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Originally Posted by Bossnass
I have to admit that I am a specisist. There is simply not enough evidence to treat other species with more "equality". One of your preemptive arguments relies on intelligence and the ability to reason, based on the statement that infants aren't intelligent. However, intelligence is the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, which human infants have in great amounts. There is no evidence that any of the food staple species are actually intelligent. While animals may be sentient, there is also no evidence of a conscience or any real self awareness.
Further, regarding the mentally retarded. The fact that we, as a society, show a social conscience strong enough to support people with disablities proves that there are real distictions between humans and other species. I am not claiming that humans have never committed acts contrary to our current social conscience, but I am arguing that our food source speicies have never shown the capacity to do so. Having a social conscience is a result of having an individual conscience, which is in turn the result of being intelligent. Thus, this species distinction is not arbitrary. Further, it has been stated that other animals, such as lions, are not capable of morality. It follows that species incapable of morality should be distingished from those that are moral, as illustrated by the penal system. I am not proposing we eat or test on criminals, I am suggesting that the ability to have morals is another real distinction between humans and other species.
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I accept that there are many ways you could come up with the differentiate between humans and other animals. For instance humans are the only animal that have the property of 'being a featherless biped'. My question is how you go from the assertion of
"humans and animals have difference X"
to
"therefore humans have no moral responsibility to humans"
You suggest that we should not experiment on, or eat criminal. My question is: Why not?
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To extrapolate this into another current issue: I support to same sex marriage, I support differnt sex marriage, I support inter-faith marriage, and I support inter-racial marriage. However, I don't support inter-special marriage. Based on the initial 'in-group, out-group' argument, do you propose that we should someday accept inter-special unions?
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Interesting come back.
But the reason I would not support marriage between species is for functional reasons.
Marriage bestows upon two people many legal rights. Applying these legal rights to a "couple" consisting of a human and an animal is meaningless.
Also marriage is (usually) associated with romantic and sexual attachments. There are very good reasons to not support sexual relations between two different species.
If you take "marriage", remove the legal benefits, remove the romantic and sexual associations, you are left with a different type of 'contract'. This is what occurs when a humans brings a pet into his house to live.
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On an unrelated note, I would suffer, as would many others, if society imposed a meat ban. While I don't presume to be able to quantify 'suffering', I would on a personal (and nutritional) level suffer. Millions of people involved in the food industry would lose their livelyhood. All the current 'meat' animals would need to be culled... there is no reason to keep them around other then consumption. The transition to a meatless society would create a great deal of human suffering.
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The suffering on a nutritional level is not necessary. It is possible to live a healthy life without eating meat.
The suffering of "but I like the taste" is much slighter than the amount of suffering an animal must go through to relieve you of this.
As for the cost on society...
It is unlikely that overnight the entire world is going to stop eating meat. If anything is ever going to happen it is almost certainly going to happen slowly over a long period of time. So the food industry should have plenty of time to adapt. Also due to the fact that there would be a much greater demand on
other types of food, plenty of jobs would be created along side those which have been lost.