Hi all. I've postponed several responses for too long now, so here's an all-at-once response.
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@Neil, it's you to whom my first response is due, and out of concern for space it will unfortunately be somewhat brief and perhaps a little unsatisfying. Re your
post #98, I think you've hit on a very important point re the moral relevance of the capacity of beings to suffer, and I appreciate you acknowledging that after all, yes, animals are aware of death and that some even mourn. I think you're missing something though, probably simply because it didn't occur to you rather than out of deliberate exclusion: the capacity of sentient beings for positive experiences and for well-being is equally relevant morally.
In terms of the supposedly lesser consciousness of certain forms of animal life - such as mealworms - I'm less inclined to side with the implications you wish to draw from IIT and more with those from the research of both Cleve Backster, who demonstrated - and which demonstration the popular television show
Mythbusters successfully replicated (a link which I've already posted) - that a plant will register emotions via a lie-detector test at the mere
thought of a nearby human of harming it, and of Jagdish Chandra Bose, whose
Boseian Thesis, based on careful experimentation and study, states that "there is no discontinuity between the living and the nonliving". In other words, I think we ought to be expanding our circle of ethically relevant beings rather than restricting it. For now I think that - for reasons given elsewhere - fruit by the botanical definition is the most sensible exclusion ethically from that circle of concern for the purpose of human diet: at least for those of us who still need to eat, and, unfortunately, I find myself amongst those.
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@Grorganic, re your
post #99, in particular your affirmation of moral relativism being a reality over human history: I think I hinted at my position on that in my response to Neil two posts prior to yours: "Empirical uncertainty is one major reason why despite that morality is objective, our moral choices sometimes anyway require the exercise of judgement". In other words, re your example of animal sacrifice being ethical in certain cultures, this, I would expect, is because the animal is seen, in the long run, not to be harmed, because it enters the afterlife with merit for its sacrifice - or there would be a belief in some other counterveiling benefit to the harm of the sacrifice. It is not that it is a
valid "culturally relative" ethic to
arbitrarily harm other beings; no, the objective moral principle that avoidable harm is wrong applies always, else the culture is not truly an ethical one: all that changes is the empirical beliefs with respect to the nature and implications of the harm in question.
So, this
does leave us in a troublesome situation, because I agree with you to the extent that one culture ought not to enforce its empirical/cultural
beliefs upon another - at least not without seriously good evidence that the other's beliefs are definitively mistaken and that this mistake is causing avoidable harm. And on a forum such as this, it is necessary to at least
countenance the possibility that afterlife consequences mitigate mortal harm, and that a group of people might have valid empirical proof of such a thing, so, yes, I am not in favour of literally and physically forcing Western-derived cultural beliefs on such cultures, and I would hope that any change which does occur does so through the activism of members of the culture in question, after those members having considered the validity of the empirical beliefs upon which their culture's various harmful practices are based.
As far, though, as any argument that culture can justify harms
absent any belief in mitigating "unavoidable" factors such as post-mortal merit, then, no, we do not, as I think is already clear, see eye to eye there.
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@Reece, re your
post #101, the one with all the teeth in it: I note that with respect to the malformed dentition you refer to the cause not as a "vegan" diet but as a "Western" diet. These are two entirely different things, and so I am not sure that your images have any relevance in this thread.
In earlier posts I expressed a lack of interest in advancing the healthfulness of a vegan diet, but since so much is being made of its apparent unhealthiness, I will reverse that decision and share a few resources which in my opinion more than counter this "argument from poor dental health":
- The most famous is Dr T. Colin Campbell and son's book, The China Study, which is very well reviewed and summarised by Ernst Erb here. This book lays out a powerful case based on a lifetime of scientific research that a plant-based diet is key to the prevention and even reversal of most common diseases, especially those common in the West. Dr Campbell came from a farming family and was originally convinced that animal products were essential to health; it was the data that changed his mind.
- The movie, Forks Over Knives, makes a similar case, and includes interviews with Dr Campbell as well as with other notable researchers.
- Dr Michael Greger's NutritionFacts.org trawls through and summarises the latest research in nutrition so we don't have to, and finds strongly in favour of a plant-based diet. Dr Greger presents yearly talks on the benefits of a plant-based diet based on the latest research; one of my favourites is from 2012, Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death, in which he outlines the ways in which a plant-based diet prevents people from dying from most of the leading causes of death in the USA.
Here Dr Greger's 2012 talk is inline:
So, I see your dentist and I raise you several doctors. And that's just a sampling; there are plenty more sources out there.
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There has also been some talk, both in this thread and elsewhere on the forum, about the supposed invalidation of the hypothesis/es that cholesterol and/or saturated fat can easily be eaten to unhealthy excess, so here are a few resources which counter this talk:
- In the British Medical Journal blog, Dr Neal D. Barnard and Angela Eakin argue that Yes, cholesterol matters. The key paragraphs in this blog post are these: So how did the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee arrive at its not-guilty verdict? The committee wrote that its finding of no relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol was “consistent with the conclusions of the AHA/ACC report,” citing a 2014 report by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology.
However, the AHA/ACC report did not actually reach this conclusion. It summarized evidence published after 1998—that is, after the most recent meta-analyses were published—and called for more research, but did not suggest that there was no relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol. Of course, the issue may be largely theoretical, because most cholesterol-containing foods also contain saturated fat—and both raise LDL cholesterol concentrations.
- The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine writes in its article, Cholesterol and Heart Disease: Two large cohort studies and one meta-analysis found that vegetarians had a much lower risk of dying from heart disease than nonvegetarians.11 A study from 2007 in the Journal of Nutrition found that a single fatty meal can cause the heart to beat harder and raise blood pressure. A high-fat, fast-food meal usually has 42 grams of fat, while a typical healthful meal would have around 1.3 grams of fat.12 One study showed that people who adopt a vegetarian diet reduce their saturated fat intake by 26 percent and significantly lower cholesterol levels in just six weeks. A more recent study revealed that when participants switched to a strict low-fat vegetarian diet for about two weeks, they lowered their total serum cholesterol and blood pressure by 11 percent and 6 percent respectively, and men lost an average of 5.5 pounds and women an average of 2.2 pounds.13 --from the section "Go Vegan to reduce your cholesterol and heart disease risk".
- Despite the potential which we all know for bias on Wikipedia, it is worth noting that the article, Saturated fat and cardiovascular disease controversy, contains these statements in its opening section: [M]ost in the mainstream heart-health, government, and medical communities hold that saturated fat is a risk factor for CVD [...]
Medical, scientific, heart-health, governmental and intergovernmental, and professional authorities, such as the World Health Organization,[2] the American Dietetic Association,[3] the Dietitians of Canada,[3] the British Dietetic Association,[4] American Heart Association,[5] the British Heart Foundation,[6] the World Heart Federation,[7] the British National Health Service,[8] the United States Food and Drug Administration,[9] and the European Food Safety Authority[10] advise that saturated fat is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), and recommend dietary limits on saturated fats as one means of reducing that risk.
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Finally, re
@malf's news article, titled "Being A Vegetarian Is Actually Worse For The Environment", unfortunately he's let the skeptic side down with his willingness to post biased news reports of studies which do not reflect the actual findings of the studies in question. A quick bit of googling could have led him to the Huffington Post article,
A Study Did NOT Actually Find That Vegetarianism Hurts The Planet, in which the researchers themselves, after being contacted by the HuffPo author, said that the claim that vegetarianism is more harmful to the environment than eating meat is a total mischaracterisation of what they found, and that what they actually found was that not all foods in a particular food group are created equal - a relatively benign finding. If you look at the
abstract of the study itself (sorry, I'm not going to pay to download and analyse the full article), you'll see, as mentioned in the HuffPo article, that none of the diets the authors analysed were even vegetarian, let alone vegan, let alone fruitarian. They all included at least seafood and dairy.
Here are some resources which demonstrate how unenvironmentally-friendly the consumption of animal products really is, including in comparison to the vegan option:
- The 108 or so page 2010 report by the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, part of the United Nations Environment Programme, Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production, Priority Products and Materials has this to say on page 79: "Animal products, both meat and dairy, in general require more resources and cause higher emissions than plant-based alternatives", and on page 82 (emphasis mine) "Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products". You can read the Guardian's article on this study (at the time, 2010), UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet.
- The 284 page 2006 report, Livestock's long shadow, also thanks to the United Nations, concludes: "As we have seen, the livestock sector is a major stressor on many ecosystems and on the planet as a whole. Globally it is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity, while in developed and emerging countries it is perhaps the leading source of water pollution".
- The 2014 film, Cowspiracy, takes up this baton and questions whether the silence from environmental organisations on the major role played by animal agriculture, particularly the farming of cattle, in climate change and environmental devastation amounts to a conspiracy.
OK, phew, that's a monster post to return to this thread with. Thanks for sticking with it if you've made it this far. Best wishes to all, and make Christmas also a celebration for the animals and plants that you
don't eat. :)
