Comment by mirror_neuron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mirror_neuron | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Serious question: how is the destruction of animal life for sustenance different from the destruction of plant life?

I'll give you my answer, and hopefully you can share your thoughts (or other answers entirely) to help clarify my thinking.

I conclude that we draw a line between animals and other kinds of life because we are more like animals than other kinds of life. And "likeness with ourselves" seems like an arbitrary way of dividing life.

Extrapolating in the other direction: why don't we practice cannibalism, as other animals do? Perhaps we find cannibalism dangerous and impractical, but also that the typical human carries social instincts that make the behavior distasteful (which in turn leads to taboos in many -- but not all -- of our cultures).

One of my favorite expressions is that "there are no boundaries in nature". That is to say: all dividing lines between categories are invented, regardless of how useful those lines may be. And human constructs change with time and culture. The line between "destroying a someone" and "harvesting a resource" may depend very much on time and place.

I'm not trying to criticize your position, only trying to clarify my own. I would appreciate your thoughts (or links to the thoughts of others).

Of course we value more the life of beings more closely related to us than the life of beings more distantly related to us.

However, there are more differences between the domestic plants and the domestic animals than that.

The life of most animals that are eaten by humans can really be said to be destructed from the day when they are born until the day when they are killed, because they are forced to live in a way different from the life for which their body is made for and that they obviously do not enjoy.

On the other hand, there is no significant difference between the life of the wild plants and that of the cultivated plants. From the plants that are perennial, we take some parts, e.g. fruits or seeds, which would have been discarded anyway. The annual plants like wheat are killed during the harvest, but they would have died anyway after spreading their seeds, and until the harvest they have lived in the same way as a wild plant.

Before the last century, the lives of the domestic animals were usually much better than now and they frequently could be said to live as well as similar wild animals. For example, the chickens grown by my grandparents were certainly happy during all their life. They had a very large space where they could wander all day and eat whatever plants or insects they liked besides the corn that supplemented their diet. They raised their young and did everything else that wild chickens would do, until the day when they were caught and killed. As a small child, I have played a lot with those chickens.

So, unlike the cultivated plants, most of them had their lives shortened, but, except for duration, their lives were not altered in other ways.

Unfortunately such animal raising methods cannot be scaled to feed billions of humans.

I like this. These are good points.

I think it's worth noting that your position is not the same as GP's, however.

One small objection: I assume you lead with "of course" in your first sentence because that value is intuitive to you. It's intuitive to me, too, but I don't have an argument for why it's moral.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com