Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural"

• stickly@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  How’s the weather in your fantasy land? You winning your fight against that straw man? I didn’t say anything about over or under population, that’s a completely different philosophical discussion. That would be a debate over questions like:

  • What quality of life is acceptable?
  • Is putting a finite lifespan on civilization acceptable? If so, how long?
  • Is it ethical to depopulate? By what methods?
  • Would it be ethical to conserve resources to sustain civilization in perpetuity by euthanizing the infirm?
  • What about a hard limit on personal consumption a la Logan’s Run ?

  You are constricting your ethical ideal to automatically answer some of those questions. Here’s a rephrasing of our conversation:

  • Fact 1: Humanity is confined to earth with a finite supply of completely non renewable resources [I’d encourage you to look into the impossibility of inter-planetary human civilization, the gist being that humans evolved for the specifically for Earth and it’s ecology; we’ll never have the energy and raw materials to reproduce that]
  • Fact 2: There is a hard limit on Earth’s capacity to sustainably support life. This would be a carrying capacity in the low billions if all resources were dedicated to humans.
  • Fact 3: Earth has 8 billion humans and counting. This is sustained entirely by a limited reserve of biochemical energy stored over millions of years. [I can get into the technical details if you’d like but there is no escaping the physical laws of entropy + our energy usage. ie: solar panels can’t cover the resource cost of more solar panels.] Depending on your thoughts on population management, this is either fine and we’ll just burn through our civilization’s resources or our population will be reduced by some method in conjunction with resource management to extend the lifespan of human civilization
  • Fact 4: Humans evolved to fit a specific niche. This natural ecological role is as a primitive hunter gatherer, foraging in balance with other species. This minimal impact state has a far lower maximum sustainable population in the range of 10s of millions. Perhaps lower depending on how many modern life improvements you let expand the ecological footprint.
  • Your ethical axiom: All creatures have the exact same rights as humans

  This axiom automatically answers many questions raised by the other facts.

  • If reproduction is a natural right in any capacity, humanity can’t ever ethically exceed earth’s carrying capacity. Until we reach a sustainable usage of our resources, humans must be equitably and fairly culled to preserve the rights of humans and other animals (because other animals don’t have the agency to cull themselves like humans)
  • Civilisation must be sustainable or the rights of our progeny will be infringed by our own consumption
  • The sustainable state must not infringe unnecessarily on the rights of other animals. This, defacto, limits us near our primal state described in Fact 4.
  • Ergo: Getting to that state requires a 99%+ reduction in the human population. That low level of human population without access to our resource intensive modern tools is basically a collapse of civilization.

  You can whine and sarcastically deflect but that’s the conclusion of your statement on total, universal animal rights. It’s not an undefendable position, but you must understand you’re pushing for a heavily restrained form of Anarcho-primitivism. If the concept of near total human civilization collapse for the benefit of other animals makes you uncomfortable (as it does for me), you’d want to reconsider that view in some way:

  • All lifeforms have rights but our human existence requires us to value human rights above others
  • Species suicide is the only ethical option because humans are the only creature capable of making that choice
  • Any ethical framework for universal animal rights is unenforceable in reality even if correct. ie. The personal choice to harm another animal is unethical but the act itself is not. Indirect and accidental harm is more acceptable than direct harm

  So I ask again, what’s your choice? There’s no free lunch.

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yep, nazi shit. Fuck off.

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    • stickly@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yay I win!

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