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Cake day: November 3rd, 2024
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1·8 months agoI take it you’re not from TST. Try to keep an open mind about what veganism is because many people don’t understand the importance of it as a social justice movement. I think partly it’s because the name doesn’t reveal what it’s about immediately. It’s about animal rights - although humans moving towards plant-based living as a species is also extremely critical for the environment/climate/planet, human society and social justice in many forms, as well as enormously beneficial for our health when implemented effectively.
It’s a common response to veganism/animal rights to say it’s a cult, which is not very nice to us or to the non-human animals. Imagine if you and your kind were being victimized and oppressed unnecessarily and wantonly, and someone arbitrarily told you that they were labeling the movement that sought to represent your interests and advocate for your rights/protection/respect/ethical treatment/liberation/freedom, as a “cult”, and dismissed it on that basis. But this fails to consider that it’s simply a movement advocating for the rights of non-human sentient beings, in very similar ways to movements advocating for the rights of LGBT people or women, or the historical movement to boycott and abolish human slavery. We want people to boycott, not contribute to, and eventually help to end/abolish animal exploitation by humans and move toward more ethical, sustainable (and healthier) ways of living for all sentient beings and the environment. It’s trying to make the world a better place and reduce harm and suffering and injustice in critical ways. And it’s not about woo-woo claims. It’s a secular movement based on hard evidence about the sentience of animals and the impact of animal agriculture on their lives and experiences, on the planet/environment/climate/food security/zoonotic diseases/potential pandemics/antibiotic resistance/etc, and human society (including not exploiting humans for dangerous & traumatic slaughterhouse work leading to high rates of domestic violence, drug abuse, PTSD, suicide, etc) and human health. It affects a lot of very important functions in the world and impacts all of us.
So if you think animal rights is a cult (despite having no leader, us all often disagreeing with each other about various things related to animal rights philosophy, and comprising a grassroots movement around the world to try to liberate animals from human oppression, much like other social justice movements), but presumably you don’t think human rights movements are cults (or do you? and remember, humans are animals), then what exactly is the difference that makes veganism/animal rights a cult but not human rights movements (such as feminism/women’s rights)?
That’s not accurate — Poore & Nemecek didn’t just lump LCAs together. They harmonized 570 studies into a standardized framework precisely to account for methodological differences. That’s why the paper is so highly cited and why its dataset is still being used by other scientists and even the IPCC. And crucially, its conclusions are backed up by dozens of other independent studies and meta-analyses, so dismissing it as ‘bad science’ is simply not credible.
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:
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Animals being confirmed sentient and holding higher moral priority in my eyes doesn’t mean limiting it to them or excluding plants from consideration.
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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.
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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.
Yourofsky (like the guy or not but don’t ad-hominem him, address the argument not the arguer) explains it better than me through a lens of intersectionalism https://youtu.be/GH2p3TOUtR8 and btw in theories like vegetarian/vegan ecofeminism - a branch of intersectionalism, which itself stems from feminist theory - the kyriarchy, as described as “a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission” has frequently been talked about as including speciesism as one of its many forms.
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).
That’s simply false. So much for valuing scientific facts and not distorting them to suit your beliefs. I referenced multiple different studies, and also the Poore-Nemecek study is widely accepted by the larger scientific community and its general findings do align with the broader scientific consensus of other studies, even if there were hypothetically some slight mistakes or inaccuracies, which you neglected to elaborate on. You’re the one cherrypicking here by hyperfocusing on supposed methodological flaws with one study while ignoring the larger body of evidence.
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Firstly, I am concerned here with the ethics of animal exploitation, not the environment - I care about the environment too, and we can even make the argument that making environmentally sustainable/low impact choices as much as we can is aligned with the tenets of TST as well, by proxy of their impact on humans and other animals, or by extending concern to plants and the environment itself. But that wasn’t the point of my post, or of sending that paper and article from OurWorldInData - which is well-sourced and based on countless different studies. It’s simply to debunk the claim that we are harming more plants or more of the environment by being vegan. It’s clear based on the laws of thermodynamics and our entire scientific understanding of how biology and agriculture work, in addition to specific evidence regarding plant & crop use & deforestation & climate change etc in animal agriculture, that significantly more plants are harmed by a life based on animal exploitation than a life based on using plants directly.
Even if the mass animal breeding/exploitation/subjugation/killing of animals was environmentally sustainable, it would violate the ethical principles of The Satanic Temple as well as those entailed by the values underlying human rights - as animal rights/sentient rights are a logical extension of human rights principles. If human slavery was better for the environment, and abolishing it was somehow worse, it still would be morally obligatory to not knowingly & unnecessarily participate in human slavery while it was legal. The same can be argued for animal exploitation today, though we do know it’s significantly better for the environment, climate & overall planet - regardless of nitpicking one particular study, the biggest of its kind, there are countless others echoing the same findings.
Joseph Poore’s quote was with The Guardian in 2018 who he spoke to regarding the paper. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth#%3A~%3Atext=“A+vegan+diet+is+probably%2CUK%2C+who+led+the+research.
Again, this is the biggest study that’s ever been done on the environmental impact of food systems, it’s a peer reviewed study and it’s been accepted by the larger scientific community, and what it says aligns with the broader scientific consensus of many other studies. Even the United Nations and IPCC have agreed we need to shift to plant based diets to avoid the worst effects of climate change and ecological collapse - I know, authorities can be wrong, but the data doesn’t lie.
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century Michael B. Eisen, Patrick O. Brown https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pclm.0000010 https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/02/new-model-explores-link-animal-agriculture-climate-change https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pclm.0000010 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22905381/meat-dairy-eggs-climate-change-emissions-rewilding
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/5/1/kgae024/7942019
“Without changing human diets, it’s impossible to halt global warming” “Researchers have shown that even when accounting for future improvements in agriculture and reductions in food waste, shifting the diets of consumers toward plant-based foods remains essential for meeting climate targets.” - Richard Waite & Daniel Vennard, World Resources Institute
Study finds that all dietary patterns cause more GHG emissions than the 1.5 degrees global warming limit allows. Only the vegan diet was in line with the 2 degrees threshold, while all other dietary patterns trespassed the threshold partly to entirely. See “How Compatible Are Western European Dietary Patterns to Climate Targets? Accounting for Uncertainty of Life Cycle Assessments by Applying a Probabilistic Approach” - MDPI, by Johanna Ruett, Lena Hennes, Jens Teubler and Boris Braun. Institute of Geography, University of Cologne, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. Sustainability journal, 2022. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/21/14449 “All dietary pattern carbon footprints overshoot the 1.5 degrees threshold. The vegan, vegetarian, and diet with low animal-based food intake were predominantly below the 2 degrees threshold. Omnivorous diets with more animal-based product content trespassed them. Reducing animal-based foods is a powerful strategy to decrease emissions. However, further mitigation strategies are required to achieve climate goals.”
Vegetarian and especially vegan diets have consistently been shown to cause the least climate impact in the Nordic modelling studies (25,29,33,54,60) (Table 1). https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Yearly-per-capita-carbon-footprint-associated-with-each-diet-scenario_fig2_334861515
In the sensitivity analysis, the environmental footprint of vegan diets is between 5% (CH4) and 38% (water use) of the footprint of high meat-eaters. For low meat-eaters, the impact is between 37% (land use) and 67% (water use) of high meat-eaters. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w#%3A~%3Atext=In+the+sensitivity+analysis%2C+the,)%20of%20high%20meat%2Deaters.
Scientific facts over beliefs? Or beliefs over scientific facts? Which is it going to be?
So, do you think that if we care about plants, we should harm significantly more plants (upwards of 10x as much directly harvested to produce products of animal exploitation, & much more indirectly in land-clearing & maintenance & environmental/climate devastation of animal agriculture), than if we just used them directly?
That said, I would prioritize animals over plants (not that we actually need to, since helping/respecting one helps/respects the other, so the point is moot), because I value sentience/subjective experience, and I do think plants most likely aren’t sentient (though I didn’t say this before now, just that there’s no reason to believe they are and every reason/much more reason to know most animals are sentient) because that’s the general scientific consensus, and because there isn’t any meaningful evidence that they are or could be sentient. I don’t believe in things without evidence, so I don’t believe in plant sentience just like I don’t believe in a higher power, or invisible fairies that I can’t prove don’t exist, or Russel’s teapot (look it up). “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”. That isn’t to say it’s false, but with the current information, the belief hasn’t been justified, so I will remain agnostic on any kind of firm belief with regards to plant sentience unless something upends our understanding of biology - which is possible, but again, being vegan would still be the best thing we can do, short of future food systems that could be entirely 3D printed/lab grown/etc. And right now, we know animals are sentient. The same credence doesn’t exist for plants.
You didn’t respond to any of my arguments, and are now just making ad hominems. Ok, I enjoy eating delicious & healthy plant-based foods, which I know are also far more sustainable, efficient, & ethical, including being lower-impact on plants themselves and animals/sentient beings. So what? This isn’t about me. It’s about the arguments against animal exploitation. You don’t need to have my username to be vegan. I don’t think you’re engaging seriously.
Are you really acting in the spirit of reason, scientific understanding, empathy and compassion to dismiss the avoidable suffering & misinfortune of non-human sentient animals at human hands by attempting to frame the ethical choice as hypocritical simply because it can’t be perfect despite being significantly better than the alternative?
I also never said plants weren’t including in all “living things”. Not all living things are necessarily sentient. Animals are. We don’t know that plants are. And a lot more plants are harmed by being carnist than being vegan, in addition to confirmed sentient animals being exploited, killed & having their interests violated - opportunistically & unnecessarily.
Veganism is inherently about sentience - it’s concerned with non-human animals by proxy of their sentience. If we discovered other sentient entities, such as sentient AI, the values underlying veganism/animal rights would be extended to include them in the circle of moral concern as well, and we would avoid harming them as much as we could, and not deliberately/opportunistically & unnecessarily exploit & victimize them either - and if there is an option by which we can reduce harm to them even lacking evidence of sentience, as long as it didn’t sacrifice beings we know to be sentient (humans and non-human animals), we should choose that too, to err on the side of the precautionary principle, which many vegans and sentientists employ. We’re already doing that by consuming plants directly instead of growing, harvesting, clearing & destroying much more plants, land & environment for animal agriculture. Sentientism is essentially a future-proofed definition of veganism that gets down to the underlying axioms of why sentience/subjective experience matters.
Veganism ( https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism ):
“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”
is more or less equivalent to Sentientism ( https://sentientism.info/ ) :
“Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings”.
Which sounds a lot like the first Tenet of The Satanic Temple to me.
I believe atheist YouTuber GeneticallyModifiedSkeptic identifies as a sentientist, but is what other people would call vegan: https://youtu.be/oQ1TJ7oUMHg
https://sentientism.info/what-is-sentientism/an-overview
"When it comes to working out what to believe and how confidently to believe, Sentientism suggests we should use evidence and reasoning. That naturalistic approach is an alternative to holding faith-based, arbitrary or unchangeable, dogmatic beliefs.
As we think about “who matters?” Sentientism suggests we should have moral consideration and compassion for every sentient being – any being capable of experiencing, particularly experiencing suffering or flourishing. Roughly speaking, that means human and non-human animals, but other types of artificial or alien being might conceivably one day be sentient too. Having moral consideration for someone at the very least means we wouldn’t needlessly exploit, harm or kill them."
Lol, nice strawman. I never said plants didn’t matter. You can care about humans and other animals as well as plants and the environment. It’s not either-or.
What you said is the typical knee-jerk response to the arguments for animal rights/veganism (or one of the about 10 different vegan bingo cards), so common that it’s been termed as the “ad plantarum fallacy” - appealing to plants.
There are 2 main reasons this argument fails. 3 depending on what your exact reasoning is - that is, if you acknowledge it’s better to thrive on plant based foods than to unnecessarily exploit animals, but you insist that that option isn’t optimal or beneficial simply because it isn’t perfect and nothing ever can be, that’s a nirvana fallacy of letting perfection be the enemy of the good.
1 of the 2 main responses is to acknowledge the scientific consensus that at least the majority of non-human animals (and yes, humans are animals) are sentient, since they demonstrate the mechanistic (brains & central nervous systems) and behavioral evidence that is expected & consistent with them being sentient beings. Plants lack any such features, and speculation about their possible sentience remains pseudoscientific, quite heavily debunked in multiple papers, ignores the burden of proof, & fails to substantiate any of its claims or provide a mechanistic explanation for how they could be sentient. Furthermore, even if we acknowledge science doesn’t always have all the answers, we know with as much certainty as we can know anything, that the non-human animals we exploit & kill unnecessarily are conscious, feel pain, have thoughts, emotions, feelings, interests, etc. and we lack the same evidence for plants. So by default it’s more reasonable to prioritize animals - or any entities we know are sentient - over plants on that basis. Most already intuitively - including young children - understand why it’s more compassionate to eat a plant than it is to hurt an animal. And in a house fire, no one is going to be saving the houseplant over the dog - for good reason. The dog is known to be sentient and we understand that dog has a similar experience to us - and a subjective experience, period.
That all said, even if we thought plants and animals were equal in moral value, being vegan would still be logically entailed as the most morally preferable option. We harm a lot more plants by farming/exploiting & killing animals, in most cases unnecessarily, than by simply farming plants to feed humans directly. The caloric conversation rate of turning plants into animals is inefficient due to the the second law, which states that energy is lost at each trophic level, resulting in a decrease in energy availability as you move up the food chain. Therefore we ultimately grow and feed much more plants to feed non-human animals than if we just consumed/used them ourselves, & used the land to prioritize nutritious plant based crops & foods, and other products like clothing, textiles & medicines, we can make from them. Clearing and maintaining the land required to grow food for, feed, house, farm, & “process” non-human animals to create commodities, foods & clothing products from their bodies, also causes more deforestation than any other industry on the planet. People point to crops without realizing the vast majority of many of these crops - and in all cases much more crops than would be needed if we just used them directly ourselves - are grown as livestock feed, and huge amounts of land is cleared to grow them as well as for pastureland & animal farming infrastructure. This causes significant destruction to natural habitats & ecosystems, species extinctions & biodiversity loss, & pollution, in turn greatly reduces carbon sequestration potential of the environment and exacerbates greenhouse gas emissions and climate change and wreaks upon the natural world, including organisms of all kinds - sentient or otherwise - animals, plants, fungi, algae, bacteria, etc. If you really cared about any of these organisms - especially animals or plants - you would be vegan to reduce your harm to all of them.
Some sources:
“Plants Tho”:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33196907/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1360138519301268
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32880005/
https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol8/iss33/15/
Do we harm more plants/environment? No, much less:
“ A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car. ”
- Oxford University lead researcher Joseph Poore in a report published in Science journal in 2018, the largest ever analysis of food systems, compiled by Poore, a researcher at the University of Oxford, and Thomas Nemecek, who studies the lifecycle of food at Swiss research institute Agroscope.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 / https://josephpoore.com/Science 360 6392 987 - Accepted Manuscript.pdf / https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29853680/
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In more precise terms, we have been granted, as a species, the key to ascend to what might be called a creator race. We possess the unique capacity to observe, understand, and influence the intricate exchanges that govern all living things. With this knowledge, we can elevate our existence, crafting a future that benefits all.
Just wondering, you say here that we have the ability and know-how to basically control (or steward) all of nature and all the life that exists within it. You then say that using this knowledge, we can elevate ourselves (presumably implying humanity), but then also “crafting a future that benefits all”. Is this all referring to just the human species, or to all sentient/conscious beings (meaning at least the majority of non-human animals in addition to humans)? Surely to have the ability to help all “living things” but to only help ourselves would be an abuse of power, no? Especially if what came with neglecting to help the other individuals we coexist with was a sense of entitlement to dominate them for being somehow inferior to us, in an arbitrary way that we likely wouldn’t apply to members of our own species that exhibited the same characteristics that we based the reasoning or justification for these actions on. Just checking 🤔
Veganism/animal rights
Is that the one Natalie Fulton is endorsing?
Also just saying, if you think TST are cool based on these tenets (which I do too, I just wish they were more consistent in following them), then it makes little sense to not think veganism/animal rights/sentientism is cool too, since we literally share all the same values - hell, “Evidence, reason and compassion for sentient beings” is a definition of sentientism (which is basically the same or an extension of the philosophy of veganism/animal rights) that almost sounds like the first tenet of TST verbatim (“One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason”), which I find very interesting (regardless of differing interpretations of the word “creatures”). Reading the TST tenets as a vegan is a perfect fit. It almost sounds like it’s describing our entire worldview (though you can be a vegan who is also spiritual/religious, so not necessarily every vegan’s worldview [regarding the focus on science of Tenet V], but most vegans are secular/atheist and very pro-science, evidence, critical thinking, logic & reason etc - and compassion/empathy/respect/moral duty to treat others well (including non-human animals/sentient beings) - and all the other tenets I would say match every ethical vegan).