Veganism

[Thumpalumpacus]

To take this aaaall the way back to the start.  It's not just fashionable to believe that there are differences between animals that could lead to different conclusions about how we must treat them each .  Nor is it merely fashionable to believe that there are differences between people that could lead to different conclusions about how we must treat them as individuals or a group.  Cats and children don't vote.  Children have more rights than cats, cats have more permissible autonomy than children.  If you ate a cat you just put something disgusting in your mouth - we've all done it.  Don't eat kids.

-I personally think that we extend our moral protection, often in error, to ourselves and things most like ourselves (really and only seemingly) because that's what we're most familiar with.  That's what we know.  We're more certain that the signifying conditions are present in those situations than others - a partial explanation for the phenomenon of moral weighting.  What I tend to see as moral progress, is the extension of that protection over time, in culture.  We find out these people over here are just like us.  That this or that animal is more like us than we thought - and so, kicking and screaming, we expand the umbrella of duty and taboo as we learn more ways these situations as we describe or experience them are manifested in the world.  We've at least started to think about a sense of global permissibility (and impermissibility) that includes things as conceptual and dissimilar to us in particular as "ecology".  If we got rid of all those concerns we would turn our attention to the slugs and moles and countless other bits of life that die prematurely due to our intentional and unintentional interventions.

In a very real sense, what we think of as progressive morality is to my mind just the wider extension of empathy to species or constructs (i.e. ecologies and so on). Nothing wrong with that to my thinking, but then I'm not an oil baron or battery manufacturer.