Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[James2014]

I think this thread is spinning off into a red-herring fest.

The philosophical issue with eating meat is simple:
-Humans suffer, and don't like it.
-We've therefore decided that causing human suffering is immoral.
-Animals suffer, but are not human.

The question is clear: is it causing suffering which is immoral, or is it only causing suffering in humans which is immoral? And the secondary question: how are we to decide between the two?

So far, people on both sides of the question have ignored the second question: it seems the actual answer (buried as it is under rhetoric and anecdote) is that each person has adopted the life choice that feels right to him. Is it that all moral systems are really a kind of democratic reconciliation of our instincts or learned feelings about things, rather than logic?

Maybe morality itself is wrong then, because I can think of no cases where this isn't the case.

Fundamentally all we can really know is that "I" suffer. We only make a generalisation to "all humans" or "all conscious beings" based on their similarity to ourselves. When meat eaters limit ethical concern to the suffering of humans they make an error of natural kind, in that rather than identifying the specific characteristics that would make other's suffering similar to ours, they assume that humans have an unidentified essential characteristic in making our suffering fundamentally different to animals.