LuckyR wrote: ↑June 10th, 2018, 12:37 am
By your logic the purpose of the sport of boxing is to kill people
No, hitting is only meant to hurt. It does.
and video games equate to genocide.
Video games are not in the same class as physical sports.
Boxing, wrestling, judo, etc, are training to fight, even if you make a game of it. Archery, fencing, target shooting are training to kill, even if you make a game of it.
Video games are a long step up from board games as
mental training, since they require a degree of reaction speed, dexterity and hand-eye co-ordination. Depending on the contents of the game, they may be mere fantasy (in wish-fulfillment, a step up from verbalizing a daydream)
or it may be training in strategy and tactics for conflict of some kind.
The progression from ideation to action in the real world can be halted anywhere along its logical path - and, for most people, does stop at the game stage. For professional fighters and soldiers, it goes on to real life enactment - hurting and killing - under particular rules; for some disturbed individuals, it goes on to crime and mayhem with no rules at all - and if the disturbed individual is commander-in-chief of a real live army, genocide is not an uncommon end result.
Your red analogy suffers from oversimplification. For a modern human whether to domesticate an animal is not a choice, farm animals already exist.
They exist in response to a demand. I am either part of the demand which increases their number, or part of the trend away from their use.
What I tried to point out is that
the legitimacy of their existence and use is entirely dependent on humans legitimizing their power to exploit other species. Humans have the ability to legitimize even their most heinous actions, and a long, untidy history of disagreement over what's legitimate and what's ethical.
Individuals can opt out of, or oppose, any human-legitimized activity that is distasteful or seems wrong to them.
And in anitiquity, when farm animals were created, it was both ethical and moral (by the standard of the day).
The ethical question was posed last week, not in antiquity. It was posed, and the answer has to be considered, in the context of modern practice. It isn't especially complicated.
As to the other four actions you mention, only “abusing” is unethical, and it is not required to raise farm animals.
Yet we know it's common practice in the industry that supplies our food. It is with that knowledge we decide whether to buy a slab of cellophane-encased refrigerated muscle.
I didn’t and I am unaware of anyone else who uses the rationale of “sparing” the wild ancestors of current farm animals to “justify” modern meat consumption. Perhaps you do.
I may have paraphrased too freely for dramatic effect.
Part of the problem with using broad stroke moral arguments against the legitimate use of farm animals lies in the underappreciation of the natural way the world works. Namely that most wild animals will die gruesome (to modern human eyes) deaths and typically will be eaten, often while still alive in the wild. Yet this isn't "gruesome" (a human word), its routine.