Be civil and follow principle of charity in the comments.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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    2 hours ago

    Most people don’t use critical reasoning to make their decisions, hence why most people live their lives in a state of constant contradictions.

    My old philosophy professor once told us that the most effective way to expose somebody’s lack of critical reasoning about an issue is to just respond with, “who says?”

    Basically the Socratic method, ask them to justify the statements they make, and see how they respond. The vast majority of the time, you’ll quickly find out that they don’t have any good reasons to support their statements. They haven’t given them much thought at all, nor much thought to differing views/positions. They live their lives in ways that feel generally “correct” or pleasurable to them, and that’s it.

    Why do they think it’s alright to eat factory farmed meat? Because they like the taste, the thought of billions of animals living short, miserable lives, then being slaughtered and processed for us to consume doesn’t horrify or disgust them, so they keep doing it.

    Most people when challenged on it will put up some vague attempt to support their actions, “Other animals do it to each other, so why not us?” “Animals don’t have sophisticated minds, so it doesn’t actually cause them real suffering.” “Humans need animal protein to be healthy.” etc. All terribly weak arguments that are easily refuted. But most people don’t care, because most societies normalize meat consumption and factory farming. They grew up eating meat with other people eating meat all around them, and they never gave it any thought.

    Hence why most pet owners who eat meat would be absolutely horrified and disgusted if their dog or cat had a litter and somebody bought all of the puppies/kittens, only to torture, slaughter, and eat them. A completely inconsistent reaction given the fact that the pet owner happily eats other animals that are treated in the same way. But again, they didn’t reason themselves into their viewpoint, so they don’t worry about being consistent.

    This is further confirmed by anecdotes from vegetarians/vegans, who will tell you about all the awkward, unprompted reactions from meat-eaters when they find out they don’t eat meat. Many people get very defensive, often making snide or accusatory remarks about vegetarianism/veganism. They don’t like the idea that eating factory meat is morally wrong, because they like the taste and don’t want to make to effort to change their lifestyle to confirm with that moral principle. So they mock, tease, or try to “expose” inconsistencies in the vegetarian/vegan’s own worldview as a defense mechanism.

    If they can make the vegetarian/vegan look foolish, then that feels like a win psychologically to them, which provides mental and emotional comfort and allows them to slip back into their lifestyle without needing to confront their own moral failings.

    • Victoria Antoinette @lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      “Other animals do it to each other, so why not us?” “Animals don’t have sophisticated minds, so it doesn’t actually cause them real suffering.” “Humans need animal protein to be healthy.” etc. All terribly weak arguments that are easily refuted.

      if you care to articulate these refutations, i’d be fascinated to see how strong your arguments are.

  • Mulligrubs@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    It’s like how soldier rapists are bad, but soldier murderers get a medal.

    Humans are fundamentally absurd, no exceptions

  • communism@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    Because they benefit from eating animals (they enjoy eating them) whereas they don’t benefit from having sex with animals (they don’t enjoy having sex with animals).

  • Cam@scribe.disroot.org
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    5 hours ago

    If you need for survival to hunt and eat an animal you are just part of the ecosystem, a predator.
    Do you need to have sex with another species? In the wild it happens and even rape is natural, but the question could be “would you like to live in a human society like that?”.

    That said, animal farming is unethical and completely unnecessary nowadays. Most people would agree that killing an animal just for pleasure would be ethically wrong, but then we as a society rape to breed, grow in terrible conditions and kill in nightmarish ways farm animals just because “meat is good”.

  • Art3mis@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    This is exactly why many indigenous cultures put an emphasis on thanking the animal for their meat.

  • graphene@sopuli.xyz
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    11 hours ago

    There is no logical consistency except what allows the continued survival and flourishing of life and the human race.

    Having sex with animals could get you sick and cause all sorts of problems. Eating animals on the other hand can extend your life beyond a few days and perhaps even into years after you can no longer drink your mother’s milk and has very few downsides, especially with the invention of cooking. Sure, we don’t need the source of sustenance that is meat today when we have several times more food than is necessary to feed the whole globe and then throw a lot of it away, but this wasn’t true for the vast majority of our history. People only a few hundred years ago had to scrape for every protein they could find.

    There’s no special moral reason because we didn’t decide. It’s just an instinct, though one that we can examine and ignore if we want.

  • teyrnon@sh.itjust.works
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    11 hours ago

    A number of US states agree with op here, some it’s legal to have sex with animals within limits, anything over 20 pounds rings a bell for one, alabama maybe. They might have changed those laws because they were getting made fun of idk.

    • CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Most of the states that were ok with it changed after Washington State, which use to have the most permissive laws about this for whatever reason, really buckled down after that guy “Mr Hands” died from a horse

  • myszka@lemmy.ml
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    11 hours ago

    While klling an animal for food is sure destructive for the animal, it is constructive for the humanity. It allows us to get all those proteins “for free” instead of producing them ourselves from plants like herbivores do and invest the saved energy in our intelligence to create beautiful and complex things. Whereas copulating with an animal is pure destruction. It harms the living being and leads to no babies and no emotional bond strengthening (contrary to human sex).

    Eating animal is still a contradiction, because destruction is there. So I think this problem does need to be somehow overcome. But at least it’s outweighed by its positive effects, unlike zoophilia.

    • pineapple@lemmy.ml
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      37 minutes ago

      We literally grow food to feed to animals. And then we have to spend time hearding the animals moving. Slaughtering is a decently evolved process (I think). They don’t give us the meet for free, we have to put effort to take it.

    • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
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      8 hours ago

      producing them ourselves from plants like herbivores do

      This bit is nonsense. I’ll give you a point for meat consumption being an easy source of protein that allowed for some developments during the evolution of humans, that are unlikely to have happened without it. But that is more a question of availability than nutritious properties. In todays surplus society, where we have industrialized agriculture and optimized crops, there is abundant access to plant protein.
      And meat is not a unique source of protein either. First of all, you don’t even have to eat meat to obtain animal protein. Eggs and dairy have it too. And when it comes to the constitution of protein, eggs were even considered the gold standard for a long time.

      Read the following wikipedia article to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_digestibility_corrected_amino_acid_score

      The listed examples should be interesting to you.

      While meats are indeed easily digestable and contain useful protein for the human body, so do many plant sources. Soy protein is even on par with eggs, while meats don’t reach the same score.
      And of course we usually don’t eat a single source of protein, and combining different sources, their amino acid profiles can complement each other to form a complete source of protein.

      This might’ve been a bit of a ramble on a side-note when it comes to discussing the ethics of fucking animals, but I’m sure the discussion benefits from getting the facts straight.

  • Pacrana@mujico.org
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    11 hours ago

    It’s simple, actually.

    The number of people who like to eat animals is larger than the number people who like to, that.

    • mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml
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      2 hours ago

      On a significant level this is basically it.

      I don’t believe moral facts exist and so every permissible behaviour ultimately is affected by societal expectations as well as individual inclination.

      People clutch pearls over anything and everything but it’s interesting to observe how what was a pearl clutching behaviour previously (I.e. showing some ankle in Victorian era England) is now not even a concern.

  • Fleppensteyn@sh.itjust.works
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    14 hours ago

    People raping and killing for their own enjoyment is sick. Someone else doing the dirty work for our enjoyment (i.e. eating meat), well that’s different. If somehow zoophilia were proven to enhance meat flavor, we’d probably be OK with it

    • when@lemmy.worldOP
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      13 hours ago

      Thanks for taking this question in purely analytical manner and questioning the conflicting social values. There are many comments here which tries to answer the question but get engaged into sense of social shame and prejudice rather than focusing into the logical consistency with given premise.

    • LwL@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Artificial semination is key to commercial animal agriculture, and that too would be unambiguously rape in human standards. Not to mention the horrific living conditions of most animals farmed for meat.

      It’s really just because one has always been normal, and the other hasn’t, aka it’s cultural. It’s not rational. Though there’s also arguably far more benefit in killing for meat vs. having sex with dubious consent, so that can be a consideration that isn’t purely cultural.

    • when@lemmy.worldOP
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      14 hours ago

      Thanks for acknowledging the inconsistencies within social values and showing optimism for the ideal outcome.

  • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶@lemmy.nz
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    18 hours ago

    False premise. Zoophilia isn’t condemned because animal rights etc. It’s condemned because ‘ew WTF we don’t want people doing that, to the extent that we will make laws against it.’

    It’s the same reason that we have laws against incest. Had laws against homosexuality.

    I’m not saying it should be allowed because we (some of us) grew up and realised that laws against homosexuality were stupid. Just that, that is the reason. Collective societal disgust. It’s only justified by using animal rights (and rightly so, because EW) the same way we justified antihomo laws because it goes against some obscure biblical / Koranic rule.

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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      1 hour ago

      It’s the same reason that we have laws against incest. Had laws against homosexuality.

      I don’t think this is right. We have laws against incest, because we were programmed by evolution to think incest is bad. The causal chain is:

      1. Incest lowers survival rates,
      2. Evolution causes humans to find incest disgusting to increase survival rates,
      3. Humans create laws to abolish incest because they find it disgusting.

      Homosexuality is not like that at all, if I understand correctly (which I may not, tbf). Homosexuality may in fact be a evolutionary trait that is selected for in a certain sense, or it may just be a side-effect of other evolutionary efforts. For instance, having a homosexual uncle could be beneficial to you, as he would spend less time taking care of his own kids (obviously won’t have any) and more time taking care of you. The uncle’s genes would have no incentive to do this and evolution would not pressure the uncle to become homosexual, but your common ancestor (your grandparents on one side) would benefit as your genes would be helped along by your uncle, and so evolution could have caused homosexuality to occur ever so often, to produce one of these “helpful uncles”.

    • einkorn@feddit.org
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      17 hours ago

      It’s the same reason that we have laws against incest.

      I’d argue it’s also the fact that because of the low genetic diversity of the parents children born from incest have a higher chance of developing genetical diseases.

      The chance is lower than most people presume but at the same time: why gamble?

        • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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          1 hour ago

          Humans may not have consciously known that incest was bad, but evolution made us think so before we were even humans. All animals avoid incest, not just humans. We only created those laws and customs because evolution already made us believe that incest is bad. It’s pre-programmed in us, so to speak.

      • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works
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        12 hours ago

        What about same sex incest, or where one or both partners are sterile, or between adopted siblings who aren’t related genetically? That would still be considered wrong, right? Even though there wouldn’t be genetic consequences

        • einkorn@feddit.org
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          12 hours ago

          Personally? IDGF about what two consenting adults do in bed. My only objection is when it comes to children being born from incest because of the higher risk of genetic diseases.

          between adopted siblings who aren’t related genetically?

          Don’t know where you from but AFAIK that’s perfectly legal in Germany.

          • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
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            7 hours ago

            My only objection is when it comes to children being born from incest because of the higher risk of genetic diseases.

            But that’s still not a 100% consistent argument and it leans into another morally complex topic: eugenics.

            Because, if you argue that way, you’d have to clarify your stance towards people with genetic diseases/disabilities in general.

            And if you follow the logic, we would also have to shun/abolish sexual relations between people with genetic disease or who carry the respective alleles, so that their offspring have a higher chance of inheriting a disease (in some cases way higher than with random siblings).

            It might be the root cause, why there seem to be marriage rules in most human societies, that exclude intermarrying of siblings (especially considering that the risks increase drastically if you keep procreating that way for generations), but the current taboo is not entirely rational and seems more based on cultural tradition than current understanding.

            • einkorn@feddit.org
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              4 hours ago

              Again, personally: As I have one confirmed genetically transmitted condition and one suspected genetically transmitted condition this is a dilemma close to my heart and TBF I haven’t reached a final conclusion for myself yet. On one hand I think it is unethical to conceive a child knowing full well, that they have a considerable higher risk of disease, and yet I don’t think GATTACA was meant as an instruction manual. As so often in life the answer is somewhere in the middle.

      • Azzu@leminal.space
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        17 hours ago

        Yes but that is also a rationalization after the fact. First, it was ew, then we figured out that there were also rational reasons against it.

        • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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          3 hours ago

          First, it was ew, then we figured out that there were also rational reasons against it.

          Well, actually, it’s the other way around. Evolutionary speaking, there was a disavantage to inbreeding, so the “ew” evolved because of that. We think inbreeding is wrong because evolution taught us that it lowers the chance of survival for our offspring.

          • MrOtingocni@lemmy.world
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            1 hour ago

            Actually, that’s assigning too much rational complexity to a blind system. Less the aversion to inbreeding and more the selection of genetic robustness of external mate mingling. To a certain degree.

            The histocompatibility of another gauged through smell and taste (i.e. kissing) ensures a preference for a certain degree of separation from one’s genetic pool to ensure protection from local viral and bacterial adversaries. But not too far away! Or it is too alien and doesn’t confer the advantages of mixed immunities.

            The ‘ew’ factor is just the societal reinforcement of the Westermarck effect. While surely there is some genetic component at play there it appears to be primarily motivated by the primate social adaptation system.

            This can be seen by studying peer groups. Even people far removed from one’s genetic pool will feel like icky siblings if they are raised together. Conversely, many cases of siblings and other relations separated at birth who later meet and fall in love/have relations.

            Edit: link for the curious. Fascinating stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect

            • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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              1 hour ago

              While surely there is some genetic component at play there it appears to be primarily motivated by the primate social adaptation system.

              This seems like a strange argument, because “the primate social adaptation system” is also ultimately governed by evolution. Obviously a primate group with a social tendency towards incest would have worse survival rates than a primate group with a social aversion to incest, and that social fabric definitely is tied to evolution (unless you mean to imply that our social fabric did not arise from evolution, but I don’t think that’s what you’re saying).

              Also, I don’t see how this can have anything in particular to do with primates and their social constructs as incest is avoided by all animals, as far as I am aware. It is not a purely human or primate thing, incest is bad for all animals and so they have all evolved via evolution to avoid it. I’d say the Westermarck effect is just the result of that evolution - obviously humans can’t directly read genetic code, so the mind assumes that whoever you grew up with must be your close relatives, and that’s good enough of a signal in 99% of cases, so that’s what evolution went with.

              • MrOtingocni@lemmy.world
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                36 minutes ago

                The point I am making is that there isn’t a aversion away from something, there is simply a preference towards something. We don’t eat wood chips and don’t like the way they taste, not because they are bad for us, but rather because we would rather eat potato chips. The potato chips are more advantageous to our survival. This may seem I am splitting hairs but it’s important to make that distinction because the following arguments are based on such distinctions and it’s important to assign the correct motivation to our evolutionary drives.

                It’s not that our blind systems somehow know that screwing our siblings makes disadvantaged babies (which it doesn’t know that and nor does it compared to mating with someone with a more prominent genetic issue- at least not for the first few generations) it doesn’t code that far ahead for cause and effect. It only instills a preference for slightly exogenous mates to confer immunity advantages.

                The Westermarck effect shows strong evidence for a higher (socially speaking) system influencing our mate preference BECAUSE it can be “circumvented” by the evidence that even siblings raised away from each other show no inhibitions towards mating. If there were purely a genetic aversion towards inbreeding there wouldn’t be a statistically significant event of long lost relatives copulating. I’m stretching a bit on the statical significance but it happens often enough to be reported on.

                Also, inbreeding is very common in the animal kingdom. Less between direct descendants, like mother/child, but on the whole most creatures make little distinction between relations. Which makes sense if the options are mate with your brood or potentially die without performing our evolutionary imperative command of passing on our genes.

                https://theconversation.com/incest-isnt-a-taboo-in-the-animal-kingdom-new-study-160937

                • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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                  31 minutes ago

                  We don’t eat wood chips and don’t like the way they taste, not because they are bad for us, but rather because we would rather eat potato chips.

                  I’m sorry but I find this premise completely ridiculous - obviously we don’t like how they taste because they are bad for us. Evolution isn’t only about preference, it’s also about avoiding stuff, like poison or rotten food or woodchips or whatever. I don’t think we can come to an agreement on such a premise.

            • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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              1 hour ago

              You can’t really definitively prove a theory like that I think. I’m no biologist so I’m not an expert by any means, but we can’t go back in time to see why evolution did what it did. We can only guess from what we have right now.

              That said, such an “ew” response to incest surely is not just coincidence. It must have arose for a reason, just like all of our emotions evolved for a reason. For example, we also experience disgust when smelling or tasting rotten milk, because drinking rotten stuff is bad for survival too, so evolution made us have that response, because it would lower the chance of us drinking spoiled milk. There’s nothing “inherently disgusting” about incest or spoiled milk. We only find those things disgusting because they are bad, evolutionarily speaking.

              And btw this isn’t restricted to humans obviously, all animals avoid having offspring with their close family, so this is a very deep-rooted behavior.

        • ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml
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          16 hours ago

          It’s been the norm in many countries for centuries, so can’t have been seen as EW as you claim