Hail Seitan!
There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets:
I - One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II - The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III - One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV - The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V - Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI - People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any
harm that might have been caused.
VII - Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Since in the modern age we can obtain all of the nutrition we need from a well-planned plant-based diet, by buying & consuming animal products, we participate in unnecessary cruelty to sentient beings
I can make an argument that being non-vegan in the modern age is violating all seven of these tenets
Tenet I : It’s neither reasonable, nor compassionate or empathetic, to needlessly exploit & take the life of a creature when we have moral agency & alternatives, unlike other animals.
Tenet II : It’s true that it’s legal to exploit & unalive animals today, but it was also legal to own slaves in the past. Just because we’re legally allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should.
Tenet III : One’s body being inviolable and subject to their own will alone should extend to all sentient beings. If it doesn’t, Name The Trait in a way that doesn’t lead to contradiction or absurdity
That is - Name The Trait different between humans and other animals that makes it okay to do things to other animals that we wouldn’t be okay with being done to humans.
I.e. justify the speciesist discrimination and double standard and differential treatment.
Tenet IV : We should be free to tell people they’re hypocrites for loving dogs & eating cows, or even for participating in the exploitative pet industry instead of adopting/rescuing companion animals.
Even if this is offensive to people. It’s freedom of speech and necessary for the activism and the struggle for justice that should prevail above laws and institutions (Tenet II).
To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of other sentient beings, is to forgo your own right to be respected like you would be if you first gave respect to other individuals (animals).
Tenet V : Insisting we need to eat meat or animal products to be healthy despite that disagreeing with scientific consensus, is distorting scientific facts to fit your beliefs,
& not conforming beliefs to your best scientific understanding of the world.
It’s denying reality,
burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the truth,
& living in ignorance & delusion & the willfull, unnecessary destruction & oppression of others, self, & planet.
Tenet VI : Assuming that we are already perfect & couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong or unjust, despite every historical society participating in normalized injustice, is not recognizing humans
are fallible.
And, when confronted with your mistake, in the form of what your kind have raised you to traditionally participate in regarding unnecessary systemic exploitation & violence to sentient beings,
if your response is to deflect, close your ears, & refuse to take personal responsibility or change any behavior, is to not do one’s best to rectify it & resolve any harm that might have been caused.
then that is to not right the wrong and fundamentally unjust relationship between humans and other animals and resolve it into one of harmonious and respectful coexistence.
Rather than one of needless exploitation, domination, violence, cruelty, and oppression.
Finally, Tenet VII : To claim that because these tenets do not specifically mention an obligation to not exploit & harm non-human animals unnecessarily & to be vegan, that means it isn’t entailed by
the values underlying them, is to not let every tenet serve as guiding principles designed to inspire nobility in action & thought & not allow the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice to prevail
over the written or spoken word.
I explained it already. Sentient beings have a subjective experience of the world. They can experience phenomena like emotions, thoughts, feelings, suffering, pain, fear, joy, love/familial/maternal bonds, etc. They can either have their experience impacted upon positively (i.e. promoting wellbeing, reducing suffering, saving/sparing life), or negatively (i.e. reducing/depriving of wellbeing/freedom/autonomy etc, taking away life). If you make a sentient being suffer, that violates their inherent interest to not suffer (even if they don’t state this as an interest, it’s reasonable to infer they would want it to not happen since it generates a negative experience in a way that doesn’t benefit them and isn’t necessary). Cutting their life short (a fraction of their lifespans in most animal industries https://www.farmtransparency.org/kb/food/abattoirs/age-animals-slaughtered ) by killing them also violates their interests to keep on living (unless they’re in extreme incurable suffering and it can be true euthanasia) since we can infer - and the safe presumption in most cases is - that they would benefit from living and experience wellbeing that you’d be depriving them of by taking away their existence and ability to experience anything.
Put another way, sentience matters in any being for the same reason it matters in humans. If a human lost the ability to experience anything, for example if they became completely brain dead but their body was still working, we might still owe some obligations to that individual and their body because they were previously sentient, and their loved ones may have preferences about what to do with them/their body, but it’s certainly not the same as if they were still sentient - if you had to take life support off that individual who was already dead mentally with no experience of anything whatsoever, or a sentient human who could continue living and experiencing and raising their family after they recovered, I think most would for good reason save the sentient human. And sentience mattering is also why most agree a human matters more than a plant or a rock.
That said, once again, if we want to shield all organisms from harm as much as we can, being vegan is requisite.
another unsupported claim
This is a moral claim, not an empirical one. Also, it’s anecdotal based on everyone I’ve talked to, that they do ultimately reveal themselves to care about sentience when they actually engage with the questions instead of dodging and refusing to answer.
claimed without proof
Proof has been given and rejected by you based on your attempts at cherrypicking.
you haven’t provided sufficient proof
how?
How could a sentient being benefit from living? Because they experience the world, they enjoy the joys of life, they spend time with their loved ones, they experience pleasure and happiness and peace. Obviously there are benefits to continuing to live rather than having your lifespan cut short, including for a non-human animal as well as humans. Do you think a dog benefits from not being killed? Do you think they’d rather keep their life and experience intact or to be forcefully unalived against their will and without their consent? The fact you’re asking “why would they benefit from living”? reveals a really gross and sociopathic attitude tbh.