mic wrote:Sustenance is not the issue at all and you know it. There is a great deal of food to be had without the slaughter of animals.
So what? I don't think there is any moral difference between humanely killing a cow and killing a carrot -- because neither are sapient. (Torture is a different manner, because cows are sentient and carrots aren't.)
By the way, as you ignored in my last post, there is already a theoretically-best diet plan.
It's called Soylent (there are other brands). You are an evil monster for not drinking Soylent three times a day.
mic wrote:As I said before, this is about gratification and the human (particularly western) condition of having whatever one wants (provided that society deems it to be acceptable).
Killing an animal humanely doesn't require a moral justification. But the animal is a resource, and I view killing an animal for no reason the same way I would view someone who bought luxury cars just to smash them up with a hammer and boast about it.
mic wrote:You seem to imply that you (or I) are in a morally superior position to the hunters, but how can this be - because we ate a small part of the animal that we didn't even kill?
Yeah.
mic wrote:Inconsequential!
Not when you view animals as objects that you can own and manage. Which they are.
mic wrote:We eat meat because we like to - purely for the pleasure of it. If hunters similarly take pleasure from shooting dumb animals, who are we to judge?
I just think it's in poor taste, in the same way it's in poor taste to go around telling people you go around buying Aston Martins just to drive them into walls.
I think trophy-hunting for no purpose other than sport is wasteful. I don't take any moral position against killing an animal humanely for any reason, but I do take a minor moral position - i.e. it annoys me a bit - against wasting potentially useful resources. "Useful" might be that someone else could have used bits of that animal for a more pressing concern, but it might also just mean that the animal was part of some ecosystem.
mic wrote:Karl wrote:...I really, genuinely don't care about the death of nonsapient beings I have no connection to - it's about resource management...
Monster!** What about the
abuse of nonsapient beings you have no connection to? Why should you care any more about the pain which they certainly experience than the loss of their lives?
Animals are sentient. It's bad to cause them pain. Animals are not sapient. It doesn't matter if you kill them.
mic wrote:Can you really not see the double standard? Admit it! Confess!!!
I can't see the double standard, no. In my opinion it's a really well-defined, easy-to-follow moral system. I'll say it again -- sentient = torture bad; sapient = killing bad. Why? Because sentience implies you can feel pain, and I don't want anything that can feel pain to feel it unnecessarily. But sapience is the threshold for having a true, introspective understanding of your life and desires and what the effect of death would be on them. That gives your continued life an inherent worth that simply isn't there in nonsapient beings.