@MAB
How big is this something special? How long? How meaty? Such deep, deep questions. To philsophers I leave the puzzle and depart for my transvestite lover.
Don't get excited, sweet cheeks. I have no intention of showing you my hairless half-incher this time.
Pertaining to the polemic:
I like the way you've slipped the word "organism" into where I said animal flesh and then proceeded to round it off by saying that I eat organisms too.
You said 'dead flesh,' but as far as I can see, whether it's a dead plant or a dead animal, it's irrelevant. Dead stuff doesn't feel pain when you eat it, so what's the moral difference? What makes eating one dead organism repulsive and eating another perfectly acceptable?
The objection is to needless suffering
Okay, so where does suffering come into eating 'dead animal flesh,' as you say? What needless suffering is caused by doing so? On what grounds, if not the aforementioned, is it objectionable?
And suffering can only be experienced by sentient creatures with a central nervous system. Plants are not sentient.
Seems to me that you're saying there's something wrong with raising and kill animals for food, not necessarily eating them. For instance, if animals could be given and good life and a painless death, and then eaten, then there should be nothing wrong with eating them then, yes? But still, there is a distinction between merely eating something and raising and killing it in a painful way, and it seems clear to me that the objection is only really to the latter, and not to the former.
And what is natural is not the arbiter of what is moral.
Did I say anything to the effect that it was? You were the one who spoke of 'normality' is if it were the arbitrator of morality:
what I would like to know is why a sane person would think it is normal to eat dead flesh.
The implication obviously being that is morally dubious (abnormal) somehow to eat dead flesh. You clearly can't mean 'normal' in the purely descriptive sense, because it obviously is normal, in that sense.
But the lion is biologically constructed to feed on flesh. It cannot survive without predation.
Yes, we don't have to live on dead animals, and it may give us good reason to stop, especially as it's arguably unsustainable to develop and expand vast stretches of pastoral land.
And animals are not moral agents.
I think that's highly debatable. Even the lowly canids display signs of moral behaviour, whether it be protectiveness of other individuals, dog or human, or punishment of wrong action by other members of the pack, etc.
Morality demands that we do not unnecessarily visit harm on sentient creatures on grounds of physical difference.
Utilitarian morality, at least.
The question is not do they look different, but can they suffer. And to that extent we owe them moral consideration. If you can find a logical misstep in my argument I welcome it.
I see that you are a devote of the Singerian school of Utilitarian ethics. A formidable position indeed, but not one that I believe is entirely waterproof, for the following reasons:
If the prevention of suffering is the central premise, then it should be entirely morally permissible to keep animals, raise them, and then kill them for food as long as their lives and deaths involve no or minimal suffering.
If animals are raised in captivity, they need not fear predation, they have medical treatment, and they need not suffer the pain of dying of a protracted illness. If animals are raised in good conditions and treated well, and therefore experience minimal suffering, then I see little grounds on which an objection may be made to their being reared and eaten, in such a scenario.
Topic: Being Vegetarian (continued from shout box)