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.
ironic you can quote this, but don’t seem to understand how kant’s own philosophy precludes animal rights.
You didn’t read what I said immediately following that. I said I disagree with Kant on a lot of things, including regarding nonhuman animals - and btw, his view that they shouldn’t have rights because they aren’t “rational beings” spilled over into denying full moral or political consideration for women and non-Europeans, too, who he also believed weren’t rational (and he also agreed children, certain cognitively disabled humans & certain cognitively declining elderly had similar low rationality as certain non-human animals). So, good on you, an archaic, sexist, racist and speciesist philosopher agrees with you - not saying you agree with all his views either, but to assume I must just because I quoted one thing he said is just as nonsensical. But that doesn’t mean I can’t agree with some of what he said. What he said in this quote is highlighting the pretty standard semi-intersectionalist connection identified between human-on-[non-human] animal cruelty and human-on-human cruelty. Lots of vegans/animal rights activists acknowledge these same ideas, and saying or agreeing with them isn’t incompatible with animal rights at all. In fact I think it’s strange and contradictory for Kant to hold this view and not extend rights to non-human animals. Even critics of his view like Jeremy Bentham had their problems. Look further back and you have Rene Descartes saying non-human animals were just machines with no feeling (in disagreement with scientific consensus - even at the time, as well as the thinking of many other philosophers). And even “animal rights” philosophers like Peter Singer had pretty unsavory & compromised views. So you will find a lot of philosophers, especially older ones, have gross attitudes toward other animals, in addition to being coupled with their other problematic views and attitudes as reflected by the time they were in. Hell, the reason you’re arguing with me now is because we live in a speciesist & anti-animal society that you were conditioned to agree with and haven’t been able to break out of.
However, I wouldn’t say his philosophy precludes animal rights. It’s nuanced. He said they should be treated well by virtue of the instrumental value that could have for how humans treat each other. If that view were taken to its logical conclusion it would mean not being violent to them and killing them if we don’t have to, since that clearly has negative ramifications for human-on-human violence, which we can even see as a pretty direct example in how when more people become employed into slaughterhouse work in an area, the domestic violence and suicide rates increase, and so does PTSD, depression & other mental health issues, and drug abuse. Even if he didn’t view or argue for ethical treatment of non-human animals through the lens of them having or deserving “rights” - in which case it may be similar to your view that rights don’t exist that we should do or not do things because they’re right, not because of others’ rights (except that he only believed specific groups don’t have rights) - it could in practice and in essence and effect result in the same conclusions and outcomes, of the non-human animals being treated as they would if they did have rights, especially if you want humans to either have rights or be treated as if they did, and if you believe that anything you do to non-human animals could potentially backfire on humans doing things to each other, meaning however you want humans to be treated, you would treat non-human animals with the same or similar standards of respect - not literally in the exact same ways given their different needs, abilities and interests, but you wouldn’t do harmful things to other animals unnecessarily (like exploiting & killing them) that you wouldn’t want to be done to humans.
I did. you are growing at straws
your not qualified to have this conversation
You didn’t understand what I meant. I know his philosophy overtly on the surface rejects the concept of non-human animal rights. I said if he effectively argued for non-human animals to be treated as well as possible by humans in order for that to foster greater behavior between humans, a logically consistent version of his philosophy, at least when applied in the modern world, is to be pro-not exploiting them or harming or killing them unnecessarily, which would more or less result in the same actions as animal rights.