Veganism

[Disagreeable]

I never said that your not abiding by common usage alone necessarily entailed that you are equivocating.  This is a logic fail.

Are you saying that when you said that if I am 'not abiding by common usage' then I am 'equivocating' you didn't in fact mean that my not abiding by common usage was alone enough to mean that I am necessarily equivocating?

If so, then I don't see why you even bother pointing it out, if it's not a sufficient reason to believe I'm equivocating, why bother mentioning it but not give any further reasons that do in fact, supposedly, explain it?

 If not abiding by common usage in combination with other things entails that you are equivocating, then not abiding by common usage not necessarily entailing the conclusion on its own does not argue that the conclusion itself is false.  This is a case of ignoratio elenchi.

This is all a red herring because it doesn't apply since I didn't equivocate. To equivocate I'd have to conflate definitions, which I haven't done.

My initial point was that you seem to be assuming that something other than the property of being human was the case regarding the moral significance.

I never said anything that suggested that I was assuming that. In fact, on the contrary, as soon as you wrongly suggested that I was assuming that I immediately responded by saying that the property of being human actually could be what was morally significant.

 If that is the sole criterion, and assuming that being human is a legitimate category as implied by usage, then things will fall into one of two categories: things that are human and things that aren't human.  If the property of being human is the criteria for determining the moral significance, then the fact that something is close to being human does not matter as there is nothing that being close grants you as far as the ethics are concerned.

Yes, but the question, then, is whether or not it is actually the case that we ought to revise our standard of what is morally significant.

Obviously if having the property of being human is what's morally significant then if something doesn't have the property of being human then that is not an objection. But the point is that if we start by saying that having the property of being human is what makes it not okay to eat a creature, but then we discover that there are creatures that it's not okay to eat that don't have the property of being human, then this entails that it's not actually the case that having the property of being human is the sole criterion of what makes it not okay to eat a creature.

 So you can parade an infinite class of close "human-like" beings and their deaths will not acquire moral significance from partially fulfilling the requisites for being human as being human is essentially all or nothing, as is any ethics predicated on that property alone.  Liebniz's law doesn't decalare things that possess some, most, or many, but not all properties the same as being the same thing.  I recognize that you seem inclined to want to argue that human-like creatures be treated the same, but in order to reach that conclusion, you have to either give up the coherence of the category human, or the supposition that being human alone is the relevant moral property.

Yes, that's the whole point, if there are creatures that don't have the property of being human but are morally impermissible to kill and eat then it's not the case that having the property of being human is the sole criterion determining which creatures are morally impermissible to kill and eat.

 

As long as the latter holds, possessing or not possessing other properties aside from being human are irrelevant.  This follows from Liebniz' law and those two assumptions.

Obviously if having the property of being human is what's morally significant then having the property of being human is what's morally significant. Yes, Leibniz's law always applies, obviously. The question is whether having the property of being human actually is what's morally significant or not. The problem is that if there are creatures that do not in fact have the property of being human but it's still morally impermissible to kill and eat them then, obviously, it's not in fact the case that having the property of being human is the sole criterion with regards to whether it's impermissible to kill and eat a creature or not.

 

If you want a different conclusion, you'll need to debate one of the two hypothesized assumptions,

Which is exactly what I've been trying to do but it's been completely going over your head.

not make emotive arguments about how things should be treated or counted as they have no potential logical force to entail a different conclusion about eating non-human animals.

We can have normative or 'emotive' reasons for how we define 'human'. And whether or not X is a human depends upon what the word 'human' refers to, and what the word 'human' refers to depends upon how we define the word 'human'.

You wrote that if having property B-H is what makes some killing immoral, then it is entailed that killing something almost having the property is also immoral.

What I'm saying is that if having the property of B-H is the sole reason for what makes killing a creature that has the property B-H immoral, then it can't be the case that it's immoral to kill something without the property B-H.

This obviously follows.

If X is the sole reason for Y then not-X can't be a reason for Y. This is very basic logic. If the entirety of something explains something, then something that is not that thing that entirely explains it cannot explain it.

If you think that follows, you're going to have to do more than simply asserting it.

What follows is that if X is the sole reason for Y then something else other than X cannot be a reason for Y. Do you know what 'sole reason' means?