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Re: An Alternative Theory for My “Vegan Brain Fog”

rsouthan — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 14:06:13 -0000

Fake comment.

Re: Essay on Peter Singer’s Flawed Metaethics

rsouthan — Sat, 24 Jun 2017 08:33:58 -0000

Glad you liked it!

Re: An Alternative Theory for My “Vegan Brain Fog”

rsouthan — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 12:55:57 -0000

It might be worth trying to reduce animal product consumption without going totally vegan, and see how you feel socially and physically. That's been working for me this year.

I'm sorry you weren't able to have children.

Re: An Alternative Theory for My “Vegan Brain Fog”

rsouthan — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 12:53:50 -0000

:) I have still been writing, but I returned to school to study philosophy, and I don't have time to write much outside of academic stuff for now. I'll get back to it eventually, I hope!

Re: Ask a Philosopher, Part Seven: Abortion

rsouthan — Sat, 09 Apr 2016 11:44:10 -0000

Hi John,

Thanks for that additional information.

A few years ago in the United States, some pro-fetal-rights lawmakers were trying to get something called "The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" passed. This was intended to ban abortion at the point at which fetuses could be said to be sentient. That act selected 20 weeks as the marker. Here's a quote from one of the pages advocating this. It sounds almost vegan in its opening paragraph ( http://www.mccl.org/pain-ca... ):

"Even those who believe that abortion in most cases is morally permissible should agree that we must not inflict needless suffering on other living things. To do so is cruel and inhumane. We do not consider treating animals in the barbaric way that abortion treats pain-capable unborn human beings. People on both sides of the abortion debate should agree that the gratuitous suffering of the human fetus is incompatible with a decent and humane society.

"A wealth of anatomical, behavioral and physiological evidence shows that the developing unborn child (i.e., the human fetus) is capable of experiencing tremendous pain by 20 weeks post-fertilization..."

And then it gives its reasons for this, which you can see at the link. Obviously, that link is biased. I have no idea if fetuses are capable of pain at 20 weeks, but it does seem testable, and it does seem like there is information out there on this issue. We don't need to use a priori reasoning about fetal development proceeding logically based on what is needed in the womb at the time to guess when sentience develops. This is what Robert seems to be doing, though he admits uncertainty:

"Sentience was a necessary development for creatures to better exploit their surroundings, and so to increase the chances of passing on their genes. It seems odd that it would appear too long before birth (though it’s sensible to assume it must start to develop at some point before birth)."

I see no reason to assume that the course of fetal development is purely rational, based on what is needed at the time. There are all sorts of developments that are not needed in the womb: eyes, hair, anuses, hands, and so on. Should we therefore assume that these all develop not too long before the baby is born, since these would be useless in the womb?

I do think there are arguments vegans can make to distinguish animal farming and abortion. I'm just not convinced that going all in on sentience is the best one.

Re: Ask a Philosopher, Part Seven: Abortion

rsouthan — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 21:03:28 -0000

In week five of a pregnancy, "the baby's brain, spinal cord, heart and other organs begin to form." ( http://www.mayoclinic.org/h... ) Vegans who give "the benefit of the doubt" to oysters and insects for possibly feeling pain may have to give "the benefit of the doubt" to fetuses earlier than you are suggesting. So I'm not sure that the fetuses aren't sentient argument takes you very far.

Your argument here seems to assume that veganism is all about suffering reduction, but does not address another vegan concern, which is an objection to the intentional ending of life that would have contained pleasure. Here are some questions to clarify your position on that:

Would it be okay to kill a sentient and conscious fetus as long as you could do so painlessly?

Would it be okay to kill a recently born infant who has congenital insensitivity to pain?

Would it be okay to kill someone who is in a temporary coma – someone who is not conscious and cannot feel pain, but is expected to become conscious?

Re: The Cecil Trap

rsouthan — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 20:28:53 -0000

Does this mean that a lot of utilitarians agree with Mill that it's "better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied"?

I know that Singer is a utilitarian who has said that having a sense of the future makes death for a being more harmful, and here you've said that all utilitarians agree with this. But I have trouble making sense of the relevance of self-awareness and future-awareness to the harm of death from a utilitarian perspective. It's especially difficult to make sense of from an impersonal (rather than person-affecting) utilitarianism, I think.

For hedonistic utilitarians, at least, doesn't everything collapse into something like pleasure and pain? And wouldn't this mean that self-awareness and future awareness would also collapse into pleasure and pain? If so, then future awareness and self-awareness would be useful insofar as they make one's life more pleasureful and less pain-filled. But if there were a being who had no self-awareness and no sense of the future – but felt tons of pleasure and little to no pain – wouldn't a hedonic utilitarian (especially an impersonal one) have to say that the death of such a being is worse than the death of a being who is self-aware and future-aware but doesn't feel as much pleasure?

Person-affecting utilitarians might have an answer to this. But as far as I can tell, impersonal hedonic utilitarians have to say that the death of the non-self-aware being who experiences tons of pleasure is worse. In which case, if pigs or dogs experience more pleasure than most humans do, the death of a dog or pig would be worse than the death of a human. (Excluding the effects on survivors, which probably tend to be much worse when humans die. And putting aside lifespan questions.)

Re: The Cecil Trap

rsouthan — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 18:34:52 -0000

I assumed that Matthews and MacAskill were not taking that kind of perspective, because neither of them brought up the issue of whether lions have more self-awareness than chickens, for instance. Maybe killing Cecil is worse from a certain perspective than killing a chicken, if Cecil had a greater degree of sentience. Matthews did mention that Cecil was old and so probably didn't have a long life ahead of him anyway, but it seemed to me that if he was relying on a gradations of sentience perspective, he would have at least addressed whether a lion life innately has greater value than a chicken life, because of brain size, and self-awareness. And that he would have discussed whether lions have a greater capacity to suffer than chickens do, and so maybe Cecil's death was more painful than what chickens go through. And anyway, since their arguments would seem to apply to humans if you take them to be anti-speciesists in a simple way, I think they should been clear about why they didn't think their arguments applied to humans. Maybe they would have used something similar to this gradations of sentience explanation. Without including all that, it's too easy to see how their arguments could be used to defend the killing of humans.

I saw that movement mentioned on Reasonable Vegan, I think. I might be a reducetarian. I live in a vegetarian co-op. Though we'll see what I eat once I move out.

Re: The Cecil Trap

rsouthan — Sat, 10 Oct 2015 16:42:30 -0000

I know there are people who claim to oppose speciesism while at the same time maintaining that human lives are more valuable than the lives of most non-human sentient animals, but I haven't seen a convincing argument for this. (Or if I have, it's not coming to mind now.) Are you thinking of anti-speciesism as representing "equal consideration of interests," with humans having greater interests in living? Or are you thinking of human lives being more valuable instrumentally rather than intrinsically?

Re: Human Extinction: It Follows From What Most People Already Believe

rsouthan — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 17:21:19 -0000

"PLUS no Vegans advocate using synthetic fertilizers. Vegans advocate Veganic permaculture."

Not all self-identified vegans are opposed to synthetic fertilizers and not all vegans advocate veganic permaculture – though you might say these so-called vegans are not true vegans. Nevertheless, I'm curious what it means to "advocate Veganic permaculture" without actually supporting it financially (or creating one's own veganic permaculture farm), or at least without making all food purchases from veganic permaculture. Most vegans do not derive 100 percent of their food from veganic permaculture, and so if vegans are required to have diets consisting only of veganic permaculture foods, hardly anybody qualifies as vegan.

Assuming one can "advocate Veganic permaculture" without getting all their food from veganic permaculture, could a meat eater "advocate veganism" without getting all their food from plants?

Re: The Cecil Trap

rsouthan — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 17:31:21 -0000

No, neither of them make that point, but both articles were written by utilitarian vegans, which means that anti-speciesism is an implied view, or at least, something that needs to be denied if it's not meant to be implied.

My perhaps too hidden-to-be-detected real argument was that the authors' arguments here expose them as speciesists, given that they were implicitly treating the lives of humans as more important than the lives of other animals. (Some say that can be a non-speciesist perspective, but I think it's hard to credibly argue for that.) And if you accept speciesism, it becomes pretty easy to excuse certain forms of meat eating that are relatively low suffering – which utilitarian vegans typically don't want to excuse. (Though of course they tend to be more flexible than deontological vegans.)

Re: What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career?

rsouthan — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 13:52:58 -0000

I'm interested in to what extent the speedy turnaround requirement for most journalists can end up backfiring when it comes to helping make the changes you want to see made.

It would seem pretty easy for journalists who are constantly churning out politically or socially relevant pieces to often rely on hasty, under-analyzed, or recycled arguments or assumptions that make it relatively easy for skeptics or opponents to dismiss the arguments. Are journalists who post a large amount of content every day or every week much more prone to these types of errors than maybe freelance essayists or book writers who can take more time with their arguments? And how much do these types of errors actually undermine the effectiveness of journalism that wants to do good? Does the kind of precision and accuracy (and possibly over-thinking) that is easier to achieve outside a daily grind of content production not actually contribute all that much? Is just getting the argument out there – even if it's not the strongest possible version of the argument – good enough?

I'm not thinking of longform essays like Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece on reparations, which obviously took a lot of time, thought and research. I'm thinking more of sites like Vox or Business Insider, where much of the content has to be turned around quickly.

Re: Animal Farming is Not “Necessary”… But What Is?

rsouthan — Mon, 27 Jul 2015 12:56:29 -0000

Great comment! I especially liked the way you revised Rob's statement to free it from his embedded assumption. That was a nice catch. We took a different approach to the "unnecessary" question, but your approach makes sense to me too, and is more relatable.

Re: Disagreeing about what’s effective isn’t disagreeing with effective altruism

rsouthan — Sun, 19 Jul 2015 14:27:04 -0000

I agree. Mozi offered the classic argument for impartial care, and while moral impartiality makes logical sense from some kind of theoretically objective "POV of the universe" type thinking, Mozi's detractors were right that it was impossible for humans to live up to it. Maybe that will change in a transhumanist future. For now, your idea of rationality mitigated partiality makes sense.

Re: Disagreeing about what’s effective isn’t disagreeing with effective altruism

rsouthan — Sun, 19 Jul 2015 09:40:01 -0000

I suspect that a lot of people who demonstrate their disagreement with effective altruism by arguing against some of the associated ideas really just dislike the core idea. However, the core idea is more awkward to disagree with, because it sounds bad to say, "No, I don't want to do whatever helps everyone the most, because I don't want to live that way." It's easier to argue against the associated ideas without looking bad, and that's probably why EA opponents hone in on that strategy, even though you're right that arguing against the associated ideas does not undercut the core idea.

I'm not sure there is much you can do to change this. Pointing out the error won't necessarily help if EA opponents aren't actually very confused, and just prefer to argue against the associated ideas rather than the core idea.

Still, it seems worth pointing out.

Re: The Vegan Response to the Insect Eating Movement

rsouthan — Sat, 23 May 2015 14:11:20 -0000

Thanks!

Re: Ask a Philosopher, Part One: What are Morals?

rsouthan — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 13:40:23 -0000

Cool, looking forward to it.

Re: Ask a Philosopher, Part One: What are Morals?

rsouthan — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 09:53:59 -0000

1. Is settling on consistency any less arbitrary than settling on anti-suffering as a basis for morality?

2. Is veganism morally consistent?

Re: Human Extinction: It Follows From What Most People Already Believe

rsouthan — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 18:56:41 -0000

"Do you just find the veganism side of the debate more interesting as an ex-vegan?"

I think that's probably true. Also, I don't know what I could say about factory farming that hasn't already been said hundreds of times already. Just look at "Eating Animals." That was supposed to be a new, artistically interesting take on factory farming because Jonathan Safran Foer wrote it, but the only new stuff there was the window dressing about his family. Everything he wrote about factory farming could have been straight out of Animal Liberation or the countless other exposes of the horrible cruelty on factory farms.

Re: Human Extinction: It Follows From What Most People Already Believe

rsouthan — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 18:31:12 -0000

My general take on the consequentialist approach to veganism is that if we interpret it in a way that doesn't lead to human extinction, consequentialism doesn't prohibit all animal exploitation either. Certainly it prohibits factory farming, and I'd definitely like to do away with that, but it wouldn't seem to prohibit ways of raising animals that entail low amounts of suffering. As you said, this is a debatable point, but it's not apparently a resolvable one since we can only estimate utility, which means there will always be conflicting interpretations of what consequentialism demands. There are probably plausible consequentialist cases to be made for and against veganism, and no way of deciding who is right. Yet trying to give all non-human sentient animals rights based on their interests clearly fails, which is probably why I'm more interested in looking at that way of arguing for veganism.

I think I do argue with the consequentialist arguments for veganism, though, but maybe in less direct ways. Like when I'm arguing that there might be health benefits to eating animal products, this contradicts some consequentialist vegans who think the only possible advantage of eating animal products has to do with taste. I probably believe that going vegan is more of a sacrifice than a lot of consequentialist vegans do, but I might not mention consequentialism in a post about that.

"Francione's argument is obviously improved by replacing 'imposing unnecessary suffering on animals' with 'causing more suffering than we are causing pleasure.' After that switch, it becomes convincing to me (but I guess still debatable) that eating farm animals causes more suffering than happiness and also convincing to me (although still pretty debatable) that human extinction would cause more suffering than happiness."

If consequentialists cannot eat animals because that potentially causes more suffering than happiness, that seems to imply that they must on average have a neutral effect on aggregate utility at worst, and ideally make a positive contribution to aggregate utility. I can see that working okay when we're looking at interactions between humans, but when we add animals into this calculation, it starts to look more like humans are a net negative whether or not we are vegans (because of all the vegan ways we harm animals), unless our pleasure counts for way more than theirs does.

Consequentialism could still lead to human extinction, then. Especially since human extinction only leads to suffering if most humans accept an anti-extinction ideology. Presumably, if humans were deciding to go extinct, they would have accepted a pro-extinction ideology (maybe because they decided it would be for the best for non-human animals), and so wouldn't find extinction to entail a lot of suffering. Like vegans who don't think veganism is a sacrifice because they find meaning through it, human extinction wouldn't be a major sacrifice for those who found meaning in it. If that were the case, human extinction might be the best way to promote overall utility.

Re: Why We Love One and Eat the Other

rsouthan — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 09:25:45 -0000

Hi Dani,

The main point I wanted to make with this post is not that pure selfishness does explain why people eat pigs while caring about dogs, but that it could. The headline confuses that point, and I should have been more clear about that in the post itself as well. Since pure self interest could explain behavior that some vegans like to frame as "contradictory," and I think sometimes does, I don't think it makes sense when some vegans treat meat eating as prima facie paradoxical. Meat eating still could be a sign of confused ethics depending on the ethics of the meat eater, but it's not inherently contradictory, the way some vegans try to frame it.

You wrote:

"I don't think the reason people don't eat dogs is purely because of selfish reasons; I've heard people, completely unsupportive of the rights of farm animals, expressing absolute disgust and sadness over the killing of dogs in China. This is not because they would be having those dogs as pets, the reason, it appears, is because they see dogs as animals who experience joy and express emotion, and do not want to die."

If this is true, wouldn't everyone who cares about dogs become vegan if they found out that pigs experience joy and express emotion and don't want to die (all of which is incredibly easy to prove)?

Re: Guess Alien Value, Chance Ratios

rsouthan — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 20:41:36 -0000

A possible utilitarian argument in favor of yelling, no matter what these ratio estimates are: If these aliens are advanced enough to find us before we find them, maybe they've also figured out happiness and suffering better than we have. If that's the case, it wouldn't be so horribly dire for them to wipe us out, because they might put our resources to better use.

It might still be nicer for them not to destroy us all, but it wouldn't have to be framed the way that you're framing it, that one possibility is nice and one is terrible. Both could arguably be advantageous in different ways.

It's true that most humans don't want to die, not even to be replaced by creatures who get more out of life than they do, but we all have to die eventually and an alien invasion seems like one of the more interesting ways to go.

Does this improve the argument for intentionally yelling?

Re: Gross violations

rsouthan — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 15:06:23 -0000

An easy counterargument to gory-image-grounded pro-life activism is to show them the image of a baby being born. The baby, covered in blood and screaming, seems to be in agony. If the decision to have a child or abort a pregnancy were based purely on repulsiveness of imagery, letting the child be born doesn't seem like much of an improvement, especially if you throw in images of the mother in pain during labor.

The big problem I see with arguing against abortion on the grounds that it is gory is that it confuses the visual experience of witnessing the gore with the subjective experience of the fetus. Just because something looks disturbing to outsiders doesn't mean it is disturbing from the perspective of the one who seems to be undergoing the harm. And if what we're concerned about in this case is fetuses, it should be the experience of the fetus that matters and not how gross abortion looks to us. It's not good enough to show gory images, then, since the goriness of abortion doesn't prove that fetuses experience abortion as harmful.

Maybe these opponents of abortion are concerned with something other than the fetus experiencing harm, but that's an argument they would need to articulate. Showing images of gory abortion aftermaths doesn't articulate anything.

Re: Icelated — Is Circumcision a Unique Violation of Autonomy?

rsouthan — Sat, 08 Nov 2014 20:39:35 -0000

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I think you're right that it's not just a matter of there being any sort of dissent at all over a procedure. As you wrote, "What the type of alteration is, whether it is reversible, whether removes functional tissue or not, whether it is based on arbitrary vs. universal aesthetic norms, whether it does, as a matter of fact, lead to resentment in a large vs. small number of grown-ups" are all very relevant considerations.

I think I mostly agree with what you're saying here, but as you seem to be implying in this sentence – "there is a much greater chance of someone feeling violated/mutilated by having had part of their healthy genitals removed, than by having what is much more universally considered to be a rare deformity (i.e., the cleft lip) 'corrected.'" – it may not be that the specialness of circumcision that you describe is inherently leading to harm; instead, that specialness is potentially increasing the odds of someone perceiving circumcision as a harm. Circumcision may seem to blatantly go against the norms of societies that preach autonomy, but that doesn't automatically translate into circumcised westerners feeling upset about their choice to have a foreskin being taken away. Whether circumcision's potential to be perceived as a harmful violation of autonomy is widely realized, and how passionately this is realized, is an empirical question. I agree with you that it must be the case that more people are upset about being circumcised as an infant than are upset about having had braces as a teenager, and more passionately so. But how many people need to be upset about circumcision for it to qualify as a non-trivial number as opposed to a trivial one?

I can't speak for Rick Shweder, but based on my previous discussions with him, I think it's safe to say that he doesn't think that very many men feel harmed by circumcision, and so he likely doesn't see infant male circumcision to be as controversial as you see it, and he might think of circumcision's discontents as falling under the trivial number category. (Again, this is an impression I have, so I can't say exactly what he believes about this.) He told me that he considered infant male circumcision to be a minor procedure, which is obviously something you disagree with. I would side with you on that: I think it's potentially pretty significant, and I would count myself amongst the men who strongly wishes to have his foreskin back.

One feature of circumcision that's interesting to me, and somewhat relevant here, is that those who feel harmed by circumcision can avoid passing that harm onto their children, as long as they start thinking of circumcision as harmful before they have children. People who feel harmed by their own poverty can't necessarily spare their children from poverty, but those who wish they weren't circumcised can avoid having their kids circumcised. This seems to suggest that if circumcision were widely perceived as harmful, it would stop. Of course, how one generation of men feels about infant circumcision doesn't tell us what the next generation will think, and I agree with you that there are good reasons for men who don't mind their own circumcisions to question whether their own children will feel the same way.

Re: Human Extinction: It Follows From What Most People Already Believe

rsouthan — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 13:53:29 -0000

"The Kant thing was one specific example, if you dislike it you can choose whatever other ethical idea or argument, and I can always say that the terms used are "unclear". This renders meaningful discussion impossible thus preventing any moral arguments from being formed."

I wouldn't call every ethical claim too vague. Francione's post just happened to be vague in its use of "unnecessary" and the idea of not treating someone as a means to an end also seems vague to me (and perhaps impossible depending on how the terms are defined), but I think those terms could be defined and debated.

"You end up maintaining that we cannot express the general statement "We should not unnecessarily kill other humans" (or any indeed any statement of similar content). Sure you can be awere about the limitations of normative, rule based ethics, but in the end whatever meta-ethical position we adopt we will need it to allow us to forbid needless killing, one way or other. You can say that we should base our reasoning on some more fundamental principles (you did not propose any? I'm really interested in what's your general ethical position) and abstain from statements like this, but unless your more fundamental principles (and some set of rules of deduction) lead to about the same set of actions being forbidding as "we should not unnecessarily kill" (e.g. killing because you like to see blood is wrong) it's just a bad ethical theory."

Is ethics explicitly principle based? Must anyone who talks about ethics have a list of principles that they follow and which they believe everyone else must follow? Do you think that's the only way to communicate coherently about ethics?

"Sidenote: " I see ethics as a search for a compromise between self interest and the interests of others, with no clear definitive answers". Just to clarify how strongly you meant this: no clear, definitive answer to any questions? Is raping children of age 3 wrong? Do you have a clear and definitive answer? If not, I believe knowledge of that would induce much of your readership to reconsider their opinion about you as an ethics commentator."

Maybe instead of "no clear or definitive answers" I should have said, "With no clear or definitive principles that we can consistently use to guide all our actions." I oppose the sexual assault of children for a number of reasons that I'm not convinced can be boiled down into a single ethical principle that would work equally well if I then had to apply that principle to actions that don't reach the same level of obvious harmfulness. If we follow Francione's example, we might phrase a principle that explains an opposition to child abuse as, "Don't harm children [or anyone for that matter] unnecessarily," but this doesn't strike me as a clear or useful principle. It might be a decent rule of thumb but it isn't a clear guide to permissible and impermissible actions. Someone might interpret "Don't harm children unnecessarily" as an injunction against infant circumcision, for instance, or they might not, if they feel circumcision is necessary to the continuation of their culture or for the eventual wellbeing of the child.

"Don't harm children unnecessarily" could also be interpreted as "Don't have children," because the experience of harm is inevitable in sentient life and it's unnecessary to have children.

And so I don't think it would be meaningful or accurate for me (or anyone else) to say they follow a rule that states, "Don't cause unnecessary harm."

That is a better example of what I was trying to get at when I said "with no clear and definitive answers."

"I disagree on whether or not do we need to define the concept of necessity to use it like Francione does. Instead of formal definitions, we can rely on generally held intuitions to an extend (which suffices for the most part, and the possibility of not sufficing will be dealt with below)."

I guess we're stuck disagreeing about this, but I do think that it's possible for Francione to more clearly define what he means by necessary and unnecessary and then that could be debated. Without those definitions it seems to me that a rule like "Never cause unnecessary harm" will tend to lead to anti-natalism.

"On the other hand, no one would say that increasing your neighbours statistical mortality risk by driving to the supermarket to buy protein shake is "unnecessary killing"."

Of course not, if no one was killed! But then that depends on how far you're taking your consideration of others' interests. Do insects count? If so, this trip would constitute unnecessary killing. (Unless you can show that driving to procure this protein shake was necessary. But how would you do that?) Since I don't see how we could call this trip necessary, I think it would be fair to say some things about its actual and potential impact: the driver unnecessarily increases the odds of a traffic accident, the driver unnecessarily harms the environment and the driver unnecessarily kills insects.

This doesn't mean that that I object to the trip, which strikes me as mildly harmful at most. But that's because I don't subscribe to an ethical principle like "Never cause unnecessary harm" or "Never risk lives unnecessarily." It seems to me that someone who does agree with those principles would have a tough time defending this protein shake trip.

Many people are, however, concerned about increasing the odds of suffering and death past a certain threshold. (Though probably not based on a principle that they can apply to all of their potential actions.) Reckless driving increases the odds of suffering and death more than careful driving does, and more viscerally so in that it's stressful to witness, so even though careful driving increases odds of suffering and death to some extent, careful driving is generally (but not universally) thought acceptable and reckless driving is not.

But if we bring non human animals into the equation by asserting that their interests must be considered as strongly as our own, behavior not previously considered reckless becomes so. Agriculture and human civilization recklessly put non-human animal wellbeing at risk, often predictably and inevitably. With non-human animal interests considered now, farming is not about just increasing the odds of death of others, it's recklessly increasing those odds, or really guaranteeing the suffering and death of others. Most people at okay with that, because they are not bothered by the harm to these animals, but I don't see why Francione is able to count himself amongst them.

"Similarly it seems clear as the day to me that killing animals because you like the taste is "unnecessary" and increasing the mortality risk by farming plants (which you need for calories to be spend on marathon) is "necessary"."

It may seem clear to you but to those of us who are not in your head, like myself, your reasoning may not be so clear. Do you think eating more than we absolutely must to survive is necessary? If so, why? Do you think human survival is necessary? If so, why?