What do you think about animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, zoos, pets?

since animals lack rationality and the ability to choose, they are wholly innocent and cannot, in a
metaphysical sense, bare any responsibility for their actions. in light of this, any suffering that
befalls an animal is undeserved in the same way that the suffering of a child is undeserved. i
cannot accept the suffering of animals since it is an instantiation of unnecessary and unwarranted
evil andi therefore contend that all animals have the right to be treated humanely and with respect,
that is, free from cruelty and needless suffering (especially at the hands of humans). despite this,
animals can be regarded as means to ends precisely because they are not rational beings; they do
not have to be regarded as ends in and of themselves in the way that each individual human being
necessarily and categorically must be regarded as a free end and as demanding respect for their
autonomy. due to this, i dont think that there is any necessary moral content in vegetarianism or
veganism because we are permitted to use all non-rational beings as means to further our own
ends, be that by aiding in human labour or by being processed into meat for food. the only
condition on the instrumental use of animals would be, of course, that they are unconditionally
treated humanely and spared any and all forms of suffering (even more so than mature humans
since we can be held accountable for our wrong doings and thus can deserve to suffer for them).
this is not to say that i dont respect vegetarianism or veganism, just that i think it more a matter of
taste and personal preference. the same applies to zoos and pets: so long as the animals in
question are treated humanely, even if it is merely for our own entertainment, i have no problem
with them. its all the better if a zoo is set up for protection and conservation purposes since this
views the animals as ends in themselves and respects them as such

Hello, I just wanted to ask you a question about your post regarding veganism etc. "we are
permitted to use all non-rational beings as means to further our own ends" In my humble
opinion it seems that you have fallen victim to something called anthropocentrism, the
belief that virtually anything and everything on earth is here for human use. I beg you to
reconsider this. I also strongly urge you to educate yourself on the negative effects that
consuming animal products has on the earth, and on your body. I must also respectfully
point out blatant hypocrisy on your end when you said that you believe animals should be
treated humanely. You CANNOT obtain animal products of any kind humanely. There is
absolutely nothing humane about murdering an innocent being with every right to live as
you. Also, some extra food for thought - people with mental disabilities are also considered
irrational beings who lack the ability to take responsibility for their actions. Does that mean
we should abuse our "power" over them and use them for whatever we who are rational see
t? I must also ask respectfully that you reconsider your "means to an end" argument since
consuming animal products of any kind is completely and totally unnecessary for human
survival and in this age, is done completely and absolutely out of greed, tradition,
selshness and requires one to lack a respect for life, human health, and the environment. I
ask all of this respectfully, I appreciate your blog very much and just think you may benet
from some of these thoughts. Choosing veganism is one of the smartest, wisest and most
benecial decisions I have ever made.

on the contrary, its precisely because i dont want to fall into anthropocentrism that ive taken this
stand point. rather, ive adopted what might be called ratiocentrism the claim that human beings
are entitled to make use of non-rational beings as they see t, but only insofar as humanity is
rational. anthropocentrism is merely a contingent consequence of ratiocentrism because we only
happen to be the sole rational beings (so far as we know!), but the facts of the matter need not
necessarily have been this way. i distance myself from anthropocentrism because that implies that
there is something in the ontology of humanity that gives us certain rights and makes us special so
to speak, but rationality can conceivably have applied to other beings in which case they too would
be privy to the rights humanity is only accidentally privileged to

this is not to say that we can usurp the planet and do what we see t with no repercussions, just
that there is no moral content to be analytically extracted from the concept of using things as a
means to our own ends. put another way, analysing the concept of carnivorousness or
omnivorousness does not yield anything objectively immoral. the reasons youve given in advocacy
of veganism, namely the adverse health effects of meat products, the environmental
consequences of their production, that they are unnecessary for human survival, are contingent
consequences of the consumption of meat the situation need not have been so but this cannot
lead to claims regarding moral value. i wholly agree that there are these adverse effects and that
they should be avoided as much as possible, but i disagree with your implication that this can lead
to moral propositions. in a hypothetical possible world where the facts are constituted so that these
adverse effects did not hold (such as a hypothetical world in which consuming meat prolonged life),
the points would no longer have content. the nature of moral claims is that they must, absolutely
must, hold in every logically possible constitution of reality they must hold in every possible world
meaning that while your claims are entirely valid as reasonable considerations to take into
account when deciding on whether to eat meat or not, they are not moral considerations because
they are notuniversally applicable

ill concede that you present a stronger case regarding the humane treatment of animals because it
very well might be that it is impossible for something to be treated humanely if they are to be killed
for food; we may be able to deduce, simply from the concept of killing and without appeals to
experience, that killing excludes humane treatment. however, im not wholly convinced and thus
will leave off giving a determinate answer pending more thought

until then though, i would draw your attention to the fact that given animals lack self-awareness (a
concept independent of rationality that i will explain in the next paragraph), they have no
conception of their own existence any more than an insect or a tree. while this might seem like an
extreme claim due to our experiences with animals and the unavoidable truth of their emotional
complexity, i maintain that emotional responses differ entirely from rational responses in that the
former are physical phenomena governed by the laws of causality. one (human beings included)
cannot choose to feel or not feel a certain way because an emotion is an effect that follows
necessarily from external causes. rational beings, however, have the ability to overcome these
physically determined responses and to freely choose how to act, an ability that animals lack. since
they are governed by the laws of causality, animals do not differ from plants in any metaphysical
sense. this is why i restrict my claim of humane treatment to prevent suffering because this is
something that animals can experience just as much as any rational being can. i should also note
that this consideration about the determinism of animals is not a moral argument there is no
ought claim made because it is based on a posteriori truths, not the priori truths which are
necessary for any moral argument. this is rather a metaphysical consideration that should be taken
into account when building such a moral argument

regarding your claim about mentally disabled human beings, there are indeed some, such as peter
singer, who would agree and say that we have to bite the bullet on the issue by revoking their
personhood. im sure youll be glad to hear that im not one of these people. singer, i believe,
mistakes rationality for a sense of self. while linked, the two concepts can exist independently of
each other. it is a sense of self that gives one personhood, meaning that one can indeed be a
person while lacking rationality. on this count, i reject your claim regarding what ratiocentrism
would require of us with respect to mental disability. id also revise my denition of ratiocentrism to
include the concept of personhood so that it extends to include respect for both the concepts of
rationality (and free choice) and personhood. coming back to the case of animals, id claim that
animals have neither rationality nor self-awareness (excluding them from being persons) as
evidenced by experiments testing various apes abilities to put themselves in others shoes. this,
again, leads to the conclusions and considerations elucidated above

regarding your last claim, that the use and consumption of animal products requires alack of
respect for life, human health, and the environment, i think ive shown this not to be the case
because there are no moral implications of the use or consumption of animal products that lead us
to this. however, i would now call on you to distance yourself from viviocentrism the position that
life has inherent worth. i am a self-confessed nihilist and so reject the practical possibility of ever
determining a mind-independent standard of moral conduct and consideration. the emphasis on life
is, i believe, just as traditional and unfounded as we both agree the use of meat products is. there
is nothing inherently morally good in the concept of life, health, and environmentalism. they may
produce contingently good and useful effects as regards our own ends, but there is nothing at all in
the very meaning of these terms that leads us to the concept of moral worth. again, this is not to
say that i advocate death or the destruction of the environment, just that choosing to preserve life
or the environment is an arbitrary choice, a choice just as arbitrary as choosing death

on a last note, i think i should also point out that i was a vegetarian until about late september (and
still would be if the vegetarian options in my university halls were at all edible), but i chose to
become a vegetarian entirely arbitrarily.i have the utmost respect for your being vegan.i hope you
dont mind such a long response; i thought you deserved something more than just a little bit of
thought. thank you for presenting such an interesting topic to engage with

Firstly, your argument that humans are the only self aware beings on the earth is simply
misinformed and incorrect. Numerous studies have shown that animals such as dolphins
and certain types of nonhuman primates are in fact self aware. I must hold strongly in
disagreement that there is nothing morally wrong with the use and consumption of animal
products and this is because there is no logical justication for murdering a sentient being
out of pure selsh desire and greed. All living beings have something in common, and that
is a desire to survive. Just because humans are what you call "rational" does not mean that
their desire to survive is greater, nor that they have more of a right to survive, nor that their
survival is more meaningful in a universal sense. Regarding your idea that there is nothing
morally good in the ideas of life, environmentalism and health - this is I'm afraid quite an
existential standpoint which although I can observe and possibly respect for the sake of a
logical argument, what it comes down to is the kind of world in which the general
population would enjoy living in, and I can say with a comfortable amount of condence
that this includes non-violence, a value of life, and peace. To value life is not an arbitrary
decision but something that has existed in humanity since our very beginning, something
that continues to be explored through means of religion etc. If the value of life was a
completely arbitrary decision with absolutely no meaning behind it, our world would look
very different today. I don't know a single person who would like to live in a world where
one could justiably kill another person or being out of pure dislike for them, for example,
which would in fact be justiable if the value of life was arbitrary. If you are indeed an
existentialist then there is quite little I can say on this issue, however I will additionally
present an idea which has helped others to understand my viewpoint. I don't know a single
person who would NOT object morally, emotionally etc. to watching me murder a cow/pig/
chicken in front of them (after being tortured or not) dismember their body and prepare for
means of food. If everyone, if YOU had to watch where your food came from from start to
nish, or if you had to be a part of it, would you?

if there are other sentient creatures on earth, such as dolphins and other primates, as you claim,
then the validity of my previous argument remains unaffected because this only affects what the
argument applies to a contingent and empirical fact and not its structure or soundness. if they
are indeed sentient, then they should be afforded a higher degree of respect and autonomy than
other animals who entirely lack sentience. however, i must confess that i nd this claim hard to
believe, especially the claim that they share a degree of sentience on a par with humanity.
nonetheless, i wont argue the point and take your word on it: if dolphins and some other primates
possess a degree of self-awareness, then they should be given an appropriate and relative degree
of respect

you are also correct in saying that it is impermissible to kill another sentient being (an act that
indeed would be classied as murder) because it disrespects their inherent dignity as beings
partaking in rationality. i mean this in a kantian sense: since we subjectively view ourselves as
ends worthy of respect (a necessary logical entailment of the possession of rationality), every other
rational being must view themselves the same way, thereby turning this subjective principle into an
objective principle that applies to all and only rational entities, thus qualifying it for inclusion into a
schema of moral commands. nevertheless, this is only a further consequent of the conditional
statement above and only applies to beings insofar as they partake in rationality (or, for the sake of
argument, sentience), meaning that if they did not do so (as cows, sheep, horses, dogs, cats, etc.
do not), then they are not subject to the principle above and can justiably be used as means to
our own ends in the same way that trees and hammers can. please refer to my previous response
for further details. as above, your point only refers to my arguments applicability and not to its
validity

you would also be correct in saying that all life has an instinctual drive to survival, a basic product
of evolutionary development and gene propagation. but this still falls victim to the is / ought fallacy i
gave an exposition of in my previous response one cannot proceed from a claim with is as the
copula to one with ought as the copula because the latter does not deductively follow and is not
entailed by the former. your claim is a fact (a fact i do not contest), but this means that it is merely
descriptive, a point from which it is impossible to bridge the gap to prescriptive claims. youre right:
everything has a desire to life, but you cannot go on to claim from there that anything at all
humanity included has an inherent right to life (merely in virtue of their ability to live) since rights
imply moral deontology and morality, as ever, requires ought claims. again, youre right, human
existence is no more meaningful in a universal sense because existence is all equally void. you fall
into the tradition of viviocentrism again, assigning inherent worth to life in opposition to death, when
actually neither are worth anything independent of human judgment; the world is not good and it is
not bad, it is indifferent and silent

again, ill agree with you in saying that valuing life, peace etc. leads to higher standards of living
and a status quo that more or less everyone would prefer to anything else. but we now nd
ourselves extending into pragmatism, a philosophy and methodology i openly reject on the grounds
that it does not pay truth its due respect. my contention is that while peace and nonviolence make
society function more effectively and would satisfy the majority of people, this is, yet again, a
merely contingent fact regarding the accidental structuring of reality. it is conceivable for there to be
a possible world where human nature is so structured that it craves violence (assuming that we,
contentiously, do notcurrently possess such an attitude) in which case your point would not apply.
as i said in my previous response, it is a necessary condition of all moral claims that they be
universal because universal applicability is the form of law (the respect mentioned above being its
content)

the value of life (or, more generally, existence) is indeed arbitrary from an objective standpoint
because it is only through our subjective participation in existence that we assign it its value. in a
world without any standard against which value can be judged, that is, in a silent world without god,
everything is equally worthless because there simply is no absolute yardstick against which worth
can be gauged. the valuing of life over death is arbitrary in this light because its justication would
not be based on anything axiomatic and incontrovertible, but rather on our own perception as nite
human beings of the moral worth of things, tainted by our inclinations, hopes, and fears, duly
applying subjective value to life and misconstruing it as objective. such an assignment of worth
from the standpoint of our participation in existence is not rational because it is based on our
contingent humanity, not on our universal rationality. only the latter can represent laws to itself as
principles of action because that is what it means to act rationally. this is why i claim that
ratiocentrism is not arbitrary (while anthropocentrism and viviocentrism are): because rationality is
the sole faculty which can tap (or at least attempt to tap) into universal objectivity, not humanness
and not existence, as is required for any kind of truly moral claim

i am not, as you seem to imply, claiming that we can justiably kill another rational being simply
from inclination. rstly, a personal desire to do so is no justication whatsoever because
justication requires that the reasoning be applicable in every similar situation. furthermore, such a
desire is also arbitrary. the thing that people tend to forget in the claim that life and death are
equally worthless is that it is not an attempt to destroy lifes worth to such a point that it is less
valuable than death, but that it is an attempt to show that both lead to exactly the same evaluation.
being arbitrary, there is no reason to choose death over life (in the same way that there is no
reason to choose life over death). however, the issue gets interesting when consciousness is
conjoined to the topic of existence as in the case of any rational being. while mere existence is
arbitrary, consciousness (or rationality) is not because any infringement upon it is a violation of the
dignity it deserves (with my justication for this the same as for the content of moral law above).
this leads us to the same conclusion: that rational nature must be viewed as an end in itself and
thereby prohibiting any form of infringement that is not consented to. but, of course, this does not
apply to non-rational beings such as animals, meaning that they can be used merely as means
your last point is, unfortunately, the furthest removed from any kind of moral claim. youre correct in
saying that the preparation of food would probably turn most peoples stomachs, but this is nothing
more than an emotional response. disgust usually leads to condemnation and it is a fallacy to
confuse this feeling for anything objectively moral. emotional responses (be it the horror of torture
or the appraisal of charity) are nothing more than just that they are descriptions of states of
affairs and cannot lead to prescriptive claims about how things should be. while it may be more
comforting, this is no gauge by which we can judge the moral worth of things (indeed, many things
are morally valuable even though they are uncomfortable)

i would, lastly, like to make perfectly clear what my core claim is. i am not trying to advocate the
consumption of meat or to say that veganism is morally wrong, but i am rather trying to say that the
consumption of animal products is not morally wrong because it does not meet the criteria to be
judged against any objective standard of morality (which, as i have said, can only apply to rational
beings). i maintain that animals deserve freedom from suffering because that equates to the
punishment of an innocent, but this is a separate, almost theological, claim. all in all, i am trying to
say that veganism, and generally what one decides to eat, is a matter of personal preference, not a
matter for morality to wade in on

I am relinquishing any effort to continue this discussion because you have resorted to
adapting total and complete existentialism as a base for every one of your arguments for
the "lack of" immorality of the consumption of animal products. At the end of the day all
you must ask yourself is whether or not your choices affect the lives of others and whether
or not those choices come from a place of compassion or not. If you choose to take
advantage of other beings who are what you consider to be less rational than yourself, that
is merely a reection on you, your beliefs and the type of world in which you want to live in.
But I will not remove all emotion from this topic as it is an emotional one. And I nd your
choice extraordinarily sad, disappointing, violent and horric.

i do take existentialism to be the basis of the majority of my moral arguments because it cuts to the
core of our place in an indifferent world as beings able to comprehend it. rationality includes the
ability to represent abstractions from that particular contingent environment and extend it upwards
to universality. universal applicability is the most important necessary condition for any moral claim
and any proposition that fails to meet such a condition cannot be classed as moral. compassion,
while signicant in forming a morally good volition, cannot be the starting point of any moral
system because it is a human issue, a particular contingent combination of affairs that is merely a
description of certain states of mind and inclinations. while it may indeed facilitate acting in
accordance with moral law, it does not facilitate acting purely out of respect for the moral law. the
highest form of morality combines acting from duty with a sincere desire to do so which would
include compassion in all probability but the former of these considerations must appear rst
since any other option takes a human inclination to be moralitys basis, something possible but not
necessary. it thus does not necessarily bind our wills as entities able to grasp the universal
applicability of the moral law and is therefore a secondary consideration

the type of world i want to live in is one in which the truth is the highest authority. while being
emotionally satised with its circumstances is something to strive for, i reject the claim that it should
be the be all and end all. morality is not an emotional topic because morality asymptotically
approaches universal truth while emotion linearly describes our relationship with the particular and
contingent state of affairs of the world. i refuse to take the world simply as it is. instead, i strive for
how it could be with a possible objective and universal moral truth as the blueprint, abstracted from
the human perspective of it. if you nd my opinion repulsive, you are entitled to that. but you cannot
press moral disapprobation against me merely with thatbecause any emotional response to the
issue is particular to your constitution as a human being, not as a rational being appealing to
universality and capable of reecting on your own representation of law which is, of course, the rst
grounds of any moral claim. nevertheless, thank you for your time and for participating in such an
enjoyable discussion. i really do appreciate it