OMG!!! Regulus, ur living in the meatrix!!!!!!! take the red pill quick!
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That's one brilliant deduction, because it goes way over my head.Player-X said:
What I said is that I find it horrible when I see or read about cruel living-conditions of animals; if I'm ignorant on such matters, I can't be expected to consider every specific cow I know nothing about, now can I? I also said that I feel there isn't enough penalty in many countries for such cruelty, if any at all, and that it deserves to be changed. Your post is a perfect example of things I did not say, and in a manner I will avoid at all times.
Razor Blade had a point: A lot of farm animals are raised to serve us for our needs in food. I have never had any problems with that, as long as these animals do not suffer. Here in the Netherlands, there is at least quite some effort being put in offering alternatives to the boxed types of farm animal treatment. It is also required here nowadays to have the facilities/means to kill these animals painlessly, and to do away with methods that often end up completely brutal, like slitting throats. Such things definitly put my mind to ease, whether I buy meat or not.
Yes, which brings an interesting question to mind: Was he a vegetarian out of sympathy for animals, or was he convinced eating meat was bad for his metabolism?industrian said:And in a less serious tone: Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian.
You'd be right if this was practiced everywhere.Razor Blade said:
But it's not. What I find worse are the living conditions. Ever since the industralization started, each affecting community tried to do so in agriculture as well, where space with live cattle was being maximized in efficiency by boxing the poor things up in spaces just big enough so they could stand up, lay down, eat and drink. There are still farm animals being treated this way all over the world.
And it is. No matter how the Quran and Torah say the animal must be killed, it reportedly still goes wrong very often. Stupid mistakes in slitting the throat often create unnecessary and gruesome suffering.industrian said:
Considerations like these weigh heavily in my evaluation of traditions and superstitions.
A much nicer reply than I would have given. I'd best leave it at that..Boltzmann said:They're not mutually exclusive worries
After work tonight I saw a truck load of sheep going to the slaughterhouse. One of them pointed their heads through the holes and "baaa"'d in my direction.
I would have felt sorry for them but Haggis tastes so damn good.
I would have felt sorry for them but Haggis tastes so damn good.
someone must be reading too much statistics probablity theormsBoltzmann said:They're not mutually exclusive worries
I'd look at it on different prespectives though. Priority should go to the same species ( aka : humans ) before we can care about other species ( I am not saying animals should be mistreated, but there are things that should come first).
Upon re-reading the previous posts, I have to disagree with this one :
Sorry, but the energy transfer is still taking place. We are taking part in the food chain ( web should be a much accurate term), otherwise we'd be dead. Even if we all turned vegetaranians, we are STILL taking part in the food chain. Unless we all turn into independant producers ( which wont happen any time, our bodies cant produce all essential protiens), we are regarded as consumers, even if we dont hunt for food.Boltzmann said:
Yours,
-Elly
Because... ? Further explanation is needed if you don't want people to get the wrong idea about you and your "great" thought...エッリー said:I think people should feel sorry for the humans suffering in the poor third world countries before worrying about farm animals
Nope, I’ve been reading a lot of ethics lately.エッリー said:someone must be reading too much statistics probablity theorms
Priority should go to the same color (aka: whites) before we care about other colors OR Priority should go to the same country (aka: whatever country you happen to live in) before we can care about other countries.エッリー said:
The thing is, the boundary that you set is arbitrary. You’re just being a human chauvinist, saying that we’ve higher moral status just because we’re humans.
I’m not saying that animals have the exact moral status as ourselves, the question is still open, but the answer is not an automatic “no”, based on the belief that humans are better than the other animals.
This kind of belief (“let us care for our kind first”) has led to a lot of unnecessary suffering throughout story, when countries, villages or even families isolated themselves (let us take care of ourselves first; we’ll help them afterwards).
No, we’ve completely sidesteped normative ecological worries about obtaining food. We don’t participate in the food web anymore, not in the sense meant by ecologists (when a ecologist speak about food chain, he’s referring to a specific place [the ecosystem], where we can identify the relationships that are going on between its inhabitants).エッリー said:
Humans don’t have such worries, we no place anymore in the food web. If I want to eat frogs, I go to the supermarket and buy them. If I want to eat rabbits, I can buy them too. Same for pork, beef, vegetables and everything else. We don’t participate in the ecosystem anymore (well, that’s not technically correct, that’s for sure. We do participate in it, but we don’t play be the rules). We’re not hunted by anything, nor do we need to hunt anything in order to survive (except for the primitive tribes who are still around, of course).
This whole discussion about the energy transfer is beside the point. If we could synthesize all of our food out of raw materials (like dirt, for instance), energy transfer would still be taking place, yet no sane person would say that we’re part of food web (and this part about synthesizing food from raw materials may happen when we reach mature molecular nanotechnolohgy [or zetatechnology, to use the term coined by Eric Drexler]).
In fact, I’ll make the point that ever since the advent of herding techniques and agriculture, human beings sidestepped the whole “food web” issue, since we were no longer constrained by the usual concerns over the availability of food (in a balanced ecosystem, no animal population can grow beyond a certain size, or else they’ll starve [their food supply will not increase proportionally], thus maintaining the balance. The human population jumped from a mere thousands to more than 6 billion individuals. Can you compare our situation to that of any other organism?).
But I'll offer an alternative as well, if you think that the fact that we still consume food make us part of a food chain/web. I'll say that humans have created their own food web, based on agriculture. That is, we participate in a human-made food web, and so the normative worries about the food chain (which were brought up by industrian, in an earlier post) are useless.
Blah, you didnt get the joke ;pBoltzmann said:
That is called discrimination/racism. Like I said, it's a matter of priorities. First things first. I am not saying animals shouldnt deserve any concern. Ofcourse they do, but I ll illustrate my thoughts in this analogy. Say that you have to visit your sick sister in the hospital next morning, yet you have promised your friend to fix his car on the very same time. You choose to attend one of those events first before going to the other ( whatever that choice may be, I am not going to debate about that ). Does that mean that the person you visited/helped first is more important? Nope. Both of them could be equally important to you, but you priorised attending to one of them first since you can only do one thing at a timeBoltzmann said:
Similarly, instead of dividing our energy into plant/animal/poverty/war/human/yadda yadda concerns, we should priorise the most important ones at first and focus at that, then we can give the other matters our full attention once we resolve our important priorities. In that, we would solve ( or at least minimise ) each case instead of dividing our attention into all sorts of concerns , which eventually lead to nowhere.
Animals are not tortured/mistreated as humans living in the stone-aged 3rd world countries. Heck, a dog living in the developed countries gets better treated than a human being living in say,...Somalia. Yes, we should care about animals, but they can wait a bit, lets save the humans suffering first. Why? because they NEED it more than the animals do. Priority should depend on the needs. Ofcourse, if we had more animals suffering than humans do, then we should give them attention first then take care of the humans - which isn't the case in our modern day world.
Kinda ironic how I am proposing a Humanitarian proposal, yet i was labelled ( even if indirectly ) "selfish"
I do agree with the point your making, I just got the impression that you were totally ignoring energy transfer. Though, I'd give you a small teaser.Boltzmann said:
Would mammal offspring be considered part of the food chain? After all, they do not hunt for food, but their parents do that for them ( Just like how we arent hunting/raising cattle ( k, subjective but that besides the point ) for food, but we let others do that for us ) Well you're missing the other factors in here. Human population didnt increase only because of lower concerns over food availabilty, but because there are other factors contributing such as a) many fatal diseases got cured as medicine advanced b) humans spread and explored more land = more resources c) Less major wars are being fought ( take the crusades for example, that lasted for almost 3 centuries ). d) Technological advances/Fossil fuels discovery increased the population of people living in deserted areas..etc e) Clean water is more available now, sea water can be refined and drank in areas where water is scarce....etc.Boltzmann said:
Yours,
-Elly
You missed the point. It's the way you're choosing your priorities that is wrong.エッリー said:
I could just say that you're dicriminating against animals, on the sole basis that they're a genetically different from us. If you allow discrimination on a genetic basis, we could easily justify discrimination for people with Down's syndrome (since they have an extra chromossome) or other hereditary diseases.
The issue of whether animals deserve full moral status (or as much moral status as human beings) is far from solved. Just read treatises on modern ethics and you'll see it. For instance, read Animal Liberation , by Peter Singer. There are other books, but this is a good introduction.
As far as my ethical system goes, I think that all sentient life deserves the same moral status (regardless of whether they're humans, klingons or wookies). Now, whether other mammals should be considered as sentient beings is another question entirely, and I don't pretend to have an answer to it. As Oscar Wilde would say, I'm not young enough to know everything.
The problem with your approach is that you just assume, a priori, that animals are morally inferior to humans, and deserve less moral consideration. I'm not saying that they're our moral equals, either. I'm just saying that the question is tougher than it appears at first glance, and that "humans deserve atention first" needs a stronger justification than "we're of the same species".
Species-discrimination is the same as racial discrimination among humans; it just works in a different level.
I'm not against your humanitarian proposal. I think that helping people is good too. I'm a regular member of Permanent End International, as well as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (both are non-profit charities, focused on improving the human condition).エッリー said:Kinda ironic how I am proposing a Humanitarian proposal, yet i was labelled ( even if indirectly ) "selfish"
That's trickyエッリー said:I do agree with the point your making, I just got the impression that you were totally ignoring energy transfer. Though, I'd give you a small teaser.
My answer would be that a non-human mammal offspring is part of the food chain because:
a) Food supply is scarce and outside it's control (therefore it's part of a balanced ecosystem);
b) It will grow up to be a full-fledged individual, able to participate in the usual exchanges of adult individuals of its species (therefore it'll have to hunt or forage for food).
This is only a tentative answer, of course
(see that humans, at least in the developed world don't meet any of the two requirements: although our food supply is not inexhaustible, humans have a much easier time than animals to obtain food [specially since we can always increase our production to meet our needs] and adult human beings still don't have to hunt or forage in order to eat.)
No, I'm not missing the other factors - I purposefully let them out. I wasn't saying that the populational explosion seen in the human race is entirely a product of increased food availability. Aggriculture is one factor among many, but without it this growth would be impossible. No matter how much land we have, or how advanced our medicine, or how pacific we are, we'll die if we don't have food.エッリー said:
Of course the other factors that you listed play a major part on the hyperbolic growth of the human population (yes, plot a graph for our populational increase and you'll see that it's hyperbolic, not an exponential, as we're taught sometimes). I only choose to underscore the food factor because we were discussing the food chain.
dooh, people, meat is meat, if you won't eat it you can be eaten Mother Nature law :evil:
Mother Nature law :evil:
Clothes are clothes... that doesn't mean that it's ok to senselessly murder animals or to exploit people on the process of making it... same happens with meat. You could take the typical easy way of saying "meat is meat" and avoid all the moral implications or you could do what humans are supposed to do and dwell on the issue with the aims of making things better...KanedA said:dooh, people, meat is meat, if you won't eat it you can be eaten
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