VeganDE

Habs Gefühl der hat so einige bekehrt. Mich hat er auch zum Umdenken gebracht dass ich mittlerweile zumindest vegetarisch lebe.

Ich fand's sehr interessant als er von seiner Studie erzählt hat, dass er seine Hunde vegan, aber mit vollem Nährstoffhaushalt ernährt. Leider hab ich von seiner fertigen Arbeit am Ende nichts mehr gehört.

Ja, ist mir klar. Macht aber für mich keinen Sinn, da die meisten Menschen all diese Dinge nie selber einem Tier antun würden. Manche vielleicht das Töten selber, aber nie die Qual.

Habd für mich herausgefunden, dass man diese Hartkäse ersatzlos streichen kann. Zum überbacken empfielt sich Bechamel und sonst einfach mal ein bisschen länger die Ölflasche drüberhalten

As I read your comment, you approach veganism from a nihilistic perspective, invalidating their belief system since it is driven by emotion. At the same time you seem to have missed that every ethical concept stems from similar emotional processes. I wanted to point out the contradiction you created by that, since there is and was no living "full" nihilist or amoralist (except folks like existential nihilists) who whishes to continue their existence.
In other words: There is no moral without emotion. So critisizing veganism that way you did before, is illogical.

And I do believe that all creatures with instinct are also moral beings… it’s not that wolves are behaving immorally when they hunt sheep, they are behaving in the most morally correct manner that emerges from their natural selection. Their appetite is more important for the wolf than the sheep’s suffering.

Didn't you know that - based on our current understanding - virtually all animals besides humans lack the cognitive capacity of moral agency?
In your example, wolves are not able to contemplate their actions the way we do. They don't have the necessary self-awareness, nor the required brain structure to even have labels such as "good" or "bad" to evaluate and prospect their (possible) actions. Their behaviour is mostly driven by instinct and training or experience. They do not "think" about whether it's good or bad to kill and eat the sheep, they also don't "think" that "they" are more important than the sheep. They simply do. They are not able to perform moral reasoning. There is no moral at play here. Moral does not exist for wolves. Only beings which posess moral agency are able to do that.

We - as humans - can evaluate the actions of wolves as morally correct or incorrect, since we are beings with moral agency. But the wolves can't. They don't look at other wolves killing sheep and think "oh dude, maybe the sheep wasn't so happy about that, but it's okay, since we need to eat".

So even though your observation is in so far correct as that wolves still have a decision making process, which allows them to hunt their prey if they are hungry, this decision making process is of purely instinctual and not morally aware nature.

Don’t you find it curious that most people only seem to care about an animal when it’s relatively close in mechanism / behavior to a human? …most people don’t have second thoughts when it comes to killing a cockroach, for example. Is the desire to not have insects in the house more important than the insect’s suffering?

I don't find it curious, no. As you already said this is rooted in similarities of capacity to suffer within us humans and other animals. According to my currenty state of knowledge, a lot of research shows that insects do not feel pain. Although a definitive answer is still out in the open. If I remember it correctly, there are hints that honey bees for example can experience some sort of distress when being smoked, which is why some vegans also do not consume honey. Vegans attribute suffering as something which can (currently) only be experienced by beings with a central nervous system. And that is also nuanced in several degrees. (An example, some vegans eat oysters since those lack a central nervous system.) This is an active interpretation of the term "suffering", and that makes sense. Why should you want to prevent damage to a being, if it is not able to feel suffering? A passive interpretation of suffering would be the presence of any stimulus which drives an organism to actions which prevent the occurence of such a stimulus. Those stimuli have evolved into incents for increasing the survival chance of an organism and its species. For example, this would also mean that plants are suffering when they don't maximize their beneficial sunlight exposure, which is why they grow towards light. This is of course one of the factors which drives evolution. However, as you will hopefully agree, there are different levels of suffering. While reactive behaviour of, e.g., oysters or plants are simple and mere reflexes to the environment, more complex organisms like vertebrates are capable of more complex forms of suffering, like pain, fear, stress, etc.. Simply put, that's also where vegans draw the line.

then it should be ok to eat meat (or use products from animal origin) as long as we could be absolutelly sure the animals involved did not “suffer” (you could even kill them yourself, right?)

Since you can not make sure that the involved animals do not suffer, this is not okay for vegans. Most vegans also don't understand "suffering" as an active negative stimulus but also as the lack of positive ones. (Which also holds for what I said in the previous paragraph.) An early end of life, the lack of "true" freedom, i.e., living in the wild as in times before humans domesticated them, the fact that most of the animals, which humans consume, are bred for optimized meat, milk or whatever yield, which decreases their natural lifespan are such lacking positives and also brings along a bunch of negatives like (hurtful) health issues. Those are all the manifestations of suffering that vegans aim to prevent.

I already disambiguated the term "suffering" as a stimulus before and where and why vegans draw a line. So I hope that this will be a sufficient response to your paragraphs which follow the quote from the last one I quoted here.

This is true, but only as the very first initial premise. You NEED logic to isolate what those premises should be (and to be able to extrapolate from those premises)

Yes, of course. Still, these premises all start with emotions. But it seems we agree on that.

if you actually want to maximize the success rate of the primal evolutionary drive that pushes our human morals.

I am not sure I completely understand you here. What do you mean by that? Which evolutionary drive's sucess rate should we want to maximize? And how is this related to the first part of the sentence?

I’d argue most crimes and acts considered immoral have their root in emotion too. Because using emotion as a basis alone, without logic, would lead to inconsistent results, the morals would be changing based on the circumstances in a way that is not logical.

Agreed. To dive deeper: there is no inherent need for consistent results. It's just that most people like to respect themselves and justify their actions. They don't want to see themselves in a bad way and therefore naturally strive for morally correct behaviour. If you then explore their moral belief system you often find that it has sometimes more, sometimes less inconsistencies which cause distress for them. They might re-evaluate their stance and correct their belief system, possibly condoning their past behaviour and views. Or they shut down, blocking arguments which might invalidate their position even though logically correct, aka "confirmation bias".

But I see now how you originally meant your "emotional blackmailing" part. You were mainly criticizing the meme and not veganism as a whole by saying that, correct?

I would still justify such a meme format, since such emotions can be the nudge required to re-evaluate ones values and beliefs. This is why populism works, but also why it is so dangerous. The problem, and I agree with you in that regard, might then become that people don't spend sufficient cognitive effort for thinking about this criticially enough, such that they could arrive at logically consistent conclusions. In this meme specifically I still see the incentive for that ("should ones own pleasure be evaluated with higher priority than the suffering of animals?"), it's therefore less emotionally appealing than more radical examples, which leverage as much emotion as possible and almost completely omit the rational part.

Furthermore I feel the need to put this into perspective: This meme was posted to the german vegan community (VeganDE), the title of the post translates to: "Why did you become a vegan?". It does not seem as if it would aim to appeal to the viewers of this post to change their lifestyle towards veganism, but I see it rather as a conversation starter within a vegan community. Also, from my experience, most vegans I met so far, have thouroughly thought about their choice to go vegan and did not made this choice irrationally based on emotion alone.