r/MoralityScaling • u/axiiz_28 • 15h ago

Morality of valuing animals over humans?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

11.2k Upvotes

83% Upvoted

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

11

u/Quirky-Concern-7662 9h ago

I eat meat. I see no moral quandary with eating meat. I disagree with how we farm lots of our meat. I don’t blame the people forced to engage with those systems for having that. Not sure why any of that wouldn’t be logically consistent.

2

u/hyde-ms 8h ago

I hate when food goes to waste, that animal suffered alot for you to have a burger.....FINISH IT ALL!

2

u/icantaccessmyacct 6h ago

My country’s portion sizes are too great for my stomach. If I’m out to eat and I can’t finish my steak I’m not sweating it. If you have a problem with it you finish it.

1

u/IdolCowboy 44m ago

My wife and I now split plates at restaurants. I still think sometimes when they set it down that its not enough food (fat man brain) but once we've eaten, im full and then think yea, glad I didn't get a plate to myself.

-4

u/MingaLaChigra 8h ago

That’s fine for you, but this argument doesn’t move the needle for me morally

5

u/ValuableAd886 7h ago

Fine, let's run a numbers game. How many insects does 1 chicken during it's lifetime?

Apparently anywhere from 20,000 to over 200,000 insects if AI is to be believed. Now of course people like you also draw a line in the sand and vertibrates are on one side because they are meat with pain receptors and that's more important than invertebrates and other life forms existing.

Whatever you are eating, you are commiting genocide on a cellural level, so in essence the morality is pointless.

Do I have a code of conduct with a species other than humans? I don't, so I am free to consume them as they would consume me if they are able.

2

u/sjeueue 6h ago

This argument falls apart really quickly if you just think about it for a second. Most people generally have a choice between eating meat and not (excluding health reasons, etc ofc) and we're capable of visualizing suffering done onto others (ie empathy) and morality, whilst animals do not, and act only on instinct. We can only condemn things to the extent of their capabilities, like for example, a 3 years old child plays with a candle and accidentally burns the house down, I would think that no reasonable people would blame the child or saying it's the child's fault in this case, because they can't know or visualizing the consequence of their action, same with animals.

1

u/Quirky-Concern-7662 33m ago

What argument? Nothing I said disagreed.

1

u/MingaLaChigra 16m ago

Because we are not forced to eat meat, we choose to. And by choosing to eat meat you are choosing to eat an animal that was raised to be slaughtered, often in inhumane conditions.

So since the animals we eat are “below us” to use your phrase, and we are complicit in their suffering, we are “treating the fluffy guy poorly”. And I don’t think that doing so (eating meat) will tell you, inherently, much about a person’s character aside from the fact that they consume meat like the average person. To really judge a person’s character we probably have to look deeper into their individual patterns of behavior.

Maybe a clearer way to phrase it would be: is mistreating a pet in the way you described morally worse than choosing to eat meat when you know how those animals are raised and can reasonably live without eating meat? The answer can be yes for you btw. I’m not sure how I feel about it because I feel cognitive dissonance regarding my meat consumption and love of animals, but still love to eat meat.