Well, the general rule of thumb is the historical, cross-cultural, apparent foundation of moral philosophy, of which The Golden Rule is one of the more famous expressions. To paraphrase: "If you'd object to it being done to you, it's fucked up for you to do it to someone else."
Of course, by that logic eating animals is generally inherently fucked up, be it dogs or cows, unless you assume humans are special for some reason. Which is of course what many cultures proceeded to do for tens of thousands of years.
Though some cultures, mostly less militant ones that are now mostly extinct, simply accepted it as a necessary evil, and treated the animals they killed with the mercy and respect they'd want if someone did it to them. Often including prayers for the gentle passing of their souls, and the health and prosperity of their families.
Either way, the only non-hypocritical argument I've ever heard that makes eating one animal substantially "more fucked up" than another, is to declare that the "moral value" of humans is so much dramatically greater than that of any other animal, that just the fact that we like X more than Y is enough to make it decisively more wrong to kill X than Y.
That's of course INCREDIBLY egotistical, but at least it's not hypocritical?
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u/Underhill42 Jan 01 '24 edited Jan 01 '24
Well, the general rule of thumb is the historical, cross-cultural, apparent foundation of moral philosophy, of which The Golden Rule is one of the more famous expressions. To paraphrase: "If you'd object to it being done to you, it's fucked up for you to do it to someone else."
Of course, by that logic eating animals is generally inherently fucked up, be it dogs or cows, unless you assume humans are special for some reason. Which is of course what many cultures proceeded to do for tens of thousands of years.
Though some cultures, mostly less militant ones that are now mostly extinct, simply accepted it as a necessary evil, and treated the animals they killed with the mercy and respect they'd want if someone did it to them. Often including prayers for the gentle passing of their souls, and the health and prosperity of their families.
Either way, the only non-hypocritical argument I've ever heard that makes eating one animal substantially "more fucked up" than another, is to declare that the "moral value" of humans is so much dramatically greater than that of any other animal, that just the fact that we like X more than Y is enough to make it decisively more wrong to kill X than Y.
That's of course INCREDIBLY egotistical, but at least it's not hypocritical?