I have no argument with your desire to establish the most cost-effective way to get the most bang for your bucks. I simply do not accept the premise that it is wrong to eat meat.
Consider the life of a steer in Cape York. It is born the property of a grazier. It is given health care of a sort (dips, jabs, anti-tick treatment). It lives a free life grazing for a few hundred days in fenced enclosures protected by the grazier’s guns from predators. Towards the end, it is mustered by jackaroos and jillaroos, shipped in a truck to the lush volcanic grasslands of the Atherton Tableland to be fattened up. On its last day, it is trucked to an abattoir to be stunned and killed.
If the grazier did not exist the steer would not exist. Now I could make some argument about ‘utility’ but I won’t. And indeed there is a distinction between the factory farming you object to (grain-fed beef) versus older ways (grass-fed beef).
I would not like to be given this treatment myself but I am not a domesticated animal. I am not a beast or a dumb animal. I am a top predator. We have evolved to prefer meat and vegetables in our diet. We have arranged the ecosystem to satisfy our desire for meat. I value steers dead, butchered and then grilled or roasted. I have no interest, rational, emotional or otherwise, in funding a life for free steers in the wild.
A fundamental political problem for vegan advocacy is that people enjoy meat and that it is ‘natural’ to eat it. Now being natural is not a right maker but going against nature and being dependent on vitamin supplements to avoid anemia is not a right maker either. Stick people in the bush with no food and a bow and arrow and they will figure out how to shoot cute kangaroos and koalas quick smart rather than starve. Submit homo sapiens to enough stress and those predator instincts and drives that are suppressed in the civilized ecosystem come to the fore.
Desire drives us all. Argument that goes against basic human desire goes uphill. Vegetarian advocacy has been around for a long time (since Buddha, Mahavira) as have the moral arguments. Alas, human moral functionality is limited. Your research dollars would be better spent on finding an ethical alternative to meat that tastes way better than soy burgers. When vegans can provide a product that rivals that of the butchers in taste and appeal, then they will succeed.
Until then, they are a tiny minority that get recruits and suffers defections at more or less similarly measurable rates. In the meantime, I prefer organic and free-range products.
I have no interest, rational, emotional or otherwise, in funding a life for free steers in the wild.
Without engaging with any of your other points, I’d just like to point out that the OP considers the good outcome to be one where farm animals don’t exist at all, rather than one where they’re free in the wild. (Because if animals don’t exist then they can’t suffer.)
Quite so. The OP I think is more concerned about factory farming than the more traditional grazing approaches to cattle. But I think if you push a morality too far up against the hill of human desire it will collapse. Many activists overestimate the “care factor”. My ability to care is pretty limited. I can’t and won’t care about 7 billion other humans on this planet except in the thinnest and most meaningless senses (i.e. stated preferences in surveys which are near worthless) let along the x billion animals. In terms of revealed preferences (where I put my dollars and power) I favour the near and the dear over the stranger and the genetically unrelated.
The Daleks are well established as natural, non-human, sentient biological organisms inside armor. Details have varied over the years, but I don’t think they’ve ever qualified as AIs.
The Daleks are well established as natural, non-human, sentient biological organisms inside armor. Details have varied over the years, but I don’t think they’ve ever qualified as AIs.
They have always been biological but they are also typically genetically engineered at a rather fundamental level to produce desired psychological traits. While I would not use “AIs” myself in such circumstances I see some merit in differentiating between the bioloical vs electronic distinction and the natural vs artificial intelligence distinction.
I have no argument with your desire to establish the most cost-effective way to get the most bang for your bucks. I simply do not accept the premise that it is wrong to eat meat.
Consider the life of a steer in Cape York. It is born the property of a grazier. It is given health care of a sort (dips, jabs, anti-tick treatment). It lives a free life grazing for a few hundred days in fenced enclosures protected by the grazier’s guns from predators. Towards the end, it is mustered by jackaroos and jillaroos, shipped in a truck to the lush volcanic grasslands of the Atherton Tableland to be fattened up. On its last day, it is trucked to an abattoir to be stunned and killed.
If the grazier did not exist the steer would not exist. Now I could make some argument about ‘utility’ but I won’t. And indeed there is a distinction between the factory farming you object to (grain-fed beef) versus older ways (grass-fed beef).
I would not like to be given this treatment myself but I am not a domesticated animal. I am not a beast or a dumb animal. I am a top predator. We have evolved to prefer meat and vegetables in our diet. We have arranged the ecosystem to satisfy our desire for meat. I value steers dead, butchered and then grilled or roasted. I have no interest, rational, emotional or otherwise, in funding a life for free steers in the wild.
A fundamental political problem for vegan advocacy is that people enjoy meat and that it is ‘natural’ to eat it. Now being natural is not a right maker but going against nature and being dependent on vitamin supplements to avoid anemia is not a right maker either. Stick people in the bush with no food and a bow and arrow and they will figure out how to shoot cute kangaroos and koalas quick smart rather than starve. Submit homo sapiens to enough stress and those predator instincts and drives that are suppressed in the civilized ecosystem come to the fore.
Desire drives us all. Argument that goes against basic human desire goes uphill. Vegetarian advocacy has been around for a long time (since Buddha, Mahavira) as have the moral arguments. Alas, human moral functionality is limited. Your research dollars would be better spent on finding an ethical alternative to meat that tastes way better than soy burgers. When vegans can provide a product that rivals that of the butchers in taste and appeal, then they will succeed.
Until then, they are a tiny minority that get recruits and suffers defections at more or less similarly measurable rates. In the meantime, I prefer organic and free-range products.
Without engaging with any of your other points, I’d just like to point out that the OP considers the good outcome to be one where farm animals don’t exist at all, rather than one where they’re free in the wild. (Because if animals don’t exist then they can’t suffer.)
Quite so. The OP I think is more concerned about factory farming than the more traditional grazing approaches to cattle. But I think if you push a morality too far up against the hill of human desire it will collapse. Many activists overestimate the “care factor”. My ability to care is pretty limited. I can’t and won’t care about 7 billion other humans on this planet except in the thinnest and most meaningless senses (i.e. stated preferences in surveys which are near worthless) let along the x billion animals. In terms of revealed preferences (where I put my dollars and power) I favour the near and the dear over the stranger and the genetically unrelated.
Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!!!
That explains the Daleks. They’re failed FAIs that were built to eliminate suffering from the universe.
Fanboy mode on:
The Daleks are well established as natural, non-human, sentient biological organisms inside armor. Details have varied over the years, but I don’t think they’ve ever qualified as AIs.
They have always been biological but they are also typically genetically engineered at a rather fundamental level to produce desired psychological traits. While I would not use “AIs” myself in such circumstances I see some merit in differentiating between the bioloical vs electronic distinction and the natural vs artificial intelligence distinction.