Vegetarianism feels to me kind of like an issue where bike shed arguments are rampant because everyone eats and everyone wants to be moral and “how hard can it be to decide what to have for dinner”? So everyone has an opinion… and feels entitled to speechify about it :-)
In the meantime I suspect that if there is a correct answer here (like there is some kind of diet that simultaneously optimizes moral, health, economic, social, and deliciousness issues) it probably doesn’t exist yet and could take decades of research to properly nail down. Maybe some sort of vegan school would actually make sense, rather than just being a fun joke? But if a vegan school makes sense then non-experts who talk about the subject are likely to be spreading BS...
And in the meantime there’s this huge number of moral prerequisites to being right about moral vegetarianism that I’m just not sure about. Despite being opportunistic omnivores rather than obligate carnivores, humans are the apex predator of the planet. (This isn’t quite as weird as it seems, because for a while grizzly bears occupied much the same niche in north america.) As far as I can tell, this makes humans (not otters or sea urchins) the ultimate de facto keystone species of the planet. We sometimes eat sea urchins and wear otters—hence regulating the size of such populations, thereby determining the functional modes of the global ecology.
Supposing that there was something (vampires?) that preyed on humans and that we had absolutely no pragmatic recourse against these new apex predators (imagine saying “don’t eat me!” to a nano-wielding fusion-powered super-intelligence that likes eating humans for some reason) what policy for the consumption of humans would we hope that they adopted? Do we want them to start eating human shaped tofu and relegate humans to zoos and textbooks? Do we want them to bioengineer brainless human-flavored vat steaks and let wildtype humans go extinct? Do we want them to give us adequate human lives and then eat us in our 40′s before our flavor goes off? Do we just want them to figure out what maximizes the happiness/virtue/number of vampires (maybe re-engineering themselves to eat algea and wheat and putting every calorie that strikes the planet into the production of this food)? Do we want them to manage wild human populations such that global biomass and biodiversity is maximized? Do we want them to domesticate us via manipulation of our genetics into a variety of types designed to serve specific ends within their economy? Maybe they could offer us some kind of “minotaur feeding treaty” where we managed some of these issues ourselves in exchange for super-trinkets? Lots of those suggestions feel to me like they have good points and bad points… so framing the question this way helps me see that I don’t really know what kind of global dietary regime that I really want to bring about with my food choices as an apex predator. I am confused.
In the meantime, I grew up on a hobby farm, and we gave the cows we planned to eat names like “Burger”, “Choice”, “Delicious”, etc so that we wouldn’t get too emotionally attached to them. Those cows had OK lives, and they were pretty tasty. Later, in college, I lived in a vegetarian house for a year and while I had nothing in particular against the diet (and found out that nutritional yeast is really yummy with pasta and popcorn) it seemed to me that there was a correlation between the degree to which vegetarians are hard core and the degree to which they seemed prone to cognitive dissonance and generally bad arguments. No one could really agree on the details of what should or shouldn’t be eaten, which is what you would expect if no one had collected enough evidence to honestly determine a real answer on this subject.
And then on the other hand (am I up to three of four hands at this point?) it seems that dietary restrictions are a very common part of many religious communities. No beef for Hindus, no bacteria or roots or meat for Jains, no pork for Muslims, no beans or meat for Pythagoreans, and kosher laws are notoriously complex… From the outside, all of this stuff looks to me like a memetic retention mechanism for preventing people captured by a belief system from breaking bread with non-believers and thereby becoming positively disposed towards alien beliefs. If these social/signaling/affiliation processes are the real issue, then my personal meta-strategic goal is to be able to prepare food under any set of restrictions so I can invite awesome people over for dinner no matter which conducts they’ve chosen to play under. Also, I should be willing to eat nearly anything someone else serves me. Anytime someone I’m not intimately familiar with offers me food, whether its baby seal soup or sprouted spelt granola, the response I’d like to give them is “Thank you, that was delicious!”
I think the Newtonmas invitation was probably made in roughly this last spirit, where a group of people who know each other quite well had a party and the host solicitously offered food roughly consistent with the paleo diet (which a number of expected guests probably subscribe to), and which signals (if anything) a nominal allegiance to personal health maximization in light of a rational recognition of our evolutionary history. Given budgetary constraints and knowledge of the host and guests, it was a socially reasonable thing to do.
Which brings us back, perhaps, to the original question: If that is how menu selection worked out in that social group, does it imply some gross moral or intellectual failure on the part of the entire group? Maybe it does if some particular dietary choice seems “obviously right” but if the right answer isn’t clear (which is my own sense) then I’d guess not.
An Orthodox rabbi of my acquaintance earned significant points from me by preemptively expressing a related belief having to do with visiting with a mourning family, in order to prevent his hosts from stressing themselves out attempting to justify the kashrut of whatever they offered him.
Vegetarianism feels to me kind of like an issue where bike shed arguments are rampant because everyone eats and everyone wants to be moral and “how hard can it be to decide what to have for dinner”? So everyone has an opinion… and feels entitled to speechify about it :-)
In the meantime I suspect that if there is a correct answer here (like there is some kind of diet that simultaneously optimizes moral, health, economic, social, and deliciousness issues) it probably doesn’t exist yet and could take decades of research to properly nail down. Maybe some sort of vegan school would actually make sense, rather than just being a fun joke? But if a vegan school makes sense then non-experts who talk about the subject are likely to be spreading BS...
And in the meantime there’s this huge number of moral prerequisites to being right about moral vegetarianism that I’m just not sure about. Despite being opportunistic omnivores rather than obligate carnivores, humans are the apex predator of the planet. (This isn’t quite as weird as it seems, because for a while grizzly bears occupied much the same niche in north america.) As far as I can tell, this makes humans (not otters or sea urchins) the ultimate de facto keystone species of the planet. We sometimes eat sea urchins and wear otters—hence regulating the size of such populations, thereby determining the functional modes of the global ecology.
Supposing that there was something (vampires?) that preyed on humans and that we had absolutely no pragmatic recourse against these new apex predators (imagine saying “don’t eat me!” to a nano-wielding fusion-powered super-intelligence that likes eating humans for some reason) what policy for the consumption of humans would we hope that they adopted? Do we want them to start eating human shaped tofu and relegate humans to zoos and textbooks? Do we want them to bioengineer brainless human-flavored vat steaks and let wildtype humans go extinct? Do we want them to give us adequate human lives and then eat us in our 40′s before our flavor goes off? Do we just want them to figure out what maximizes the happiness/virtue/number of vampires (maybe re-engineering themselves to eat algea and wheat and putting every calorie that strikes the planet into the production of this food)? Do we want them to manage wild human populations such that global biomass and biodiversity is maximized? Do we want them to domesticate us via manipulation of our genetics into a variety of types designed to serve specific ends within their economy? Maybe they could offer us some kind of “minotaur feeding treaty” where we managed some of these issues ourselves in exchange for super-trinkets? Lots of those suggestions feel to me like they have good points and bad points… so framing the question this way helps me see that I don’t really know what kind of global dietary regime that I really want to bring about with my food choices as an apex predator. I am confused.
In the meantime, I grew up on a hobby farm, and we gave the cows we planned to eat names like “Burger”, “Choice”, “Delicious”, etc so that we wouldn’t get too emotionally attached to them. Those cows had OK lives, and they were pretty tasty. Later, in college, I lived in a vegetarian house for a year and while I had nothing in particular against the diet (and found out that nutritional yeast is really yummy with pasta and popcorn) it seemed to me that there was a correlation between the degree to which vegetarians are hard core and the degree to which they seemed prone to cognitive dissonance and generally bad arguments. No one could really agree on the details of what should or shouldn’t be eaten, which is what you would expect if no one had collected enough evidence to honestly determine a real answer on this subject.
And then on the other hand (am I up to three of four hands at this point?) it seems that dietary restrictions are a very common part of many religious communities. No beef for Hindus, no bacteria or roots or meat for Jains, no pork for Muslims, no beans or meat for Pythagoreans, and kosher laws are notoriously complex… From the outside, all of this stuff looks to me like a memetic retention mechanism for preventing people captured by a belief system from breaking bread with non-believers and thereby becoming positively disposed towards alien beliefs. If these social/signaling/affiliation processes are the real issue, then my personal meta-strategic goal is to be able to prepare food under any set of restrictions so I can invite awesome people over for dinner no matter which conducts they’ve chosen to play under. Also, I should be willing to eat nearly anything someone else serves me. Anytime someone I’m not intimately familiar with offers me food, whether its baby seal soup or sprouted spelt granola, the response I’d like to give them is “Thank you, that was delicious!”
I think the Newtonmas invitation was probably made in roughly this last spirit, where a group of people who know each other quite well had a party and the host solicitously offered food roughly consistent with the paleo diet (which a number of expected guests probably subscribe to), and which signals (if anything) a nominal allegiance to personal health maximization in light of a rational recognition of our evolutionary history. Given budgetary constraints and knowledge of the host and guests, it was a socially reasonable thing to do.
Which brings us back, perhaps, to the original question: If that is how menu selection worked out in that social group, does it imply some gross moral or intellectual failure on the part of the entire group? Maybe it does if some particular dietary choice seems “obviously right” but if the right answer isn’t clear (which is my own sense) then I’d guess not.
There are Buddhists who are vegetarians, but who also believe that accepting hospitality is more important than not eating meat.
An Orthodox rabbi of my acquaintance earned significant points from me by preemptively expressing a related belief having to do with visiting with a mourning family, in order to prevent his hosts from stressing themselves out attempting to justify the kashrut of whatever they offered him.