Responding to both Farinata and Mike here. The issue, I think, can be divided into 3 parts. 1) Eating meat is immoral, 2) Eating meat violates the rights of animals, and 3) factory farming, as practiced in the US currnetly (and otehr countries) is immoral. In fact, I largely agree with point 3, so let's start with arguments 1 and 2. As I said, when confronted with a Hindu who thinks meat eating is wrong, for example, my reaction is similar to my reaction to a Catholic who thinks masturbation is wrong. In both cases, a good case can be made that teh action carries with it some negative moral baggage. Meat eating because it causes teh destruction of a possibly sentient being, masturbation because it epitomizes selfishness and self-gratification. In both cases, I defer to the guy's superior morality, and I respect his ability to live up to high principle. But I also recognize that such principles are too high for the majority of fallible man to follow, myslef included, and are minor enough points of morlaity that I am comfortable with not satisfying them. I prefer to sin in these minor ways and live a good life otehrwise rather than sin in the mnore major ways. let's look at just how much of a sin meat eating really is.
a) Is it causing the destruction of life? yes, but then so is pest control. We are in a struggle with nature, and with otehr animals, the Darwinian struggle for survival. We can't live without killing SOME things.
b) Does it cause pain and suffreing to a sentient being? Certainly a pig suffers when it bleeds to deathj. (Not coincidentally, I don't eat pigs). But how much capacity for suffering does a fish have? or creatures like a clam or oyster, which have no brain? Lack of a brain would tend to make suffering fairlyminor, don't you think? In light of this, how immoral is it to eat a fish, a shrimp or an oyster?
c) Is it really wasteful fo resources to harvest fish? Certainly if it's done idniscriminately, hwoever fish can be havrvested at an optimum level which will allow year;ly replenishment of the stock.
d) Can more people be fed nutrititiously if we shifted toa vegetarina diet? The answer is no. First of all, our capacity to gfeed people would go down, because we would be failing to use the foodfish and wild animals which live off grass, plankton, and other inedible resources. The argument that a gram of corn provides more calories direct than if it's processed through a cow is obviously true. However, it overlooks teh fact that i never heard of anyoen feeding high-quality corn to an Alaskan pollock. Most Third World societies, even when they do raise chickens or goats, feed them off inedible scraps or grass. This is actually a very efficient and smart way of converting inedible substances to edible ones, and indubitably EXPANDS the total amount of food available to man. So your argument here applies only to the wasteful consumption of American idnustrial farming, to which my repsonse its, 'that's news?' We've all known for a long time that America is a wasteful society, on the whole.
e) Also, man does not live by calories alone. If we all switched to a vegetarian diet, finding protein and the vitamins and minerals that are rich in some animals products would be a problem. Shifting to a bv=vegetarian diet would probably cause us to start consuming mroe carbohydrates and less protein, as did the shift from hunting to agriculture. It si a well-documented fact that shifting from hunting to farm,ing was a disaster for human health. Height dropped, tooth and bone problems increase, vitamin deficiencies increased, kwashiorkor made its appearance. porotein deficiency is a serious problem worldwide, and soemthing taht would further aggravate the problem is not something taht I think we need.
Before this gets interminable, let me add a word about factory farming. The three commonly factroy farmed animals are cows, pigs, and chickens. For religious reasons, I don't eat cows or pigs, and I try to eat non-factroy farmed chicken when I can, so I don't really see hwo this applies to me. Nevertheless, it was interesting to read your arguments. I'm sure we can agree on a good deal, in partciular our opposition to capitalism.
