You can compare the two, yes. A human getting a 5mm paper cut vs a dog getting its legged chopped off. Who do you think suffered more?

I can't dictate what you feel or don't feel, but hopefully I can influence it.

Ah, the ethics of "influencing" emotions. What a feel-good topic.

Right. So we compare a smaller human injury to a larger animal injury? Fair.

Does the dog worry that the loss of its leg may lead to an infection and possibly death? Or does it just go on living as usual? Is it aware of the potential of death? Does the human worry about a potential infection or the influence that losing a leg might have on his ability to do his job or to be employable or to look after his family or to continue to be desired by their spouse? How much mental anguish between the two is comparable?

Can we make such FAIR comparisons for human pleasures and animal pleasures as well? Should I be playing more Mozart to my dog? Is he missing out?

What else can we compare so easily across the two, in your informed opinion?

If you're trying to say that a human losing its leg is a larger loss than a dog losing its leg, then I agree, but what's the relevance? Adopting a vegetarian diet is about comparing "smaller human injury to a larger animal injury".

Ethically, a vegeterian diet makes sense. Many of us don't care for the ethical life however. We're at peace with our conscience living a less-than-ethical existence. Are you suggesting we shouldn't be at peace with our conscience? Do you want me to be perturbed over the same things you are? Or to believe what you believe?

Ethical? So is a lion eating a gazelle unethical then?

Lions, unlike us apes don't have the cognitive ability to be ethical. It's a non-starter.

This, plus lions are carnivores, unlike humans which are omivores, and can choose between eating flesh and not eating flesh without sacrificing nutrition.

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Like I said, I can't dictate what you feel, but admitting that it's unethical is a big step. I ate meat for an additional ~2 years knowing it was unethical before stopping.

We've made a lot of advancements as a species, e.g. abolishment of slavery, women rights, LGBT rights. The next step is animal rights. Time to be a modern 3rd millennium human.

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They also can't derive reasons and claim to have ethics like we can. However, if they could, their reason faculties would just as individual as our consciences and emotions. If they were us, they would have the same whole, diverse package of existence as us. But they are lions and they have the lion package.

So who is charge of ethics again? Question for thread.

Have you talked more about this journey somewhere on the forums?

I'd be interested to hear more details. I have stopped eating pigs because it feels like eating dogs and i wouldn't knowingly eat a dog. That may be as far as it ever goes for me, but i'd like to hear your experience with this.

I live with vegetarians. For a laugh, I like to tell them things like - for every animal you don't eat, I'll eat three.

And I do.

Clean meat is coming out soon. I should be at peace with my conscience until then.

This reminds me that i will eat pig if it's placed in front of me and would simply be discarded otherwise. I make myself feel better by pretending it's human flesh.

Tranquility while eating is a great experience. It's hard to be tranquil when some one is trying to scare your conscience about your food. The cows don't eat grass when riled up.

The Smith's problem is I don't need to refute their reasons. Why would I? They are clearly their reasons. And why would I need to share reasons about my food just because they shared their reasons about theirs? If we are going to argue for influence about food, That's a thing to look at

And while common reason is a virtue, we all have some reason to eat and that is reason found in common. So as to include reasons in an array of reasoning about ethics, that should be easy to grant.

It's fruitless to speculate about counterfactual situations.

I enjoy you it, but you don't have to. It's a nice complement to the lions to imagine what they could do if they us. Not a bad look for humans either. However since I closed wth a factual obvious statement that lions be lions, you can call the course corrected already if you want. Really my point is that lions are more than carnivores which related indirectly to humans are more than their food consumption category.

And the reasoning that eating is towards life while murder is against life still calls to question a basic assumption that meat is murder ethically speaking using reason. How can you make an ethical life argument about an activity which is towards life while making a claim that it is against? Clearly some reason that we eat is a concerning to the veracity that meat is ethically murder.

I have not, but I'll gladly share. There two key moments which triggered my shift:

I went to a steak house for a work meeting. This was when I was in my morally ambivalent phase. I always heard Veal is good meat, but never tried it. I ordered it, and sure, it tasted good, though not much better than any other steak, but good taste does imply a good experience. The next morning a few coworkers crowded around me and asked what I ordered. I muttered "Veal". They obviously didn't hear me, so they asked "What?", and I was forced to repeat, but louder and clearer the second time. If I couldn't answer plainly to what I ate due to shame and the fear of being judged (though no one really would), then what the hell was I doing eating meat? That too Veal?

Roughly a year later, the second experience is when my father passed away, coincidentally today being his death anniversary. Needless to say, it was the most painful and shocking day of my life, and I never want to create, contribute or celebrate that type of pain, regardless whether animals share the exact experience as human loss or not. I saw it as a time of rebirth, a time to make good changes in life.

I'd like to hear other people's stories as well.

What on earth about ethics of eating animals being such a big deal? It is not at all a big deal if done properly and it's not at all an issue in wildlife because without it we wouldn't be here to have that discussion as it's all a giant life cycle of perilous existence for 99.9999% of it all and our past and us even eventually. We owe our rise in intelligence to the evolution of the brain of mammals and others before that developed to survive against beasts and harsh conditions. So thank you for the suffering. It made us intelligent!!! Thanks a great deal actually! I owe it all to it. And all i can do is prove worthy of it going forward and now.



I can claim that by eating also meat and meat products in my diet i can do productive and strong creative job that will eventually create a world that animals would have a much better time than now. Yes that is accurate. I can back up this claim because if i try to go all vegetarian i don't exactly enjoy 100% the food or to do so i have to cook it for more time and with better preparation procedure otherwise it sucks or it's just salads (they are good but not enough). There are tons of unreal vegetarian 100% dishes in Greek cuisine that i can go on super happily eating for days without any meat but of course get massively better with a little bit of butter, eggs and milk or cheese (of course not most of them need any of this). Sure i can survive definitely with great design of diet that covers all that is needed without almost any meat. But it is not trivially easy. I need to enslave a mother or wife or chef to cook for me or myself to cook for hours that way. Proper recipes vegetarian food takes a lot of care to produce to be very enjoyable. Try to cook beans properly and see how long it takes. Try to cook moussaka (without meat) or stuffed with rice vegetables and tell me how often you will spend 1.5 h to prepare and 1.5 to cook again. Of course if i have that every day who needs meat but only here and there a few days per month and not really if i design diet properly to get all major nutrients.

Do not for a moment imagine that i dont endorse 100% a mostly vegetarian with only occasional meat and products diet that is healthier. But it does take more effort.

So yes it is a sacrifice currently for a greater project to not be 100% vegetarian. Parents sacrifice for their kids all the time. I sacrifice many things for higher things all the time.

I am not proposing that sacrificing anything is ok to get somewhere important (goal doesnt justify the means, any means.) but what is lost here is another day of a clueless consciousness life of eating more corn, insects and little stones and moving around doing nothing interesting.

So i propose that i want indeed a wold that animals are brought to life to live well and then one day they never wake up. Nothing is lost. It is only lost if the animal knows it will happen and if the animal is in some long term project (ie i coulnt argue that way for a higher level animal that is planning).

Now i will argue that a very intelligent animal (intelligence caused by heavy interaction) that has been living with you and has learned things about you like a chicken pet that makes eggs for you every day is another story and i will consider never killing it deviating from others and tradition but i will eat its meat if it dies and it's not sick as my last respect for its purpose and a promise that i will put its energy to greater use for the good in this world.

But if you grow chickens or fish or even other lower level birds and even bigger animals like cows and pigs that never bond with humans and never have anything interesting going with any human then their lives are boring (short of eating all day and walking around give me a break now) and trivial or can be arranged to be boring and trivial without being bad to them (ie make them enjoy food and walking around in cool farms etc) then i see nothing ethically lost if the chicken and others one day after 3 years doesn't wake up if its life expectancy in the wild would have been 1-2 years less easily or dead at infancy. I in fact gave it more pleasure that way with a scientific society design than its DNA intended in wild nature.

So if you want to bring ethics in to it i will bring unreal ethics you never imagined and prove superior in my thinking of how ethics work and i will go ahead and create a better world than the one you imagine is great without eating animals. I will have the pie and eat it too because this is what intelligence does (finds ways to grow prosperity) and that kind of intelligence seen in animals that you are so afraid to be lost is going to sit back and watch the planet get attacked by an asteroid or other disasters in total bliss. Yes humans will get it right eventually and you will have ten other earth style ecosystems in this solar system before 1 more million of them centuries later.

So yes damn right the planet is ours now and we use the sacrifice of other life to become better, wiser, stronger and eventually to have life across all the galaxy in beautiful ecosystems of exceptional diversity and pleasure where many if not all animals live great lives and only then near the end become food for others or they are never becoming food because i feed all of them artificial food. That way all the super sensitive obsessed with political correctness ignorants of this world (the unhealthy side of some liberals that rivals the prejudice on the right in other topics) can finally be happy in their hysterical extremism lol unable to recognize that this is the game that life plays for hundreds of millions of years, a game of sacrifice in the name of the rise of higher complexity.

I salute and remain grateful for all animals that have sustained me and promise to never obtain their meat by having them experience violent death and pain or a life of suffering if i can control it and if i cant living in ignorance i will try to build a world that controls how they live to be happy and not suffer and raised for both having a happy life and their products without ever knowing the endgame.

But there is nothing major lost if an animal lives 3 years and then its one day over after it has lived so happily and without any planning in place that i terminated. Only then its unethical to cause a death or if others are impacted. Its probably not a good thing to kill an animal that has little ones because a plan exists at that moment, it is working towards a goal that is even instinctively meaningful. But the majority of all other cases it does appear the animal is simply repeating a cycle of experience without adding to it some emerging developing process. That is invalidated if the animal is learning from interactions and shows curiosity and personal interactivity. I do not expect those things from many animals though that can be properly used for food if raised with decent methods.

Thanks for sharing the story and long life to you and your family in honor of the anniversary.

Thanks, and I'm sorry if I was being a dick earlier.

No we are good. Just share a few easy yet still delicious vegetarian recipes/dishes because the ones i know are taking hours to render super nice alternatives.

So it was a sudden decision after being in the back of your mind for awhile?

How has it changed you, physically? Are there any cons?


curious as well about recipes..