Morality from the ground up

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't think killing either Bessie or the immigrant is okay.  However, if there is a moral issue with killing animals, it's probably more sourced in their being caused to exist at all than in what you do to them after they have been brought into existence.

Maybe, hard to say not knowing why that would be, but obviously not from the system of harm or suffering, as no harm or suffering need be caused there.  Though, again, if there were some shitty moral component to food production..and in practice there usually is something, we'd still be choosing the least egregious among a field of sub-optimals.  That's -generally- not seen as grounds for moral condemnation even when the act in a vacuum might be considered immoral.  

Let me clarify the point of using the racist example.  I think the main reason that animals aren't much considered in the moral metric is that they are other, and lower, and that we reserve our full moral consideration for those capable of entering into a social contract with us.

They -are- considered, and very much.... in the moral metrics, Benny.  People who kick dogs are broken, and we know that they're broken.  Even from the grounds of the social contract..how other people treat animals is a part of that contract with other people.  IE, a society of dog kickers is not a good society, I want to live in a better society than that.

But slavery, jew-killing, etc. follow this same principle, and our social mentality is turned against us: black people are animalistic savages, and so by right of our superiority, we don't treat them as we'd treat each other.  Jews are tricky little buggers who will wave a contract in front of your face while stabbing you in the back, so we don't need to treat them as we'd treat each other.  We view them as humanoid animals, and surprisingly easy adapt to doing them harm without the sense of moral conflict that we probably SHOULD have.

-that's lazy.  Yes, they're dehumanized, but it goes deeper than that..the nazis weren't gassing german shepherds.  They treated them as -less- than animals.  They extended their notions of morality and noty being cruel, for example...to dogs, but not to those jews.  

Killing the caribou bothered me because it was avoidable and served no benefit.  Eating meat doesn't bother me because I don't do it.  I stopped because I had developed a sense of intrinsic beauty and value in animals, and my desire to eat a Big Mac was less important to me than appreciating that value, even indirectly.  I don't want to participate in the killing of an animal that has feelings much like my own.

Hurting someone with or without drugging them bothers me because I've been hurt, didn't like it, and see no rational reason why I'm more important or more worthy of protection than anyone else.  (or, in my case, anything else)  Except mosquitoes-- fuck mosquitoes, they must die.

So harm matters.  What was the point, then, in saying that it didn't?  It was useless diversion and waste of time.  Maybe you -aren't- more worthy of protection than anyone else.  That's certainly not the american ideal - of equalilty under law.  I would protect you, though...and not just for your own benefit.  Just like I think that trophy hunting probably shouldn't be a thing. Unfortunately, we have to make compromises, because protecting some other person might actually ential letting them arrange trophy hunts - hell..protecting an entire species might entail that. It might entail, in the same vein, an acknowledgement that livestock are a necessity. Protecting everyone, and even protecting whatever animals we may be currently protecting..might entail the compromise of protecting -you-....even if you were a positively horrid creature that no one gave a shit about, like a mosquito.

I want to point out here, that in all of the above, you refused to continue the discussion of the rationalization you argued to -be- rational. You refused to consistently apply it, you refused to entertain the logical consequences of it when it determined that killing bessie was -not- immoral even though killing the immigrant was..and not because one was human and one was a cow - and now, you're just trying to start that again, up above.

Benny, there is no necessary anthropocentric bias or human favoring inconsistency in a harm based morality. You can certainly find people who do not apply it consistently, and many of us have such biases (and more) but that doesn't make the system, itself, inconsistent. We could only be discussing moral failure, for whatever reason..at that point, and human beings don;t even -need- a reason to fail to consistently live up to their moral ideals.

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-here's something fun to point out, rather than go full balls to wall crazy with "harm doesn't matter", you could have asked whether or not a society in which livestock production is okay is a society that creates suffering - for the animals.  After all, just because the law says we have to do x, doesn't mean we will, or that everyone does x.