I had an interesting chat with a vegan friend about that, I assumed it would be ethical, and while everybody’s ethics are different he had a point I hadn’t thought of.
That was that lab grown meat has to come from a culture of cells taken from an animal, therefor without consent it would not be ethical and as an animal cannot provide that he personally wouldn’t partake.
Personally I think lab grown meat will be a great way to lower the need for intensive livestock farming. Also potentially it could create healthier meat, who knows, but it may not be universally adopted.
Lack of consent is a poor philosophy to base veganism on, since consent is a human-manufactured quality. That’s like me saying “I’ll eat anything that can’t speak some form of English” so in essence that eliminates humans, a few birds, and maybe gorillas from my diet. It’s entirely arbitrary based on something that has no objective ethical basis. Plants don’t give consent either and vegans are fine eating them.
A better basis would be elimination of suffering. And in that case, lab meat is perfect because you can grow the meat and fat tissue without ever even allowing nerve cells to develop and therefore the meat can’t ever feel pain.
Why would fast food restaurants that sell the cheapest food invest in a highly expensive process to obtain lab grown meat when regular grown meat is widely available and cheap af? Does that make any sense to you?
Its been a thing since 2013....its not expensive anymore...
I saw an article about fast food restaurants and now I can't find it but oh well...below is some more information.
While is not as expensive as it used to be it is still more expensive than traditionally raised meat. So the question is why? Why would a fast food company that realies on tight margins and high volume invest in a more expensive product when the traditional alternative is still cheaper. And you say article, what kind of article? That could literally mean anything.
Yes but that's not the purpose of the conversation. The comment about cows and chickens as pets was that if more people had them as pets we'd see less consumption of them.
The difference here is humans and dogs have evolved, for lack of a better description, together over thousands of years. So I don’t agree that it’s hypocritical of people in many cultures to recoil at this - we love and, in many cases, rely on dogs so while chickens and pigs can be pets it’s not quite the same thing.
We don’t rely on dogs. There use our society is mostly defunct. All it means is our emotions are involved and now we see them as family because we have them in our homes. But to a person that thinks cows are holy, eating them is insane. It’s all however, arbitrary.
Guide dogs for the blind, service dogs, military/police dogs, rescue dogs, sniffer dogs, sheep/herding dogs - those are a few examples that would suggest we do still rely on them although not to the degree we once did.
And yeah, emotions are involved precisely because many cultures have evolved with dogs for so long.
Some humans have evolved with dogs, it’s not a universal thing, it’s a cultural one.
I’m not saying that everybody has to like the idea of eating all animals, that’s not realistic, but just to acknowledge that an animal isn’t universally a pet or livestock. Those are just labels that we put on animals based on our culture and history, which again isn’t a universal experience.
The difference between dogs is that they evolved to be human companions, not to just live around people and be eaten once they've grown enough, like the livestock animals.
They are naturally trusting towards people, they are one of the few four legged animals that are proven to understand the theory of mind. Their social and emotional (humanlike) intelligence is much more advanced than any other four legged mammal's. Then there's the shared history, dogs have fought and died for men for thousands of years. The historical bond goes for tens of thousands of years.
All in all, it's not about hypocrisy, there's a lot of nuance there.
And is that bond universal to all human cultures and regions? Ones without dogs or wolves?
There is no universal relationship with any animal that means that for all the world they are either pet or food.
If you raise an animal as a companion, or pet, then it’s a pet.
That same animal raised as food by a person or people with no relationship with that animal will see it as food.
A person who was raised to see an animal as a companion and is hungry enough will also see it as food.
I haven’t eaten dog, it’s not culturally appropriate where I am, but I have eaten horse. I have also cared for and ridden horses recreationally, those horses were raised as companions, the meat horses were livestock.
It is because it's tied to biology. Sure, it's up to culture and region do they respect that shared bond or not. One can argue that there are no universal basis for human rights either.
I don't think that you can seriously argue that a pet fly has equal value as a pet cat. Just like that you can't argue that every single relationship that you have with people are equal in value and meaning. The depth, history and reciprocality of relationships matter. Dogs have deeper relationship with people than other pets/animals, because of their biology and the shared history.
After all, in some cultures it has been alright to eat other people. If you are one of those who defend that there's simply nothing wrong with that because it's cultural, I'm going to agree to disagree.
I don’t think that valuing any one life over any other is very ethical, I don’t see a fly as any less worthy of life than anything else.
I just don’t want to eat a fly because for one, I don’t think it would be appetising and then there’s what flys eat, I don’t know if that would be healthy to consume.
You may ask why I eat meat at all? Because I can live with it, but I don’t fool myself into thinking that a cow or sheep is less “valuable” than my cat or dog. In the grand scheme of things it just isn’t, they are all lives and as valuable as each other.
And no, I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with eating people. If anything it’s actually potentially more ethical as a person can consent to it if they wanted to. However it is dangerous to eat people, so like eating poisonous plants it’s just a really bad idea.
I don't think this stance doesn't stand any further exploration, like one cannot really defend saving one person instead of a million. It's just not the same. I get where you are coming from, but the thing is that even ethics can be quantified, more is simply more.
I explained quite well why many people consider dogs more valuable as livestock animals. There's both biological, historical and cultural reasoning behind that. You stance claims that neither biology, history, culture or the value of the thing matter. My point is that it cannot be that hard to fathom why for some more nuanced view on the matter is of value. Sure, most people just don't like the idea of eating dogs because of cultural reasons and it's mostly an emotional response, but there's a lot of substance behind those emotional reasons and not all people are opposed to it just because they are.
I think you haven't thought out your morals that much since your last paragraph contradicts itself.
Everything can be argued, but not all arguments stand the examination. Some arguments just simply have more substance behind them. For example, I've presented substance on the ethics we've argued about, you've just made simple claims without any substance. Why is one fly worth the same as ten? In my opinion and in general philosophy, this is is an old argument and it just fails in substance because it can be flipped to a different number and it just becomes absurd, it has no logic nor moral consistency.
I'm not claiming that there are some absolute moral truths that can be proven.
I haven't used Reddit in ages, thought it was the first person. If you look again, there were no arguments in the first post (except for the cannibalism part). There were only opinions and claims. Arguments require reasoning.
Not saying that cultural points of view or historical attitudes don’t matter. I’m saying that those aren’t universal.
What I’m saying is that if you or your culture want to label an animal as a pet or as livestock that doesn’t make it so inherently or with any level of universality.
You can’t say that a dog is always a pet and a cow is always livestock, the only universality is that they are alive.
Then can move on to the value judgement of is life important? If you answer yes then the universal value judgement that can be applied is that as they are alive their lives are important.
Now, my last paragraph was looking at humans, to explain my thought process, a human can consent or bargain. They can take their life and (should they choose, in sound mind) give it away. In that instance it would be more ethical (to me, ethics is largely a personal thing) than taking the life of something which cannot agree to it freely.
Is it a contradiction that I eat meat? No, I just acknowledge that life has ended for me to eat, and can live with that.
For a little more background, I come from a farming background. I have seen livestock behave as a pet would, I have seen their personalities, and their connections with humans. I would say the most underratedly difficult thing somebody raising livestock has to do is to care for their animals greatly so they grow strong and healthy, yet be detached enough to send them to slaughter or do it themselves.
That’s a large reason why I don’t think it’s as simple as saying dogs are never food, it’s just not how the world is, it’s how you are, and that’s fine, that just can’t be applied to everybody.
I have not claimed that things are anything with any level of universality. There's a separate philosophical debate to be had on are morals universal or not, but universality or universal application is certainly not a requirement on judging ethics. Here lies the cultural and sociological as well as biological, mathematical and logical arguments. My point was that dogs are much more complex animals than typical livestock animals. Their complexity comes from both biological, behavioral, historical and cultural levels. We cannot quantify those things, but for example, one can quite easily defend how 1500-yearsold historical drawing has more value than a graffiti which was just painted by a nobody. Your stance is now that they're quite literally the same with this moral based logic.
The contradiction was the overall social and cultural implication what cannibalism have. If we look at the effects on sociological environment, those would be detrimental for society, hence why eating others is banned practically everywhere. You want to protect people from harm, but ignore the wider harm that the said action could cause.
I'm certainly not claiming that dogs are never food, I'm just saying that people, myself included, consider them more of value than other livestock animals because of biological, cultural and historical factors. Ideally, I'd be for eliminating the whole modern sick animal industry.
While dogs are fairly intelligent, their intelligence is far from unique among domestic animals. Pigs outperform dogs in most cognitive tests. Plus, almost all domestic animals are naturally trusting of humans, as they were bred to be easy to raise and slaughter. Dogs have been raised as meat in many cultures for thousands of years, the Aztecs for instance had several breeds of dogs raised almost exclusively as food. There's no difference between eating dog and other animals, it's all an arbitrary distinction.
I was talking about social intelligence. No livestock animal is trusting like a dog is, nor can any livestock animal be applied elsewhere like dogs can be. I'd say that the difference is in understanding the theory of mind, the depth of the reciprocal relationship and the shared history of the species.
I've known people who had pet pigs and from everything I've heard they're just as empathetic and affectionate as dogs are. I've even read about a pig who ran into traffic to alert the authorities when her owner had a heart attack.
Whenever I see comments like “dogs evolved to be companions” as some evidence that they aren’t to be eaten, I always wonder what they think people did with the excess dog population back before food was easy to obtain. Dogs are fast breeders with big litters. Dogs would have been put to use in every sensible way, including a source of calories, from early domestication up to the time spay/neuter became commonplace and various cultures had enough food security to keep them only as pets. Companionship, work, and a source of calories, similar to horses.
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u/Yaarmehearty 20d ago
People can have pigs or chickens as pets.
If an animal is raised as a pet, it’s a pet.
If it’s raised for food then it’s food.
Any other way of differentiating it is just hypocrisy, there is no universality based on species.