Depends on what you are basing your morals on.
If it is about producing less waste and consumption, it is moral in that humans consume less vegetation than a cow would and therefore less toiling of the earth.
But on a conscious level it is the same. Either meat or plant is just as conscious as the other.
at least eating meat: consumers are at least admitting to the suffering they are committing on another conscious being and have the humility to acknowledge as much while they also acknowledge they require to eat to continue to survive in human form. this is what it means that existance is the cause of suffering. regardless of what you consume.
The type of vegans who refuse to acknowledge plants as a conscious being for no other reason that a plant cannot run away or make noise to ‘prove’ their consciousness to them and then have the audacity to turn around and judge others. i believe that to be immoral and unethical as well as emotionaly manipulative and deeply disassociated to the encumberance of life.
Eating plant based: while it is healthier, it is better treatment to the earth itself by consuming less but i would not be fooled into thinking there is a moral high ground in consuming consciousness to be looking down on anyone else.
Eating plants directly causes less plant harm compared to feeding them to animals and then eating those animals.
Because it’s more efficient. Every step along the food chain a lot of energy is lost due to thermodynamics.
same damage. animal eats plant. you are also eating plants. there isnt a zero sum just cuz you moved off of one onto the other.
had you argued less animal farming you might have had a good point as feeding large amounts of meat is inefficent.
you really missed your chance there.
No that’s why I brought up thermodynamics.
Directly eating plants kills less plants than eating animals that grew up eating plants all their life.
You are so close yet so far. You’re still missing that one link of refinement to make your argument water tight and it is very important to acknowledge nuance here.
You don’t suddenly eat less just cuz you changed what you’re eating. Caloric intake is still requiring to be the same.
If you change to plants you need less animals to eat. They’d in turn require less.
You can’t just lazily spew thermal dynamics and nothing to connect it. It makes you sound almost smart but missing the point.
Again you keep missing your opportunity regardless how often I’m bringing it to you on a silver platter. I’m arguing with myself for you. And yet you still keep missing it lol. I guess some ppl really can’t be helped.
unless we feed animals p arts of plants we don’t want. one harvest, two uses.
What if the left over parts are not enough and you had to dedicate lots of land and grow crops just to feed farm animals?
you don’t have to. just don’t do that.
Either meat or plant is just as conscious as the other [citation needed]
consiousness has been undeniably defined on a scale and now has been located within the physical body and i have all these scientific papers to back it up so i can continue to use magical thinking to feel better about eating plants which over animals using the consious argument [citation needed]
Oh dear, seek help.
Seek citations
For what? Burden of proof is on you.
Why? No vegan ever produced a paper proving consciousness. Why do they get a pass?
I’m not here defending vegans, I’m here questioning your batshit insane take that animals have an equivalent level of consciousness as plants.
Depends on your morals.
No, if you are Vegan. Yes, if you eat animal products. The question is, do you care?
You are what you eat. Cows eat grass. Cows are machines that convert grass into more cows. Cows are essentially converted grass. Thus, if it’s ok to eat grass, it’s ok to eat cows. Checkmate.
No, quite the opposite. If people didn’t eat meat then people wouldn’t herd cattle, so most cows wouldn’t ever exist. What is worse, living and then dying, or not living at all? We’re doing the animals a favour by raising them, feeding them, caring for them. A favour which they repay by allowing us to eat them. Anything else would be morally wrong. Now excuse me, my steak is ready.
Fun fact: the plantation owners in the southern states of the USA used this argument to defend slavery.
So it must be right?
How does one eat a slave? What are the best methods of preparation? Any recipies to share?
Don’t be a jerk.
Jerk chicken is pretty good, but why wouldn’t I use that on my slave?
comparing slaves to animals is what slavers do.
Good point. Why should we treat animals like slaves then?
no one said we should
Other way around. Not comparing slaves to animals, comparing animals to slaves.
the comparison operator is commutative. it’s the same thing.
What is worse, living and then dying, or not living at all?
Laughs in antinatalist
More commonly, I think people would base this on quality of life. An animal being born to spend its entire life in a tiny, disgusting cage in generally deplorable conditions doesn’t make the cut by any reasonable standard.
To add on to that, most modern livestock live absolutely miserable lives.
I was going to add a separate comment, but in the interests of brevity, I think I’ll just put it here:
I find that in order to answer questions like OP’s, it’s helpful to remember who we are and how we lived for the ~2.5Myrs total of humanity’s (i.e. genus Homo) existence. So in terms of our diet, we’ve been opportunistic omnivores (heavy on plants) for the vast majority of that time, much like our fellow apes. It’s a completely sustainable way of living, and our bodies are perfectly engineered for that.
At the other end of the spectrum would be a pure carnivore diet, which science studies consistently find to cause increased cardiovascular disease and cancer rates. On top of all the enormous waste, expenditure, and utter cruelty towards livestock.
Point is-- if you consider all that, I think you can find some pretty decisive answers about the “morality” of one’s diet.
At the other end of the spectrum would be a pure carnivore diet, which science studies consistently find to cause increased cardiovascular disease and cancer rates.
You will find there have been no studies on the pure-carnivore (zero carb) diet wrt cvd or oncogenic effects.
There have been observational epidemiology on high carb omnivores (75% plant) which people like to extrapolate around and make causal statements such as ‘caused increased… rates’ which the data cannot support.
pure-carnivore (zero carb) diet
Right, I got a little carried away with the ‘pure’ angle, but I do recall seeing many abstracts / summaries of studies for quite a few years that found that diets heavy on meat indeed seem to correlate to increased cancer & CVD incidents.
Shouldn’t be too surprising based on studies of the GI systems of numerous herbivores vs. numerous Carnivorans, either. Extra-long GI vs. very short one depending on diet. Ours certainly seems to be a middle-ground, omnivore-type GI. AFAIK only rarely do we find from archeology & anthropology evidence that humans ate very-high meat diets, such as Innuit peoples for example.
Right, I got a little carried away with the ‘pure’ angle,
Fair enough the moment takes us all sometimes.
but I do recall seeing many abstracts / summaries of studies for quite a few years that found that diets heavy on meat indeed seem to correlate to increased cancer & CVD incidents.
Not quite - these are FFQs applied to the general populations so protein is really around 15%. There is considerable debate in the literature if these findings are clinically meaningful.
Fair enough the moment takes us all sometimes.
Not just the moment, but the motivation to get the core of a point across to a casual audience with a brevity of verbiage.
Not quite - these are FFQs applied to the general populations so protein is really around 15%. There is considerable debate in the literature if these findings are clinically meaningful.
What is your relevant background in such matters, if I may ask?
What is your relevant background in such matters, if I may ask?
I’ve been reading the debate with great interest.
What are yours?
A vegetarian diet isn’t much more ethical than an omnivore diet, anyway. Veganism has a much better argument.
Not sure I’m getting your point, but meat tastes better than lettuce.
People seem to focus on the ills of the dairy industry when talking about vegetarians, but the egg industry is particularly egregious.
Eggregious*
If ethical = animal welfare, perhaps.
But when factoring in e.g. water consumption and CO2e per unit of food consumed, I would argue the average vegetarian diet to be significantly more ethical compared with the average omnivorous diet.
Obviously the type of animals involved, the way they are treated and killed, and religious views add more complexity to this case.
edit: the essence of my point is that this isn’t a black and white matter.
I think that’s a flawed argument. Cow milk production requires that cows get pregnant once a year, and the calves can’t all become milk cows, too - thus, cow milk production cannot exist without cow meat production. And IIRC milk products still have a worse environmental impact than chicken meat.
TBH I’m not sure about the environmental impact of eggs vs meat. But animal welfare is generally the main reason why people keep to vegetarian or vegan diets, and chicken farming is not great in terms of animal welfare.
The bottom line is: 1 cow birth per year (or let’s call it cow deaths, because that’s what is most relevant here) yields around 10.000L of milk. Out of which around 1000kg of cheese can be produced, plus of course the meat of that calf.
Does that make it ethical? I don’t think so. But I would say around 1.5-2x less unethical compared to eating meat, which is significant.
Whether something is moral or ethical doesn’t depend on the commercial benefit you can derive from it! What the actual fuck!!
Not OP, but I think the argument is more about nutritional benefit than commercial benefit.
Yes, thank you for clarifying this.
Not sure why anyone would assume monetary/commercial benefit here.
Do you think dairy farmers eat their 100lbs wheels of cheese? It’s the same thing.
In either case, you’re talking about harm reduction when it is so trivial to eliminate harm. It is in fact EASIER. But your attachment to the fruits of abuse won’t let you see it that way, and you’re looking for ways to make your abuse more emotionally palatable.
Treating a vulnerable individual as a means instead of as an end is fundamentally wrong. No amount of benefit to you short of saving your life can make it morally acceptable. In a famine we have to make hard choices and sometimes we have to sacrifice others. That’s not the situation right now. We grow more food each year than humanity could eat in two years without harvesting any vulnerable individuals.
I read a book called “change of heart” by a vegan animal activist, which was all about research into what actually worked in terms of convincing people to reduce animal suffering. For him, it would be ideal if we reduced animal suffering to zero. But even encouraging someone to eat less meat (e.g. Meatless Mondays) reduced animal suffering, and was a win in his book. I kind of agree with that.
The way I see it is similar. If everyone stopped eating animal products today like turning off a faucet, literal millennia of selective breeding guarantees there will be animal suffering. A better option is to reduce overall consumption while also working towards reversing the changes we’ve made to the animals to turn them into products. At this time, dairy cows overproduce milk making milking a requirement for the animals health and safety. Poultry is a whole other discussion that isn’t quite as environmentally problematic but way more ethically problematic that requires a whole extra level of discussion towards improvement
I thought you were talking about environmental impact? Both cow milk and cow meat have a worse environmental footprint than chicken meat.
My point is: ethics should not be confused with a single dimension of ethics. Whether something I’d ethical, depends on your beliefs.
Simultaneously, if animal welfare is all we optimize for, vegetarianism is a step forward. And indeed, so is pollotarianism when optimizing for just environmental impact. Perfect is the enemy of good.
For water consumption and CO2, avoid beef, milk and cheese. Chicken and eggs are no issue, they cause less harm in that regard than many plant products (like almonds).
Depends on your morals. For mine it is.
morals are anecdotes that define your personal integrity. morals are arguable at best and carry little to no merit outside of personal experience.
I believe you mean ethical.
ethically, no, it’s not wrong. mostly because the animals we consume are bred and raised specifically to eat. however, the treatment of those animals in corporate factory farms is unethical, and so makes the consumption of the products from those establishments unethical.
No. The nature of life consumptions of living things. I do believe however that it is preferable to eat from the least sentient of creatures as possible. You can even go further and eat things which does not kill things at all like fruitarians. This would be following the ethic of least harm. Its almost impossible for anyone living in the modern world to not be destroying it with their consumption. Most vegans for example would be doing more harm to me than say someone native to the americas before colonialism that ate meat.
Fruitarian diet is quite dangerous.
It’s already hard eating all necessary nutrients on a vegan diet. Possible, but harder than with omnivore diet.
But restricting to just fruits… I don’t know if it’s even possible to get all your body needs just from fruits.
Oh sure that is the issue with all diets. Kinda depends how you look at it. Morally I would see milk and egg as not being an issue. That is why I said like the fruitarians because you would be hard pressed to find a mondern one who accepted those animal products. Jains have a whole sorta categorization of how bad it is to eat particular things.
Something interesting and anecdotal. We get a lot of Indian immigrants in my area, and they’re primarily vegetarian. But as soon as they move here, they become anaemic, because the lentils etc grown in our soil doesn’t have enough nutrients for survival. They have to start taking supplements. I’m not sure why that is, but it makes me wonder if people would be more willing to be vegetarian here if it was actually viable nutritionally.
Is it morally wrong to ask a bait question on a public forum?
It’s bait if it makes me angry
I guess you’re not going to bait stickly into examining the consequences their choices have on others who are powerless to protect themselves from those consequences. He’s too clever for that kind of bait.
I don’t understand wht you mean.
But I’m not baiting anyone. I wanted to see people’s personal opinions and get some insight from their arguments.
Yeah, the most ethical diet is plant based.
Why do you ask it?
the most ethical diet is
not a matter of objective fact
Yeah.
They would need to specify to which set of ethics are they talking about. And then we could compare to which ethics a vegan diet adhere more or less.
explain how you developed this idea it is more ethical. based on what exactly?
Minimizing harm to others and harm to the environment is more ethical than not minimizing harm to others and harm to the environment
It is not minimizing harm in the way you can’t hear a plant scream. That’s the same logic people had about fish. This is a foolish and irresponsible way to think of consciousness.
I will agree it is minimizing harm on environment however we have much room to improve even on that standard.
Like not burning crops simply because it doesn’t make money.
A foolish and irresponsible way to think about consciousness would be to pretend we can actually define it, then go around professing things are either conscious or not without considering there might be a scale.
so you say you cant define it but you can throw something you dont know on a scale? so its only ok if you do it. uh huh. i see. that is some bullshit, fool.
I said “consider there might be” whereas you were all over the thread speaking in absolutes to support your weak hypothesis.
Nuance is obviously lost on you which is a shame as it’s kind of a prerequisite for the philosophical debates you keep attempting to engage in.
you certainly defend yourself in absolutes. pick a lane.
“Plants feel pain” is an argument that supports a plant-based diet because it is more efficient to consume plants directly than to feed them to animals.
i agree with the efficiency.
stick with that argument.
it works for you.
stepping into moral logic around consiousness around pain and suffering: that the shittier arguments vegans come up with to feel satisified with themselves over others with magical thinking and that shit needs to stop.
Vegans’ moral arguments are just fine, it’s just that most people don’t give a shit. When you realize how shitty most people are to other people, it makes the need to take a different approach very obvious.
Everyone requires a certain amount of mental gymnastics to consume any living plant or creature to continue to exist in a meat body.
You can pick and choose food but you don’t get to pick and choose who has consciousness.
Denying that is shittier.
Are you reducing the harm to others in a actually statically significant quantity though?
To others I suppose you refer to animals. By being vegan you mosly reduce harm to a few species of big animals.
Most animals by quantity are insects.
If you count by individuals a person who saves a few ant nest from the horrors of nature and give them a nice controlled habitat would reduce the number of harm happening to individual animals orders of magnitude over what a diet change could achieve.
As for environmental damage. It’s a way. But not the only way. The most effective way to control environmental control would be to reduce the number of humans on earth.
You have to take into account that animal agriculture is responsible for the vast majority (70%) of plants that we grow and we use pesticides for them. If we stop eating animals or stop using animal products all together we need tremendously less pesticides and harm less insects in turn.
animal agriculture is responsible for the vast majority (70%) of plants that we grow
this isn’t true. humans consume about 2/3 of all crop calories.
First, agriculture made for animal consumption doesn’t have the same quality sanitarian standards as agriculture made for humans.
Second, not all animals require vast agriculture.
We could also war animals that do not requiere such agricultural measures. I have eaten cows, pigs and chickens that were raised traditionally, out of the natural fields and the parts of the plants that we humans do not want to eat.
In fact for a environmental perspective traditional farming is far better than vegan diet.
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I generally agree with you, however your argument does add some subjectivity to the maybe and no sections. I’d add that while not every situation can accommodate a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle, in 2026 the vast majority of people have the capability to change to a non-meat diet without any detriment to their health or lifestyle besides social ostracism of unaccepting peers depending on where they live.
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no, for 100,000 years we went vegetarians.
proof?
No.
Sincerely, A lifelong vegetarian.
Vegetarians are the worst kind of carnist. Would take so little, still don’t give a shit.
is it morally wrong to breathe? i mean, you’re using another being’s oxygen.
the question isn’t whether it’s right or wrong, but about where you draw the line. that you can only decide for yourself.
Being vegetarian or omnivorous isn’t very different, morally, as producing milk still requires killing calves. I think the better comparison would be with veganism
producing milk still requires killing calves
It certainly is not a requirement. They don’t have to use the males born to make veal.
Yes, it is an economic requirement. They can’t compete with beef cattle for meat production, keeping them alive just makes the milk more expensive than the farmer down the road who murders his calves can sell it for.
the vast majority of dairy calves are brought to full weight before slaughter, but slaughter still isn’t necessary.
How do you recoup the costs of raising a bull to full weight (which happens at a fraction of its natural lifespan) without slaughtering him? It’s like saying breathing isn’t necessary because you can just hold your breath.
you can just choose not to do that
As in, choose not to be a dairy farmer or consume dairy products?
even a dairy farmer can just choose not to kill.
Sell them to beef ranchers. Make even more money and meat. 🤦♂️
