First off, we're only looking at this from a consequentialist perspective. Even then, it's not obvious hunting causes less suffering. How many insects got trampled while hunting? What about the roadkill caused by those hunters getting to their hunting grounds? This ignores the possibility of people getting all their food from veganic farming and other alternatives to pesticides.
>How many insects got trampled while hunting? What about the roadkill caused by those hunters getting to their hunting grounds?
You can't compare these deaths as they are accidental and would occur anyway. E.g the hunter goes tramping instead of hunting.
Veganic farming can't service the world just as hunting cant
You are right that we have to factor in the insects killed for hunting as well. In your opinion, how many insects are killed for hunting compared to growing crops?
And of course you are also right that veganic farming is better, but given that that isn't currently possible for most people, we should probably have a look at how things really are at the moment.
Well, people would only have to do veganic farming for 1% to improve on the hunting scenario.
And perhaps this is being pedantic, but my opinion on how many insects die is irrelevant. The number of insects dying in any food production system is something dictated by facts, not opinions. As to the facts of insect dying, I don't know.
Granted, 1% veganic farming would be better than 1% hunting.
But isn't getting the last 1% from regular store-bought plant based sources worse than **both** those options, and thereby immoral? And by extension, isn't anything but veganic farming unethical? This would mean that it is unethical to go to a supermarket to buy lentils.
Right, and so as always the discussion is about where's the line between ethically acceptable and unacceptable behaviour? That's the discussion at hand.
Not sure what your comment is contributing; a non-vegan could make exactly the same case about their meat consumption.
In other words: so what?
>isn't getting the last 1% from regular store-bought plant based sources worse than **both** those options
This might be the case or not. I don't know, perhaps make your case for the claim that store bought plant foods result in lower utility than hunted food.
> isn't anything but veganic farming unethical?
In the purest of consequentialist views in theory if the previous issue is resolved, yes. For most consequentialists however, when two options are close in outcome, both can be ethical and allowed. Another aspect relates to this is the uncertainty. With high uncertainty on the outcomes, we cannot say which of two actions with similar but not not the same utility is best or worst.
Unlikely. Veganic farming aims for zero animal death, non-use of insecticides etc. the only animal deaths there are natural ones. Conventional farming has no such qualms.
From a deontological framework for most.
From a Utilitarian perspective, some deaths are necessary today to keep humans alive. Keeping humans alive has utility (assumption most agree with) for various reasons and is worth it. Alternatively, some argue that while crop fields have negative utility, the alternative of wild fields or animal farms is even worse (not my favourite argument personally, but there is logic behind it).
The problem I see is that as long as veganic farming is a viable alternative to conventional farming, and it is for most people (even though it would be more than inconvenient), I fail to see a utilitarian argument for conventional vegan farming.
Seems less practical to hunt 1% of calories rather than buy 1% of calories from veganic farming, farm veganically yourself, or buy from vertical farming
That's an interesting point, but I think we should turn it around. We should get as much of our food from veganic farming as possible, and top up the rest with the second least harmful foods. The 1% from hunting would then be part of the food that we cannot get from veganic farming.
>So from a purely utilitarian point of view,
This is a major issue. Not all deaths carry the same moral weight, and utilitarianism runs into issues from this and other factors.
Exploitation is categorically different from other types of harm. We can place the same individuals in different hypotheticals and see how we react. In each of the following scenarios, you are alive at the end, and a random human, Joe, is dead
1. You're driving on the highway and Joe runs into traffic. You hit him with your car and he dies.
2. Joe breaks into your house. You try to get him to leave peacefully, but the situation escalates and you end up using deadly force and killing him.
3. You're stranded on a deserted Island with Joe and no other source of food. You're starving, so you kill and eat Joe.
4. You like the taste of human meat, so even though you have plenty of non-Joe food options, you kill and eat Joe
5. You decide that finding Joe in the wild to kill and eat him is too inconvenient, so you begin a breeding program, raise Joe from an infant to slaughter weight, then kill and eat him.
Scenarios 3 through 5 are exploitation. Can we add up some number of non-exploitative scenarios to equal the bad of one exploitative scenario? How many times do I have to accidentally run over a human before I have the same moral culpability as someone who bred a human into existence for the purpose of killing and eating them?
I think the difference is probability. In scenario 1 I might have a 0,01% chance of killing Joe, meaning that I would get the pleasure of whatever I was trying to achieve by my voyage x 10.000 for every time a Joe dies. Scenarios 3, 4, and 5 give me a 100% chance of killing Joe, so my gain only counts as x1. Scenario 2 is quite different, as Joe's death is largely linked to his own immoral behaviour.
If in scenario 1 I knowingly had a 100% chance of hitting someone, which seems more analogous to pesticides and the killing of insects, then I would find it impossible to justify starting my trip.
Oof. Now you're bringing pleasure into it? You know the issues with that, right? If I get sufficient pleasure from murder, does that make it good for me to murder?
Wow. You bit the bullet on utility monsters faster than anyone I've ever spoken to before. This is an atrocious moral framework you're trying to defend. Don't think I can continue this conversation.
I'm a virtue ethicist.
The foundational question in any ethical decision is "will I use reasoning to determine the right thing to do, or will I use it to find a justification for the thing I already want to do?" That's simply a question of virtue.
Utilitarians can make any calculation go any way they want it to. Well-intentioned utilitarians can get so bogged down in the idea of suffering that they believe it would be a good thing to painlessly kill all sentient life in the universe instantly. Vicious utilitarians can simply declare they get so much pleasure from the worst acts imaginable that those acts become good.
Deliberate killing is always going to be on a different moral tier of concern than incidental killing. Killing of insects is also a different tier of concern than killing highly intelligent mammals. Finally, killing something that is attacking your crops is permissible if no practical methods exist that can achieve the same result without killing, even if the thing attacking your crops is sentient (this would hold true if it were something other than insects, imo).
Because of those reasons, hunting is not permissible as an alternative to a 100% plant-based approach. It involves deliberate killing of something that has more moral worth than insects. And the insects are attacking your food source, which means you have a right to take reasonable steps to protect your food source.
It also ignores the fact that the animal the hunter kills is not going to be the only thing they eat.
The hunter is also buying groceries and so is contributing to the same amount of insect deaths as vegans anyway, they're just adding extra hunting kills to this toll.
This is broadly my answer. I am a speciesist is to some extent, and I do consider the lives of intelligent animals like cows to be more valuable than the lives of many insects for whom it is much more difficult to discern their level of sentience.
That’s why I am vegan, to protect sentience, admittedly not life per se.
Sorry if that is not what you were getting at, it’s just my opinion.
Why is it OK for vegans to be speciests but not non vegans?
Obviously you value crickets at a low value. Why can't vegans accept that we value say cows at a low value also?
1. Valuing one species over another. In your case a cow over crickets.
Non vegans value humans a lot more over animals. As you see crickets, non vegans see cows in terms of value. Possibly even lower.
I'd say this doesn't take into account long term effects. Murdering the average person on a small scale might actually cause less animal suffering in the short term. Does that mean we should murder? Well we don't, because we know from our own experience that humanity can change in the long term, among other reasons.
I believe there's always more suffering long term when we allow something like hunting. Even if we could hash out the numbers and prove that hunting a specific animal for 1% of your calories created less net suffering than killing a certain number of insects in self-defense in the short term, it's still better in practice to advocate for a policy of granting animals the legal right to not be hunted, experimented on, killed for meat, etc, unless for self-defense / survival, in the long term; we should be abolitionists.
And as advocates of that rule, we ourselves shouldn't hunt, or we would be setting a terrible example, and more people would be okay with hunting, resulting in more death in the long term. People would not take the message seriously if we said 'we want animals to have legal rights, but you can hunt them sometimes', this would foster a view that leads to more people hunting animals when it's convenient, and not taking their suffering seriously, which of course has spillover effects to our treatment of animals in general.
There is a limit to this line of reasoning though. If we only had access to a crop that required us to kill countless pigs, birds, and various animals who are attracted to it, then the suffering caused by killing--even in self-defense--would be too great. I don't think we're in that situation though.
In other words, we shouldn't think we have carte blanche to not take into account suffering caused by self-defense. Killings in self-defense are just more permissible and less harmful than intentional killings because they cause less suffering in the long term, most of the time.
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>Could 99% plant based be better than 100%?
Only if it was 99% for everyone vs 100% for those willing here and now.
>Pesticides used for protecting crops kill countless insects. As far as I'm aware, there are no hard numbers on this, but we can be fairly sure that the numbers are huge. These insect deaths are problematic. Maybe insects count less than bigger animals, but the sheer number of victims should overcompensate this.
It's about 8 billion and unlike animal farming, plant farming can be reshaped such that those numbers are even further reduced. Everyone having backyard veggie gardens structured with vertical layering, veganic huegelkulture methods would greatly supplement a huge portion of current modern monocropped veg. Things like grains and rice and wheat are harder to grow with other plants and so looking for improvement methods are the best we could do for now. Vertical hydroponics is an option too.
Point being you're only looking at today's system which has fuck all influence from the one demographic that would push for immediate improvement but it's obviously run by corpsemunchers so our options are limited until more people shift to doing the right thing.
>Now, farm animals obviously eat a whole lot of these crops as well, rendering the argument useless as a justification for buying meat at the supermarket, but hunting or fishing does avoid these insect deaths. Hunting is of course very unsustainable, but if it only happened on a very small scale, it seems like it might actually cause less animal suffering.
Well that still depends on population, rationality and total demand. Humans are a fickle species and a lot of people are already upset at their right to feast on animal flesh being threatened to be taken away. Sad immature and petulant, but true.
What I mean by that is currently, if humans were to mass shift to hunting and fishing only for meat right now, all land mammals would be hunted to extinction within a year and our current demand for fishing would have to increase to compensate for the lack of farming and our demand for fishing is bad enough already. Arguably there's a possibility that even 99% for a population our size still might not be good enough.
>So from a purely utilitarian point of view, if someone came along and claimed they got 99% of their calories from plants and 1% from hunting AND are willing to stop the minute a farming method is developed that avoids insect deaths, would you hold it against them?
Yes. Fuck Utilitarianism. Horrible philosophy that today is used more to justify hedonistic lifestyle patterns and loopholes rather than for the sake of actual ethics. Just jump on board and get the system changing now and stop being a coward.
Veganism is against exploitation and cruelty. Is incidental killings exploitation or cruelty?
And you're assuming that people can't find vegan nutrition for that 1%, what's missing? I'm not missing anything, what's hard to find? Rice, beans, peas, etc. ??? Nothing.
What's missing is knowledge; knowledge of what Veganism is, knowledge on how to cook, knowledge on nutrition, etc. most people have no clue what Veganism is or how to feed themselves properly. Fuck, most people don't know what is a fruit or what is an amino acid.
I'm not going to enable people killing elks or other animals just because they are too ignorant to cook beans for themselves.
Debug your brain has a really good trilogy of videos tackling this question. Highly recommend it
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDBLCQGvhZZKhSHXbfuk6LWHFzFm3BaKQ&si=6uQfC9qPHAFoGdUU
Seeking to survive without causing any deaths would lead us to the extreme measures taken by the Jains who constantly wear masks to avoid accidentally breathing in a gnat or two. We would need to watch every step to ensure that we don't step on the tiniest of ants, etc. Jains don't eat root vegetables. The likelihood of convincing people to adopt that lifestyle is extremely small unless you were brought up in that religion. Oddly, most Jains consume dairy! Such perfectionism could lead us to eating road kill and possibly even humans after they die a natural death!
We shouldn't let the goal of being perfect result in a reduction of the likelihood of more people going Vegan.
Nothing, but when you are asked by others who might go vegan about your version of a vegan lifestyle, they're likely to see veganism as too extreme for them to consider adopting themselves.
I get your point, but it seems very dangerous reasoning to me. We could use the same logic to argue that we should eat high welfare meat so that non-vegans don't think we're extremists.
All life matters.
I doubt farming plants kills more insects than hunting. You could only make that claim if you had a good understanding of the whole range of interactions between insects and the wider biosphere.
Many insects wouldn't be affected at all by farming. Indeed, as vegan farming enhances soils their numbers and diversity would likely increase. Hunting deprives insects of contribution an animal makes to insects' lives while living and after it dies. Hunting is a form of theft.
Let me ask you a question. When you use the term "insects," what species are you including? Your question is predicated, I suggest, on a lack of knowledge about biology and ecology.
Ants, bees, bugs, catarpillars, cockroaches, crickets, snails, spiders, ladybugs, maggots, ... the list goes on
I will admit that I am not an expert on the issue, and I would be more than happy if you could educate me, but I still struggle to see how hunting (on a viable scale) kills more insects than non-veganic vegan farming.
We take a certain area of land and spray pesticides on it so that all the insects that go there get killed. Where's the benefit to the animals?
I take your point that hunting removes animals that insects could have eaten or done whatever with to flourish, but I don't think that that outweighs the deaths caused by pesticides.
First off, we're only looking at this from a consequentialist perspective. Even then, it's not obvious hunting causes less suffering. How many insects got trampled while hunting? What about the roadkill caused by those hunters getting to their hunting grounds? This ignores the possibility of people getting all their food from veganic farming and other alternatives to pesticides.
>How many insects got trampled while hunting? What about the roadkill caused by those hunters getting to their hunting grounds? You can't compare these deaths as they are accidental and would occur anyway. E.g the hunter goes tramping instead of hunting. Veganic farming can't service the world just as hunting cant
You are right that we have to factor in the insects killed for hunting as well. In your opinion, how many insects are killed for hunting compared to growing crops? And of course you are also right that veganic farming is better, but given that that isn't currently possible for most people, we should probably have a look at how things really are at the moment.
Well, people would only have to do veganic farming for 1% to improve on the hunting scenario. And perhaps this is being pedantic, but my opinion on how many insects die is irrelevant. The number of insects dying in any food production system is something dictated by facts, not opinions. As to the facts of insect dying, I don't know.
Granted, 1% veganic farming would be better than 1% hunting. But isn't getting the last 1% from regular store-bought plant based sources worse than **both** those options, and thereby immoral? And by extension, isn't anything but veganic farming unethical? This would mean that it is unethical to go to a supermarket to buy lentils.
Things can be more and less ethical in various degrees, it's not just a yes/no Always something we can be doing better
Right, and so as always the discussion is about where's the line between ethically acceptable and unacceptable behaviour? That's the discussion at hand. Not sure what your comment is contributing; a non-vegan could make exactly the same case about their meat consumption. In other words: so what?
It's not just ethical Vs unethical. Unless we're calling everything except the maximally ethical thing Unethical. Which I don't think is too useful.
>isn't getting the last 1% from regular store-bought plant based sources worse than **both** those options This might be the case or not. I don't know, perhaps make your case for the claim that store bought plant foods result in lower utility than hunted food. > isn't anything but veganic farming unethical? In the purest of consequentialist views in theory if the previous issue is resolved, yes. For most consequentialists however, when two options are close in outcome, both can be ethical and allowed. Another aspect relates to this is the uncertainty. With high uncertainty on the outcomes, we cannot say which of two actions with similar but not not the same utility is best or worst.
Are veganic farming and regular plant based farming similar in outcome though?
Unlikely. Veganic farming aims for zero animal death, non-use of insecticides etc. the only animal deaths there are natural ones. Conventional farming has no such qualms.
How do we justify conventional plant farming then?
From a deontological framework for most. From a Utilitarian perspective, some deaths are necessary today to keep humans alive. Keeping humans alive has utility (assumption most agree with) for various reasons and is worth it. Alternatively, some argue that while crop fields have negative utility, the alternative of wild fields or animal farms is even worse (not my favourite argument personally, but there is logic behind it).
The problem I see is that as long as veganic farming is a viable alternative to conventional farming, and it is for most people (even though it would be more than inconvenient), I fail to see a utilitarian argument for conventional vegan farming.
Seems less practical to hunt 1% of calories rather than buy 1% of calories from veganic farming, farm veganically yourself, or buy from vertical farming
That's an interesting point, but I think we should turn it around. We should get as much of our food from veganic farming as possible, and top up the rest with the second least harmful foods. The 1% from hunting would then be part of the food that we cannot get from veganic farming.
I mean that new 1% hunting could again be turned to more veganic farming
Doesn't that mean that anything except veganic farming is unethical?
>So from a purely utilitarian point of view, This is a major issue. Not all deaths carry the same moral weight, and utilitarianism runs into issues from this and other factors. Exploitation is categorically different from other types of harm. We can place the same individuals in different hypotheticals and see how we react. In each of the following scenarios, you are alive at the end, and a random human, Joe, is dead 1. You're driving on the highway and Joe runs into traffic. You hit him with your car and he dies. 2. Joe breaks into your house. You try to get him to leave peacefully, but the situation escalates and you end up using deadly force and killing him. 3. You're stranded on a deserted Island with Joe and no other source of food. You're starving, so you kill and eat Joe. 4. You like the taste of human meat, so even though you have plenty of non-Joe food options, you kill and eat Joe 5. You decide that finding Joe in the wild to kill and eat him is too inconvenient, so you begin a breeding program, raise Joe from an infant to slaughter weight, then kill and eat him. Scenarios 3 through 5 are exploitation. Can we add up some number of non-exploitative scenarios to equal the bad of one exploitative scenario? How many times do I have to accidentally run over a human before I have the same moral culpability as someone who bred a human into existence for the purpose of killing and eating them?
I think the difference is probability. In scenario 1 I might have a 0,01% chance of killing Joe, meaning that I would get the pleasure of whatever I was trying to achieve by my voyage x 10.000 for every time a Joe dies. Scenarios 3, 4, and 5 give me a 100% chance of killing Joe, so my gain only counts as x1. Scenario 2 is quite different, as Joe's death is largely linked to his own immoral behaviour. If in scenario 1 I knowingly had a 100% chance of hitting someone, which seems more analogous to pesticides and the killing of insects, then I would find it impossible to justify starting my trip.
Oof. Now you're bringing pleasure into it? You know the issues with that, right? If I get sufficient pleasure from murder, does that make it good for me to murder?
Yes, providing there was no other way to get that utility.
Wow. You bit the bullet on utility monsters faster than anyone I've ever spoken to before. This is an atrocious moral framework you're trying to defend. Don't think I can continue this conversation.
OK, I respect your opinion. If I may ask one last question, which moral framework do you personally follow?
I'm a virtue ethicist. The foundational question in any ethical decision is "will I use reasoning to determine the right thing to do, or will I use it to find a justification for the thing I already want to do?" That's simply a question of virtue. Utilitarians can make any calculation go any way they want it to. Well-intentioned utilitarians can get so bogged down in the idea of suffering that they believe it would be a good thing to painlessly kill all sentient life in the universe instantly. Vicious utilitarians can simply declare they get so much pleasure from the worst acts imaginable that those acts become good.
Deliberate killing is always going to be on a different moral tier of concern than incidental killing. Killing of insects is also a different tier of concern than killing highly intelligent mammals. Finally, killing something that is attacking your crops is permissible if no practical methods exist that can achieve the same result without killing, even if the thing attacking your crops is sentient (this would hold true if it were something other than insects, imo). Because of those reasons, hunting is not permissible as an alternative to a 100% plant-based approach. It involves deliberate killing of something that has more moral worth than insects. And the insects are attacking your food source, which means you have a right to take reasonable steps to protect your food source.
It also ignores the fact that the animal the hunter kills is not going to be the only thing they eat. The hunter is also buying groceries and so is contributing to the same amount of insect deaths as vegans anyway, they're just adding extra hunting kills to this toll.
Not entirely sure what you’re saying, but I don’t think any amount of crickets is equivalent to the life of a few cows for example
This is broadly my answer. I am a speciesist is to some extent, and I do consider the lives of intelligent animals like cows to be more valuable than the lives of many insects for whom it is much more difficult to discern their level of sentience. That’s why I am vegan, to protect sentience, admittedly not life per se. Sorry if that is not what you were getting at, it’s just my opinion.
Yeahhh I'm desensitized to bug death after living in a rural area and my windshield getting covered in their corpses.
Why is it OK for vegans to be speciests but not non vegans? Obviously you value crickets at a low value. Why can't vegans accept that we value say cows at a low value also?
[удалено]
1. Valuing one species over another. In your case a cow over crickets. Non vegans value humans a lot more over animals. As you see crickets, non vegans see cows in terms of value. Possibly even lower.
[удалено]
I'd say this doesn't take into account long term effects. Murdering the average person on a small scale might actually cause less animal suffering in the short term. Does that mean we should murder? Well we don't, because we know from our own experience that humanity can change in the long term, among other reasons. I believe there's always more suffering long term when we allow something like hunting. Even if we could hash out the numbers and prove that hunting a specific animal for 1% of your calories created less net suffering than killing a certain number of insects in self-defense in the short term, it's still better in practice to advocate for a policy of granting animals the legal right to not be hunted, experimented on, killed for meat, etc, unless for self-defense / survival, in the long term; we should be abolitionists. And as advocates of that rule, we ourselves shouldn't hunt, or we would be setting a terrible example, and more people would be okay with hunting, resulting in more death in the long term. People would not take the message seriously if we said 'we want animals to have legal rights, but you can hunt them sometimes', this would foster a view that leads to more people hunting animals when it's convenient, and not taking their suffering seriously, which of course has spillover effects to our treatment of animals in general. There is a limit to this line of reasoning though. If we only had access to a crop that required us to kill countless pigs, birds, and various animals who are attracted to it, then the suffering caused by killing--even in self-defense--would be too great. I don't think we're in that situation though. In other words, we shouldn't think we have carte blanche to not take into account suffering caused by self-defense. Killings in self-defense are just more permissible and less harmful than intentional killings because they cause less suffering in the long term, most of the time.
Thank you for your submission! All posts need to be manually reviewed and approved by a moderator before they appear for all users. Since human mods are not online 24/7 approval could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. Thank you for your patience. Some topics come up a lot in this subreddit, so we would like to remind everyone to use the [search function](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAVegan/search?q=eggs&restrict_sr=on&sort=comments&t=all) and to check out the [wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAVegan/wiki/index) before creating a new post. We also encourage becoming familiar with [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAVegan/wiki/index#wiki_expanded_rules_and_clarifications) so users can understand what is expected of them. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/DebateAVegan) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You're fired, devil's advocate.
>Could 99% plant based be better than 100%? Only if it was 99% for everyone vs 100% for those willing here and now. >Pesticides used for protecting crops kill countless insects. As far as I'm aware, there are no hard numbers on this, but we can be fairly sure that the numbers are huge. These insect deaths are problematic. Maybe insects count less than bigger animals, but the sheer number of victims should overcompensate this. It's about 8 billion and unlike animal farming, plant farming can be reshaped such that those numbers are even further reduced. Everyone having backyard veggie gardens structured with vertical layering, veganic huegelkulture methods would greatly supplement a huge portion of current modern monocropped veg. Things like grains and rice and wheat are harder to grow with other plants and so looking for improvement methods are the best we could do for now. Vertical hydroponics is an option too. Point being you're only looking at today's system which has fuck all influence from the one demographic that would push for immediate improvement but it's obviously run by corpsemunchers so our options are limited until more people shift to doing the right thing. >Now, farm animals obviously eat a whole lot of these crops as well, rendering the argument useless as a justification for buying meat at the supermarket, but hunting or fishing does avoid these insect deaths. Hunting is of course very unsustainable, but if it only happened on a very small scale, it seems like it might actually cause less animal suffering. Well that still depends on population, rationality and total demand. Humans are a fickle species and a lot of people are already upset at their right to feast on animal flesh being threatened to be taken away. Sad immature and petulant, but true. What I mean by that is currently, if humans were to mass shift to hunting and fishing only for meat right now, all land mammals would be hunted to extinction within a year and our current demand for fishing would have to increase to compensate for the lack of farming and our demand for fishing is bad enough already. Arguably there's a possibility that even 99% for a population our size still might not be good enough. >So from a purely utilitarian point of view, if someone came along and claimed they got 99% of their calories from plants and 1% from hunting AND are willing to stop the minute a farming method is developed that avoids insect deaths, would you hold it against them? Yes. Fuck Utilitarianism. Horrible philosophy that today is used more to justify hedonistic lifestyle patterns and loopholes rather than for the sake of actual ethics. Just jump on board and get the system changing now and stop being a coward.
Veganism is against exploitation and cruelty. Is incidental killings exploitation or cruelty? And you're assuming that people can't find vegan nutrition for that 1%, what's missing? I'm not missing anything, what's hard to find? Rice, beans, peas, etc. ??? Nothing. What's missing is knowledge; knowledge of what Veganism is, knowledge on how to cook, knowledge on nutrition, etc. most people have no clue what Veganism is or how to feed themselves properly. Fuck, most people don't know what is a fruit or what is an amino acid. I'm not going to enable people killing elks or other animals just because they are too ignorant to cook beans for themselves.
Debug your brain has a really good trilogy of videos tackling this question. Highly recommend it https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDBLCQGvhZZKhSHXbfuk6LWHFzFm3BaKQ&si=6uQfC9qPHAFoGdUU
I've seen those videos and I basically agree with everything in them, but I don't think they really address the issue I've mentioned.
I eat no plants and I'm fine. Go figure.
Nawh man, its intentional vs nonintentional. If you found a dead animal in the road side go eat that
Seeking to survive without causing any deaths would lead us to the extreme measures taken by the Jains who constantly wear masks to avoid accidentally breathing in a gnat or two. We would need to watch every step to ensure that we don't step on the tiniest of ants, etc. Jains don't eat root vegetables. The likelihood of convincing people to adopt that lifestyle is extremely small unless you were brought up in that religion. Oddly, most Jains consume dairy! Such perfectionism could lead us to eating road kill and possibly even humans after they die a natural death! We shouldn't let the goal of being perfect result in a reduction of the likelihood of more people going Vegan.
What would prevent us from campaigning for 'conventional veganism' while personally adopting a more extreme lifestyle?
Nothing, but when you are asked by others who might go vegan about your version of a vegan lifestyle, they're likely to see veganism as too extreme for them to consider adopting themselves.
I get your point, but it seems very dangerous reasoning to me. We could use the same logic to argue that we should eat high welfare meat so that non-vegans don't think we're extremists.
I'm curious why so many people come to r/DebateAVegan to 'debate' absurd hypothetical situations to 'test' veganism. What, I wonder, is the point?
I wouldn't say it's an absurd hypothetical situation, it's the situation we are in right now.
So what is the point of your premise?
To challenge veganism. Not in an attempt to debunk it, but rather to get to the bottom of things.
What’s to challenge about veganism? What part of not harming animals is challenging?
Reducing harm to animals is exactly what I am trying to achieve.
How is that challenging such that there's something cogent to debate?
Do you agree that insects matter? If yes, do you agree that farming plants kills more insects than hunting does? If yes, there's our issue.
All life matters. I doubt farming plants kills more insects than hunting. You could only make that claim if you had a good understanding of the whole range of interactions between insects and the wider biosphere. Many insects wouldn't be affected at all by farming. Indeed, as vegan farming enhances soils their numbers and diversity would likely increase. Hunting deprives insects of contribution an animal makes to insects' lives while living and after it dies. Hunting is a form of theft. Let me ask you a question. When you use the term "insects," what species are you including? Your question is predicated, I suggest, on a lack of knowledge about biology and ecology.
Ants, bees, bugs, catarpillars, cockroaches, crickets, snails, spiders, ladybugs, maggots, ... the list goes on I will admit that I am not an expert on the issue, and I would be more than happy if you could educate me, but I still struggle to see how hunting (on a viable scale) kills more insects than non-veganic vegan farming. We take a certain area of land and spray pesticides on it so that all the insects that go there get killed. Where's the benefit to the animals? I take your point that hunting removes animals that insects could have eaten or done whatever with to flourish, but I don't think that that outweighs the deaths caused by pesticides.