While I largely agree with your post, I did want to argue with:
On the other hand, we understand we are causing suffering to other beings in order to sustain ourselves. No matter how humane out treatment of such animals may become, it’s still something that we will struggle to accept, or that we will ignore outright to not have to struggle with the thought.
There is a third option. We accept that our continued existence is predicated on the death of other life forms and stop being bothered by it. You seem to have a foundation premise that people must be bothered by killing other living things. That’s an assumption on your part and one which doesn’t hold true for all others. This also comes up again in your post when you state:
I’m unable to kill, and I’m convinced I’d first die than kill even a chicken to survive (or if I do, the guilt will eat me alive), but I eat chicken every day and I will continue to do so until the day I die, even though there’s a strong cognitive dissonance there, since I can’t really do much about it without compromising my own nutrition in some way,
This is an expression of how that foundational assumption builds your moral system. You have drawn a line at the direct killing of another animal while being less clear about the line of allowing an animal to be killed. This isn’t a terribly surprising distinction, and is often explored via The Trolley Problem. Most people end up viewing allowing harm as less morally problematic as causing harm. Though, any hard lines are then exposed to be less hard by pushing the parameters of the problem about.
This is also one of the places where your base assumption clashed with one of my own assumptions: that outsourcing the killing of an animal for consumption is tantamount to killing it yourself. I don’t expect to convince you of that, nor do I expect that you’ll convert me any time soon. However, it’s useful to try to understand the positions of others and how they likely arrived at their beliefs. And this why I pointed out the line at the start of this response. You created a false dichotomy by which one must either give up meat or give up morality. There is a perfectly valid third option, which is, I don’t agree with your moral premise and therefore do not face such a dilemma.
You’re absolutely right and it is something I sometimes fail to account for since it nourishes hopelessness in me. I do, however, believe that such empathy is developed and not something you’re born with. You see it in varying degrees by how much someone cares for their families, friends, their community, and really even themselves. Some just care about themselves, some care about their peers but not their communities, and some don’t care about themselves but would bend over backwards for others. Empathy for lives beyond our own species is something that would be nurtured just like empathy for other humans is.
When I talk about our options as a species, I am inclined to believe that most of our species leans towards having empathic feelings for lives beyond our own species. It may just be a matter of hope that I’m reflecting on my comments, but it is also an evolutionary advantage for us to develop such empathy as we further develop our abilities to morph this world to our needs and wants, since we do depend on other species for almost everything.
Maybe I’m intertwining the necessities of our species with our individual feelings over those necessities, but I would believe this moral conflict would surface for most of us, with the level of such moral conflict varying greatly from person to person. My previous comment mostly wonders of the possibility that a great number of us start to develop such moral conflict over more than just domesticated species or cute mammals or such.
With regards to the trolley problem, you’re right. By me profiting from the atrocities of others, I’m a part of such atrocity. It’s a fact of more than just harvesting farm animals. It affects our economies, our climate, our biodiversity, our social norms and behaviors towards outsiders and minorities, as well as our digital lives. It’s a cop-out to just wash my hands from such actions and only hold myself responsible for my direct actions regardless of those of others that my benefit me, and that’s why I said it was a cognitive dissonance, one that I just have to live with of my own choosing.
While I largely agree with your post, I did want to argue with:
There is a third option. We accept that our continued existence is predicated on the death of other life forms and stop being bothered by it. You seem to have a foundation premise that people must be bothered by killing other living things. That’s an assumption on your part and one which doesn’t hold true for all others. This also comes up again in your post when you state:
This is an expression of how that foundational assumption builds your moral system. You have drawn a line at the direct killing of another animal while being less clear about the line of allowing an animal to be killed. This isn’t a terribly surprising distinction, and is often explored via The Trolley Problem. Most people end up viewing allowing harm as less morally problematic as causing harm. Though, any hard lines are then exposed to be less hard by pushing the parameters of the problem about.
This is also one of the places where your base assumption clashed with one of my own assumptions: that outsourcing the killing of an animal for consumption is tantamount to killing it yourself. I don’t expect to convince you of that, nor do I expect that you’ll convert me any time soon. However, it’s useful to try to understand the positions of others and how they likely arrived at their beliefs. And this why I pointed out the line at the start of this response. You created a false dichotomy by which one must either give up meat or give up morality. There is a perfectly valid third option, which is, I don’t agree with your moral premise and therefore do not face such a dilemma.
You’re absolutely right and it is something I sometimes fail to account for since it nourishes hopelessness in me. I do, however, believe that such empathy is developed and not something you’re born with. You see it in varying degrees by how much someone cares for their families, friends, their community, and really even themselves. Some just care about themselves, some care about their peers but not their communities, and some don’t care about themselves but would bend over backwards for others. Empathy for lives beyond our own species is something that would be nurtured just like empathy for other humans is.
When I talk about our options as a species, I am inclined to believe that most of our species leans towards having empathic feelings for lives beyond our own species. It may just be a matter of hope that I’m reflecting on my comments, but it is also an evolutionary advantage for us to develop such empathy as we further develop our abilities to morph this world to our needs and wants, since we do depend on other species for almost everything.
Maybe I’m intertwining the necessities of our species with our individual feelings over those necessities, but I would believe this moral conflict would surface for most of us, with the level of such moral conflict varying greatly from person to person. My previous comment mostly wonders of the possibility that a great number of us start to develop such moral conflict over more than just domesticated species or cute mammals or such.
With regards to the trolley problem, you’re right. By me profiting from the atrocities of others, I’m a part of such atrocity. It’s a fact of more than just harvesting farm animals. It affects our economies, our climate, our biodiversity, our social norms and behaviors towards outsiders and minorities, as well as our digital lives. It’s a cop-out to just wash my hands from such actions and only hold myself responsible for my direct actions regardless of those of others that my benefit me, and that’s why I said it was a cognitive dissonance, one that I just have to live with of my own choosing.