Veganism

My argument is simply that any of us who have an easy choice of whether or not to purchase products that are made from animals should choose not to because of the enormous suffering the animals endure and/or because they lose their life.  Tell me why you disagree.

1. Animal suffering doesnt matter, so that argument is irrelevant.

2. Meat is tasty

3. Hunger for meat can only be satisfied with meat

4. Meat is a democratic choice. Majority wants meat.

5. Meat industry lets more animals live. There is no way billions of cows would survive in the wild

6. Being slowly ripped apart by wild animals is just as bad as being killed in a usual way by butchering.

7. Human suffering caused by meat is insignificant, since humans consent to eat meat and enjoy it and gain much more happiness from it than from eating shitty vegetables, fruit or corn.

Since no "bad example" you can come up with includes these 7 together, I rest my case.

Point

Hello again, Best.Korea, thanks for joining me.  

So, your points 2, 3 and 4 are essentially saying that a lot of people love to eat meat, which would make perfect sense as legitimate reasons to continue to eat meat if your first point, that the suffering of animals doesn’t matter, were true.  I obviously disagree on that first point, and, for now, I’d like to put points 5 through 7 to the side, (we can definitely return to them later), and focus only on this first point.

What, specifically, is one reason that you have for believing that animal suffering doesn’t matter?  Please give me one (and only one) very specific reason.   

I dont need a reason for it.

Matters = values in brain

Animal suffering bad = error, value not found,

The reality is, people will still keep eating your animal friends.

To them, your animal friends dont matter and they dont matter to me either.

So really, until you convince us that animal suffering matters in any significant way, I dont see what will keep us away from that tasty chicken.

And unless all people on this site agree to go vegan, which they wont, I dont see how your arguments will ever convince the majority.

So go ahead, tell us why should we care about your animal friends. They are not human or important enough to not be harmed.

Let me rephrase the question.   I’m assuming that you do think that human suffering and/or death matters, is that correct?   

If so, explain one reason that the suffering of an animal (let’s say a chicken, since you brought it up) doesn’t matter to you.   In other words, why does the life and/or suffering of one matter, but not the other?    

Animals arent humans. I can tell what is a dog and what is a human.

Tell us why animal suffering matters.

Ok, but why does being human matter?   What, specifically, is it about humans that causes you to value whether or not they suffer?   The reason I ask is because, in my view, merely the capacity to feel pain and value our lives, that basic desire to live and to not suffer, is something that all sentient beings share in common, humans and animals alike.   Most of us humans have empathy for billions of complete strangers (the majority of the world’s human population) simply because we can imagine being in their shoes, at least in the sense of our shared mortality and capacity for suffering.    Animals, of course, share this with us as well, yet you claim not to care about their suffering because they aren’t human?   But, why does that matter?   It seems so arbitrary, no?  Couldn’t we just as easily say people who are left handed don’t deserve empathy from right handers because they aren’t right handers?   Do you see what I’m saying?  Being “human” is such an arbitrary distinction, isn’t it?

As I said, humans arent animals.

Every moral distinction is an arbitrary distinction.

Saying  that animal suffering matters "because human suffering matters" is nonsense, because humans arent animals.

Go ahead, tell us why animal suffering matters.

Saying "because they have capacity to suffer" is circular reasoning.

Its like me saying humans matter because they have capacity to be humans.

Thank you for the debate.