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I'll begin... I'm a vegetarian and just for fun I decided to start this thread... I'm not strongly opposed to any diet, I just like to discuss things. Please don't let any emotions get in the way!
This is just for fun and for the sake of discussion.
I'll start by quoting TheAnimus from another thread...
Just because there are people starving, doesn't mean it is immoral for people not to starve.Originally Posted by TheAnimus
Morality is a matter of personal feelings, something only the individual can understand about themself.
For example, I feel bad about all of the poverty and death in the world, and I do what I can to help those whom I can. If one person helped one other person, then every person would be helped (unless there's an odd number of people, in which case one person would have to help two people.) But in theory this is how it should be. For those who need help, there are government funds to help them, and billions being donated in their cause. Although, I don't see how that has anything to do with a vegetarian diet.
Vegetables and fruits yield more food per square kilometer than meat. If there were more demand for vegetables (say, due to a larger number of vegetarians...), then world hunger could be fought better equipped. The problem is not due to individual morality but large-scale political purposes. The governments simply don't do enough to help these people.
You say the "moral-vegie" argument is "de-railed" by that analysis, but I don't see how it has anything to do with a vegetarian's morality. I cannot feed 1.8 billion starving people, if I could, I would. I can, however, feed 1-2 at least... And I do by giving money to charity.
It's easy to see that cutting a living creature's throat, letting it bleed out, and then eating its flesh for sustenance is unnecessary when you can survive perfectly well off of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. It is causing unnecessary harm.
However, I'll propose an argument against vegetarians that actually works, as opposed to the one that you made which doesn't.
Every living creatures existence, whether plant or animal, has such a finite perceivable purpose that it is irrelevant, from a large-scale-perspective, what happens to said creature.
If you zoom out and look at the entire universe from beginning to the distant future, life flashes before your eyes. Everyone and everything is born, and then dies just as quick. So with that mind frame you can easily kill animals, who don't speak your language and cannot ask you to stop, and eat them. If you don't, they would die any ways and you would've wasted an opportunity to eat fresh meat, and now it will rot and be left to scavengers.
So with this argument, it's taking the "cycle of life" theory, which shows that all creatures are born, and then are either eaten, killed, or die of "natural" causes... and then the cycle starts over again... So no matter what you eat, or don't eat, in the end it doesn't matter because everything has the same fate.
However, as intelligent humans with the ability to perceive suffering and to comprehend it to the extent of being able to alter the circumstances of said sufferer... we should not hasten to take such a world-view, unless we want to stagnate our beautiful evolutionary progress.
We would have to regress to becoming just like any other animal on the planet, in order for that argument to be proper. We would have to say that we're simply animals and it doesn't matter what happens to other species, so long as our species is #1...
But there's other animals who are cannibals... Should we be cannibals? Why or why not? We perceive it as evil, but if you open this chapter, then nothing is "evil" it's just a matter of survival, and the "cycle".
So you either have a limit, or you have no limit...
If you're going to have a limit, then you'll run into all sorts of issues. If you have no limit, then nobody can really argue with you, because you're just an animal who lives to die.
However, with limits, you live to hopefully prosper and help to achieve some sort of purpose in life.
Many people feel that their purpose is to try to put an end to suffering. Something that can never truly be done, but something that should be attempted none-the-less. Can you think of any other genuine purpose in life?
There's only so much we can do... eat/sleep/drink/poop/mate/die/sports/watch tv/games/travel/learn... Learning is something we all neglect very much, yet even those who neglect it still learn something new virtually every day.
If you can physically kill an animal yourself and cut its flesh and then cook it and eat it, or not cook it, and just eat it, then you qualify to be a rational meat-eater... But if you can't do it yourself, then why do you eat meat? If you see something wrong with it, personally, then why eat meat?
I don't know of anyone short of a psychopath who can kill another human and eat them. Why should we treat animals differently? Would you eat your dog, or your cat? Why not? They are meat just the same as cows and pigs and chickens...
So the moral dilemma is not with the vegetarian who tries their best to put an end to suffering, but with one who says they'll put an end to suffering yet has a bundle of it in their fridge.
