Childhood indoctrination

[Forbinator]

This is the point of morality being subjective and therefore consensual. You call them victims, we call them food. You feel it is horrible. We feel that they, like ourselves, are part of the food chain. You have exhorted us to rise above our base animal nature. We embrace our animal nature.

A lot of it is subjective, yes, but much of our morality is so uniformly applied that it could be considered objective (e.g. murdering humans for pleasure, stealing from humans for pleasure, inflicting pain on humans for pleasure, senseless animal cruelty for no perceived gain). Everyone here would believe that all four of those things are immoral (and yes I realise I open myself up to being accused of populist reasoning, but I know I have to concede any argument to a person who doesn't believe those four things are immoral). So what I can do is appeal to you to apply those moralities to situations involving non-human animals, to the extent that their interests overlap with ours. If we also recognise how completely unnecessary the animal exploitation industries are, it becomes easier to view them as approaching senseless animal cruelty as well, since their gain to humans is minimal or non-existent.

A victim is one who suffers as a direct result of one's actions, this has nothing to do with my feelings. Your animal nature does not provide a logically consistent argument for animal use, any more than it does for a man to rape a woman. (Please note I'm not saying the actions are morally equivalent, but a man could logically say that he is simply embracing his animal nature by committing rape)

Also there are a whole lot of reasons why humans are not naturally adapted to killing and eating animals anyway (lack of sharp teeth and claws for a start). Ability to hold tools doesn't count (since this evolved in primates who are completely herbivorous). There are many reasons why we are in fact biologically herbivorous: http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/natural.html We have used our intelligence to find ways of doing lots of things that don't necessarily improve our survival rate.

Since our sentiments in this matter do not overlap your appeal to our moral nature has failed. It happens. It doesn't mean there won't be many more matters where we would share moral sentiments. Just not this one.

As I've already said I applaud you and yours for eating low on the food chain. (Can I get an amen for the fact that I've not and will not be breeding?) We're both contributing to a related problem.

I certainly agree with this, and human overpopulation definitely seems like an "elephant in the room", especially when people are discussing their plans for when they have babies and how many they will have.