Destiny Debates: Do Animals Matter? 

Shit like this is gonna make me a goddamn vegan eventually isn't it.

It's a common paradox: overintellectualization can frequently cause people to reach incredibly stupid conclusions. They fool themselves into thinking they're rational, but really they're just making elaborate excuses for their base, immoral choices.

I'm glad Alex is still talking about animal rights issues. I also appreciated him pushing Singer on his ideas in their conversation recently.

Destiny finds the idea of giving up on eating animals too difficult so he goes about justifying it with a whole lot of mental gymnastics.

I don't understand why it's so hard to be honest about all this. These days you can live for decades eating beef and pork and lamb and all kinds of fish without ever having left your city, without ever having seen these aninals alive. Kinda hard to empathize with a KFC bucket or a Big Mac. On the flip side, it'd probably be harder to empathize with Bambi if you were a hunter or with chickens if you regularly killed your own to make soup. Growing up in rural Greece in the '80s, I saw a woman decapitate a chicken with a flimsy bread knife. That same woman gave her son a right whooping for throwing dirt at their dog's face. "How would you like it if I did the same to you and you went blind, huh?" We're animals too, social mammals, and our feelings are complicated and often contradictory. The other day I gently scooped up an earwig and observed how cute it looked as it groomed itself, standing at the tip of my finger. That same day I ate pizza that would have been vegetarian save for the pepperoni, processed slices of unidentified meat. I think the crushing majority of people recoils when faced with videos of factory farming. We don't wanna see it. We wanna be disconnected and act as if burgers grow on trees. How many people who make "bacon though" jokes have the stomach to butcher a pig and make their own bacon, I wonder? Vegans have affected me. I have greatly reduced the meat I eat and completely quit beef, lamb, rabbit, octopus and more. That said, if I were at a friend's house and they'd made rabbit stew, I'd rather eat it than throw it away. The harm's already done. Anyway, I never had a moral argument against veganism. My inability to be a vegan is a personal moral failing in my eyes.

Destiny is intelligent enough that he *must* know his arguments on this topic make no sense.

Destiny the type of girl to put a cat in a blender

What a strange line to draw. Many animals share some of our most valued experiences: love, fear, hunger, longing, and most importantly of all (and the main anchor of our morality) pain. He makes it seem like morality is a choice rather than a carefully thought out set of values based on the suffering of others, humans or none..

i’m an avid bird photographer, and I see their society I see their lives it’s ridiculous to think that only humans could have have moral worth

This is the one topic where destiny is just pure coping. I cope too but not to this level.

Animals don't lock their prey in cages - but Alex *they would if they could*. Even dolphins blow bubble nets around more fish than they could ever eat. Animals aren't less effectively predatory on their prey because of moral qualms - it's just lack of ability.

lol… the lengths this guy is willing to go to in order to remain non-vegan AND logically consistent is embarrassing.

thank you so much cosmic skeptic i really appreciate the work you do

Animals are not just NPCs you can abuse and throw away

Yes, I did enjoy the clip. I struggle to figure out what my position is. Your dialogues are very helpful in having me flesh out my thoughts.

God I hope AI don’t develop Destinys ethical framework. If Destiny were an AI he’d be trying to justify the matrix.

My dogs, experience, joy, pain, fear, they have desires they have preferences, and I think that’s true of every animal including birds

He’s contradicting himself.. one moment he is saying animals have no conscious experience at all… then he admits there is probably some conscious experience in animals..

I have been out of the loop for a while but it looks like Destiny's position has been crafted to maintain consistency against the Name The Trait argument he has dealt with in the past. Allowing any moral concern for animals pretty much always collapses into veganism so the 'trick' is to find a way of only valuing humans with some quality that is as uniquely human as possible (or perhaps definitionaly human but hard to define as we see here)

When I ate meat I did not try to justify it like this, I just said I eat meat and its wrong. It so obviously morally wrong, no need to walk into "things dumber than me don't matter" trap

I eat meat, but i totally agree with Alex. I wouldnt say that eating meat is a moral issue but the industrial farming complex is. It is just quite easy to ignore where the food comes from. But in no good conscience can you say that these conditions in the lifestock farms are humane, or justified for a few more bucks. What i dont get is, why is it so difficult for some people to admit that its wrong and instead do all these mental gymnastics?

human sentience is, categorically, animal sentience

That blue hair dye has seeped into his brain, the cognitive dissonance is astounding.

What is super interesting to me is that Destiny, when interacting with animals irl, clearly shows that he cares if he hurts them.

Hi Alex, it's Anna here, it was great to meet you today in the café! This debate was great to listen to, I appreciate the intellectual integrity on your side.

Absolute moral bankruptcy at its most apparent.

Destiny said to Healthgamergg that when he was a kid his Grandma use to have a new animal and everytime he went back it would be dead. They never really talked about it but seems like she was killing them. That could be why he's detached from animals now.

Destiny is super inconsistent between his take on fetal development and the value of animal experiences. He's good with a 5 month cutoff for abortion because that's when (in his judgement) that's when there may be signs of some conscious experience, but he can't even acknowledge the incredibly vivid conscious experience animals have relative to that fetus.

Such a bad take from Destiny - there are chimpanzees alive right now that are smarter/more capable/more imaginative than the dumbest humans (mental disabilities, babies, severe alzhiemers etc). By his own logic, he shouldn't care about these people at all. Its all just copium to try retain moral consistency in a morally flawed position. Huge L

Intuitively you should know that is wrong to harm innocent beings.

Don't look for excuses, choose compassion over violence.🍀

Solid clip indeed.🌱🌅🍀

I am not a vegan. But Alex won the argument here. Made me think I need to be a vegan.

7:50 just noting an extension of this argument: following this principle, hypotetical humans in 100k years will not believe you capable of moral consideration. That seems like a troublesome position to have by Destiny

The full debate was great . They were so polite and considerate and listening to each others points authentically. The animal things is probably one of the only things i dont fully agree with destiny on but this is so rare so gunna give him props for owning it also hes not a robot. Alex is so good at drawing out the underline concepts . So interesting and entertaining thnx guys.

Destiny's positions are so robotic that idk how anyone would engage with it.

How does this look in practice? Or in Destiny's ideal world, do people not care about animals

He sounds almost psychopathic. A person can rationalize any cruelty when you lack empathy.

It seems like Destiny bases his morality entirely on rational self-interest with the "moral rule" of "valuing human sentience" being a means toward the end of self-interest (since upholding this value within a society allows for greater benefit for everyone, including him). But I think he really needs to explore the implications of this view. As Alex pointed out, if this is your moral system, then you should be okay with breading a separate species of human into existence and exploiting them. Destiny may say that doing this would make him feel bad or it would create societal tensions and other psychological effects on the non-exploited humans such that it violates the goal of rational self-interest. The problem with this argument is that we could take measures to reduce the harm experienced by the non-exploited humans. Specifically, we could do exactly what we currently do with non-human animals: dehumanize them, separate them from the non-exploited human species, fabricate propaganda to make ourselves feel like those humans are being treated well, etc. I don't see any kind of categorical distinction between the efficacy of these measures when it comes to exploitation of humans as opposed to animals. Clearly, many of us humans do feel very bad about the exploitation of animals, and I think most people feel some kind of guilt over it, so there is some amount of harm caused to humans by allowing animal exploitation. And if animals were tortured in the streets and public squares, and murdered in classrooms in front of children, I'm sure it would have a radically harmful effect on society and individual humans (e.g. increases in violence/domestic abuse like we see with slaughterhouse workers). There doesn't appear to be a categorical distinction between the harm experienced by non-exploited humans in a society where we exploit animals, vs a society where we exploit a socially isolated class of humans. So I think you would have to accept that "rational self-interest" still allows for radical exploitation and murder of a class of humans as long as we can mitigate the spillover effects to the privileged class of humans to the same extent we currently mitigate the spillover effects of exploiting animals.

This conversation reaffirmed my assumption that Destiny just clings on to this stern stance of human value and no regard to animals for the sake of remaining consistent without having to engage his deeper moral inconsistencies. For me it became clear when admitted that torturing a cat or dog would actually make him feel bad. This video pretty much confirms this too: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YF_jynH9eVY.html

One of my issues with the MOVEMENT behind "animal rights" (in the form most commonly advocated for by the vegan community), is the notion that sentience and nociception is limited to vertebrate animals with central nervous systems. There's a circularity in the reasoning behind this argument that is limited by anthropocentrism. We start out by setting ourselves as the benchmark, the original model for sentience and suffering, then we draw a correlation, based on existing science, between those and certain anatomical and physiological traits, and then look for those traits and corresponding behavior in other life forms. Scientific research, however, is limited by paradigms (as per Kuhn and Foucault), and systems of human needs and biases that privilege certain fields and objects of study over others. Currently our theories of sentience and suffering are limited by the, perhaps inevitable, privileging of human perspectives, in a way that necessarily reduces the probability of directing our lines of scientific inquiry such that we can discover or acknowledge, or model sentience and suffering in life forms other than vertebrate animals most close to us. There is a debate over whether AI based on neural networks can be sentient. If there is such a possibility, that there's a certain threshold of systemic complexity that generates sentience, that would mean we would have to look at non-vertebrate, non-CNS based networks and systems of cells or analogous structures, as candidates for sentience, and also for novel perspectives on what sentient behavior can look like. For instance, complex root networks in plants and plant communities, bacterial colonies, fungal colonies, eusocial insect collectives, etc. The other issue is that empirically speaking, our direct, intuitive motivation for valuing human (non-)suffering is not the moral consideration that other humans are sentient (that's a post-hoc rationalisation), but because of self-preservation and kinship. We care about ourselves and our kin (family and friends). We tend to care less about those who feature less prominently in our own lives: we obviously don't care at all about people we've never heard of. Many people, even non-vegans, often elevate individual animals to kin status. Our pets often matter to us more than human strangers. We are distraught when our pets die, vegans and non-vegans alike, but don't bat an eyelash when we hear about death happening en masse in developing countries. This sort of relationship can happen even between predator and prey animals. There are instances where individual cats develop a friendship with individual parakeets or cockatiels, but still continue to hunt other birds. In other words, even in our "non-vegan" societies we don't privilege one species over another, we privilege individuals over other individuals based on our personal relationships with them, regardless of species. There is simply a higher likelihood that the individuals we privilege will hail from our own species because of the way our society is structured. We also operate on the implicit assumption that our own safety and success is only guaranteed insofar as everyone else's safety and success is guaranteed and agreed upon socially. We understand that if we allow someone else to be killed or harmed with no repercussions, we or those we care about can be next. This reality, or at least the sense of this reality, is not carried over to the phenomenon of animals being farmed and killed for food. A larger number of slaughterhouses in one's area does not increase the sense that you or your friends, or even your pets, could be slaughtered. Our willingness to project value onto individuals further away from us in our network of personal relations is limited by our own abundance and success. The happier we are, and the more successful we are, the more we are inclined to be benevolent to more individuals, which can be both human and animal. In situations of crisis or societal collapse, humans reduce their circle of consideration to themselves and the closest friends and family members. Universal human rights, and universal vertebrate rights, and universal animal rights, are an ideal we strive for because it is inexorably associated with living conditions that would allow these rights to be upheld. A powerful, wealthy, happy society can guarantee rights to more living beings, and that's the society we want. I would argue that consciously or unconsciously, when we talk about a society where slaughterhouses and wars cease to exist (to use Tolstoy's language), we are really thinking of a safe, happy, successful and resource-abundant society first, and the implications of it for "universal rights" second. In other words, I agree that a society where wars are eliminated would also be likely to eliminate slaughterhouses. However I don't think that the elimination of slaughterhouses in and of itself would prevent wars. We should privilege the creation of a warless society even at the expense of animal exploitation now, rather than focus efforts on reducing exploitation even at the expense of our standards of living and quality of life. The former gives us the opportunity to create conditions for the latter, but the latter reduces the chances of both. To conclude, my philosophical position (which is vaguely pantheistic) is that every single identifiable object in reality possesses sentience. Systems are sentient, and elements of systems are systems in their own rights. Our willingness and readiness to acknowledge and respect the sentience of entities which mean less to us is correlated with our own security, abundance, success, and level of personal growth and development. The vegan, animal rights movement, as it stands now, advocates for changes which are meant to eliminate some of the ways in which some sentient entities are harmed, privileging those over others based on the biases inherent to human scientific inquiry. My conception of ethics dictates we should push ourselves to acknowledge sentience and value in larger and broader classes of entities, and develop awareness of the way our actions affect our environment and the entities within. However, we should prioritise developing the traits which help us do this, even at the cost of the inevitable exploitation it will bring to the classes of entities we have not yet matured enough to recognise as sentient and valuable.

Alex is doing a very good job here. Really liking the animal related content recently

It's unusual for him to do, but Alex missed a few important challenges to the positions that Destiny maintains.. Still, it is an interesting interview and was certainty sufficient to reveal the fuzzy and sometimes heartless beliefs that Destiny maintains.. One opinion only..

I will certainly watch the full debate. But for this segment I will award the points to Alex. Interesting. 😮

This guy with blue hair is such a sad excuse of human being, and sadly and to my great despair many, many people are exactly like him. I dont see hope for our world and specially the animal kingsom with these type of people. It shatters my heart.

No idea who this person is but my god are they lost. What a state we, as humanity, are in

I wonder on what grounds he believes human infants have the relevant "human consciousness" while animals don't.

It would be neat to here Alex's perspective on one of Destiny's vegan gains debate, which just went in semantic circles on what sentience is.

His views on anything non human is a little disturbing.

By the way, Destiny's point that species suddenly stop being able to breed is completely wrong. It happens slowly over long periods of time.

*Alex poses a philisophical thought experiment to test the arugments and justifications of Destinys position* Destiny: "Im not even gonna try to think about that and Im keeping my view unchanged. Its just unsatisfying, take it or leave it. I mean you wouldnt fuck a cow right? What we care about is all arbitrary anyways" Sir, that is not how you do philosophy.... Is Destiny supposed to be a philospohy youtuber?

Animals have purposefully and consciously saved the lives of human beings on numerous occasions. How are these mindless animals able to offer us a consideration that we are unable to reciprocate? I am not a vegan. I do think that veganism is a morally superior position. However, it is not necessary to be a vegan to recognize that nonhuman animals have value and deserve moral consideration. I rescued 2 dogs who were abused. I did not want any pets but couldn't feel good about myself leaving them to suffer. The idea that their suffering is meaningless is disgusting to me. Those dogs would give their lives to protect me from harm. Using mental gymnastics to justify being a callus indifferent shitbag is a trait unique to human beings. I don't see why we deserve special consideration for it though.

The very fact that animals have survival instinct and they are aware enough to eat when they're hungry, drink when they're thirsty and aware enought to recognize when their life is in danger and sense fear in that situation... Animals are absolutely aware of themselfs, they can't speak or solve mathematical problems but that doesn't mean they are somehow less alive than we are. Destiny mentinoned human sentience, but some animals can sense some situations much better than humans, anyone who had a dog will confirm this. Biggest difference between us and animals is intelligence but all biological functions are very similar. They are alive just like we are, and they are fighting to live a good life just like we do.

4:55 interesting this idea of another animal/alien that wouldn't be 'eatable' (or whatever) due to it's level of 'sophistication/quality of it's experience of reality', if this animal was more sophisticated(...etc...) and wanted to eat us, we wouldn't have a moral leg to stand on with this argument

He knows if you accept animal suffering matters at all he'd be forced to accept that meat-eating is wrong, so he's constantly trying to find a criteria which separates humans and animals meaningfully, but it's always incoherent because if we took that criteria (say human consciousness) away from humans, it'd still be wrong to torture/eat them.

Alex says that valuing the sentience of a non-human is much closer to valuing the sentience of a human than valuing the existence of nature or the structure of a tree for example. Though this is true, he gets bit in the butt by his own argument from just a few minutes prior: similarity to human sentience exist exists on a gradation, and it is impossible to produce a compelling reason why you should put the line in one particular place and not any other. Valuing sentience over valuing grass is totally arbitrary.

This is my first major exposure to Destiny and his takes. Wow this guy is an utter monster People watch this guy?

Yeah I'm not a vegan but Destiny kinda lost this debate. IDK why so many non-vegans feel the need to downplay the sentience of animals to make their arguments. Yeah animals can think abstractly. Soft vegans like Cosmic tbh have a solid moral premise but hard vegans (aka people who believe that ALL animals should be treated as just as morally valuable as humans) are not connected to the reality of nature.

It’s morally wrong to invest this amount of care and effort into animals when you can invest it into humans

We are animals. So, if we matter, then at least some of the animals matter.

Sometimes i wish morality was absolute so we could prove he's being an absolute monster by having these opinions

"Sentient beings deserve moral consideration" is the argument. Stephens counter is to differentiate between human sentience and animal sentience. When asked what the difference was he kept repating "because it's human sentience" before being cornered and specifying that it's different because humans have abstract thought. You don't need abstract thought to be sentient. Steven knows he can't say not all sentient being deserve consideration so he makes up "human sentience" arbitrarily to avoid contending with the argument. Like if you said "anything with hair is a mammal" and I say a cat isn't a mammal because it doesn't have human hair and only those with human hair are mammals. Nobody differentiates human and non human sentience because it makes no sense to do so when asking "do sentient beings deserve consideration"

Amazing

You should have a conversation with Pinecreek regarding veganism... That would be interesting!

I dont think anyone, Destiny included really believe that only human sentience have value. I don't think Destiny would really be fine with putting a cat in a blender.

I see it like this: What makes human sentience inherently more important? I think there's really only 3 routes you can take, which all lead to problematic ways of thinking if you ask some questions. 1: Humans are smarter and thus worthy of the moral consideration. Well what do we do with mentally disabled people then? Would it then be okay to take mentally stunted individuals and treat them in a way similar to the way we treat non-human animals? 2: Humans are kin, closer to my own person and thus worthy of moral consideration. Well then doesn't that make racism rational? People of your own race or more specifically: your ethnic group are closer to you in this way than other humans, should you value their sentience more because of it? 3: We are the same species. This bypasses the moral issue with [2] but then what if we colonized mars or something, and over time the people on mars evolved to deal with the different environment and evolved so far that earth humans and mars humans could no longer interbreed, basically becoming 2 separate species. Would a member of the other species then be subject to the same ethical guidelines as we have to non-human animals? I am personally not satisfied with any rationale for why human sentience is inherently worthy of moral consideration above non-human animals.

I always wonder if ppl who argue like this have never had pets. I own guinea pigs for 20+ years and they are really not the smartest rodents to run around, yet they have diffrent flavours in foods, they have best friends in the group that they remember, they suffer when their besties die - so much they barely eat and just lay in the corner for days and weeks, they can develop peculiar habbits, have diffrent noise patterns, they can be jealous or feel empathy when a companion gets bullied and run to their defence, in fact their characters are so individual i havent had 2 guinea pigs who I would even call alike.

Well destiny view point is highly flawed but veganism is also flawed. We have to eat meat. It doesnt matter what you feel. Seems kind of trivial to discuss if humans matter more than other living things, we all need eachother, bio systems matter. Ecosystems matter. This isnt difficult.

Destiny seems to have learned some words, says them fast, and became popular for doing that. I don't find a coherent argument anywhere within Destiny's online presence. He works so hard to be against veganism it shows how silly his entire ethical arguments are. He is not a serious personality.

Why was Destiny not questioned what makes this human sentience so special? Or did i miss something?

Did Destiny really say you can tell where your neck ends and your head begins?! I feel like that's one of the easier distinctions to make in the human body!

If we were able to transplant a human mind into an animal either by moving the brain itself or somehow copying the "mind" from the brain to another brain, I wonder what he would think of that.

I draw the line at the ability to have moral consideration

Add ableist to Destiny's rapsheet

As a premise, I don't agree on what destiny is saying, but I think that talking about evolution was not the best response for this argument Because you can't resurrect any of our closest ancestors with chimpanzees so now the line is way more distinct between us and modern chimpanzees so you will not find any animal with human sentience. The only things you could argue is the definition of sentience and human sentience, because if you draw an x on a dolphin 's head he will go look himself at the mirror and have fun is not really different of what a human child experience. Sorry if my English is not really good but it's not definitely my native language and philosophy is definitely not my field ahaha

This is hard for me. I am not a vegan but I obviously know that some animals seem to be self aware. I am much less sympathetic to a chicken then I am a dog. I don't blame Alex or Destiny for their views. It is thought provoking at the least.

“Human sentience” is so arbitrary.

Destiny's ridiculous position reeks of desperation to continue eating cheeseburgers

The stench of Descartes lingers on, and the ape with the blue fur is ripe with it.

its not just "unsatisfying", it makes the arbitrariness of destinys "standards" for moral value extremely obvious. even more so, he used the term "philosophical zombie", which implies he assumes there is a metaphysical basis behind his standards, which could be traced back to some concrete difference in the brainstructures etc., but he never attempts to argue that somewhere along the line of ancestors, there would simply be a point where importent difference regarding the brainstructure are present, which would be to the on-off-switch like the border between "here we have electricity" and "here we dont" - it would absolutely suffice to explain the sudden drop from 100 to zero.

Destinies position allows infinite torture of infinite cows pigs chickens The worst torture you can imagine, he’d be ok with What a lunatic

I'm fully convinced that this is the one topic Destiny actually doesn't want to really question himself on. Never heard him make such weird excuses on any other topic. "- Hey, we both seem to value sentience, why the weird arbitrary and oddly convenient cut off? - um, well, why do you arbitrarily value sentience and not sth like beauty, huuuuuuh?" How is this even an answer? Of course the foundation is arbitrary, you are being criticized because it doesn't seem consistent.

I see destinies counter argument for the switch problem as very solid. If you value all life, and life evolved from matter, there must have been a period where you needed to make a clear cut distinction between matter and life, despite it being a scale. And unlike human sentience, were only humans have it today, there are creatures today that are between matter and life, such as germs, single cell organism and even robots. In my opinion the meat-vegan question should drop the angle of morals for a solution, and instead focus on individual values. For example, if we want to be kind individuals, it might be beneficial and logical to extend this kindness to animals.

In another philosophy video of Destiny's that I saw several years ago he took the position that the moral worth of another creature is based on its ability to reciprocate actions. Essentially, that if two creatures are capable of harming each other then it is useful to ascribe some morality to actions that encourage mutual cooperation. I'm curious why he didn't bring this up at all in this video. Especially since in the broader context of this clip, he describes morality as essentially self-serving. Maybe he no longer feels this way?

If humans lack empathy and compassion for other species, then do they have a conscious human experience? Do people who abuse the innocent for pleasure, lack moral consideration?

Destiny is great but this is his worse take ever. Contradictions all over the place. Just give up on the rationalization and continue eating meat. Or stop.

I'd like to consider myself a concious sinner when it comes to eating meat. I don't think it takes a genius to understand that not initiating force against an innocent being is the morally superior position. And yet, just as we all do some bad things, I do it because i think its nutritionally healthy and tastes good.

"It is suffering, more than anything else, which clears the way for the grace which transforms human souls. Suffering, more than anything else makes present in the history of humanity the powers of the Redemption." -Pope St. John Paul II

The problem with the gas chamber argument is that animals possibly would do that if they had the ability to make gas chambers. Animals certainly inflict all the cruelty they are actually capable of committing right now.

Very well done, your questions to destiny were on point, I think in the end you highlighted accurately how predation by animals is not the same as locking and killing every animal you wish to eat (the probability of survival for prey is actually quite high, probability of survival for farm animals is effectively zero). Also I don’t fully understand his position with human sentience. Does he believe humans are valuable because some humans can abstract amazingly well. Well surely those humans who abstract well may think other humans who are less effective at abstracting should be considered worthless. Anyway I think to assume zero worth for animal sentience is an extremely extremist view point, now he could argue based on animal (including human) sentience capabilities, emotion capabilities is generally possessed by all animals and has value, but humans have abstraction capabilities that means more moral worth….

I think, ironically, that Destiny’s take on animals can easily be paralleled to that of someone with a fundamentalist belief system. There is zero compassion outside of “what God has created”. I’m not sure how one gets to this point and doesn’t have a change of opinion. Alex was three steps ahead this entire debate and Destiny fumbled. I expected more.

If destiny is some sort of emotivist, I don’t understand why he thinks it’s goofy for people to be outraged at dog eaters and not at the eating of other animals. If these are merely moral attitudes and not propositions, there isn’t any hypocrisy or logical inconsistency - you just value different things. The more I watch Destiny talk about philosophy, the more I feel like this guy is just a wiki warrior pseudo intellectual

I've never seen Destiny grilled as much as this and actually come off looking a little, well not stupid, but lacking in some way. And Destiny is a super smart guy. You've gained a new viewer, Alex. I'm not a vegan, or vegetarian, but I accept that I'm probably acting immorally by eating meat. Ultimately I don't care enough, but I don't think I'm a very nice person, so there's that.

For me, it's pretty simple, I (occasionally) eat meat, because I don't care enough about the anonymous, faceless animal that was often born only for that purpose. If it had been an animal I knew personally and that I had grown to like, it would be a very different story.

I don't get this argument. Just because you can not talk with animals doesn't mean they are not sentient. So, a french person is fair game ?

Blue hair guy isn’t really listening. Just loaded next response. He is closed to any change in position (Sunk cost). He is all in on his views. Philosophy aside it feels wildly sociopathic to be able to not care one iota about another animals suffering. That would be a different discussion. What mental gymnastics it takes to care zero percent about non-human animals but care wholeheartedly about humans. Frankly seems concerning.

Free the animals ✊🏼

This gradation of consciousness that goes from animals to humans is an argument that is also used in pro-life debates. There is no specific point where the fetus becomes a baby.

I thought you believe in moral relativism? In your eyes, there is nothing objectively wrong with eating meat, it's just a matter of values. Values change. I, for one, do not think it's immoral to eat meat, so how could anything prove otherwise? It's not coping, it's a difference of principles.

Ok you all need to see Why Reality, Space & Time Is An Illusion on Tom Bilyeu. The implications reach into this discussion and it's just mind blowing in any case.