Hail Seitan!
There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets:
I - One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II - The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III - One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV - The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V - Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI - People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any
harm that might have been caused.
VII - Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Since in the modern age we can obtain all of the nutrition we need from a well-planned plant-based diet, by buying & consuming animal products, we participate in unnecessary cruelty to sentient beings
I can make an argument that being non-vegan in the modern age is violating all seven of these tenets
Tenet I : It’s neither reasonable, nor compassionate or empathetic, to needlessly exploit & take the life of a creature when we have moral agency & alternatives, unlike other animals.
Tenet II : It’s true that it’s legal to exploit & unalive animals today, but it was also legal to own slaves in the past. Just because we’re legally allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should.
Tenet III : One’s body being inviolable and subject to their own will alone should extend to all sentient beings. If it doesn’t, Name The Trait in a way that doesn’t lead to contradiction or absurdity
That is - Name The Trait different between humans and other animals that makes it okay to do things to other animals that we wouldn’t be okay with being done to humans.
I.e. justify the speciesist discrimination and double standard and differential treatment.
Tenet IV : We should be free to tell people they’re hypocrites for loving dogs & eating cows, or even for participating in the exploitative pet industry instead of adopting/rescuing companion animals.
Even if this is offensive to people. It’s freedom of speech and necessary for the activism and the struggle for justice that should prevail above laws and institutions (Tenet II).
To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of other sentient beings, is to forgo your own right to be respected like you would be if you first gave respect to other individuals (animals).
Tenet V : Insisting we need to eat meat or animal products to be healthy despite that disagreeing with scientific consensus, is distorting scientific facts to fit your beliefs,
& not conforming beliefs to your best scientific understanding of the world.
It’s denying reality,
burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the truth,
& living in ignorance & delusion & the willfull, unnecessary destruction & oppression of others, self, & planet.
Tenet VI : Assuming that we are already perfect & couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong or unjust, despite every historical society participating in normalized injustice, is not recognizing humans
are fallible.
And, when confronted with your mistake, in the form of what your kind have raised you to traditionally participate in regarding unnecessary systemic exploitation & violence to sentient beings,
if your response is to deflect, close your ears, & refuse to take personal responsibility or change any behavior, is to not do one’s best to rectify it & resolve any harm that might have been caused.
then that is to not right the wrong and fundamentally unjust relationship between humans and other animals and resolve it into one of harmonious and respectful coexistence.
Rather than one of needless exploitation, domination, violence, cruelty, and oppression.
Finally, Tenet VII : To claim that because these tenets do not specifically mention an obligation to not exploit & harm non-human animals unnecessarily & to be vegan, that means it isn’t entailed by
the values underlying them, is to not let every tenet serve as guiding principles designed to inspire nobility in action & thought & not allow the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice to prevail
over the written or spoken word.
it’s not clear this is the case, though
Denying basic physics now? Do you dispute the second law of thermodynamics or think you can magically subvert it using magical fantasy meat powers? Typical carnist cope.
https://weizmann.elsevierpure.com/en/publications/the-opportunity-cost-of-animal-based-diets-exceeds-all-food-losse
“This arises because plant-based replacement diets can produce 20-fold and twofold more nutritionally similar food per cropland than beef and eggs, the most and least resource-intensive animal categories, respectively.”
Plants to animals is an inherently inefficient conversion. When you swap animal products for nutritionally equivalent or similar plant foods, cropland productivity jumps: plant replacements can yield ~20× more food per acre than beef and ~2× more than eggs; the implied “opportunity losses” of using land for animal foods are huge (beef ~96%, pork ~90%, dairy ~75%, poultry ~50%, eggs ~40%). That means more plants have to be grown and harvested to support an animal-product diet than a plant-only one, all else equal.
And this isn’t even factoring in that most deforestation is caused by animal agriculture or the subsequent impacts that has on natural habitats, ecosystems, the climate, and the effect of global warming on all life on Earth.
It’s funny that for a group that claims to value scientific fact and not distorting it to suit your beliefs, that’s literally all you can do to attempt to justify how you obviously violate the first tenet of compassion to all creatures, and you clearly don’t actually care about the tenets since you don’t follow any of them.
no citation, probably bs.
These are calculations using data from the study I sent. Just because you don’t like facts doesn’t mean they’re automatically bs. You reject and deny literally any evidence put in your face, the sign of an insecure position.
the one that misused LCA data? definitely bs
No, you clearly didn’t read anything I said and are just dismissing everything by assuming it uses Poore and Nemecek (which did not misuse LCA data and is widely accepted by the larger scientific community, but even if it did, very similar findings are being echoed by many independent studies and reviews like this one), even though many of them don’t at all, and the ones that do also draw on other studies and their own findings too.
This PNAS study does not cite Poore & Nemecek (2018), nor does it depend on Poore & Nemecek’s data or methodology.
It’s an independent analysis, grounded in land-use and nutritional efficiency through linear programming, not life-cycle assessment (LCA) meta-analysis.
you are clearly not qualified to participate in this conversation if you think LCA studies can be combined
no.
why should deforestation be factored in at all? most farmland has been cleared for centuries.
Because deforestation is still happening at an alarming rate, most of it in the Amazon, and most of it for beef pastures and soy for livestock feed (humans consume a fraction of the soy produced, vegans an even smaller fraction (and soy is avoidable - there are soy-allergic vegans), and most of it doesn’t come from the Amazon when fed to humans). This is all going to increase as animal product consumption is currently increasing, not decreasing - though it’s decreasing in more developed countries as more humans who have already had the luxury of animal products for a long time have started to realize all the massive problems with them, and increasing in more developing countries and populations that are becoming wealthier and more able to afford it more frequently. And also, just because the human population is still increasing (and most of those will be raised as carnists), despite dropping birth rates.
And also, the effects of climate change from animal agriculture, which are manifold, but include direct GHGs, and the opportunity cost of maintaining deforestation (in addition to increasing it) instead of taking advantage of the essential carbon sequestration potential of reforestation & rewilding, contribute to climate change and environmental destruction too, which obviously kills far more plants and contributes to the 6th mass extinction event of various species of organisms on the planet in general.
Additionally, even on lands where forests have already been cleared, preventing plants from becoming overgrown there and constantly “maintaining” the land for animal farming still harms a lot more plants than using far less land and requiring far less plants to just give them to humans directly.
And of course with the much higher crop/plant use/harvesting for animal products than plant based foods & products, the number of plants harmed and killed in animal agriculture blows that of plant agriculture - when provided directly to humans - out of the water.
humans use about 93% of the global soy crop. didn’t lie.
We use it on non-human animals. It’s misleading at best to frame that as us using it. Sure, indirectly. Not directly. We consume about 4-7% directly as food, and most of that is consumed by non-vegans. Most people think of us using something like crops as consuming/using them directly because many people aren’t aware how much of global cropland (and pastureland) is used feed non-human animals that we breed to exploit and kill. So you’re drawing on this misconception to perpetuate harmful myths. The fact we use it on non-human animals is why it’s so inefficient.
we press about 85% of the global soy crop for oil. about 7% is fed directly to animals.
no citation, probably bs.
It’s literally from the study I sent.
the one that replies in misused LCA data?
No, you clearly didn’t read anything I said and are just dismissing everything by assuming it uses Poore and Nemecek (which did not misuse LCA data and is widely accepted by the larger scientific community, but even if it did, very similar findings are being echoed by many independent studies and reviews like this one), even though many of them don’t at all, and the ones that do also draw on other studies and their own findings too.
This PNAS study does not cite Poore & Nemecek (2018), nor does it depend on Poore & Nemecek’s data or methodology.
It’s an independent analysis, grounded in land-use and nutritional efficiency through linear programming, not life-cycle assessment (LCA) meta-analysis.
whatever you think you sent, all I’ve seen from you is poore-nemecek and studies tainted by their work
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/search?q=pnas.org&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=New
ad hominem
It’s actually not an ad hominem, even if it seems insulting. I’m saying your argument is a coping mechanism typically deployed by humans trying to justify non-human animal exploitation. And I said it in connection with my argument critiquing what you said, so you’re taking it out of context.
it is. don’t lie
Just because you feel insulted doesn’t make something ad hominem. Calling your argument a “cope”, or a deflective coping mechanism often used by carnists, might not mean much on its own, but combined with my other points and reasoning hopefully it’s clear why I made that assessment.
this is what a cope looks like.
you have no intellectual honesty at all and only a cursory familiarity with academic discussion. instead of accusing others of constantly engaging in fallacies, try actually engaging with what they’re claiming.
fallacies truck us into believing something because they mimic good reasoning. sometimes, some claim or statement might use a phrase you’ve learned to associate with a fallacy, but which is actually using good reasoning.
no.