Drolefille, I hope you saw my post responses at end of pg 24 and start of pg 25.
I did, I was just traveling with all my Master's program stuff and was stuck on mobile so I had to wait to respond.
I'm sure they have sapience of some things, and they could possibly have sapience of freedom if they've felt it.
Provide evidence then. I don't think you know what sapience means.
Animals do not have the same concept of freedom that you do. Putting a dog in a crate isn't restricting its freedom of self in the same way putting a man in a cage is.
In the same sense, man isn't all that sapient in some similar spots either. They do not know how lucky they are. "Oh, I lost about 80 dollars in all" *yes this is me as an example* but what I didn't realize is that there are people starving off in Africa.
Sapience isn't wisdom in the moment, and it doesn't mean you always make good choices. You're sapient because you can use your judgement, not because you necessarily do.
I can never truly remember or know what pain really is until I feel it, neither can any human.
In the same sense, animals cannot know what freedom really is until they feel it.
That's a nice story, but there's no evidence that my indoor cat really wants to run outside and never come back. And cats are the least domesticated of our pets. She benefits from the constant source of food and water here as well as the companionship - domestic cats stay in a sort of kitten phase because we don't kick them out at maturity like mother cats do - but she has no concept of freedom or captivity, and no, no love.
Make a claim of sapience, provide evidence.
Fair enough, can't say I haven't a few times also.
Good, so animals = non-human animals for the course of this discussion.
Age has nothing to do with arguments.
No, age has to do with you being a minor and simultaneously not getting the joke.
It wasn't an argument, you were lashing out with an illogical statement.
Should a murderer be okay with being murdered?
No, and I wouldn't expect one to be. If nothing else, self interest gets in the way.
So you are equating meat eating with murder now yes? So you consider animals people? Please be specific on these.
animals are not people, but people are certainly animals.
Not for the purposes of this argument. Animals = non-human for the purpose of this discussion.
The thing is, both animals and people suffer, so making them suffer is prone to moral consideration. I don´t see why specie must come into question for it.
And the corn you eat is farmed by machines that kill snakes, mice, rabbits, and pretty much anything in the way. I don't see killing an animal for food as equivalent of making them suffer unnecessarily - now my ideal and reality aren't there yet, but it is possible to find ethically raised meat and other animal products.
They can suffer.
Eating meat promotes their suffering for gastronomical pleasure. (at least in bast majority of meat-eaters)
Without eating meat there is non-existence for most of them, is that better or worse?
And in the wild they exist for other animals' "gastronomical pleasure" is that better or worse?
I find it ethically neutral.
I see love from cows. You might see instinct, but i've seen cows behave very affectionately toward one another (calling for each other, cuddling and grooming etc.).
Are you just anthropomorphizing them though? How do you know it's love and not instinct. A cow calls for calf because that's what instinct says, if the calf is dead she keeps calling because he hasn't shown up yet. That seems to us like mourning and love but it's really instinct. Maybe you could argue our love is really instinct and I personally think it is derived from instinct, but that our intelligence, our sapience, makes us different.
Why is 'humanity' a criteria?
In fact, why is sapience a criteria? When you are hurting/haring something, shouldn't the criteria be it's ability to feel and suffer? You don't need sapience or high intelligence in order to suffer greatly.
If someone was torturing a cat, would it make you feel bad for the cat?
I would. And I also feel bad that it suffers when we breed and then kill it. Why should you feel bad for a cat being physically harmed but not for the cow being slaughtered?
Because causing pain purely for pleasure is different than killing something for utility. Even if you argue that we don't have to have THAT specific utility, a slaughterhouse worker isn't gleefully watching an animal be in pain, they're doing their job. People who eat a steak aren't relishing the pain that the animal experienced, they're feeding themselves.
Causing pain for pleasure in torturing animals is a psychological problem, an inability to feel empathy that typically carries over to humans. Most fully well adjusted humans with empathy distinguish between the humans and animals. Maybe this is, again, only self interest. Maybe it's an evolutionary relic of our own sort of tribalism, but mostly I think it's because there are no other intelligent species on this planet.
If we had neanderthals' descendants living here with us, we'd probably include them as non-food sapient people rather than food-animals. (I can certainly write a SF story where its otherwise, but logistically it's too had to keep sapient beings for food even if you somehow don't have ethical issues with it. We'd have fought wars and if we didn't eliminate each other probably have some semblance of equality by now. )
The reason we don't eat other humans is entirely cultural. Which is why there have been many instances throughout history of humans eating humans and humans torturing humans. The reasons that you think about eating another human as being unethical or taboo or squeamish is the same for someone brought up in a vegetarian environment/community/culture in regards toward meat-eating.
Well you can't logistically raise people for food. It doesn't make sense, we're too expensive to raise and we breed to slowly. I wouldn't complain about a culture that ate its deceased outside of the health reasons - which are not related to the taboo per se, that taboo is probably more like the incest taboo, there's some evolutionary reasoning behind it and most people never consider close family members as potential mates due to a psychological/hormonal process that happens during youth that I don't know a lot about but could look up if you want to know more.
I grok that the taboo exists for vegetarians with regards to eating meat, but once you recognize it as a cultural taboo rather than a universal ethical principle it's no longer logical to attempt to enforce it on others as an ethical principle. It's cool that it's "your" culture and taboo, but don't expect me to live by it. Similarly I'd never expect someone else to eat meat. But not torturing people is something I can say - despite certain governments thinking differently - should be a universal ethical principle. A taboo against eating with a certain hand, or certain types of animals, or from getting tattoos are fine, but they're taboos.
(I'm not much of a sociologist, more psychology so I hope I make sense here. I'm less precise on these issues.)
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