Meat Morality and Human/Animal/Alien Rights

If you did not have available to you the vast diversity of plants that are able to substitute in your diet the things you get from eating animals, you would have a harder time surviving. Human beings have evolved as omnivores which is why even though in modern times it is trivial, if you avoid eating meat then you usually have to be conscious that your plant sources of food have a certain diversity of nutrients. Which seem to provably be entirely a cultural thing. It is also true that the amount of people able/willing to grow their own crops is suprisingly small. The amount of people able/willing to perform life saving trauma intervention is also surprisingly small. Yet we manage to as a society find some people willing to take on these roles. It has absolutly nothing to do with the morality of killing animals and everything to do with the personality and cultural upbringing of individuals. Really there is no such difficulty. Plenty of "horrific" things result in desirable outcomes for ourselves. The kinds of things that happen to human explorers venturing into a new frontier (be it be the ocean or space, etc) can be "horrific" when things go wrong yet the personal qualities and the results of human exploration are regarded as some of our absolute highest virtues. The same can be said of some sports. The same thing can be said of war in defense of your country"horrific" is also hyperbole of course in the case of meat eating it is quite possible to believe that killing an animal is not "horrific". For some people who are squeemish about the issue it might just be "messy" or "smelly" or "hard work". There are plenty of reasons for humans to want to avoid killing an animal apart from the "horror" of it of which the foremost may just be the propensity of humans for laziness. There seems to be nothing of the sort. The difficulties we would have as a species from eliminating meat from our diet would be significant. There best argument I can think of is from a pure environmental perspective in that we are running out of land to raise our meat. Certainly an argument can be made for health reasons that we eat too much of it (westerners tend to be more carnivore vs omnivore) but to say that we have an obvious directive to not eat meat is a matter of an unevidenced opinion by people who have chosen that as their particular lifestyle.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

---

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. --Thomas Jefferson

In the same vein as my previous reply, it would perhaps be "moral" for aliens to treat us like cows if they had evolved the requirement to do so. That is the only analogy I can think of. That is also why people tend to think it is less moral to kill/eat/mistreat whales and other primates. Most of our meat comes from sources that we have domesticated, a skill we aquired during our evolution.Given that we must consume other life of some sort to survive, trying to decide where the "moral" line is with regard to what kind of life we can and cannot consume seem to be an exercise in arbitrary reasoning. Without modern interventions, humans physically require a certain amount of calorie dense plant food sources combined with the occasional meat. If the "morality" of the situation changes just because we can engineer a particular diet to avoid animal sources of nutrition then I am not quite sure why you would have such a high criteria as "objectivly moral" that you do to begin with.The only way we can reason about the morality is because we can reason about sophisticated food sources. Absent that there would be no discussion.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

---

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. --Thomas Jefferson

Yes, I understood you. That is why I provided 2 examples. One for 'skill' (farming) and one for 'psychology' (trauma response). Well no it doesn't. Straggler is looking for an objective moral. If there is a cultural influence, it cannot be objective.So you can have your personal moral all you want, just don't proclaim it to be universal. I don't disagree with that statement. But remember what you said? No such shift is required. We regularly condone activities for which we would not personally engage in for our direct benefit. In fact we often exalt the people willing to do them. That was my point. I never claimed that "laziness" causes that revulsion. You didn't quite get my point. I mentioned laziness to say that it isn't just "horror" that stops people from killing their own meat. You seem to casually be making that association when it is quite probable that "laziness" is just as much of a factor as to why people don't kill their own animals.Also, rather than "horror" it could just be "dirtiness" or "smelliness" that turns people off from doing the job themselves. You are using a worst case and making a broad generalization. That is a logical fallacy. Again you misunderstand. I said there MAY BE good reasons to REDUCE our intake of meat. There are environmental reasons to do this which is a very objective criteria. That is a far cry from the emotional moralizing that you have been doing.

---

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. --Thomas Jefferson