Hail Seitan!
There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets:
I - One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II - The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III - One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV - The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V - Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI - People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any
harm that might have been caused.
VII - Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Since in the modern age we can obtain all of the nutrition we need from a well-planned plant-based diet, by buying & consuming animal products, we participate in unnecessary cruelty to sentient beings
I can make an argument that being non-vegan in the modern age is violating all seven of these tenets
Tenet I : It’s neither reasonable, nor compassionate or empathetic, to needlessly exploit & take the life of a creature when we have moral agency & alternatives, unlike other animals.
Tenet II : It’s true that it’s legal to exploit & unalive animals today, but it was also legal to own slaves in the past. Just because we’re legally allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should.
Tenet III : One’s body being inviolable and subject to their own will alone should extend to all sentient beings. If it doesn’t, Name The Trait in a way that doesn’t lead to contradiction or absurdity
That is - Name The Trait different between humans and other animals that makes it okay to do things to other animals that we wouldn’t be okay with being done to humans.
I.e. justify the speciesist discrimination and double standard and differential treatment.
Tenet IV : We should be free to tell people they’re hypocrites for loving dogs & eating cows, or even for participating in the exploitative pet industry instead of adopting/rescuing companion animals.
Even if this is offensive to people. It’s freedom of speech and necessary for the activism and the struggle for justice that should prevail above laws and institutions (Tenet II).
To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of other sentient beings, is to forgo your own right to be respected like you would be if you first gave respect to other individuals (animals).
Tenet V : Insisting we need to eat meat or animal products to be healthy despite that disagreeing with scientific consensus, is distorting scientific facts to fit your beliefs,
& not conforming beliefs to your best scientific understanding of the world.
It’s denying reality,
burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the truth,
& living in ignorance & delusion & the willfull, unnecessary destruction & oppression of others, self, & planet.
Tenet VI : Assuming that we are already perfect & couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong or unjust, despite every historical society participating in normalized injustice, is not recognizing humans
are fallible.
And, when confronted with your mistake, in the form of what your kind have raised you to traditionally participate in regarding unnecessary systemic exploitation & violence to sentient beings,
if your response is to deflect, close your ears, & refuse to take personal responsibility or change any behavior, is to not do one’s best to rectify it & resolve any harm that might have been caused.
then that is to not right the wrong and fundamentally unjust relationship between humans and other animals and resolve it into one of harmonious and respectful coexistence.
Rather than one of needless exploitation, domination, violence, cruelty, and oppression.
Finally, Tenet VII : To claim that because these tenets do not specifically mention an obligation to not exploit & harm non-human animals unnecessarily & to be vegan, that means it isn’t entailed by
the values underlying them, is to not let every tenet serve as guiding principles designed to inspire nobility in action & thought & not allow the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice to prevail
over the written or spoken word.
Firstly, surely you agree being compassionate to all creatures (animals) is entailed, since that is literally the first tenet, right?
Secondly, outside of the context of TST, I contend that non-human animal rights/sentient rights are entailed as a consequence of belief in human rights, for a number of reasons: because humans are animals, so if we are believing in human rights we are already believing in a form of animal rights or animal rights for one species of animal, and often humans also believe in an at least stronger form of rights & higher standards of respect for companion animals like dogs & cats than other non-human animals, which again demonstrates that they believe in animal rights for some species, including not just humans but even some non-human animals; because human animals (one species of animal) and non-human animals (all of the species of animals excluding humans), as groups, both include sentient beings/individuals, and almost all non-human animals are confirmed by our best available scientific understanding of the world to be sentient and to think, feel and experience many of the same things we do in response to the same actions; and because there’s no logically consistent way of justifying withholding from/denying rights to (especially negative rights to not be unnecessarily, opportunistically harmed, exploited & killed by human moral agents with alternatives) non-human animals/sentient beings, in a way that actually attempts to explain the reasoning between the differential treatment/speciesist discrimination, without also denying them from certain cases of humans (& dogs & cats) or leading to absurdity. And a variety of other reasons.
One very compelling argument for non-human animal rights being logically entailed from most humans’ views on human rights is the Name the Trait argument by AskYourself which is an evolution of the age-old argument from marginal cases in animal rights theory. It challenges the person who believes in withholding those rights from non-human animals, or finding it ok to do things to them that would violate those hypothetical moral or legal rights, while not holding the same view for humans and believing it to be morally impermissible to withhold from or violate those rights when it comes to humans (or, sometimes even dogs & cats, who if you don’t find it ok to exploit & kill for unnecessary products, would mean you would face even more of a challenge justifying doing or being okay with doing those actions to other animals), to name the trait either present or lacking in non-human animals that justifies doing to them what you wouldn’t think is justified to do to humans. You can also extend this style of argumentation to asking someone to justify the discrimination & differential standards of respect between dogs & other non-human animals, and even apply it to forms of discrimination between humans as well (agree with me or not, I also advocate for LGBT rights & women’s rights, and I’ve found the Name the Trait argument very effective in those contexts and other human rights discussions by equalizing situations and individuals and challenging the logical consistency (or inconsistency) of different arguments used to justify forms of discrimination).
there is no reason to limit it to animals. where can you find any justification for that?
I never said we should limit it to animals. I specifically said we can include plants and other organisms or phenomena in our moral consideration as well as animals, and the most optimal actions (veganism) would still remain the same (since that causes the least harm to all of them) and the entailed actions would be unaffected in most situations. More strawmanning. And you avoided the question. The question isn’t about whether “only” being compassionate to creatures is entailed by a human rights based reading of the tenets of TST, it’s just about whether being compassionate to all creatures is “entailed” by it period (it’s kind of a rhetorical question, because the answer must be yes if you’re actually following the tenets since it literally says it there). I have spoken in depth about the plants tho objection and explained both why it’s rational - in a consistent manner - to prioritize entities we know are sentient over entities we don’t know are sentient, but also why the best thing to do if we want to protect plants or other non-animal organisms is also to be vegan anyway, so there’s no point saying anything more about that.
this is so intellectually dishonest, we are done. stop talking to me
It’s not intellectually dishonest. I’ve literally never said that. From the beginning as soon as people made the plants objection I stated that we could include them in our moral consideration too, not harm them unnecessarily, and that being vegan was the best thing we could do for them. I also made cases for why we should prioritize beings we know are sentient (aka most animals) over organisms we don’t know are sentient (aka non-animal organisms, including plants). That doesn’t mean not considering the organisms that haven’t been proven to be sentient. Just like someone who valued humans over other animals but was still vegan because they thought other animals still mattered, and mattered more than many humans’ arbitrary habits that they have replacements for, isn’t necessarily saying we should limit moral consideration to humans just because they would prioritize humans over other animals in a situation where their fundamental interests conflicted or you could only save one of them. It’s simply bad faith strawmanning to claim that’s their view when it isn’t. And it’s the same as what you’re doing.
For the last time:
Animals being confirmed sentient and holding higher moral priority in my eyes doesn’t mean limiting it to them or excluding plants from consideration.
More plants (and animals) are spared by being vegan and it’s far better for crop & land efficiency, & for the environment & Earth’s ecosystems as a whole, meaning better for all life on the planet - sentient or not.
stop lying. get help
NTT is a line of argument that falls afowl of the line-drawing fallacy (also called the spectrum fallacy). just because there is no single differentiating factor, or a specific collection of factors which, when considered are sufficient to distinguish one end of a spectrum from another does not entail that there is no difference between one end of the spectrum and the other. humans are different from pigs.
if we are believing in human rights we are already believing in a form of animal rights or animal rights for one species of animal…
i know this is a hot take, but i don’t, personally believe in any rights at all. so this falls flat for me, though i suppose some might find it compelling.
but for those who do, i would ask if “right” is the correct term for the motivation to treat animals well. i’d say it’s more about doing the right thing, not respecting a right.
so? sentience isn’t the basis of the axiom of being compassionate to creatures.
again, i don’t really believe in rights, so this is shaky, at best. but to try to deal with the claims about the distinction between people and animals, i’d admit its speciesist, but go further and say that speciesism in necessary for correct action. you shouldn’t treat lions like cows, or dogs like fish. and you shouldn’t treat animals like humans.