= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
farming even for vegetables requires killing rodents and birds
Killing birds? Really? I'd have thought keeping them away would be much more practical.
So why stop eating meat, and yet disregard all the other multiple cases in which our technological civilization massively kills animals?
You have more control over whether to eat meat than over those other things. And some of them are much smaller -- e.g., I guess the average driver kills at most one animal ever by bumping into them, whereas the average meat-eater may consume thousands of animals.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Somewhere that's easy to evaluate and that generally gives results that match reasonably well with those of careful case-by-case deliberation. For most vegetarians, pigs will be on one side and spiders on the other; the exact location of the line will vary.
It doesn't need to give results that match perfectly in every case; no one has the time or mental energy to make every moral decision optimally. And it doesn't have to be deduced from universal general principles; the point of drawing a line is to provide an "easier" approximation to the results on gets by applying one's general principles carefully case by case.
So, e.g., the simplest vegetarian policy says something like: "Don't deliberately eat animals." This will surely be too restrictive for most vegetarians' actual values; e.g., I bet most vegetarians would have no moral objection to eating insects. But so what? It's a nice simple policy, easy to apply and easy to explain, and if it means you sometimes have to eat vegetables when you had the option of eating insects, well, that's not necessarily a problem.
Someone inclined towards vegetarianism who decides, after careful reflection, that most fish aren't sufficiently capable of suffering to worry much about (and/or just really likes eating fish) may choose a more permissive policy along the lines of "no animals other than fish" or "no animals other than seafood". That might be too permissive for their actual values in some cases -- e.g., they might not actually be willing to eat octopus. But, again, that's OK; if they see octopus on the menu they can decide not to eat it on the basis of actual thought rather than just applying their overall policy, much as a non-vegetarian might if they see monkey meat on a menu. Or they might just always defer to the overall policy and accept that sometimes it will lead them to eat something that overall they'd prefer not to have eaten. (I would expect the first of those options to be much more common.)
Another vegetarian, worried about broader harms than just being eaten, might adopt veganism: "Don't eat anything derived from animals." That's a really strict policy, strict enough to be really inconvenient and difficult for health in a way that ordinary vegetarianism isn't; that's probably one reason why few people are vegans. But, again, adopting such a policy isn't the same thing as claiming that eating something is morally acceptable if and only if it contains nothing derived from animals; it just means deciding that drawing the line there gives a good enough approximation with little enough cognitive load.
Do you think there's something wrong about all that? Because it seems obviously reasonable to me.
(Disclaimer: I am not myself a vegetarian, and my guesses about what "most vegetarians" think are only guesses.)
Well, perhaps it is a reason of "cognitive simplicity" but it really feels a very artificial line when someone refuses to eat meat in every situation, with all associated consequences, like they are invited to relatives for christmas eve dinner and they won't eat meat, putting extra burden on the person inviting him so they cook a secondary vegetarian meal for him, and yet not caring much about the rats that are killed regularly in the basement of his apartment by the pest control.
It feels more like a religious interdiction than an utilitarian decision. There are people who avoid eating meat, but do occasionally ("flexitarian" they are called I think). Those appear as much more reasonable than a strict "no meat" policy, if you admit that killing animals is something society has to do anyway, so you try to avoid it, but not in a strict manner.
I do myself have lots of "ethical behavior", like I try to buy fair trade products when I can for stuff like tea, coffee, chocolate, ..., because I want third world producers to be treated decently. But I know that my computer was probably assembled by workers in sweet shops, and if I'm offered a non-fair trade tea at a relative I won't refuse it.