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Comment by muninn_ | Hacker News Reader

Vegetarianism is not about making sure animals have good lives, it's about not eating them or participating in the intentional destruction of them by humans as much as possible. Stopping nature from taking its course in the world outside of human action is not a concern of vegetarians. Moving them to farms seems to be something very much against what a vegetarian would do.

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It's specifically talking about ethical consequentalism, which is related to utilitarianism -- the idea that you should act in a way to maximize happiness and minimize suffering.

Some vegetarians are not consequentialists, and so they can reject this argument for the reason you describe, but I know many who are.

I've been around a lot of hardcore vegans, and literally none of them would subscribe to the bizarre abstract philosophy of "minimizing suffering" in the wild. It's an absurdity.

The idea is to remove human causes of destruction, not to intervene in nature to manufacture some kind of utopia. Again, absurd. Essentially nobody would actually believe this, aside from philosophical masturbation.

I am a vegan and I believe there's an important qualitative distinction between the suffering that we cause and the suffering that we fail to prevent, but I still think the suffering in nature is bad and would like to see a way that we could reduce it.

There must be different cultures and views within veganism. :-)

That's the point of the paper, though, right? The paper compels them to explain why they find it okay to dismiss the idea as absurd, if they want to consider themselves as being ethically consistent regarding animal suffering.

Nobody moves animals to farms. Farm animals were specifically created by humans and could not exist outside that context.

I eat farmed meat but I also go hunting and try to take down a deer each year and maybe some grouse. Since this is just nature taking its course, I assume vegetarians won't care much about this.

This article explicitly states that it only applies to a subset of Vegetarianism, namely Ethical Consequentialist Vegetarianism. Ipso facto, it does not apply to the entirety of Vegetarianism, hence the explicit disclaimer in the introduction.

I reject that as an appropriate or meaningful subset of what it means to be vegetarian, hence my comment. It's basically nonsense as far as I'm concerned. Do you have any supporting view of ethical consequentialist vegetarianism as a sound philosophical position or argument?

The foundational work that advances this view is Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, from 1975, and a whole bunch of other philosophers have written about it since then.

Thank you. This looks like a book I should read.

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