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What hills are you dying on?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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eating meat doesn't inflict any pain or suffering though.
It does, because the meat industry is tremendously abusive to animals. Ontop of that it's a poor use of land and it contributes greatly to global warming. But for sure, the animals feel pain and suffering assuming it is possible for them to do so. Trillions of shrimp die horribly painful deaths every year, but nobody cares because they have a funny-sounding name.
all of that can be true without necessitating veganism
Moral baseline is not a necessity. It's a comparison point. Basically, if you're not vegan, you should be doing something else to end up net-positive (from a utilitarian point of view). I'm not vegan, I'm vegetarian, so I'm in the negatives I guess.
I'm not a utilitarian. most people aren't
Then I guess for you there is no way to outweigh not being vegan. Consider utilitarianism :)
i have considered it, and its epistemic issues make it impractical as a basis of deciding correct actions.
Oh, you need to employ bayesianism to make utilitarianism even begin to make sense. Regardless of whether I might ultimately find utilitarianism contradictory, Bayesianism is the hill I'd die on.
you are splitting hairs
none of this makes eating meat cause pain or suffering. these are all problems with production, not consumption.
Describe a way to eat meat that doesn't require prior suffering then.
an event in the future cannot cause an event in the past. eating the meat doesn't cause it to have been produced.
I am not interested in discussing meta-physics. For you to eat meat, an animal suffered. That is the point.
eating meat doesn't cause an animal to have suffered.
That is true, so the pieces of meat which were placed on earth by god 6k years ago can be eaten guilt-free. However, all other pieces of meat require harvesting from an animal first, incurring the aforementioned downsides. Just as purchasing an item encourages its production, eating meat encourages its purchase.
Here are two simple scenarios where eating the meat does indeed cause meat to be produced:
Isn't this simple common sense though? Were you really not aware this is how the world works?
none of that is causal.
I used "so" and "hence" in both of those examples, indicating what I perceive as causality. How am I wrong?
people have free will. their actions can only be said to be caused by their own will.
A simple test of causality, X => Y: go back in time and change X to ¬X. If ¬Y as a result, it would appear X => Y can be inferred.
You can say your eating meat is your free will, but if the meat were counterfactually not produced, you would not eat it. Similarly, your eating meat causes other people to produce more meat. They may have free will, if you believe in that -- but you can't deny that if you hadn't done X, they wouldn't have done Y.
meat producers are responsible for their own actions. no one else causes them.
I understand where you're coming from, but there's a problem with your philosophy.
it's well-understood by economists that the market behaves according to mathematical rules. The exact rules in question may be debated, but regardless it's clear from observation that markets are very effective in some scenarios at deriving optimal response to their environments (at least in some scenarios). Remove one meat producer from the market, it will inevitably be replaced by another one that's just as good, or so the theory goes. As a result, it's rather useless to say that meat producers are responsible for their own actions and that no one else causes them -- because in fact, the actions are caused by the market's environment. You can say it, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that you, the consumer, exercise control over the market.
If the production of meat is immoral, and the producers don't meaningfully affect the quantity of meat produced, then it is actually the fault of the consumer (who will not be replaced simply because they stop eating meat) that the meat is produced.
(IMO, most political ideologues who are steeped in theory agree that markets behave like this, but disagree on how or whether to stop them.)
this is storytelling, not evidence. if we can't agree that meat producers have free will, and i am only responsible for my own actions, we have a fundamental disagreement that won't be resolved on lemmy. but ask yourself: at what point do meat producers become responsible for tehir own actions?
they become responsible for their own actions when quitting the industry would reduce the harm done to animals.
obviously we disagree. i hold them accountable for their actions regardless.
Regardless of whether the meat industry itself is a problem, you surely must admit that consuming meat from the industry only feeds the meat industry.
whether I do or not, the industry continues to grow.
Yeah, due to increased demand. Let's be clear here, I'm not talking about "how much difference can just one person make?" -- if you eat meat, you eat one person's worth of meat. That one person's worth of meat is due to you. If you did not eat meat, there would be one less person eating meat, and the meat industry would be that much smaller; a couple fewer animals might be slaughtered as a result over the course of your lifetime (I have no idea how many animals the typical person eats tbh).
I'm not claiming that one person becoming vegetarian will bring a halt to the meat industry.
if I died today there is no reason for me to believe any industry would get smaller as a result, and I would of course stop purchasing everything.
there are more vegans now more than ever, and more meat produced. being vegan doesn't decrease the size of the industry.
Obviously not. Eating meat increases the size of the meat industry. If twice as many people ate meat, that'd be twice as good for the meat industry -- I think. At least some constant factor times better. I would have to double-check my old textbook to see what classical economics predicts, there might be diminishing returns.
eating meat doesn't cause people in the meat industry to do anything. they get to choose what they do.
Are you just trolling at this point? Do you even understand what you're saying about causality? Are we debating semantics?
Edit: this is like saying you have zero ethical qualms with somebody hiring an assassin to kill somebody. Yeah, the assassin ultimately does the deed, but you're still paying for it. If you had not hired the assassin, the person would not have died -- looks like cause and effect to me.
Similarly, you should understand that if you choose to eat meat, that benefits the meat industry and more animals will die as a result. Put aside your definition of "cause" for a moment -- you must agree with me that this is true right?
I pity that you spent this long talking to a very poor LLM set out to troll people. Either that, or a human so far gone there's truly no point in talking to them, as they deluded themselves into believing that the world is completely seperated from their actions.
I think I learned a little from this interaction. But it was more cathartic than I would have thought to be honest. That was two accounts btw.