Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[James2014]

We thus return to the ethical side of things, and the question of how far we extend our empathy and to what degree we legislate personal morality.

I would argue we should extend empathy to animals on the basis of logical consistency. All ethics start with an assumption that something is of value, as there is always an impenetrable barrier between is and ought. However if one applies ethics without being logically consistent, one must have made an error somewhere.

When we extend empathy to humans, and not animals, most will do so on the basis of our ability to reason, use language have culture etc. But there are also some humans that do not have the ability to do this, and yet we would certainly extend our empathy to them. To be consistent one must either then extend empathy to animals or conversely not have empathy for disabled humans.