Animal Slavery

[John V]

Actually, you haven't gotten to justifications yet. You need to show first that animal suffering and animals generally have moral significance. If they don't, no justification is necessary.

OK. Humans are animals, and God needs no justification for his treatment of us.

That's where the evolutionary argument comes from, from arguments with vegetarians and animal rights advocates who mount an argument from ignorance that a moral division between how we treat animals and how we treat humans cannot be made. My argument shows that it can be made, so the advocate is put in the position of bearing the burden of proving that the lives of animals has moral significance.

Your argument doesn't hold up, as it's based on the unsupported idea that biological evolution occurs solely or primarily at the species level. You've no doubt heard of The Selfish Gene. Science debates whether the unit of selection for biological evolution is the gene, the cell, the individual, groups of individuals within a species, or species. From what I've read, the gene and the individual are considered to be much more significant than the species. So, no, you haven't shown that your argument can be made.