I kind of get what you’re trying to do, but it doesn’t really work as a comparison. Being dismissive toward class relations as a whole would indeed be a bad thing, but “I think wage labor is slavery” is a contestable statement even in ML terms. Wage labor is not, in fact, slavery. It sucks and capitalism is a highly exploitative power model, but slavery is literal ownership of a person and wage labor is not that. Wage labor may feel as bad as slavery sometimes by people who have never been slaves, but it is still a different form of exploitation.
Though I don’t fully agree with the position Nocturne took, their comparison to religion is somewhat valid. The idea of killing non-human animals counting as murder in the same meaning as killing another human being gets into beliefs that are hard to ground in science, not unlike when a Catholic says that abortion is killing a child. And like abortion, there are real problems with jumping at saying it’s a terrible thing to do and then thinking about it from the standpoint of punishing people for doing it - which could sound like a strawman, but there is someone in this thread who was talking about giving non-human animals human rights (which would mean you could be punished similarly for violating their rights).
Calling vegan ethics “like religion” is backwards. Veganism can be argued from moral principles: consistency, avoidance of unnecessary harm and recognition of animal sentience. By contrast, the idea that animals exist for human use has often been justified through explicit religious and cultural hierarchy, especially in Abrahamic traditions: that animals were created for human use and that human dominion over them is natural or divinely ordained. So if anything, the long-standing normalization of meat eating is closer to a theological worldview than the refusal to exploit animals is.
The idea of animals as property is not some neutral baseline of reason, but deeply tied to theology and cultural inheritance.
Also, comparing animal killing to murder is not a claim that animals are literally human, any more than opposing factory farming is the same as claiming abortion and murder are identical. It is a claim about morally relevant harm, not that species are interchangeable.
At the same time, I do not support axont’s position and do not attribute equal moral value to humans and animals. At the same time, animals already have rights in many places, from wild animals to pets and livestock, and with regards to our other comments, the distinction between which is which of those three is entirely culturally enforced and not “logistical” or a “matter of survival”. Where I live, you would face charges for treating your cat or dog like they treat livestock.
I believe non-human animals are people on the same level as a human and should have the same rights as humans. Eating a deer is cannibalism because it’s consumption of a person’s flesh.
In this very thread. You can speak on what you believe, but you can’t tell me all representations of veganism are saying what you say as if I’m making up positions that aren’t there - when I was just replying to one earlier.
Edited to add:
Calling vegan ethics “like religion” is backwards.
Someone in this thread pointed out that veganism has had ties to buddhism going back a while. Which is a religion…
I believe non-human animals are people on the same level as a human and should have the same rights as humans. Eating a deer is cannibalism because it’s consumption of a person’s flesh.
In this very thread. You can speak on what you believe, but you can’t tell me all representations of veganism are saying what you say as if I’m making up positions that aren’t there - when I was just replying to one earlier.
Lol, I will not base my arguments around reactionaries. Just as I scoff at people who point to some fringe reactionary marxist-in-name-only organization and say:
“You can speak what you belive but you can’t tell me all representations of marxism are saying what you say…”, lets be serious. Just as there is little moral and logical consistency in eating meat, the same can be said of 1) attributing the equal moral value to humans as other animals and 2) thus enforcing the same judical rights for them.
Calling vegan ethics “like religion” is backwards.
Someone in this thread pointed out that veganism has had ties to buddhism going back a while. Which is a religion…
Now it I am starting to feel you are not arguing in good faith.
You are shifting between two different things: historical religious dietary rules and modern vegan ethics. The fact that some Buddhist traditions or other spiritual systems arrived at similar conclusions does not make veganism itself religious. It only shows that different moral traditions can converge on similar practices.
And yes, that is not strange at all. Philosophical and theological systems often overlap on certain conclusions by coincidence or through shared moral intuitions. That does not mean they have the same basis. Modern veganism can be grounded in secular ethics even though some older religious traditions happened to reach similar dietary practices.
Pointing to Buddhism does not prove that vegan ethics are “like religion.” It proves only that some religious traditions restricted animal use. That is not an argument against veganism, just a historical parallel.
Modern Western veganism is a reaction to factory farming.
Veganism has existed for millennia. (X)
Therefore vegan ethics are like religion.
Those do not cleanly follow from each other. At most, Buddhism shows that some religious traditions have long contained food ethics that overlap with vegan or vegetarian ideas. That does not make the modern secular ethical case for veganism “religious".
Especially since you yourself rejected this argument (X):
In any case, the form of veganism I was trying to talk about is the distinctly modern western form of it, one that doesn’t seem to have any noticeable relationship with buddhism.
If the point is specifically about the modern movement, then the relevant question is its actual moral structure now, not whether some older religion had adjacent practices.
There are multiple things going on here that are becoming painful to follow even when I was one of the ones in the conversation.
You replying to me to tell me:
Calling vegan ethics “like religion” is backwards. Veganism can be argued from moral principles: consistency, avoidance of unnecessary harm and recognition of animal sentience.
Then proceeding to argue that it’s actually the reverse, citing Abrahamic religion as an example:
the idea that animals exist for human use has often been justified through explicit religious and cultural hierarchy, especially in Abrahamic traditions: that animals were created for human use and that human dominion over them is natural or divinely ordained. So if anything, the long-standing normalization of meat eating is closer to a theological worldview than the refusal to exploit animals is.
Buddhism is a direct counterpoint to this, as it shows there is a longstanding religion that has a near opposite view on animals.
On top of this, there is as you say, the more modern secular trend of veganism in the west. So your original claim is not sound. It is a statement on what you believe about where vegan arguments should be derived from, not a historical argument on what it is in practice.
You can say “those aren’t the real vegans” like we might about the ACP with regards to marxism-leninism, but that’s the framing then, if so. Not that the diverging point of view isn’t a real phenomenon. It is the dismissiveness that I was pushing back on and the framing implying that I was arguing with strawmen.
Especially since you yourself rejected this argument (X):
Me: In any case, the form of veganism I was trying to talk about is the distinctly modern western form of it, one that doesn’t seem to have any noticeable relationship with buddhism.
If the point is specifically about the modern movement, then the relevant question is its actual moral structure now, not whether some older religion had adjacent practices.
This was a different argument where I was clarifying that I was criticizing the effectiveness of modern veganism as an individualist boycotting practice in the west. I was in the process acknowledging that veganism also has ties to buddhism historically.
The fact that we cannot point to a “vegan state” of sorts in the way that we can with marxism-leninism is part of the problem (or at least, a revolutionary vegan theory - maybe there is one, but I haven’t seen it brought up in this thread). You can tell me what vegan is and then I might talk to someone else and get a different view and where is it leading? How can anyone organize for it if there is not even broad agreement on what it means in practice beyond the very basic definition of specific foods you don’t consume?
It’s pretty easy to agree in a general sense, “Don’t mistreat animals”, but if one person’s version of that is don’t factory farm abuse them and another’s is give them human rights, we’ve got no solid ground to stand on. Am I making sense or no?
I kind of get what you’re trying to do, but it doesn’t really work as a comparison. Being dismissive toward class relations as a whole would indeed be a bad thing, but “I think wage labor is slavery” is a contestable statement even in ML terms. Wage labor is not, in fact, slavery. It sucks and capitalism is a highly exploitative power model, but slavery is literal ownership of a person and wage labor is not that. Wage labor may feel as bad as slavery sometimes by people who have never been slaves, but it is still a different form of exploitation.
Though I don’t fully agree with the position Nocturne took, their comparison to religion is somewhat valid. The idea of killing non-human animals counting as murder in the same meaning as killing another human being gets into beliefs that are hard to ground in science, not unlike when a Catholic says that abortion is killing a child. And like abortion, there are real problems with jumping at saying it’s a terrible thing to do and then thinking about it from the standpoint of punishing people for doing it - which could sound like a strawman, but there is someone in this thread who was talking about giving non-human animals human rights (which would mean you could be punished similarly for violating their rights).
Calling vegan ethics “like religion” is backwards. Veganism can be argued from moral principles: consistency, avoidance of unnecessary harm and recognition of animal sentience. By contrast, the idea that animals exist for human use has often been justified through explicit religious and cultural hierarchy, especially in Abrahamic traditions: that animals were created for human use and that human dominion over them is natural or divinely ordained. So if anything, the long-standing normalization of meat eating is closer to a theological worldview than the refusal to exploit animals is.
The idea of animals as property is not some neutral baseline of reason, but deeply tied to theology and cultural inheritance.
Also, comparing animal killing to murder is not a claim that animals are literally human, any more than opposing factory farming is the same as claiming abortion and murder are identical. It is a claim about morally relevant harm, not that species are interchangeable.
At the same time, I do not support axont’s position and do not attribute equal moral value to humans and animals. At the same time, animals already have rights in many places, from wild animals to pets and livestock, and with regards to our other comments, the distinction between which is which of those three is entirely culturally enforced and not “logistical” or a “matter of survival”. Where I live, you would face charges for treating your cat or dog like they treat livestock.
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11773976/8264341
In this very thread. You can speak on what you believe, but you can’t tell me all representations of veganism are saying what you say as if I’m making up positions that aren’t there - when I was just replying to one earlier.
Edited to add:
Someone in this thread pointed out that veganism has had ties to buddhism going back a while. Which is a religion…
Lol, I will not base my arguments around reactionaries. Just as I scoff at people who point to some fringe reactionary marxist-in-name-only organization and say: “You can speak what you belive but you can’t tell me all representations of marxism are saying what you say…”, lets be serious. Just as there is little moral and logical consistency in eating meat, the same can be said of 1) attributing the equal moral value to humans as other animals and 2) thus enforcing the same judical rights for them.
Now it I am starting to feel you are not arguing in good faith.
You are shifting between two different things: historical religious dietary rules and modern vegan ethics. The fact that some Buddhist traditions or other spiritual systems arrived at similar conclusions does not make veganism itself religious. It only shows that different moral traditions can converge on similar practices.
And yes, that is not strange at all. Philosophical and theological systems often overlap on certain conclusions by coincidence or through shared moral intuitions. That does not mean they have the same basis. Modern veganism can be grounded in secular ethics even though some older religious traditions happened to reach similar dietary practices.
Pointing to Buddhism does not prove that vegan ethics are “like religion.” It proves only that some religious traditions restricted animal use. That is not an argument against veganism, just a historical parallel.
Those do not cleanly follow from each other. At most, Buddhism shows that some religious traditions have long contained food ethics that overlap with vegan or vegetarian ideas. That does not make the modern secular ethical case for veganism “religious".
Especially since you yourself rejected this argument (X):
If the point is specifically about the modern movement, then the relevant question is its actual moral structure now, not whether some older religion had adjacent practices.
There are multiple things going on here that are becoming painful to follow even when I was one of the ones in the conversation.
Then proceeding to argue that it’s actually the reverse, citing Abrahamic religion as an example:
Buddhism is a direct counterpoint to this, as it shows there is a longstanding religion that has a near opposite view on animals.
On top of this, there is as you say, the more modern secular trend of veganism in the west. So your original claim is not sound. It is a statement on what you believe about where vegan arguments should be derived from, not a historical argument on what it is in practice.
You can say “those aren’t the real vegans” like we might about the ACP with regards to marxism-leninism, but that’s the framing then, if so. Not that the diverging point of view isn’t a real phenomenon. It is the dismissiveness that I was pushing back on and the framing implying that I was arguing with strawmen.
This was a different argument where I was clarifying that I was criticizing the effectiveness of modern veganism as an individualist boycotting practice in the west. I was in the process acknowledging that veganism also has ties to buddhism historically.
The fact that we cannot point to a “vegan state” of sorts in the way that we can with marxism-leninism is part of the problem (or at least, a revolutionary vegan theory - maybe there is one, but I haven’t seen it brought up in this thread). You can tell me what vegan is and then I might talk to someone else and get a different view and where is it leading? How can anyone organize for it if there is not even broad agreement on what it means in practice beyond the very basic definition of specific foods you don’t consume?
It’s pretty easy to agree in a general sense, “Don’t mistreat animals”, but if one person’s version of that is don’t factory farm abuse them and another’s is give them human rights, we’ve got no solid ground to stand on. Am I making sense or no?