How does that argument extend to animals that eat other animals? And why is the default defined as not eating meat?

The common justification for this is the comparative anatomy argument that we're primates and primates don't eat meat. These same people have had their heads in the sand for the last 30 years, because it's been found that primates do quite commonly eat meat.

Definitely not. The common justification for this is that we, as the most intelligent species on the planet, have developed a moral conscience. As such, it is unconscionable that we support the literal mass murder and ill-treatment of billions of animals each year when there are alternatives that require no suffering and no death.

Parent Poster said:

    > the default

You're talking about something else completely. There is no default morality. If morality is a choice to make then it is not a default behavior. I'm responding to the question asked while you're propping your moral choice above the observed natural behavior of other species. I didn't even begin to discuss the morality of eating meat.

>it is unconscionable that we support the literal mass murder and ill-treatment of billions of animals each year when there are alternatives that require no suffering and no death.

There are ways to put down animals which require no suffering.

And no, there are no alternatives to death. Plants are living things too. Why is it okay to murder a plant but not an animal?

We usually divide the world into moral agents (pretty much just humans) and non-moral-agents.

The default is not eating meat because the default is not eating anything. Humans must take a positive action to eat something.

Generally perfect duties in the Kantian sense take the form of "thou shalt-nots", so a positive action you shouldn't take, like killing a random stranger or some such. This is contrasted with imperfect duties, which are things that are merely virtuous to do - like using your time & resources to help the less-fortunate, for example.

>The default is not eating meat because the default is not eating anything.

That's default for rocks and such, but not living things, whose existence requires by default the death of other living things

I'm a solitarian. I use photosynthesis.

> Humans must take a positive action to eat something.

If you're going to talk about morality and agency, it is not a positive choice to eat anything. It's acting out of necessity to survive. Choosing not to eat is self-destruction and there is absolutely nothing about that that's a moral choice. In fact, it's generally accepted to be immoral[1]. This is why we force feed people on hunger strikes and why suicide is illegal. Modern/western written law is based on natural law.

"Breatharianism" is pure stupidity/insanity and anyone who undertakes such practice can (and will) literally go die.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI25easQs2k

Yes, per Sartre killing oneself is a course of action available to us at (almost) any moment, which must be justified against by any supposed moral system. This is pretty standard.

We aren't talking about what the law dictates, we're talking about how some moral system might inform our actions. Two very different things, although of course the relationship between them is fascinating in its own right.

Eating isn't a choice. Please don't deflect from the criticism of your claim.

Downvote me all you like Andrew, but I'm going to call you out for espousing ideas that can literally kill people.

I can't downvote you, HN doesn't allow you to downvote people who reply to you.

I'll leave you with this quote of yours to consider:

> Choosing not to eat is self-destruction and there is absolutely nothing about that that's a moral choice. In fact, it's generally accepted to be immoral.

If something is immoral, there must have been a moral choice made to engage in the immoral activity. "Moral choice" here is a technical term which means the choice itself has moral weight, not that the choice is moral.

Couldn't this be extended to plant life as well?

It could, and indeed there are people who hold this belief. They are called "Fruititarians" and only eat things which can be taken from the plant without killing or harming it, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism

I don't personally subscribe to this.

Animals don't raise other animals on cruel factory farms.

Ants farm aphids.

Apparently lions, tigers and bears aren't aware of the Kantian perfect/imperfect duty divide.

I don't know that I fully agree with the parent's logic (despite the fact that I actually am a vegetarian), but I think the rationale to his argument is that humans are able to survive without meat (unlike cats, lions, or tigers), and we also have the ability to realize that we are able to avoid meat. Cats, bears, and tigers really don't have the mental faculties to know good or bad, or right and wrong, but we do (at least to some extent). If that's the case, shouldn't we avoid killing wherever possible?

Again, not sure I completely agree with the line of reasoning, but I at least see the point.

Non vegetarians everywhere demonstrably don't have the ability or "mental faculties" to see that eating meat is wrong, any more than lions and tigers and bears do.

It's like someone saying everyone has the ability to accept God or Jesus. No, we don't. And it's a touchy subject, because zealots tend to next infer that someone isn't fully human if they don't share fundamental beliefs or axioms.

Again, not saying that I fully agree, I'm just trying to explain the perspective.

Oh my.

Obviously those animals are unethical. But once Orca evolve enough to really grok Kant they should come around and die off.

Should it?

If I argue that it’s immoral to not vaccinate your children, am I failing in not arguing that wild deer should vaccinate their children?

The default really is not eating anything. Just fast, and fast, and fast, and die.

Re: why not "animals that eat other animals," the burden of proof here is with meat-eaters (those against killing people at least). There's a special status we afford to ourselves as humans, so why do we so easily accept the privileges of it, but raise objections when it comes with additional moral responsibilities?

As for the default, I think a simple way to put it is, "you don't have to eat meat."

Okay, I'll make a go of it: Which insect-eating-insect relationships are morally justified in the context of farming, and why? Are ladybugs morally superior for their crop-protecting abilities or morally inferior for their consumption of peaceful herbivores?

This is along the same lines as asking a vegan cat-owner what they feed their cat. I know that it's trite, but it's worth pondering.

Edit: 1hr without a reply. Wasn't that difficult.

> If you care at all about moral justifications for your own actions, eating meat is an extremely difficult position to defend.

Let's do it gradually, first move to eating beef: less killed lives per lb of meat. From another hand if we reduce demand, those chickens will not even been born..

Oh man, the moral status of possible future entities is like a singularity of very weird conclusions. I would avoid it.

Then why do you concern yourself so much with past entities?

And this ladies and gentlemen is why vegans have a reputation for being annoying.

Haha, even as an occasional meat eater I liked this comment. If this sort of comment is annoying, maybe time to inquire into the defensiveness. Maybe you have too much "skin" in the game?

It's not defensive to be annoyed by people claiming moral superiority.

The annoyance is fascinating to me, because I grew up eating meat and also felt such annoyance. It's an interesting thread to pull if you're into knowing thyself - why do I feel especially aggravated on this topic? Might lead you somewhere.

I don't find this equivalence very compelling. Anti-gay arguments are based on either religious or extreme-naturalism grounds. This seems much different than arguments based around not harming sentient creatures, which I think many people intuitively identify with to some degree.

You argue philosophy (religion is a philosophy like any other in my book) but an existentialist would tell you that the morality of eating meat is purely an artificial construct: the animal simply exists and the actions of killing the animal and eating it are just actions.

Or, to put it more bluntly: you can't prove that eating animals (or gay sex, for that matter) are the "wrong" choices to make, no matter how much philosophy you've read or argued about. You can't even prove you exist or that this is reality. If you can't even prove that, you're a long way from proving that killing animals is a moral choice.

I think you misunderstand the nature of argument. All arguments rest on a set of premises, and those premises themselves rest on premises, recursively so until we reach axioms which we simply accept to be true without further justification - like that the external world exists in some sense. Feel free to doubt that, by all means. Proof is not accessible to us - not a point the existentialists made (as you seem to believe), but rather something they took as self-evident and were responding to.

Analytic philosophy basically contends that if we assume axioms hold (correspond to the world in some sense) and we construct arguments from those premises which conform to logical rules, then the conclusions of those arguments are also true of the world in some sense. This is, of course, doubtable in various ways - but you pretty much have to abandon reason itself as the alternative.

>not harming sentient creatures

Plants are sentient creatures

Our current scientific understanding in no way leads to such a conclusion.

However, even considering the hypothetical that plants are sentient, eating plants actually causes the least harm seeing as livestock are not very efficient converters of plants to meat.

>Our current scientific understanding in no way leads to such a conclusion.

False:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_(physiology...

https://asknature.org/strategy/leaves-signal-presence-of-pre...

>eating plants actually causes the least harm seeing as livestock are not very efficient converters of plants to meat.

Let's continue this facile logic to it's conclusion: if animals are causing so much "harm", why shouldn't we kill them to prevent them from "harming" so much?