Do angry vegans turn you against going vegan?

[Saul Goodman]

And hence a pretty good cover if you can pull it off without cracking.

And therein lies the problem.

 

[Baronage-Phase]

Spat my tea out I'm laughing so hard at this page
No offence to anyone...but there's some genuinely very funny posts today

 

[kebabking]

I wonder if vegan scene spycops - when they go to random Travelodges for their monthly debriefs - cut about in puppyskin brogues, have massive portions of Tandoori Chicken, Lamb Biryanni, and Burger King delivered, take 8 showers a day and spend the day saying 'nah, mate, i'm nothing special, just a cunt...'?

 

[existentialist]

being a pathetic baiting liar on here keeps you away from the school gates I guess, silver lining and all

Oh, and YOU'RE offended by insinuations?

Still, I guess it's OK if you're doing it, and it's not as bad as suggesting someone's an undercover copper, is it?

 

[existentialist]

There IS a line is there??

"I was only making a point", is that it?

 

[existentialist]

I wonder if vegan scene spycops - when they go to random Travelodges for their monthly debriefs - cut about in puppyskin brogues, have massive portions of Tandoori Chicken, Lamb Biryanni, and Burger King delivered, take 8 showers a day and spend the day saying 'nah, mate, i'm nothing special, just a cunt...'?

It's called "maintaining the covert persona"

 

[Saul Goodman]

I wonder if vegan scene spycops - when they go to random Travelodges for their monthly debriefs - cut about in puppyskin brogues, have massive portions of Tandoori Chicken, Lamb Biryanni, and Burger King delivered, take 8 showers a day and spend the day saying 'nah, mate, i'm nothing special, just a cunt...'?

 

[PaoloSanchez]

I missed out on the angry vegan meet up in London on Saturday. (grandson's birthday in Manchester)



I'll try and go next year, looks like it was a decent gathering.

 

[Saul Goodman]

I missed out on the angry vegan meet up in London on Saturday. (grandson's birthday in Manchester)



I'll try and go next year, looks like it was a decent gathering.

"A sea of vegans"
We should be so lucky

 

[8ball]

Grandson?

Had you down as early twenties.

 

[NoXion]

I missed out on the angry vegan meet up in London on Saturday. (grandson's birthday in Manchester)



I'll try and go next year, looks like it was a decent gathering.

"End all animal oppression" - does that include the use of pest control measures?

 

[Saul Goodman]

"End all animal oppression" - does that include the use of pest control measures?

Animal oppression that doesn't affect tofu munchers.

 

[8ball]

"End all animal oppression" - does that include the use of pest control measures?

Well, of course. And oppression of humans by humans. And oppression of animals by animals.

Best thing is to take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.

 

[NoXion]

Well, of course. And oppression of humans by humans. And oppression of animals by animals.

Best thing is to take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.

Vegans may be complicit in the murder and displacement of animals, but at least they don't eat their corpses, dammit!

 

[Saul Goodman]

Vegans may be complicit in the murder and displacement of animals, but at least they don't eat their corpses, dammit!

So not only are they murdering cunts, they also waste the meat they murder?

 

[NoXion]

Thankfully, there is a way out:

Non-Human Animals

So far I've focused on suffering in just one species. This restriction of the abolitionist project is parochial; but our anthropocentric bias is deeply rooted. Hunting, killing, and exploiting members of other species enhanced the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. [Here we are more akin to chimpanzees than bonobos.] So unlike, say, the incest taboo, we don't have an innate predisposition to find, say, hunting and exploiting non-human animals wrong. We read that Irene Pepperberg's parrot, with whom we last shared a common ancestor several hundred million years ago, had the mental age of a three-year-old child. But it's still legal for so-called sportsmen to shoot birds for fun. If sportsmen shot babies and toddlers of our own species for fun, they'd be judged criminal sociopaths and locked up.

So there is a contrast: the lead story in the news media is often a terrible case of human child abuse and neglect, an abducted toddler, or abandoned Romanian orphans. Our greatest hate-figures are child abusers and child murderers. Yet we routinely pay for the industrialized mass killing of other sentient beings so we can eat them. We eat meat even though there's a wealth of evidence that functionally, emotionally, intellectually - and critically, in their capacity to suffer - the non-human animals we factory-farm and kill are equivalent to human babies and toddlers.

From a notional God's-eye perspective, I'd argue that morally we should care just as much about the abuse of functionally equivalent non-human animals as we do about members of our own species - about the abuse and killing of a pig as we do about the abuse or killing of a human toddler. This violates our human moral intuitions; but our moral intuitions simply can't be trusted. They reflect our anthropocentric bias - not just a moral limitation but an intellectual and perceptual limitation too. It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings. [Recall how Aristotle, for instance, defended slavery. How could he be so blind?] Our moral intuitions are poisoned by genetic self-interest - they weren't designed to take an impartial God's-eye view. But greater intelligence brings a greater cognitive capacity for empathy - and potentially an extended circle of compassion. Maybe our superintelligent/superempathetic descendants will view non-human animal abuse as no less abhorrent than we view child abuse: a terrible perversion.



True or not, surely we aren't going to give up eating each other? Our self-interested bias is too strong. We like the taste of meat too much. Isn't the notion of global veganism just utopian dreaming?
Perhaps so. Yet within a few decades, the advent of genetically-engineered vatfood means that we can enjoy eating "meat" tastier than anything available today - without any killing and cruelty. As a foretaste of what's in store, the In Vitro Meat Consortium was initiated at a workshop held at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in June 2007. Critically, growing meat from single stem-cells is likely to be scalable indefinitely: its global mass consumption is potentially cheaper than using intact non-human animals. Therefore - assuming that for the foreseeable future we retain the cash nexus and market economics - cheap, delicious vatfood is likely to displace the factory-farming and mass-killing of our fellow creatures.

One might wonder sceptically: are most people really going to eat gourmet vatfood, even if it's cheaper and more palatable than flesh from butchered non-human animals?
If we may assume that vatfood is marketed properly, yes. For if we discover that we prefer the taste of vat-grown meat to carcasses of dead animals, then the moral arguments for a cruelty-free diet will probably seem much more compelling than they do at present.

Yet even if we have global veganism, surely there will still be terrible cruelty in Nature? Wildlife documentaries give us a very Bambified view of the living world: it doesn't make good TV spending half an hour showing a non-human animal dying of thirst or hunger, or slowly being asphyxiated and eaten alive by a predator. And surely there has to be a food chain? Nature is cruel; but predators will always be essential on pain of a population explosion and Malthusian catastrophe?

Not so. If we want to, intelligent agents can use cross-species depot-contraception [4], redesign the global ecosystem, and rewrite the vertebrate genome to get rid of suffering in the rest of the natural world too. For non-human animals don't need liberating; they need looking after. We have a duty of care, just as we do to human babies and toddlers, to the old, and the mentally handicapped. This prospect might sound remote; but habitat-destruction means that effectively all that will be left of Nature later this century is our wildlife parks. Just as we don't feed terrified live rodents to snakes in zoos - we recognise that's barbaric - will we really continue to permit cruelties in our terrestrial wildlife parks because they are "natural"?

If animal suffering is to truly be consigned to history, then we must be willing to engage in the wholesale modification of bloody-clawed nature in order to do so.

 

[krtek a houby]

Animal oppression that doesn't affect tofu munchers.

Tofu isn't munched, really. It's more like a yoghurt.

 

[JimW]

Tofu isn't munched, really. It's more like a yoghurt.

Not all of it, smoked tofu and similar very chewy. The meat eaters can even enjoy blood tofu which is sort of like black pudding.

 

[8ball]

If animal suffering is to truly be consigned to history, then we must be willing to engage in the wholesale modification of bloody-clawed nature in order to do so.

Very funny bit in there about human moral intuitions not always being trustworthy. Not a shred of any sense of self-awareness or irony.

 

[NoXion]

Very funny bit in there about human moral intuitions not always being trustworthy. Not a shred of any sense of self-awareness or irony.

Are they always trustworthy, though? And intuition concerning morality is not the same thing as reasoning about it, which is what I gather the author of that page is attempting to do.

 

[8ball]

Are they always trustworthy, though? And intuition concerning morality is not the same thing as reasoning about it, which is what I gather the author of that page is attempting to do.

Based on faulty human moral intuitions...

 

[NoXion]

Based on faulty human moral intuitions...

Such as? "suffering is bad"? I'd say that's more of an observation than an intuition.

Note also that the author does not state that moral intuitions are *always* untrustworthy, only that they can be at times.

 

[Toast Rider]

A vegan protest with its own black bloc

 

[8ball]

Such as? "suffering is bad"? I'd say that's more of an observation than an intuition.

Note also that the author does not state that moral intuitions are *always* untrustworthy, only that they can be at times.

Firstly, there is an inherent anthropomorphism to veganism that is hard to get around, which is located around Western sense of moral precepts. Animals do not make the kinds of value judgments that humans do, and if they could, it wouldn't surprise me if many chose being predated on when getting old and slow, compared to a slow death from starvation.

Secondly, it was me that said that human moral intuitions are not always trustworthy. The author of that piece said "our moral intuitions simply can't be trusted".

 

[NoXion]

Firstly, there is an inherent anthropomorphism to veganism that is hard to get around, which is located around Western sense of moral precepts. Animals do not make the kinds of value judgments that humans do, and if they could, it wouldn't surprise me if many chose being predated on when getting old and slow, compared to a slow death from starvation.

Secondly, it was me that said that human moral intuitions are not always trustworthy. The author of that piece said "our moral intuitions simply can't be trusted".

Animals don't particularly care what the source of their death and suffering might be. Whether being ripped apart by a predator or starving to death, they have a deeply-ingrained instinct to continue living and thus work to avoid such fates to the best of their abilities.

And that is very much based on observation, not intuition.

 

[8ball]

Animals don't particularly care what the source of their death and suffering might be. Whether being ripped apart by a predator or starving to death, they have a deeply-ingrained instinct to continue living and thus work to avoid such fates to the best of their abilities.

And that is very much based on observation, not intuition.

Actually it isn't. The most you can say of many animals is they avoid noxious stimuli and seek out food and mates. It varies by species, of course.
They do what they do because previous generations that passed on their genes also did this, and those that didn't, or did it less effectively, are no longer around.

Some animals will stop doing what they need to do to continue living as soon as their genes have been passed on. Some, like wasps, will actually cease to be able to continue processes necessary to survival once the security of the colony has been assured.

This is not true of humans, and so we project these desires onto animals as if it is universal.

In terms of suffering, I agree with you that we should seek to avoid causing suffering to sentient creatures, especially those functionally more similar to us.

 

[JimW]

Firstly, there is an inherent anthropomorphism to veganism that is hard to get around, which is located around Western sense of moral precepts.

Either you're misunderstanding anthropomorphism or you're just wrong in believing it's inherent. Sentimentalised views of animals are no part of my view of the issue and hardly necessary for ahimsa style personal practice, though that's such an ancient idea there's been a long debate about that with all sorts of positions taken. We're sort of rehashing arguments had in India 2,000 years ago anyway. That and other non-Western vegetarian and vegan traditions puts a lie to the latter bit too.

 

[8ball]

Either you're misunderstanding anthropomorphism or you're just wrong in believing it's inherent. Sentimentalised views of animals are no part of my view of the issue and hardly necessary for ahimsa style personal practice, though that's such an ancient idea there's been a long debate about that with all sorts of positions taken. We're sort of rehashing arguments had in India 2,000 years ago anyway. That and other non-Western vegetarian and vegan traditions puts a lie to the latter bit too.

That's a fair point if we're talking about longstanding non-Western vegetarian traditions.

 

[krtek a houby]

Not all of it, smoked tofu and similar very chewy. The meat eaters can even enjoy blood tofu which is sort of like black pudding.

Sounds delicious, a bit like Korean sundae.

 

[PaoloSanchez]

"End all animal oppression" - does that include the use of pest control measures?

Vegans may be complicit in the murder and displacement of animals, but at least they don't eat their corpses, dammit!

Sigh.
This has been done already.
I'll refer the (dis?)honourable gentleman to the current definition...

"Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."

I'm assuming that you are not genuinely concerned for the plight of critters killed as a by product of human activity and that you are on another one of your whataboutery missions in search of the holy grail of "gotchas". It would appear that your approach to this subject is like that of a short attention span Sun reader, so it's probably not worth my while to attempt any kind of meaningful engagement until you switch from tabloid mode and actually put some smarts into your criticisms.

The highly intelligent Ask Yourself has already given sound rebuttals to nearly all of the silly anti-vegan arguments (eg. Vegans kill more animals – 45:31 - covering your pest control example) which I have previously posted. If you're feeling brave enough you can get a live rebuttal in the "debate crucible" voice channel on his Discord server, although with your weak arguments I don't think you'd last very long unless you somehow manage to up your game.