Who's a vegetarian?

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In all seriousness...
I feel that morals themselves relate exclusively to humans, and their interaction with each other. I side with vegetarianism being a preference.
 
I think all meat eaters and vegetarians should just chill and enjoy a nice glass of MALK.....

malk.jpg
 
Luis Caffesse said:
I think you might be overreaching just a little by using the word "meant."

I think its more than fair to say that humans have the ability to eat meat.
But to give any sort of intention to evolutionary adaptations seems a bit strong.
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"Meant" in the same sense, as observing that a bacterium's flagella are "meant" to propel it along, or a dolphin's sonar melon is "meant" to expand its senses.

Believe me, I don't ascribe intention to natural selection. Making "meant" a sloppy word choice...

Anyway, ability is the clue that we are "meant" to eat meat, in that sense. No organism has a functional capacity, against which there is a convincing argument regarding its use.

Luis Caffesse said:
We may have evolved with the adaptation to eat meat for survival, but that does not necessarily mean we are 'meant' to eat meat today.
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Cooperative hunting was a major influence upon the earliest development of human societies. And, we're evolutionarily derived from omnivores. I don't think we evolved with an 'adaptation to eat meat for survival;' our evolutionary predecessors were already there. We developed ways to do it better.

Luis Caffesse said:
It just means we have it as an option - not an absolute, not a necessity.
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Considering the caution and fine attention to balance and supplements that vegetarians are obliged to give, it seems fairly obvious that it's vegetarianism that is merely an unnatural option, and omnivorism that is the biological absolute and necessity, for human beings.
 
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There is such a thing as trying to assign a moral value to a decision where there is none to be found. Not everything is right or wrong. Many actions, such as brushing your teeth or blowing your nose, hold a purely neutral moral value.

Sure, folks can make out a decision between meat and veggies to be a decision between right and wrong, but bear in mind that there are also people out there who feel it is wrong to murder and eat vegetables, too.

You can say, well, to them it is. But what is it ultimately? Depending on your view of truth and morality you'll say either that there is always an ultimate truth, or that there are 8 billion different versions, one for each person on the planet.

I hold to the former, so I would say that killing vegetables is not murder and that the question of "meat versus veggies" is preference and nothing more. The person making the decision can tell himself it's a "moral" decision, a decision between an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but he can pretend it's immoral to eat saltine crackers as well.
 
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Good knowledge! There's a man who's had a bit of a classical education :)


Although I think you've got the name wrong.....Manicheans? Let me wiki it.


Edit:

Nope, you're absolutely right!

The Manicheans were doctrinally against the consumption of meat.

Again, good knowledge!
 
It was the Pythagoreans. They also refused to pick up objects that they had dropped on the ground, and believed that the dodecahedron was a geometric form of such massive philosophical implications, that they kept it secret and refused to discuss its existence, with anybody.
 
Luis Caffesse said:
Is it?
I'm just playing devil's advocate here but I think some people would tell you that 'just because we got the ability to think' makes all the difference in the world.
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It has been like this for millions of years and then we started thinking.... makes it hard for me to believe it is suddenly a bad thing.

Luis Caffesse said:
Animals don't have a choice - they live off instinct.
An animal doesn't 'choose' to eat another animal.
An animal also can't run down to the grocery store and pick up what it needs for the week.
Animals do what they must to survive.
Humans choose to do what they want to do.
We have the option, and overwhelmingly we choose to eat other animals.
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We have that option right now, right. But not nessecarily in the future and we also havent had it in the past. So does that time/situation factor decide if its good or bad? Someday we maybe cant choose anymore. Are we bad people then? I dont think so.

Luis Caffesse said:
Some don't see it as a moral choice - I personally do see it as a moral choice.
I have a hard time seeing how you can't.
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Of course it is a choice, but for me it is no moral choice. It is just normal/natural for me. In my eyes it is natures life.

I wanna give you one example out of my life.
I live in the countryside. When I was a teenager I always went to a farm and spend whole days in the forrest and so on. One day a friend and I found a small buzzard that fell out of the nest. So we decided to raise it up.

You may think. Nice, no problem so far. But then the buzzard is hungry. And what do buzzards eat? Mice. So you have the decision to kill mice to feed the buzzard or to let the buzzard die. Well, we chose to kill the mice. But I dont feel bad about that. Either way you HAVE to make a decision. But both of them are not bad.

People can just change the outcome a little bit, but I think its not a moral decision.

And no matter what we do/eat, we will harm something. There are just to many people on the world.

Luis Caffesse said:
To take your argument to the extreme one could say - animals kill animals all the time - it's not bad, it's just nature.
Man is no different. Therefore, we should allow murder.

It's a slippery slope if you want to remain logically consistent, I think.
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Well, that is for sure. I think there is no real logical solution.

BTW. I just had a nice vegetarian ratatouille :)
 
They believed that the soul in process of reincarnation, went through a phase of being corporealized in beans. So eating beans entailed the risk of eating a beloved departed teacher, friend or family member. In bean form.

No weirder than most any other religious belief, I guess.

Plus the eminently practical benefit, of curtailing flatulence.
 
Sad Max said:
Believe me, I don't ascribe intention to natural selection. Making "meant" a sloppy word choice...
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Fair enough.
I figured that was what you meant, just wanted to make sure we weren't saying it wasn't a moral choice on one hand, yet our evolutionary adaptations had intentions on the other. Somehow that seems contradictory...not sure why.
:)

Anyway, ability is the clue that we are "meant" to eat meat, in that sense. No organism has a functional capacity, against which there is a convincing argument regarding its use.
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I would say no organism has a funcational capacity against which there is a convincing argument regarding its use at some point in its past. The presence of an adaptation today merely points to the fact that it was once advantageous - once the environmental pressure is taken away for that particular adaptation, it's not simply going to dissapear from the population (assuming it is not detrimental).

Cooperative hunting was a major influence upon the earliest development of human societies. And, we're evolutionarily derived from omnivores. I don't think we evolved with an 'adaptation to eat meat for survival;' our evolutionary predecessors were already there. We developed ways to do it better.
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Yes, and we've also developed way to do many other things better - like refine sugars and starches. Those aren't necessarily good for us either. I don't really see the fact that we improved on something as a justification for its necessity.

If anything, I think we can at least agree that while human definitely have phisological traits which point to an adaptation for meat eating - humans today seem to eat much more meat that the human body actually needs (IF it needs any, that is).

Considering the caution and fine attention to balance and supplements that vegetarians are obliged to give, it seems fairly obvious that it's vegetarianism that is merely an unnatural option, and omnivorism that is the biological absolute and necessity, for human beings.
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I would agree that omnivorism is the biological 'natural state' so to speak, of human beings. But I don't think I would go as far as to say that eating meat is a necessity. While you're right in that most vegetarians pay much more attention to the balance of foods they consume, and many do take supplements - I would also point out that most vegetarians on the average are in better health than the average population. Most people don't pay much attention at all to what they eat. So while it may be more 'troublesome' to be vegetarian - that alone doesn't mean its an 'unnatural' state.
It's troublesome to watch what you eat no matter what your diet is.

As far as to whether or not its a 'moral choice.'
I still personally think it is - I just happen to think its not immoral to eat meat...so I do it.

We're getting into quite a bit of minutiae here - to be honest, I'm forgetting what we were debating exactly.
:)
 
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Jared Meyer said:
There is such a thing as trying to assign a moral value to a decision where there is none to be found. Not everything is right or wrong. Many actions, such as brushing your teeth or blowing your nose, hold a purely neutral moral value.
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There is also the possibility that everything is a moral decision in so far as we are defined by our actions, and they are a reflection of what we find to be right and wrong.
In a desperate attempt to tie this back to the main purpose of these boards.... it's like the nature of storytelling and drama - action defines character.

So while it may not seem like a moral decision - the fact that you choose to brush your teeth says that you find dental hygiene, and personal hygiene, to be something worth doing. This says that you have respect for yourself and your body - and that you feel it is an important thing to do. That is really only a step away from saying it's the 'right' thing to do.

What does it say about someone when they don't blow their nose, or brush their teeth?
I'm not saying they are immoral...but I think most of us would have different views of a person with a full set of healthy teeth, versus a person with half a mouth full of rotten teeth.

Our decisions, great and small, define who we are - of course most of the time we believe things that vary greatly from what we actually do....but that's a whole different aspect of human behavior.

But anyhow - at this point we're splitting hairs (or at least, I am)
:)
 
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