I'm not arguing that they areexactlyidentical. I'm arguing that they arefunctionally equivalent.Do you understand the difference there?
Yes, I understand the difference. While they perform the similar functions, the mechanic of that function and its impact on the given subject are vastly different. You are wilfully reducing the argument to ignore factors like the animal's psyche and the human psyche.
Again, apples and oranges.
No, Apples and Sheep, and that is the point. What you see as quivalent is simply not equivalent. Similar? Yes. The same? No.
Pete, here's a question: When you see humans abused, can you identify "cruel?" Why should we not have sweatshops and stuff? They are very efficient!
It's really all grey area. I refuse to just see animals as tools and ignore their similarities in biology and cognition to humans. I refuse to see them as the same as a bacteria.
So that said, should we not engineer meat animals that are incapable of experiencing pain or discomfort?
I consider breeding something to be stupid. So that we don't feel bad about killing it to be worse then death. I'd much rather eat something that knows to fear me. Besides. Cows are already pretty stupid.
I don't see how vat grown meat would ever be economically practical. It's going to cost a lot more to make even a small amount of comparable product. Start up costs are going to be huge, and I only see this filling a niche market. Besides. Has anyone ever considered what they use for raw materials to make vat meat? Soylent Green anyone???
I think we should change what we eat. Especially when it comes to see food. More trout/tilapia/catfish and less salmon and tuna. They breed better in captivity and have a higher food/weight ratio thinggy that I can't remember right now.
I agree, but the mechanical difference is immaterial to my argument.
its impact on the given subject
This is where I disagree. The impact is effectively the same. They accomplish the same biological function and have the same end goal: a response to injury or threat. The mechanics vary, yes, but again, that's immaterial.
animal's psyche
As per my above argument, you cannot truly claim to know an animal's psyche. Your perception of an animal's emotional state is an extrapolation that you make based on your observations of its behavior, and your unconscious attempt to fit that behavior to its human equivalent. This is a messy process that often doesn't work, but we think it does because that's the only way we can understand things.
The only reason you can't get at the plant's psyche is because they don't produce immediately observable external responses. They still respond, the just do it differently than a dog does. The mechanical differences between plants and dogs lead us to think that plants are non-sentient, but when you brush aside your external perceptions and drill down into what is actually happening, you'll find a lot of similarity.
It's like killing a lobster by cutting its head in half. A lot of people are squeamish about that because the lobster continues to move after you've cleaved its head in twain. Your observation of its behavior leads you to believe that it is suffering intensely. Thus, most people kill a lobster by plunging it into boiling water. It stops moving after about a minute or so, so people think it's less cruel. However, when you look at what is actually happening, the knife to the head kills the lobster instantly, and the extended movement is an artifact of the quick kill. When you plunge a live lobster into boiling water, it takes the full minute to die. The banging on the pot is the lobster trying to escape the hot water. This is another example of our external observations leading us to draw an erroneous conclusion. There are countless other examples - Terri Schiavo, Sigfried and Roy's white tiger, etc - but they just reinforce the same point.
Essentially, if you want to talk about what is actual cruelty to animals, you have to ignore your interpretations of their psychological state, because your interpretation is faulty and more likely to be incorrect than you interpretation of a human's psychological state.
I am not talking about "my" interpretation, I am discussing what has been studied and observed by animal and human psychologists alike. While both plant systems and animal systems perform a similar function, they do so with very different means. You are ignoring the means and only looking at the ends. The reason we aren't discussing plant psyche is because THEY DON'T HAVE BRAINS. WTF, Pete? By following your argument to its logical conclusion, killing humans for food - if safe to the consumer and standardized like most meat raising and processing - is perfectly fine. The pain function in humans is similar or the same as animals. Why not eat people? EDIT: I think there are valid arguments for eating meat, I just think your argument ignores very glaring differences between plants and animals and that lack of distinction seems like statements from a sociopath.
By following your argument to its logical conclusion, killing humans for food - if safe to the consumer and standardized like most meat raising and processing - is perfectly fine. The pain funtion in humans is similar or the same as animals. Why not eat people?
Eating other people involves a far, far greater risk of disease, that's why.
By following your argument to its logical conclusion, killing humans for food - if safe to the consumer and standardized like most meat raising and processing - is perfectly fine. The pain funtion in humans is similar or the same as animals. Why not eat people?
Eating other people involves a far, far greater risk of disease, that's why.
You are ignoring the means and only looking at the ends.
Yes, because the means are unimportant. If you really want to argue the means, you need to start discussing the specific mechanical differences between the animal and human nervous systems. We perceive differently than cows, process differently than cows, and feel differently than cows. Why is it OK to equivocate cow psyche and human psyche, but not cow psyche and tree psyche?
The reason we aren't discussing plant psyche is because THEY DON'T HAVE BRAINS. WTF, Pete?
Again, you're missing my point. Sure plants don't have brains, but they have systems that accomplish the same functions. The brain is just the hub of a complex series of biochemical responses. That's it. Plants have a complex chain of hormone responses that allow them to respond to their environment. They have things that fulfill the same function as the mammalian brain.
My point here is that the presence of a brain doesn't make an organism particularly special. It carries certain implications for the mechanics of its responses to the environment, but that's it. Everything we perceive as "consciousness" or "psyche" are just biochemical responses. That's it. Nothing else. Plants do the same thing, so I conclude that they must have something which fulfills the same function as a human's "psyche." Unless you think there's something to humans beyond their biology, the complex system of biochemicals that produces everything I'm typing right now is no more or less special than the complex series of biochemicals that results in a tree closing the stomata of its leaves in order to prevent a pathogen from invading.
Yes, I'm ignoring animal psychology because the field is fundamentally flawed. Everything is based on external observations of animal behavior, which results in flawed conclusion, and it is based on the assumption that we can map animal behavior to human emotion. We can't. The brains are different, the responses are different, the mechanisms are different, so the behavior must also be different. It makes just as much sense to study plant psychology.
Again, I never made the point that plants, animals, and humans have the same mechanisms of sentience. That's ludicrous. What I am saying is that our perceptions of animal sentience, of suffering, of intelligence, and of emotion, are necessarily flawed and make a poor basis for drawing conclusions. We've the same amount and types of evidence pointing to plant sentience, and yet the idea is considered laughable. Why?
To arbitrarily say that, for example, tail docking is a cruel and barbaric practice, but to not recognize that you're performing the same "cruelty" on other organisms and are OK with it, is going to be very limiting.
I'm not saying we should cage up 20,000 chickens and hold them immobile for their entire lives, because it does seem cruel to me. However, that perception of cruelty is faulty. I know it's faulty. What I am
Pete, here's a question: When you see humans abused, can you identify "cruel?" Why should we not have sweatshops and stuff? They are very efficient!
No, I can't always identify "cruel" in humans. I can always identify obvious cruelty, like concentration camps and so forth, but there are other people who voluntarily engage in behaviors that most would find abhorrent or cruel. That's an instance where your perception of behavior would lead to an erroneous conclusion.
We can't always get it right in people. How could we get it right in an organism that functions in a radically different way?
I'm all for vat-grown meat, by the way. We should get on that ASAP and put an end to all of these arguments.
Eating other people involves a far, far greater risk of disease, that's why.
Not really. You can eat a placenta without a problem. I don't see why more people don't partake. First, it's good for you like "Super Food" good. Second, nothing died making it. In fact, SOMETHING LIVED! It's like double karma Tuesdays all over again!
Eating other people involves a far, far greater risk of disease, that's why.
Not really. You can eat a placenta without a problem. I don't see why more people don't partake. First, it's good for you like "Super Food" good. Second, nothing died making it. In fact, SOMETHING LIVED! It's like double karma Tuesdays all over again!
Indeed, not partaking in placentophagy is an obvious waste.
I don't see how vat grown meat would ever be economically practical. It's going to cost a lot more to make even a small amount of comparable product. Start up costs are going to be huge, and I only see this filling a niche market. Besides. Has anyone ever considered what they use for raw materials to make vat meat?
These are concerns of all new technology that are eventually mitigated by technological progress. Electrochemically-created nutrients using solar or nuclear power will almost definitely be more efficient and less impactful than all current methods.
Soylent Green anyone???
You do realize that "Soylent Green" was not, in fact, people, right?
This is actually fairly simple.
Pete is 100% correct on all accounts.
However
Pete is stopping prior to the most important part of all this, and thus making them effectively useless.
There is no meaningful difference between bacteria and sunflowers and people and crystals and viruses and prions and stars and planets and galaxies. That's because, simply put, there is no meaning to anything but what we choose to assign to things. The facts are the facts. Replicators replicate themselves within a closed system. I choose to personally decide that causing what I label as pain or suffering to certain lifeforms that I personally choose to view as "higher" functioning forms of life is wrong. That's the meaning I assign to the facts presented before me. Love and life and joy and pain and suffering are all meaningful solely because we exist and assign meaning. We mean something because we mean something to ourselves: there's no external force of meaning.
I value joy over pain, peace over suffering. This may be a largely biological imperative, but I at least have the perception that it is something over which I have conscious control. I made my own meaning.
It is both 100% correct and 100% wrong to say that plant pain is no different from animal pain.
Pete, I get your point, but you don't seem to get mine. I am not equating human psyche with a cow's psyche, but there are valid studies of animal psychology that exist. The fact that you don't see them as valid because they are based on outside observation is both incorrect (they are also based on neuromapping, hormone tests, etc.) and means that any observed data in any field is completely worthless, which it certainly isn't. We can easily and verifiably see (on neuromapping, by varying level of hormones, and based on behavior) that many animals experience pain AND that that pain (in many cases) is very similar to how the human animal feels and reacts to pain. The fact that the functions of plants and animals work in vastly different ways make them VASTLY DIFFERENT. You keep saying that they perform the same function, but that doesn't MAKE THEM THE SAME.
On one level all life is similar, but to ignore complexity and obvious (and verified) differences, is just reductionist to the point of being functionally useless.
By following your argument to its logical conclusion, killing humans for food - if safe to the consumer and standardized like most meat raising and processing - is perfectly fine. The pain function in humans is similar or the same as animals. Why not eat people?
Because you should never ever ever ever eat meat from an apex predator. It is a really bad idea. You know about how Peregrine Hawks were going extinct because of DDT? It turned out that the DDT was being sprayed on the crops, which was being eaten by the mice, which were being eaten by the hawks. Now imagine someone ate a Peregrine Hawk, those toxins would then be passed to that person. Humans are not disimilar to hawks in this respect. If you eat human meat you are gonna get hella food poisoning, and that's why you don't eat humans.
By following your argument to its logical conclusion, killing humans for food - if safe to the consumer and standardized like most meat raising and processing - is perfectly fine. The pain function in humans is similar or the same as animals. Why not eat people?
Because you should never ever ever ever eat meat from an apex predator. It is a really bad idea. You know about how Peregrine Hawks were going extinct because of DDT? It turned out that the DDT was being sprayed on the crops, which was being eaten by the mice, which were being eaten by the hawks. Now imagine someone ate a Peregrine Hawk, those toxins would then be passed to that person. Humans are not disimilar to hawks in this respect. If you eat human meat you are gonna get hella food poisoning, and that's why you don't eat humans.
Again, with the caveate that it was safe to the consumer. Do you people not read?
Again, with the caveate that it was safe to the consumer.Do you people not read?
Without explicitly raising people to be eaten, human meat will never be safe to the consumer. EDIT: However, if people were explicitly raised to be eaten, then there are no objections. DOUBLE EDIT: My edit was Ninja'd
Pete is stopping prior to the most important part of all this, and thus making them effectively useless.
Well, I stopped because I wanted to get people on board with my argument progressively. I break things down into steps like that, and complete each step before moving on to the next one. Yes, the rest of the argument is exactly what you said, though I alluded to that earlier:
It's completely practical. In fact, my argument is fully rooted in practicality. My whole point in all of this is that we need to consider how it is we define "cruelty" with regard to animals.
Because this is an inherently unknowable area, I argue that we need to get over many of our preconceived notions of what constitutes "cruelty" and realize that in order to feed the massive population we have, we might have to do some ugly stuff. Yes, we should try to minimize it, because I'm not a sociopath and recognize that things feel pain, but at the same time, I value human life several orders of magnitude more than I value animal life.
I would rather see 20,000 chickens raised in inhumane conditions in order to feed humans than have food be less plentiful for humans because it makes some people feel better. Humans come first in my book. I think the people who place undue emphasis on the humane raising of animals are the real sociopaths. Humans are humans, animals are animals.
If a family has to eat their dog in order to survive, I have no problem with that. It's not good that it has to come to such drastic measures, but it's not cruel.
I have a few problems with cannibalism, other than the safety issue, but if it's the only option available, I think it's a necessary evil. I don't like it, but I don't find it abhorrent. Survival trumps my squick factor.
EDIT: Raising humans to feed humans is a bad idea. Humans are really really inefficient as a food source, compared to the amount of effort they require to raise. Further, it breaks down the pack mentality when pack members start eating others of their own kind, and you wind up breaking down a lot of necessary social constructs. Also, raising people in pens is impossibly cruel and abhorrent. I don't really care too much about a cow's well-being, but if you raise a baby in a pen, you're a monster.
Mostly. Also, while I argue about the nature of intelligent thought and so forth, I do so largely as an academic exercise. Humans have limitless potential. A cow is helpless unless tended to daily. Ergo, the potential present in a single human is far more valuable to society as a whole than the life of any single animal. Hell, even a pack of animals. If push came to shove, I would slaughter a herd of cows to ensure that a single family could survive.
Well, I stopped because I wanted to get people on board with my argument progressively. I break things down into steps like that, and complete each step before moving on to the next one. Yes, the rest of the argument is exactly what you said, though I alluded to that earlier:
Your strategy, however, causes an initial rejection of the premise as abhorrent. What you've done would achieve the opposite effect: the "Oh shit, he's right!" gnosis moment when you complete your argument. It's the "one-two punch."
Your slippery-slope-to-acceptance-of-the-abhorrent path would only work if you started with part two and worked back toward part one from it.
Humans have limitless potential. A cow is helpless unless tended to daily.
Indeed - we made them that way. In any case, how do you measure this "potential"?
Arguments about intelligence and suffering are merely attempts to rationalize the inherently irrational way in which we differentiate between different living beings. The truth of the matter is that, in the end, it comes down to empathy and self-preservation. The problem is that not all human beings experience these in the same way. How do we make a decision based on such factors if they are not even consistent?
Your strategy, however, causes an initial rejection of the premise as abhorrent. What you've done would achieve the opposite effect: the "Oh shit, he's right!" gnosis moment when you complete your argument. It's the "one-two punch."
Your slippery-slope-to-acceptance-of-the-abhorrent path would only work if you started with part two and worked back toward part one from it.
I'm too used to arguing with other scientists. We tend to start down at the base and work our way up. Though I also don't think that accepting my initial argument necessitates acceptance of the abhorrent. How abhorrent is it to say "OK, you're technically right about the plant thing, but so what?"
In any case, how do you measure this "potential"?
Oh, there's no metric for that at all. It's an entirely subjective judgment. I would argue that the animals in a pack are more important than other animals, but that's a really low-level argument that misses the point that I'm making.
I measure the potential of humans historically. We appear to have advanced dramatically in a relatively short span of time, all through our own abilities. One could argue what constitutes true "advancement," but I would say that a dramatically increased lifespan and overall improvements in health of all kinds and the ability to acquire resources would constitute societal advancement. It's a good thing.
Sharks, on the other hand, have been the same for 200 million years. A human carries more potential than a shark. Yes, there are technical flaws in that line of reasoning, but kowtowing to those flaws is impractical.
How do we make a decision based on such factors if they are not even consistent?
We make the most pragmatic and rational decision we can with the information we have available, and prepare ourselves to amend that decision in the face of new evidence or when the situation necessitates it. My argument, and I believe the argument that most people would support, is to do the most good for the most people while doing the least harm to the environment. Everything else needs to be argued individually.
So, we probably shouldn't cage 20,000 chickens and hold them immobile for their entire lives, because that's unnecessary cruelty. However, we have to be ready accept a certain level of that which we don't like in order to facilitate the lives of others, a bit like everybody taking a pay cut to ensure that nobody gets fired.
So, industrialized farming is a net positive thing, so long as we aren't unnecessarily cruel about it. There are already numerous statutes in place regarding animal welfare; what we really need to do is enforce extant standards and heavily penalize those who violate those standards.
Your strategy, however, causes an initial rejection of the premise as abhorrent. What you've done would achieve the opposite effect: the "Oh shit, he's right!" gnosis moment when you complete your argument. It's the "one-two punch."
Your slippery-slope-to-acceptance-of-the-abhorrent path would only work if you started with part two and worked back toward part one from it.
I'm too used to arguing with other scientists. We tend to start down at the base and work our way up. Though I also don't think that accepting my initial argument necessitates acceptance of the abhorrent. How abhorrent is it to say "OK, you're technically right about the plant thing, but so what?"
Because, as I said before, following that argument's logic one must essentially conclude that it can be applied to human life. Moreover, it is so reductionist or as Emi put it "zoomed out" that all detail is lost. You also sweepingly state that it is impossible to determine how pain and suffering functions within animals, which - I am sorry - is simply phooey.
following that argument's logic one must essentially conclude that it can be applied to human life
Well, you don't know where the argument is going at that point, but you have some ideas. So, raise those ideas. You argued well ahead, drew a conclusion, and then dismissed my argument based on that conclusion. You also don't necessarily have to conclude that my argument must be applied to human life. I think about humans differently than I think about animals. I may be breaking down the biological function of pain and demonstrating its existence in other life forms, but that doesn't suddenly mean that I'm advocating treating people the same way we treat carrots.
You also sweepingly state that it is impossible to determine how pain and suffering functions within animals, which - I am sorry - is simply phooey.
I never said that we can't possibly know anything about how pain and suffering work with animals. I only stated that any conclusions we draw about that information are necessarily flawed, because you need to make several assumptions in order to do the analysis. Simply stating that you can even fit animal "emotions" to human emotions is a massive assumption. We only think animals have emotions because it appears that way to us. We need to consider that assumption whenever we look at animal emotions.
Is a dog really capable of "love?" That's a question that has yet to be answered by anyone. Considering the answer to an unanswerable question when making a decision that affects the lives of millions of people is, well, pointless. I'm not advocating that we ignore the question entirely, but undue consideration that hampers our ability to provide for ourselves is counterproductive.
following that argument's logic one must essentially conclude that it can be applied to human life
Well, you don't know where the argument is going at that point, but you have some ideas. So, raise those ideas. You argued well ahead, drew a conclusion, and then dismissed my argument based on that conclusion. You also don't necessarily have to conclude that my argument must be applied to human life. I think about humans differently than I think about animals. I may be breaking down the biological function of pain and demonstrating its existence in other life forms, but that doesn't suddenly mean that I'm advocating treating people the same way we treat carrots.
Pete, I read every word you wrote and responded to each point you raised. I didn't pre-conclude any mroe than you did. You are CHOOSING to look at human life differently. You are also CHOOSING not to differentiate between plants and animals. There are fundemental biological differences between animals and plants (more so than humans and animals). These differences do inform a difference in treatment.
EDIT: How the hell am I to know you had more to your argument? You posted what you posted. I just followed that line of thinking. I took your proposed reasoning and applied it to humans and I asked you to account for it. That is all.
I never said that we can't possibly know anything about how pain and suffering work with animals. I only stated that any conclusions we draw about that information are necessarily flawed, because you need to make several assumptions in order to do the analysis. Simply stating that you can even fit animal "emotions" to human emotions is a massive assumption. We only think animals have emotions because it appears that way to us. We need to consider that assumption whenever we look at animal emotions.
Is a dog really capable of "love?" That's a question that has yet to be answered by anyone. Considering the answer to an unanswerable question when making a decision that affects the lives of millions of people is, well, pointless. I'm not advocating that we ignore the question entirely, but undue consideration that hampers our ability to provide for ourselves is counterproductive.
WOW, way to put words into my mouth. You are assuming that I equate human psyche with animal psyche. I most certainly do not. They are different and they even differentiate between species. Stop assuming that I am equating them WHEN I AM NOT. I only brought the human psyche into the equation because we do empathize with animals and we empathize with them more than we do with plants (in most cases).
These are concerns of all new technology that are eventually mitigated by technological progress. Electrochemically-created nutrients using solar or nuclear power will almost definitely be more efficient and less impactful than all current methods.
Unlikely. You're over estimating technology and underestimating biology. Biology has been around much much longer. It's the "Old Master."
I think we'll all be in flying cars and wears speed suits before Mc Donalds will put this on their Dollar Menu. Development costs aside, I don't think that many people care. Wally Mart sells more hamburger then tofu. If you can manage to make a product that'll sell for 10% less then it's competitor AND have the same quality, maybe you'll get a profit. This doesn't even work right, and it may never work. They have yet to produce anything similar to what I would call meat let alone anything the quality of fillet that we literally kill for. SPAM is still "meat" ,but you don't see it flying off the shelves... Except in Hawaii
All the crap I said aside. I don't know jack about economics; but if this was a good idea, why hasn't someone already invested in this?
You do realize that "Soylent Green" was not, in fact, people, right?
I'm just being a D. Cookie and making a pop culture reference. The non-jerk part: This "meat" still comes from somewhere. You can't make an organic from an inorganic. Flesh only becomes salt in the bible, and they don't even say it can happen in reverse. Ok, yeah they did; but they fixed that. Amino acids don't just magically shows up. Well kind of but anyways. They had to be something before hand.
What biomass or culture starter or organic Slush Puppy do they used to make this "meat?" Bacterial, plant, insect, or other animal??? Or baby?!?!
You are assuming that I equate human psyche with animal psyche.
I don't think I said that explicitly, and if I did it was not intended as such. Those parts of my argument were more directed outward, and I think Emily was making the stronger case for the human/animal psyche connection. My apologies.
My point was that any animal psychology study must try to equate animal psyche and human psyche, which, as I said, is a messy and error-prone effort. We only understand depression because we've identified it as a phenomenon in humans. Trying to say that pigs suffer from "depression" is inherently flawed because it assumes that we can explain pig psyche in human psyche terms. I fundamentally question that assertion and equate it to someone attempting to understand the psychology of radishes. They're equally fruitless endeavors.
You are also CHOOSING not to differentiate between plants and animals.
I never said that they were the same. Of course I distinguish between plants and animals. I've said that they have functionally equivalent mechanisms that appear to be very very different. The point of bringing up plants is to force people to consider their interpretation of animal behavior. Plants are every bit as complex and alive as a lobster, and yet there is a lot of emphasis placed on lobsters, and less on plants. It's not a call to say "plants and animals are the same," but rather a call to ask "Why do we place so much emphasis on this issue?"
I only brought the human psyche into the equation because we do empathize with animals
While I understand why you brought up the human psyche part, I fundamentally question the ability of any human to truly "empathize" with an animal. They have a totally different brain and function in completely different ways. There's no way one can claim true "empathy," and any empathy that is claimed is necessarily one-sided. That's another reason I brought up the plant argument; claiming that we can truly empathize with animals ignores the fact that their brains are as different to us as we are to cabbage.
EDIT: @the artificial food argument: The initial development of the meat has to come from somewhere, but once things get rolling, we can probably just keep culturing from other vat-grown stuff. I think the biggest challenge so far has been conditioning the stuff so it maintains the right texture.
EDIT 2: One last thing.
You are CHOOSING to look at human life differently.
Yes, I am. There are other people who choose to make less of a distinction, or in the case of PETA, virtually no distinction at all, between human life and animal life. My argument is that that conclusion is deeply flawed and based on the assumption that animals have the capacity to feel anything remotely close to what humans feel. It's misplaced empathy that leads to an irrational conclusion. It's OK to believe that, but to make policies based on an irrational conclusion is unconscionable.
How do we make a decision based on such factors if they are not even consistent?
We make the most pragmatic and rational decision we can with the information we have available, and prepare ourselves to amend that decision in the face of new evidence or when the situation necessitates it. My argument, and I believe the argument that most people would support, is to do the most good for the most people while doing the least harm to the environment. Everything else needs to be argued individually.
Comments
Why should we not have sweatshops and stuff? They are very efficient!
It's really all grey area. I refuse to just see animals as tools and ignore their similarities in biology and cognition to humans. I refuse to see them as the same as a bacteria.
I don't see how vat grown meat would ever be economically practical. It's going to cost a lot more to make even a small amount of comparable product. Start up costs are going to be huge, and I only see this filling a niche market. Besides. Has anyone ever considered what they use for raw materials to make vat meat? Soylent Green anyone???
I think we should change what we eat. Especially when it comes to see food. More trout/tilapia/catfish and less salmon and tuna. They breed better in captivity and have a higher food/weight ratio thinggy that I can't remember right now.
The only reason you can't get at the plant's psyche is because they don't produce immediately observable external responses. They still respond, the just do it differently than a dog does. The mechanical differences between plants and dogs lead us to think that plants are non-sentient, but when you brush aside your external perceptions and drill down into what is actually happening, you'll find a lot of similarity.
It's like killing a lobster by cutting its head in half. A lot of people are squeamish about that because the lobster continues to move after you've cleaved its head in twain. Your observation of its behavior leads you to believe that it is suffering intensely. Thus, most people kill a lobster by plunging it into boiling water. It stops moving after about a minute or so, so people think it's less cruel. However, when you look at what is actually happening, the knife to the head kills the lobster instantly, and the extended movement is an artifact of the quick kill. When you plunge a live lobster into boiling water, it takes the full minute to die. The banging on the pot is the lobster trying to escape the hot water. This is another example of our external observations leading us to draw an erroneous conclusion. There are countless other examples - Terri Schiavo, Sigfried and Roy's white tiger, etc - but they just reinforce the same point.
Essentially, if you want to talk about what is actual cruelty to animals, you have to ignore your interpretations of their psychological state, because your interpretation is faulty and more likely to be incorrect than you interpretation of a human's psychological state.
While both plant systems and animal systems perform a similar function, they do so with very different means. You are ignoring the means and only looking at the ends.
The reason we aren't discussing plant psyche is because THEY DON'T HAVE BRAINS. WTF, Pete?
By following your argument to its logical conclusion, killing humans for food - if safe to the consumer and standardized like most meat raising and processing - is perfectly fine. The pain function in humans is similar or the same as animals. Why not eat people?
EDIT: I think there are valid arguments for eating meat, I just think your argument ignores very glaring differences between plants and animals and that lack of distinction seems like statements from a sociopath.
My point here is that the presence of a brain doesn't make an organism particularly special. It carries certain implications for the mechanics of its responses to the environment, but that's it. Everything we perceive as "consciousness" or "psyche" are just biochemical responses. That's it. Nothing else. Plants do the same thing, so I conclude that they must have something which fulfills the same function as a human's "psyche." Unless you think there's something to humans beyond their biology, the complex system of biochemicals that produces everything I'm typing right now is no more or less special than the complex series of biochemicals that results in a tree closing the stomata of its leaves in order to prevent a pathogen from invading.
Yes, I'm ignoring animal psychology because the field is fundamentally flawed. Everything is based on external observations of animal behavior, which results in flawed conclusion, and it is based on the assumption that we can map animal behavior to human emotion. We can't. The brains are different, the responses are different, the mechanisms are different, so the behavior must also be different. It makes just as much sense to study plant psychology.
Again, I never made the point that plants, animals, and humans have the same mechanisms of sentience. That's ludicrous. What I am saying is that our perceptions of animal sentience, of suffering, of intelligence, and of emotion, are necessarily flawed and make a poor basis for drawing conclusions. We've the same amount and types of evidence pointing to plant sentience, and yet the idea is considered laughable. Why?
To arbitrarily say that, for example, tail docking is a cruel and barbaric practice, but to not recognize that you're performing the same "cruelty" on other organisms and are OK with it, is going to be very limiting.
I'm not saying we should cage up 20,000 chickens and hold them immobile for their entire lives, because it does seem cruel to me. However, that perception of cruelty is faulty. I know it's faulty. What I am No, I can't always identify "cruel" in humans. I can always identify obvious cruelty, like concentration camps and so forth, but there are other people who voluntarily engage in behaviors that most would find abhorrent or cruel. That's an instance where your perception of behavior would lead to an erroneous conclusion.
We can't always get it right in people. How could we get it right in an organism that functions in a radically different way?
I'm all for vat-grown meat, by the way. We should get on that ASAP and put an end to all of these arguments.
This is actually fairly simple.
Pete is 100% correct on all accounts.
However
Pete is stopping prior to the most important part of all this, and thus making them effectively useless.
There is no meaningful difference between bacteria and sunflowers and people and crystals and viruses and prions and stars and planets and galaxies. That's because, simply put, there is no meaning to anything but what we choose to assign to things. The facts are the facts. Replicators replicate themselves within a closed system. I choose to personally decide that causing what I label as pain or suffering to certain lifeforms that I personally choose to view as "higher" functioning forms of life is wrong. That's the meaning I assign to the facts presented before me. Love and life and joy and pain and suffering are all meaningful solely because we exist and assign meaning. We mean something because we mean something to ourselves: there's no external force of meaning.
I value joy over pain, peace over suffering. This may be a largely biological imperative, but I at least have the perception that it is something over which I have conscious control. I made my own meaning.
It is both 100% correct and 100% wrong to say that plant pain is no different from animal pain.
The fact that the functions of plants and animals work in vastly different ways make them VASTLY DIFFERENT. You keep saying that they perform the same function, but that doesn't MAKE THEM THE SAME.
On one level all life is similar, but to ignore complexity and obvious (and verified) differences, is just reductionist to the point of being functionally useless.
EDIT: However, if people were explicitly raised to be eaten, then there are no objections.
DOUBLE EDIT: My edit was Ninja'd
I would rather see 20,000 chickens raised in inhumane conditions in order to feed humans than have food be less plentiful for humans because it makes some people feel better. Humans come first in my book. I think the people who place undue emphasis on the humane raising of animals are the real sociopaths. Humans are humans, animals are animals.
If a family has to eat their dog in order to survive, I have no problem with that. It's not good that it has to come to such drastic measures, but it's not cruel.
I have a few problems with cannibalism, other than the safety issue, but if it's the only option available, I think it's a necessary evil. I don't like it, but I don't find it abhorrent. Survival trumps my squick factor.
EDIT: Raising humans to feed humans is a bad idea. Humans are really really inefficient as a food source, compared to the amount of effort they require to raise. Further, it breaks down the pack mentality when pack members start eating others of their own kind, and you wind up breaking down a lot of necessary social constructs. Also, raising people in pens is impossibly cruel and abhorrent. I don't really care too much about a cow's well-being, but if you raise a baby in a pen, you're a monster.
Your slippery-slope-to-acceptance-of-the-abhorrent path would only work if you started with part two and worked back toward part one from it.
Arguments about intelligence and suffering are merely attempts to rationalize the inherently irrational way in which we differentiate between different living beings. The truth of the matter is that, in the end, it comes down to empathy and self-preservation. The problem is that not all human beings experience these in the same way. How do we make a decision based on such factors if they are not even consistent?
I measure the potential of humans historically. We appear to have advanced dramatically in a relatively short span of time, all through our own abilities. One could argue what constitutes true "advancement," but I would say that a dramatically increased lifespan and overall improvements in health of all kinds and the ability to acquire resources would constitute societal advancement. It's a good thing.
Sharks, on the other hand, have been the same for 200 million years. A human carries more potential than a shark. Yes, there are technical flaws in that line of reasoning, but kowtowing to those flaws is impractical. We make the most pragmatic and rational decision we can with the information we have available, and prepare ourselves to amend that decision in the face of new evidence or when the situation necessitates it. My argument, and I believe the argument that most people would support, is to do the most good for the most people while doing the least harm to the environment. Everything else needs to be argued individually.
So, we probably shouldn't cage 20,000 chickens and hold them immobile for their entire lives, because that's unnecessary cruelty. However, we have to be ready accept a certain level of that which we don't like in order to facilitate the lives of others, a bit like everybody taking a pay cut to ensure that nobody gets fired.
So, industrialized farming is a net positive thing, so long as we aren't unnecessarily cruel about it. There are already numerous statutes in place regarding animal welfare; what we really need to do is enforce extant standards and heavily penalize those who violate those standards.
Is a dog really capable of "love?" That's a question that has yet to be answered by anyone. Considering the answer to an unanswerable question when making a decision that affects the lives of millions of people is, well, pointless. I'm not advocating that we ignore the question entirely, but undue consideration that hampers our ability to provide for ourselves is counterproductive.
EDIT: How the hell am I to know you had more to your argument? You posted what you posted. I just followed that line of thinking. I took your proposed reasoning and applied it to humans and I asked you to account for it. That is all. WOW, way to put words into my mouth. You are assuming that I equate human psyche with animal psyche. I most certainly do not. They are different and they even differentiate between species. Stop assuming that I am equating them WHEN I AM NOT. I only brought the human psyche into the equation because we do empathize with animals and we empathize with them more than we do with plants (in most cases).
I think we'll all be in flying cars and wears speed suits before Mc Donalds will put this on their Dollar Menu. Development costs aside, I don't think that many people care. Wally Mart sells more hamburger then tofu. If you can manage to make a product that'll sell for 10% less then it's competitor AND have the same quality, maybe you'll get a profit. This doesn't even work right, and it may never work. They have yet to produce anything similar to what I would call meat let alone anything the quality of fillet that we literally kill for. SPAM is still "meat" ,but you don't see it flying off the shelves... Except in Hawaii
All the crap I said aside. I don't know jack about economics; but if this was a good idea, why hasn't someone already invested in this?
I'm just being a D. Cookie and making a pop culture reference.
The non-jerk part: This "meat" still comes from somewhere. You can't make an organic from an inorganic. Flesh only becomes salt in the bible, and they don't even say it can happen in reverse. Ok, yeah they did; but they fixed that. Amino acids don't just magically shows up. Well kind of but anyways. They had to be something before hand.
What biomass or culture starter or organic Slush Puppy do they used to make this "meat?" Bacterial, plant, insect, or other animal??? Or baby?!?!
My point was that any animal psychology study must try to equate animal psyche and human psyche, which, as I said, is a messy and error-prone effort. We only understand depression because we've identified it as a phenomenon in humans. Trying to say that pigs suffer from "depression" is inherently flawed because it assumes that we can explain pig psyche in human psyche terms. I fundamentally question that assertion and equate it to someone attempting to understand the psychology of radishes. They're equally fruitless endeavors. I never said that they were the same. Of course I distinguish between plants and animals. I've said that they have functionally equivalent mechanisms that appear to be very very different. The point of bringing up plants is to force people to consider their interpretation of animal behavior. Plants are every bit as complex and alive as a lobster, and yet there is a lot of emphasis placed on lobsters, and less on plants. It's not a call to say "plants and animals are the same," but rather a call to ask "Why do we place so much emphasis on this issue?" While I understand why you brought up the human psyche part, I fundamentally question the ability of any human to truly "empathize" with an animal. They have a totally different brain and function in completely different ways. There's no way one can claim true "empathy," and any empathy that is claimed is necessarily one-sided. That's another reason I brought up the plant argument; claiming that we can truly empathize with animals ignores the fact that their brains are as different to us as we are to cabbage.
EDIT: @the artificial food argument: The initial development of the meat has to come from somewhere, but once things get rolling, we can probably just keep culturing from other vat-grown stuff. I think the biggest challenge so far has been conditioning the stuff so it maintains the right texture.
EDIT 2: One last thing. Yes, I am. There are other people who choose to make less of a distinction, or in the case of PETA, virtually no distinction at all, between human life and animal life. My argument is that that conclusion is deeply flawed and based on the assumption that animals have the capacity to feel anything remotely close to what humans feel. It's misplaced empathy that leads to an irrational conclusion. It's OK to believe that, but to make policies based on an irrational conclusion is unconscionable.