Childhood indoctrination

[little_monkey]

I'm still waiting Forbinator to define what he means by ethical. I guess not only The Germans are coming is at fault here.

I thought I'd already made my position pretty clear from previous posts. But I'll try to summarise: Ethical is a subjective quality, but there are some aspects of ethics that (practically speaking) are objective and accepted axiomatically.

You can't be wishy-washy. It's either subjective or objective. Most atheists will opt for subjective. The vast majority of theists will say that God commands, and those are objective.

I listed four things earlier:

1. Murdering humans for pleasure
2. Stealing from humans for pleasure
3. Harming or physically violating humans for pleasure
4. Senseless animal cruelty

Those are your choices, and you can't impose those choices on everyone. But you can be an activist and try to convince a concensus of people to agree with those choices. And perhaps change people's attitude.

If you think any of those four things are not ethically wrong, then I probably have to concede any moral argument with you, as there would be no ethical reference point to base any argument on, and ethics is a relativistic topic.

See above answer.

If we combine the above four "ethical wrongs" with some facts, we can logically determine that our exploitation of animals cannot be justified:

5. The animals that we exploit have a survival instinct, and therefore an interest in living, as evident from their "fight or flight" responses, production of catecholamines and corticosteroids in response to stress (particularly when predators are visible), and ability to feel pain and suffering as evident from their central nervous system and pain receptors. Since the nervous system of birds, fish and mammals is effectively the same as ours, the burden of proof is with you to show that it has a different function from ours given that the anatomy is virtually the same. It's a bit like trying to claim that an animal uses his/her ears for something besides hearing; the burden of proof would be with you, and in the meantime we assume their ears are used to hear.

6. Animal farming necessarily involves cruelty, although it wouldn't be considered "senseless" as it serves the purpose of producing food and clothing. But the cruelty is still unnecessary, since we can use plant-based resources for the same outcome, and with much less land use (which, among other arguments, offsets the environmental arguments against veganism).

Given what was stated in (5), we must apply (1), and by extension, (3), to other species including birds, fish and mammals, and almost certainly to crustaceans as they have pain receptors but as part of a different nervous system. The key is that while other species are different from us, they are the same as us in the ways that pertain to wanting to live.

Given what was stated in (6), and if we accept that the distinction between "senseless" and "unnecessary" cruelty is negligible, and irrelevant to the outcome for the victim, we must apply (4) to all cases of cruelty, including those which inevitably occur as part of the farming and slaughter process. http://www.earthlings.com shows the different types of cruelty that occur, and explains why they are not "one-off" events, but are intrinsic to production.

Those are good reasons to not treat animals with unnecessary cruelty. But we are what we are from millions of years of evolution, which made us omnivores. So I believe your activism is bound to fail.