Okay I'll bite. What's the Nazi critique of capitalism?

Heidegger isn't always consistent as a person. I agree that there is an inherent critique of capitalism in his works more broadly, especially in his critique of emerging technology (which to me feels compatible with Marx), but the guy was also a Nazi. He asks interesting questions and makes interesting observations, but it's like none of that informed his life.

Yes, I understand, and I'm not trying to shame anyone for eating meat (I eat meat, just not very often). All I'm pointing out is that there isn't yet a very strong ethical argument in favor of meat consumption. None of these animals are engaged in ethics, and I tend to agree with David Hume in that ethics has some prerequisites which they all lack, making this a uniquely human issue.

At the end of the day we're all animals and our behavior can't be fully dictated by logic, ethics, or evidence. Regardless, I think it's important to understand when we're acting in a way that doesn't have any real justification even if we go ahead and act that way sometimes.

As I said in another reply, if you're hunting for survival then you're engaging in an activity too primordial for the preconditions for ethical behavior to even exist.

If you're killing animals just because the taste and texture of their flesh gives you pleasure, then you're going to have a hard time finding an ethical argument for doing so.

That being said, hunting is significantly better than factory farms.

I think this line of reasoning is still contentious. It might have been correlative rather than causal. It might have been coincidental or accidental. After all, plenty of pea brained animals also eat meat.

Even if it's true, it's still not a very convincing argument for meat consumption being ethical.

Personally I eat meat, though not very often. This is consistent with a lot of humans throughout history and it's very easy to maintain a healthy diet doing it. It's what I would advocate as the next step. As I see it, advocating for veganism is a little like advocating for communism. It might be something that is easily possible in the distant future, but we need to take steps if we wish to one day get there. It would be a radical reorganization of the food industry to shift to my diet, much less a fully vegetarian one.

Sure, I think there's actually a compelling argument that we're animals and this goes beyond ethics to some degree. I don't think this is an excuse to escape entirely from ethics, but I do think it serves as a framework for understanding our own limitations when enforcing upon ourselves a rigorous and unforgiving ethical mandate.

Should the lack of a defense for meat eating eradicate all meat consumption? I think that's an interesting question honestly, and I suspect that addressing it helps to also calm the fears of meat lovers who feel threatened by calls for vegetarianism or veganism.

Well, again, an omnivore who decides not to eat meat isn't an herbivore. There's a decision there and that decision is what we call ethics. So it's an important distinction.

The claim that there's advantages to eating meat isn't very well supported. It's certainly easier, but that's largely due to the fact that meat consumption is the norm (more than in any historical period in fact).

We synthesize most of our fertilizers thanks to the Nazi tech we employ. If we wanted to maximize the use of animal produced fertilizers, we'd have them grazing in our fields rather than using fossil fuels to transport it. Also, it wouldn't be necessary to eat those animals.

To be a vegetarian, you have to first be an omnivore and then decide not to eat meat. This doesn't stop you from being an omnivore. Herbivores can't make this decision; they have to eat plants. Same with carnivores. They don't get to decide.

Similarly, you can't decide to stop being an omnivore any more than you can decide to stop being a carbon based lifeform. You can only decide what to do as an omnivore.

A tiger is a carnivore, and thus there isn't a question of meat eating for them. They either eat meat or die. The same is true for an herbivore; they are not acting more ethically simply because they are incapable of surviving entirely off meat.

The fact that we're an omnivore, and thus are confronted with a choice at all, is why ethical consideration comes into play.

I suppose it depends on their treatment in that case; though we usually don't eat old animals after they die from natural causes so I'm not sure this is ever going to realistically happen.

My personal take is that if you're talking about the survival of one animal vs. the survival of another animal, then we're discussing something more primordial than ethics. That is; the prerequisites for ethics haven't been met.

If we're talking about eating an animal simply because it's pleasurable, though, then I think you'd have to somehow find a way to justify that animal's suffering and death to create that pleasure and I'm not sure this is possible to ethically justify.

I don't know of an ethical framework that's yet been able to launch a successful defense for eating meat, honestly.

Well, sure, I agree that an externally imposed ethics isn't the best. At the same time, this doesn't excuse us from ethics. We still have to be able to create an ethical justification for meat consumption. I'm not aware of one, but should one emerge, then it would lend more weight to the decision to eat meat.

The question of whether or not we can justify the animal suffering and death necessary to perpetuate meat consumption.

So is your point that because evolution brought us to the point where we can consider things ethically that we should not consider things ethically and instead just appeal only to evolution?

Our brain probably evolved through natural selection, which is a very distinct process from ethics.

This just sounds like the naturalistic fallacy to me.

It's also a red herring because we are omnivores and thus capable of making a choice one way or another. This is where ethics come in.

Ah, I thought by "utilitarian" you meant utilitarianism.

Is the question of harming animals anything but an ethical question? What else would it be?

Also, the article doesn't actually claim that lab grown meat is being developed for "utilitarian reasons". Did you read it? The final section is titled:

> Moral crises can’t be solved by technology

Nuclear is preferable to fossil fuels, of course, but it runs into a fatal problem; it's incompatible with capitalism. Plants are expensive and time consuming to build, and the returns simply don't come within the timescale this economic system (especially in its late stage) allows.

It's also a very incomplete solution. Energy isn't just produced and then that's the end of it. It's used, and what it's used for tends to be in the extraction, refining, manufacturing, and transportation of goods. All of these activities are just as (or more) damaging than the production of energy itself, especially if we consider the extreme levels of energy one can acquire from nuclear sources.

Ultimately, the answer is degrowth, because the scale and speed of our economy is the true engine for climate change. It's extremely reductionist to view it as a problem of CO2 levels. Especially under capitalism, producing massive amounts of cheap energy simply saves companies on energy expenses and allows them to consume more energy for the same price. This is Jevon's Paradox.

The conversation about nuclear power, I believe, is more of a distraction than a real attempt at a solution to climate change. Ultimately, capitalism as a belief and practice is at the core of environmental destruction, and as a result, technological solutions will simply empower the capitalist system to sacrifice the health of the planet for the short term profit of the owning class. Even if nuclear didn't have the problems of potential accidents, nuclear waste, and nuclear weapons, it would still have more costs than benefits if we don't also radically restructure society to fundamentally change how we employ technology.

> And of the ones we do produce, do you think it is possible that they are "of a different kind", perhaps in ways we are not able to discern?

I think somewhat. Historically, intellectuals tended to be part of the privileged class, and though they often challenged certain norms, they just as often served to justify the forms of power of their era.

I think, over time, intellectuals in general became more critical of those power dynamics. Enlightenment thinkers were critical of religious dogma, liberal theorists were imagining an alternative to the monarchies of the day, socialists were critical of capitalist structures, and anarchists were critical of the emerging nation state.

Along with this deepening skepticism for the traditional structures of society came backlash. History could have probably gone one way or the other, but the way it went was a victory for the power structures against intellectual analysis. Today, I think, we're living in an era (a kind of Dark Age in a sense) where unjustified power structures have asserted themselves (mostly through violence, their primary tool) and seem invincible (and even inevitable).

The remaining intellectuals are fearful of speaking out too much, subverted to serve power unintentionally, suppressed entirely, or quietly sabotaged through language and information manipulation.

> Agree....and I (perceive myself to) notice this in many different forms....for example, on plausibly "intellectual" subreddits, people (including genuinely intelligent ones) refusing to engage in intellectual discussion. Do you think my read is off here? ("For many intellectuals, their expertise is a point of shame or brings out reactionary violence" suggests not?)

As far as social media, I think many experts in their field have little to gain and just don't engage. With misinformation so rampant and many of the people posting being either hired by corporations to serve their agenda or simply automated bots, it's likely not the best use of time.

In person, I find that intellectuals are more than happy to engage in conversation. Excited even, given how few and far between it is to find someone willing or enthusiastic towards stimulating conversation.

> I've yet to encounter someone who can push beyond their innate reaction, although to be fair I haven't done too many experiments.

We're trained by corporate propaganda (which we call advertising instead) to act based on our feelings even when it contradicts our ability to reason. That's the defining characteristic of a consumer, and I think it takes a somewhat exceptional individual to overcome that. The sciences have more and more been about controlling populations, and the methods being employed on us are extremely effective. That's what I suspect is happening, and why we can see it getting worse over our lifetimes as new methods are developed and perfected.

> Maybe not the same thing, but I have noticed a pattern where if someone is in favour of a general idea, and if you go like "Ya, yes let's do that then....", people suddenly switch tack and are like "Whoa whoa whoa, <and then various reasons why actually pursuing the very goal they proposed is a bad idea, or their interest level in their own idea simply drops 90%>".

I've seen this sometimes, and I wonder if it's a form of learned helplessness. We are certainly trained, from childhood on, to feel like we can't have any impact on the world. It's one thing to speculate about the future and another thing entirely to work towards that. This is a major problem I've seen in movements that want to change society for the better, and probably one of the major reasons why we've gone through such a long period without serious rebellion or revolution to the current conditions. At the same time, though, I'm seeing this less and less among younger people, so there might be a time soon that there is once again active resistance to worsening conditions.

Yes, I think there is a different way in which people engage in our era as opposed to history. Likely, many people historically didn't do it and we didn't have the technology to be exposed to that anti-intellectualism yet, but nonetheless society produced intellectuals, which it is doing less and less today.

Personally, I think it comes down to dogma and taboo. Intellectualism isn't allowed to flourish as it once was. For many intellectuals, their expertise is a point of shame or brings out reactionary violence. My field is environmental philosophy, and I know I and my colleagues in the past haven't much appreciated being treated as extremist terrorists. I think this trend really started in the 19th century with the backlash against most of the great intellectuals like Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, etc. who challenged the dogma of the time. Today, the most cited scholar in human history (Noam Chomsky) was blacklisted by the media.

Also, since seeking utopia has been demonized so heavily, anyone who would otherwise be pushing for a better world is stuck modelling our dystopia instead. We see the backlash against environmentalists, feminists, Marxists, vegetarians, race issues, and really any critique of the authoritarian structures in society.

In the place of intellectuals, we get the worship of billionaires and other powerful figures. The climate today paints ideas like socialism or communism as a naive utopia while dreaming of living on Mars with Elon Musk or maybe driving in one of his dangerous and ineffective traffic solutions. In essence, we're allowed to think and dream only about what benefits the powerful. Anything else is seen as foolish or dangerous.

> Socialist, anarchist, ecological, feminist, egalitarian, free love, gay, lesbian and many other forms of utopias have been envisaged and attempted, whilst dystopias have become a more popular form of literary genre.

What a low bar for a utopia. I imagine a utopia being so much more... I dunno, ambitious, than something as basic as worker controlled economic systems, direct democracy, women's rights, acceptance of sexual preferences, etc.

I think we're in an era of such incredible pessimism that the notion of any spark of hope for the future is seen as naively utopian. Our imagination has been reduced to only seeing the worst case scenario as the realistic one.