Seriously, where are 99% of the life begins at conception people on the meat industry?
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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It's racism. They think human lives are more important than other races.
Yes, exactly. The complexity of the human soul is uncomparable to the basic impulses of any animal.
Embryos don't have souls. The soul develops during the third trimester.
If you can play music into your belly and get a kick, that thing has a soul. But there's a lot of time where it's not that developed.
Poor choice of words on my part, perhaps. Maybe, if I chose "mind, instead of the more poetic word "soul" people would not reply about how an embryo is not ensouled.
But please tell me, was your original comment about racism towards animals sarcastic? It is sometimes hard to tell, and it seems almost like a position someone would hold.
I'm genuinely a vegan because I think racism is wrong.
Single cells don't have a mind either. Minds are made of neurons. An embryo begins developing neural cells during the fifth week of development. That's just a few neurons, though, not a full brain. A fetus doesn't get smart enough to process sounds until the late second. If a mind isn't even complex enough to process any sensory information, is it more deserving of life than a cow? Cows like to run in the grass and play. They have social relationships. Fetuses aren't that complex.
Obviously I am not talking about fetuses. I responded to the racism comment and the inner lives of people are generally not that complicated when tbey are in the womb. I am just using this as a reason to value humans over animals.
Also, minds are not made out of neurons, brains are.
If one human's inner life were more complex than another's, would you value their life more?
No, I wouldn't.
While humans and animals have inner worlds that are orders of magnitude apart in terms of complexity, I would say that most people feel more or less the same emotions, but of course some people are more self-actualised, but everyone has the potential for that, even if it is not realised.
And it is impossible to compare this complexity in practice, of course, as there are no criteria for measuring that. Also, every human is unique in a sense and is valuable precisely because of that.
Ultimately, our values are impossible to defend. We can either share them or not, I do not care much about the animals, you do, this is fine by me.
Then why do you believe there's a huge difference?
Impossible to compare between humans.
Animals are functioning clearly at a more primitive level than humans. You must surely agree to this.
I dunno. I haven't had a long enough conversation with one to tell. I'd rather be safe than sorry. Last time we assumed a group of beings were subhuman and enslaved them, it wasn't good.
Yes, because they are the same as us - humans.
Animals are not necessarily subhuman, but clearly not human.
I mean, I guess I could go into detail about the differences about the behavioir of animals and humans and what that tells about their intelligence and inner life, but I am not such a big fan of typing to be honest. I will only say that animal behaviour is simple enough to be predicted, ehy always act on the strongest impulse: whether it is food, sleep or whatever. But a human has a such complex network of character, desires, affect, beliefs, and emotions, that they can in a way that is impossible to predict. Can you imagine an animal starving itself to death deliberately? No, it would not be able to do that, as it's instincts would overpower anything else if it got sufficiently hungry. But we can have other reasons for that that we act upon.
Honestly, if I was a vegan, I would almost certainly not say thay animals are as complex as humans, as most people would probably(quite rightly) not agree. They are more primitive as a great deal of what makes us us is our complex social structures that no animal has(even highly social ones). We have meanings and values given to us by society, which animals do not have. We are capable of morality, animals are not. I am honestly tired of typing. I think the point is clear enough now that I can stop.
Species is made up bullshit. There's no such thing as humans.
Then there is no such thing as plants and there is no need to value a life of a pig over a life of a potato.
Potatoes don't have a nervous system. As far as we can tell, a nervous system is required to feel pain.