Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural"
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 7 hours agoNot everything is black and white. You are painting a picture where we have two options: (1) cause as much harm as we please and not worry about the consequences, or (2) cause no harm at all by eradicating our species from the face of the Earth (which would actually cause a lot of harm to members of our species but we’ll sidestep that for now).
But this is of course a false dichotomy. Because there are degrees to this. A vegan diet is undoubtably less harmful, both in its carbon footprint and in the direct harm in causes to other species. So if someone wants to reduce the amount of harm they are causing it’s the way to go. So why try to diminish that with this ridiculous dichotomy between death to all humans or unmitigated animal torture? If someone wants to decrease of amount of harm they are causing shouldn’t we be encouraging this sort of prosocial mindset?
stickly@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I’m not the one making the dichotomy! I’m fully in favor of all harm reduction possible (including a vegan/utilitarian vegan diet) for the obvious benefit of our own species. The commenter above is positing that there is no ethical direct/indirect violence toward any animals. It’s impossible to hold that position while simultaneously pretending billions of people can exist.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. A simple rational examination of our limited resources is being discarded because “animals have human rights/you support slavery/you want animals to be raped”. No, I have a very obvious and consistent position:
Humans are a higher class of animal and being good stewards of our only planet is crucial for our own well being. We thrive with nature and unnatural violence (like industrial animal farming) is bad for our psyche anyway. That doesn’t mean animals can’t or won’t die to support our existence.
This stuff is so basic and fundamental; tradeoffs HAVE to be made. Pretending that the world can support life (let alone a good life) for billions of people without animal death/displacement/extinction is deranged. It’s on the commenter to pick up the shambles of that position and make anything that can fit in the real world.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 35 minutes ago
Dude, I never, ever wrote that there would be no competition for resources like land. That’s fucking obvious. That doesn’t make life a “zero sum game”, a zero sum game means that every gain is someone elses’ loss, and that at the end of the game there are no new resources created. That is strictly not true. We can take actions in life which benefit us without harming others.
In real life, humans have rights, but we also take a balanced view of rights when there are conflicts. For example, if we need to build some important infrastructure, that takes priority over the rights of whoever is living where that infrastructure needs to go. My argument is that the rights of animals not to be killed is more important than our desire to have a tasty meal. I’m not out here arguing we shouldn’t build wind turbines because of their negative impacts on wildlife, because I know the positive impacts on countering climate change is better overall.
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 6 hours ago
You could argue that our way of life in wealthy countries is impossible without the exploitation of the third-world. Does that mean we are a higher class of humans? No.
Let’s just strive to be as harmless as possible and leave our grand philosophical ideas about who is better than who aside.