Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[bennyboy]

Who gets to decide what organism has the right range of emotions to merit their being spared by my ravenous appetite?

It really doesn't matter about the emotions. If I came across an outer space alien that had a broader range of emotions and was smarter than me it wouldn't bother me at all to eat it if given the opportunity.

Right. So this argument, that animals experience emotions differently (and possibly less) than humans doesn't work. In my opinion, all of the arguments for eating meat fail:
-it's necessary (no it's not, because there are healthy vegans)
-animals can't feel as we do (irrelevant, and probalby false)
-it's okay, because they are not human (special pleading)

It also seems that the vegetarian argument than switching to a vegetarian diet will reduce suffering and loss of life, may also be false, due to industrial farming practices.

I think the reason people eat meat is because they WANT to eat it, and because they can. We are in a position where it's easy for us as a species to arrange for the opportunity to eat meat, and we are programmed to appreciate the high quality protein and large caloric content of it. It's not a moral decision or an immoral one. I'd say for most people it's amoral.

But I think it SHOULD be a moral decision. If humans are better than other animals, on any level, it is that we have the capacity to use reason to overcome our other programming. And given an understanding of suffering, and a reasonably easy means of reducing very much suffering, the moral choice is to take those steps to reduce it.