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1. It’s always refreshing to see bloggers venting unrefined complacent self-righteousness.Oh wait… that’s the worst aspect of the blogosphere. I’m not vegetarian, but the idea that non-humans might be worthy of some degree of moral respect is hardly “repugnant.” Next time you have the urge to make a post that makes your audience stupider, just don’t.

   — Jake · Oct 22, 10:01 AM · #

2. Hey, better be self-righteous than humorless.

   Oh, wait.

   — PEG · Oct 22, 10:22 AM · #

3. “The reason we have a problem with a man raping an animal (and conversely no problem with him eating it) is not because it’s demeaning to the animal…”

   You could at least indicate the moral theory under which this is the case so that your readers could examine whether it actually implies what you think it does. As surprising as it may seem to you, not all of us find the claims presented in your post self-evident.

   — kzndr · Oct 22, 10:55 AM · #

4. What a ludicrous reason to ban something – if a man wishes to demean himself, who are we to stop him?

   Incidentally I only favour consensual hippy-killing.

   — cerebus · Oct 22, 11:05 AM · #

5. cerebus: I actually agree about the animals. I don’t think bestiality should be illegal (though it’s not my cup of tea).

   — PEG · Oct 22, 11:19 AM · #

6. While the quote here is clearly radical and outside the mainstream, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for being vegetarian or vegan that have nothing to do with having compassion for animals. For example, the overuse of antibiotics, animal sickness caused by poor diet and raising conditions, the environmental effect of raising animals (methane gas, sewage storage), bioengineering in factory farming, chemical treatment of meat, poor oversight of the FDA and ASDA in preventing food borne pathogens in meat and recalling contaminated meat…

   I don’t find any of that “ideology” repugnant, but the ignorance of it is.

   — alessandra b · Oct 22, 12:30 PM · #

7. Oh, to have a license to shoot self-righteous bloggers on sight…

   — RIRedinPA · Oct 22, 12:34 PM · #

8. This is far and away the worst post to ever appear on this site. So there is no moral theory that considers the raping of animals wrong because it is cruel to animals?

   — Joe · Oct 22, 12:38 PM · #

9. “there are plenty of legitimate reasons for being vegetarian or vegan that have nothing to do with having compassion for animals. For example, the overuse of antibiotics”

   I’m confused about what it means to be vegan or vegetarian. If this were the reason, then eating a pig you shot would be fine. But I thought by definition vegetarians and vegans don’t do those things. Vegetarians don’t consume animals. Period. The reason for that can’t involve any of the above, because the above aren’t reasons for not eating meat, they’re just reasons for not supporting the meat industry.

   — John · Oct 22, 12:39 PM · #

10. John, true. I’m a “less and local” meat eater, and will happily eat a free range egg or pasture raised, grass-fed beef.

    The “less” is important though, because a country can’t eat meat 3 meals a day, 7 days a week, without factory farming and all of its above implications.

    If “less” turns into “none” over time, so be it. The purpose of the post is to illustrate that vegetarian diets are not just for hippies against bestiality.

    — alessandra b · Oct 22, 01:21 PM · #

11. Morality is not seamlessly rational, and it never will be. Part of that is because we get our morality from history, part of it is because morality is an evolving quasi-consensus across society.

    A better example is why is it legal for a person to obtain a sex toy that mimics an animal, but not allowed to have a consensual sexual relationship with an animal?

    My guess is that it breaks down to enforcement costs. We want to have a societal moral code, and letting the zoo-philiacs suffer doesn’t seem like that much of a price to pay.

    — J Mann · Oct 22, 01:33 PM · #

12. Alessandra: I’m actually also a less and local person. But I feel no need to pontificate about it on a national newspaper.

    Much better to write semi-trollish, over the top blog posts and see how many take me seriously.

    — PEG · Oct 22, 01:36 PM · #

13. That’s been my hypothesis since near the end of the latest kids voting discussion. ;-)

    — J Mann · Oct 22, 02:31 PM · #

14. Wow. I saw the humor but I still agree more with the people bashing PEG here.

    For one, no, we do in fact recognize that bestiality demeans the animal (I am flashing back to a little Faulkner bit about a retarded man’s interactions with a cow which arguably ennobled the man — somehow the cow drew a deep emotional response from him of which he’d been incapable — but nonetheless was condemned). And we have animal cruelty laws for just that reason. There’s a lot of research that’s banned too. I mean, I guess you could kluge it and say, we ban this because it’s so gratuitously cruel and so horrid to the animal that if a person wants to do it that demeans the person, but saying that it demeans the person to demean the animal is pushing it a bit, no?

    The post PEG references is a bit — more than a bit — confused on the underpinnings of Jainism (some things like onions or garlic are verboten more for tamas/sattva reasons), but what Freddie seems offended to have called a ridiculous and prima facie dumb question, is a ridiculous and prima facie dumb question. Most of us vegetarians aren’t so because we fetishize life. Were that so we’d be screwed: just moving around, breathing, eating, and indeed tending crops we wreak vast harm to “life.” (Jains can go quite far in this regard and I am always struck anew when I see their priests walking and carefully brushing the ground ahead to avoid trampling ants, but even Mahavira knew that was more symbolic than actual). Rather we value compassion.

    Stick a pin in a spider, hit a bird, kick a horse, and it shows its hurt in very recognizable way. It’s obvious to anyone watching what the thing wants and is feeling, and that it’s in pain. It shows that it loves its life, maybe its young or its fellows, in ways I can recognize and that resemble the ways we as humans communicate to each other our need for love and sympathy. Maybe it doesn’t do that for all its behaviors, depending on the animal and the behavior, in ways I can recognize. But there are many, and we have recongized that about animals back into prehistory. One can have wonderful debates about whther animals feel what we feel. But hey certainly act like we do, and it is those actions — of our felow humans or indeed of animals which arouse compassion in us all. Most of us think that compassion is a great thing — something from God — to be heeded and valued.

    An onion doesn’t really play that game. The wall between the onion and me is just really solid. If I don’t want to hurt it in the defense of some very abstract idea about “life” then I guess there’s that sort of odd argument, but it doesn’t seem interested in communicating anything in any way that I or something like me can hear. Trying to hold up an argument that the onion “doesn’t like” being eaten would be more than ridiculous.

    I will note that there are some “vegetarians” who will on this reasoning eat clams and mussels and the like and I haven’t really got an argument against that. In fact I’m not really bothered by it at all and I suppose I’d go ahead and do that myself but I think it’d be a bitch to try to avoid cruelty to animals in other places: you draw a line where most people understand it to be because one day you start eating clams and the next day your boss serves you chicken saying, oh, I didn’t think you were that kind of vegetarian,” which is a pain in the ass. But Freddie would get a lot less eye-rolling and maybe some considered responses if he asked, “why not eat clams,” whereas if you try to morally equate a chicken with a potato you deserve the condescension you get: all you’re saying is, you don’t feel the compassion the way damn near everyone else on the planet, meat-eater or no, does.

    I am sure there are some enlightened souls who feel as much compassion for the potato as for the chicken — but damn if I know what they’re picking up on, and my sense from the few people I’ve met who might be such, is that the death or the pain that they might inflict on the potato/bird isn’t really what concerns them anyway.

    — Sanjay · Oct 22, 03:10 PM · #

15. I’m also a bit miffed by the dull-eyed, knucklewalking idiocy of assuming vegetarians haven’t considered these moral issues. Given that the ones Freddie is talking about live and operate in worlds where their friends and associates eat meat, they’re confronted with it daily, and more than a few times go hungry for a while while passing up nonvegetarian options, I’d say they think about it more than he does, by a lot.

    — Sanjay · Oct 22, 03:14 PM · #

16. Pain, sure. We shouldn’t inflict unnecessary pain, or any pain at all. But death? What’s wrong with death?

    The idea which animates your spider lesson is that it’s reasonable to infer interior, subjective experience from exterior fact. I writhe when I am in pain, the spider is writhing, so the spider must experience something close enough to what I call pain that it makes sense to say “the spider is in pain.” Leave off whether this is a valid heuristic. Arguendo, I’ll concede the moral imperative: do not cause (unnecessary?) pain to anything which responds in pain-like ways.

    However, if you make your stand on phenomenological, experiential grounds, visiting a quick, unanticipated, painless death cannot possibly cause you any problems. (Okay, it can, but not in ways that are relevant (e.g., pain qua grief and despondency to third parties.) And of course, once death has been done, eating the animal has no hedonistic cost at all. In fact, the only possible cost is to the eater or the observer of the eater, that is, people who moralize the eating of animals and who therefore experience a real diminution in subjective, Benthamite utility upon witnessing it.

    In other words, once the animal is dead, there is no difference between it and an onion — except for distinctions artificially imported by muddled moral thinking.

    That said, this post is kind of a waste. Insofar as it is making a joke, it fails to be interesting. Insofar as it is tries to be interesting, it reads like a joke.

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 22, 03:43 PM · #

17. Well, sure, Sargent, that’s why a lot of vegetarians are looking forward with great joy to the coming of lab meat.

    But you will trip up a bit much by focusing on say pain. The point is that the animal shows it wants to live in a way I can understand “want,” and in a way I might myself. The scallion does not. The scallop may not. So killing a pangolin is wrong. I have no reason to think that the kohlrabi, on the other hand, isn’t like the cow in “Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” kind of hoping to get roasted.

    — Sanjay · Oct 22, 03:51 PM · #

18. An onion doesn’t really play that game.

    In fact the onion, which cannot run away or writhe, is employing sulfur-based chemical weapons against you in defense of its own life.

    Isn’t that at least some kind of indication that, yes, the onion is enamored of its own existence? Physical pain is just a mechanistic response to violations of bodily integrity – a warning/damage signal. Whether or not that mechanistic response proceeds through a brain doesn’t seem to change what it is. (Of course, my responses must not proceed through a brain either, since here I am again, trying to engage Sanjay in an intelligent way. Doubtless he’ll proceed to immediately claim a Ph.D. in botany and tell me I’m the one who got it wrong.)

    I guess what I’m objecting to is the zoological chauvinism that relegates plants to a passive backdrop, nothing more than a stage for animals. Plants act. They do take steps to preserve their own lives, compete with other organisms, pass on their genes to offspring.

    — Chet · Oct 22, 04:01 PM · #

19. But that’s not so. There’s no question that plants do things to survive. But the mechanism you cite also helps the onion get nice and big and juicy for me to propagate it. It’s not doing something that’s easily recognizable as something a person would do. It would be a very, very unusual person who is moved by it. I’m not saying such people don’t exist. But it’s not an arbitrary cutoff to say we feel for things which express themselves like we do. It’s not that anyone’s saying the plant is passive. We’re saying there isn’t a framework for what it feels.

    Not that you have a brain. C’mon, stupid: take me up on my $5,000 bet.

    — Sanjay · Oct 22, 04:17 PM · #

20. To me, at least, the philosophy is still muddled even if you ground it in aspirational inference.

    Not to belabor Chet’s point, but I can think of numerous plants that, when faced with mortal danger or sudden opportunity, react in ways which would allow us to infer that they want to live — at least, if we remain as unrigorous and unscientific as your claiming the spider wants to live. Danger signaling, toxin production, coalitionism, sudden growth spurts, etc: these signs are not obviously less salient than a spider’s pain avoidance. The are both ‘fixed action responses’, no?

    But an even more significant problem lies at the heart of the philosophy. Ultimately, for an organism to want something like a human wants something — or at least close enough to a human to demand moral consideration — that animal be physically able to produce such mental states. Every mental state, including aspirational states, reduce to neurological states, yada yada. But it’s true. And hard to square with your position.

    Neurological states are dependent on the available hardware. A spider does not have the hardware. And if it doesn’t have the hardware, claiming that a spider ‘wants to live’ is not a meaningful observation. Unless we admit a spiritual reading. And then we’re back to the artificial distinction between plants and animals, both of whom ‘want to live’ in a spiritual, life-loving sense. Or am I just completely missing the point?

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 22, 04:23 PM · #

21. Hippieism is a lost art. Sad to say, I was a real hippie in the late sixties and early seventies — sold the underground newspaper, The Great Speckled Bird, on street corners to get enough money to buy a jug of Bali Hai wineand dime bag — watched Spirit and Country Joe for free in Piedmont Park — saw God at the Atlanta Pop Festival — read Kerouac & Ginsberg — listened raptly to Cleaver and Carmichal — acted in Hoffman’s and Rubin’s theater of the absurd when I graduated to yippie, and eventually crashed in ’79. There are no hippies left.

    — mike farmer · Oct 22, 05:01 PM · #

22. I think the natural gambit for the vegetarian at this point is to turn it around and ask for a non-muddled, non-arbitrary reason for privileging human life over non-human life. For example, Kristoffer, couldn’t your 11:43 comment be modified thusly:

    “once the animal a person is dead, there is no difference between it and an onion — except for distinctions artificially imported by muddled moral thinking.”

    — kenB · Oct 22, 05:05 PM · #

23. Yes, in fact it could, kenB. But you still have other considerations, like what about all the ‘other-judging’ humans who will ostracize me, or punish me corporeally.

    However, if you’re in a primitive society where such is allowed or celebrated, then you, the primate with a moral instinct, will not have a subjective, phenomenological, negative limbic reaction to the eating of a human being. And since there is no such thing as ‘a priori immoral’, just prepared moral categories and broadly universal inclinations, well, there you go. In that particular case, it would not be meaningful to say that cannibalism is immoral.

    And we know this, intuitively, which is why we can be disgusted at the Donner party without blaming them. Context matters.

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 22, 05:14 PM · #

24. That said, it is in society’s objective interest to outlaw the desecration of human bodies, including cannibalism, and to foster a culture in which such practices are presumed and experienced to be immoral.

    I can, in fact, prove this, but first I’d have to develop the architectonic space. Which I won’t.

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 22, 05:26 PM · #

25. re: a non-muddled, non-arbitrary reason for privileging human life over non-human life.

    Answer: neurological and behavioral, Turing-test congruence between you and me. I can conclude that you and I have the same baseline natures and cognitive and emotional capabilities, that we experience the world in almost exactly the same ways, and I can conclude these things beyond a reasonable doubt. Therefore, insofar as I value my own life and experience, a compelling argument exists to value your life and experience. And, of course, there’s the pragmatic side of ‘do unto others’. I want my life to be valued for non-arbitrary reasons — non-arbitrary to me — so it behooves me to support a principle where all lives are valued.

    ‘Course, the further away from humans you go, the less compelling the arguments.

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 22, 05:41 PM · #

26. No, Sargent, that’s not quite it. It’s not really a subtle point.

    When you take tissue damage, say, your tissue locally does a lot of interesting chemical shit just like a hibiscus’ does and a llama’s does and even a bacterium does. When you see your beloved all kinds of nifty hormonal shit happens and probably there’s all kind of interesting chemical communication; there can be analogies for the hibiscus and the llama and the bacterium. So far so good. Those are automatic things your biochemistry dictates. Some will happen even after you’re dead!

    But when we say the llama responds like we do we’re saying something very different that we can’t say about plants. When a spear goes through you you scream and writhe: these are actually responses you could suppress, if you chose to (and some do, in some cases, and some pathologies do that too). They don’t really help you a whole lot. They are designed to communicate to other people. Communication not through automated biochemistry, mind you, but routed at least through your mind and your heart. Those actions — writhing, screaming — appeal to others’ empathy and we say that someone who responds to those things is compassionate. As PEG says we want not to demean the individual, well, we generally accept that compassion ennobles the individual. Similarly when you encounter your beloved you caress, you nuzzle, etc., and these are suppressible — and in that sense again: these aren’t simply biochemistry, but are directly intended to make another human being feel and think something.

    And that’s why the hibiscus and the bacterium are nothing like the llama. They respond, sure. Perhaps they even respond in ways that would communicate things to other hibisci and bacteria. But only the llama responds in ways that should, if your conscience and humanity are “working,” mean something to you. And it does, and nobody likes to see a puppy get kicked or a chicken tortured (barring a couple psychopaths). So I’m not at any point saying, only the animal does something. I’m saying, only the animal does something that makes sense to you (or should) within a normal compassionate framework. That’s a lot less angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin than your idea that different types of responses might signify equivalent feeling in different systems or that the same response might not: sure, but my contention is that to a human, screaming indicates the attempt to communicate pain, caressing indicates a communication of love, etc. and surely we should hear and respond to that communication (even if for some their “reason” then kicks in and says, yes, the cow is doing something that tells me it’s in pain — but maybe that’s not really what it means, or maybe pain isn’t for the cow what it is for me, or maybe the cow doesn’t “count.”) The compassion arrow points in one way: maybe other factors are going to point another way. The hibiscus has no way of appealing to that arrow.

    I could make other physiological arguments if I had to of course. The onion has nothing like a central brain: I can have a nasty cut doing all the things cuts do but still be happy and OK. I can get an arm cut off but be shot so full of morphine I couldn’t really be called “in pain,” and so on. Or, well, I’m looking at a lot of trumpet plants right now that are connected by a central rhizome: one is brown and dying, others are thriving (though winter should fix that soon). So there is a physiological appeal you could make if you feel the need to start digging in the chemistry, but I think those considerations are at least secondary. The moral issue is that there is a message being sent that you should be primed to — indeed should train yourself to — receive and interpret a certain way, even if in the particular instance (hey! That’s not a dude, that’s a lobster!) the interpretation is misguided.

    Example #2 of knucklewalking in Freddie’s post: asserting blithely that “consciousness is not a binary, but rather a spectrum, so the question becomes whether an animal has more right to life if it is more conscious.” If you can show much about how consciousness works you should alert the Nobel committee immediately.

    — Sanjay · Oct 22, 06:46 PM · #

27. I’m amazed that Kris and Sanjay are arguing — it’s honestly hard for me to see much daylight between their moral frameworks. Some observations:

    1) It’s very very hard to reduce ethics to a convincing logical argument. As evidence for this, I offer the following. (a) Most of you are very smart, and have logical arguments to support your ethical frameworks. (b) Despite this, almost no one is ever convinced by your arguments to change their own ethical framework substantially, regardless of how smart you are and how smart they are.

    2) At that point, it’s much more helpful to say kind of a Humean “That’s so interesting that you believe there is a moral imperative to be a vegetarian/vegan/sport-hunter/seal clubber/whatever. Why do you think you think that?”

    3) Freddie’s post is odd – his complaint is ultimately that a spectrum of consciousness or pain-based ethic is usually not fully considered. To which I say DUH! In my opinion, MOST ethical and moral beliefs aren’t that well considered. So what? Only Socrates gets to have morals?

    4) Freddie’s assertion that the consiousness-spectrum-based vegetarianism usually isn’t well-enough-considered for his taste doesn’t really pin down his objection. Why isn’t sympathy for consiousness (or similarity) a pretty reasonable basis to decide that it’s ok to eat onions, mostly ok to eat clams, bad to eat chickens, horrible to eat gorillas, and monstrous to eat humans. (I appreciate that there has to be a different reason why it’s monstrous to eat Terry Sciavo, but we can take on one issue at a time).

    — J Mann · Oct 22, 06:54 PM · #

28. J Mann, it’s because what we’re arguing about is whether that cutoff is arbitrary or whether there is at least a very clear dividing line there, which there is. How you respond to that dividing line is where the “what are the ethics?” questions come in, but for the most part everyone’s avoiding that (I think). So where you’re thinking is tangential.

    — Sanjay · Oct 22, 07:06 PM · #

29. In my conlaw course, we had this semester-long hypothetical of the “consenting goat” that we always returned to. I’ll let your imagination run wild with that…but it got to this very issue.

    — mpb · Oct 22, 09:23 PM · #

30. Wouldn’t the relevant claim be that taking up the moral status of animals is simply redundant? If an ethic of human dignity or nobility can get us a world in which power and authority are arrayed successfully enough against raping nonhuman animals, why not stop there?

    — James · Oct 22, 09:26 PM · #

31. I must be dense, Sanjay, because what you’re describing sounds like anthropomorphism. I get your point that animals in pain naturally activate an empathetic response almost as if these signals were ‘designed to communicate to other people’; that we evolved an emotional intelligence, and using it is how we make sense of the world; that a camel screaming in pain plays on our heartstrings; that humans simply are compassionate creatures, essentially empathetic, which is why we feel the way we do when we see an animal scream and writhe; and that “surely we should hear and respond to that communication” as compassionate creatures, which we are.

    Me, I don’t particularly trust anything about my natural reactions (though I certainly don’t mind indulging them). One, I’m the product of selfish replicators; much of what makes me tick is subterranean and inscrutable, my System One automatic processes are not exactly designed to look out for Numero Uno: Me, The Vehicle Who Gives A Damn (to update Heidegger). Two, the principle of parsimony: our accuracy in mentally modeling the world is just good enough to keep us alive and fucking. Three, first hand experience with myself: I stand behind deliberations at room temperature and nothing else, including and especially my motivational inclinations and moral intuitions “in the field”. Four, religion and history and science and art, which jointly and separately remind us that human cognition is deeply imperfect.

    Two, animal signals have nothing at all to do with human beings and our innate emotional responses. Sure, we read them as if they do. But that means it’s just a neurological short cut — what Kahneman calls a heuristic — rather than a “should”. So how do you get to “should”?

    To me, what I should do is compensate for my heuristics with facts and impersonal theories, which means approaching the animal as an object to be studied. Then I can build a more accurate image of its qualia, its way of experiencing the world, to see if there is any relevant overlap with mine which would, in the end, justify my moral intuition.

    James, I think it’s because moral intuitions about animals are everywhere now. And as you know, with morals intuitions precede and in fact demand justifications, that is, the “observation” that animals have a moral status happens, the rationale comes later, going as deep as necessary to avoid cognitive dissonance — and no further.

    But logically, yes, it is redundant, if ethics are judged by their effects.

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 22, 10:10 PM · #

32. I guess my point is, I agree that a clear line dividing animals from plants exists. I just don’t think it equals the moral line we’re talking about (I think much of what J Mann wrote is exactly right). The capacity to trick my brain into anthropomorphic empathy seems like a good place to start, but not a satisfactory way to end the inquiry.

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 22, 11:27 PM · #

33. You don’t have to be Peter Singer or a vegetarian to think that raping an animal is wrong, not merely because the man is debasing himself, but because the animal feels pain unnecessarily.

    That said, a horny person doesn’t have as strong a claim to anything as a hungry person. Nobody needs to rape to live; everybody needs to eat.

    — Patrick · Oct 23, 12:54 AM · #

34. It’s not doing something that’s easily recognizable as something a person would do.

    It’s macing you right in the face. I find that highly recognizable. You should, too, Sanjay; I suspect it’s how most of your dates end.

    — Chet · Oct 23, 01:26 AM · #

35. Well, yeah, Sargent, that puts us closer to the same page. Basically where Freddie got stalled is in thinking of moral “ends” as either the absolute protection of life (which is silly because impossible) or the avoidance of pain (which runs into problems of many sorts). But I don’t think that’s where morality goes (and certainly from the Hindu perspective Freddie contrasted in his post, it doesn’t, but there’s substantial Western backing for this too). Rather, you practice morality as practice: that is, you want to be better.

    So you decide the limits of your compassion, weigh those against your other interests, and there you go. And you’re putting down a reasonable case which I won’t argue that those emotional responses might need to be checked once, twice and three times against those other interests, and may not have a basis in reason. That’s unobjectionable..

    My main contention (which I think you get) is that it’s not about life or pain but ennobling of the individual: the flipside at it were of PEG’s argument about bestiality. In the practice of trying to be better people I think we try to get better and better at that language — that very optional language, designed to communicate, not to automatically protect — of emotion and need. My point’s been that animals (mostly) speak that language, plants entirely don’t. So when we’re passed a signal in that language it may well be good practice — it might make us “better” — to listen to it. Even though it surely is not intended for us, nor is it likely we’re comprehending the signal correctly.

    That’s not exactly anthropomorphism (or it doesn’t have to be) but it’s halfway there. I’m not asserting that the spider feels what you feel (although asserting that it doesn’t have the “hardware” to, is suspect). Just that it uses (almost certainly for other reasons) the same tools humans use when they intend to communicate to humans, and that kind of communication should be privileged at least in one’s moral calculus (if not in outcome) because we train ourselves to privilege it. An onion or a carrot never does that.

    But I think we’re aware of the framework I’m using.

    — Sanjay · Oct 23, 02:43 AM · #

36. Oh, to have license to shoot P-E Gobry on sight.

    Haha, only kidding. That makes it okay, right? Right?

    Asshole. This blog has really jumped the shark.

    — LarryM · Oct 23, 06:05 AM · #

37. Larry: Totally. The network will pull us off the air soon.

    — PEG · Oct 23, 06:43 AM · #

38. “Plants act. They do take steps to preserve their own lives, compete with other organisms, pass on their genes to offspring.”

    And they are successful — in that we farm them. Their tastiness has made them very successful at passing on their genes, since they now have a large, organized animal population actively helping them to reproduce on the largest possible scale. :)

    — SDG · Oct 23, 01:58 PM · #

39. Heh, what SDG wrote reminds me of something I used to think about while smoking pot in college.

    Ultimately, for life to survive we’re going to have to leave the planet. Therefore it is an evolutionary imperative for each and every genetic code, to find somebody that has the capacity to build an Ark, and then convince the Ark-builders to take your code with them when they leave. So in a very real way, our eating chickens redounds to their benefit.

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 23, 02:24 PM · #

40. And Sanjay, I think we both understand each other.

    One quick question. When you say that such and such will make us ‘better’, from which perspective do you measure the improvement? (This is not a gotcha question; I just want to know.)

    It has the ring of spiritualism, but I didn’t want to simply assume it. It could be from society’s perspective, or a Myworldline, self-animating-and-justifying-narrative perspective. It’s also, I suppose, none of my business.

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 23, 02:36 PM · #

41. “Ultimately, for life to survive we’re going to have to leave the planet.”

    Ultimately, life does not survive, whether we leave the planet or not. (Presumably you realize this while not smoking pot.)

    “When you say that such and such will make us ‘better’, from which perspective do you measure the improvement? … It has the ring of spiritualism, but I didn’t want to simply assume it. It could be from society’s perspective, or a Myworldline, self-animating-and-justifying-narrative perspective.”

    Don’t know Sanjay’s answer, but the idea of making right choices because they make us better people is essentially the thesis of virtue ethics, which seems to me the most persuasive moral system out there.

    Germain Grisez proposes a standard predicated on human nature, which he develops in terms of a set of fundamental goods fulfilling to human nature (life and health, meaningful work and play, inner harmony, knowledge of truth and appreciation of beauty, harmony with others, etc.).

    — SDG · Oct 23, 03:01 PM · #

42. Well, yeah, Sargent, I am coming from a religious perspective but Aristotle would be 100% on board too: the idea is to make a habit of morality, not to resort to the rigorous application of moral reasoning to everything. You try to do what Priam would do because you’d like to be like him. I think one could be utilitarian as well — sensitivity to the kind of communication I’m talking about priviliging probably buys real benefit for both individuals and societies — so I’m trying to be as general (evasive?) as possible. There’s probably a few ways to quantitate “improvement” where those values still have weight.

    And to be honest I’m not even that sure what we’re trying so hard to be better. My wife isn’t vegetarian and nor was I eleven years ago. It’s just a reording of which calculations matter most and that might be an ad hoc, “I’m working on this right now” kind of thing.

    LarryM is being goofy but PEG, you’re too blithe brushing him off. I read your post, thought, “I wonder if I find this kind of offensive,” and then decided, yep, I do. And I’m not I hope so reflexive that way except when expressing the revulsion that any reasonable person feels towards Tyler Brule.

    — Sanjay · Oct 23, 03:16 PM · #

43. No, I would not be, you twit.

    — Aristotle · Oct 23, 03:56 PM · #

44. You most certainly would, you old homo, you.

    — Aquinas · Oct 23, 05:26 PM · #

45. The point of a squash plant, the goal of it’s life is that you eat it’s fruits and thus distribute it’s seeds/genes. It lives for one season, grows these fruits, and then you eat them. Leafy vegtables are are annuals as well. The leaves exist to feed the seeds so that they can be distributed by the wind or something. I guess when we eat the leaves before the seeds are distributed we are thwarting the spinaches life plan, but since we plant spinach again next year, they probably don’t mind. Perenial food crops like trees, again, want you to eat that fruit so their genes get distributed. Potatoes are the same. The potatoe makes itself into food so that it will be eaten and then pooped out somewhere else.

    Plants and animals have very differnt life histories.

    — cw · Oct 23, 05:54 PM · #

46. Did someone say homo?

    — Patroclus · Oct 23, 05:58 PM · #

47. I was just telling you to check that dude out, soldier.

    — Pilate · Oct 23, 07:30 PM · #

48. Oh, very good. Pilate wins.

    — SDG · Oct 23, 08:02 PM · #

49. Berkeley Breathed beat you to it by a couple of decades, PEG…

    

    — Erik Siegrist · Oct 24, 10:00 PM · #

50. what Freddie seems offended to have called a ridiculous and prima facie dumb question

    Oh, I never said that Safran-Foer’s question was dumb. Not at all. I just think that there are other questions that he is failing to consider.

    — Freddie · Oct 24, 11:15 PM · #

51. But Freddie would get a lot less eye-rolling and maybe some considered responses if he asked, “why not eat clams,” whereas if you try to morally equate a chicken with a potato you deserve the condescension you get: all you’re saying is, you don’t feel the compassion the way damn near everyone else on the planet, meat-eater or no, does.

    This is not an argument.

    — Freddie · Oct 24, 11:18 PM · #

52. Watching people try to argue against Sanjay’s never-ending array of arguments by assertion is either funny or sad. Hey: he thinks it, and as he will constantly assert, he is in some way better than you, ergo… .

    — Freddie · Oct 24, 11:21 PM · #

53. This will be interesting. Let’s look, then, at Freddie and “arguments by assertion.”

    Freddie, the doofus who raged at Douthat for a title he didn’t write, writes a title contrasting Jainism, that oh-so-exotic-belief-of-the-mystic-Orient, with vegetarianism and asserts, “I understand radical Jainism….Certain strains of the Jainite religion have a diet that…disallows the consumtion of root vegetables…because that kills the organism.”

    That of course is wrong. For example anyone who’s so much as seen dinner in a Jain household knows that they use turmeric (and anyone who’s smelt it knows they use inji) so using roots that kill the plant? OK. They also don’t eat mushrooms, which you get without killing the creature. The diet is almost indistinguishable from that of (say) my Iyengar grandparents and Freddie simply gets the philosophy wrong. I assert. That’s not surprising because Mahavira, like his more famous contemporary, came from a tradition that is pretty damn sure you can’t actually kill anything, so it would be bizarre for Jains to fetishize life the way Freddie seems to think vegetarians do. In fact if he had known anything about it he’d have gotten to the idea I have been pushing above: the goal isn’t the life of the eaten, it’s the compassion of the eater: morality, for Mahavira, is to make you better. It is a complete misportrayal.

    [Now, Freddie made an assertion that probably three seconds of googling would’ve cleared up because it’s so damn convenient to use the ethnic caricature here. The reason this is particularly shiteating is I don’t think anyone has any question what he’d say if, say, Friedersdorf did that. Don’t wait for the apology or climb-down from Freddie though. He benefits here from the kind of thing that got GWB a pass on misstatements: Freddie writes with such a characteristic cringe that it’s hard to expect much.]

    This leaves him trying to tell us that it’s hard to respond to a question about why ending animal life is different from ending vegetable life. But it’s not. Any four year old will tell you killing a chicken isn’t like killing a potato. So it’s not hard to do the four year old thing and say, that dude’s naked. You can make arguments about why they are the same — but that argument is difficult. That there’s a bright line there is pretty clear as we’ve more or less all agreed above.

    But hey, Freddie continues to assert. “Consciousness is not a binary, but a spectrum.” Yeah? Prove it. That’s another just plain dumb thing to say.

    But most annoying is the assertion that most vegetarians haven’t considered these deep moral issues like clever clever Freddie. Now, I live in the Southeast where it’s hard to get your aspirin without natural pork flavor, so I end up knowing a lot of hapless vegetarians and maybe once a week one or more will stop by for dinner and we’re happy to host. These’re people from good old Southern families with big meat-eating traditions who, as I said, often find themselves going hungry a while or having difficult family issues over their moral choices. How wonderful that some pudgy stripling sobbing over his keyboard has though much harder about the moral issues here.

    But, uh-oh. I’m saying I know more about Jainism than Freddie (which I think we’ve seen isn’t saying much) and I know more vegetarians. I know something, he doesn’t, so I’m asserting I’m in some way better than him in the way that always seems to be the case, since I’ve yet to see Freddie bothering to learn something about something before opining. And let’s be clear that that’s what these boobs are biting at: how dare you claim to have done anything? To have a degree? To have any experience with anything? [In a way I don’t understand this dovetails with Freddie’s apparent whiny fear that somehow we’re all tossing Ivy League gang signs behind his back: that’s so mindbogglingly pathetic I haven’t yet figured out how to make fun of it. For those keeping score at home, have no fear I will when I come up with something mean enough.] What these guys want is any actual achievement, experience or actually going and doing shit suspect, because in the glamorous new world of the internet they’re hoping there’s gold to be found in simply bitching clever bitches with nothing behind them.

    Don’t kid yourself about why Freddie wants that.

    — Sanjay · Oct 26, 02:16 AM · #

54. Ahhh…. the internet.

    — cw · Oct 26, 02:32 PM · #

55. What these guys want is any actual achievement, experience or actually going and doing shit suspect

    Nobody thinks you’ve actually “gone and done shit”, Sanjay.

    — Chet · Oct 27, 05:12 AM · #

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