neuralnerd

Swatting a mosquito generally doesn’t induce suffering, if it’s done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won’t suffer from the loss.

This is like saying it is okay to kill a lonely person with no friends and family, as long as it is an instant death.

No, it is more like saying it doesn’t cause suffering, which is true. Whether it’s ok or not is another matter, but some could argue can be.

I don’t agree with you that suffering is the single center concept to base your moral judgement on these issues. Not all living things that i care about are able to suffer, and I do not care about all living things that do suffer.

I didn’t say suffering is the single center concept to base moral judgment on, although some moral philosophers argue it is (negative utilitarians). But suffering is the main problem with speciesism: we accept much more suffering on non-human animals than we do on on humans, for no good reason.

If you care about things that cannot suffer, then you do not care for their well being, since they can’t experience well being. It may be a semantic problem here, because I thought caring was about the other’s well being.

Anyway what you do care about is not really relevant unless you consider we should just follow our instinctive morality. What I was discussing is what we should care about.

I do not care that i cause a mosquito suffering by killing it (wounding it), if it is sucking my blood, or even just being annoying when flying around me, because I value my comfort above its existence (and suffering). I expect you do the same? This is speciesism.

No, I would avoid causing suffering to the mosquito (for example by moving it our of the room or protecting myself). And if killing it is the only practical way to make it stop being an unacceptable annoyance I would still try to minimize its suffering. It’s not speciesism because I would apply the same logic if it was a human or any other species.

That’s like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don’t look like them: racism.

Except we both agree that racism is wrong. We do not both agree that speciesism is wrong.

And yet speciesism is very similar to racism. It’s the same mechanism. Racism is a discrimination on irrelevant characteristics like skin color, and speciesism is a discrimination on irrelevant characteristics like cognitive ability, cuteness, ability to talk, etc.

In both cases these characteristics are irrelevant when we try to decide whether we can cause suffering to these beings. The only relevant characteristic is whether they can suffer.

But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of “some level of sentience”, I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?

Swatting a mosquito generally doesn’t induce suffering, if it’s done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won’t suffer from the loss.

But yes, if an animal is probably sentient you should avoid inflicting pain to it, for the same reason you should avoid inflicting pain to humans: because they can suffer.

But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word “harm”, the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.

Indeed, but going against natural interests or not is not the point. The point is about suffering. And more specifically the fact that the amount of suffering we inflict to animals to eat their meat would be inacceptable if it was done to humans.

If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans. Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.

Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.

That’s like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don’t look like them: racism.

So in your ethical theory, harm doesn’t matter at all?

You seem to follow some kind of deontology. There’s no obligation in your system to not cause unnecessary harm? I guess you have some obligation not to hurt your dog even if you like doing that. Isn’t that obligation related to the fact the dog would be harmed if you did?

Maybe it’s just a difference between consequentialism and deontologism, but I was convinced deontologists generally had some rules that prevent unnecessary harm. They don’t?

There’s at least Tom Regan who was a deontologist (at least in his book The Case for Animal Rights) and talks about harm:

In Regan’s view, not to be used as a means entails the right to be treated with respect, which includes the right not to be harmed.

deontological ethics are explicitly not about that.

I guess it depends on the philosopher, but at least one includes “doing no harm” in the obligations[1]:

Ross [20] modified Kant’s deontology, allowing a plurality of duty-based ethical principles, such as doing no harm, promise keeping, etc.

can you name an ethical system that does concern itself with that?

Probably all consequentialism and at least utilitarianism (harm decreases the global well being). Negative consequentialism is more specifically focused on reducing suffering/harm.

what creates a duty to NOT HARM something?

About all ethics is about reducing harm. If you don’t know that harming is bad I don’t think we can have a discussion.

you can’t prove plants aren’t sentient.

And you can’t prove something is sentient. But scientists have criteria that help determine whether a species is sentient. See this review for example.

even if you could, why should sentience matter?

I already answered. If something can’t be harmed there no need to prevent harming it.

what ethical system even accounts for sentience as a factor of right behavior?

About all animal welfare:

Respect for animal welfare is often based on the belief that nonhuman animals are sentient and that consideration should be given to their well-being or suffering, especially when they are under the care of humans.[4]

The question was “why is eating meat bad?”, my answer is something like “because to have meat you must harm animals”, and someone answered that “we always harm something when we eat” and my answer is “no, there are foods that you can’t harm because they are not sentient”.

Because if something is not sentient it cannot have negative experiences, so it can’t be harmed.

The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this?

It does have a concrete meaning. Scientific papers usually define what they are studying. For example the Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans has a definition. It also has criteria to evaluate it.

Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.

Having reactions to external stimulus is different from having feelings. Feelings require consciousness, or sentience.

Even having nociceptors doesn’t mean you can experience pain (see the above review in the “Defining sentience” section).

If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition

This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.

Yes you can be harmed without knowing it, but it still must have a negative effect on you. If something can’t have negative (or positive) experience then how can you say it’s being harmed?

If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed. Being sentient is having this ability to experience being harmed. That’s why I meant it’s by definition that non sentient beings can’t be harmed. The word exists to distinguish what can and cannot experience harm (among other feelings).

There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species

And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence.

But having food doesn’t necessarily mean harming something. And even if it does, different foods have different level of harm. We can choose the foods that minimize harm.

If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.

Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.

In your example the “bad weather” means “bad for me/us” (a farmer would probably disagree, for example, as would some animals). Indeed morality is about what’s “bad to others” or to everyone. But since OP didn’t specify to whom, I considered it meant “bad in general”, for the one eating and for the others.

OP included “Ethical reason for consuming animals” in the accepted answer, so answering about morality doesn’t seem wrong.

It’s not about “all life” but about “all sentient life”. Only beings that are able have pleasant and unpleasant experience should be considered. If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition.

Sentience is studied scientifically. It cannot be stated with absolute certainty but scientists have good sets of criteria and experiences that helps identify it. With the current knowledge it’s almost certain that all mammals are sentient, like us. Fishes and birds are also very likely to be sentient. Some species of insects are probably sentient while others may not be. And plants are likely not sentient.

But even if all living things are sentient, it doesn’t change very much. Speciesism means treating beings differently only because they belong to some specific species. There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species (and studying sentience helps identifying these interests). It’s very likely that we do less harm by growing plants than by breeding animals. And even if it was the same amount of suffering we would still do less harm by avoiding eating animals because breeding them to eat them actually requires more plants than just eating plants. We should seek to minimise suffering and avoiding eating animal is a good way to do that.

It is indeed about morality. Morality is about what is “good” and “bad”, so it’s perfectly in line with OP’s question “why is the consumption of meat considered bad”.

Religions have arbitrary morality so it doesn’t seem very interesting to discuss why these religions allow or forbid to eat their specific set of animals, unless you’re studying these religions.

Moral philosophy on the contrary tries to study morality with real arguments. In almost all cases they agree it’s bad to harm others while it’s not necessary. Even with our intuitive morality most people would agree with that. And in most cases eating animals products contributes to harming them and is not necessary. It was not necessarily the case in the past, but today it is. So eating animal products nowadays is immoral.

The environmental problems only adds additional harms on top of that by causing harms to even more animals, including humans.

Because it’s speciesism. If we started giving birth to humans to eat them, that would be absolutely outrageous, but to do that to animals seems perfectly fine to most people. Animals have the same desire as we do not to be killed or abused, and to live a happy life.