Vegetarianism is a Necessary Lifestyle Choice to Lead a Perfectly Ethical Life

We have a complaint in the comment section that the "set up" is weak. I agree, and will therefore take some time to summarize what has been said before making my closing remarks. Although I will point out that it was never my responsibility to set a stage since I only need to react to the Affirmative side's attempt at meeting the burden of proof. He had the first argument, and will have the last as well after this. Feel free to skip the summary entirely if you feel you have followed the debate well enough. ::Begin Summary:: In the beginning, I mentioned that you have the burden of proof since you are the one making a positive and non self-evident claim. I didn't have, do not need, and will not try to present an argument why we should NOT forbid meat-eating before you present an argument why we SHOULD. This is because "not forbidding" is the default stance one should take in the absence of sufficient reason FOR forbidding people at large from acting a certain way. In other words, it is a very serious matter to guilt people ethically without sufficient reason, and even more serious to guilt people morally (which is by the way a second and potentially unrelated issue. Morals are not the same as ethics and you interchanged the two words a bit). I then commented that I failed to see such sufficient reason - in the form of a coherent argument FOR forbidding people - in your statement. I rather saw a wealth of information, with only some of this information being accurately factual. I understand the attempt to get many facts out there - because when you are in the business of balancing good and bad as you are, you have the very difficult task of accurately weighing ALL the factors involved before you forbid others from an action. Therefore, the factors need to be accurate, and then you need to weigh them in an argument to draw your conclusion. You haven't even mentioned whether vegetarianism still comes out on top after considering the water use, land use, pesticides ETC ETC of VEGETABLES (which you don't mention and weigh at all). Rather than go point-for-point, I contested as inaccurate the only two facts that you DID actually use as premises in an argument. All the others are very dubious as well, and as I said before, are irrelevant anyway in the sense that you don't use them in an argument to draw a conclusion. Here is my best summary of your argument, with the bold ones being the critical facts I'm contesting. "P1.To be ethical, suffering/cruelty should be minimized while humans and society should be improved and nourished. P2. Meat eating has no nutritional benefits over vegetarianism. i.e. no improvement/nourishment P3. Meat eating hurts animals and increases suffering/cruelty in the world, while vegetarianism does not. C1. One is therefore required to choose vegeterianism in order to be ethical (by minimizing suffering while maximizing improvement and nourishment of human society)." You mostly ignored my contradictions: 1. That there are benfits of eating meat over vegetarianism and 2. That the cited reasons why meat-eating is hamful are not necessarily accurate (ie the environmental one is not - see the previously linked source - and this is by far the best argument because the negative effects are widespread.) This takes out the premises (P2 +P3) that link P1 to C1 in a syllogism and therefore invalidate the conclusion. By the way, any negative effects on only the individual that MAKES the choice are much less important because they are not at all widespread. I only mention this because, as I said before, you need to WEIGH the factors as it says in your own P1. This is why, in addition to the fact that they're dubious and unincorporated into an argument, I ignore ALL the other factors you mention besides nutrition, suffering, and the environment - because they are all limited to one person at a time (probably an unethical and unthoughtful person because he is eating meat way too often than what is necessary to get collagen for example, like the moderation I suggested). ::End Summary:: Now my closing remarks, which will be a response to the new round. You basically re-typed a lot of the same facts, and still didn't incorporate them into an argument. The one part that is an argument is where you say that eating meat would logically extend to eating people. Be careful because this is potentially the fallacy of argumenting from consequence, but I will grant that the consequence is mentioned only because it is a percieved negative effect that needs to be weighed. You didn't do said weighing, and I think you just assume it is "immoral" (you mean unethical) because it is disgusting. I don't have anything to react to, so here is my own weighing. Feel free to ignore all of this as I am not obligated to do my own -I have shown that he has not sufficiently done his to prove that meat eating is unethical, which is all I need to do. You are right, I said that the benefits of meat eating are inevitable because of the similarities between humans and animals (but not plants) and it is therefore obviously true that humans are even MORE similar and they would also be good to eat. I don't contest this and never said it was unethical to eat humans. In your first example, you mention a human that is already dead. This would be perfectly ethical as it does not harm anyone necessarily, and would even help because of the nutrition we just mentioned. But then you changed the story (without even noticing it?) and mentioned instead killing humans in order to eat them. This would almost certainly be unethical even if it was done in the same manner (painlessly) that I am suggesting IS ethical for other animals. This is because humans have a great capacity to do good for other humans and animals as well. For example humans, unlike animals, have the capacity to do science (sometimes on animals ironically!) that can benefit GREATLY other humans and animals alike. It is therefore much worse to kill any human for food which hasn't proven to be very harmful, or hasn't had a chance to prove to be very useful in this way. They are really two totally different things if all you are doing (as you are) is trying to weigh out the good and the bad and make sure the good comes on top. In summary, I hope the audience sees that the fact presented by the Affirmative Side are from a website which doesn't cite primary literature. And that I have cited more credible sources for rebutting the few facts he actually uses in an argument (ie the telegraph link and the following for the collagen tidbit http://en.wikipedia.org...). And that I am unafraid of the consequences of any stance which is true - and we should not ever be becasue it never leads to bad consequences in the first place. For example, although eating anything aready dead, including ones uncle, is not necessarily bad as I discuss above, I feel confident in my own ability to weigh the RELEVANT facts, and would not - even though it is NOT unethical - eat my uncle (even after he died). It would be sufficiently bad in my particular case since I would vomit and my family would be very mad! But I know that it is not necessarily bad, and there are other people who may have different circumstances where their own weighing concludes that they should eat someone dead, and I will not forbid them or judge them for this.