Is it ethical to eat fish?

Why do you think they do not apply?

Some reasons why I think they apply:

fish are animals
industrial fishing is destroying the oceans and sea life (way more is killed than what ends up sold and eventually maybe eaten)
international waters are a lawless playground for every abuse imaginable

I eat fish so I am not playing the guilt game, they're just the ethical considerations I can think of.

I disagree. The two main arguments against eating land animals are 1) cruelty and deprivation of life and 2) effect on the planet.

Both of these apply. Commercial fishing uses inhumane killing methods and fish are actually quite intelligent.

Overfishing is completely destroying the ocean ecosystems and will even have a knock-on effect on land ecosystems eg salmon in rivers normally transfer masses of nutrients to land and trees via bears etc.

In a global ecological sense, it is worse to eat fish than pork, we are sucking the seas dry, we have known it for decades, and invented new methods to do it more efficiently.

With land animals you can see the conditions and the effect of over production, with fish you don't, and we keep at it.

Grown fish is less bad, but still contribute to pollution of the seas.

Trawling should be banned globally for a minimum of 50 years.

Was that particular fish a dick?

They are certainly a lot of issues with eating fish. Maybe not the same as factory farmed land animals. More along the lines of extinction of species and the destruction of ecosystems. It's worth looking into if it's something you are concerned with. There's also indirect cruelty to more intelligent species like dolphins.

Fishing is industrialized too, so that can be a problem, specifically with the aquatic ecosystem. For vegans, fish still have a central nervous system so they are deemed undesireable. I still would eat fish because of health reasons, though.

Permanently Deleted

What about eating meat is ethical or unethical and how does that apply or not apply to eating fish?

On a simple level I'd say it depends on the brain structure so it'd vary by fish species even. Though as others have said, things like living conditions and overfishing are ethical issues nonetheless.

Though I just wanted to post this silly video, Would You Eat a Fish if it had Arms and Legs? by Mattias Pilhede. Mirror link

Depends on the perspective being considered:

Are fish sentient? Yes.

Are they very sentient, with lots of free-will? No.

Does our current industry's completely-gutting the marine food-chain have global consequences? Yes.

How are we doing with respect to keeping that food-chain alive? Terrible: any species that becomes our industrial prey, gets reduced to 10% of its normal population within 1 decade.

Cod used to live to be about 80y old, ttbomk, now they live to be 8, or less.

The smashing of the coral-forests they breed in, at the bottom of the ocean, with dragger-nets ( falsely called "rock hoppers" ), means the cod-fishery collapsed & stayed collapsed, and all fisheries are "managed" like that, by lobbying to protect industrial-ignorance.

Accountability won't ever happen, because industry/money won't tolerate that.

There's a ScientificallyTestablePrediction in the Christian bible, in Rev, that both terrestrial & marine food-chains collapse ( at the time of the "3rd Seal" ).

That is going to happen this century, no matter what political/religious rabies goes rampaging where.

All the political & religious & food-insecurity & ClimatePunctuation wars that we must enact in order to "manage" our unconscious-minds' stress/fear/panic, and all of the nihilist malicious-actors ( China cyaniding other country's seas, because those other countries are not breaking & obeying China, in recent news )..

Morality is contextual.

Personal-context can say 1 thing, or another, global context can be quite different.

Buddha said that eating the flesh of another's life was faulty because they never consented to be butchered/consumed, and that is true.

I can't remember what other reasons were given, that one stuck on me.

I don't eat any meat, or that aweful "Beyond Meat" or "Impossible Meat" stuff, because I can't then reach the meditations I'm using to rip my continuum out from this world's ideology-driven death-spasms, and remaining in this world, now, is indulging in being ground-to-hamburger, in my eyes.

I want out.

Eating meat of any kind blocks me from progressing on that through the meditations, exactly as the ancient rishis of India said.

That tested to be true.

You have to live with yourself, not with my conscience.

You decide on your own morality: you have to live with it.

I've never bothered learning the "precepts" or any of the other stuff of AwakeSoulism/Buddhism: I care about results, not about dogma.

What tests to be true, that is worth relying-on, for me.

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My entire ethical framework for what animals are ok to eat is wether or not it's cute.

I say eat them.

"It's okay to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings." - Nirvana

Fish would eat you if they got the chance.

People's opinions will differ, and most people's won't be changed. Instead of a discussion, it will be people yelling at each other until they both leave angry.

Personally, I think it's not ethical to eat any meat, whether that is white, red, wet, or otherwise.
Other people have, and will, think it is ethical to eat all meat, including other humans.

Farmed fish is probably not too bad by comparison but.. wild caught fish hell no. We’re speed running fucking up the ocean ecosystem and ruining the aquatic biosphere. It always alarms me when I see a change to the species of fish used in “generic budget oven-cook battered fish fillets”. It doesn’t even seem possible to make wild catch fishing sustainable, unlike every other form of animal husbandry where you could argue it’s more of a technical challenge.

Hmm now I realise I’m a hypocrite. Think I’ll stop eating fish

Could depend on the fish species in question? Lionfish for example is extremely invasive in the Southern USA, so environmental agencies have been encouraging people to eat them to curb their population, potentially making it a more ethical choice. I've been seeing it pop up more and more, but it doesn't seem to have caught on too much.

But we should definetly limit our consumption though when it comes to more threatened/overfished species. There's also some unethical fishing practices out there such as removing sharks' fins then stranding them, causing harm to cetaceans, and other environmentally destructive fishing techniques.

I see two concerns, humanitarian and ecological. The ecological concern is only a problem with overconsumption. The humanitarian concern I don't think applies to fish since they are dumb.

It is ethical to eat fish and meat.

It is unethical to kill fish. If one must eat fish, wait for it to be in a position like death where it won't get in the way of anything. Fish are no different from other animals.

Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life.

This is necessary.

Cries in Gen X.

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. -- G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain (The New World )

I don't think they apply to most animals either, so yes.

If fish could eat you do you believe they would think it's unethical?

If you answer it's yes then don't eat fish.

Yes, it's ethical to eat fish. I'm against the industrial practices, but that doesnt have anything to do with people eating them.

There's no such thing as ethical consumption, so go away and eat whatever you want.