Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[bennyboy]

I think this is an example of the fallacy of the beard. Just because it can be difficult to define the boundary does not mean there is no boundary.

The problem is the boundaries overlap. A pig, for example, is a quite aware, social, and emotion-displaying animal. Some elderly people are much less aware, much less social, and feel (so far as anyone can tell) much less emotion, due to the brain impairment of senility.

The overlapping condition, if level-of-sentience or level-of-feeling is an adequate argument, must receive a single treatment: either all members killed without regard, or all members protected equally. If it does not, then we have a case of special pleading: "THOSE organisms are insufficiently aware for us to care whether they suffer. THESE organisms, which are just as unaware, must still be cared about because they are human." Don't believe it's special pleading? Fine-- slit Grammy's neck with a kitchen knife and punch a bolt-gun through her brain; send her ground-up body off to a dog-food factory. Rover won't care-- Grammy tastes like tough chicken, I'm sure.

Now, if qualitative states don't allow the arbitrary killing of humans, then there are only two other things to consider: 1) DNA; 2) a. . . soul? Discounting a soul, then it is not that a FEELING BEING must be saved, but its DNA. In which case every time someone leaks a drop of sperm, a billion murders have occurred. Neither of these seems like a good criterion on which to establish a right to kill or a lack of it.

So it's neither a soul, nor DNA, nor an aware being, which is being protected. It must be something else. It is nothing but the sensitivities of the non-Grammy-killers that is being preserved. And there's no drawing borders between or around world views.