The premise is what matters, which is that you like to eat meat. Because of this, let’s say a chicken company has decided they will kill a chicken so that you can buy it. Your actions cause an incentive to kill animals, and so someone does and sells it to you.
You could kill it yourself, but like you said, you are no murderer, so you pay a company to do it for you and then you get to feel like you aren’t a murderer. What a deal!
People dont eat meat because companies produce it, companies produce it because people eat it. Therefore the blame lies with those that eat it, which also means the best way to reduce animal deaths is to stop eating meat so that companies will produce less of it.
Eventually, they might stop producing it at any meaningful scale altogether, once enough people reduce or stop their consumption of meat.
Yes I also understand not every country is in a position to be plant based, its a transition that takes time. The numbers I’m most interested in seeing is percentage of the population that is vegan and whether that percentage goes up or not.
I’m sort of confused what you think buying a product from a company means? The price they charge is to cover all of the costs they spent to produce it plus a profit. You are paying a company to make whatever good you buy from them by purchasing the item, they’ve just premade it for convenience. They do take a risk that they assumed wrong and the people they thought would buy it don’t. When that happens they reduce supply or make something else that those people do want.
Its a relationship essentially and I dont think its possible to assign responsibility to a single side of the relationship. Ultimately its both the companies fault for offering to supply it, and the customers fault for offering to buy it.
Its very similar to why its so hard to decide who to blame when looking at a drug dealer selling to a drug addict. The answer is they are two sides of the same coin, and neither would exist without the other.
I understand you want proof but I think all I can offer is philosophy or whatever we want to call it. This whole concept is important to how I make decisions and I will stand by it until someone can reason me out of it.
Unfortunately I’m having a lot of trouble following the logic of your position. For me it falls apart as soon as I try to think a few steps past the immediate action of buying pre packaged meet in a store, and what those actions lead to.
No but that wasnt my goal. The goal is to get people to reduce meat consumption at least to some level of healthy as right now its a major cause of a bunch of illnesses and diseases. If you are responsible for someone else’s diet its sort of crazy to not have them eat whatever will make them feel best, which is usually whole food and plant based.
Not everyone is able to do that of course. I personally dont think its possible to get to a point where animals aren’t ever killed for food, but I would like to see a point where factory farms do not exist.
They do take a risk that they assumed wrong and the people they thought would buy it don’t. When that happens they reduce supply or make something else that those people do want.
they can choose to reduce their supply for any number of reasons. i’m not responsible for their decision.
If you were to go to your grocery store every week and buy 100 chickens, they would increase production specifically for you. If they then sent out a notice to your grocery store that said “due to Commie buying so many chickens we have increased our crop of chickens to accommodate, all hail Commie the chicken slayer”.
Would you consider yourself responsible at all or thats still the companies choice to produce the chickens for you or not. Should I be mad that they would increase their production for you rather than I should be mad that you are buying so many chickens?
It seems like you are sort of hiding behind the small scale of it all. Like you are so small and minor on the whole system you can’t possibly matter, so you dont. Is that accurate?
you are so small and minor on the whole system you can’t possibly matter, so you dont.
this is true, but it’s not what i’m saying. what i’m saying is that i don’t decide whether or how many chickens are killed. someone else does, and they are responsible for their own decisions.
Only if you dont ever interact with another person directly or indirectly. I will accept you could live this way but I wouldnt be able to apply that type of moral system to one where I need to consider those around me as well as myself.
Your actions cause an incentive to kill animals, and so someone does and sells it to you.
people’s actions are not caused by incentives. they are caused by our will. i don’t decide for others whether to kill chickens. tehy decide for themselves.
Peoples actions are caused by rewards. When you do something and are rewarded either externally (other people, nature, etc.) or internally (self-reward) which then causes you to want to repeat the actions. Its cyclical, and you can’t have the action without the reward or the system breaks and the action stops being rewarded. If you do this cycle long enough, you will learn a habit that no longer requires the type of reward to sustain.
You buy meat, reward company with money, company is happy and decides to do it again, rinse and repeat. You can’t have one without the other so the company is just as responsible for selling as you are for buying. Either of you could break the cycle but neither wants to.
Thats why vegans try to show a good example and share their reasoning and discuss things, because this is what breaks harmful cycles and habits.
Yeah, try that one in court. No your honor, i didn’t pay for the murder, i paid for someone who paid for someone to commit the murder. I’m obviously innocent!
It’s a plain stupid argument to try and make, and it makes no sense. And i’m not even vegan, i just recognize that yes, a part of the money i pay for meat goes to who kills it, so i pay for someone to kill animals for me so i can eat them. That’s how the world works, and denying that is just ridiculous.
your analogy doesn’t reflect the reality at all. a more apt analogy would be that someone paid to have their grandfather murdered, and later had an estate sale. at that estate sale, if i buy a watch, am i responsible for murder? no.
We already force our cats to eat the canned food and dry kibble we provide them. The standard cat diet is just not healthy to start with, which is what opens the conversation to “what food would make my cat healthy” and then if you are already there, its not much of a stretch to consider ALL types of foods so that we are sure to find the best result.
If vegan food for cats is possible without reducing the cats quality of life, then its worth trying. Most cats just plain dont like the vegan food though, and no vegan would force their CST to be unhappy just to make them vegan.
The whole point is to improve the cats life, not to force our morals on them. If it was possible for your cat to live 25% longer on a vegan diet, would it be abusive not to even consider it? (Not saying that’s a settled fact, its a thought exercise).
your version of the story leaves out some important facts like it doesn’t matter whether you put it in your cart because it’s already dead, and the person who killed it was already paid by somebody who wasn’t you.
That is pretty irrelevant. You purchasing the product signals a certain demand for it, that demand will help determine how much product is requested in the future, there is a cascading effect all the way up the supply chain. Sure an additional chicken might not be bred just because you purchased a chicken, it’s way more abstract than that. Maybe if a hundred more chickens are bought then a hundred more chickens will be bred as replacements plus extra to account for growth and failed product (dead or sick chickens). And if you were one of the hundred people who purchased a chicken you can be seen as one hundredth responsible for at least a hundred chickens which is the same as being responsible for the 1+ chicken. Do you think if nobody purchased chickens that they would just keep stocking the shelves?
if you were one of the hundred people who purchased a chicken you can be seen as one hundredth responsible for at least a hundred chickens which is the same as being responsible for the 1+ chicken.
If you don’t eat chicken nobody is going to swoop in and eat all the chicken you don’t eat. However if a farmer or farming corporation decides to stop harvesting chickens then it’s almost certain some entity will swoop in to replace them in the market. So acting like the consumer here is not one of the if not the most important part in this causal chain is just naive.
If you don’t eat chicken nobody is going to swoop in and eat all the chicken you don’t eat. However if a farmer or farming corporation decides to stop harvesting chickens then it’s almost certain some entity will swoop in to replace them in the market.
why do you tihnk both these sentences are true, and how would you go about trying to disprove either of them?
So while you are eating said chicken, you are thinking “I’m not responsible for what happened to this bird?”
Is it the same as roadkill to you? Like it just so happened to be dead and nearby?
How about this: if person A murders person B, and then sells the meat to person C to consume, are both persons A and C responsible for murder or just A? What if person C is in the room when person B is murdered and butchered, does that change the answer? What if person C lives in another country and the meat is shipped to them, any change then?
I’d ask you to honestly consider that instead of discounting it for replacing animals with humans.
your analogy is disanalagous to how people decide whether to buy meat entirely. even in the first case, though, of course their not responsible. the others, it’s not clear to me whether there is any other actual conspiracy. regardless, no such conspiracy exists in the grocery store.
The point of the the thought experiment is to allow you to view the situations without the biases you already have, as most people have been in a butcher shop which is the first situation I described, and most people have had food delivered to them from far away which is the second situation I described. Since those are normal things, your initial thought would likely be that they are normal and not murder.
If you replace it with humans, I would argue that both situations would be murder for person C because there is no way they could reasonably assume they could get human meat without a person being killed and it taken from them.
In other words there is no eating a cooked dead chicken carcass without killing a chicken.
If you replace it with humans, I would argue that both situations would be murder for person C because there is no way they could reasonably assume they could get human meat without a person being killed and it taken from them.
there was some ambiguity in how you phrased it whether the person buying even knew it was human meat. regardless, they are not responsible for the actions of other people in the past.
Yes increasing awareness amongst our social groups about the benefits of vegan diets and the detriments of meat based diets. Most people want to be healthy.
The meat industry has a large effect on pollution a well, and affects the environment in many ways in water and on land.
Everyone’s not vegan until they decide to be, I was a meat eat for 30 years before I made the decision, I understand its not easy or quick.
Some people just need to live in proximity with a vegan so they can learn by watching. The general public still has a lot of animosity towards vegans and especially vegan activists (and environmental activists as well, when they bring up meat). Sort of similar to how proximity dispels racism in a lot of ways.
That’s not important. I was illustrating that clearly if nobody ate chicken nobody would harvest chickens for food. Unless you think that the same amount of chickens will be harvested until the very last human gives up chicken then you have to acknowledge that the individual consumer does make a difference.
Unless you think that the same amount of chickens will be harvested until the very last human gives up chicken then you have to acknowledge that the individual consumer does make a difference.
no one does that
Ok, i get it, it’s fun to hate on the vegan, but he’s right and you’re not.
If you buy meat somewhere part of the price is you paying for the person that killed it. That’s obvious right?
Of course in relation to the cat, even if there’s a healthy vegan diet possible, he’s wrong imo. Why force our choices onto pets?
no. that person is already paid and paid by somebody who is not me
The premise is what matters, which is that you like to eat meat. Because of this, let’s say a chicken company has decided they will kill a chicken so that you can buy it. Your actions cause an incentive to kill animals, and so someone does and sells it to you.
You could kill it yourself, but like you said, you are no murderer, so you pay a company to do it for you and then you get to feel like you aren’t a murderer. What a deal!
People dont eat meat because companies produce it, companies produce it because people eat it. Therefore the blame lies with those that eat it, which also means the best way to reduce animal deaths is to stop eating meat so that companies will produce less of it.
Eventually, they might stop producing it at any meaningful scale altogether, once enough people reduce or stop their consumption of meat.
i don’t know how you would go about trying to disprove this claim.
have you tried that?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-production-tonnes?tab=chart&country=~OWID_WRL
Yes I also understand not every country is in a position to be plant based, its a transition that takes time. The numbers I’m most interested in seeing is percentage of the population that is vegan and whether that percentage goes up or not.
i have never done that.
I’m sort of confused what you think buying a product from a company means? The price they charge is to cover all of the costs they spent to produce it plus a profit. You are paying a company to make whatever good you buy from them by purchasing the item, they’ve just premade it for convenience. They do take a risk that they assumed wrong and the people they thought would buy it don’t. When that happens they reduce supply or make something else that those people do want.
Its a relationship essentially and I dont think its possible to assign responsibility to a single side of the relationship. Ultimately its both the companies fault for offering to supply it, and the customers fault for offering to buy it.
Its very similar to why its so hard to decide who to blame when looking at a drug dealer selling to a drug addict. The answer is they are two sides of the same coin, and neither would exist without the other.
I understand you want proof but I think all I can offer is philosophy or whatever we want to call it. This whole concept is important to how I make decisions and I will stand by it until someone can reason me out of it.
Unfortunately I’m having a lot of trouble following the logic of your position. For me it falls apart as soon as I try to think a few steps past the immediate action of buying pre packaged meet in a store, and what those actions lead to.
no. i’m paying them for the good. when you stopped buying meat, did the companies you bought it from stop selling it?
No but that wasnt my goal. The goal is to get people to reduce meat consumption at least to some level of healthy as right now its a major cause of a bunch of illnesses and diseases. If you are responsible for someone else’s diet its sort of crazy to not have them eat whatever will make them feel best, which is usually whole food and plant based.
Not everyone is able to do that of course. I personally dont think its possible to get to a point where animals aren’t ever killed for food, but I would like to see a point where factory farms do not exist.
Not every vegan is black and white with it.
they can choose to reduce their supply for any number of reasons. i’m not responsible for their decision.
If you were to go to your grocery store every week and buy 100 chickens, they would increase production specifically for you. If they then sent out a notice to your grocery store that said “due to Commie buying so many chickens we have increased our crop of chickens to accommodate, all hail Commie the chicken slayer”.
Would you consider yourself responsible at all or thats still the companies choice to produce the chickens for you or not. Should I be mad that they would increase their production for you rather than I should be mad that you are buying so many chickens?
It seems like you are sort of hiding behind the small scale of it all. Like you are so small and minor on the whole system you can’t possibly matter, so you dont. Is that accurate?
no. they make their own choices.
this is true, but it’s not what i’m saying. what i’m saying is that i don’t decide whether or how many chickens are killed. someone else does, and they are responsible for their own decisions.
everyone is responsible for their own actions
Only if you dont ever interact with another person directly or indirectly. I will accept you could live this way but I wouldnt be able to apply that type of moral system to one where I need to consider those around me as well as myself.
i feel no responsibility for what the animal agriculture industry does, and if i did, to stop it, i wouldn’t go vegan. i’d buy bolt cutters.
people’s actions are not caused by incentives. they are caused by our will. i don’t decide for others whether to kill chickens. tehy decide for themselves.
Peoples actions are caused by rewards. When you do something and are rewarded either externally (other people, nature, etc.) or internally (self-reward) which then causes you to want to repeat the actions. Its cyclical, and you can’t have the action without the reward or the system breaks and the action stops being rewarded. If you do this cycle long enough, you will learn a habit that no longer requires the type of reward to sustain.
You buy meat, reward company with money, company is happy and decides to do it again, rinse and repeat. You can’t have one without the other so the company is just as responsible for selling as you are for buying. Either of you could break the cycle but neither wants to.
Thats why vegans try to show a good example and share their reasoning and discuss things, because this is what breaks harmful cycles and habits.
no. tehy are caused by the will of the person. they can choose to do otherwise. i do not make their choice for them.
the company is paid long before i walk into the grocery store.
Yeah, try that one in court. No your honor, i didn’t pay for the murder, i paid for someone who paid for someone to commit the murder. I’m obviously innocent!
It’s a plain stupid argument to try and make, and it makes no sense. And i’m not even vegan, i just recognize that yes, a part of the money i pay for meat goes to who kills it, so i pay for someone to kill animals for me so i can eat them. That’s how the world works, and denying that is just ridiculous.
i would be innocent. i had nothing to do with any of their decisions, and only much later did i pay anyone, but not the people responsible.
your analogy doesn’t reflect the reality at all. a more apt analogy would be that someone paid to have their grandfather murdered, and later had an estate sale. at that estate sale, if i buy a watch, am i responsible for murder? no.
no, it doesn’t. that person was already paid.
it’s obvious you can’t suss it out, but the rest of us have had a pretty good conversation about it til you showed up.
We already force our cats to eat the canned food and dry kibble we provide them. The standard cat diet is just not healthy to start with, which is what opens the conversation to “what food would make my cat healthy” and then if you are already there, its not much of a stretch to consider ALL types of foods so that we are sure to find the best result.
If vegan food for cats is possible without reducing the cats quality of life, then its worth trying. Most cats just plain dont like the vegan food though, and no vegan would force their CST to be unhappy just to make them vegan.
The whole point is to improve the cats life, not to force our morals on them. If it was possible for your cat to live 25% longer on a vegan diet, would it be abusive not to even consider it? (Not saying that’s a settled fact, its a thought exercise).
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your version of the story leaves out some important facts like it doesn’t matter whether you put it in your cart because it’s already dead, and the person who killed it was already paid by somebody who wasn’t you.
That is pretty irrelevant. You purchasing the product signals a certain demand for it, that demand will help determine how much product is requested in the future, there is a cascading effect all the way up the supply chain. Sure an additional chicken might not be bred just because you purchased a chicken, it’s way more abstract than that. Maybe if a hundred more chickens are bought then a hundred more chickens will be bred as replacements plus extra to account for growth and failed product (dead or sick chickens). And if you were one of the hundred people who purchased a chicken you can be seen as one hundredth responsible for at least a hundred chickens which is the same as being responsible for the 1+ chicken. Do you think if nobody purchased chickens that they would just keep stocking the shelves?
i’m not responsible for others decisions at all.
this is not causal. someone decides whether or how much of a product to purchase. they have free will. i am not responsible for their decision.
If you don’t eat chicken nobody is going to swoop in and eat all the chicken you don’t eat. However if a farmer or farming corporation decides to stop harvesting chickens then it’s almost certain some entity will swoop in to replace them in the market. So acting like the consumer here is not one of the if not the most important part in this causal chain is just naive.
there is no causal chain.
why do you tihnk both these sentences are true, and how would you go about trying to disprove either of them?
So while you are eating said chicken, you are thinking “I’m not responsible for what happened to this bird?”
Is it the same as roadkill to you? Like it just so happened to be dead and nearby?
How about this: if person A murders person B, and then sells the meat to person C to consume, are both persons A and C responsible for murder or just A? What if person C is in the room when person B is murdered and butchered, does that change the answer? What if person C lives in another country and the meat is shipped to them, any change then?
I’d ask you to honestly consider that instead of discounting it for replacing animals with humans.
that’s pretty apt, yea.
Well thats consistent at least. Would you care much if companies stopped selling meat?
i doubt it. i have drunk a lot of soylent and huel in my time. i’m open to all kinds of food, i just buy what’s at the corner of Cheap and Convenient
your analogy is disanalagous to how people decide whether to buy meat entirely. even in the first case, though, of course their not responsible. the others, it’s not clear to me whether there is any other actual conspiracy. regardless, no such conspiracy exists in the grocery store.
The point of the the thought experiment is to allow you to view the situations without the biases you already have, as most people have been in a butcher shop which is the first situation I described, and most people have had food delivered to them from far away which is the second situation I described. Since those are normal things, your initial thought would likely be that they are normal and not murder.
If you replace it with humans, I would argue that both situations would be murder for person C because there is no way they could reasonably assume they could get human meat without a person being killed and it taken from them.
In other words there is no eating a cooked dead chicken carcass without killing a chicken.
there was some ambiguity in how you phrased it whether the person buying even knew it was human meat. regardless, they are not responsible for the actions of other people in the past.
do you have a plan to get no one to purchase chickens?
Yes increasing awareness amongst our social groups about the benefits of vegan diets and the detriments of meat based diets. Most people want to be healthy.
The meat industry has a large effect on pollution a well, and affects the environment in many ways in water and on land.
Everyone’s not vegan until they decide to be, I was a meat eat for 30 years before I made the decision, I understand its not easy or quick.
Some people just need to live in proximity with a vegan so they can learn by watching. The general public still has a lot of animosity towards vegans and especially vegan activists (and environmental activists as well, when they bring up meat). Sort of similar to how proximity dispels racism in a lot of ways.
good luck.
That’s not important. I was illustrating that clearly if nobody ate chicken nobody would harvest chickens for food. Unless you think that the same amount of chickens will be harvested until the very last human gives up chicken then you have to acknowledge that the individual consumer does make a difference.
no, i don’t
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this is handwaving, not evidence for your position
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iphones were made before anyone ever bought one. that’s how linear time works.
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it’s a legitimate objection unless you can show causation
I haven’t made an argument. I’m rebutting yours. this, too, is not evidence for your position
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do you have a plan to achieve this? I’ll help. let me know when I’m the last one.
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I’m being earnest
animals were killed for food long before money. there is no reason to think it will ever stop
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you don’t know what I need
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