I've been watching this thread for a while, hoping that someone would touch upon the underlying issue of this debate.
The thing one has to consider while deciding if being vegetarian or non-vegetarian is "good" or not, is deciding whether you actually have the right to the life of the organism you are eating.
On one extreme, you can say that you have the right to kill and eat any organism you can kill and eat. Which would mean it is morally justifiable to kill a person to eat him.
On the other extreme, you can say that you have no right over the life of any other living creature and you become an ovo-lacto-fruitarian. That is, you can eat unfertilized eggs, drink milk and eat fruits, since no live creature is being harmed here and much effort is put into raising the hens/cows/plants that provide the food.
The most common argument seen here is derived form "natural law", i.e. since it occurs in nature all the time, it is "good" or acceptable. That argument is not very sound, since humans are not bound to act according to nature's dictates and there are many other things that occur in nature that we consider immoral for humans to do.
As far as I can see, neither extreme is rationally justifiable and since natural law doesn't give a rational answer either, we must look elsewhere. As far as I can see, there are two criteria upon which we can decide whether it is morally justifiable to kill a creature to eat it or not.
1. You cannot claim the right to consume anything and everything you may desire. The only things you do have a right over are the products of your own efforts. That is, you should have an integral role in creating and cultivating the life you are about to consume.
That means, you can grow crops and breed animals and then you have the right to eat them. You do have the option of buying this right from someone else who happens to have done the necessary. This, however, excludes life that is not the result of your effort, i.e. you cannot kill and eat another person, or hunt down a wild animal, or take another man's food.
2. Whenever you are killing a creature for food, you are asserting your right over its life as greater than that creature's right to live. Basically, you are saying "Just because something is alive does not mean that it has a right to live" as well as "I have the right to that creature's life". For this, it is necessary to determine a basis on which we can deny something a right to live.
I think, at the very basic, sentience is a requirement, i.e. if something is not sentient, it has not inherent right to live. As the upper limit, we have "being human", since we don't allow people to eat other people.
However, I don't think that simply being a part of human species somehow magically grants us any rights. Rather, the qualities that are inherent to being a human is the basis for these rights. One such quality would be capacity for rationality. And since we don't let people eat babies or insane, we can add self-awareness, capacity for emotion and thoughts to the list. Then the creatures we have no right to eat would certainly include some of the other higher order mammals such as apes.
So, in order to decide if we have the right to kill and eat a creature, the said creature must not be self-aware, capable of emotion, thought or rationality and we should have put in effort to raise that life.
Also, these criteria only apply to creatures that are alive, so anything already dead is fair game. Which means, if a person happens to die of natural causes, I see no moral objection to eating his dead carcass.
Let me throw this out as a flame-bait. I'm pro-choice (since I don't consider a fetus to have any rights until its born or atleast born-able) and as I've just said I have no objection to any cannibalism done without murder. Therefore, I do not see any moral objection to eating dead fetuses.
The thing one has to consider while deciding if being vegetarian or non-vegetarian is "good" or not, is deciding whether you actually have the right to the life of the organism you are eating.
On one extreme, you can say that you have the right to kill and eat any organism you can kill and eat. Which would mean it is morally justifiable to kill a person to eat him.
On the other extreme, you can say that you have no right over the life of any other living creature and you become an ovo-lacto-fruitarian. That is, you can eat unfertilized eggs, drink milk and eat fruits, since no live creature is being harmed here and much effort is put into raising the hens/cows/plants that provide the food.
The most common argument seen here is derived form "natural law", i.e. since it occurs in nature all the time, it is "good" or acceptable. That argument is not very sound, since humans are not bound to act according to nature's dictates and there are many other things that occur in nature that we consider immoral for humans to do.
As far as I can see, neither extreme is rationally justifiable and since natural law doesn't give a rational answer either, we must look elsewhere. As far as I can see, there are two criteria upon which we can decide whether it is morally justifiable to kill a creature to eat it or not.
1. You cannot claim the right to consume anything and everything you may desire. The only things you do have a right over are the products of your own efforts. That is, you should have an integral role in creating and cultivating the life you are about to consume.
That means, you can grow crops and breed animals and then you have the right to eat them. You do have the option of buying this right from someone else who happens to have done the necessary. This, however, excludes life that is not the result of your effort, i.e. you cannot kill and eat another person, or hunt down a wild animal, or take another man's food.
2. Whenever you are killing a creature for food, you are asserting your right over its life as greater than that creature's right to live. Basically, you are saying "Just because something is alive does not mean that it has a right to live" as well as "I have the right to that creature's life". For this, it is necessary to determine a basis on which we can deny something a right to live.
I think, at the very basic, sentience is a requirement, i.e. if something is not sentient, it has not inherent right to live. As the upper limit, we have "being human", since we don't allow people to eat other people.
However, I don't think that simply being a part of human species somehow magically grants us any rights. Rather, the qualities that are inherent to being a human is the basis for these rights. One such quality would be capacity for rationality. And since we don't let people eat babies or insane, we can add self-awareness, capacity for emotion and thoughts to the list. Then the creatures we have no right to eat would certainly include some of the other higher order mammals such as apes.
So, in order to decide if we have the right to kill and eat a creature, the said creature must not be self-aware, capable of emotion, thought or rationality and we should have put in effort to raise that life.
Also, these criteria only apply to creatures that are alive, so anything already dead is fair game. Which means, if a person happens to die of natural causes, I see no moral objection to eating his dead carcass.
Let me throw this out as a flame-bait. I'm pro-choice (since I don't consider a fetus to have any rights until its born or atleast born-able) and as I've just said I have no objection to any cannibalism done without murder. Therefore, I do not see any moral objection to eating dead fetuses.
