Vegans just casually creating a class system to value one life above others.
We have a name for the class of animals that eat grass, stay in packs for safety, and lack the individual skills necessary for individal survival. And even they are smart enough to be opportunistic omnivores.
The only species of animal stupid enough to consume against their needs and instincts are humans.
What? That's what you took from vegans saying "stop killing others unnecessarily"?
Carnists are literally putting out an idea that values someones sensory pleasure over the lives of others and then acting accordingly and killing by the billions each year.
To the best of my knowledge plants are not sentient. If they were I would take much better care of houseplants and still be vegan because eating other animals still kills way more plants (google trophic levels)
Disingenuous, ignorant, mentally deficient from years of choline deficiency. You're right. If the shoe fits.
Eating keeps things alive, only a vegan would think taking something out of its natural environment and subjecting it to worse living conditions and a shortened lifespan without the purpose of benefitting another lifeforms ability to survive as being less harmful.
We kill for survival, you kill for pleasure and ego.
Classist vegans only care for sentience, not life.
We kill for survival, you kill for pleasure and ego.
Why do non-vegans always have the stupidest takes wrapped up in some pseudo-intellectual bullshit. You obviously don't believe that someone killing your houseplant or lawn is as bad as someone killing your dog, so why say something so blatantly untruthful and dumb?
And how are vegans killing for pleasure when they have a more restricted diet than you?
Go out and continue the circle of life in your local Publix, you ferocious lion you!
Nice to know that you don't have any arguments. Vegans are the dumb ones for sure! Continue trolling and pretending to be an idiot, that really shows how you have a point and they don't lol
Saying killing plants is morally equivalent to killing animals is not only dumb, it's also an argument for veganism. It takes more plants to sustain an omnivore diet than a vegan one. All the animals you eat had to eat as well, and it's not an efficient transfer of calories. Look up trophic levels if you're actually arguing in good faith.
So I agree! Killing plants is murder! So you should go vegan and stop killing excessive plants for your selfish taste buds.
Sentience is what I base my ethics on (i'm a sentientist or sentiocentrist), which has implications on diet when considering whether to exploit and/or kill sentient beings for food. I don't think it's arbitrary, if someone is sentient, they are morally relevant because they can experience positive and negative valence (pleasure/pain, to put it more plainly but lose some nuance). If something is not sentient, I don't see how it can be ethically relevant except in cases where the nonsentient thing matters to a sentient being
if you're looking for arbitrary, the anthropocentrists are that way
Also I agree we can't prove that plants aren't sentient, that's why I said "to the best of my knowledge"
there are other approaches to sentientism that aren't based on valence. I don't feel like writing a book on the different ones, but to give an example of a rights based one that I think is strong is that every sentient being has, at the very least, a right to their body, since that's the one thing they're born with and that is (almost certainly) what gives rise to their sentience in the first place. And to violate another sentient beings bodily autonomy is to forfeit your own (a sort of low level social contract), which allows for self defense and defending others
but to go back to utilitarianism, I think there's a strong argument that most ethical frameworks can be defined in terms of a sufficiently creative definition of utility. I don't really feel like getting into the weeds of that discussion though, and I don't think it's particularly relevant to the conversation anyways
Sentientism answers the question of "who/what matters?", not "what ethical framework should be used to care about who/what matters?". It can underly many ethical frameworks, personally I don't care that much what ethical framework you use as long as we can agree on who's included in the moral scope (although there are some utilitarians who I think have bad definitions of utility and/or do a bad job weighing the utility)
I have to admit, I skipped the rest of this sentence on I don't foresee myself attempting to read it: I don't believe in rights as an objective phenomenon, either.
but to go back to utilitarianism, I think there’s a strong argument that most ethical frameworks can be defined in terms of a sufficiently creative definition of utility.
this is a good reason to doubt the validity of the theory: it is constructed in a way that it is not disprovable.
I explained why it's not arbitrary, then pointed to a group that does draw arbitrary distinctions. That's not tu quoque because I'm not saying "you also"
you're saying it's not arbitrary. "no, you" is still a form of tu quoque. you haven't actually made a case that sentience isnt an arbitrary standard, and there isn't a case to be made: sentience isn't a natural phenomenon outside of human subjective classification. without people, there would be no concept of green or warm or sentient, and any of those attributes is an arbitrary standard to use to judge the ethics of a diet.
Are you saying everything we can talk about is arbitrary because everything we can talk about is with words and concepts?
Are you talking about meriological nihilism? (thanks alex oconnor for teaching me that term lol)
I know sentience is real based on the fact that I'm experiencing things right this moment. Based on my understanding of the brain and nervous system, and the strong evidence that those things give rise to my sentience, I think that it's reasonable to extrapolate that other, similar nervous systems/brains are also sentient and their experience is worth consideration in a similar way to how I consider my own experience (among the many other reasons to have a basic level of empathy)