vegetarianism

[nekrenas]

For the past couple weeks I have practiced pescetarianism. The primary reason is environmental: meat, especially beef, is highly carbon-intensive. If you want to lessen your carbon footprint, the easiest, most effective way to do so is almost certainly to reduce your meat intake

Comments

Question for You

[anonymous]

"To me, any concept of animal rights is fraught with logical pitfalls and anti-humanistic gotchas..."
I'm sorry but on what grounds do animals have "rights" to begin with? And if they do have "rights" then where do they come from?

Of course, much of the same could also be said about human rights. But we can always reinterpret human rights as a set of agreements that we enjoy amongst each other as humans, which is always contingent on where we are in the evolutionary process. I don't see how this same trick can be applied between humans and animals; to wit, how does one go about forming a contract with a cow?

The essential difficulty with all this "rights" talk is that it's a hangover from a more religious past, where "rights" could be easily understood as being anchored in the divine. Not so in today's world

Re: Question for You

[nekrenas]

Right.

I think rights is an inappropriate concept for animals. Animals do suffer, and I think humans have a moral obligation to keep unnecessary suffering to a minimum, but it's not about rights.

Moral Obligations

[anonymous]

Nekrenas wrote:
...and I think humans have a moral obligation to keep unnecessary suffering to a minimum
Really! Where do these moral obligations come from? Do humans create them de novo? If so, what enables us to enforce these moral obligations on each other?

I would submit that we humans have no moral obligation because there is no such thing as the transcendant, and ultimately the transcendent is needed in order to anchor a meaningful concept of moral obligation. Nietzsche said as much himself when he famously proclaimed the death of God. Perhaps you've adopted some of the West coast's fuzzy ideas in this regard.

Of course, as animals, our societies have a kind of moral consensus, where we trade a portion of our liberty in order to make our modern arrangement possible. But this consensus is hardly binding and is without the heavy-handedness usually associated with "moral obligations" (especially in light of the fact that our societal [moral] consensuses change from time to time).