Ok humans can also not eat meat, we aren't carnivores. If it doesn't matter what animals do then why are you using animals as an argument in the first place?

Dude again in the particular case of humans, humans eat meat my exact point is that it’s not about looking at animals in general but humans in specific. It doesn’t matter what other animals do it’s about what the human animal does and what it evolved to do and be capable of.

Personally I eat meat, though not very often. This is consistent with a lot of humans throughout history and it's very easy to maintain a healthy diet doing it. It's what I would advocate as the next step. As I see it, advocating for veganism is a little like advocating for communism. It might be something that is easily possible in the distant future, but we need to take steps if we wish to one day get there. It would be a radical reorganization of the food industry to shift to my diet, much less a fully vegetarian one.

Ok and not every animal eats meat so why should we do so? An appeal to nature isn't gonna get you very far

Bro chill my point is that not every animal rapes their young and we are clearly not a species of animal that rapes their young like I said just because one animal does something doesn’t mean all of them do it. I feel like I expressed that clearly earlier though I may not have, I just hope you’re taking the time to seriously consider my difference of opinion here.

That wasn't your question. Your question was whether it's okay to raise and then eat a cow that dies from natural causes.

A wild cow? Probably also not, if you consider that a wild carcass is part of the ecosystem. But as for what you're really tacitly asking: no, you haven't done a moral harm to the cow per se by eating it then.

Free will exists is not wrong. Here's an observation, we sometimes do things in auto mode yes? If we find ourselves doing that, there's an exercise we can do to express free will and that is to stop the act or do it ahead of time, where we stop ourselves from doing something.

That's the only thing that comes to mind on exerting free will.

Yeah no for sure just cause we eat meat doesn’t mean we should treat the animals we eat terribly while they’re alive and that we shouldn’t balance the benefits of eating meat with the moral, practical, and environment costs. I just don’t feel the idea of completely getting rid of one of our basic food sources makes sense.

>Because we're animals

>Because we're not "animals"

Kinda contradicting yourself a lot. So how is your argument valid for diet but not infanticide or rape?

Ok but we’re not “animals” we’re humans, a type of animal just because some animals do things doesn’t mean we do. And the reason we should sustainably enter the cycle of life and nature is because we are and have always been a part of it, we cannot escape it, nor would it be of any good of us to escape it and so we should be in it properly and responsibly

I understand but I think that’s more of a technicality.

Ok but your decision is nonsensical it’s like saying that because you’re breathing carbon dioxide and there’s too much carbon dioxide in the air you shouldn’t breath air out in the open but should instead stay inside a bubble that filters out the carbon.

Then tell me what’s not supported.

And finally you can probably make the calculation on the amount of fertilizer a cow will produce over a given period of time and how much that will improve your crop yield versus the nutrition you’d get from simply eating it. And you can further perform the calculation on the carbon cost of transporting the manure versus creating it in a factory

That's a dishonest evasion. Is it or is it not OK to eat a cow that has died of natural causes?

Who said I believed in objective morality? If there is an objective morality of the universe then the universe must have a design, right? Then there must be a designer which imbued the universe with that objective moral truth, right? This is the line one would have to argue.

I found the "so is it good because God says so or is God simply the messenger of what is good?" argument to be pretty good at discrediting the objective moral goodness of God until I heard an argument that went something like "Goodness is an essential element of the concept of God" (Craig). I'll paste a quote about this below.

Either way, you don't have to believe in objective morality to recognize that without it morality is not actually "real." It would be up to everyone to decide for themselves, even if that includes rape and murder.

"You state your fundamental question as follows: How do we know that God is good?Now at one level, as I explained in last week’s Question #294, that question is easy to answer: it is conceptually necessary that God be good. That is to say, goodness belongs to the very concept of God, just as being unmarried belongs to the concept of a bachelor. For (i) by definition God is a being worthy of worship, and only a being which is perfectly good would be worthy of worship; and (ii) as the greatest conceivable being God must be morally perfect, since it is better to be morally perfect than morally flawed."

That's from this page: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/on-the-goodness-of-god

Sure, I think there's actually a compelling argument that we're animals and this goes beyond ethics to some degree. I don't think this is an excuse to escape entirely from ethics, but I do think it serves as a framework for understanding our own limitations when enforcing upon ourselves a rigorous and unforgiving ethical mandate.

Should the lack of a defense for meat eating eradicate all meat consumption? I think that's an interesting question honestly, and I suspect that addressing it helps to also calm the fears of meat lovers who feel threatened by calls for vegetarianism or veganism.

Ok and why should we do that? And by that logic, since animals also rape and kill their own young, shouldn't we do that too? After all it's just a part of nature like the rest.

Well, again, an omnivore who decides not to eat meat isn't an herbivore. There's a decision there and that decision is what we call ethics. So it's an important distinction.

The claim that there's advantages to eating meat isn't very well supported. It's certainly easier, but that's largely due to the fact that meat consumption is the norm (more than in any historical period in fact).

We synthesize most of our fertilizers thanks to the Nazi tech we employ. If we wanted to maximize the use of animal produced fertilizers, we'd have them grazing in our fields rather than using fossil fuels to transport it. Also, it wouldn't be necessary to eat those animals.

How about one along the lines of I am part of nature and I am an animal, no matter how smart I may be to deny my nature is to deny myself? Plus animals can be treated well and still killed for meat.

Because we are animals and are part of nature and are therefore part of the cycle of life, our goal should be to integrate ourselves sustainably into nature not remove ourselves from it, we should not go against our being omnivores that eat meat and plants, but do so responsibly

Probably not, because the use of resources needed to raise such animals is detrimental to the environment.

But then I can preform a calculation based on the amount of manure they will produce plus the nutritional yields I will get from using it as fertilizer versus the nutrition received by just eating it as meat. Avoided also doesn’t mean gotten rid of, and as long as we need fertilizer it’ll be better for the environment to get it from cows and pigs then a factory, at which point the previous calculation I mentioned would come into effect in deciding when killing the animal for food would be efficient for us and the environment.

And I never said that was an invalid argument.

You really don't understand at all what I've been saying. I've tried enough, if you won't or can't understand so be it. But just for my interest, where do you believe objective morality comes from?

But it's ok to eat these animals, right?

The animals still make manure if you don't kill them.

In fact you receive a constant supply of manure from live animals.

A lot of fertilizer use can also be avoided by no longer practicing monoculture, and cultivating many types of plants that have symbiotic relationships.

Maybe definitionally but if you decide to stop eating meat completely you’ve functionally stopped being an omnivore. Plus the idea that despite having a choice one of those choices is always wrong no matter what just doesn’t sound realistic. Eating meat has advantages either in the fact that certain nutrients are more easily digestibly accessible through meat or the fact that the animals we get meat from also provide fertilizer for our plants and often are fed with waste products from crops that humans cannot eat to begin with.