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Why do you think they do not apply?
Some reasons why I think they apply:
I eat fish so I am not playing the guilt game, they're just the ethical considerations I can think of.
Counterpoint: we really don't know how much self-awareness fish have versus the mammals that the OP seems to be referring to. Call it gross anthropocentrism, but most people respect the lives of non-humans in terms of intelligence. Pigs are pretty well understood to he intelligent and are probably conscious of what's going on around them. Some shrimp? Maybe not.
This doesn't really address the meta concerns w/r/t procurement in your comment, but if I had to choose between a plate of fish or a plate of pork, this would be my thought process.
We do know octopi, for example, can solve complex puzzles
Just to be the super-nerd, octopus is not a regular latin word.
I think it is actually a greek loan word in latin.
So the plural is either octopodes to follow the original greek or octopuses in regular english.
The correct plural is whatever word you say that people understand as meaning more than one octopus. That's how language works.
If enough people make a language mistake, it becomes a rule.
That's true, and a lot of westerners take issue with octopus as food
@PP_BOY_ but more and more research is showing us that fish are smart.
E.g goldfish driving "cars" around in a room, the research on those fish that choose eels to hunt with and communicate via gesture, etc
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
_ /\ _
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
All I can say is I truly embrace the fact that I'm a human and an omnivore. I don't deny there are ethical horrors with the way animals are raised for slaughter, it's quite disgusting in fact. But I ALSO can't deny that I love eating meat off the bone - chicken wings, spare ribs, steak, you name it. When I'm eating meat I'm very happy indeed. And I don't try to pretend I can justify it as somehow OK with regard to how the animals are slaughtered.
I'm a walking contradiction in many regards. I don't try to reconcile my love of meat with my love of animals. I have both, and they sometimes are in conflict. I eat all kinds of things, veggies and grains and all kinds of stuff, but my primary love is meat. I don't deny it, and I don't justify it. It is what it is, and so am I.
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
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
Axolotl
"It's okay to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings." - Nirvana
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.
