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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

> Charlie Winter, a London-based terrorism researcher, was dining with friends one recent evening when the conversation turned to whether it is ethical to eat meat. Someone brought up slaughterhouse conditions, Winter said, and he instantly grew uneasy. He stayed for a while longer, squirming, and then finally left the room. That word — "slaughterhouse" — had conjured images of one of the most gruesome ISIS videos he'd come across. The militants had filmed a mass execution in a slaughterhouse, casting their prisoners as the animals.

I wonder if watching gruesome animal slaughter videos would eventually produce the same reaction. Given how much the industry wants to keep their treatment of animals secret [1], I can't imagine the effect is benign.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag "Supporters of ag-gag laws have argued that they serve to protect the agriculture industry from the negative repercussions of exposés by whistleblowers."

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Maybe but ... my grandfather use to raise 3 cows a year. One for him, one for my family and one for my mom's sister's family.

I got to see them kill the cow. Cut it open and remove the gut sack and then later got to see them process it at the butcher. I still eat meat.

I guess that's the same as witnessing it on an industrial level, day after day.

It takes a certain level of awareness to even be capable of making that distinction though.

Most people would be rapidly desensitized. Recall that not too many decades ago, people routinely butchered their own animals, and many still do in much of the world.

Sure, but there's a difference between how the animals are/were kept, killed, and butchered in small farms vs a dedicated meat factory.

That's about the fairest argument, and I say this as an unrepentant meat eater, hunter, and fisher.

It's not just that the animal is dead, it's that the animal spent its entire existence in terrible conditions.

Thanks for saying this. "Repentant" meat eater here. Every time I eat meat, it came from an animal that enjoyed being alive and didn't want to die. More people should hunt and fish, and know what it's like to take the life that you're going to eat. I think people would feel a sense of obligation to the animal's quality of life, in light of the sacrifice they are making.

Sorry it's slightly off topic, but wanted to thank you for creating common ground. If I try to make it topical, I think conversations like this between different points of view overall reduce extremism.

“As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.”

Pythagoras

The animal kingdom is absolutely brutal. And not in the "predators kill prey" sort of way. I just watched the documentary "The Lions of Sabi Sands" on the recommendation of someone here, and the level of violence that exists in animal societies is something I think most would find shocking.

This hardly operates as a justification for human brutality towards animals. Most aspects of human society are less horrible than the natural state of affairs and an argument from nature that would should relax our standards seems highly suspect, both from an intuitive and logical perspective.

Doesn't it, though? The point of human society is to make life nicer for its humans, not for the state of nature that comes into contact with it.

"The point of human society is to make life nicer for its humans."

How do you figure this? Why not "The point of human society is to make the world more aesthetically pleasing?" Or "The point of human society is to make life nicer for all conscious beings?" Or "The point of human society is to make life nicer for all great apes?" or "The point of life among higher animals (of which human beings are a cohort) is to make life nice for all higher animals?"

Its hardly a settled point _what_ the point of human society is or even where "society" should have its limits defined.

The Absolute Truth is that the point of Life is to become conscious enough to discover that the point of life is to become infinitely loving and utterly selfless. But imagine how conscious you have to be to get there! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PjZB9CoFfs

While I'm sympathetic with the idea this seems like a lot of woo to me.

See if you can be radically open minded about it and notice the implicit metaphysics of your anti-woo default position

There isn't one damn thing that is implicit about my metaphysics.

When you say something is "woo" you're implying that reality is physical, which is your implied metaphysics. The Truth is that reality is _not_ physical, but you have to do a lot of metaphysics to get there, look into the video I linked.

Indeed!

Ref Katharine Hepburn, in "The African queen":

"Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put in this world to rise above."

Tigers and bears don't seem to have any emotional strife about their position in the food chain. Don't think we should feel too bad about it either. There are real concerns to address about sustainability though.

Bears also don't have any emotional strife about killing cubs to increase their odds of mating. Perhaps looking to them for moral guidance is not the best idea.

But that’s part of the point. We owe animals humane treatment because of what we are, not because of what they are.

To be clear, holding tigers and bears to a different moral standard is human exceptionalism. I’m fine with that, but many people seem to feel we should treat animals humanely because they’re the same as us.

Either animals are moral entities, or they're not.

If they are, we owe them moral treatment, but then they are subject to being held accountable for their own moral failings.

If they're not, then they can't be said to accrue any moral failings, and we don't owe them moral treatment.

Hard disagreement, if something can feel pain and suffering then we should be striving to overcome the need to inflict that on them.

Also, just because we don't "owe" it to them doesn't mean we shouldn't. Being nice or doing good in the world isn't something that should be earned by the recipients, it should be the default for how we treat each other if we're REALLY trying to progress and move forward as sentient beings.

> it should be the default for how we treat each other

What should be included in the set of "each other"? You're suggesting we include entities that are totally amoral, who happily destroy other sentient beings in the most painful ways, and who are incapable of reform. There is no imaginable social contract that could possibly include such monsters.

Surely there must be some element of symmetry as a condition of such a set membership. It's implied by the very phrase "each other".

I think trying to figure that out is the exciting part, and I'd prefer to err on the side of generosity.

Many rodents eat their own babies when stressed, and many animals practice rape. Following nature for ethical concerns is sketchy at best.

How do you know? There's no experiment I can think of to confirm this.

IMO, the correct 'null hypothesis' wrt mammals is that they think and feel like humans do, except where we've managed to prove otherwise.

We're not tigers or bears, so I never really understood this line of thought.

We're all part of the same natural world, we have more in common than we have differences. The world we're all born into doesn't seem to particularly care about suffering -- it's baked into its very fabric, we're all going to suffer and die.

If you are going to survive, you have to kill every day, be it plant or animal; it's just the way it is. You can say that plants matter less than animals, and make up some justification about consciousness and suffering, but that is simply our own personal bias. There is no way to know if the universe cares more about thinking or non-thinking things, or if they share the exact same intrinsic value. All such moralizing is on very shaky ground and comes down to human bias and not much else.

Source? Because pythagoras never wrote anything down. That was kinda his thing.

This is fake, unless it is from the greek pythagoras who was a athletic trainer, in which case your attribution is still dodgy.

My source: the pythagoren sourcebook.

It's attributed to Pythagoras through Ovid but I couldn't find exactly where. It doesn't seem to be in the Metamorphoses.

For the laymen, note that Ovid lived about 500 years after Pythagoras, so you can still be skeptical about this attribution.

Pythagoras was infamous for being a lunatic in everything - you can't even exclude his area of sanity mathematics given his erroneous insistence on rationality in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Articles that seem relevant to the topic:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L214

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Treblinka

It depends. I don't think seeing animals killed would affect me too much.

I do think seeing animals suffer would definitely help to change my behavior.

“As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

> in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis.

Which is more than a little ironic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism

Where's the irony?

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