In general none of this stuff matters (“feelings” or cruelty or whatever). What matters is when you get into the strange additives used to help make the most money out of the slaughter and their eventual bad side-effects on the consuming population. This is more related to the general trend of food-tampering that’s been going on for decades though.

I have a question which I don’t think anyone has an answer for: is my food safe? If it isn’t, why the fuck are we eating it?

If you think that way, you should also find it acceptable to breed a genetic branch of humans that wouldn’t otherwise exist, then slaughter those people in their prime, and serve them in restaurants.

A simple way to create a genetic branch of humans for food, that wouldn’t otherwise exist, would be to pay a substantial amount to a bunch of pregnant women who would otherwise abort their babies.

If you don’t care about the animals’ well being, and you don’t believe that there’s a magical difference between human animals and other animals, then you should be fine with such a branch of humans being used for other humans’ food.

I.e. We provide a minimum level of comfort to animals we plan to eat, regardless of cost; if that means we end up eating fewer animals because meat becomes expensive, so be it.

Also, we should encourage meat-eaters to “do the deed” themselves before allowing them to outsource the task to butchers. This would, at least, help limit the absolute level of hypocrisy by forcing the issue (i.e. change habits or beliefs)

Nonetheless, I agree, the more compelling reason to adopt vegetarianism is not moral consistency (or health) but sustainability. I don’t care if a wolf kills a deer or a hunter kills a deer, unless the deer is endangered. It’s factory farming, overfishing, hunting to extinction that could be avoided.

It gets to a point where one has to defend the politics for taking a piss – behind a bush, in an alley, in a public restroom, in your own bathroom – indoor or outhouse. That my need to take a piss should be weighed by my peer collective, culture, community and society as a whole as to when I should, how I should, where I should and sometimes with who – whether as to arguments for privacy, communal joints unisex or not, and perhaps even erotic and intellectual sports.

It’s nothing.

Maybe someone better suited can debate the economic impact and solutions rather than pulling on moral and ethical strings or social nazism of the current green trend.

Personally, I’m for solyent green as a recommendation for a sustainable future.

But eh, likewise I am also lost on the arguments of.

I eat what I eat because I have a desire to and to promote survival. It’s my selfish need – which arguably could be the need to eat at all.

I’d be keen to say my politics aren’t dictated by my diet, my diet isn’t dictated by my politics. But thinking on it… maybe it truly was a manifesto in the making in protest of VeggieTales or an herbivore fursuit fetish.

Yeah, what was the argument here…?

Let us seek principles that can account for most of our acts, …

In other words, let’s rationalize our actions away. Actually, though, there are two ways to take this: prescriptive and descriptive. If this curious way to start is prescriptive, meaning if it is supposed to actually be a respectable belief on what we should do, this can’t be defensible because it starts with the assumption that current practice is correct. But whether we should continue current practice is actually the question. It is theoretically permissible to justify current practice, but not this way. We can all think of examples in history where starting with the assumption that we should justify current practice would go astray (human sacrifice, slavery, holocaust, etc.)

And if these principles more or less just describe what we do, so that we can formalize our actions and maybe cut out a tiny bit of the worst ones, then it’s of course not really an answer to whether we *should* eat meat, since the latter is a prescriptive question. One would instead end up with descriptive principles, merely generalized behavioral observations that have no moral impact. It’s not really a compromise, just principles that fits most of the behavioral data with an unargued for prescriptive assumption that these principles should be continued. In other words, the whole idea that this is a compromise is never truly defended.

Defining a meat animal based on intelligence…then why don’t we eat retarded people?

Some of us are vegetarians for reasons that have nothing to do with concern for animal welfare. Or health. We abstain based on environmental degradation. Becoming a vegetarian is more effective than the top ten sustainable strategies COMBINED. At best, most will drive a hybrid, buy better lightbulbs, recycle their trash or bring their own bags and call it good. Few are willing to make substantive life style changes and go against the grain of culture and family norms. You become an outcast. Who wants to signal that? Assuming you could. Speaking of, Tim wrote:

“vegetarianism is not about animals – it’s about holier-than-thou signalling – to illustrate to each other what saintly creatures we are”.

I’ve written quite a bit about this. You can’t effectively signal your vegetarian status. You can signal you care about sustainability whilst tooling around in your Prius; perfect strangers will think you’re hip. Diet is private. At best, your family and friends know. Diners at the next table won’t know or care. I’ve long argued that were it possible to signal your vegetarian status to perfect strangers, the number of vegetarians would dramatically increase.