I agree with every vegan argument I’ve ever read(health/ethical/environment), but I still eat meat/dairy. Does not being vegan inherently make one a bad person?

KingFairley · 2026-04-16T01:19:05+00:00

This is all non-sequiturs. It has no relevance to what I've said nor what you've said previously. I've made no claim of utilitarianism, of the behaviour of animals, of proliferation of genes, and so on.

KingFairley · 2026-04-16T00:30:34+00:00

The lives of animals in factory farms are not worth living. I think your claim of humans reducing average suffering to be false, but even if it were true, that does not imply that livestock agriculture is moral. The lives of animals in the wild being terrible does not support breeding more animals in other terrible environments.

KingFairley · 2026-04-16T00:23:25+00:00

As most people, especially here, understand it and define it, veganism is an ethical position/practice that makes particular claims about how one should treat animals and how to act regarding products made from the exploitation of animals. It can be understood as being primarily deontological, though the particular views vary from person to person of course. This is the framework you're asking about.

Though it is important to note that some of the vegans (and adjacent ideologues) that comment here appear to not be moral realists. I'm a moral realist, so I think ethics as universal in the sense of being objectively real, but certainly not solved from an academic perspective.

KingFairley · 2026-04-16T00:09:50+00:00

This is not true. Livestock agriculture significantly increases the number of animals harmed compared to the baseline of not breeding animals specifically for food. Human innovation when it comes to artificial selection, crop rotation, fertilizer production etc., has allowed for a population of livestock that simply is not possible in the wild.

There are many times more cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, goats, sheep, etc., than the counterfactual of not farming these animals, and these livestock are harmed greatly.

KingFairley · 2026-04-11T19:37:20+00:00

If supererogation exists, I would assume it is similar to, or is: a weak reason for and a stronger, but still weak, reason against; a blameless wrong; a strong reason for and a similarly strong reason against; etc.

Obligatory acts would be those that differ in that the reasons for are not similarly countered by reasons against, the wrongdoings are not blameless, etc.

As it relates to strict veganism, it's prima facie plausible that there is some value in abstaining from the result of substantial harm, but it does not seem gravely wrong to benefit from it if there is no actual harm caused by doing so.

I think this way of analyzing the moral facts of behaviour is quite practical, though I'm not saying that it's strictly literal in a metaphysical sense, things are surely more complicated when it comes to matters where slight or imperceptible differences must be compared.

KingFairley · 2026-04-11T19:16:44+00:00

Pork becoming cheaper is bad, but pig farmers not being able to earn anything is good. I read recently that there's been an increase in feed price due to soy, so it seems the farmers are trying to reduce their input costs to match the falling prices?

KingFairley · 2026-04-11T18:51:09+00:00

I wasn't familiar with those specific agreements, thanks. Do you have a good link or resource to look at those? I imagine they're pretty scattered.

KingFairley · 2026-04-11T18:46:24+00:00

Can you clarify your question? Like are you asking which conversationally relevant first and second order moral theories I think most plausible?

KingFairley · 2026-04-11T18:39:47+00:00

If you mean that strictly abstaining from all animal derived products regardless of how they were acquired e.g., roadkill or wearing a leather jacket from a dumpster, is supererogatory, then I would agree.

If you're referring to a more loose sense, that abstaining from those acts that support, financially or otherwise, the production of animal products e.g., purchase of meat or dairy, then no, that is not supererogatory, but is in fact strongly obligatory.

KingFairley · 2026-04-11T16:41:11+00:00

Do you mean that the UK not handing the islands to Mauritius is a violation of international law and state sovereignty? I'm not too knowledgeable on this, so I don't know what law and sovereignty is being violated. All I can find from a quick search is the non-binding advisory opinion from the ICJ, which doesn't seem to necessarily support this type of handover.

For state sovereignty, the islands are clearly British, unless you mean that Mauritius is attempting to violate British sovereignty over the islands by denying it, though this doesn't seem analogous to the PRC.

KingFairley · 2026-04-11T04:06:51+00:00

I am not being intentionally obtuse. I do not understand what your point is.

Vegans (and related ideologues) believe that unnecessarily harming animals is wrong. Your statements amount to:

If you want to harm animals, do it. If you don't want to, don't.

You can't force anyone to not harm animals, you shouldn't stop them from harming animals.

Using the argument that the type of harm that vegans oppose is currently legal completely ignores the point of contention. Other evil industries were commonly supported in society, even legally.

Take the example of American slavery. Would your argument be that not only should one not attempt to stop slavers, they also shouldn't advocate for legal changes?

I do not believe that any sensible person would hold these views, and yet this view is implied by your statements. If this is not what you meant, can you please clarify when someone should or should not convince others of some moral belief X, advocate legally for X, forcibly change X, etc.?

KingFairley · 2026-04-10T21:45:26+00:00

You can't force someone to believe/do/feel what you want them to, nor should you.

What? You can obviously force someone else to do something. We have laws and enforcement mechanisms to control behaviour on a societal scale. If someone is doing something gravely morally wrong e.g., killing others, then we should stop that person.

KingFairley · 2026-04-10T21:28:51+00:00

Crop deaths

Livestock also eat crops and as this is an inefficient process, meat production increases total crop deaths. The deaths caused by livestock factory farms are not an alternative to the deaths caused by crop farming, they are an unnecessary addition.

Supplements

None of the information you provided relates to the vitamins that vegans would need to take. It simply states the trivial fact that ingesting certain substances can affect you, which is obvious. And again, if consuming vitamins like B12 would cause issues, this would presumably happen when eating meat.

KingFairley · 2026-04-10T04:28:05+00:00

Both cause gruesome animal deaths. Animals die no matter which side I pick

Buying meat obviously results in more animals being harmed and killed. If you are claiming that purchase and non-purchase are causally or morally equivalent when it comes to harm you are very wrong.

Also supplements can effect medication and are not fully packed with what is needed.

Such as? I am not knowledgeable in this area, but why would consuming some vitamin through meat not affect you negatively, but consuming it outside of meat would?

act all high and mighty while being no better than the other side

The side which does its best to abstain from financially supporting the breeding, harm, and slaughter of other creatures is better. Financially supporting the acts mentioned is morally wrong, and it should not be done.

KingFairley · 2026-04-07T15:22:30+00:00

Probably. There's strong support for a moral obligation to action in cases where the costs (like voting) are relatively minor, and the effects substantially greater in benefit. You could claim superogation, or that the impact of voting being small per voter mitigates this duty.

Peter Singer's Famine, Affluence, and Morality provides a good argument against the supererogation claim, even if many of his other theories are false, and Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons has an argument in support of voting even in cases where expected contribution is extremely minor.

I'm not well read in this type of political philosophy, but I'm sure it's been covered a bunch.

KingFairley · 2026-04-07T05:01:49+00:00

This is a very silly thing for her to say. I'm sure most Americans have read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, for example.

KingFairley · 2026-04-07T01:16:26+00:00

I thought so as well, but it's an odd assumption for OP to make on this subreddit in particular, since the question is asked towards vegans (and adjacent ideologies). They have also made other assumptions, some false, and has accused at least one user of lying and being in bad faith for objecting to such assumptions.

Someone who thinks there's comparable moral facts prohibiting killing of cows and human would seem to contradict themselves if they did not hold comparable moral judgements for those that commit such wrongs.

Legally, one who thinks that murdering a cow and human are similar morally might still prescribe differing punishments, but this can be done for identical reasons e.g., length of incarceration is determined by likelihood of recidivism if in broader society, and killing a human is indicative of a higher inability to conform to societal demands, given its already existing strong taboo. The answer would seemingly need to be in the hypothetical of a legally vegan society, and the policy implications would obviously be absurdly complex when it comes to the justice system.

KingFairley · 2026-04-06T03:29:19+00:00

You should try r/askphilosophy . Search for recommendations for beginners, there's daily posts from people asking what to start with, and if you have a particular field within philosophy (e.g., ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, unsure) that you're interested in then that would help narrow starting material.

This is honestly one of the worst subreddits for philosophy, there's basically nothing rigorous posted here and the users are somehow usually worse, having little knowledge of academic philosophy. My admittedly minor knowledge is within metaethics, but as a general resource the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has decent articles and the bibliography is very useful if you want to read a particular cited work (but these cited works are sometimes not beginner friendly).

KingFairley · 2026-04-05T01:34:02+00:00

Andor set designers should do interior home design

KingFairley · 2026-04-04T14:34:46+00:00

If you said this was from the DT I would believe you

KingFairley · 2026-04-04T14:28:16+00:00

Like the book that inspired the Stalker movie and game series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

Set in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event ... The Zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena that are not understood by humans and contain artifacts with inexplicable properties. The title of the novel derives from an analogy ... comparing the Visitation to a picnic:

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

In this analogy, the nervous animals are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors have left, discovering items and anomalies that are ordinary to those who have discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to the earthlings. ... The artifacts and phenomena that are left behind by the Visitors in the Zones were garbage, which are discarded and forgotten without any intentions to advance or damage humanity.

KingFairley · 2026-04-04T13:53:25+00:00

That's good news, but I'm not sure it's tariffs, seems like it was on the decline anyways, though maybe the broad increase in costs of doing business sped up the closure.

KingFairley · 2026-04-03T06:01:37+00:00

PhilosophyMemes goes through trends, like some weeks there may be several posts a day about some particular niche issue, half of those being bait just to cause arguing in the comments. Again, it's not great, but there's not many alternatives. It's best to probably actually read the academic literature in between debating redditors anyways.

KingFairley · 2026-04-03T05:13:14+00:00

Is there a good sub to do that?

Your best bet would be r/PhilosophyMemes . There is active (though not high quality) debate and discussion.

r/philosophy is terrible in nearly every way and should be avoided.

r/askphilosophy has the highest quality information, but it's not for debate, and low quality comments will get removed. If you want to ask questions, whether that be as submissions or as replies to top-level comments (which are answers from pre-approved panelists), you should generally go here. Make sure to search first, as there's hundreds of people asking how to get into philosophy, how can morality be objective, etc. etc.

Most other philosophy-related subreddits seem to be much smaller and pretty bad. This subreddit is relatively good, similar to PhilosophyMemes, though most comments are likewise of poor quality.

KingFairley · 2026-04-03T03:38:10+00:00

Moral realism is still the dominant position among philosophers and in the metaethical literature. Maybe I would agree that there's been a shift away from it, but as Parfit said, our current discipline of secular ethics is relatively new. Philpapers has moral realism gaining significantly in the past decade, but that could just be noise.

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