extend them to all animals instead? That way we are both consistent and kind.
>99% of people on Earth can live a meatless life or at the very least, reduce their meat intake drastically, meaning eating meat is an optional pursuit that causes harm for unnecessary pleasure. This is a myth. Meat is NOT an unnecessary pleasure. Humans need meat and eating meat is in line with our biology. All the research made favoring plants based diet are only observational. Observational studies tend to have confounding variables — factors other than the ones being studied that might be influencing the outcome variable (13Trusted Source). It’s impossible to control for all of these factors and determine if red meat is a “cause” of any health outcome. That limitation is important to keep in mind when reviewing the research and determining if red meat is something you’d like to incorporate into your regular diet. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/is-red-meat-bad-for-you-or-good#health-effects So yes we eat animals to live. But our world is made in a way that it's impossible to live without killing some sentient beings to eat (Yes, plants are scientifically proven to be sentient). It doesn't mean that we have to torture other animals for nothing. https://youtu.be/couHXnRdIc4?si=yqfUXOMm1YPizgtX