Guilty pleasures or conscious immoral decisions you take?

[Josquius]

Eating non free range meat.
I know factory farming is wrong and nasty but...I'm poor.
Hell, these days I'm not.
Nonetheless....I'm northern.

[Valmy]

Perhaps I wasn't specific enough. There are situations where humans are justified to eat meat. I just don't see the situation in which I (or you) live to be one of them. And that does not even come close to eating foie gras.

That does not really address his question

In the future the vast majority of meat will be artificially made in labs anyway.

[Ideologue]

Can't get here fast enough.

[Gups]

The human demand for animal products like meat and milk sustains life for millions of living creatures who, in the absence of such demand, would most likely be rendered extinct or near extinct.

I asked a vegan about this once (who I was dating at the time).  "Where would all the cows go if people stopped eating them?  You can't just have millions of cows wandering the country side".

"You would just run the last cows through the system and not breed anymore".

"so there wouldn't be any cows left outside of zoos and such"

"Yeah I guess".

This idea of destroying a species to alleviate suffering struck me as very strange.  If you equate human being with animals (as many radical animal rights groups do), then this suggests that it is moral to destroy populations of human beings to alleviate the suffering they have.  I think she finished college, and I did not so she probably has an answer to this.  But to me at least, that sounds like a justification for genocide.

You've never heard of wild cows? There's millions of them in India. Cows don't need humans to  want to eat them to survive as a species anymore than horses need humans to ride them.

[Razgovory]

You've never heard of wild cows? There's millions of them in India. Cows don't need humans to  want to eat them to survive as a species anymore than horses need humans to ride them.

I don't live in India.  In Missouri at least, people tend to enclose their property with barbed wire.  So there's not a great deal of space where wild cattle could roam.  Also I don't think farmers would like it if wild cattle would periodically trample their crops.

[Gups]

You have to live somewhere to know anything about it?


A species doesn't become extinct because it's not allowed to roam free over Missouri.

[The Minsky Moment]

You've never heard of wild cows? There's millions of them in India.

But how many outside of India?

[Razgovory]

You have to live somewhere to know anything about it?


A species doesn't become extinct because it's not allowed to roam free over Missouri.

Honestly, I wasn't thinking of India. I was also 18. It would still require a large scale reduction of the numbers of cattle in the US.  There were wild cattle in vast numbers 200 years ago, there's no way that's coming back.  People are having a hard enough time feeding cattle here as it is.  The summer did a number of the hay crop, and bale of hay is going as high as 100 bucks.

[Viking]

You've never heard of wild cows? There's millions of them in India.

But how many outside of India?

define "cow", and if you use the word domestic then I suggest you go back to the start of the argument and rebuild it from the start.

[The Minsky Moment]

Let's do a little thought experiment in which we assume for the sake of argument that there exists something like the Islamo-Judeo-Christain God, who has a dialogue with a philosopher:

P: So God, every day you murder millions of innocent human beings.  How can you justify this?
G: Human mortality is part of my plan.  And it wouldn't be practical not to kill them off - the populations couldn't sustain themselves.
P: So your "plan" involves allowing humans to live for a short time, only to kill them off when convenient for you.
G: Yes, that's right
P: Isn't that cruelty?
G: From the point of view of the humans, it isn't.  They don't know of any life other than one that cuts off by mortality.  They accept it as part of the world they inhabit
P:  But only because there is no other choice.  They can understand death and fear it; they can feel the pain of disease and the breakdown of the body.  That is cruelty.
G:  But what is the alternative?  Without mortality I would have no other use for humans in my plan.
P:  Forget about your plan for a second.  Having taken responsibility for humans, don't you have a moral obligation to do whatever you can to minimize their suffering and allow them to live a full and unlimited life?
G: What you suggest is not feasible.  If I took your suggestion seriously, I would have to apply the same logic to all my creatures, and every living thing on earth would have to be immortal.  Don't take the omnipotence bit too seriously - I may seem all powerful and mysterious to you, a lowly human, but I can't spend all my time and energy sustaining the immortality of trillions  of earth creatures.
P: So under your plan the only way human beings can exist is if they also have mortality?
G: I guess in theory I could keep a million or so alive in India, but the rest would have to go.
P: But wouldn't that be the moral thing to do?  Isn't it less cruel not to exist in the first place, then to live a life plagued by the fear and suffering that comes with mortality?
G: That is a matter of opinion.

[Ideologue]

There are other concerns regarding humans that make it undesirable to limit our population to negligible numbers, specifically scientific-technological productivity.  However, this might not matter much in Edenlike conditions.  That said, immortality wouldn't be much of a boon to a creature with a brain only capable of finite memory.

We could split the difference and have a few billion at a thousand years apiece.  I'll take my chances.

[crazy canuck]

Tim, you remain silent about Marti saying incest is ethical.  Strange given your recent treatment of Yi.

[Gups]

Your premise is wrong Joan. You think that cows can't exist in significant number unless bred for meat by humans.

In fact there are some 300 million cows and buffalo in India, some wild and some domesticated for milk etc. That's way more than in any other country, three times as many as in the US.

Personally I love a steak. I just try not to kid myself I was doing the cow a favour by eating it.

[crazy canuck]

Your premise is wrong Joan. You think that cows can't exist in significant number unless bred for meat by humans.

In fact there are some 300 million cows and buffalo in India, some wild and some domesticated for milk etc. That's way more than in any other country, three times as many as in the US.

Personally I love a steak. I just try not to kid myself I was doing the cow a favour by eating it.

How many cows do you think would be alive in North America within a year if the population became vegan?

[Capetan Mihali]

G: That is a matter of opinion.

My opinion is that there is nothing inherently moral about existing, as a person or an animal.

And if letting the cow population dwindle to a million is a bad thing, then wouldn't the good thing be to try to increase the cow population, and give more cows the precious gift of existence?  We could rededicate the Bureau of Land Management solely to sustaining massive cow life on public lands.