(February 1, 2024 at 2:42 pm)Ravenshire Wrote:(February 1, 2024 at 1:54 pm)FlatAssembler Wrote: It's difficult to explain why murder is wrong without implying that eating meat is wrong. The most obvious answer is that, like Descartes claimed, non-human animals cannot feel pain. But modern science has made it clear that for birds and mammals (aside from perhaps those with very devolved nervous systems such as naked mole rats) that's not the case. And I think we can all agree that even in Descartes'es time, there was no good reason to think that.
Murder applies only to sapient creatures. When you can demonstrate sapience among farm animals, I'll reconsider my stance on eating meat.
I don't think that "sapience" is a meaningful concept. It does make sense intuitively, but consider the Moravec's Paradox. Human brains are powerful computers, but they are also very specialized to solve only certain kinds of tasks (that came useful during the evolution). That's why what seems simple to us has little correlation with what is actually simple to a computer. And the same is probably true to the brains of other animals, not just computers. We simply know too little about animal psychology to make such judgements.