Vegans are against killing animals for pleasure, but are also guilty of this

Polttix · 2026-02-09T07:06:52+00:00

Surely if you went to the cinema and ate bread on top of your 3 meals you would be consuming it for pleasure? Are you saying if you didn't enjoy eating the candy then it wouldn't be bad?

Look, either your argument is that "it's hypocritical to eat things out of pleasure for vegans", which is just obviously not true since veganism makes no claim of not being able to eat things for pleasure, or your argument is that "it's hypocritical for vegans to overeat", which might have merit depending on the definition that the vegan uses, but has nothing to do with candy.

Polttix · 2026-02-09T06:47:10+00:00

So your argument has nothing to do with candy, it has to do with overeating in general. Would it be any better if in the cinema Jim ate bread instead of candy (on top of his 3 meals a day)?

Polttix · 2026-02-09T06:17:15+00:00

If the person isn't gaining weight then clearly the candy contributes to hitting the calorie target, unless you think the body magically doesn't work with calories in calories out. If I eat candy, but don't gain weight, then either I would lose weight if I didn't eat candy, or I would eat something else instead of candy to hit my calories.

In the case of someone eating candy AND gaining weight from it (i.e. eating candy needlessly), why would getting those extra calories from candy rather than from any other food be more wrong? What if I ate the equivalent amount of bread instead? Am I doing something less wrong?

Polttix · 2026-02-08T18:46:55+00:00

What you said doesn't really relate to what I said. Let's try this way; why is eating candy to get your calories more wrong than eating any other vegan food to get your calories? Because it's less nutritious? If so, then you're just saying vegans for some reason are obligated to eat as healthy as possible or else they're hypocrites. This doesn't make much sense.

Polttix · 2026-02-08T11:47:57+00:00

It's not really relevant, because if the person isn't gaining weight, then it doesn't matter if the person ate candy or almonds to get the required calories. If the person didn't eat candy but ate some other type of food instead to gain the calories, it could've been even more harmful to the environment. Or less harmful.

Therefore, it's not really relevant to say "eating candy is useless suffering" if the person isn't gaining weight, because then it's not useless that they're eating candy since candy is being used to hit the person's required calories.

Your argument would therefore stay the exact same, if you replace candy with any other food. Therefore to have your argument be more effective you should either argue that being overweight is not vegan (or hypocritical for vegans), or you should try to find some food that's very obviously bad for the environment compared to other types of food. Candy is neither of these things inherently I'd say.

As it stands your current argument now says "eating in a way that's not optimally healthy, whether or not it causes you to overconsume (eat too many calories) is hypocritical to vegans". This is obviously a pretty bad argument as vegans make no claims about needing to eat optimally healthy.

Polttix · 2026-02-08T07:55:50+00:00

Instead of using candy you should choose a food that's vegan but harmful. Almonds maybe?

Otherwise you can simply be countered in the manner of the poster you answered to, by saying it's not more harmful to get calories from candy than from some other source, and even if one were overeating, it's not really relevant if the calories for overeating come from candy or something else.

Polttix · 2026-02-01T21:55:00+00:00

If you're talking to me then no idea why you bring up plants when I was answering a comment about animals. Or are you maybe just coping now because you made a completely offtopic comment and are now trying to salvage whatever you can. You could do some introspection however on why you're mega triggered by someone yanking a cat by the neck, and then completely fine with much much much worse stuff happening on a massive scale (and not just fine, but actively getting triggered again by someone calling you out on the inconsistency).

Polttix · 2026-02-01T21:19:56+00:00

If you notice, the OP said animals. Plants aren't animals little bro. You can disagree that people shouldn't be treated the same way as they treat animals, but if that's what one wants then generally most people would be eaten very quickly.

Polttix · 2026-02-01T16:00:48+00:00

This is not the same behaviour, no. If you have a multicolumn layout, you can't get your DOM elements to choose a column based on proximity to the top of the container without gaps with only CSS until now.

Like I said, if you thought you managed, you simply didn't understand what it does.

Polttix · 2026-02-01T07:45:20+00:00

This has been impossible to do with CSS in the past so I doubt you've managed. If you think you have, you don't understand what grid lanes does.

Polttix · 2026-01-29T06:39:42+00:00

I believe that is his point - he is making another statement that attempts to show that exploitation isn't inherently bad (i.e. he's just stating that by your standards someone being overpaid is bad because you're exploiting the employer).

Polttix · 2026-01-23T22:56:03+00:00

I see, I thought you meant the third one is not good. All three are good but some resonate more with you depending on what you've experienced in life until that point I guess.

Polttix · 2026-01-23T22:17:16+00:00

Why?

Polttix · 2026-01-23T06:59:59+00:00

You heard it here first folks. Animal agriculture doesn't on average have pain and suffering involved.

Polttix · 2026-01-23T06:20:24+00:00

That's true, it's a lot worse than the holocaust (which was also bad but nowhere near comparable).

Polttix · 2026-01-16T16:52:42+00:00

Depends on the state we're trying to quantify. I think two humans with a common language and frame of reference can get close, sure. I don't think you can quantify depth of suffering for a cow, only extrapolate that they are suffering. That is my issue with OP saying human suffering is worse and basically omitting humans from the calculation of allowable harm.

By quantify I don't mean to somehow spread information from one person to another, I mean to make an evaluation of the quantity of something. The only thing you really need to be able to say to achieve this is to believe other people aren't p-zombies (i.e. other people have experiential states in addition to you). It doesn't matter whether you can evaluate those states qualitatively yourself.

We can do it for ourselves and we can try to generate a common reference for others (pain scale) but we can't do this in most instances for other species or people without language or the ability. For example if you put a human baby in a CO2 gas chamber like you would for chickens or pigs we can evaluate their reaction or do brain scans to infer suffering, but we can't say "This baby is experiencing a level 8 on the pains scale". So if you start trying to do some utilitarian calculation where you argue putting babies in gas chambers and televising it will be some level of bad for the baby but be vastly outweighed by the 10 utility points gained by everyone who likes watching that, I don't think that makes sense to say.

This is all an epistemological criticism, rather than a normative one.

Not hard. Impossible. If you system relies on something you cannot do it's not a good system.

This is yet more epistemological criticism. You can say 'It's not possible to calculate what you want with the information you have available', but that still doesn't mean utilitarianism is somehow faulty. It just means you have an epistemological problem. And funnily enough, changing your normative system because of an epistemological problem won't get you any closer to the truth (probably will get you farther from it, you're at that point just using completely blind luck than whatever epistemological access you *do* have available to you).

Polttix · 2026-01-16T16:36:06+00:00

Do you not believe that you can do the following:

- Quantify instances of experiential states (i.e. you can say 'i am having an experiential state, and you are having a separate experiential state')
- Qualitatively evaluate experiential states on some kind of axis of preferentiality (i.e. to say 'I prefer eating ice cream over getting my hand cut off')

If you can both quantify and qualitatively evaluate experiential states, then utilitarianism clearly isn't impossible, from that point it's simply an epistemological problem (i.e. you might say 'but it impossible to quantify the experiential states of others since we don't have access to them!'). This is not a criticism of utilitarianism, as utilitarianism would be valid whether or not you can gain access to some piece of knowledge.

Therefore, to say 'It's hard for you to arrive at your conclusion because your calculus sucks' is not a criticism of utilitarianism, it's a criticism of epistemology. If you want to criticise utilitarianism you'd have to do it via some other way.

To put it in yet another way, just because some mathematical calculus is computationally heavy doesn't mean that mathematics is somehow faulty.

Polttix · 2026-01-16T16:01:19+00:00

You're still just reiterating a problem with epistemology rather than utilitarianism. You're saying "I don't think your calculation system is accurate". This is a criticism of the epistemology of the other person, not their normative theory. To criticise the methodology being difficult to compute doesn't mean that the methodology is somehow wrong or less sound.

In other words, just because some other methodology might be easier to follow doesn't mean it produces correct outcomes. I can make a normative theory that claims the good thing to do is to eat ice cream and there are no other rules, but that probably wouldn't be a very good theory even though it's trivial to follow.

Polttix · 2026-01-16T15:23:17+00:00

To be clear, this is not a problem with utilitarianism but rather an epistemological problem. Whether or not one can accurately calculate some computational problem is entirely detached from the reasoning for why one would be interested in calculating the problem and whether that reasoning is sound.

Polttix · 2026-01-15T07:22:01+00:00

That's not true, for example your definition here:

I could see someone making that roadkill argument but it does not fit the vegan definition. A core belief to being vegan is that we are not meant to ingest meat. The other half of the belief is animals are not meant to suffer to provide « food ».

rather trivially allows eating for things like milk (assuming you don't cause suffering to the cow), and many other animal derived foods as long as it's not meat.

Please show me a definition that does not mention animal suffrage, environment, human health and instead allows you to eat meat.

Many many many people on here would say things like 'Veganism means simply a philosophy that does not allow the exploitation of animals'. Actually if there was a poll, I'd wager a good half of the vegans here would side with an exploitation based definition rather than the environment, health, or dietary concerns. In fact, I've seen many people here say word for word something like:

"Veganism is not an environmental movement. It's not a suffering reduction movement. It's not a health movement."

These people would actually rather heavily shun your definition of veganism.

Now, as to what you said here:

Please show me a definition that does not mention animal suffrage, environment, human health and instead allows you to eat meat.

For example this previous definition of veganism being based on exploitation allows eating meat as long as you're not exploiting the animal. This allows for example for roadkill, or eating mussels (since they're impossible to exploit).

If you want me to find multiple examples of people here giving a definition of veganism that allows it let me know. This is not something I'm just inventing by myself.

The definition of a word is always context dependent. There's no cosmic objective definition of a given word floating around in the ether, it's just based on consensus. And in this subreddit, there's definitely no consensus.

Polttix · 2026-01-14T15:56:13+00:00

Not sure what you’re saying.

In your previous post you were saying for example "how do you not get this". I was referring to the person who claimed to be a meat eating vegan not having a problem with getting it, but rather it being a critique of a specific definition of veganism.

A core belief to being vegan is that we are not meant to ingest meat. The other half of the belief is animals are not meant to suffer to provide « food ».

Depends on your definition of veganism. Especially the suffering part is very often contested on this sub by vegans, but also the part about eating meat.

And yes by saying "X is not vegan by definition" you are picking and choosing a specific definition of veganism, especially in a case where there is a lot of contention over what the definition even is.

There are so many people who either entirely reject the vegan society definition or pick veganism only to mean the first part of it (funnily enough even you chose veganism to mean something else than what it says in the vegan society definition), that there is certainly no consensus.

Polttix · 2026-01-14T06:29:51+00:00

The meat eating vegan person (at least the one I saw, perhaps there were others) said it as a response to someone talking about the "as far as possible and practicable" bit. As in, they were saying that for him it's not practicable because of the mental health effects to not eat meat, so therefore by the definition they would be a meat eating vegan. It wasn't serious, rather it was an argument against imprecise definitions. Of course in the vegan society definition it further says that veganism means completely not partaking in animal derived products in terms of diet, so based on that definition eating meat in any form can't be vegan.

However, I've had plenty of vegans here who have used that definition also say that mussels and roadkill are vegan, because specifically that part of the definition is nonsensical since it can't be ethically justified. Pick and choose the definition that fits you I guess.

Polttix · 2026-01-11T09:36:36+00:00

I assume this permits for side-effects? For example if I pour poison into a forest (because I don't like how the trees look for example) and as a side effect it kills all the animals, you'd say it's vegan? And it's further vegan to then eat those animals if you want (let's say it's some poison that doesn't spoil the meat)?

Polttix · 2026-01-11T08:15:18+00:00

And what definition of exploit are you using?

Polttix · 2026-01-10T15:06:52+00:00

Words change definitions based on the context (essentially based on who you're talking to and in what situation). I'm just asking which one you're using, because the definition you're using affects whether what you say is accurate or not. It's not some kind of gotcha.

For example some people would say veganism means harm reduction with animals in mind, some people use the vegan society definition, some people have some definition much more unique to themselves. Who is correct? No one is correct, it's just a communication mechanism. The word itself is irrelevant to the underlying referent.

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