this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
91 points (84.2% liked)

Asklemmy

44122 readers
619 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] anarchost@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Edit: thank you for all the thoughtful replies from the people who downvoted but left an explanation!

The more I think about this question, the more complexities it creates. I am not a vegan, so I can only guess what the average vegan would think...

  • If you eat a plant that causes harm to a living being like an insect, are you doing a moral good from a vegan perspective because you are reducing harm?
  • Would it be morally good for a vegan to use vegan means to prevent more harm to animals?
  • Would it be the ultimate moral good for vegans to hunt down every wild Venus flytrap and consume them?
  • What if the Venus flytrap only ate insects that significantly harmed animal or human populations by spreading diseases?
  • If vegans could alter the environment using non-vegan means, in such a way that bats stopped eating mosquitoes without upsetting the overall ecosystem, but these mosquitoes started spreading a terrible but non-deadly disease in humans, would it be moral for them to do so, or would it be immoral for them to avoid it?

Unfortunately, I don't know the calculus a vegan uses when placing value on the life of a human versus an animal, so the bat mosquito thing is entirely up in the air for me up in the air for me

[โ€“] PM_ME_FAT_ENBIES@lib.lgbt 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Genetically engineering the disease in the saliva of the lone star tick so that it's sexually transmissible between humans is vegan.