What is life?

[turil]

So, animal rights and veganism are primarily about respecting and valuing life. But what is life? Why is it so special that we want to give living things certain basic rights

Comments

[roboticminotaur]

Vegans do draw a line between beings that deserve moral consideration and those that don't. Often meateaters will jump on this point and claim that vegans are arbitrarily priveleging some life forms over others. Vegans typically respond by trying to say what it is about animals that makes them worthy of special treatment. I think this is the wrong way to respond to the challenge (or, at least, definitely not the only way to respond).

The challenge is that veganism draws an arbitrary moral line among types of life. The response I prefer to give is that maybe it does and maybe it doesn't; but either way, vegans are in the same boat as omnivores on this issue. Put another way: meateaters draw the same line as vegans, so if vegans are arbitrary, then so are meateaters; equivalently, if meateaters are not arbitrary, then neither are vegans.

Meateaters eat meat; but they're not completely wanton about their treatment of animals. Meateaters (I'm speaking generally here, obviously there are some exceptions) believe that some forms of animal cruelty are morally wrong. Even meateaters agree that it is wrong to flay a baby cow to death purely for the fun of watching it suffer. (Even though I'm speaking generally about "meateaters" here, I usually give this response in terms of the individual person challenging me: that is, "YOU believe that it's wrong to flay a baby cow to death for fun, don't you, random meateater?")

That is a form of moral consideration that meateaters give to cows. They give it to cows... but not to tomatoes. Not to dandelions. Etc. So in the end the average meateater draws the exact same moral line as the vegan as to which beings deserve moral consideration and which don't. The vegan and the omnivore disagree about what that moral consideration requires of us. Vegans think it means we can't raise them for food; omnivores disagree. But we both agree that cows deserve moral consideration, and tomatoes don't.

So the challenge is misguided; it cannot show vegans to be either more or less arbitrary than omnivores. It tries to put an argumentative burden on vegans that we shouldn't have to bear, since we are no different from omnivores in the line we draw between which beings deserve moral consideration and which don't.

[ugly_fruit]

this is a very interesting arguement, thanks for posting it.