I understand when people speak about the ethical problems with eating meat, but I think they do not apply to fish.
Why do you think they do not apply?
Some reasons why I think they apply:
- fish are animals
- industrial fishing is destroying the oceans and sea life (way more is killed than what ends up sold and eventually maybe eaten)
- international waters are a lawless playground for every abuse imaginable
I eat fish so I am not playing the guilt game, they’re just the ethical considerations I can think of.
It’s not that they don’t apply to us, it’s that they don’t apply to many vegetarian cultures. I remember a lesson in history class about how, when Buddhism arrived in Japan and preached against meat consumption, fish were so ingrained in Japanese diet they had a literal revolution to keep fish on the menu. Not just the stereotypical things like sushi, but I guess they like fish so much they’ll eat dolphins (which their cuisine has always considered “fish”), which to me is equal in gravity to cannibalism, this coming from someone who doesn’t necessarily like them. Because if an animal is mindful enough to engage in diplomacy, why the hell are we eating them?
Sometimes this “except you” attitude is also applied to insects, though that seems to be less culturally specific. If people need to for some reason reconcile vegetarianism with needing meat, I don’t understand why they don’t do the obvious thing and just separate meat of animals killed in cold blood from other meats.
I think this kind of example is interesting as it demonstrates how much of a person’s values and ethics are determined by cultural factors.
I’ve always been fascinated by cuisine as a part of culture and your demonstrated overlap of cuisine and ethics is another fascinating aspect to ponder.
Sushi as we know it is actually relatively modern. The Japanese made a few exceptions to vegetarianism mostly out of practicality. For example, birds were also not seen as animals.
Somewhat related to this, there was an emperor who died of beriberi because apparently all he ate was polished white rice.
I disagree. The two main arguments against eating land animals are 1) cruelty and deprivation of life and 2) effect on the planet.
Both of these apply. Commercial fishing uses inhumane killing methods and fish are actually quite intelligent.
Overfishing is completely destroying the ocean ecosystems and will even have a knock-on effect on land ecosystems eg salmon in rivers normally transfer masses of nutrients to land and trees via bears etc.
The idea that fish do not experience pain is also ludicrous… They possess a central nervous system and can very much feel pain.
I’m also opposed to catch & release fishing for fun/sport for this reason.
Imagine a hyper-advanced species suddenly and painfully yanked you up into different atmospheric conditions where you’re desperately unable to breathe.
Is it perfectly acceptable just because they put you back down in your natural environment before you died, with a new painful wound and traumatic experience?
I certainly don’t think so…
Their bodies are also formed to exist supported by the water. When taken out their very bodies are crushing their organs. It’s grim.
This depends on how deep the fish lives. For example, where I live, anglers are required to have a descending device on them and ready to go to quickly return a deeper sea fish to the depths without causing it significant harm.
At the same time, all hooks are required to be barbless so as to cause minimal damage to whatever is caught.
It definitely doesn’t. Animal from the deep sea are used to being under higher pressure, that’s an entirely different issue and not what I’m talking about.
Fish of any level will be supported in the water in a way that they won’t in air so they haven’t developed the structure of land animals to keep their organs from crushing each other.
Then there’s a whole host of other issues that occur - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Physiological-responses-occurring-when-fish-are-removed-from-water-Effects-of-air_fig1_281930182#:~:text=exposure%20can%20be%20considered%20acute,(Ferguson%20and%20Tufts%201992).
Even when only removed from the water for a short time a proportion of the fish die after being put back. When the time is increased to do measurements, take photos, whatever else you want to do, the proportion that die shortly after increases quite quickly.
OP didn’t specify commercial fishing. What about traditional fishing practices, or a singular fisher catching for himself/family?
Commercial fishing just makes it happen at scale a lot more efficiently. If every person who ate fish was out there fishing for themselves, I would imagine it would be a significantly larger impact than the commercial fishing.
You are deliberately not answering the question.
“If every person that ate fish was out there…” exactly - they purchase fish caught commercially because either they don’t know how to catch their own fish or they don’t have access to catch their own fish (access either with time, money, or physically). Commercial fishing solves that by precisely doing it “at scale a lot more efficiently” as you pointed out and ships the fish to where people will purchase it.
I didn’t ask “what if everyone went out and did it themselves”
I asked your thoughts on people who DO fish for themselves, or those using traditional fishing practices.
@Alue42 but that then still maps closely onto the ethical issues around meat-eating per se versus eating the products of commercial meat production.
Which makes eating fish no different to eating other kinds of meat in terms of the ethics.
In a global ecological sense, it is worse to eat fish than pork, we are sucking the seas dry, we have known it for decades, and invented new methods to do it more efficiently.
With land animals you can see the conditions and the effect of over production, with fish you don’t, and we keep at it.
Grown fish is less bad, but still contribute to pollution of the seas.
Trawling should be banned globally for a minimum of 50 years.
We have also invented ways to do it more sustainably, and even have handy wallet sized Sustainable Seafood Lists for each region of the US to make sure you make sustainable choices when eating at restaurants or purchasing at the market
Seafood Watch Guides@Alue42 we used to have these in New Zealand. It was a card you could keep in your wallet, listed all the common eating fish from best to worst, with sustainable ones coded green at the top and endangered ones in red.
But it was depressing over the years with each new edition to slowly see all those green fish turning orange and then red as each species became depleted.
I just tried looking for you, and the most up to date I could find was for 2017. That’s disappointing, but slightly out of date is better than nothing.
By 2017 it had already happened - almost all the NZ fish had gone from the green zone and they’d started putting farmed shellfish and stuff caught in international waters at the top of the list to make up for it.
I think those of us who care about our local marine environment seldom eat actual fish now. We don’t really need a guide any more.
What about eating meat is ethical or unethical and how does that apply or not apply to eating fish?
extreme environmental issues, mass execution of innocence, destruction of indigenous culture and land.
theres definitely a couple easy ones to point to.
idk why it wouldnt apply to fish
They are certainly a lot of issues with eating fish. Maybe not the same as factory farmed land animals. More along the lines of extinction of species and the destruction of ecosystems. It’s worth looking into if it’s something you are concerned with. There’s also indirect cruelty to more intelligent species like dolphins.
Was that particular fish a dick?
Spiny dogfish. Those spiny, bait-stealing little jerks.
Yeah, like (not exactly fish) fish-like sea mammal named Dolphin. He or She is Asshole
Fishing is industrialized too, so that can be a problem, specifically with the aquatic ecosystem. For vegans, fish still have a central nervous system so they are deemed undesireable. I still would eat fish because of health reasons, though.
I’m reminded of the thought experiment of the vegan oyster.
The oyster lacks a CNS and cannot feel pain or suffering. It’s farming is a net benefit on the environment its in as it acts as a natural filter for purifying waterways. It is nutritious. Is it vegan? If not, why? Is it that is merely alive? How does that differ from a plant or mushroom?
While I don’t think one could seriously suggest an oyster is vegan friendly food, it’s an interesting line of thinking to inspect one’s own values.
Depends on the perspective being considered:
Are fish sentient? Yes.
Are they very sentient, with lots of free-will? No.
Does our current industry’s completely-gutting the marine food-chain have global consequences? Yes.
How are we doing with respect to keeping that food-chain alive? Terrible: any species that becomes our industrial prey, gets reduced to 10% of its normal population within 1 decade.
Cod used to live to be about 80y old, ttbomk, now they live to be 8, or less.
The smashing of the coral-forests they breed in, at the bottom of the ocean, with dragger-nets ( falsely called “rock hoppers” ), means the cod-fishery collapsed & stayed collapsed, and all fisheries are “managed” like that, by lobbying to protect industrial-ignorance.
Accountability won’t ever happen, because industry/money won’t tolerate that.
There’s a ScientificallyTestablePrediction in the Christian bible, in Rev, that both terrestrial & marine food-chains collapse ( at the time of the “3rd Seal” ).
That is going to happen this century, no matter what political/religious rabies goes rampaging where.
All the political & religious & food-insecurity & ClimatePunctuation wars that we must enact in order to “manage” our unconscious-minds’ stress/fear/panic, and all of the nihilist malicious-actors ( China cyaniding other country’s seas, because those other countries are not breaking & obeying China, in recent news )…
Morality is contextual.
Personal-context can say 1 thing, or another, global context can be quite different.
Buddha said that eating the flesh of another’s life was faulty because they never consented to be butchered/consumed, and that is true.
I can’t remember what other reasons were given, that one stuck on me.
I don’t eat any meat, or that aweful “Beyond Meat” or “Impossible Meat” stuff, because I can’t then reach the meditations I’m using to rip my continuum out from this world’s ideology-driven death-spasms, and remaining in this world, now, is indulging in being ground-to-hamburger, in my eyes.
I want out.
Eating meat of any kind blocks me from progressing on that through the meditations, exactly as the ancient rishis of India said.
That tested to be true.
You have to live with yourself, not with my conscience.
You decide on your own morality: you have to live with it.
I’ve never bothered learning the “precepts” or any of the other stuff of AwakeSoulism/Buddhism: I care about results, not about dogma.
What tests to be true, that is worth relying-on, for me.
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Thems a lotta words, bro.
My entire ethical framework for what animals are ok to eat is wether or not it’s cute.
I say eat them.
Could you envision a fish so cute you would feel it is unethical to consume it?
I started imagining what it would look like and it was just a baby seal
What attributes of the seal differentiate it from a fish that makes it to cute to snack upon?
It looks like a sea puppy
Octopodes
Not fish, but absolutely adorable and intelligent and unethical to eat.
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On a simple level I’d say it depends on the brain structure so it’d vary by fish species even. Though as others have said, things like living conditions and overfishing are ethical issues nonetheless.
Though I just wanted to post this silly video, Would You Eat a Fish if it had Arms and Legs? by Mattias Pilhede. Mirror link
Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life.
This is necessary.
i mean, animal farming isn’t technically necessary at this point in human and technological evolution
They didn’t say farming is necessary. They said that it was necessary that life feeds on life.
Calm down Aquaman.
People’s opinions will differ, and most people’s won’t be changed. Instead of a discussion, it will be people yelling at each other until they both leave angry.
Personally, I think it’s not ethical to eat any meat, whether that is white, red, wet, or otherwise.
Other people have, and will, think it is ethical to eat all meat, including other humans.Mmmm, a good chianti with your liver. Bon appetit!
I would prefer the fava beans
It is unethical to kill fish. If one must eat fish, wait for it to be in a position like death where it won’t get in the way of anything. Fish are no different from other animals.
He’s my conundrum with that. Other species will not go after animals that are close to death. I’ve worked with a lot of wild animals. The thinking is that if it is dead or close to death they will leave it to the scavengers since they don’t want to risk contracting whatever killed it. Bears, eagles, so many animals are going to hunt healthy fish - bears specifically go after the salmon about to spawn and pass on their genes.
Hunting is part of nature, and not just with fish.
I understand the issue with industrialized/commercial kills, but is hunting also off the table in your train of thought? I mean this as a genuine question, not an attack, I know tone of voice is often lost through text.
Is hunting/fishing off the table for us as the species with higher intellect? We do not have as robust immune systems as the scavengers of nature do, so waiting for things to be in a position near death is worrisome to me. Whereas hunting/fishing (again, not the industrialized practice, but individual) is how conservation of species was born by developing species limits and it’s how some species levels continue to be kept in check (for instance, invasive lion fish in the US South East)
There is necessity but there is also ethics. Do they clash? Of course. But this clash isn’t unique to the world of the food chain, and in these other situations, there is at least substantial acknowledgement and regret that ethics is being sacrificed. I am not a vegetarian elitist like many people are (I encountered quite a few of those here where I faced the opposite criticism), but I still quietly frown upon the idea of me descending to the mindset of survival at all costs. Keep in mind we live in a world where it’s normal to go from “we need meat to survive” to “let’s eat X exotic animal that absolutely doesn’t have to be the one to sustain us”.
Ok, but what you said tried to toe the line while actually using absolute hyperboles to prove neither point.
Keep in mind we live in a world where it’s normal to go from “we need meat to survive” to “let’s eat X exotic animal that absolutely doesn’t have to be the one to sustain us”.
We actually don’t need meat to survive. While there are species that are indeed obligate carnivores or ones that whose digestive system is more efficient with meat proteins, we are omnivores. It’s even been shown that body builders and athletes can sustain themselves on a vegan diet.
“let’s eat X exotic animal that absolutely doesn’t have to be the one to sustain us”.
While some people get a thrill out of eating the highly illegal species, turning new species into a new food item can be a boon to conservation. Lionfish never used to live in the Florida Keys, then one popped up, then a handful, then all the sudden they were taking over whole reefs and the native species had no where to live. There was no way to get rid of them, they hide under the outcroppings of the reefs, they can’t be caught on a line, no gillnetting, they have to be speared which is NOT easy as government operation or some sort of eradication program. Finally, it caught on how delicious they are and the area started teaching people how to handle the spines and the filet around the venom glands in order to cook them, and it took off like crazy and everyone was in the water to get them! The population hasn’t declined, but it’s somewhat leveled so the local marine species can at least get a toehold again.
And this isn’t the only species with a story like this. So taking on exotic species (plant and animal) in your diet can indeed be a good thing for conservation.
But, the point is I asked if hunting was off the table for us as a species despite it occurring in nature, and if so was it due to our intellect? You responded with hyperboles on both ends that don’t provide an answer.
We actually don’t need meat to survive. While there are species that are indeed obligate carnivores or ones that whose digestive system is more efficient with meat proteins, we are omnivores. It’s even been shown that body builders and athletes can sustain themselves on a vegan diet.
I’m confused then, what are you trying to say? I was saying spare the fish, you argued against that, but now veganism is ideal? Nothing against you, but I’m lost.
I did answer whether or not hunting is off the table. The first few sentences alludes to hunting (a necessity) versus abstaining (ethics). It is ethical not to kill (which hunting is), no? Even farming, though often not great, is morally superior to hunting. You can live off farming, you don’t need hunting. Hunting exotic animals can have good aspects, but it’s still killing, not always necessary anyways, and these good aspects don’t apply to, say, going to a Korean restaurant and lo and behold they have live octopus. If by any chance there are no invasive species, you can do just fine with everyday farm animals (supposing one absolutely had to eat meat). Everyday life isn’t Survivor and deliciousness shouldn’t/doesn’t have to be someone’s whole ideal.
I was showing that your statements are incorrect. That hunting is not a necessity because we are omnivores. But it’s not a necessity for the bear either, they are also omnivores.
Therefore, is hunting off the table for us? Both of your statements “eat meat to survive” and “eat x exotic animal” have been proven extreme false hyperboles that don’t relate to the question at hand.
For the third time, yes. I am baffled as to why hunting would be necessary if meat eating isn’t.
So the bears, foxes, deer, egrets, etc are also being unethical and should be damned? Because they absolutely can live without meat but chose to hunt.
If fish could eat you do you believe they would think it’s unethical?
If you answer it’s yes then don’t eat fish.
If a fish ate me, I wouldn’t find it unethical at all.
I feel the same about cows, chickens and pigs.
Fish can and do eat you
There’s a fish nibbling on me right now and i didn’t even notice!
I mean undesirable and unethical are not the same thing. I wouldn’t really even place an ethical question on a fish, unless maybe they live in an aquarium and know better or something (like eating their handler, assuming living conditions are good). Not even moral questions really, though a hungry fish is probably acting pretty morally to meet its base needs TBH.
That said, if there was a neck-snapper-fish I’m pretty sure people would seek it out. And they’d say stuff like live by the fish, die by the fish.
I will go to swim with sharks to see if they talk about if eating me it’s ethical or not.
I mean if I was in the ocean and a shark just wanted to grab a bite to eat that’s just fine. I can’t really swim anyways so I guess that’d be preferable. Just as long as they’re quick about it.
Also I hear sharks are really smooth, so that’s nice.
