TW Scott:
I found your last post particularly amusing and enlightening.
Actually you have given me [no reasons not to eat meat], except for your own moral belief.
Partially correct. Notice that this thread is in the "Ethics, morality and Justice" forum. That means that we discuss - you guessed it - questions of ethics, morality and justice here.
I have given you good ethical reasons not to eat meat. They include:
1. Killing innocent beings purely for your own pleasure is wrong.
2. The meat industry is, by its very nature, cruel in its practices towards animals, and it is not ethical to support the wrongdoing of others.
3. Bringing animals into existence for the sole purpose of killing them for pleasure is wrong.
4. It is good to protect those over whom you have power, and wrong to exploit them.
5. Sentient creatures ought not to be treated as property. We abolished the slave trade, and the farming of meat animals is, in essence, no different to slavery.
Apart from that, there are other reasons:
6. Less land would be needed for agriculture if we didn't farm animals for food, which would help preserve the environment and biodiversity - generally considered a worthy aim by thinking people.
7. A vegetarian diet is probably healthier in the long run than a meat-based diet. (This is a separate debate, so I haven't really mentioned it up to this point. Also, it isn't an ethical argument, but a health-based one.
And the list goes on...
On your side of the argument, on the other hand, we've had no ethical arguments. You made a stab at "what is natural is always good", but I've shown you that argument doesn't hold water. You also tried "we have no alternative but to eat meat, or we'll die", but that one didn't wash, either. Then there's the old "I'm human, so I'm special, and therefore I can do what I want with animals" argument, which requires some kind of justification - a justification which nobody has managed to provide yet.
And that's about it, I think. Did I miss anything?
If you are just afraid of the question just say so, please. The reason you are afraid of it is that is like the real world.
Just for you, TW, I will respond to your question in a separate post below. It's irrelevant to the main argument, of course.
Again, you are completely wrong. I have never equated the eating of chicken to the murdering of people.
Whooo, thank god, you are not under oath. 15 years baby.
...
No, if you had reading comprehension above the fifth grade you would see this was trying to tell you that you have no real perception. You did equate eating animals with murdering people. Where you got this equation I can only guess they both include death.
This is hardly worth responding to. But if you want to play "find the quote", TW Scott, go ahead. Quote me where I said the eating of animals was the same as murdering people - if you can.
Since your comprehension level is obviously way beyond fifth grade, I'm sure you will have no problem distinguishing between "equating" and "comparing". For that matter, I'm not sure I even directly compared the two, but I could be wrong about that.
No I believe self awareness is factor of wheter or not I eat them.
A factor in what?
Oh great gonna tell a farmer his business. Ooh smart. Actually I did raise a cow for 4H, did raise chciken for money and eggs, and have raised a pig for slaughter. So you can just back your freight train up.
Interesting! Sounds like you have a vested interest. That might explain why you're so strident in your defense of meat eating.
Are you in the meat industry? Do you farm animals to sell for meat? If so, should anybody be surprised you'd be keen to defend your livelihood. They can hardly expect you to be objective, can they?
Tell me, TW Scott - in your extensive experience of rearing animals, have you ever spent any time just watching the animals in a close-to-natural setting? Do you keep your animals in small pens, or do they live in fields? Are they allowed to mix with other animals, or are they kept separate?
I do make the moral choice and your failure to understand that just makes me wonder how well you listen.
I have now asked you many times to explain your moral position. Here, you once again assert that your actions are moral. Do you think that, this time, you can actually back up that assertion?
On what basis is the killing and eating of animals morally justifiable?
When I first asked you this, the best you could come up with was to stick your fingers in your ears and say "I don't have to tell you if I don't want to." Now you've had a couple more days to think about a better answer. So...?
We cry foul over a few ranches that use antiquited and cruel methods to make veal, but ignore the vast majority who use State of the Art and kinder methods.
This is blatant misrepresentation, which again makes me wonder about your vested interests. Take one example:
About 4 billion chickens are killed every year in the United States. By far the majority of these are raised in tiny individual cages which are too small to allow the chicken to turn around in. These chickens virtually swim in their own excrement. They are fed hormones to fatten them up faster, which produce many deformities. Their legs often become too weak to hold them up - not that they ever get to use them anyway. These chickens never see sunlight. They live their entire, brief lives locked in those individual cages, before being killed by a machine built specifically for the purpose, but which nevertheless often does not do the job painlessly.
We're not talking "a few ranches" which treat chickens this way. The vast majority are treated this way.
You mention veal. What is veal? Baby calf, as you so helpfully pointed out before. At what age are these calves killed, TW? For what reason are they bred? What are their lives like during their brief lifespans? Do you know, or care? Or do you only care about the taste?
We cry foul over lumber operations but fail to see the reforesting that the same companies do.
Reforested land, in general, has a fraction of the biodiversity of the old-growth forest it is meant to replace. But that's a different argument.
You mention the media. Tell me, TW Scott, how much does the meat industry spend each year promoting meat? Now tell me how much animal rights groups spend. Compare and contrast. Whose message is louder? Or is it that you only notice those pesky animal rights people?
People like James R. have ben told that meat is immoral.
Yes. Everybody is introduced to ideas at some stage.
he does a touch of fact checking and of course finds biased sites.
Yes, and unbiased ones too. And I've read a number of books on the topic. I've read articles from both "sides" of this debate.
How much "fact checking" have you done? Not much, judging from the incorrect information you have posted.
So this reinforces his new belief.
As it happens, yes it does.
Add in meglomania and fear of facts and you get a fantaical group who believe they are superior to everyone else. They know that their morals are the only ones and if you don't agree you are just evil. There is no room for compromise in his world. There is no room to analyze situaltions, reality, or even the larger group dynamic.
Again, I point out the simple fact that I keep giving you good moral reasons not to eat meat, but you are yet to dig up even one defensible reason to eat it. Enough said, really.
I make no apologies for not being a moral relativist. I do not believe "everybody is entitled to his own individual moral code". On the contrary, I believe that some moral positions are logical and defensible, while others clearly are not. Some actions really are evil - it isn't just a matter of perception.
As for compromise, what would that involve here? You continue on as usual, and I give up trying to convince you to change? That is not a compromise - it would be an acknowledgement that your position had some validity - which it does not.
The "group dynamic" you say? I've already pointed out that safety in numbers is a poor argument. The mob has been wrong in the past, and on this issue it is wrong now, too. I urge you to break free of the mob and start doing some independent thinking.