I'd rather think about the wrongs done to the indigenous peoples of American, instead of a goddamn bird.
OSU scientist questions the moral basis of a vegan diet (3/5/02)
Stick your guilt where the sun doesn't shine.
Caring about one injustice doesn't mean you shouldn't care about another.
Because people's lives are WAY more important than animals lives, right?
Because people's lives are WAY more important than animals lives, right? GTFO
Casey Rain said:Caring about one injustice doesn't mean you shouldn't care about another.
The injustices done to the indigenous peoples of America is of course a terrible thing. But, it's an entirely different argument, and the difference is, YOU are not contributing to THEIR suffering on a daily basis. If you want to make a thread about that though, I'll happily contribute. But it's irrelevant to this one.
Nice try.
Garbage argument. For that argument to have any merit, you have to assume that accidental death and deliberate, knowing, murder are equally abhorrent. Obviously, they are not.
Again, nice try. Try harder next time.
So if a kidnapper puts a gun to a person's head and holds his shoe over an ant and asks you to choose. Are you really gonna say "gee wiz, I don't know, I'm not in a position to make this grave ethical decision"?
We KNOW it kills wildlife. That's not accidental. How is knowing it has these consequences but doing it anyway any less worse than the outright killing?
If you have to conjure up bizarre hypothetical situations in order to prove a point, you're trying too hard and losing validity.
As Gandhi once said "In my mind the life of a lamb is of no less value than the life of a human being".
We should all strive to be that compassionate.
By this logic, if I know that a earthquake is going to hit and it's epicentre is at your mothers house and will kill her, and I don't literally fly to your country and physically remove her from that house, that's exactly the same thing as me tying her up to a chair and stabbing her repeatedly through the chest with a pitchfork.

You're pussying out because you know you don't want to answer that question.
So if a kidnapper puts a gun to a person's head and holds his shoe over an ant and asks you to choose. Are you really gonna say "gee wiz, I don't know, I'm not in a position to make this grave ethical decision"?
No. ("If you have to conjure up bizarre hypothetical situations in order to prove a point, you're trying too hard and losing validity." Sounds familiar!)
Killing a cow and eating it.
vs.
Refusing to kill a cow because of moral objections, having a product instead that you know causes animal harm and death in it's production and then STILL point the blaming finger at the cow eater.
This scientist, Steve Davis, concludes that if we're trying to kill as few animals as possible, we'll do better to eat beef--as long as it's fed on grass--then to follow a vegan diet.
The economist, Gaverick Matheny, took him to task for it about a year later in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics:
http://jgmatheny.org/matheny 2003.pdf
You should read the whole thing because he makes some other good points. But, basically, Davis made a gross error in his calculations. He assumes that an acre of land will feed the same number of people irrespective of whether it's used to raise grass-fed beef or to grow crops. In fact, an acre of land used for crops will feed about ten times as many people as an acre of land used for grass-fed beef. When that difference is fed into the calculations, Davis's argument is turned on its head, and proves that vegans are indirectly responsible for killing only about a fifth as many animals as those who eat grass-fed beef.
Davis is also only considering the number of animals killed and not the suffering they endured while alive.
"Early in the paper, Davis shifts from discussing the harm done to animals under different agricultural systems to the number of animals killed. This shift is not explained by Davis and is not justified by the most common moral views, all of which recognize harms other than death... Davis, in discussing the number of animals killed rather than their treatment prior to death, ignores an important question that must be answered in order to assess which system of agriculture causes the least harm."
"Predictably, his argument has been cited as a justification for traditional omnivorism, a misreading Davis did not intend and one that any faithful reading of his paper should prevent."
So, yeah, eating vegan kills some animals. But not as many as does meat-eating, and without the numerous concentration camps for animals.
If the argument is least harm and suffering, then vegans have the ethical edge over meat-eaters, both in numbers killed and in treatment. But this shouldn't be about moral superiority, just about doing the right thing and trying to cause the least harm if there's no way to avoid it.
Casey Rain said:Realistically, I would give both the human the opportunity to explain why he felt his life was more valid than the ant's.
We're talking about every day morals here anyway, not bizarre one off situations.
Casey Rain said:Ummmm, I'm using YOUR logic. Hence the hypothetical example. The whole point was that since I was using YOUR logic, I'd make a bizarre hypothetical point. I'm not sure how you completely managed to miss that, however I expected you to say that, as if I hadn't thought of it. hook line and sinker.
Casey Rain said:The second is still a morally better situation than the first.
Were Switzerland as evil as Nazi Germany for failing to act on them? Their actions could be perceived as wrong, but certainly nowhere NEAR as wrong as what the Nazi's did.