Dawkins, Atheism, Morality, and Veganism
September 22, 2008
A commenter here recently wrote:
“Of course humans were meant to [eat] animals. We can digest animals, all cultures have hunted, it’s a human universal, and, as evolutionary biology has found, women have sexually selected traits that lead to better hunting skills.
“As for reducing cruelty, what do you think happens in the wild? Animals eaten by humans are treated far better than those left to the tender mercies of the crazy Mother Nature. As Richard Dawkins astutely noted:
“‘During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying from starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.’ (Dawkins, River out of Eden)”
I’ll dissect…
“Of course humans were meant to [eat] animals.” - Meant by whom? Given the Dawkins quote I assume the writer is an atheist like me. So what is this reference to design or intent even mean? It’s absurd. Humans weren’t “meant” to do anything. There is no God, no intention, no design. We just are.
“We can digest animals” - Sure we can. We can also digest dirt, human flesh, vitamin supplements, and many other things. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
“all cultures have hunted” - First, that’s not true. For example: Buddhists and Jains tend not to hunt. Moreover, most cultures have done all kinds of terrible things that we should learn from and evolve away from rather than repeat. For example: infanticide, incest, cannibalism, genital mutilation, genocide, slavery…
“it’s a human universal” - No it’s not. Throughout history there have always been vegetarians and nonhunters.
“as evolutionary biology has found, women have sexually selected traits that lead to better hunting skills” - This is complete and utter bull. Have you even heard of guns? Women don’t need men to help them kill stuff.
“As for reducing cruelty, what do you think happens in the wild?” - I think plastic-wrapped, CO2-injected meat in grocery stores doesn’t exist in the wild. I think a KFC “chicken” dinner that’s actually only 55% chicken and 45% soy and other stuff doesn’t exist in the wild. I think that hotdogs don’t exist in the wild. I think that foie gras doesn’t exist in the wild. I think that a medium-rare steak paired with a fine wine doesn’t exist in the wild.
“Animals eaten by humans are treated far better than those left to the tender mercies of the crazy Mother Nature.” - I assume you haven’t seen these videos? Because I’m pretty sure Mother Nature doesn’t use a forklift.
Regarding the Dawkins quote - Again, just because we can doesn’t mean we should. Atheism is not an excuse for immorality. Humans have evolved with emotions and reason. We have the capacity to philosophize about ethics as well as the capacity to act ethically. Our very nature - as beings with feelings of sympathy, empathy, guilt, worry, and sadness - suggests we ought to listen to our moral intuition and we ought to cause less harm to other sentient beings.
What’s missing from your argument is the leap from what is to what should be. Ethics is about what should, not what is. What happens in the wild doesn’t matter. You don’t live in the wild. You live in a society that tortures animals needlessly. And your decision to refuse veganism enables that torture.
Want another Dawkins quote? Here you go:
“What I am doing [by not going vegetarian] is going along with the fact that I live in a society where meat eating is accepted as the norm, and it requires a level of social courage which I haven’t yet produced to break out of that. It’s a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery. Where lots of people felt morally uneasy about slavery but went along with it because the whole economy of the South depended upon slavery.” (source)
He over-emphasizes the courage being vegan or vegetarian requires. It’s not a courageous act to refrain from harming others; it’s really very simple: just order a salad.
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- Honestly… : Elaine Vigneault on September 28th, 2008 4:12 pm
[...] of the many reasons I love my husband. He wrote this recently in the comments to a post about morality: “What I wish, though, is that people who fundamentally don’t care that they are enjoying [...]
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“no God, no intention, no design”
Actually, while natural selection is a blind process, it does have a kind of
“all cultures have hunted” , Let me qualify, until very recently in human history, people hunted and women sexually selected the men who brought home (literally) the bacon. Why? Because it ensured the good health of their children, reduced their risk of dying and thus lessened their suffering.
“as evolutionary biology has found, women have sexually selected traits that lead to better hunting skills” - This is complete and utter bull. Have you even heard of guns? Women don’t need men to help them kill stuff”
Yeah. Okay. Now, how long have guns existed? How long have human being existed? Runaway sexually selection for the best hunters has created, in part, the significant physical differences between men and women. Margo Wilson and Martin Daly’s book Homicide is a good book.
Look, you love animals and this like eating them. Great. I on the other hand, value my role in continuing the great circle of life. Does it make me a bad person. Probably.
Dawkins is also supportive of the Great Ape Project, which advocates legals rights for great apes. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_project and http://www.greatapeproject.org/)
Even though, you know, apes live in the wild, kill other wildlife, and sometimes even hunt one another. Talk about selective quoting.
For a non-veg, Dawkins is generally respectful of veg*ns and veg*n ethics.
(And yes, he is indeed one of those evil, outspoken atheists; he was involved in the highly amusing PZ Myers / Expelled kerfluffle: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/expelled.php)
Ethics is about what should, not what is. What happens in the wild doesn’t matter. You don’t live in the wild. You live in a society that tortures animals needlessly. And your decision to refuse veganism enables that torture.
I love that - especially “you don’t live in the wild” - haha!
I think “iamsowise” says it all in those last few sentences.
I hit “submit” before I meant to!
As I was saying, I think “iamsowise” says it all in those last few comments. If you think what you’re doing is making you a bad person (your words not mine) then why would you keep doing it? I don’t understand.
He probably doesn’t give a crap. I’ve heard some of the most ridiculous, convoluted, circular, psuedo-logical rationalizations for all manner of serious nastiness. And I’ve heard it from perfectly intelligent people who should and probably do know better.
The bottom line is that they don’t give a crap, but they know that if they just come out and say it like that they’ll concede the argument.
So they just obscure and obfuscate with bullshit about evolutionary biology and states of nature and how honey badgers behave like it means something.
I’ll be honest… I can understand not giving a crap. There’s far too much misery in this world for me to give a crap about it all. I would probably end up in a suicidal depression if I tried to. I’m a privileged person and I benefit every day at the expense of people and animals who are oppressed, and I’ll admit that I don’t actively eschew 100% of my privilege and I often don’t work for change enough. These issues are sometimes too large for my human brain to digest.
What I wish, though, is that people who fundamentally don’t care that they are enjoying privilege at the expense of others… I wish they would be more honest with themselves and others about it. Enough with the pseudo-intellectual nonsense about evolutionary biology already. Enough with the social darwinism. You make the choice to eat meat because you just don’t give a damn about the atrocities of factory farming. You’re ok with people and animals suffering and dying for your benefit. That’s the fact of the matter… if that becomes your conscious decision, so be it. You wouldn’t be the first.
“pseudo-intellectual nonsense about evolutionary biology”. Look, if you dislike the science, then disprove it. If this proved those elements of evolutionary biology, well, you’d be the first blogging vegan to win a Nobel. Otherwise embrace intelligence design or creationism.
As a vegan, you should embrace evolutionary biology. After all, as Singer points out in A Darwinian Left- evolutionary biology undermines the specialness of man and the Judeo-Christian belief of man’s dominion over the animals. Of course, evolutionary biology may continue to show eating meat and other exploitations of animals are a fixed part of human nature, resisted only great suffering and negative consequences by people, like life long abstinence.
I suppose war is also a “fixed part of human nature” as well? What about incest, rape, infanticide?
Evolution, by definition, means there is no “fixed” anything. We change and evolve. That’s the point.
Evolution and ethics are two distinct and orthogonal fields. In my experience efforts to glue the two together tend to be woefully flawed and also tend to serve as justifications for oppression.