Morals are internal and are often informed by one’s culture, upbringing, and lived experience. There is a wide array of answers here and that’s not surprising.
For me I do consider vegetarianism to be a more moral option, I am not a vegetarian though. I think that Americans eat more meat than they need to and men in particular are targeted to over consume meat to the detriment of their health. With these things in mind I do try to eat less meat and go through phases when I am more successful.
After taking a college course about the meat industry, my partner decided not to purchase meat, but still does eat it.
Yes
Is it not morally wrong to drink the milk of an animal that was forcibly impregnated and whose child was murdered for said milk? Why stop at vegetarianism?
artifical insemination doesnt need to happen for milk production
It’s not clear here if you think that is the only problem with rape, child theft, torture, and murder. It’s not even clear whether you understand that a child has to be created, neglected, and abused for a mother’s milk to be sold.
- how is it rape
- how is it torture
- child theft?
- murder?
You cannot even accept “torture”? Really. Well then that clarifies your original comment.
they should be killed swiftly and painlessly
non sequitur
you’re clearly speaking from a place of ignorance, about what you want to be true. you should learn more about where your food actually comes from and what externalities are being paid by others because of your choices. right now you’re just brainwashing yourself so that you don’t have to emotionally cope with your cruelty and violence.
He thinks cows are people.
I think cattle are moral individuals that have the capacity to be wronged. That is all. That doesn’t require that they are human-like people with full human-like capacities and rights. Just because a human is worth more than a cow doesn’t mean a cow is worthless and you can do whatever you want to her, doesn’t mean that a cow cannot suffer every bit as harshly as you can.
Giving different words to the crimes we commit against animals is a way of insulating yourself from the crimes you commit, like how calling cow flesh “beef” insulates you from the horror and cruelty you commit.
Yeah I think so probably. The animal product industry seems pretty messed up. Very un-cool what we do to them. Inefficient too but that’s another argument.
No.
Sincerely, A lifelong vegetarian.
Vegetarians are the worst kind of carnist. Would take so little, still don’t give a shit.
Is it morally wrong to ask a bait question on a public forum?
It’s bait if it makes me angry
I guess you’re not going to bait stickly into examining the consequences their choices have on others who are powerless to protect themselves from those consequences. He’s too clever for that kind of bait.
I don’t understand wht you mean.
But I’m not baiting anyone. I wanted to see people’s personal opinions and get some insight from their arguments.
Vegetarianism is a dietary preference. Veganism is a moral philosophy. They don’t have anything to do with each other.
Depends on who you ask and the background of your question.
Yes
It is undeniable in current day the horrors industrial farming creates and inflicts on millions of sentient beings to sustain a business that was originally fomented in order to supply food for a post-war world where several countries were rendered with little or no usable land for farming.
The traditional model of farming, where animals were an integral part of a production chain that kept the land itself alive and reduced waste to a minimum was destroyed to give place to a highly destructive model where lowest cost, hight profit margins and speed of production is absolute.
In this process, thousands, if not millions, of landrace animals, along with heirloom seed varieties, went extinct and were lost. Petroleum products and by-products entered the daily life, from food, to clothing, to essentially anything imaginable. Not because those were better but because it was cheaper and protected interests.
Knowing this and still leaning heavily on an animal protein based diet with no concern for its toll on our collective ecosystem and the suffering it creates is nothing short of regrettable.
No
Meat is cheap. Artificially cheap but still. Processed foods cheaper; with meat in it, even more.
Many people throughout the world do not have access to the means to have a fully exclusive or at least heavily based vegetable diet, either because of the environment they live in or simply because they lack the means to afford it. Many people in developing countries still depend on cattle to provide food and raw materials, if not on hunting, trapping and fishing. Even more people, in rich, developed countries, don’t have the money to afford a proper diet, even less a vegetable based one.
These people are as worthy of living as any other. It can not be taken against them wanting to survive.
Maybe
Some people aren’t aware how much their personal decision can have a meaningful impact.
Others don’t have the time or hability to extract from vegetables meals that can truly satisfy them and don’t want to resort to ultraprocessed foods. Others are simply too deep into a cultural mindset that blocks them from experimenting.
It is just another type of barrier. There is a degree of lack of interest and effort in this stage but we can’t (shouldn’t) hold against people their personal circumstances, which adds poorly when it comes to changing minds, habits and cultures.
Take your pick.
I generally agree with you, however your argument does add some subjectivity to the maybe and no sections. I’d add that while not every situation can accommodate a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle, in 2026 the vast majority of people have the capability to change to a non-meat diet without any detriment to their health or lifestyle besides social ostracism of unaccepting peers depending on where they live.
My entire argument is subjective, like any other, as it stems from my personal views, thoughts and experiences.
Yeah, the most ethical diet is plant based.
Why do you ask it?
explain how you developed this idea it is more ethical. based on what exactly?
Minimizing harm to others and harm to the environment is more ethical than not minimizing harm to others and harm to the environment
Are you reducing the harm to others in a actually statically significant quantity though?
To others I suppose you refer to animals. By being vegan you mosly reduce harm to a few species of big animals.
Most animals by quantity are insects.
If you count by individuals a person who saves a few ant nest from the horrors of nature and give them a nice controlled habitat would reduce the number of harm happening to individual animals orders of magnitude over what a diet change could achieve.
As for environmental damage. It’s a way. But not the only way. The most effective way to control environmental control would be to reduce the number of humans on earth.
It is not minimizing harm in the way you can’t hear a plant scream. That’s the same logic people had about fish. This is a foolish and irresponsible way to think of consciousness.
I will agree it is minimizing harm on environment however we have much room to improve even on that standard.
Like not burning crops simply because it doesn’t make money.
“Plants feel pain” is an argument that supports a plant-based diet because it is more efficient to consume plants directly than to feed them to animals.
i agree with the efficiency.
stick with that argument.
it works for you.
stepping into moral logic around consiousness around pain and suffering: that the shittier arguments vegans come up with to feel satisified with themselves over others with magical thinking and that shit needs to stop.
Vegans’ moral arguments are just fine, it’s just that most people don’t give a shit. When you realize how shitty most people are to other people, it makes the need to take a different approach very obvious.
Everyone requires a certain amount of mental gymnastics to consume any living plant or creature to continue to exist in a meat body.
You can pick and choose food but you don’t get to pick and choose who has consciousness.
Denying that is shittier.
A foolish and irresponsible way to think about consciousness would be to pretend we can actually define it, then go around professing things are either conscious or not without considering there might be a scale.
so you say you cant define it but you can throw something you dont know on a scale? so its only ok if you do it. uh huh. i see. that is some bullshit, fool.
I said “consider there might be” whereas you were all over the thread speaking in absolutes to support your weak hypothesis.
Nuance is obviously lost on you which is a shame as it’s kind of a prerequisite for the philosophical debates you keep attempting to engage in.
you certainly defend yourself in absolutes. pick a lane.
the most ethical diet is
not a matter of objective fact
Yeah.
They would need to specify to which set of ethics are they talking about. And then we could compare to which ethics a vegan diet adhere more or less.
Morals are subjective, I don’t consider myself the arbiter of truth and I also reject theistic positive claims stating otherwise such as objective morals or free will. Personally I know I can survive without eating animals, so I’d rather not be indirectly involved in the killing of other animals where it is reasonably possible and I don’t consider humans more important/superior to any other animals, generally.
I think you could get a lot of people to even admit to valuing very old trees over a lot of people too so even some plants are worth leaving alone, according to some of us. Like Red Wood giants in Cali, for example. All the land cleared of wildlife to grow food for billions of humans is disturbing stuff at least to me as well. The planet is actually kinda… small. I’ve come to realise. I fully reject humanity’s unearned superiority complex.
I acknowledge it’s hard/impossible to be absolute in the vegetarian ideal given all the ramifications of industrial overpopulation and just casually participating in the society I was born into. Best I can do on this suffering planet, that I never consented to being born to live temporarily upon pointlessly, is to minimize (elimination is unrealistic) the suffering my life inflicts on others.
In other words, I don’t owe anyone jack shit, not even Mommy Dearest. Yet I still stand by this moral position. Although I’d argue this is just who I am and always was. The justications put into words and labels applied came later. You’ll notice I didn’t condemn meat eating in this comment and that’s quite deliberate. You are not me. I just explain my position when asked and it’s up to others to adopt it or not.
We are social animals. We all owe each other our entire survival.
Anything that offends you gets the thought terminating edgy label applied, I see you bud. Username checks out.
“I don’t owe anyone jack shit, not even Mommy Dearest,” is a decidedly edgelord thing to say. Other parts of what you were saying are not trying to be edgy, and I think I get that you were trying to create some kind of rhetorical contrast, but that’s just objectively an edgelord comment. I edited my comment to tone it down, but not before you saw it, so I guess I have to stand by that.
Being vegetarian or omnivorous isn’t very different, morally, as producing milk still requires killing calves. I think the better comparison would be with veganism
producing milk still requires killing calves
It certainly is not a requirement. They don’t have to use the males born to make veal.
Yes, it is an economic requirement. They can’t compete with beef cattle for meat production, keeping them alive just makes the milk more expensive than the farmer down the road who murders his calves can sell it for.
Sell them to beef ranchers. Make even more money and meat. 🤦♂️
the vast majority of dairy calves are brought to full weight before slaughter, but slaughter still isn’t necessary.
How do you recoup the costs of raising a bull to full weight (which happens at a fraction of its natural lifespan) without slaughtering him? It’s like saying breathing isn’t necessary because you can just hold your breath.
you can just choose not to do that
Depends on your morals.
I think it depends on where you get your meat, eggs, and dairy.
A proper farm where the animals are kept safe, healthy, and happy for longer than they’d live in the wild, and in the case of meat killed quickly and painlessly? That could be considered morally okay.
Factory farms where they lead short, filthy miserable lives, constantly being bred to maximize milk production? Nah, that is not morally okay.
That could be considered morally okay.
Carnism is the typically unconscious and unexamined belief that cruelty and violence to vulnerable individuals such as livestock can sometimes be good or acceptable. It’s not. The more you pick at it, the more it falls apart. I spent years trying to find ways to be an ethical consumer of other individual’s flesh. It’s fucking impossible, it contains contradictions you can never solve. Your whole idea of a “proper farm” would be laughably if it wasn’t such a horrifying and self-serving delusion. Just stop abusing vulnerable individuals, it’s actually so much easier than trying to consume “ethical meat”.
A vegetarian diet isn’t much more ethical than an omnivore diet, anyway. Veganism has a much better argument.
People seem to focus on the ills of the dairy industry when talking about vegetarians, but the egg industry is particularly egregious.
If ethical = animal welfare, perhaps.
But when factoring in e.g. water consumption and CO2e per unit of food consumed, I would argue the average vegetarian diet to be significantly more ethical compared with the average omnivorous diet.
Obviously the type of animals involved, the way they are treated and killed, and religious views add more complexity to this case.
edit: the essence of my point is that this isn’t a black and white matter.
I think that’s a flawed argument. Cow milk production requires that cows get pregnant once a year, and the calves can’t all become milk cows, too - thus, cow milk production cannot exist without cow meat production. And IIRC milk products still have a worse environmental impact than chicken meat.
TBH I’m not sure about the environmental impact of eggs vs meat. But animal welfare is generally the main reason why people keep to vegetarian or vegan diets, and chicken farming is not great in terms of animal welfare.
The bottom line is: 1 cow birth per year (or let’s call it cow deaths, because that’s what is most relevant here) yields around 10.000L of milk. Out of which around 1000kg of cheese can be produced, plus of course the meat of that calf.
Does that make it ethical? I don’t think so. But I would say around 1.5-2x less unethical compared to eating meat, which is significant.
Whether something is moral or ethical doesn’t depend on the commercial benefit you can derive from it! What the actual fuck!!
Not OP, but I think the argument is more about nutritional benefit than commercial benefit.
Yes, thank you for clarifying this.
Not sure why anyone would assume monetary/commercial benefit here.
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I read a book called “change of heart” by a vegan animal activist, which was all about research into what actually worked in terms of convincing people to reduce animal suffering. For him, it would be ideal if we reduced animal suffering to zero. But even encouraging someone to eat less meat (e.g. Meatless Mondays) reduced animal suffering, and was a win in his book. I kind of agree with that.
I thought you were talking about environmental impact? Both cow milk and cow meat have a worse environmental footprint than chicken meat.
My point is: ethics should not be confused with a single dimension of ethics. Whether something I’d ethical, depends on your beliefs.
Simultaneously, if animal welfare is all we optimize for, vegetarianism is a step forward. And indeed, so is pollotarianism when optimizing for just environmental impact. Perfect is the enemy of good.
For water consumption and CO2, avoid beef, milk and cheese. Chicken and eggs are no issue, they cause less harm in that regard than many plant products (like almonds).
Not sure I’m getting your point, but meat tastes better than lettuce.
If it’s possible and you’re capable to do it, then I think it’s a moral choice.
If it’s a matter of survival, health or inaccess to a variety of food, I don’t think it really is a choice one should have to make on grounds of morality.
