Roel wrote:Littleendian wrote:
namely to a heart full of compassion and love owards our dumb little brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom.
May I object to this? You say dumb little brothers and sisters, lately I saw a documentary about animals and their intelligence as opposed to their instinct, in comparison to crows, most humans are dumb as hell, only a few minority of humans can match the intelligence of a crow. Besides humans the only animals which can understand the physics of Archimedes and build tools ina wide variety of ways, comparable to the way how humans create different kinds of tools.
You think crows are smarter than you? Silliness. Of course certain animals can do certain things that we can't, but for the most part it's not based on intelligence as we commonly define it, but on semi-automatic patterns of behavior placed in our brains by evolution.
By the way, Littleendian may have intended the alternate definition of dumb, meaning "unable to speak".
-- Updated March 23rd, 2015, 2:21 pm to add the following --
Littleendian wrote:Wilson wrote:
(Nested quote removed.)
Is it murder when a lion kills an antelope?
Bad lion. Bad lion.
It's a necessity for the survival of the animal, therefore it's not a question of the moral realm.
As omnivores humans do have a choice, it is not necessary for our survival to eat meat, therefore it becomes a moral question whether it is okay to do so. The answer is quite clear. The confusion is brought on only by our stubborn resistance against change. As long as most people are doing it, most people will run with the herd, where it's safe, and assume it's okay to do without checking it against their own moral compass, which will more often than not lead them to draw the conclusion that human evolution must aim much higher, namely to a heart full of compassion and love towards our dumb little brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom.
What about an omnivorous animal - a bear, for instance - who kills another animal for food? Is that bear guilty of murder and therefore immoral?
It all depends on your definition of morality. If you feel that animals have equal rights with humans - if their lives are just as important - then you might have a point. But most of us just simply don't feel that way, and I suspect that you don't either. If a house was on fire, and you could only save a baby or a dog, but not both, I hope that you would save the human child, without hesitating.
Personally I'm an animal lover and tend to see them as individual personalities. So I certainly empathize with animals and would react violently if I saw an animal being treated cruelly. However, there's just enough of tribalism me that I value human life much more highly than animal life - though admittedly it would be wrenching if I had to choose between one of my dogs and a random human being.
My rationalization for eating meat - enthusiastically and with only an occasional moral twinge - is that animals fear pain but don't fear death in the same way that we do - so killing an animal is morally acceptable as long as it is raised and killed humanely. The criterion for me is suffering. If an animal has a good life and then is killed quickly and painlessly, I see nothing wrong in that. Of course that isn't the norm, and we should try to craft laws that require good treatment of the animals raised to feed us.
Besides, we humans evolved to love the taste of meat. For most of us, vegetarian dishes can be very good, but there's nothing like the primal, sensual, inborn pleasure we get from a great steak.