
Why I'm proud to be a vegan - apsec112
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/why-im-proud-to-be-a-vegan-20160113-gm4t63.html
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voidr
> Detractors of veganism often like to tout the fundamental right of personal
> choice: "I respect your choice to be vegan, now respect mine to eat meat".
> What such proponents are failing to consider is that when a personal choice
> has a victim, it is no longer just personal. Just as it is morally bankrupt
> to have the opinion that women are inferior to men, it is equally
> unacceptable to subject a living, feeling, and consciously aware animal to
> death, just so your personal choice can be satisfied. So, the next time you
> think to ridicule a vegan, consider that it is people like vegans who have
> led the charge for every great inequality that the world has ever seen.
> People who weren't prepared to let morality be obscured by the status quo.
> Without people like vegans, we would still be living in a society where
> women could not even vote.

The author is trying hard to convey the supremacy of vegans over the rest of
humanity.

You know somebody is just trying to stir up a flamewar when they bring sexism
into the mix for no good reason.

Carnivores eat other animals, are they immoral beings? Is nature immoral then?

Contrary to what the author is trying to make you believe, by definition being
a vegan is a personal choice, and nothing more.

If you care about animals, you should support PETA.

If you want to personally protest against the horrible treatment of animals on
a lot of the farms, choose to buy free range products.

If you just want to be vegan, fine, do that and respect that not everyone is
like you(the same thing vegans ask) and a lot of people prefer that juicy
meat.

~~~
cholantesh
I'm not a vegan and I think the article is self-aggrandizing fluff. However,
this rhetorical question you pose:

>Carnivores eat other animals, are they immoral beings? Is nature immoral
then?

is one that has been addressed by vegans for a long time, usually on the basis
of biology (carnivores are literally incapable of extracting nutritional
content from plants, where we generally have that choice), intelligence (some
animals are just as intelligent as young humans), and moral agency (the
question of whether animals have it). I'm not saying I agree with these
arguments, but they exist, and are worthy of discussion. Peter Singer's Animal
Liberation is the work that explained these ideas best, much better than I
could. I think it's a great read.

~~~
xlm1717
If I understand correctly, this line of reasoning states that because animals
can't make the choice, we can't make it for them (we could feed them all
kibbles if we wanted), but since humans _can_ make the choice, then we should
make that choice for all of them.

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k__
I always find moral based decisions questionable.

If you're vegan because of some practical reasons, like you think it's
healthier, or because it is uneconomical to raise animals to eat them, why
not.

But if you simply think "vegans are the true moral bastions of society" like
the text says, you're no better than any religion on the planet.

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herval
"Vegans are often ridiculed, abused and written off as self-righteous
extremists who like nothing more than to push their "beliefs" upon others."

..."vegans are the true moral bastions of society."

Hmmm.

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threatofrain
Personally I avoid moral and ethical discussion because I think it takes real
discipline to create a convincing, general, elegant, and accessible moral
framework by which to convince others, and I don't think anyone has a go-to
framework yet.

In fact, I think having a framework for _anything_ is uncommon and difficult
(concurrency and parallelism, cognitive science, causal learning, math). The
consequence of discussing without a framework is that we're really just
thinking about what we want, and working backward to find any reason for it,
unwilling to just say "It's what I want."

I've yet to meet a vegan that provides me a framework with accessibility and
clarity, and this article is no exception. I don't even have a moral or
ethical framework for myself yet, because I know it must be incredibly hard,
and I feel like embarking on a search for one would be like wasting one's
mathematical career on P ? NP. I'm not a philosophical genius. I'm just a
person with feelings.

With morality and ethics, it's either you already agree with my values or you
don't. It's nigh impossible for me to persuade you in the value of Jesus the
Christ. You would expect me to solve some unsolved philosophical questions
with clarity and accessibility, and I likely wouldn't even scratch the surface
of the problem.

I don't think any vegan is about to come out with a blockbuster theory that
smashes through the philosophical community, building general consensus. In
the meantime, they're just having feelings like I do, and trying to find
justifications for them post-fact.

Do you already have the same feelings as I do? Great. Now we can make some
arguments about achieving our mutual feelings. But I'm not going to pretend
that it's some conclusion of a logical foundation.

~~~
erdeszt
Even if I'd have a moral framework to start a discussion upon I wouldn't be
able to convince you to stop eating meat because it was not a choice you made
based on facts and rational arguments but something you've born into. Unless
you find the moral values yourself you'll be eating meat forever.

~~~
threatofrain
That's exactly my thinking about moral and ethical argumentation. If we
already share the same values, lucky for us, we have a foundation to build
upon. If not, oh well, let's look for areas we can agree upon.

I think moral consensus is successfully used when the right historical moment
has come along, and the tipping point has come to the old moral majority.
Obama has made a similar point in his recent arguments about gun policy,
stating that for some issues, there just isn't the moral consensus to do
pragmatic work.

The likelihood is that one cannot build a bridge across values, and that
values are axiomatic. Either you accept them or you don't. But if you built a
blockbuster theory that built consensus in the philosophical community, those
effects would probably begin to ripple outward. I think that's incredible
work.

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pigpaws
I eat animals and wear their skin. Get over it you pretentious cunt.

