Morality from the ground up

[The Grand Nudger]

Yes, first world privileges indeed.  But I am part of that first world, and I DO have that privilege.  I'm not the first one to think that with that privilege comes added responsibility to minimize in other ways the harm which I do.

-and it's a privilege which I've already told you I don't take issue with...just not something that can be, on the grounds you've offered, a compulsion.  

My own vegetarianism comes from guilt, by the way: a needless accident cause by wreckless driving on the Trans-canada highway: doing like 140k (90miles/hr I guess) on an icy road with bald summer tires.  I crashed into a Caribou, and when i couldn't find the body I reported to the police immediately.  They told me that beautiful animal dragged itself out to the woods to die, probably after at least a couple days of excruciating pain.  I'm vegetarian because of a disgust with my own wastefulness and arrogance, and lack of consideration of the world, not so much because I'm on a campaign to save cows.

Cow, caribou, squirrel, dog....whatever species it was it wouldn't matter much to me.  You have your own reasons and those reasons are good enough for you..so they;re good enough for me, for you.

So I'm not really a preachy moralist on the issue I think-- although in the context of this thread, I do have to wonder if there's a rational reason for ANY of the lines we draw, or if it's all really just chimps with language, talking about their feelings about things.

I know, and that was the question that I answered.  Yes, there's a rational reason for the lines we draw, and we do draw lines...though, there seems to be -no- line in which we imagine that it's just okay to cause suffering to any creature capable of suffering.  The way you frame these questions is gross oversimplification bordering on straw. The quality of the discussion of of the answers you get is tied to the thoughtfulness involved in the question. No matter where ion the world you go, if you find a person wandering around kicking dogs and whatnot out of sheer malice you're going to find a bunch of people giving them the sideways glance. We all know that something has snapped inside that person. That they are cruel.

---

The anthropocentric bias isn't so much in the belief that people can suffer more.  It's in the decision to accept that as a moral argument for allowing the suffering of non-humans.

We don't allow it, we couldn't stop it if we tried..and we do what we can where we can to reduce it.  

If the relative amount of suffering is a prime moral consideration, then it is.  So yes, it's rational, but only if you take a previous point as axiomatic.

No, it's not rational, it's the runup to a nazi apologists thought droppings.  A society in which that was "moral" - by it's very nature, becomes the cause of immense suffering. The premise necessarily contradicts the conclusion.