are vegetarians more ethical by not eating meat?

[littleendian]

I just want to state quite flatly: Similarity =/= proximity. You know what else has a central nervous system? Insects. I wonder if you are so careful when it comes to termites or ants or spiders as you are when it comes to respecting their desire to live.

I kill a mosquito that is going to sting me, yes, that is called self-defense and is quite justifiable.

Except no brain study of an animal has ever managed to show that they have even a fraction of the emotional range we do, much less the ability to comprehend just what death even means or to consider what life itself is.

Neither do most human beings have a good understanding about what death means or what life is, but that doesn't allow us to exclude them from moral considerations. Neither has any brain study ever shown that another human being has quite the emotional range that you yourself as the subject of those experiences have, all you see is some neurons firing. It is all based on reason and inferance. That doesn't lead you to question that other people have very similar experiences and desires as you do.

You keep dismissing plants as having feelings, yet we have evidence that they CAN fucking feel shit.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05...71027.html

I never dismissed that plants have some kind of consciousness and will, that they are very much alive. However it is never immoral to do what I need to do to stay alive, and I have to eat plants in order to stay alive. I don't have to eat animals, and I have much more direct evidence of the suffering and pain of a screaming pig when it is butchered than when I pick an apple from a tree. Which, by the way, is not killing the tree, matter of fact it is what the tree has produced the apple for in the first place, reproduction. I'm actually giving the tree its equivalent of sexual pleasure for all I know.

Just shut up and quit bitching and eat a damn steak.

I'll consider the screaming all capitals and the insulting tone as a confirmation that you, too, deep down inside can feel that there is actually something very wrong here. Why else would you, and not only you, get so emotional despite your proclaimed trust in reason.

Also, it is unworthy of someone who quotes Hitchens in his signature to tell someone who he disagrees with to "shut up".