I don’t quite understand what you mean by moral implications. Would I be upset if aliens started eating people? Yeah, that would suck. Would it be morally defensible to fight back in the same way a cow might kick? Of course. But I can’t consider their view because they are defined as a higher tier of being in this scenario.

You’re imagining little green humans with forks when it may just as well be a hyper-developed cloud of space bacteria. In their view, every human gut biome is a slave pit where trillions can be massacred at will.

Using us as incubators and then harvesting the “human” collection of cell resources is a perfectly ethical thing to do. Who cares about the shrieking sound waves and fluid that spills out while humans melt, that might as well be the smell of fresh cut grass. It’s just a bunch of clones of one DNA sequence vs the plethora of diverse cells unleashed from the gut. Easy decision.

Keeping us happy and healthy is crucial for the health of the gut biome, no need to cause any undue stress because that would hurt the final product. But of course, through gene manipulation or artificial selection they can make us into a more durable and docile species.

…And at that point modern humans are effectively extinct. I don’t have to worry about the ethics of an incubation vat in the same way you don’t worry about our bizzarre and unnatural domesticated crops.

the childish, optimistic look here really just highlights the compartmentalization you have to go through for a “coherent” position.

I’m totally lost here. You’re saying a comatose human is actually not a human but it is an animal (and therefore gets human rights)? My “higher thought” point is that our measure of life is relative to human features and human ability. A comatose human is very obviously still a human. Hell, even a dead human is still a human until it decays away and is recycled into something else.

Instead of silly screaming corn: What if I bred creatures that couldn’t express pain in any measurable way? Just sacks of flesh that you could herd around and harvest when they’re big enough. Slice off some reproductive piece and stick it in a tube to grow the next batch. Basically a meat tree on legs.

Is that unethical? Just because it’s gross? It’s no different than a plant. What if I told you I made them from pig DNA [no harm was done to the pig btw] but I cut out all traces of sensory organs that might convey pain. They can sense just barely enough to stand upright and only have the barest parts of a brain needed to grow more mass.

At what point does the distasteful husbandry become acceptable gardening? When the creatures can’t move? When the red blood is sap? Does the flesh have to be green instead of pink? Do the insides need to taste like a mango instead of bacon? Does it need photosynthesis like a spotted salamander or a sea slug?

Your position is incoherent if you can’t tell me exactly where the line is crossed AND that line is solid for all vegans. When does that lifeform gain or lose rights?

If you can’t do that or admit there’s subjectivity in the judgment then why can’t that subjectivity hold for cultures that bred dogs for food? Dogs are clearly not humans, but they’re too close to my personal experience of pets for comfort. That clearly isn’t the case with all humans, so I can’t pass judgment on the mere fact that a dog is eaten.

Yay I win!

For the record I 100% agree with both of your positions in practice. We slightly differ on the topic of distaste for exploiting life.

IMO that’s a function of how many human features we attribute to the life and how we exploit it. Thus it’s very subjective and can only be looked at in the aggregate: slaughtering cows and pigs is distasteful because they bleed and scream like any mammal. Milking is exploitative but it can be a much less invasive process and a more fair exchange for a decent life of domestic animals. Think of the human job of a wet nurse, it doesn’t inherently have to be shitty. In practice its just not feasible to have a benign and symbiotic relationship while providing milk for everyone.

I’m just here to rail against extreme positions like “all animals must have the same rights”. It’s such a seemingly benevolent statement that’s loaded with much more complex implications when you apply it to reality.

How’s the weather in your fantasy land? You winning your fight against that straw man? I didn’t say anything about over or under population, that’s a completely different philosophical discussion. That would be a debate over questions like:

• What quality of life is acceptable?
• Is putting a finite lifespan on civilization acceptable? If so, how long?
• Is it ethical to depopulate? By what methods?
• Would it be ethical to conserve resources to sustain civilization in perpetuity by euthanizing the infirm?
• What about a hard limit on personal consumption a la Logan’s Run ?

You are constricting your ethical ideal to automatically answer some of those questions. Here’s a rephrasing of our conversation:

• Fact 1: Humanity is confined to earth with a finite supply of completely non renewable resources [I’d encourage you to look into the impossibility of inter-planetary human civilization, the gist being that humans evolved for the specifically for Earth and it’s ecology; we’ll never have the energy and raw materials to reproduce that]
• Fact 2: There is a hard limit on Earth’s capacity to sustainably support life. This would be a carrying capacity in the low billions if all resources were dedicated to humans.
• Fact 3: Earth has 8 billion humans and counting. This is sustained entirely by a limited reserve of biochemical energy stored over millions of years. [I can get into the technical details if you’d like but there is no escaping the physical laws of entropy + our energy usage. ie: solar panels can’t cover the resource cost of more solar panels.] Depending on your thoughts on population management, this is either fine and we’ll just burn through our civilization’s resources or our population will be reduced by some method in conjunction with resource management to extend the lifespan of human civilization
• Fact 4: Humans evolved to fit a specific niche. This natural ecological role is as a primitive hunter gatherer, foraging in balance with other species. This minimal impact state has a far lower maximum sustainable population in the range of 10s of millions. Perhaps lower depending on how many modern life improvements you let expand the ecological footprint.
• Your ethical axiom: All creatures have the exact same rights as humans

This axiom automatically answers many questions raised by the other facts.

• If reproduction is a natural right in any capacity, humanity can’t ever ethically exceed earth’s carrying capacity. Until we reach a sustainable usage of our resources, humans must be equitably and fairly culled to preserve the rights of humans and other animals (because other animals don’t have the agency to cull themselves like humans)
• Civilisation must be sustainable or the rights of our progeny will be infringed by our own consumption
• The sustainable state must not infringe unnecessarily on the rights of other animals. This, defacto, limits us near our primal state described in Fact 4.
• Ergo: Getting to that state requires a 99%+ reduction in the human population. That low level of human population without access to our resource intensive modern tools is basically a collapse of civilization.

You can whine and sarcastically deflect but that’s the conclusion of your statement on total, universal animal rights. It’s not an undefendable position, but you must understand you’re pushing for a heavily restrained form of Anarcho-primitivism. If the concept of near total human civilization collapse for the benefit of other animals makes you uncomfortable (as it does for me), you’d want to reconsider that view in some way:

• All lifeforms have rights but our human existence requires us to value human rights above others
• Species suicide is the only ethical option because humans are the only creature capable of making that choice
• Any ethical framework for universal animal rights is unenforceable in reality even if correct. ie. The personal choice to harm another animal is unethical but the act itself is not. Indirect and accidental harm is more acceptable than direct harm

So I ask again, what’s your choice? There’s no free lunch.

If the advanced aliens had the control over us that we exert over animals then I wouldn’t have a choice. And whether I fight or not isn’t relevant to their choice to farm me. If anything it’s in their best interest to keep me healthy and content until I’m harvested.

Your coma example is laughable. They’re a human. A medical procedure (even if we don’t have the technology to perform it) could return them to normal function. Turning a cow into a human-like creature is a different discussion altogether, it would be a transformation at such a fundamental level that we might as well be discussing artificial personhood instead of the ethics of diet.

If we invented a procedure that could make corn moo would it no longer be vegan?

I guess it’s like a barometer for morals: the lower it goes the bigger the storm

You’re still in denial here. There can be symbiosis in nature where species can cohabitate to the benefit of both, but that’s just two different niches being filled. It’s a completely orthogonal topic to species competing for the same niche. It’s not about building windmills and good vibes; human beings have overstepped our natural boundaries with billions of people in places we have absolutely no evolutionary excuse to be.

We’ve done this strictly because we can; it’s the natural animal inclination to favor your own progeny and expand your access to resources. Our ability to adapt has broken the evolutionary game. We won. The mere existence of 8.3 billion humans causes an unfathomable amount of harm that can’t be fixed by skipping “tasty meals”. That’s the ethical equivalent of whitewashing guilt and ignoring the structural problem.

So asserting something like “all animals have equal rights” is asinine. They clearly don’t, and we can’t change that without abandoning the 99% of human souls who stress the system beyond its natural ethical bounds (within the expected balance of evolution).

The carrying capacity of Earth is 2-4 billion people, and that’s assuming an ultimate human primacy with no regard to other species (except in the amoral ways they could sustain human existence). A “harmless” existence is a fleeting fraction of that, the small niche filled as hunter-gatherer megafauna mammals. This is a hard physical fact no matter what universal rights we put on paper. The choice is quite literally billions of human lives against trillions of birds/insects/fish/critters/predators/prey in conflict with them. There’s no free lunch.

Plants don’t have to feel pain to be a lynch pin in the ecosystem supporting the animals around them. One less native plant is one less place to shelter or feed an endangered animal, or one less set of roots preventing the erosion of a habitat at risk.

Eliminating animal products mitigates the problem but it in no way absolves you from our exponential consumption of finite resources, and in many ways it’s naive non-solution.

For example: culling and eating pest animals like deer is not vegan, but leaving them alone with no natural predators does exponentially more harm to all other animals that depend on the native plants decimated by an unchecked deer population. Eliminating the predators is a human-caused problem but washing our hands of the situation will kill far more.

Brother I am vegan (at least 95% in diet if you want to quibble over niche animal product additives). I’m just not going to shed tears over every single creature on earth like they’re my family pet while losing sight of the purpose of harm reduction. Why is the few grams of milk powder in your chips more important than mass deforestation supporting your avocados and coffee?

If most militant vegans actually examined their emotional arguments before they posted them people would take them way more seriously. Animals suffering and dying might make you deeply uncomfortable but that’s not a universal experience. You can’t browbeat people out of 15k years of animal husbandry just because you personally couldn’t stomach skinning a rabbit.

I’m not the one making the dichotomy! I’m fully in favor of all harm reduction possible (including a vegan/utilitarian vegan diet) for the obvious benefit of our own species. The commenter above is positing that there is no ethical direct/indirect violence toward any animals. It’s impossible to hold that position while simultaneously pretending billions of people can exist.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. A simple rational examination of our limited resources is being discarded because “animals have human rights/you support slavery/you want animals to be raped”. No, I have a very obvious and consistent position:

Humans are a higher class of animal and being good stewards of our only planet is crucial for our own well being. We thrive with nature and unnatural violence (like industrial animal farming) is bad for our psyche anyway. That doesn’t mean animals can’t or won’t die to support our existence.

This stuff is so basic and fundamental; tradeoffs HAVE to be made. Pretending that the world can support life (let alone a good life) for billions of people without animal death/displacement/extinction is deranged. It’s on the commenter to pick up the shambles of that position and make anything that can fit in the real world.

Just reading text isn’t really a fair representation of the English language as you go back to beyond the 14th century. The grammar remains pretty similar if you sound it out and most vocab is similar (or can be figured out by context clues).

The non-standardized spelling and premodern characters make it feel alien but it’s mostly someone with a heavy accent using phonetics to write [approximately] what they’re sounding like. I bet most people wouldn’t struggle if the text was massaged a bit.

I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game

Then you’re a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That’s 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.

From there you’re now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc…

Humans aren’t friendly little forest nymphs, we’re megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That’s a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.

That’s just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.

We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance.

Uh ooooooh… someone isn’t familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬

We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don’t even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.

This is a ludicrous argument. If you truly believe that all animals have the same rights then the only internally consistent conclusion is the virtual extermination of the human species.

Life is a zero sum game. Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources. Optimizing for the minimum harm to earth’s ecosystem is always going to be the end of agriculture, housing, hunting, industry and basically everything other human institution. We’re the most insidious invasive species ever and the world would be healthier without us mucking around.

So unless you’re stumping for that, don’t pretend to have the moral high ground. If you are, stop wasting your time shaming people and skip right to culling them.

The differentiation “human” is artificial and made up…

You share 25% of your DNA with a tree, is it slavery to own four apple trees?

Why doesn’t my dog have a right to vote? Why can a snake eat eggs but I can’t? Why is it OK for ants to farm aphids but not for humans to farm cows?

Different things are, in fact, different. There are lots of dead simple and airtight arguments for veganism without counterproductive emotional appeals. Talk about economics or ecology or health and not about sad puppy dog eyes.

Animals can have rights and be protected from unnecessary cruelty without anthropomophizing them and granting full human rights. You’re equating full, sapient humans with a species specifically bred for a base purpose without higher levels of thought and expression.

I don’t even think that statement is anthropocentric hubris. If ultra-advanced aliens showed up tomorrow and started domesticating humans for food or some other purpose, I would have the default expectation of them having the same or similar morals. Maybe we’d get access to decent healthcare and good libraries before we went to the slaughterhouse.

Cows get more rights than trees or crops because they have an ability to express pain and convey emotion. They don’t have the same rights as humans because they could never give a passionate argument for suffrage to a jury.

And to be clear: there are plenty of real, tangible reasons to end animal husbandry and make everyone vegan without even touching philosophy.

There’s a weird dissonance in these conversations where “justice” turns into “poetic justice” without the speaker realizing it. It’s an ironic reversal of positions that sounds good without any rational backing for why it would be good.

Would it be a satisfying narrative loop to result in indigenous people retaking what they historically had? Of course.

Does being a member of a marginalized group grant some specific virtue that makes you a just leader or caretaker? …Maybe tangentially? At the very least you might have more practical understanding of oppression.

Does being in a marginalized group that has a bloodline traced to an arbitrarily collection of humans who once lived in a place give you some inherent “connectedness” to (or “ownership” of) that place?..

No. That’s actually a pretty fucked up line of reasoning. That kind of argument is what propped up “Europe for Aryans” and “Blacks back to Africa”.

Your value in a community is in the bonds you have to it. Sure, some of those are family bonds, but a lifetime is far more than just that. We’re strengthened by our living connections to each other today, not by our unchosen connections to a string of dead people who can’t reciprocate.

None of us can go back in time and reverse genocides; how can those tragedies get special correction beyond curing the echoes of injustice that exist today?

In my opinion there are two simple facts:

1. People can housed, fed and have their specific needs cared for regardless of background
2. The core value in acknowledging the past is in correcting our course on current and future injustice

If we were committed to live by those the rest becomes moot.

Using in game credits to rent content? Not exactly new, I remember that being the entire business model of EA’s Battlefield Heroes (circa 2009). That was only 3 years after Bethesda was first selling horse armor.

There’s an intersection of politics and science and this isn’t anywhere close to it. Meme about research funding or the astroturfed anti-intellectualism fucking our progress on vaccinations.

This is just a milquetoast leftist tagline with some science words stapled to it.

There are about 3-5 pedestrian deaths directly caused by bikes per year in the USA. Licensing and registering bikes over that is performative pearl clutching. Add more bike lanes if you’re really worried.

If you’re worried about cyclist safety then properly classify ebikes and lower their top speeds. If a rider wants to go faster than they can handle that’s on them. Might as well be licensing all these Olympic sports, don’t want people sledding or skiing too fast.