realitybites.
I'm the anonymous you had the longest conversation with. (The educated high school dropout. / The one with Susan, Mike and Frank.) This is the second time I discuss animal rights with you. The first time took place about a month ago. (I still haven't forgotten your idea of 'moral agents'; I hope you've let that argument go, as it is incredibly irrelevant.)
Mainly you're great. You are an intelligent person. You're certainly more intelligent than 99% of the people I've had these conversations with. This makes me like and respect you. The thing that doesn't make me like and respect you is that some of your intelligence seems to be pseudo. You hold on to vague philosophical theories when often all you need is common sense. You lack backbone to say: ok, I may have been wrong this time, you seem to know more than I do.
After all: you obviously don't have a clear stance on animal rights. You don't really know what you think about the subject, or why you see things the way you do. You've yet to find a stable, rational basis for your beliefs. At the moment, the basis is merely emotional: you simply have this feeling that humans are more important than dogs, and you'd like to be able to rationalize it. That's not enough. Many people intuitively react to the suffering of a dog more strongly than to the suffering of a human. That doesn't make dogs more important than humans.
You keep repeating that you and 'many others' / 'most people' are speciesists, as if this somehow justified speciesism. A hundred years ago most people were racists. Of course they were. People are not rational beings, people are cultural beings. Cultures evolve.
To someone like me, who's actually spent years writing books on the subject, these conversations are honestly f***ing tiring. I hate this. This wears me out. I mean, let's face it: you don't like it when Morrissey compares the modern meat industry to the Holocaust mainly because you personally eat meat. You find the comparison uncomfortable. Therefore you don't like the idea of it being factual. And that's it. You can admit this without going vegetarian.
Many of your arguments have been inconsistent and, more than anything else, irrelevant. (Reading your responses, I often find myself wondering: how on Earth is this relevant to anything I said?) You claim that 'many vegans' use 'emotional arguments', yet the only emotional arguments in this conversation have been written by you. According to you, some vegan somewhere has claimed that animals are 'sacred' - so what? What does that have to do with our conversation? I'm an atheist. I don't think that anybody is 'sacred'. In this conversation, many posters have used very good, extremely rational arguments to explain why your arguments are invalid. -> You come up with new invalid arguments. -> Other posters explain why these arguments are invalid. -> You come up with new pseudo-philosophical crap, and I'm sure this could go on forever. You clearly haven't thought this through. That's okay. Accept that in this conversation, other posters make more sense than you do. They don't have their moral self-image at stake. Give up.
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On some of your latest arguments:
"Humans have a potential for great suffering because of our potential for interconnectedness." As I said, this isn't relevant. We are talking about the meat industry. The animals in the meat industry have enough suffering even without the burden of their parents. They already suffer every second of every day.
So far, I think we've agreed on the fact that all vertebrates are complex, sentient beings. Now, suddenly: "We don't know how much of what we are seeing is fright or just behaviors that look like fright responses. A cat may hear a noise and react--its ears pop up and it runs under the couch. Does she actually experience fear? Pain? Suffering? Or are we interpreting what looks like these things, to be that? Anthropomorphism?" Cut the crap!
I wrote: "About 60 billion individual animals suffer in the meat industry every year. In a decade, 600 billion. That's a much greater number than the number of all humans combined. In most cases, the suffering is constant from birth to death. Even if every human on the planet started suffering right now, the amount of suffering would still be pretty small compared to the suffering in the meat industry."
Your response: "It just isn't ALL about suffering, as far as I am concerned. It is more than that. Suffering is unavoidable, inevitable. In fact, it can be argued that suffering is a part of the human condition, just as much as pleasure is. And that a flat line, no pleasure/pain dichotomy, or just a constant steady stream of pleasure, would be undesirable. The lows make the highs noticeable. We need that contrast. It is what being human is all about."
I don't see how this is relevant. The Holocaust was wrong because it caused pain and suffering. Period. That 'more than that' factor sounds religious. It does not exist in scientific reality.
What I wrote about the amounts of suffering ^ makes complete sense. It should end this conversation. Since you're unable to tell me that I'm wrong, you should admit that I'm right: the meat industry is a greater crime than the Holocaust, since it creates more pain and suffering.
So far, I think we've agreed on the fact that suffering is the point. Now, suddenly: "Humans have equal moral value. But NOT because we all have the potential to suffer. But because we are human with human QUALITIES." This is religion. You could just as well say that only white people have equal moral value, because only white people have 'white people qualities'. The only morally relevant thing that a popular child genius and a homeless, mentally challenged orphan have in common is their ability to suffer if we hurt them. That's why we shouldn't hurt them. = human rights. This applies to non-human animals just as well. = animal rights.
Finally:
You say that all humans are morally equal as if this (unlike animal rights) was some sort of universal truth. It's not a universal truth. You've simply learned the concept of human rights. If you think about it, equal human rights don't necessarily make much 'sense'. This is the first time in the history of our species when people claim to believe that all humans are equal. It is not a natural idea. It is just as unnatural as the idea of animal rights. Hopefully, societies will eventually adopt the unnatural idea of animal rights the same way they've now adopted the unnatural idea of human rights. It would be fair.
To assume that all humans are morally equal isn't any more obvious than to assume that all sentient beings are morally equal. (In fact, the latter is the more consistent option.) If we start to measure an individual's value by, say, counting their family members, we lose the whole point; human rights, just like animal rights, are a matter of faith and agreement. They're not 'real'. We simply have to choose to start believing in them.
This is a f***ing massive post! I hope we can seriously wrap it up here. There isn't really anything smart to add. Thank you, my friend. o7