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The Meat Eater Problem
Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford and the Happier Lives Institute; ^ | 10/31/22 | Michael Plant

Posted on 07/02/2025 11:49:31 AM PDT by DallasBiff

Abstract: Here are two commonly held moral views. First, we must save strangers’ lives, at least if we can do so easily: you would be required to rescue a child drowning in a pond even if it will ruin your expensive suit. Second, it is wrong to eat meat because of the suffering caused to animals in factory farms. Many accept both simultaneously—Peter Singer is the pre-eminent example. I point out that these two beliefs are in a sharp and seemingly unrecognised tension and may even be incompatible. It seems universally accepted that doing or allowing a harm is permissible—and may even be required—when it is the lesser evil. I argue that, if meat eating is wrong on animal suffering grounds then, once we consider how much suffering might occur, it starts to seem plausible that saving strangers would be the greater evil than not rescuing them and is, therefore, not required after all. Given the uncertainties and subjective assessments here, reasonable people could substantially disagree. The surprising result is that a moral principle widely considered to be obviously true—we must rescue others—is not, on further reflection, obviously true and would be defensibly rejected by some. Some potential implications are discussed.

(Excerpt) Read more at journalofcontroversialideas.org ...


TOPICS: Chit/Chat; Food
KEYWORDS: barfalert; eatingtastyanimals; food; garbage; meat; meateater; oxford; uk
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To: DallasBiff

Is this supposed to pass as a serious discussion? IMHO, who ever came up with this steaming pile of horse crap is one really sick unit.


21 posted on 07/02/2025 12:31:01 PM PDT by Ditto
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To: DallasBiff

Logical fallacy. False moral equivalence. Animals are not human beings. End of discussion.


22 posted on 07/02/2025 12:33:22 PM PDT by Flatus I. Maximus (I didn't leave the Democratic Party. It LEFT me, and keeps going further left. )
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To: DallasBiff

Pale and frail is no way to go through life....Vegans don’t even look healthy.


23 posted on 07/02/2025 12:33:44 PM PDT by G Larry (Its RACIST to impose slave wages on LEGAL immigrants and minorities by importing cheap ILLEGAL labor)
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To: reasonisfaith

There is no viable moral argument against killing animals, in the normal manner, for consumption.

The only substantive reasoning against it is reducible to the aesthetic sense.

From what I’ve seen from Peter Singer over the years, he’s not an honest philosopher.
*********
If there’s one thing that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all agree on, it’s that we can eat meat. In fact, Jews are commanded to eat lamb during Passover.


24 posted on 07/02/2025 12:36:17 PM PDT by Socon-Econ (adi)
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To: DallasBiff

Guess what’s on the menu at the UK’s Parliament: Meat.


25 posted on 07/02/2025 12:37:17 PM PDT by mewzilla (Swing away, Mr. President, swing away!)
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To: DallasBiff

Absolute nonsense.


26 posted on 07/02/2025 12:43:35 PM PDT by EastTexasTraveler
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To: DallasBiff

Let the kid drown, I want my BACON!


27 posted on 07/02/2025 12:53:27 PM PDT by If You Want It Fixed - Fix It
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To: DallasBiff
Not directly related, but Dennis Prager often speaks about going to college campuses and posing to the students the following question: If your dog and a perfect stranger were both drowning, which one would you try to save? Most college students chose to save their dog.
28 posted on 07/02/2025 12:54:12 PM PDT by fidelis (Ecce Crucem Domini! Fugite partes adversae! Vicit Leo de tribu Juda, Radix David! Alleluia!)
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To: DallasBiff

Philosophy majors...


29 posted on 07/02/2025 12:56:59 PM PDT by Rio
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To: RainMan

Yep. When you acknowledge that mankind is set above the animals, that argument is blown to smithereens!


30 posted on 07/02/2025 12:59:55 PM PDT by vpintheak (Screw the ChiComms! America first!)
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To: DallasBiff

I have four testicles and require McDonalds full-pounders.


31 posted on 07/02/2025 1:08:33 PM PDT by tumblindice (America's founding fathers: all armed conservatives)
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To: ShadowAce

“The Meat Eater Problem”?
We have a much bigger Social Justice Warrior Busybody Problem.


32 posted on 07/02/2025 1:14:08 PM PDT by brookwood (America Was Built By MS-13. We Are A Nation Of MS-13.)
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To: DallasBiff


You got that right. See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind if guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I've seen the future, you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sittin' around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing "I'm an Oscar-Meyer Wiener".
33 posted on 07/02/2025 1:16:57 PM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: DallasBiff

Ecological system depends on survival by chain of carnivores eating next lower group. I big cats stopped eating deers, there will be no vegetation left on earth. If sharks stopped eating small fish, the oceans will be full of dead fish bodies floating on ocean surface. If humans stopped eating meat, diabetes will become top killer.


34 posted on 07/02/2025 1:25:34 PM PDT by Bobbyvotes (TERM LIMITS IS THE ONLY WAY TO STOP CORRUPT CAREER POL ITICIANS. York )
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To: Ruy Dias de Bivar

Most greens have almost no nutritional value.


35 posted on 07/02/2025 1:25:52 PM PDT by packrat35 (Pureblood! No clot shot for me!)
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To: joshua c

I only eat meat and cheese mostly.


36 posted on 07/02/2025 1:26:59 PM PDT by packrat35 (Pureblood! No clot shot for me!)
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To: DallasBiff

Deontological drivel from a U.K. academic. Spare me!


37 posted on 07/02/2025 1:29:34 PM PDT by atomic_dog
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To: joshua c

It is certainly true that our digestive tract is designed for an omnivore diet. It’s not nice to fool mother nature…


38 posted on 07/02/2025 1:48:07 PM PDT by rlmorel (Factio Communistica Sinensis Delenda Est.)
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To: vpintheak; linMcHlp; DallasBiff; 9YearLurker; epluribus_2; Jamestown1630; Tell It Right; ...
I believe we have dominion over animals, and I have no illusions about where my meat comes from. There are a lot of people that probably believe meat is birthed in a Styrofoam tray and covered with cellophane. The same people who believe electricity comes from those things in walls with the funny holes in them.

I can also believe they are sentient creatures, but at the same time, feel that they serve a purpose to man and have no compunctions about using them for that purpose.

There is a remarkable woman named Temple Grandin that they made a movie about… She is an autistic woman (Not someone on the "Spectrum" as commonly said about people, she had Aspergers that was far closer to being fully autistic, though not incapacitated by it) who became famous not necessarily because she overcame her autism and was able to function in society, but because she pioneered changes in the slaughter house industry that made the process more humane to the animals, better for the quality of the meat, and more efficient for the slaughter houses.

It's a remarkable movie about a remarkable story, I have recommended it to many people, and without fail, they all say it is one of the best movies they never heard anything about.

Honestly, if my wife hadn't brought it home from the library one time, I would've never seen it. It's one of those movies that if you walked by it in one of the old movie rental stores, you wouldn't even give it a second glance.

In any case, it's relevant here because she had a great quote about slaughtering animals:

"Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be."

Because she was autistic, she had the ability to observe a slaughterhouse in action, and while everybody else was fixated on what the various hands were doing with cattle prods and ropes, she was totally fixated on the stairs themselves.

All the other people involved we're fixated on the process, and she was watching the way the cattle moved, the sounds that they were making, and realized that the process was inefficient and in the end inhumane because it ramped up the stress levels in the cattle because their natural behaviors and patterns were never even a consideration in the design of a slaughterhouse. That increased stress had a detrimental effect on the quality of the meat, and the cattle's natural resistance to being forced through a maze necessitated the employment of ropes, cattle prods, and lots of men to wield them.

And when those men prodded them, roped and pulled them, they were treating them as inanimate objects. It was dangerous work for the hands who were working there, and highly and efficient.

For example, in her observations of cattle, she figured out that they like to walk in certain patterns as a herd. She also found that they were greatly disturbed by contrasts in light (for example, sunlight that would be shining in through a slatted wooden chute or fence rendering bars of light and darkness) and she also observed that when the cattle were herded into a pit filled with liquid meant to remove parasites, due to the common design of the day, they were hesitant to go in and off and had to be dragged in with ropes and prodded in with cattle prods.

Occasionally, one of the cattle would end up drowning in the pool, and had to be dragged out by men.

What she did, as a total noob in the industry, was design a slaughterhouse that took all of these behaviors (and more) and incorporated them into a design with the shoots and sluices so that there was no light coming in from the sides which were curved to the natural patterns that cattle preferred to walk in, and she put special ramps into the dip so that the cattle walking into it could have a foothold as they walked in. I believe this is an image of the design she created as a proof-of-concept:

She was a total outsider to the industry (and autistic to boot) in addition to being a woman in a men's industry, so it isn't hard to imagine that her ideas were immediately embraced.

She did however find somebody who is interested in her observations and had her design a slaughterhouse to those specifications that could be built, and they built a test facility. On the day she was supposed to do her demonstration of the functionality of this new design, the foreman and the hands who we're going to run the demonstration completely developed a workflow to go around all of her innovations, and tore up much of it.

She had it reworked, and when she ran for demonstration, the onlookers from the industry and the magazines that service industry were astonished.

The cattle, with little to no human intervention, calmly walked into the maze that curved this way and that depending on what needed to be done, the cattle walked right down into the liquid dip with no problems without the ropes in the prods, and went all the way to the end where they were humanely slaughtered.

It is an extraordinary true story. Here she is with the actress that played her in the movie:

To this day she is an inspiration to families with autistic children, and speaks to those groups often to give them encouragement and show them that their children can function in society.

One would think this movie would've been focused on the feminist aspect, a woman going up against all the men… And there was a tiny bit of that because it was true. She was a complete outsider.

But it wasn't focused on feminism. (If it had been, I would have sniffed it out in the first few minutes, and likely would not have finished watching the movie.)

It was focused on the challenges of autism and how one woman so impressively overcame those challenges.

39 posted on 07/02/2025 2:47:40 PM PDT by rlmorel (Factio Communistica Sinensis Delenda Est.)
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To: rlmorel

I remember her story.


40 posted on 07/02/2025 2:50:20 PM PDT by 9YearLurker
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