I’m not the one making the dichotomy! I’m fully in favor of all harm reduction possible (including a vegan/utilitarian vegan diet) for the obvious benefit of our own species. The commenter above is positing that there is no ethical direct/indirect violence toward any animals. It’s impossible to hold that position while simultaneously pretending billions of people can exist.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. A simple rational examination of our limited resources is being discarded because “animals have human rights/you support slavery/you want animals to be raped”. No, I have a very obvious and consistent position:
Humans are a higher class of animal and being good stewards of our only planet is crucial for our own well being. We thrive with nature and unnatural violence (like industrial animal farming) is bad for our psyche anyway. That doesn’t mean animals can’t or won’t die to support our existence.
This stuff is so basic and fundamental; tradeoffs HAVE to be made. Pretending that the world can support life (let alone a good life) for billions of people without animal death/displacement/extinction is deranged. It’s on the commenter to pick up the shambles of that position and make anything that can fit in the real world.
Dude, I never, ever wrote that there would be no competition for resources like land. That’s fucking obvious. That doesn’t make life a “zero sum game”, a zero sum game means that every gain is someone elses’ loss, and that at the end of the game there are no new resources created. That is strictly not true. We can take actions in life which benefit us without harming others.
In real life, humans have rights, but we also take a balanced view of rights when there are conflicts. For example, if we need to build some important infrastructure, that takes priority over the rights of whoever is living where that infrastructure needs to go. My argument is that the rights of animals not to be killed is more important than our desire to have a tasty meal. I’m not out here arguing we shouldn’t build wind turbines because of their negative impacts on wildlife, because I know the positive impacts on countering climate change is better overall.
You’re still in denial here. There can be symbiosis in nature where species can cohabitate to the benefit of both, but that’s just two different niches being filled. It’s a completely orthogonal topic to species competing for the same niche. It’s not about building windmills and good vibes; human beings have overstepped our natural boundaries with billions of people in places we have absolutely no evolutionary excuse to be.
We’ve done this strictly because we can; it’s the natural animal inclination to favor your own progeny and expand your access to resources. Our ability to adapt has broken the evolutionary game. We won. The mere existence of 8.3 billion humans causes an unfathomable amount of harm that can’t be fixed by skipping “tasty meals”. That’s the ethical equivalent of whitewashing guilt and ignoring the structural problem.
So asserting something like “all animals have equal rights” is asinine. They clearly don’t, and we can’t change that without abandoning the 99% of human souls who stress the system beyond its natural ethical bounds (within the expected balance of evolution).
The carrying capacity of Earth is 2-4 billion people, and that’s assuming an ultimate human primacy with no regard to other species (except in the amoral ways they could sustain human existence). A “harmless” existence is a fleeting fraction of that, the small niche filled as hunter-gatherer megafauna mammals. This is a hard physical fact no matter what universal rights we put on paper. The choice is quite literally billions of human lives against trillions of birds/insects/fish/critters/predators/prey in conflict with them. There’s no free lunch.
Wait, are you saying that earth is overpopulated, now? I didn’t realize I was in conversation with a nazi, but honestly, it explains a lot. Which ethnic group do you want to exterminate?
You could argue that our way of life in wealthy countries is impossible without the exploitation of the third-world. Does that mean we are a higher class of humans? No.
Let’s just strive to be as harmless as possible and leave our grand philosophical ideas about who is better than who aside.
I’m not the one making the dichotomy! I’m fully in favor of all harm reduction possible (including a vegan/utilitarian vegan diet) for the obvious benefit of our own species. The commenter above is positing that there is no ethical direct/indirect violence toward any animals. It’s impossible to hold that position while simultaneously pretending billions of people can exist.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. A simple rational examination of our limited resources is being discarded because “animals have human rights/you support slavery/you want animals to be raped”. No, I have a very obvious and consistent position:
Humans are a higher class of animal and being good stewards of our only planet is crucial for our own well being. We thrive with nature and unnatural violence (like industrial animal farming) is bad for our psyche anyway. That doesn’t mean animals can’t or won’t die to support our existence.
This stuff is so basic and fundamental; tradeoffs HAVE to be made. Pretending that the world can support life (let alone a good life) for billions of people without animal death/displacement/extinction is deranged. It’s on the commenter to pick up the shambles of that position and make anything that can fit in the real world.
Dude, I never, ever wrote that there would be no competition for resources like land. That’s fucking obvious. That doesn’t make life a “zero sum game”, a zero sum game means that every gain is someone elses’ loss, and that at the end of the game there are no new resources created. That is strictly not true. We can take actions in life which benefit us without harming others.
In real life, humans have rights, but we also take a balanced view of rights when there are conflicts. For example, if we need to build some important infrastructure, that takes priority over the rights of whoever is living where that infrastructure needs to go. My argument is that the rights of animals not to be killed is more important than our desire to have a tasty meal. I’m not out here arguing we shouldn’t build wind turbines because of their negative impacts on wildlife, because I know the positive impacts on countering climate change is better overall.
You’re still in denial here. There can be symbiosis in nature where species can cohabitate to the benefit of both, but that’s just two different niches being filled. It’s a completely orthogonal topic to species competing for the same niche. It’s not about building windmills and good vibes; human beings have overstepped our natural boundaries with billions of people in places we have absolutely no evolutionary excuse to be.
We’ve done this strictly because we can; it’s the natural animal inclination to favor your own progeny and expand your access to resources. Our ability to adapt has broken the evolutionary game. We won. The mere existence of 8.3 billion humans causes an unfathomable amount of harm that can’t be fixed by skipping “tasty meals”. That’s the ethical equivalent of whitewashing guilt and ignoring the structural problem.
So asserting something like “all animals have equal rights” is asinine. They clearly don’t, and we can’t change that without abandoning the 99% of human souls who stress the system beyond its natural ethical bounds (within the expected balance of evolution).
The carrying capacity of Earth is 2-4 billion people, and that’s assuming an ultimate human primacy with no regard to other species (except in the amoral ways they could sustain human existence). A “harmless” existence is a fleeting fraction of that, the small niche filled as hunter-gatherer megafauna mammals. This is a hard physical fact no matter what universal rights we put on paper. The choice is quite literally billions of human lives against trillions of birds/insects/fish/critters/predators/prey in conflict with them. There’s no free lunch.
Wait, are you saying that earth is overpopulated, now? I didn’t realize I was in conversation with a nazi, but honestly, it explains a lot. Which ethnic group do you want to exterminate?
You could argue that our way of life in wealthy countries is impossible without the exploitation of the third-world. Does that mean we are a higher class of humans? No.
Let’s just strive to be as harmless as possible and leave our grand philosophical ideas about who is better than who aside.