Yes, I completely agree that your comments thus far have been attempts at negation without offering any positive claim of your own. Since this isn't a class in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and I fail to entertain the position of logical pondering in service of nihilism, you're coming across as a veg*n apologist aiming to cast aspersion whilst offering nothing but a gaping chasm in return. In such cases, rants are the only way I can survive the tedium.

I wasn't responding to your rebuttal of the veg*nism argument, but rather trying to make the point that that argument isn't really the essential argument for veg*nism in the 1st place. I agree with you that it's mainly just a propagandist attempt to sway people to a particular point of view.

And when i say that the place to begin in exploring the issue as an ethical one is to ask whether we need to eat meat to survive that's exactly what i mean, and i do mean it in a lowest common denominator sense; however, that's obviously only the starting point, issues "along the lines of "optimal", "thrive", or "flourish," etc. would obviously have to be examined further down that path, if as I stated, the goal was "to arrive at a well-reasoned conclusion." Because obviously it's a complex issue.

As for your final paragraph, it mostly just seems like a rant. I think you would agree that just because some ethical arguments for not eating meat "tend to be spuriously focused," does not therefore lead to the conclusion that there are no sound ethical arguments for veg*nism.

If survival was the question, we could all be hooked up to an IV sugar drip and provided with mental stimulation a la the Matrix. Since your premise is bad, the subsequent reasoning is flawed accordingly.

When the question contains something along the lines of "optimal", "thrive", or "flourish", we get very different answers than lowest common denominator survival.

Ethical arguments for veg*nism tend to be spuriously focused on an anthropomorphized notion of sentience whilst ignoring the unintended consequences of agriculture – from the inherent dominance hierarchies it causes in humans to the killing and displacement of myriad species that are abstracted by a Utopian image of green fields and a golden sun excerpted from a logo Monsanto's ad agency chose for its soy-based fake meat products.

the question of eating meat then is really an ethical question. you first determine whether we "have" to eat meat to survive, and if the answer is "no," then you have to ask the question, "well, if we don't have to eat meat should we?" and proceed to honestly explore all aspects of the issue to arrive at a well-reasoned conclusion.

I'm surprised you didn't have liver up there!