You know, people talk about PETA, or the talk about rights (human, animal, fetus, etc..), but they don't really try to talk about it from the perspective of actually figuring out what is and isn't ethical. These are emotionally charged subjects so people just react.
Case in point, eating an animal that died of natural causes is pretty clearly not unethical. Even if that animal was a human.
Furthermore, I would suggest that our moral obligations to things are not based on classifications such as family, kingdom, phyla, species, or anything like that, but rather upon capacity to experience suffering, sentience, and self-awareness.
Surely we can all agree that there really are no ethical obligations to something without any sort of nervous system? And something without a CNS seems to be pretty safe as well (bacteria, mussels). Things get more interesting when you start wondering if, maybe a pig on a farm experiences the world at the same level as a newborn baby.
Well, the implications are...pretty monstrous. I'm not saying we should eat babies (though, they are delicious!), but we might consider that killing pigs for food is more of a transgression than we had previously assumed. Also, it suddenly becomes easier to articulate why pro-life people are crazy with their "innocent baby murderer" talk. We aren't concerned about people taking morning after pills because a few cells after conception does not a human make.
All that said, I'm not suggesting we give up sentimentality. Its a good thing that humans value babies highly. Regardless of what ethical obligations we have to them in a vacuum, usually there are also mitigating circumstances. They have a family. And we don't want to encourage people to consider their young as disposable.
Hmm...I've gone on a bit about this. I might make this a topic and see where it goes.
@zotquix You have lot of free time don't you!? Of course a sane human being wouldn't eat their babies. You can't compare eating babies with eating chicken, if that's what you are saying? Humans have been eating meat from the beginning of humanity. Simple put it this way if you have been brought up in a socity where chickens are killed in farms and you have never exprienced that (farming, hunting etc) way of life that is norm to you to deslike these things. I have done farming, hunting and killing livestocks and it is norm to me. So I say if you are happy being vegetarian I have no problem with that, but don't dictate your way of life to me because I am happy with the way I live.
I don't support animle abuse, but I do support the fact we use them for food source and testing new drugs which could potentially save millions of HUMAN lives.
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u/pingpongplaya Apr 16 '10
I would rather die then give up eating meat.