Pro-lifers sometimes bring up historical examples about how certain minorities have been dehumanized in the past, and then say that individuals of the opposite position, like pro-choicers and antinatalists are guilty of a similar mindset as nazis and slave owners.
I would argue that pro-lifers are the ones that are guilty of the nazi mindset, not the other way around, many of them are speciesists with no respect for consciousness and suffering, frequently they don’t care about harm to non-human animals, they only think that all humans need to be protected, even when those humans are incapable of being harmed like a freshly fertilized egg, which is analogizable to a slave owner caring about his braindead white grandmother because she’s white, but not about fully conscious black slaves being whipped all day – zero respect for suffering, they only respect what looks similar enough to them.
Their go-to point is that fetuses are a human life. They are human, and also alive.
To that I would respond that sperm and braindead humans are also human and alive. Bacteria is alive too, so are fruits and vegetables, but fair enough, they’re not human.
If you really think about it on a deeper level for a moment, is being human actually what makes it bad to have certain things that you currently don’t want to happen to you (like having a knife in your throat, being burned alive, cut open, etc) bad?
I could do these things to a braindead human, and it would in no way bother that braindead, but still perfectly human and living (other than for the brain) organism, it would not bother ”them” one bit, so it seems like containing human DNA is not what determines whether or not something is actually bad or good, this is determined by consciousness, sentience, pain and pleasure.
Of course, it’s possible to offend family members and friends by let’s say having sex with or defecating onto a braindead human body, but that just proves again that then the thing that made that activity problematic is sentience/consciousness, not human DNA, it offends the feelings of those around the braindead human.
But just in and of itself, how is a braindead human harmed more by being pulled the plug on than a computer is harmed by being pulled the plug on?
Here they might say fetuses will become conscious over the course of 9 months, braindead humans won’t. But then you just need to ask about fetuses of other species and if they think it’s fine to abort them, or in fact just hypotheticals, like grassblades that become conscious if I let them grow long enough, am I now obligated to completely inconvenience myself for them and never mow the lawn again because it’s important to let grassblades become conscious?
I’m sure they’d say no, it’s only important to not stop a human organism from becoming conscious before it can have any desire to become conscious because it simply isn’t conscious yet, which then again reveals that it is about the sacred human DNA particles for them, in which case the question is still relevant – their notion that we must wait until an organism becomes conscious is again only confined to organisms containing the sacred human DNA.
Having human DNA is not what makes being harmed problematic, it’s irrelevant just like having white skin color or a certain set of genitalia.
I would make the exact same point to a racist slave owner that values the protection of all whites, whether those whites have the capacity to be harmed or not, but on the other hand can’t be bothered to care about the welfare of black slaves.
A braindead white human might be white, but so what? Do you think it bothers them to be whipped? Having white skin color is what makes being hit with a whip into a bad thing? You’re an idiot if you think that. If you were honest you would name the characteristic ”sentience” as to why you would like to avoid being hit with a whip, and guess what, black slaves are also sentient.
Just that pro-lifers are not racists, they are often speciesists. They care about the poor fertilized egg that doesn’t care any more about its own existence than a tomato cares about being kept alive, the concern of the fertilized egg not to be squashed is as non-existent as a tomato’s concern to not be turned into tomato soup – but many of them will gladly pay someone to abuse pigs, cows, chicken for them because they don’t contain the sacred human DNA.
Thinking that dehumanization is some kind of problem is already bigotry, because you are assuming that just because something is not human, it is perfectly fine to harm that organism.
”Despite clearly having the ability to create value notions, good and bad, pleasure and pain, you get no ethical consideration, because you’re not in my particular group, you’re not white/human.”
Just like a racist slave owner or nazi, such pro-lifers have zero respect for consciousness and suffering, or only manage to acknowledge it as existing when they see someone of their close ingroup, i.e other white humans, anyone who looks too different is falsely identified as an object, despite being a feeling (obviously, non-subjects don’t feel) subject.
The mentality is quite similar, so it just looks completely self-unaware that they’re accusing the other side of thinking like the slave owners and nazis, similar to when said speciesist pro-lifers accuse someone of being hostile towards the disabled for aborting a severely disabled fetus but then justify harming other animals by pointing out that they are less intelligent than humans, which would mean that there’s nothing wrong with farming sufficiently intellectually disabled humans on the same intelligence level as such animals.
I think sometimes they get away with all this because pro-choicers are also speciesist and go along with this non-sense, there are some that will make uneducated or confused claims that human fetuses are somehow not human or alive (although even that is often times a misinterpretation on the pro-lifer’s part when the discussion is about what constitutes a human, i.e a person, not if it contains human DNA), because if they really insisted on sentience/suffering-ability, they would make themselves vulnerable to being consistency-tested about their speciesism as well.
”So do you not eat other animals? They’re also sentient! Hypocrite!” – so they figure instead they’ll resort to saying some complete non-sense like ”human fetuses aren’t alive”, to which the pro-lifers will then proudly respond that science is indeed ethically on their side and fetuses are indeed living organisms just like jizz and bacteria, so the debate is over.
It shouldn’t even matter if something is human or alive.
What the nazis did to the jews wasn’t bad because they were human, what the slave owners did to the black slaves wasn’t bad because they were human, it was bad because they were conscious.
Sure, if hypothetically, the nazis were a group of people that only rounded up a few braindead jews that are clearly incapable of feeling pain, and these braindead jews had no family or friends to grieve over them, and then they put these jews into the oven, there’d probably be no harm in that, not inherently more of a problem than doing it to a piece of wood, it would cause the exact same amount of bad feelings and grievances in the world: zero.
We might be inclined to feel bad for such braindead jews because they look similar to humans we know to be conscious, so that bias overcomes us, but ultimately rationally analyzing the situation would lead one to conclude that that is as silly as feeling bad for a living, but non-sentient grassblade or a piece of wood.
Suffering that goes on in nature amongst wild animals, such as:
Being subjected to illnesses, diseases, parasites you can’t fix.
Being threatened and attacked by other animals.
Being drowned.
Starving to death.
Breaking your bones and not being able to call an ambulance.
Being severely tortured, eaten alive by a hyena for example.
All count as a form of suffering, which should be enough for people to understand that it is indeed a bad thing, something ideally to be prevented.
Suffering is always a bad thing, make no mistake. Sometimes in life, we might be forced to endure one suffering to avoid even greater suffering, like the painful vaccination to avoid a more painful disease, or the painfully boring job to avoid the more painful homelessness, or the painful workout to avoid more pain associated with being weak and unhealthy in the future.
But in and of itself, suffering isn’t a good thing. If the doctor could give you immunity by snapping fingers, you would go for that instead of getting the needle rammed in your arm. If I just rammed the needle into your arm as hard as possible for no benefit in return, you would think I’m an asshole.
So suffering itself is a bad thing. Masochists are not a valid counterexample, because if you’re a masochist, you would get a benefit in return for me ramming the needle into your arm, which is the alleviation of sexual frustration, which is also a form of mental pain/suffering.
If the masochist doesn’t inflict some short-term pain onto themselves, they’ll experience more sexual pain/suffering in the long run.
But when it comes to suffering in nature, many are almost immune to even recognizing that the experiences these animals are going through arebad.
They don’t even feel the need to justify it beyond saying ”well, that’s just nature” – so because it is happening in a certain location, i.e nature, it is suddenly fine.
If you have a parasite in your anus, we can solve that problem for you by 1. removing it or 2. simply dropping you into the rainforest, because having a parasite up your ass is totally no longer a problem if you live in the rainforest, it’s just obvious.
So as long as you sit in that location, the itching parasite in your anus no longer makes you uncomfortable?
Why do humans fail to recognize wildlife suffering as a problem?
I would argue there are primarily three issues standing in the way:
Ingroup bias.
Intentional vs. unintentional harm.
Viviocentrism, pro-life ideology.
1: Ingroup bias.
This is the same problem that makes humans accepting of the systematic objectification of sentient organisms (factory farming for instance), they are biased towards their own kind, it’s the same psychology that motivates racism and sexism.
If you have metacognition, ability to think about your thoughts – evaluate them, and you reflect on why you really need to have rights, like a right to be free from torture, you’re likely going to come to the conclusion that it is because you can feel pain.
You want a right to not have a knife stuck in your eye because you are able to feel things, you don’t worry about whether or not someone is going to stick a knife in your eye once you’re braindead or a complete corpse – unless you’re actually insane enough to believe in life after death, which is like believing that data on my computer will invisibly float around in the air even if I managed to destroy the hard drive entirely.
The only reason why it could be bad to stick the knife in the braindead person’s eye is because it could in some way still affect other pain-capable organisms, like the mother of the dead person, but in and of itself, pulling the plug on a braindead person isn’t more harmful than pulling the plug on a computer, let’s be real.
White skin color has nothing to do with it, gender has nothing to do with it, species has nothing to do with it. Discriminating solely based on human DNA is just as dumb as me choosing to discriminate based on eye color. I have brown eyes, you don’t, so fuck you, you’re an outcast. Why should I care if someone tortures you to death slowly? You don’t have brown eyes like me, you don’t have human DNA like me, although you can feel just as much pain.
Wild animals don’t have the same human DNA, so just like farm animals, they’re fucked, bigoted humans fail to extend care to the outgroup. Neither are they cats or dogs, which are semi-protected by an ingroup bias called nepotism.
Nepotism is just favoring your family, not your species or race over others, it is making the value of a sentient being dependent on what third parties feel about them, i.e if a child gets brutally raped and murdered, it’s bad because it makes the parents feel bad, but if you’re an orphan, then who cares, it doesn’t make your owners sad.
Humans see cats and dogs as part of the family. Pigs, cows, chicken, fish – much less so. A wild octopus somewhere in the atlantic ocean being torn apart by a shark? Even much less so, it’s too far away, they fail to empathize with that octopus.
2: Intentional vs. unintentional harm.
It is harder for people to see something as horrible if it is caused by unknowing, unintentional agents or even just inanimate, non-conscious phenomena.
If you got violently raped, what scenario would be more offensive?
1 – The rapist is a complete sadist and takes great joy in making you feel like shit.
2 – The rapist is severely mentally disabled and doesn’t know what harm is, he only knows hard peepee causes suffering, hard peepee problem must be solved.
Both is bad, but most people would be slightly more offended by the first scenario of someone taking pure joy in causing pain to others. And here we have the problem – nature is an unintentional force causing pain, the animals within it fail to comprehend what ”harming someone” even is, so it’s shrugged off as not that big of a deal, it’s not like the image of the evil sadistic psychopath brutally raping a child.
Some get angrier over a person like this sitting in a prison cell where they can no longer harm anyone anyway than about actual harm that is still going on around them as long as it’s not caused intentionally, like a parent abusing a child but thinking ”it’s for the best”.
But obviously unintentional harm is still harmful. You protect yourself against illnesses, cancers, viruses of all sorts, even though they have no intent to harm you. You protect yourself against objects that have no intent, like looking left and right before you cross the street to not get unintentionally hit by a car, you make sure you don’t accidentally fall into a meatgrinder.
Yes, the hyenas don’t know that they’re causing suffering to you, they have no real ability to understand why what they’re doing is bad, unlike Ted Bundy. But would you therefore no longer mind if they were to eat you alive? Would you voluntarily throw yourself at them and say ”eat me for you don’t know any better”? No.
We still arrest the mentally disabled rapist. Yes, the sadistic, fully competent rapist might be a little more offensive, but ultimately it’s the whole rape thing itself that is the problem, so it’s just hypocritical to say that getting your entrails ripped out of your anus is no longer a big deal just because the hyena is too dumb to understand that it’s painful.
If we were to completely interfere with nature, the ecosystem, it could also disrupt human life. If we were able to simply sterilize and euthanize all other animals to prevent their suffering forever, it would affect human life as well, and it’s assumed that human life must always exist.
Or they simply lament the idea of any life going extinct, not paying their attention to the welfare of that life, if it’s being tortured or not, similar to pro-lifers opposed to the right to die because they misguidedly cling to the notion that life is always good, no matter how much suffering is involved, there can be no excess of life.
And this is what they are not willing to accept, because they believe human life or just sentient life in general must exist. Why? Because in life, we can have pleasurable experiences they don’t want to give up, like eating chocolate and getting an orgasm.
But ultimately this is non-sensical, because if you’re never born, you won’t need to get an orgasm in order to avoid suffering. If you don’t have a wound, you don’t need a bandaid.
Prior to being born, there is no desire wound, so there’s no necessity for a bandaid either – all pleasures are unnecessary, they only serve to prevent suffering once you already exist, but fail to give a reason for why you should exist in the first place, just like you wouldn’t say that just because it’s good to put bandaids on wounds that already exists somehow justifies creating new wounds to put bandaids on.
Preventing someone’s pleasure is only a problem if they’re already in pain, the non-discomforted don’t need to be comforted, non-existence has no discomfort in it that needs to be fixed.
Only once you’re conscious, the alternative to pleasure becomes pain. You don’t eat, you hunger, you don’t drink, you thirst, you don’t shit, you constipate. You don’t reach good, you’re trapped in bad. That’s the nature of consciousness, and biased humans who already exist project that understanding onto non-existence, and then end up believing children must be brought to consciousness to be saved from the unborn purgatory.
So obviously, continued life is seen as a necessity, we can’t just put a stop to mother nature and life itself, that is what they end up thinking, that’s ”playing god” – but somehow creating feeling things is not playing god, somehow, letting a crude, dumb force like nature with no intelligence create feeling things is not playing god.
It’s pretty much like a religion for some, they think of nature almost as some kind of godlike entity that intentionally created life for some kind of divine purpose that must not be questioned, you can’t interfere with the god of nature.
The other animals have to exist to keep a healthy environment for humans to exist in, the torture is just seen and shrugged off as collateral damage, more important is that the ”circle of life” is upheld, we must have life at all costs, no matter how many organisms are being tortured to death.
Some vegans make the point that a lot of other injustices that exist, such as racism and sexism are often motivated by speciesism, and if we taught children how to respect animals, it would be much harder for them to be racist and sexist later on, discriminate and objectify other humans.
This is all fine, but I think it’s not the root cause, I’m going to argue it goes even deeper. The real problem is pro-life, pro-natalist, viviocentrist (life-centered) ideology, the idea that life can be a net positive is used to justify speciesism.
Species survival is assumed to be a noble goal overriding suffering:
”But if we didn’t eat the cow, then the cow wouldn’t even be alive right now, they’d all go extinct! You want to murder the cows???”.
It’s true that if we didn’t want to eat pigs, cows, chicken anymore – pigs, cows, chicken as they are would go extinct, we wouldn’t deliberately breed them into existence anymore and it’s unlikely that such animals could survive in the wild.
However, it would be completely irrelevant, because before cows existed, cows were not trapped in an unborn cow purgatory from which they desperately waited to be released. All their pain would have been prevented, and no pleasure, relief of pain they could have experienced in their lives, like eating grass, could have been missed by them either.
You only get hungry from not eating if you exist. If you don’t exist, you don’t eat, but you also don’t get hungry as a result of that, because you don’t exist.
Pleasure is not intrinsically valuable, it only becomes valuable when you make someone dependent on it by reproducing them. If you’re never reproduced, you don’t miss pleasure from the unborn purgatory, by being reproduced on the other hand, you’re being put into the position of having to chase comfort to avoid being in discomfort.
So really, the cow is not benefitted by being made dependent on comfort that farmers give the cow in return for the milk they give, because the cow did not feel a need to exist before it existed, so arguing you’re doing it a favor by giving it comfort in return for milk would be like arguing I’m doing you a favor by injecting you with heroin in your sleep, making you addicted to it, and then making you suck my dick for more heroin. See, it’s a symbiotic relationship, if I didn’t make you addicted to heroin, you would have never enjoyed satisfying your heroin addiction.
Circle of life, the cow gets comfort and shelter from wild predators that it didn’t need before you forced the genetically modified, retarded cow to exist in the first place, and you get to fondle the cow’s tits. You get new heroin that you didn’t need before I forced you to become addicted to it, and I get my dick sucked.
”Are you going to stop all the carnivores from eating meat, silly vegans? No? Then veganism is wrong! Just admit it vegans, you want to murder lions, just admit it!”.
A great amount of speciesists spend their time pestering vegans with questions about how we ought to deal with cats that need meat to survive, and then all the wild animals that need meat to survive if we want a vegan world.
In all of this, they don’t even question whether life itself is an absolute necessity. Fine, let’s say the animal needs meat to live – does the animal need to live in the first place?
Let’s say some mad scientist bred a new alien species in his laboratory. They will be carnivorous, and they will thrive primarily eating the intestines of human children.
Meat eaters think that it’s justified for cats and other carnivores to hunt for flesh based on the justification that they are carnivorous, and frequently they want to pretend that they themselves are also carnivorous.
So if ”I’m carnivorous” is a justification for harming someone else, then these meat eaters would have to offer their children to the carnivorous alien species in order to not be total hypocrites.
Would they do that? Why or why not? I thought that ”I need meat to live” is an adequate justification for eating someone? Are you saying that the suffering experienced by your child being gutted by my alien breed justifies sterilizing and/or straight up euthanizing my alien breed?
So you SUPPORT GENOCIDE? You don’t think these aliens need to exist?
Suddenly, I think most of these meat eaters would be able to give a clear answer. No, these aliens did not really need to exist to be honest. Before they existed, no one ever needed them to exist. But guess what, that’s the same for all life – before conscious life existed in the universe, the universe never said ”but I really need conscious life to exist! :(”.
If humans, cats, lions and my hypothetical alien breed didn’t exist anymore, they would never miss out and lament not existing, so why is the harm caused by their existence justifiable? It is not.
”What about animal experimentation, you want humans to get sick and die? Ha! Veganism disproven, harming animals is necessary to preserve human life!”
Same, just use alien hypotheticals. We do it for factory farming, we can do it for the animal experimentation problem too. Let’s say there are aliens that will have to perform medical experiments on human children in order to save themselves from a few illnesses that their existence presents them with.
It’s true that these aliens might have to experiment on us once they exist and are prone to suffering, but it still does not explain why they need to exist and be prone to suffering in the first place.
If I know that if I create an alien species, I will have to perform a thousand horrific vivisections on human children in order to figure out what the right medication is for my alien breed when they get a migraine headache, you’d look at me the same way we look at someone like Josef Mengele, what gives me the right to do all that, just because I have a giant boner for aliens existing on planet earth?
Nothing. And similarly there is no justification for the harm caused by human existence or non-human animal existence, speciesists just have a hard-on for humans existing ad infinitum, we can torture as many organisms as possible to preserve human life, life itself is more important than suffering.
Nepotism, another form of ingroup bias: why is it wrong to value the dog over the pig? I also value my child over any other child!
Nepotism is the favoring of your family over others, many vegans while they try to reject speciesism don’t fully reject nepotism. Nepotism is making the value of an organism dependent of what a third party feels about them, i.e it is bad if my child is raped and killed, because that then makes me feel bad because it’s my child.
But obviously, you know that if the parent that valued the child did not exist, you still wouldn’t want to be in the position of the child getting tortured, you recognize the suffering itself as a problem as soon as it happens to you, and don’t want your right to be free from torture based on how your family would be affected by you being tortured.
What about orphan children whose parents don’t feel bad about them being abducted, raped and killed? So nepotism is a bigoted non-sense philosophy, just like speciesism, just like racism, caring about a child only because it popped out of your vagina is bigotry.
An equal consideration of interests as true anti-speciesist philosophers like Peter Singer promote also goes against nepotism, you want exception from torture based on the fact that you are able to be tortured, so can other animals be tortured, so they have to consistently go into the category of organisms that have a right to be free from torture. The same principle rejects nepotism, your child is torturable, but it is not torturable just because it is your child.
Some vegans argue that humans learn racist behavior from being speciesists who ignore the suffering of other animals first, and then they internalize that behavior and have a higher chance of becoming nazis.
”Jews are just subhuman animals” – the nazis said.
But I think the truth is that nazi ingroup favoritist behavior is learned much earlier when the child internalizes that their parents and siblings are somehow more important than everyone else’s parents and siblings.
Right there, they learn to ignore the capacity to suffer in organisms of equal suffering capacity to their own, because other parents and siblings are able to suffer just as much as their own parents and siblings, but somehow the child is more attached to their family than anyone else’s.
So it’s more likely that nepotism comes first, then comes speciesism, then comes racism, that is where the first ”somehow my ingroup is more important” feelings are created, and the creation of families is again promoted by pro-lifers, pro-natalists, viviocentrists who think that life is an absolute necessity, because if there’s no life, there’s no happy happy joy moments, and the reason why we chase happy happy joy moments is to avoid miserable miserable pain moment, and they’re just too dumb to figure out that if life didn’t exist, miserable miserable pain moment would no longer exist, so it wouldn’t need to be escaped.
The assumption that life must exist can be found in a lot of anti-vegan arguments, showing confusion about the implications of what would happen if we were to reject speciesism:
”But then these farm animals would go extinct!”
”But then what about wildlife suffering, euthanize carnivores???”
”But that’s the circle of life, big fish eat small fish!”
There is no need for life to exist, it is not an absolute necessity to avoiding suffering, it only becomes one when you create the life, so why create it?
A frequent excuse that speciesists use to mistreat non-human animals is that animals in the wild, e.g. lions, hyenas, tigers, etc are doing the same thing in nature. In nature, all kinds of bad things happen, animals are worse off than on farms, so that justifies the way they treat animals.
Why is it acceptable for a lion to harm a zebra for its flesh, but not for us to harm a pig for its flesh?
And I think if anyone really questions it, there is no good excuse for that either, which many vegans like to gloss over, the most common excuses you’ll hear for wildlife suffering are that:
1 – Other animals don’t have moral agency, i.e they cannot think about their actions philosophically and recognize they are harming others, these animals, or nature itself lack the intent to do bad things, unlike humans who intentionally do bad, which is evil.
While this is true, this ultimately doesn’t make the suffering caused by a given object or subject any better. A mentally retarded rapist might have little to no ability to contemplate the consequences of his actions, but this still doesn’t make the end result of the rape, harm, any better, the harm is still just as harmful.
If the harm was no longer bad just because it was caused by someone who had no ability to understand that he’s causing it, we wouldn’t prevent severely retarded rapists from raping.
Of course, the same applies to other animals too in that sense, if you really thought that the pain caused by a hyena ripping the entrails out of a wildebeasts anus was somehow not bad, just because the hyena lacks the ability to contemplate how it’s harming others, you shouldn’t at all mind if we fed you to the hyena instead, pain is only bad if its caused intentionally after all.
We can even apply this to completely non-sentient phenomena.
Viruses, cancers and meatgrinders certainly have no intent to cause anyone harm, a meatgrinder cannot contemplate that its harming others by grinding them up, but you still wouldn’t therefore intentionally throw yourself into a meatgrinder because you figured that if something has no intent to harm you, the harm caused by it is somehow no longer bad.
You would remove cancer from your body, even though the cancer didn’t mean to harm you, plain and simple. Similarly you could name situations where intent to harm exists, but it doesn’t result in any harm, so it’s not something to be distressed about anymore.
If a serial child rapist and murderer in a high security prison cell is intending to rape and kill children, it’s not a problem just because he’s intending to do so, because his intending to do so is not resulting in any actual harm to anyone anymore.
It’s the pain itself that is the problem, not the intent to cause it, if the intent to cause pain never actually resulted in it for some reason, we wouldn’t care about it, we only care about the intent to cause pain because it frequently results in pain being caused, but it’s certainly still just as painful of a pain, even if it is caused by something that did not intend to cause said pain.
2 – Other animals are doing it for a necessity, they need the (nutrients in) flesh of other animals in order to survive, humans don’t.
The same problem applies, if the fact that the carnivorous animal is deriving nutrients from their victim somehow makes the suffering being caused no longer a problem, then nature apologists shouldn’t mind being fed to the hyena either. The hyena needs (nutrients in) meat to survive, and these nutrients can also be derived from humans.
So why do they wish to interfere whenever there is a human being attacked by a bear or lion, but when it’s happening to another animal, it’s somehow justified? The characteristic that makes harm to both bad and even possible in the first place, which is sentience/consciousness, is present in both humans and other animals, it’s just speciesism.
One could also use alien hypotheticals to demonstrate this point. Let’s say there were carnivorous aliens, much stronger than us, impossible to be reasoned with, just violent killing machines that rip our entrails out of our anuses. Would any of the nature apologists accept being brutalized by such an alien, just because the alien is also deriving some nutrients from our flesh? I don’t think so.
If these aliens could only survive on human flesh for some reason, we’d still have a problem with it, at that point we would just ask the question whether or not these creatures have a right to reproduce more aliens in the first place.
Pain is pain, no matter by what it’s caused.
I think ultimately all animals should go extinct to be saved from suffering.
Pain exists, that’s a bad thing in and of itself, sometimes in life we may tolerate one pain to avoid a greater one, like a painful vaccination to avoid a disease, but in and of itself, pain is bad, if you could snap a disease away with your fingers you’d do that.
So all else held constant, it is good to prevent it from happening. You prevented a broken leg before it happened? Good. We can ultimately prevent pain, by simply stopping the production of pain machines, which is any conscious being – humans, other mammals, insects.
All we lose is all pleasures, which bothers many, but in reality isn’t a big deal, because if you don’t exist, you don’t even need pleasure. Not hungry? You don’t need to eat. No broken leg? You don’t need a painkiller. Problem solved, I don’t remember ever having a desire to exist before I existed because I simply didn’t exist, and I think it’s the same for everyone else ultimately.
The absence of pleasure is not the presence of pain. When you exist, the absence of pleasure is the presence of pain. You don’t eat, you hunger. You don’t drink, you dehydrate. You don’t defecate, you constipate. So when you exist, you need good to avoid bad. But when you don’t exist, pleasure is also absent, but it does not result in any pain. So why create the need for pleasure?
Let’s say I put you in control of Pluto or some other planet, you could press the button to create alien evolution, slimy tentacle monsters cannibalizing each other. You know they currently don’t exist, so they’re not missing out on pleasure. You know if you push the ”create” button, torture will be thrown into the ingredient list. So why create unnecessary torture for unnecessary pleasure?
Sentient existence itself is unnecessary.
All conscious beings do is to try to avoid bad/suffering, by obtaining good/pleasure, relief of bad/suffering, which we didn’t need before we existed and didn’t experience any suffering, so to argue that you could change any organism for the better by making it conscious is ridiculous on the same level as arguing I can do you a favor by stabbing you in the chest for the good of then pulling the knife out of your chest again and putting a bandaid on it.
Yes, the lion might need to eat a zebra to sustain their existence in the wild. But the lion didn’t need to exist in the first place, there’s no unborn lion purgatory from which the lion cubs felt horribly deprived of zebra flesh. So if you just don’t make a new lion, it won’t need to consume any zebras, it’s delusional that nature apologists think there is some kind of great loss for the collective species in simply not existing anymore. If there’s such a high price to pay for this unnecessary cycle of sentient organisms being created, why endorse the game?
Species don’t have interests, individual animals have interest in avoiding suffering, humans are projecting their delusions of ethnonationalism + the silly idea that there is a pre-birth deprivation chamber onto these animals. Ultimately, the responsibility can only be on us to stop harm to these animals, they are too incompetent to do it, but instead idiotic humans are using it as an excuse for inflicting harm because nature does it, and that’s the point here.
Nature is a shithole, but that is not an excuse.
Yes, in nature, bad things happen – at the hands of animals that have a comparable intelligence to severely mentally retarded humans. If a meat eater justifies their mistreatment of animals just because animals in the wild do it, that is ultimately no better than me looking at a violent mentally retarded person and saying they acted badly, so that’s now an excuse for me to do the same, although I’m more intelligent to potentially know better.
Vegans who are in denial or support of wildlife suffering are certainly delusional for clinging to their pro-life bias, thinking the good in life justifies all the bad, but this doesn’t ultimately absolve the carnists of their crimes against other animals.
Carnists frequently make up the narrative that they’re doing these animals a favor by still abusing them, because they would be abused worse in the wild, completely ignoring that they could also just not breed them into existence in the first place.
It’s not as though we just have the options 1. let the cow live on your farm or 2. release the cow into the wild, another option is also 3. don’t breed more cows.
And they could also keep the animals without exploiting them, they just wouldn’t profit from it, and that’s what they don’t like. It’s as though you’re presenting us only with two options of 1. I can adopt a child from Africa and rape it or 2. I let the child starve to death in Africa. Why not leave out the rape part? You don’t have to release a cow into the wild, still doesn’t mean you need to force her through pregnancy again and again.
They use the other animal’s lack of intelligence resulting in harmful behavior as an excuse to engage in harmful behavior towards animals as well.
It would be like I work in a home for said severely disabled people, and I see that one of them is sexually assaulting and beating a girl. But instead of intervening, I figure I might as well just join in. I mean, the retards did it, so why shouldn’t I rape a disabled girl too? Survival of the fittest, top of the food chain bro, big fish eat smaller fish.
Why not? Severely mentally disabled people who don’t understand that they’re causing harm are doing it too, so I should not have to take any responsibility for my behavior either, although I’m more intelligent to know better.
This retarded rapist (nature) brutalizes his victim much worse, I brutalize my victims less (animal agriculture), therefore, rape isn’t really a big deal now, because the mentally retarded rapist rapes worse than I do.
Often in discussions about what is done to non-humans by humans, hypothetical scenarios involving the severely intellectually disabled are used, since speciesists will often excuse the harm they cause by saying that animals are lesser than us in terms of their intelligence.
But obviously there are humans that are stupider than pigs, so if you wouldn’t sign me a contract that said I can cut your nuts off with no anesthesia if you were to get into a car accident tomorrow, leaving you permanently disabled on the same intelligence level of a pig, why would you think that this type of treatment is acceptable for a pig? It’s hypocritical.
Other animals can suffer just like us, all they lack is intelligence, similar to how small children or severely mentally disabled humans lack intelligence, but that wouldn’t lead you to conclude that now their pain is no longer bad. Small children and disabled people are human, pigs aren’t, but that is irrelevant, because braindead humans are human but can’t feel pain, you wouldn’t mind having a knife shoved in your throat if you were braindead.
A good way to demonstrate the horrors of the dairy industry would be to just imagine I’m doing what they are doing with a mentally retarded human female on the same intelligence level of a cow, which is to forcibly impregnate her, rape, but if it’s not rape when it’s happening to cows because cows aren’t smart enough to spell the word rape and explain the concept of rape in proper english, then neither should the rape of said similarly intelligent human female be considered a real rape.
Then, I take her children, which are all due to their young age not much more intellient than a cow anyway and tie them up in some kind of BDSM type manner, so their flesh stays soft and tender, and then after a while I slaughter them all and make steak out of them. I do this to said retarded girl again and again so that I can get the milk, and then when her tits become non-functional, I slit her throat or throw her in a meatgrinder.
And we can do a similar thought experiment for wildlife suffering.
Let’s say we isolate all the severely intellectually disabled, but mostly physically strong into an abandoned forest somewhere, cut off by a wall or some such object from our general public.
They search for berries in the forest, they might resort to cannibalism if they can’t find anything to eat, they beat each other up and rape each other, fall into all kinds of traps and accidents, die of infectious diseases in said forest that they don’t know how to prevent.
There you have basically recreated the wild – mother nature, creatures as sentient as human children being tormented and not knowing how to prevent it from happening.
If we would see the abandoned forest experiment as a problem to be solved because we recognize that although they are less intelligent, but they can still feel pain, then so should we see wildlife suffering as a problem to be solved because we can recognize that although they are less intelligent, but they can still feel pain, there’s no reason why our feeling of responsibility should be any different towards wild animals than towards children or severely mentally retarded humans – we are the only ones that can potentially put them out of harm’s way.
But here the nature apologists want to believe that nature somehow magically knows what it’s doing, many of them don’t feel the need to justify it beyond saying that it exists, so therefore it’s perfectly fine. ”That’s just nature, that’s just life” – it is, so therefore it should keep existing. Is-ought fallacy, nothing more, nothing less.
That’s like discovering the torture chamber of a serial killer somewhere, and then not calling the police, because you see that the torture chamber indeed does exist, so therefore, what’s going on inside it must be good, it should keep existing, otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
They even glorify it, sometimes tourists like to watch these animals fight and don’t feel the responsibility to interfere and shoot a tortured animal to end its misery, leaving their fate in nature’s hands is assumed to be the right course action to take, just because it exists, so it must be good, ultimately this is just as bad as cheering on a retard gladiator war, starved mentally retarded humans trying to eat each other.
They even wish to replicate it, breed more tigers. Why is that? Why is it good to create more creatures that will rely on violence towards other animals to get their food, when you would look at anyone who thinks we should try to breed as many mentally retarded humans that violently assault and rape others as insane?
What’s to take away from this is that yes, nature is bad, many bad things happen in nature. But nature has no intent or plan, and the animals residing in the wild are not particularly intelligent enough to understand the implications of their actions, so to look at such a retarded process and say that it is a great guide for you on how to live your life and justify abusing animals is absurd, similar to pointing to the behavior of a severely retarded rapist and arguing that because he did it too, you should be allowed to rape.
Instead of recognizing nature to be the unfair shithole that it is, they are using it as an excuse for the pain that they cause by this unintelligent, primitive force, saying animals in nature have it far worse, so therefore, animal farming is just fine. That’s just like the retarded rapist raped more brutally, so therefore, you should be allowed to rape as long as it’s a little less brutally.
Why use an unintelligent, crude, dumb force as an example of how to behave?
The argument for humans rights is the same argument for animal rights, other animals possess the characteristic that makes it important to be put into the category of organisms that have rights, which is sentience – the capacity to feel things.
It is not my white skin color that makes it important for me to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat, as I could be braindead, still contain white skin color, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not the white skin color that makes avoidance of a knife in my throat into an important priority.
It is not my penis that makes it important for me to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat, as I could be braindead, still contain a penis, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not penis that makes avoidance of knife in my throat into an important priority.
And finally, it is not my human DNA that makes it an important priority to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat either, as I could be braindead, still contain human DNA, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not human DNA that makes avoidance of knife in my throat into an important priority.
There is absolutely no reason why it would be in any way worse to pull the plug on a braindead person, any more than to pull the plug on a computer, the only reason why it could ever possibly be bad to do so is because it affects another sentient organism, like a family member or friend of their’s that has some kind of emotional attachment to the braindead body, but if that family would indeed be more upset by someone destroying their computer than the braindead human, then it would be worse to destroy the computer in fact.
Speciesists are under ingroup favoritism/bias, just like racists and sexists, i.e I am important because I can feel things, that is understood, but this other creature is not important despite being able to feel things just like me, because it doesn’t share group membership with me, you’re not in team white, team penis or team human, so we can torture you.
An other difference that exists between humans and animals, that does not as severely exist between whites and blacks, or men and women, is the different level of intelligence, it is true that pigs, cows, chicken are much less intellectually capable than humans, whereas there’s no such extreme difference between blacks and whites, or men and women.
However, then we run into the mental retardation problem.
There are of course severely mentally disabled humans that aren’t much more intelligent than pigs, cows, chicken, definitely not chimpanzees, so would any of these speciesists sign me a contract that states that if they were to get into a car accident tomorrow and end up on the same level of intelligence as a pig, cow or chicken, I am allowed to treat them as a pig, cow or chicken?
Let’s say you are no longer able to add 50 plus 50, and cannot read books, so now I can cut your nuts off with no anesthesia, stick my arm up your asshole and throw you into a meatgrinder once you are of no more use for me to rape and exploit? Is that perfectly fine? I couldn’t get any more milk out of that retarded bitch’s tits, so I beat her to death with a sledgehammer. Why not?
”BUT THEY’RE STILL HUMANS!!!!!”
Saying that such disabled humans are still human though, even if they’re not as intelligent, so they’re still granted rights unlike the other animals is nothing but a cheap cop-out, because if the speciesist specifically states intelligence to be the reason why humans have rights unlike animals, and we already established that human DNA in and of itself is worthless (braindead vegetables contain human DNA but can’t feel shit), then obviously if there’s a human that does not possess such a level of intelligence, they don’t deserve rights, plain and simple, it’s logical consistency.
It would be analogous a sexist saying men are granted rights because they’re stronger than women, but then, when we find these sexists a man that is just as weak as the average woman, they say ”but he still has a peepee!” to justify why this man has rights, but women don’t, because the very reason they stated as to why penis havers deserve rights is because they’re stronger than women, this man is not, so he doesn’t deserve rights according to said sexist.
They basically want to attempt to say that even if this retarded person is no more intelligent than a pig that they justify eating based on said pig’s lack of intelligence, they should still be treated the same as other humans, because they share one characteristic with them, which is being human.
This is completely irrational and arbitrary, by that sort of rule (treat the minority the same as the majority based on sharing one characteristic with them), I could say most people are not rapists, Ted Bundy is a serial rapist but also a person, so therefore, we shouldn’t arrest Ted Bundy, because he shares the characteristic, which is personhood with non-rapists.
Speciesists don’t really have any coherent excuse for this, here they frequently just try to make it sound more complex than it is, by appealing to extrinsic factors that may in practice, not in principle be different about causing harm to an unintelligent creature, or use other concepts to describe intelligence and say that animals lack these capacities, like rationality, reason, the ability to reciprocate morals and social contracts, etc.
So they might say if you assault the retarded person, the family of the retarded person would be upset, if you assault the cow, no one would be upset, except the cow of course.
Great, then just rape a retarded orphan child that no one knows on an abandoned island, or in a society of psychopaths that all join in and rape the retarded orphan child too. You’d sign the contract then that says if you end up retarded, we can treat you like that? No.
The pig on the other hand was just bred for meat, the retard wasn’t! Great, then let’s just explicitly breed pig IQ humans for the purpose of turning them into mince meat then, that surely makes it a lot better, as long as you breed someone for the sole purpose of exploiting them it’s alright, slavery is only a problem if you weren’t bred for it and your IQ is over 70.
Of course, they’d mock even the idea of a cow being assaulted or raped, because the cow is supposedly not intelligent enough to understand the concept of assault and rape (i.e in our differently verbalized language, they still feel what is happening), the cow cannot spell the words assault or rape. So therefore, supposedly you can’t assault or rape them because they’re too dumb.
Although, they would of course be completely fine with calling the assaulting and raping of a human female on the IQ level of a cow assault and rape, it’s hypocritical on every level, perhaps they’d even say ”OH MY GOD THIS IS RAPE” if they walked in on some guy inserting his arm into their tied up pet dog’s anus, that is no more significantly intelligent than a cow either.
Or speciesists may dress it up in other abilities that are related to intelligence to make their bigot argument sound more complex, some examples would include:
”Ability to understand morals and reciprocate the social contract.”
Same problem applies, some humans cannot adequately reciprocate ethics, here a favorite dishonest weasel tactic is of course to appeal to violent mentally handicapped humans that have been locked away for the sake of public safety to demonstrate how these individuals lost their right to freedom as well, but we’re not talking about their violence, just their retardation, and there are harmless retarded individuals that don’t need to be locked away, just like pigs, cows, chicken are harmless.
”Ability to understand and speak in our language.”
Hilarious one too, that retarded mute cunt couldn’t talk back, so I just kept raping her.
”Ability to write poems, philosophize and make scientific discoveries.”
Even average humans often can’t do that, so turn them into mince meat?
”Ability to do math.”
So a calculator or a computer has more rights than an average human child?
”Ability to think and plan ahead for the future.”
Same problem, not to mention that many animals can do this, but that’s a less important point.
And so on and so forth, ultimately it all boils down to the same concept – intelligence, and very obviously, intelligence is not why you want to avoid pain, if you legitimately believe that, you are delusional, psychotic, fundamentally disconnected from objective reality.
A butthurt attempt at downplaying the suffering of animals is then often times also that because these other animals are less intelligent, therefore can’t comprehend how to act rationally towards one another, we’re somehow allowed to be just as retarded, even when we know better.
”Ha! Silly vegans, you all try to save the animals, but the fact is, these animals would eat you too if they got the chance!!! Look at nature, dog eat dog world, the lion is eating the zebra too so why shouldn’t we do the same???”
You are appealing to what retarded creatures that don’t know any better are doing, to justify you doing the same, even though you know better.
Imagine the following scenario, I work in a facility for mentally retarded humans, sometimes these disabled individuals are sexually assaulting and beating each other, because they lack the ability to think about and contemplate the ethical implications of their actions.
What would be the ethically responsible thing to do here?
1 – Prevent them from sexually assaulting and beating each other.
Or:
2 – Joining in and brutally raping a mentally disabled girl too because they did too.
Look, these retards don’t know any better, they would sexually assault you as well, so you might as well just join in and sexually assault them too. No problem.
Not to mention, other animals are largely completely harmless to you as well, pigs, cows, chicken generally don’t assault humans in some kind of dangerous manner, so that makes it even worse.
It’s not as though we’re talking about a lion attacking you, which we could analogize to a big, strong retarded person sexually assaulting you, we’re talking about a chicken that can’t seriously harm you, so this is pretty much like some sociopathic rapist saying you are under no obligation to not violently assrape a 3 year old with your fist because a 3 year old kicked you in the nuts once.
The 3 year old has no obligation not to punch me, so I don’t have an obligation not to punch the 3 year old either, checkmate you anti-child abuse idiots. You don’t punch 3 year olds? Well guess what, they would punch you because they don’t know any better, so I should do the same!
You get the point, ultimately supporting animal abuse because animals have a lower IQ is not a rational stance, it’s an irrational stance, and none of the dishonest tactics that speciesists use to justify this stand up to scrutiny in any way.
What all forms of discrimination like racism or sexism, but also speciesism and nepotism have in common is that they are just different forms of irrational ingroup favoritism that deny that the reason as to why it’s bad to be discriminated against is the capacity to experience suffering itself, not membership of the particular group, it’s discrimination based on an irrelevant factor.
Adherents to more socially acceptable forms of ingroup favoritism, like speciesists like to claim that comparisons to the holocaust, racism and sexism are unfair when one is talking about what is done to non-human animals, because that’s unfair to humans that have been dehumanized by the racists and nazis, not understanding that this is just another irrational ingroup bias on their part, assuming that if something is not human, it is fine to harm it anyway without needing further explanation.
Speciesism is bad for the exact same reason that racism and sexism are bad.
A simple enough question to ask, what is the characteristic that makes it important for you to be put into the category of things that have rights (e.g. a right not to get randomly assraped with a chainsaw)?
Is it your skin color?
Is it your genitalia?
Is it your particular family origin?
Is it your country?
Is it your species?
The answer is no to all of these, the reason why you want to avoid getting anally raped with a chainsaw randomly is because you are sentient, that is the characteristic that makes it important to be put into the category of things that have rights, sentience, the capacity to feel things, not skin color, not gender, not species.
Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia“).
P1: Sentience is what makes it possible and bad to be harmed.
P2: Most non-human animals are sentient.
C: It is bad when said non-human animals experience harm.
If one is sentient, one can produce sensations, and sensations are of different qualities. They can be better/less bad, e.g. I’m in a blanket and this feels good because it protects me against the cold, or worse/less good, e.g. I poured gasoline all over myself and set myself on fire, this is a little too warm.
On the other hand, if you were a completely braindead human vegetable on the same level as literal vegetables like carrots or broccoli emotionally, you wouldn’t care if I set you on fire even though you would still contain human DNA and be alive, that’s because you wouldn’t be sentient, so it doesn’t feel bad anymore, it doesn’t feel like anything, so this proves that it’s not the possession of human DNA that makes the avoidance of harm an important priority.
A speciesist ignores this and downplays the suffering, just like a racist slave owner ignores the capacity to suffer of the black slaves. Like the other ingroup favoritists, they pretend that the characteristic that makes it a really important priority to avoid being harmed is membership of their ingroup, when obviously the characteristic that in reality makes it an important priority to avoid being harmed is simply the capacity to experience harm itself.
”You can’t call it rape!”
That is something that speciesists sometimes insist when it comes to cows getting restrained and forcefully impregnated, because it’s a human concept supposedly.
How so, why exactly do they think that is a sensible definition? Rape at its core describes having your preference not to engage in a sexual activity or especially to be penetrated violated, particularly the unwanted penetration of your sexual organs, otherwise it can also be referred to as a molestation.
Human DNA is not the enabling function of a preference, sentience is the enabling function of a preference, that is what creates preferences that can either be alleviated or frustrated.
Can I rape a braindead person that has absolutely no preference not to get raped? Is it not rape if I were to restrain a dog in a rack and stick my arm up its asshole? I’m sure if any of these speciesist bigots walked in on someone violently fistfucking their cat, they would be perfectly comfortable saying ”that guy raped my cat”.
You could dishonestly refer to what dairy farmers do as ”just artificial insemination”, but if they have to be restrained because they don’t want to be artificially inseminated, that entirely fails to capture the aspect of forcing yourself on someone else, it’s not as though the cow is consensually making a doctor’s appointment to be artificially inseminated.
These ingroup favoritists that proclaim to be against against racism and sexism but get offended when one discusses the non-human animal holocaust have learned nothing from past mistakes of humanity, they foolishly think racism and sexism were only bad because it harmed other humans, how horrible, as if that is somehow a relevant factor.
Smashing a braindead human with a sledgehammer is by itself not any worse than doing it to a car or a computer, it could only produce some amount of badness in the sense that it affects sentient organisms that care about said braindead human, if the family of said braindead human cared more about their plasma TV than the braindead human, it would be worse to smash that plasma TV with a sledgehammer.
That’s the only reason why it could ever possibly be bad to destroy a braindead human, if some other sentient organism, like their family were to be negatively affected by it in some way, human DNA in and of itself is absolutely worthless, just like skin color or genitalia.
In reality the reason why black slavery was bad was also only because blacks were sentient, not because they contained human DNA, if really all the blacks had been braindead it wouldn’t have mattered that whites enslaved them, and that’s why it’s also bad to enslave pigs, because they are generally not braindead.
In fact, it wouldn’t have even been slavery anymore of course, because again, in that instant, if there is no sentience, there exists no preference/desire not to be enslaved either, you cannot enslave a rock, this entire concept of raping or enslaving something that has no will is absurd.
It’s absurd how those humanist bigots that criticize racism and sexism are offended by the racist and sexist analogies because they feel that it downplays the suffering blacks and women go through, when in reality it’s the exact other way around if anything, comparing what they go through in the first world downplays the suffering of non-human animals.
The last time I checked black men aren’t getting castrated without anesthesia, immigrant children aren’t being thrown in a meatgrinder, women aren’t being kept in a cage and repeatedly forcefully impregnated, then have their offspring ripped away and slaughtered.
This doesn’t mean they can’t face any problems, but certain non-human animals have not and are not even considered as subjects under the law for the greatest part of history, blacks and/or women are generally not considered property under the law anymore, it’s fair to say their sensibilities are almost always considered less important, by default.
They make it out to be like someone getting called a fat cunt or receiving an unwanted sexual compliment whilst walking down the street is simply inherently worse than getting raped multiple times, then having your offspring ripped away and slaughtered, then having your throat slit open once you can’t produce any more milk, because one happens to a lifeform that contains human DNA and the other one doesn’t, as if that actually means anything to how much suffering is being produced any more than which skin color or set of genitalia you have.
Completely distorted priorities stemming from a psychology that is ironically no better than that of the racists and sexists they like to criticize, it’s the manifestation of their ingroup bias, they are acting no better than the nazis and fascists they take issue with.
Of course, some animals may have a lower capacity to suffer than humans, so if you were forced to throw either an animal of lower sentience or one of higher sentience in a meatgrinder, it would be more rational to throw the animal of lower sentience into it, but this is not an irrational discrimination based on species membership alone.
It’s not more important to protect a human than a cockroach because the human is part of the human species, it’s only more important in the sense that the human has a higher capacity to experience sufferingupon being thrown into the meatgrinder, so you throw the cockroach instead of the human infant.
In fact, were the human entirely braindead, or were we talking about a human embryo that is likewise not sentient, some variation of human that is less sentient than cockroach, then at that point it would become the more sensible option to throw said human vegetable in a meatgrinder than the cockroach, it would generate less suffering, better squash a thousand human embryos than one cockroach, it would cause less negative sensation to be produced.
You don’t want to avoid suffering because you have human DNA, just like you don’t want to avoid suffering because you have white skin color, you want to avoid it because suffering is simply an inherently negative experience, that’s why you put on the seatbelt and get anesthesia during a surgery, that’s why both speciesism and racism are a failure, you fully know you wouldn’t want to be that thing you discriminate against when it’s experiencing harm.
Same principle applies to nepotism as well, another more socially acceptable form of bigotry, which is all it ultimately is as well – bigotry, this tendency already starts with your family, because I know that some bigots are so deep into their bigotry that they would answer the typical vegan question of:
”Why pet the dog but eat pigs?”
with simply more narrow-minded bigoted rhetoric like:
”But, I also treat my child better than every other child, nothing hypocritical about that at all.”
Is the fact that someone’s child is someone’s child really what makes it important for the child to avoid harm though? No.
It is not the fact that your child is your child that makes it bad for the child to suffer, it is bad simply because suffering itself is bad just like water is watery, even if it happens in a different vessel that is not your child, water in a different bucket is still just as wet and watery.
You don’t want whether or not you have a right not to be tortured based on whether or not others are positively biased towards you, so it’s still hypocritical to say that the dog’s value is dependent on you being positively biased towards it.
Or did you only care about avoiding harm as a child because you were of some use to some nepotistic bigot, is that what determined your value? No, of course not, even if your parents died when you were 5 years old, you would’ve still tried to avoid it if someone tried to set you on fire, you wouldn’t have volunteered to be burned alive, saying:
”Well, I’m given no extrinsic value by my parents, so therefore, I’m but a worthless object, go ahead and set me on fire all you want!”
As if the whether or not an experience is bad is dependent on how someone else (in this case parents) feel about it, so if the parents think that the child feeling bad is good, then the negative sensation the child experiences is somehow simultaneously positive (a direct contradiction).
The experience generated by an orphan child about which no one cares being burned alive is bad regardless of whether or not some nepotistic bigot thinks it is bad, if someone tried to set you on fire when you were 5 years old, you would have still tried to run away, even if you didn’t have any parents that cared about you.
You should ideally care about your child only because it is a sentient organism capable of suffering, not because it crawled out of your vagina in particular – caring about it only because it crawled out of your vagina is bigotry just like speciesism, which is bigotry, just like racism.
And if you were faced with the meatgrinder scenario again, and your child or 50 other children would have to be thrown into it, then it would be more rational to throw your child into the meatgrinder, because harm to your child is bad because it is harm itself that is bad, not because it is your child, but if 50 were thrown in a meatgrinder instead, it would generate more harm, so if you throw your child in there, it’s less harm, less bad, it would be less bad in that scenario if one of the two things had to happen either way, no matter how offensive to common human intuition that is.
Ultimately any kind of narrow focus on the rights of a subset of sentient organisms is delusional – black, white, men, women, human, animal, etc rights, what makes it an important priority to have rights to be protected from suffering is never being part of those particular ingroups, it’s the capacity to experience suffering itself, once you make it about the group in particular, it becomes non-sensical.
All that matters is that you’re part of the sentient group so to speak, if you’re not, we can’t possibly even harm ”you” by treating ”you” a certain way, you wouldn’t want to face the discrimination farm animals face unless the trait sentience/consciousness/suffering-capacity would be absent in you, it’s not about being human or not human or how attached others are to you.
The argument for antinatalism of course also applies to other animals, sentient organisms try to avoid suffering their enitre lives and the best way they can achieve that is by not being alive in the first place. Suffering is always bad, sometimes in life you might be forced to bear one suffering to avoid even greater suffering in the future, like a vaccination to avoid a more painful disease, or a boring school life to get a good job liberating you from poverty later on, but suffering itself is always a bad thing.
By creating sentient life, you create suffering of everyday needs and urges, such as hunger, thirst, constipation, sexual frustration, fatigue, all kinds of little irritations and proneness to much worse suffering in the future, e.g. car accidents, drug addiction, cancer, etc, the list goes on and on, for animals in the wild it might be being eaten alive or having parasites in your asshole.
Life also contains good experiences, but you would not have suffered from missing them if you simply never came into existence.
When you exist, you need to chase pleasure, or you are punished with suffering, but when you simply don’t exist, while you won’t experience pleasure, you will not experience any suffering as a result of it either.
Eat or get hungry (or experience appetite or boredom, also suffering, someone can suffer from being put in prison and no longer being able to eat their favorite dessert).
Drink or get thirsty.
Shit or constipate.
Cum or get tense.
Sleep or fatigue.
Socialize or get lonely.
So on and so forth.
Meeting your needs is good, but is it a problem if your needs simply never exist to begin with? No. You can perfectly stitch up a wound, that doesn’t mean you’re better off than never having been wounded in the first place, that’s the game you’re in once your instantiation of consciousness exists, always trying to heal a wound/preserve yourself.
You can fulfill your needs, you can avoid suffering temporarily, but never as efficiently as by just never becoming conscious in the first place. Creating unfulfilled need, want, desire for the good of fulfilling them, creating suffering for the good of alleviating it is about as absurd as to give someone an illness for the good of then treating that illness.
It’s true your victim avoided the pain of a stabwound going untreated, better a bandaid than no bandaid, it’s true that they obtained a sensation of great relief from getting a painkiller, but you could have still done better by just not sticking the knife into their chest in the first place.
Neither is speciesism in any way a more coherent viewpoint than racism, it’s bad to have certain things happen to you, like having a knife pushed in your throat, because you are sentient, you can feel things, it’s not your white skin color, gender, or even your species that makes having a knife pushed into your throat into a problem.
It’s bad to get stabbed, because it simply produces bad sensations, it’s not bad because you contain a certain skin color or human DNA, as you could be braindead and still contain said skin color or human DNA, but it would no longer produce badness if someone stabbed you, so both racism and speciesism fail, they’re just as irrelevant in determining whether or not it’s bad to get stabbed.
Sentience is the only important characteristic here, destroying non-sentient things cannot produce badness, unless it is of course in another sentient organism, i.e a family member might be offended that you destroy a braindead human with a sledgehammer, but it doesn’t produce any badness in the braindead human, but if the family members indeed care much more about their plasma tv, it’s arguably worse to smash that plasma tv in with a hammer.
So the conclusion is that creating sentient life is bad, and so is being a speciesist who only apply antinatalism to human animals.
Ideally, both humans and other animals would stop reproducing, and indeed, when we look at other animals, we can see that in a lot of ways they’re suffering a great deal as well, that’s because they are less intelligent and therefore not as able to work toward reducing suffering.
Many are dependent on the nutrients in the flesh of other animals.
Hyenas eat their prey alive.
Lions dominate other lion groups and often brutally kill off the lion cubs.
Many female spiders, some octopuses kill and eat the male after the mating ritual.
Ducks commit organized gang rape.
Chimps sometimes fight brutal wars where they rip each others body parts off.
Here even many animal rights supporters are indeed complete hypocrites, they’re still suffering from a pro-nature and a pro-life bias, they don’t wish to interfere with nature to stop the suffering of wild animals or as much as with farmed animals, which already frequently becomes apparent when carnists ask them (though in that case most likely with dishonest intent) why it is ok for the lion to kill a zebra for flesh, but not for us to kill a pig for its flesh.
There is actually no great answer to this, the common rebuttal is that:
The lion doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to acknowledge it is harming others, humans are harming others intentionally, other animals don’t.
If that is the issue, then there would be no point in stopping a mentally retarded person on the IQ level of a lion from brutally raping someone, to make it more similar, let’s say it’s his mentally retarded sister on the IQ level of a zebra. But the intelligence level of the harm causer doesn’t diminish the harm they cause, the outcome, suffering, is still bad nonetheless.
Why don’t these nature apologists offer themselves to be eaten by lions then, if the fact that lions don’t understand what they’re doing makes what they’re doing not bad?
Intent is ultimately irrelevant, if a rapist with severe mental retardation, schizophrenia or multiple personalities raped you, you’d still want it to stop. If you were the one eaten by the bear, you’d still want it to stop. If you were tortured by a virus or machine with no intent, you’d want it to stop.
The lion is a carnivore by nature, needs the flesh of others for survival.
Then again, why don’t these nature apologists offer themselves to be eaten by lions, the lion needs (nutrients in) flesh to survive, so they should have no problem with being eaten by one, the lion derives nutrients from human just like from gazelle flesh.
There should be no problem with a hypothetical, physically stronger (than human) carnivorous alien species hunting or farming us for our flesh, because they’re naturally carnivorous, so that somehow makes the suffering we experience no longer relevant, as long as the aggressor is deriving nutrients from it, it’s acceptable.
Pain is not any less bad by it being caused or experienced by those that aren’t able to grasp what they are caught up in or just because someone is deriving nutrients from their victim, it’s in fact irresponsible of us not to interfere with this completely unfair game, we’re the only ones that can really do anything about it.
It’s the pain in and of itself that is the problem, not the intent to cause it. The only reason why we care about bad intent is because it tends to lead to a bad outcome later on, e.g. a serial rapist and killer in solitary confinement may have bad intent to cause harm to others, but it’s not a problem anymore, because he’s unable to do it, a virus has no intent to cause harm but you’d still try to prevent it from infecting you.
To a wild boar it doesn’t matter whether it is torn apart by a wild predator or tortured by some sociopathic factory farm worker, the suffering is just as bad, if not worse in many cases, torture in the wild has been going on for much longer than in factory farms and there’s no harm mitigation whatsoever, no rules against eating someone alive.
When it comes to wildlife suffering, all the arguments that they refute when carnists make them suddenly come out of the woodwork.
It is what it is.
That’s just nature, therefore it’s good.
That’s how it always has been.
Often times in discussions about what is done to non-human animals by human animals, hypotheticals involving mentally handicapped humans are utilized, as one of the great differences between humans and other animals are their different levels of intelligence, but obviously being less intelligent doesn’t make being harmed no longer bad, so if it’s bad to torture humans that are no more intelligent than pigs, then it’s bad to torture pigs as well.
A good way to demonstrate the horrors of the dairy industry would for instance be to just imagine I’m doing what they are doing with a mentally handicapped human female.
Forcefully impregnate her, steal her kids that are due to their young age no more intelligent than cows anyway, tie them up so they can’t move for their flesh to stay tender, then slaughter them all. Yes, they are all less intelligent, but it’d obviously still be bad if I did that, it would generate negative sensations.
The thought experiment for nature and wildlife suffering would just be leaving the severely intellectually disabled in a forest to fend for themselves.
Imagine we isolate all the severely intellectually disabled into an asylum into an abandoned forest somewhere, cut off by a wall or some such object from our general public.
They desperately search for berries in the forest, try to cannibalize each other when food resources are scarce, they die of all sorts of accidents or infectious diseases in said forest they don’t know how to prevent, and once in a while they manage to get on top of another and produce more having the overall same legacy.
This would almost certainly be seen as a problem, the same thing essentially happens in the wild, which is by most not acknowledged as a problem at all, even as something to be preserved, frequently justified by simply pointing to the fact that this is mother nature, therefore it must go on as it is, which is no better than justifying the forest experiment by simply pointing out that it is indeed the abandoned retard forest, so therefore, it must be good because it exists.
That’s just an is-ought fallacy – it’s like you discovered the torture chamber of a serial killer and didn’t call the police because the torture chamber exists, so you figured that what’s taking place inside it must be good, otherwise the torture chamber wouldn’t exist, it exists so it must be fine.
This is a faulty conclusion, because just because something exists, that doesn’t mean that it generates good outcomes for sentient organisms.
It exists, therefore it should keep existing, that’s the assumption.
The blinding difference here is human DNA again, but the suffering endured in the wild is the same as suffering endured in the abandoned retard forest, human DNA alone doesn’t determine your capacity to suffer, human fetuses prior to reaching consciousness and braindead human vegetables being the greatest examples of this, so there’s no reason why we should interfere with the forest experiment for such an insignificant reason but not nature in general.
Both contain tremendous amounts of suffering in the same way and no one is harmed by not being brought into existence, so we should interfere with both the abandoned retard forest and the jungle.
If any of these nature apologists had parasites in their assholes, they would insist on removing them. If we dumped them into the location they are defending, the wild, and they would still have parasites in their assholes, they would still insist on removing them, so in what exact location suffering is happening is rather irrelevant, it’s the suffering part itself that is the problem, regardless of its location.
If the big, strong, 6’5 tall, tiger IQ human sexually assaulted everyone the nature defenders would see it as a problem, even if he doesn’t know any better than to sexually assault everyone, even if he only assaults mentally handicapped girls that aren’t much more intelligent than zebras, you wouldn’t insist on creating more individuals like that because you understand the negative consequences of doing so.
When they a see a tiger causing harm, they get a big boner because it looks so majestic and has pretty tiger stripes too, so that’s different when the tiger is torturing a zebra to death, so we shouldn’t stop this from happening.
Conservation efforts focused on keeping these animals breeding forever are simply misguided (when we’re talking about something directly related to the welfare of already existent animals it’s a different story of course), wild animals will go through much more suffering if we try to preserve them at all costs, first off because they’ll be born which always results in suffering, need, want, desire, just as with humans, the global antinatalist argument based on antifrustrationism applies to both, secondly because of the particularly faulty and destructive manners they are wired to act.
Extinction is benign and should be seen as the end goal, there is no tiger or elephant right now in the unborn (non-human) animal purgatory lamenting the absence of more tigers and elephants roaming planet earth, you wouldn’t be doing these animals a favor by breeding more of them.
These animals first and foremost want to avoid suffering, just like humans by the way, it’s just that they don’t have any of the emotional complications and delusions going on that humans developed as a way to deal with suffering.
A wildebeast with its entrails ripped out of its asshole by a hyena isn’t laying around in the grass, hoping that no one comes to euthanize it because that would violate its religious belief that getting your entrails ripped out of your asshole by a hyena is god’s test and you must endure it to go to wildebeast heaven one day, these are idiotic coping mechanisms and rationalizations only humans come up with to justify all the suffering that surrounds them in life.
How one should go on about preventing all the other animals from reproducing as peacefully as possible for everyone involved is of course a different and more complicated question, but the first step certainly is to at least recognize that negative sensations aren’t suddenly less negative just because they’re being produced in a different location in the wild.
That seems frequently to be the attitude of both carnists and some number of vegans that seem to think non-human animal suffering is somehow only bad if it’s happening at the hands of humans, or worse, anthropocentric antinatalists, vhemt (voluntary human extinction movement) types that think somehow the other animals would be better off if just humans went extinct, which is about as idiotically irresponsible as thinking it’s a good idea to leave a severely mentally retarded person in a forest somewhere and move to a different country forever.
Counterintuitive conclusions 
