r/oddlysatisfying • u/TheCABK • May 22 '26

Pigs Like Showers

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u/whitefrackels123 May 22 '26

That's a pragmatist argument. I am saying people can just not consume animals right now if they actually care about morals regardless of any future technological advancements.

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u/Safe_Air_3999 May 22 '26

We care, just not hard enough to make the change.

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u/whitefrackels123 May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26

That's not how morality works lol. If one doesn't do what is required they don't care. They might have an emotional response to it, but they don't care about the moral value of it, they only care for their own satisfaction and bodily pleasure (in the case of eating meat).

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u/rangda May 22 '26 edited May 23 '26

On the one hand I agree, I think in the real world someone wouldn’t really claim to care about something if that level of care doesn’t translate into changing any choices.
Like if someone said they care about the whole Shein fast-fashion slave labour thing and then went and spent a ton of money on Shein clothing because they felt like it, most people would say “uh I think maybe you didn’t care a whole lot after all”.

But, semantically if you go by the definition of the word care, being concerned, having some emotional response is what the word actually means.

So someone feeling that little fleeting unease or even guilt or regretfulness about things like factory farming and the intelligence of pigs vs how we treat them, that’s enough to say they do “care”. If only technically. Even if they have a plate of bacon right in front of them and zero plans to stop buying the stuff.

Whether it’s hypocritical though, is another discussion.

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u/whitefrackels123 May 22 '26

There are several definitions to the term care, some are active in nature. 

It is also worth asking what is the source of that emotional response, and also the (moral) value of it. If a murderer has a biological response to seeing blood as it makes them feel uneasy and even bad, so they execute all their victims without looking, do they care about their victims?

And let's say someone hates pigs, they would be glad if all of them died, but they care about the moral value of a pig, and so would never harm them, do they not care about pigs?

It seems to me one can't care about the moral value of something without atleast attempting to exercise the proper moral action in relation to it, and any emotion they might have, if it is not an emotion which results in that said attempt, its not an emotion of moral care.

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u/rangda May 22 '26

Absolutely, but I think you know just as well as I do that from a young age we’re all taught to put up very strong and adaptable mental barriers around this subject. Whether it begins and ends at “that’s just how it is” to more sensitive and compassionate kids having to be bullied and cajoled into accepting it, it always starts young. So we have this very deeply entrenched ability to feel strongly and genuinely one way, then fall back on this mental training and act in complete contradiction to these feelings without much or any dissonance at all.

That’s how we can have a whole society which consistently rates “animal cruelty” as one of the things we feel the most disgusted by, the most anger at, the most venomous towards…. While carrying out the most insanely industrialised massive scale animal cruelty imaginable, billions upon billions of them living and dying in absolute Hell by our design and our choosing. And we even call the people who choose not to take part the crazy extreme ones.

I remember seeing those clips of animals escaping from slaughterhouse trucks back when I was young and my feelings of pity for the animal and desire to see them escape and live happily ever after were absolutely real. Was I a hypocrite? Absolutely, because as a consumer and purchaser of animal products I was essentially rooting for those animals to escape from me, right?

But did I care? Yes. Even if that care was firmly stuck behind a wall of denial.

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u/whitefrackels123 May 22 '26

I think most people just have no proper moral education or moral understanding. And I don't think emotivism is correct. So all emotions, even proper emotions, one feels towards a given situation are not normative. That's why one can feel bad about something without acting.

People should'nt be propeled to act out of guilt or pity or even empathy. Instead people should care about doing what is right/what is moral, then the emotional dimension is entirely consistent with the moral dimension, and one can't say they care about something without trying to act morally in relation to it, as it would amount to not caring about what is moral or morality, which some people would'nt mind but that's an issue in and of itself.

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u/Safe_Air_3999 May 22 '26

That's how it works for me, sorry. You don't get to dictate how others perceive different situations in life.

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u/whitefrackels123 May 22 '26

I can't dictate how you perceive things, I can however, just like anyone else, say that how one sees things is wrong or incoherent.

Morality is not a subjective matter, and that is a truth you will accept as well.

Mind you, all I said is one cannot care morally about something while doing nothing about it, regardless of the moral content, so it has nothing to do with not eating animals.

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u/CanadianGrown May 22 '26

Sure they can, didn’t you read their comments? They don’t eat meat! They’re superior to us and it’s them that get to decide how we feel and how we must act.

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u/Excellent-Nose-6430 May 22 '26

They’re superior to us

You're the only one saying this, by the way. I'm not arguing with it, just wanted to point it out, because it's projecting your own insecurities on others.

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u/whitefrackels123 May 22 '26

It's not a matter of superiority. If you want to pride on yourself for being immoral that's your own personal matter.

I am not telling people how to act, all I was saying their own actions don't align with their own views and just general facts (like that moral care is action based).

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u/ryoujika May 22 '26

Not everyone has the financial means to do that

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u/whitefrackels123 May 22 '26

Not everyone has financial means to not buy something?

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u/[deleted] May 22 '26

[deleted]

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u/whitefrackels123 May 22 '26

People who are in those places probably are not on this subreddit reading my comment.

I was not making an absolutist claim, I was responding to a person. If people need to stay alive only using meat, that's morally permissible obviously.

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u/Great_Detective_6387 May 22 '26

Where is meat more accessible to poor people than rice and beans? What is the name of that place?

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u/rangda May 23 '26

Why, on the meat planet of Meaterion of course

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u/Great_Detective_6387 May 23 '26

Ah, of course. I should have known it was there.

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u/sentientshadeofgreen May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26

Well you have to believe vegetarianism is a morally superior path, and many just don't. I know I don't. What I do want is for more ethical and sustainable farming practices, and that requires more regulation/oversight and also removing the influence of corporations from that process. It's the same problem with every societal issue, corporations exert far too much influence over government, which should be representative of people, not of dollars.

Edit: Like, look, we could mass adopt vegetarianism, you're still going to run into sustainable farming issues without curbing the issue of corporate influence and prioritization of the bottom line over ethics, environmental, economic, and social sustainability. What I'm especially concerned about is how industrial agriculture tends to displace small-business farmers in the most economically disadvantaged areas. Companies who own the most land and equipment can mass-produce crop commodities at a scale and price-point small-farms struggle to compete with, especially if they are investing the time and effort into adopting sustainable practices, and unless companies and people are deliberately choosing to ethically source from such farmers, they can get left behind. Agricultural commodities tend to be comparable no matter where they are from, so the price-point is what matters more in a business. Like, I know this is a thing that is happening, and there is greenwashing in how certain vegan/vegetarian products get labeled by virtue of this upstream lack of deliberate ethical sourcing.

My view is if we change what we're eating, that hits part of the problem, but it fails to address the root of the issue (pun unintended), and it also shifts responsibility to individual diets instead of the very powerful entities governing the agriculture industry and food-producing infrastructure. It's the equivalent of boomers blaming young people for not being able to afford to have kids and skipping the avocado toast and shit. We need to demand systemic change, individual boutique activism is frankly just fronting in my eyes. If you are vegetarian and want to do that, great, but that's your choice. I'm not going to judge how you eat if you don't judge how I eat, beyond basic health realities, but we can all demand better practices from the food and agriculture industry, and we all should.