this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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As I said in the other reply, you got to choose between the serious and memes-friendly reply. You had ~3h to do so, and you're showing activity, so you picked neither = both.
c/memes friendly answer: Serial killer? Come on, I don't put ketchup on pizza, sauce on ribs or hard cheese on seafood!
Serious answer. Spoilers for the sake of other users.
First off. I will cut you some slack, but keep in mind that "serial killer" is generally understood as "one who periodically kills humans", so what you're doing is libel. Others might not cut you the same slack, so get a bit more insightful with your insults.
Secondly. I also understand that "I shouldn't soapbox in a meme comm" is a bit too complex of an idea for nationalists, vegans, racists, and Christian zealots. And given that you belong to at least one of those groups, this should be really hard for you, o poor thing.
Final and more importantly:
You wouldn't call a jaguar piercing the necks of capybaras "serial killing", even if they periodically do so. Or orcas hunting seals, even if they can get really "playful" (cruel) towards their prey, also periodically. Or chickens eating bugs alive, so they die either crushed or dissolved in hydrochloric acid, even if they don't need it to survive. Or chimps hunting termites and teaching their children how to do so, even if there's a cultural factor in this.
And yet you refer to a human being killing a member of another species [ipsis ungulis] "serial killer" Why, even if by the above we know that you don't give a fuck about periodicity, cruelty, necessity, or culture? Why?
Because you want to pretend that you're part of a very, very special snowflake species, "holier and above all those filthy irrationals", above them. As if you were better, more moral, more deserving of The Kingdom of God than those "poor things".
Cut off the bullshit. You and me are catarrhines with a weird hair pattern. We are animals; acknowledge you as such, instead of wallowing in wishful belief. The morality behind our acts is the same as the morality of the same acts of other species. If eating flesh is immoral for us, so is for both other omnivorous species and the carnivorous ones. You can claim that eating flesh is moral, or immoral, but you need to do it for both sides.
If you claim that it's immoral, go grab your shotgun and kill every fucking jaguar, orca, chimp, and chicken out there. (Except battery farm chickens, those cause less death of precious animals than you'd like to admit.) Or even better, go ramble at the jaguar, he'll totally listen to you and stop eating capybaras. (He'll probably eat something dumber than a capybara then. You.)
If you claim that it's moral, I rest my case.
You're also putting animal lifes in a weird altar over the lives of everything else. Every fucking living thing thrives off the death of something else; even plants, bacteria and funghi. Why is this weird altar even there? Because you're an animal and put your own group over the others, in detriment of those.
I'll pre-emptively rebuke some really stupid counter-arguments that you perhaps might utter:
Get off your high horse.
Note for other vegans that might be reading this, before some assumer starts whining and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: I'm not chewing on this moron because it's a vegan, but because it showed itself consistently dumb across the thread.
TL;DR but jaguars dont have moral agency. People do.
Fourth bullet point.
First bullet point.
Whoa now don’t go comparing the natural order to factory farms. There’s a huge difference.
The most important being that no other animal farms other animals to the scale humans do. There are some examples of ants harvesting honeydew from aphids, and other symbiotic relationships…but the relationship between predator/prey makes up the majority of animal life, and in doing so, ensures a natural sort of checks-and-balances to keep things from spiraling out of control.
And on top of that, the natural order is damn near close to zero-waste. Nearly everything down to the bone gets consumed by a variety of predators and scavengers, right down to the insects cleaning up the scraps.
Factory farming is a big middle-finger to the whole natural balance. We breed, raise, and slaughter huge populations of large animals at a massive scale. And it’s effects are only worsened by growing alfalfa in the desert and soy in the regions formerly known as rainforest, and transport those by millions-of-years-sequestered carbon off to the factory farms to make the specially-bred bovine grow especially fast.
Personally I went “mostly vegan” for environmental reasons (will still enjoy an occasional high-quality cheese or dairy-based sweet treat). I just can’t reconcile the GHG impact of meat farming with my personal needs. Plenty of other sources of protein and micronutrients than the 3-4 sources of meat that regularly make their way to most American diets.
This is the fallacy of appeal to nature. "Natural order" isn't necessarily "good".
Regarding the rest of your comment, refer to the fifth bullet point.
Hunting/gathering societies, much like predator/prey relationships, are intrinsically more sustainable. It’s pretty much the only system of checks and balances on population growth.
I don’t think you can handwave away natural selection under appeal to nature fallacy. That’s usually reserved for medicine. The only place it’s really applied in agriculture is organic/non-GMO produce which is a whole other shovel of BS.
And in point 5, if not for factory farming, our consumption of beef is not sustainable as it is. There is, quite simply, not enough arable grazing land in the world to accommodate our consumption of beef. The only solutions to that are to reduce the level of beef consumption, or to expand factory farming. And any institutional/government-level intervention to do the former would be wildly unpopular without there first being a sizable voting population who reduced or eliminated beef consumption themselves.
After reading that, I'm curious about your stance on ethics.
A utilitarian could argue that—even if their lives were fleeting and miserable—the factory-farmed animals would otherwise not exist were it not for their use as livestock. Would it be less ethical to have prevented their existence entirely?
[A] The existence of these animals contributes to the net quantity of happiness in our world. Even if it's very little on an individual scale, it's a significant amount as a whole. Wouldn't it, therefore, be better that they do exist, even in such conditions?
[B] Does a livestock animal's life not have a value in itself? Even if its life was objectively awful, it was given the opportunity to experience it. Would it be more cruel to—as argued by pro-life individuals—deny it the chance to experience life, no matter how such a life turned out in the end?
[C] Relatively speaking, perhaps the animal did not have such a miserable life as we imagined. From the perspective of an outsider, growing up in a cage sucks. But, maybe an animal would enjoy being constantly given access to food and water for no effort. We can generalize based on scientific data, but much like humans, there could be lazy animals that enjoy the lifestyle.
Sorry for the huge wall of text. It's a bit of a complex theme.
At its core I think that my ethic stance is best described as anti-realism. There's no intrinsic value; value is assigned by the subject. In turn, each individual (incl. me) assigns values due to a bunch of different factors: defending one's own interests, instinct (kin selection), culture/ideology, Realpolitik, or even on a whim.
Thus moral premises (or their absence - moral nihilism) are individual and arbitrary. I personally picked "weighted selfishness" and kin selection as two of mine. This leads to some sort of "rank", like: myself > my close relatives > other humans > other primates > other vertebrates > other animals > other living beings. Some individuals are sub-ranked higher due to their effect on individuals on higher ranks (e.g. someone's pet dog is above a stray dog, my lemon tree is above other non-animal living beings, etc.)
Beyond that it works like a "weighted utilitarianism" where life, general well-being and happiness of a higher category are more important than the ones of lower categories. It works symmetrically though - for example a jaguar hunting a human being is still moral, even if the jaguar was somehow intelligent. (And so is the self-defence of the potential human. Or of a pig against a human.)
Based on that: battery farm is for me less moral than free range, but still within acceptable morality - because it benefits beings high in my priority (humans) by a lot.
Animal lives matter a bit. Animals closer to us matter more. I'm not sure however if their simple existence has a positive "happiness" value, it's just referring to the life itself.