If you ask a bunch of people to define murder, vegans would be about the only ones who would include animals without prompting. Even among non-vegans who might refer to killing a pet as murder, few would support treating pet killers they way we treat people killers.
the real question is what is the difference between a dog and a pig that justifies the difference in moral consideration between them?
This also strikes me as arguing -- at least from a moral standpoint -- that you can make a roughly apples-to-apples comparison between how humans and animals should be treated. Of course you're going to get people thinking you're saying that.
If you ask a bunch of people to define murder, vegans would be about the only ones who would include animals without prompting.
does that matter though? for a spicy counterexample, if you asked those same people to define murder, leftists would be about the only ones who would include "dropping bombs on people for empire" or "denying people food because theyre poor in a wealthy country" unprompted. the whole point is that people should think of these things as murder even when people generally dont
Even among non-vegans who might refer to killing a pet as murder, few would support treating pet killers they way we treat people killers.
strongly disagree. john wick is a very popular blockbuster three-movie revenge fantasy about how righteous and cool a man is for killing hundreds of people after someone killed his dog. look at any r*ddit thread about someone who killed a pet dog and see what non-vegans are saying about the perpetrator. most people (and the laws of most countries for that matter) think deliberately killing a pet dog for pleasure is a crime that should be punished by prison time (edit to add that core of the crime is the cruelty to the animal itself not "damage to property"). maybe a shorter sentence than for a human, but still as a very comparable (if not identical) crime to killing a human. as MF_BROOM was saying, not apples-to-apples, but very comparable
This also strikes me as arguing – at least from a moral standpoint – that you can make a roughly apples-to-apples comparison between how humans and animals should be treated. Of course you’re going to get people thinking you’re saying that.
sorry what do you mean? im talking about the comparison between dogs and pigs in the bit you quoted, not people. i genuinely dont follow
All I'm saying is that it should be obvious why non-vegans think vegans make a moral equivalence between humans and animals. It's because they do exactly that pretty often, either explicitly or through stuff like calling someone who kills an animal a murderer.
No one is straw-manning anything here -- people are telling you what you're communicating.
is it a confronting word to use? of course, its making an inescapable statement that the act is not morally-neutral, which the word "kill" can be ambiguous on. it invites people to think of justifications for why such a deliberate killing for pleasure of a thinking, feeling being that doesnt want to die shouldnt invite moral judgement. thats a confronting thing to have to do, especially when youre not used to thinking about it
no leftist legitimately thinks that its wrong to use the word murder because of dictionary definitions or because it implies animals are the exact same as humans, we both know that. everyone here is smarter than that. they think its wrong because it makes them uncomfortable to have to make a moral examination of something they participate in every day, that perhaps theyre not as certain about the morality of as they think
they think its wrong because it makes them uncomfortable
This really isn't it. The most immediate reason people are annoyed by it is because it's aggressive and hostile without being funny or novel.
To the extent they engage with it, it's just a sloppy argument. When people hear "meat is murder" they see that as arguing that killing an animal is morally equivalent to killing a person. They usually disagree with this. They are then told it's not 1:1 equivalent, but killing animals is still really bad. This gets more traction -- most people like most animals -- but it also begs the question of why shouldn't we treat things that are different (animals and people) differently? The issue is then further confused when "murder" rhetoric is mixed back in; it's arguing it both ways.
i know its not the crux of the discussion, but the specific phrase "meat is murder" is a punchline these days (due to pop culture use), people dismiss it without even engaging and i absolutely think its a tactically-incorrect phrase for vegans to use regardless of truth or otherwise. but saying equivalent things like "that animal that died for your dinner was murdered" does still have some power, i think, and is what people on this site have been saying. so id like to steer clear of discussing "meat is murder" itself (pedantry but kinda important i think).
and also just something thats easy to forget - most of us here werent brought up vegan, most of us have been non-vegan leftists much like you, and most of us have been on both sides of this argument. and i can tell you 100% from my personal experience that for me the reason i disliked the word "murder" was because it made me uncomfortable about my own actions, and that the answers i was telling myself as to why calling it murder was ridiculous just werent cutting it (i of course wasnt 100% consciously aware of it at the time).
and yeah, not intended to be funny and novel, intended to be confronting and uncomfortable. if instead of saying "murder" i said "deliberately and immorally killing - for pleasure - a thinking, feeling being that doesnt want to die" it doesnt quite roll off the tongue in the same way but would provoke the same angry response because its not about technicalities of whether killing an animal and killing a human are exactly 1:1 or not (and i would refer you to @BeamBrain s excellent post addressing this very point). its about being told "your actions make you not as moral as you like to think you are" and reacting defensively because deep down you know theyre right.
but if you can convince yourself you proved vegans wrong on some semantic technicality, its a great way of avoiding grappling with the rather obvious truth that killing animals that dont want to die just for the sake of yumyums is wrong, but that people dont want to stop because taking action to stop doing it seems scary and hard. ps for anyone reading its actually not that scary or hard at all and its actually very liberating to free yourself from the cognitive dissonance of being a leftist trying to justify unnecessary death and suffering for the sake of treats
so yeah please stop deliberately and immorally killing - for pleasure - thinking, feeling beings that dont want to die, its good for them but also for you
It absolutely is straw-manning, you cannot seriously see a vegan use the word "murder" to refer to the slaughter of an animal and jump to the conclusion that that same person is saying that there is a moral equivalence between a human and animal being killed, that's just asinine. We literally just don't want animals--which have the capacity to suffer--of any kind to get killed for our own selfish needs if it is avoidable, it's not rocket science.
edwardligma is right about the confrontational nature of using "murderer", the OP may have used the word in part to be provocative and draw attention to the suffering of animals.
When non-vegans hear "meat is murder" their #1 thought is "so you're saying killing a deer is the same as killing a human?" That's what the words are communicating, regardless of what you intend to communicate.
It's like talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat to a non-leftist. Their #1 thought is "so it's a dictatorship?" It doesn't matter what we're trying to communicate with that phrase -- what is actually communicated is what the recipient gets out of the message. Maybe you can salvage it with additional explanation, but maybe not.
I personally don't really tend to use the word "murder" myself to describe the slaughter of animals because non-vegans routinely react in the exact same negative way toward it, but I also won't chastise another vegan who uses that term.
Again, I will reiterate that you cannot get into the inner psyche of every vegan who says that and know in no uncertain terms that they are saying that killing an animal is the same as killing a human. "Murder" as a concept doesn't have to be inherently tied to humans--for most of us, we literally just don't want any creature with a capacity to suffer to be slaughtered, human vs. animal comparison be damned. edwardligma is also correct, a stereotypical western pet like a dog is often seen as a member of the family by some people, and there are articles that exist that refer to dogs deliberately getting killed as "murder". Besides, there are literally some dictionaries that have additional definitions of murder as "to kill or slaughter inhumanly or barbarously" or "to slaughter wantonly", which seems a pretty apt way of describing animal agriculture. Definitions of words, just like all facets of society, also don't have to be permanently rigid, so there's no reason to think that the society-accepted definition of victims of "murder" couldn't eventually evolve to include non-human animals as well.
If you ask a bunch of people to define murder, vegans would be about the only ones who would include animals without prompting. Even among non-vegans who might refer to killing a pet as murder, few would support treating pet killers they way we treat people killers.
This also strikes me as arguing -- at least from a moral standpoint -- that you can make a roughly apples-to-apples comparison between how humans and animals should be treated. Of course you're going to get people thinking you're saying that.
does that matter though? for a spicy counterexample, if you asked those same people to define murder, leftists would be about the only ones who would include "dropping bombs on people for empire" or "denying people food because theyre poor in a wealthy country" unprompted. the whole point is that people should think of these things as murder even when people generally dont
strongly disagree. john wick is a very popular blockbuster three-movie revenge fantasy about how righteous and cool a man is for killing hundreds of people after someone killed his dog. look at any r*ddit thread about someone who killed a pet dog and see what non-vegans are saying about the perpetrator. most people (and the laws of most countries for that matter) think deliberately killing a pet dog for pleasure is a crime that should be punished by prison time (edit to add that core of the crime is the cruelty to the animal itself not "damage to property"). maybe a shorter sentence than for a human, but still as a very comparable (if not identical) crime to killing a human. as MF_BROOM was saying, not apples-to-apples, but very comparable
sorry what do you mean? im talking about the comparison between dogs and pigs in the bit you quoted, not people. i genuinely dont follow
All I'm saying is that it should be obvious why non-vegans think vegans make a moral equivalence between humans and animals. It's because they do exactly that pretty often, either explicitly or through stuff like calling someone who kills an animal a murderer.
No one is straw-manning anything here -- people are telling you what you're communicating.
is it a confronting word to use? of course, its making an inescapable statement that the act is not morally-neutral, which the word "kill" can be ambiguous on. it invites people to think of justifications for why such a deliberate killing for pleasure of a thinking, feeling being that doesnt want to die shouldnt invite moral judgement. thats a confronting thing to have to do, especially when youre not used to thinking about it
no leftist legitimately thinks that its wrong to use the word murder because of dictionary definitions or because it implies animals are the exact same as humans, we both know that. everyone here is smarter than that. they think its wrong because it makes them uncomfortable to have to make a moral examination of something they participate in every day, that perhaps theyre not as certain about the morality of as they think
This really isn't it. The most immediate reason people are annoyed by it is because it's aggressive and hostile without being funny or novel.
To the extent they engage with it, it's just a sloppy argument. When people hear "meat is murder" they see that as arguing that killing an animal is morally equivalent to killing a person. They usually disagree with this. They are then told it's not 1:1 equivalent, but killing animals is still really bad. This gets more traction -- most people like most animals -- but it also begs the question of why shouldn't we treat things that are different (animals and people) differently? The issue is then further confused when "murder" rhetoric is mixed back in; it's arguing it both ways.
We're not trying to be funny or novel. I find the murder of humans and the murder of animals equally distasteful, so I'll call them both murder
i know its not the crux of the discussion, but the specific phrase "meat is murder" is a punchline these days (due to pop culture use), people dismiss it without even engaging and i absolutely think its a tactically-incorrect phrase for vegans to use regardless of truth or otherwise. but saying equivalent things like "that animal that died for your dinner was murdered" does still have some power, i think, and is what people on this site have been saying. so id like to steer clear of discussing "meat is murder" itself (pedantry but kinda important i think).
and also just something thats easy to forget - most of us here werent brought up vegan, most of us have been non-vegan leftists much like you, and most of us have been on both sides of this argument. and i can tell you 100% from my personal experience that for me the reason i disliked the word "murder" was because it made me uncomfortable about my own actions, and that the answers i was telling myself as to why calling it murder was ridiculous just werent cutting it (i of course wasnt 100% consciously aware of it at the time).
and yeah, not intended to be funny and novel, intended to be confronting and uncomfortable. if instead of saying "murder" i said "deliberately and immorally killing - for pleasure - a thinking, feeling being that doesnt want to die" it doesnt quite roll off the tongue in the same way but would provoke the same angry response because its not about technicalities of whether killing an animal and killing a human are exactly 1:1 or not (and i would refer you to @BeamBrain s excellent post addressing this very point). its about being told "your actions make you not as moral as you like to think you are" and reacting defensively because deep down you know theyre right.
but if you can convince yourself you proved vegans wrong on some semantic technicality, its a great way of avoiding grappling with the rather obvious truth that killing animals that dont want to die just for the sake of yumyums is wrong, but that people dont want to stop because taking action to stop doing it seems scary and hard. ps for anyone reading its actually not that scary or hard at all and its actually very liberating to free yourself from the cognitive dissonance of being a leftist trying to justify unnecessary death and suffering for the sake of treats
so yeah please stop deliberately and immorally killing - for pleasure - thinking, feeling beings that dont want to die, its good for them but also for you
It absolutely is straw-manning, you cannot seriously see a vegan use the word "murder" to refer to the slaughter of an animal and jump to the conclusion that that same person is saying that there is a moral equivalence between a human and animal being killed, that's just asinine. We literally just don't want animals--which have the capacity to suffer--of any kind to get killed for our own selfish needs if it is avoidable, it's not rocket science.
edwardligma is right about the confrontational nature of using "murderer", the OP may have used the word in part to be provocative and draw attention to the suffering of animals.
When non-vegans hear "meat is murder" their #1 thought is "so you're saying killing a deer is the same as killing a human?" That's what the words are communicating, regardless of what you intend to communicate.
It's like talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat to a non-leftist. Their #1 thought is "so it's a dictatorship?" It doesn't matter what we're trying to communicate with that phrase -- what is actually communicated is what the recipient gets out of the message. Maybe you can salvage it with additional explanation, but maybe not.
I personally don't really tend to use the word "murder" myself to describe the slaughter of animals because non-vegans routinely react in the exact same negative way toward it, but I also won't chastise another vegan who uses that term.
Again, I will reiterate that you cannot get into the inner psyche of every vegan who says that and know in no uncertain terms that they are saying that killing an animal is the same as killing a human. "Murder" as a concept doesn't have to be inherently tied to humans--for most of us, we literally just don't want any creature with a capacity to suffer to be slaughtered, human vs. animal comparison be damned. edwardligma is also correct, a stereotypical western pet like a dog is often seen as a member of the family by some people, and there are articles that exist that refer to dogs deliberately getting killed as "murder". Besides, there are literally some dictionaries that have additional definitions of murder as "to kill or slaughter inhumanly or barbarously" or "to slaughter wantonly", which seems a pretty apt way of describing animal agriculture. Definitions of words, just like all facets of society, also don't have to be permanently rigid, so there's no reason to think that the society-accepted definition of victims of "murder" couldn't eventually evolve to include non-human animals as well.
I'm not saying this, come on.