are vegetarians more ethical by not eating meat?

[littleendian]

For me, I'll give Bessie an affordable and comfortable life for a couple of years, and then kill Bessie with a boltgun and consume its delicious flesh as a steak.

It all boils down to this: If you do the above then you have no logical, objective way of arguing against someone who does the same thing to a human being, let them live for a few years in relative safety but not free and then kill them quickly to consume their "delicious flesh". There is no objective reason for why the one thing is okay but the other is not. To fall back to the default response of stating that humans are simply more important is a subjective feeling that has no objective basis and ignores the simple biological fact that any animal, human or not, has the same urge to live and be free of suffering. Using this capacity of suffering as a measure of who is eligible to our moral consideration is the only objective basis offered so far. So in order to remove this contradiction from morality, I would argue it is best to extend our sense of who our moral duties apply to.

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So, littleendian, when you make something suffer and die just so you can eat it's "self preservation," but when others do it it's immoral? Gotcha.

Do you see the difference between self-preservation and gusto? That's the difference between eating vegetables and eating meat for anyone who doesn't require meat to survive.

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There comes a point in every discussion, I think, where you have to realize when you've won and when you've lost. I'm not going to be responding any further, I'll let you come to your own conclusions as to why.

Thanks for the discussion, although it would've been even more interesting had it been more objective at times, it's hard work to pick out the worthwile arguments in between all the... strong emotions. But I see why my position is winding up people easily. Maybe this is hard to imagine but I could actually do very well without being the asshole who pisses off everyone at these kinds of heated debates, but I don't think I would do anyone a favor if I backed down from a position arrived upon by reason without a solid argument.