Slavery and eating animals

[Alex K]

Esquilax, that is a non sequitur. A naturalistic fallacy seems beneath you.
Or I completely misunderstand.
I'm not trying to convince you that meat eating is immoral, the reasoning just seems knee jerky.

When it comes to the morality of my biological necessities, I'm a bit of a pragmatist; I've evolved to eat meat, predation is pretty much a reality, so I don't see any particular reason to abstain from what is, essentially, an unsolvable reality of the world we live in. My personal abstention from eating meat won't change the fact that it's a large component of the global ecosystem, after all.

But I'm not saying it's moral because it's natural, as I don't happen to think that's true; there are plenty of natural things that I would consider immoral. It's just that in my book, morality concerns the well being and biological requirements of thinking agents, and since the eating of meat is a component of who we are as a species, how we've evolved, that is a factor in my moral considerations on the subject.

I appreciate the pragmatic approach you outline, although I suspect that if we were to apply it analogously to other issues, it would lead us down roads you would find unacceptable very quickly - as you say, there are many things in the world, and in our species, which we would never dare use in a similar appeal to nature. The fact that changing the actions of one individual has no significant impact in society or nature at large is also a line of reasoning everyone uses all the time, but which is not exactly material for the morality books. I'd therefore feel more comfortable with arguments for meat eating which actually deal with the animals and the consequences for them.