McKee

Yep Big meat and dairy is doing the same in the food industry. Fuck those corpos.

Here’s a video about the subject in the US https://youtu.be/hmCvD9KxSB8

Let’s stop “farming” animals. I suggest converting these barns to mushroom farming, I can never have enough mushrooms.

Let’s abolish slaughterhouses and animal husbandry.

One of the worst sector for human exploitation and the worst for animal exploitation.

Yeah, two years ago I was kinda not sure what the issue was not actually following the thing too closely. Then I watched Shaun’s video essay on YouTube, discussed with some trans friends about the issue and started checking her twitter.

She literally only tweets about trans people all day every day and often insinuates they are rapists/pedo etc.

She’s crazy.

Ok it feels like you’re just starting to spam answers without even taking the time to argument on why you think something. I try to take the time to justify my position and you just answer with small sentences that don’t do anything for an interesting discussion.

Let’s stop there, have a nice day.

What’s your morally relevant argument for killing for example cows for taste pleasure and not humans then? What’s this special trait humans have that other sentient being do not possess that allows us to do that to them?

Yes I agree in principle that it’s a discrimination. They way I used discrimination was implying that someone on the “bad” side of the discrimination could be discriminated against. My bad I should have clearly defined the way I used this term. Sorry English is not my first language as well.

In any case a discrimination that does not hurt the discriminated or another sentient being is of no consequence for me.

But you would agree that the rocks themselves cannot have an issue with it? That’s the gist of the sentientist position. Sentient beings have an interest in living, not being exploited and thus the sentientist position goes further and say that for the same reasons we say that humans have a right to live (i.e.: not being killed) or being exploited, we should extend the same rights to sentient beings because there is no morally relevant difference between us and other sentient beings that would justify killing them when you would not kill a human being in the same position.

Note that this does not mean all sentient beings should have exactly the same rights. Obviously giving the right to vote to a cow does not make sense, the same way we don’t give the right to abortion to cis men because they cannot make use of this right.

Ok let me unpack your two points:

• The difference with the sentience criteria is that a non-sentient being by definition cannot be hurt by actions taken against their being as there is quite literally no subject, no one, to experience anything. Would you say that someones that likes smashing rocks is discriminating against rocks? Of course not because it makes no sense to speak about discrimination for a non sentient being/object. The only time where you can make an argument that doing something to a non sentient being is an issue is when it affects a sentient being.

• Again as I’ve literally stated in my earlier comment the discrimination is not based on species but on sentience. If you want a more concrete example, let’s imagine a philosophical zombie or in other terms a non-sentient human. I would not include such a being in my moral circle by itself as it would lack sentience.

I guess we all have our blind spots :)

Again that’s a misunderstanding of the position. The discriminatory criteria is sentience. If a plant was found to be sentient, this plant would be included in the moral circle. You can make the same argument for things we consider animals but lack all of what we currently consider needed for sentience. An example would be a sea sponge. I personally do not include a sea sponge in my moral circle and I do not think they have any sentience even though they are considered animals. I would also consider someone that says sea sponge should be included in our moral circle just because they are part of the animal kingdom to be quite dogmatic.

And even if we want to debate on whether a sea sponge is sentient, there is absolutely no debate on most animals we currently kill for food or exploit for entertainment. They are clearly sentient.

There was a chapter in his book “Starry Messenger” dedicated to this subject. I unfortunately cannot reproduce the entire chapter here. However, here is a video essay on it that you can watch if you’re interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbXw13Npvlg (25min)

One of his dumbest argument imho was trying to claim that vegans were specist towards plants, even though no scientific existence of sentience in plants exist which is the moral criteria used in most anti-specist philosophy. I will add that even if plants were all found to be sentient, we’d still kill less sentient beings by eating them directly rather than feeding them to non-human animals and then killing them.

Here is another video of him talking about this very chapter for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9HrMdNEKPA (6min). I think this shows a complete misunderstanding of what veganism and anti-specism is about. To me it seems like he does not even consider the sentience of the animals and considers them as machines. He also seems to straw man the position to “vegans want to protect life”.

As long as he sticks to subjects he clearly understands. Everytime I’ve read or watched one of his take on veganism/anti-specism I was left dumbfounded and ashamed for him.

Just as it still makes it not right for cows and chickens it makes it not right for monkeys. Or would you be OK if I was breeding humans for slavery purposes?

They were working from another office per the article.

Isn’t she the one that’s always ranting about trans people as well? Yeah seems like the scene changed a lot since I was last involved.

I know that 15years ago on the scene usually they cracked games for bragging rights so no DRM version was no fun hence you would find mostly the cracked version uploaded by the scene.

I don’t know if it still operates this way.

I think when going this route it helps to view it with an analogy as it makes it more intuitive to understand why I don’t find this an appealing view.

If I were to to adopt this view point, this would mean I would be also ok with breeding humans for any given purpose (let’s say Slavery as it’s an easy one) as I could justify it saying: “It’s better for them as they would have never existed otherwise”. However I think intuitively most people would agree that would still not make it ok and that’s why I would not consider it ok for animals. Because fundamentally we’re still violating - I think - fundamental rights. (e.g. most negative rights like right not to be killed)

P.S.: I have a rights based approach on how we should interact with animals and not a weéfarost one as I think it leads to these kinds of issues where you end up justifying terrible things.

You’ve clearly asked me why I considered plant life less than animal life which I answered. I then went further and showed that this question was actually irrelevant to the point I was making because even if I were to consider it as equal or more important I should still plants instead of animal products.

There is no difference between the two when not in a survival situation. One is done for taste buds pleasure the other might be done because you enjoy kicking dogs.

Actually I would dare say that kicking a dog is better than killing and eating them.At least I know I’d prefer getting kicked rather than killed and eaten.

Because life is not the most important factor to me. Sentience is.

But let’s entertain the idea life was the most important factor. Raising animals to eat them kills way more plant life than just eating plants directly as you need to clear a ton of land and grow a ton of plant just to feed all these animals you’re raising. So even if that was the differentiating factor not exploiting other non human animals would be the way to go as you would preserve more life.

Liking something to me is not a solid argument to exploit another sentient being. If I was saying that I liked kicking dogs it would not make it ok to do so for example.