Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[bennyboy]

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.

I've thought about this a lot, and it's been nagging at me. If the anthropocentric argument is based on qualities of humans, like the ability to suffer, or to think, or to feel, then what should happen to humans who do not think, feel or suffer as others do? We don't just kill handicapped people, or highly autistic kids, or even sociopaths (usually). But given a raving Charles Manson on one side, and a cow peacefully chewing its cud on the other, I have to favor Manson as the organism who should be getting the bolt to the head. In terms of brain function and capacity to interact with the world, my senile old Grammy-Grams is no less a candidate for a slit throat and a sledge hammer than your average cow. So what exactly is so special about humans that JUST BY BEING HUMAN, some organisms deserve protections or considerations that other organisms do not?

I can only see two answers:
1) DNA
This is irrelevant, because DNA is not a person-- it can't feel, or think, or bear moral responsibility.

2) A SOUL
And there it is. The idea that something is INTRINSICALLY special about people, and not about other animals (even high-functioning mammals) is a vestige of religious thought. Once that magical God-given "special snowflake species" status is stripped away, there's really nothing left to separate us, in moral terms, from other organisms-- except maybe an overinflated sense of our own worth. In this thread, I've been called a religious nut, precisely because I DO NOT recognize that humans deserve a special status "just because." But in rational terms, that's bass-ackwards.