(May 21, 2013 at 9:40 am)littleendian Wrote: The term "food" is ambiguous here. There is "food" for someone who is starving and there is "food" for a well-fed person sitting in a BBQ joint stuffing his face with beef because he enjoys the taste. You may kill someone who is about to kill you, but you may not kill someone for the joy of killing.To clarify, you feel that there is a justification for killing an animal for food, if it's absolutely necessary to sustain a human life?
littleendian Wrote:However, we can apply human morals to human actions, and as so far as these actions affect the life and well-being of another non-human animal I would argue that, yes, we certainly do have a moral responsibility towards these creatures and in that sense yes, we must extend our "moral plane" to include them.Does this cover other areas? Such as using animals for scientific research and testing?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
