Is human steak from a consenting donor vegan?
Yes, but you’d have to be really strict about the word “consenting”. Human breast milk is vegan as long as it’s given freely with consent and not as a form of exploitation, and so we could probably engineer a convoluted scenario where human meat is technically vegan. Let’s run through some possible ones with the understanding that all of it is still nasty as fuck, unethical in every circumstance that could plausibly happen in the real world, and will probably give you a prion disease:
- Killing and eating someone without their consent. Obviously unethical and obviously not vegan; moving on.
- Finding and eating an already-dead body. Desecrating a corpse is – I think – widely considered a very cruel act toward a person even if they’re no longer alive, and moreover, it would inflict immense psychological suffering on those close to that person that their family member or friend was dismembered to be eaten.
- Getting consent to eat them after they die. I think this is probably the closest you could physically get to giving Carl from Llamas with Hats a vegan diet. First, the person would need to offer consent, and I think this would go beyond traditional contract law, requiring robust, multifaceted mediation from psychiatric professionals as well as a judge. “Are you sure you want to do this, and are you sure you’re in the right state of mind to consent to something like this?” Next, both death and how they’re eaten would have to be strictly on the terms of the one being eaten: their time, their method, their circumstance. If they want to back out at the last minute, that’s their prerogative. And lastly, for such an extreme circumstance, I think it should be the case that you can’t promise anything at all in exchange, and it must not be from any person who has tangible power over the lives of the person being eaten or someone very close to the person being eaten. Essentially trying to limit the possibility of a quid pro quo. Even with this broad list of protections, there are almost assuredly factors I’m not properly accounting for.
TL;DR: Not in the real world, no.
I can tell you right now with 100% sincerity, if you want to eat me after I’m dead, feel free!
I’d never thought about it before, but now I genuinely want to find a way for people who want to try human to get a part of me before they burn me.
I’m gonna be dead, wtf do I care?
My only regrets are that I will never know how I taste and that I don’t get to personally tell people to bite my ass.
She is vegan the same as I am a cannibal. Fuck that bitch who calles herself a vegan!🤮
So a person who agrees with you 100% 353 days a year and only agrees with you 99.999999% on 12 days a year should be completely cast out? Should they just go back to eating meat or something because they’re ‘no true vegan’? This really feels like a ‘let perfect be the enemy of good’ sort of situation.
This isn’t quite as black and white as you make it out to be. Severity is an issue here. If you apply the same concept to human life, a similar argument would quickly fall apart. (Oh it was just one human life, so it’s OK, you don’t kill anyone 99.9999% of the time.)
I personally think that whom you kill and for what reason matters greatly. If you accidentally step on a bug, that’s not the same as intentionally killing a rodent, which is not the same as intentionally torturing monkey. Just how killing in humans, intent and state of mind matters, so it does with animals.
I’m not saying that your conclusion is wrong, by the way, just that the reasoning by which you’ve arrived at it is suspect.
It isn’t a matter of “casting people out”. Most vegans don’t even have a vegan community to be cast out of. It’s not a helpful lens to be viewing this from.
Veganism isn’t a club. It’s a moral philosophy and the ethical consequences of that philosophy. Whether or not you are a vegan doesn’t depend on what other people think of your conduct, it depends on whether you accept and believe the axioms of veganism.
If someone thinks that all women should be allowed to own property… except for his wife, he is not 99.99999% a feminist. He’s not a feminist at all, he’s just someone with preferences that coincidentally align with the philosophy most of the time. But clearly he does not believe and accept the principles of that philosophy, so he is in no way a feminist.
The original article. Bivalves’ nervous systems can be summarized as follows:
The central nervous system (CNS) of bivalves is bilaterally symmetrical, of ganglion type. The nervous system consists of aggregations of nerve cells arranged into a chain of paired, sequentially connected ganglia. The paired ganglia are connected via commissures to each other and via connectives to neighboring ganglia. There are three pairs of ganglia in the nervous system of bivalves of the subclass Autobranchia: cerebro-pleural (cerebral), pedal, and visceral (viscero-parietal). The pedal and visceral ganglia communicate with the cerebro-pleural ganglia via the cerebro-pedal and cerebro(pleuro)-visceral connectives, which makes such a nervous system tetraneurous. The major difference between bivalves and other classes of mollusks is the reduction of the head region and, as a result, the absence of some structures: bivalves lack buccal ganglia like those in gastropods, while the cerebral ganglia merge with the pleural ones at the later stages of embryogenesis. The simplification of the nervous system in bivalves is suggested to be a consequence of a slow-moving lifestyle due to the filter-feeding on substrate.
It’s first and foremost incorrect to call yourself vegan if you eat oysters; the commonly accepted definition by the Vegan Society is just objectively contravened here. But semantics aside, as noted in the article, the question becomes “is there something wrong with it?” I definitely think there is. Bivalves are still shown to proactively avoid noxious stimuli in the way a more developed nervous system might, and while the existing research is too sparse to definitively call it “pain”, this feels like yet another step in a long, storied history where humans decided animals didn’t feel pain until researchers stepped in and found out yes, they definitely do (see, e.g., fish). It’s easy not to eat them, and it’s pretty ridiculous to treat the waiting period for more robust scientific literature as a “grace period” instead of something that should be treated with caution. Getting it out of the way, because it’s often presented in bad faith, the whole “plant pain” argument is absurd on its face, both because a basic understanding of entropy still means veganism would be the way to go even taking that asinine premise at face value (vastly more plants per calorie for meat than simply via directly eating plants), and more importantly, plants lack a nervous system at all. They don’t feel pain, and the argument exists 5% to be sincerely believed by nutjobs and 95% to soothe cognitive dissonance felt by people who pay to have animals feel pain.
Honestly, bivalves were the last thing I gave up before becoming fully vegan, even after dairy and eggs, mainly, as you’ve pointed out, due to their very simple CNS. I found the “we don’t know yet, and it’s better to be safe” argument, as well as the fear of being purity checked by other vegans, convincing enough to stop eating them. Being vegan already makes you a bit of a social pariah, so I don’t need the trouble from both sides.
However, I personally believe that sentience and consciousness exist on a spectrum which is also roughly correlated to CNS complexity. That spectrum dictates how much a living thing is capable of suffering, and hence how much moral consideration they should be afforded.
“Vegans” eating bivalves is so incredibly low on my list of things I care about, it might as well be nonexistent. Let anyone who only eats produce from a veganic farm throw the first insult.
Regarding your last paragraph, I broadly agree. I’ve said before that I could see this becoming a weird wedge issue in the far future where humans have finally reached a broad consensus against exploiting mammals, birds, fish, etc. for food but where maybe now the main ethical cause is against the exploitation of insects. And within those who oppose insect exploitation, you hypothetically have a split over whether the line is at animals or whether it’s at having a CNS.
For right now, I think it’s very low on the list of priorities because “Does a cheeseburger justify perpetuating unimaginable suffering on an unfathomable scale? Discuss, and if you say ‘no’, then you’re an extremist weirdo.” is where the Overton window is at right now. Nonetheless, going around telling a major newspaper to write a human interest story on you advocating the position that eating animals is vegan unambiguously deserves pushback.
As an aside, oysters are not bivalves, they are brachiopods. Brachiopods do have a nervous system - some even have eyes.
What’s the difference and how do you tell a brachiopod from a bivalve? It’s the plane of symmetry. In bivalves the plane of symmetry is where the shells (also known as valves) join. So bivalves have two identical shells. Whelks and razor shells are bivalves. Brachiopods also have two shells, but the shells are normally quite different. The oyster for example has one big concave shell and one small flat one on top. The big shell has a hole at the apex (just next to the hinge) and a root-like anchor grows from it to bind the brachiopod to the matrix on which it lives. Brachiopods have an axis of symmetry from this root/foot that vertically separates each shell into two mirrored parts.
… In other news… A livestock breakthrough using CRISPR grows cattle with a complete lack of pain. Tune in for the full story, “Vegan Beef,” on Fox News at eleven!..
…I don’t know about you Karen, but between the vegan human brains, and disposable painless laborers subscriptions from Monsteranto, neo ethics are amazing… said to cohost nervously /s
Wasn’t crispr the name of that microwave weapon that was considered a war crime to use?
Also don’t know about anyone else but personally I’m 100% still not touching meat grown in a lab
CRISPR is possibly one of the most significant technologies invented this century lmao. It’s a technique for inserting base sequences into DNA at targetable sites, the idea being that you can attach their expression to the expression of another sequence.
It enables making transgenic organisms reliably. You can actually like order sequences and do it at home with a little knowhow.
Have a read about it, it’s truly one of the most exciting things of our lifetime.
I’m not a vegan, and neither is that
