Dessi said:
My perspective as a vegan is fairly simple: that there's no real credible distinction between animal rights and human rights, they're two sides of the same coin. I'm a vegan because I understand animal rights as a natural extension of the principles that everyone accepts regarding the ethical treatment of humans.
I doubt it. Do you reject all advances made through animal testing?
I do in the same sense that you reject the many medical advances gained by
non-consentual human experimentation.
First you must define" cruel" and exactly what you mean by "mentally similar."
I usually think of cruelty as anything which causes suffering, particularly suffering that is easy to avoid. Some cruelty can be relatively trivial, like tying a sock around your cats belly to watch it fall over; sometimes cruelty can be profound, such as pouring lighter fluid on a cat and setting it on fire. Most of the time, cruelty is going to refer to acts that are closer to the "lighting a cat on fire" level of severity than the "tying a sock around a cat's waist" level. I think that's a good starting point.
I like to use the words "mentally similar" because people talk about human abilities, particularly human intelligence and rationality, as if the mental capacities between humans were homogeneous and uniform across the entire population. For example, people often make the remark that its ok to kill animals because animals aren't smart enough to make moral decisions... well, there's a whole class of humans in that category, like infants, children, severely mentally handicapped, who are no more or less capable of making moral decisions than animals, a fact which kinda throws a wrench into the argument against animals if we're not prepared to apply it non-rational humans. I like to use "mentally similar" as kind of an umbrella term for a humans, usually called marginal persons, who lack requisite rationality, intelligence, moral reciprocity, sense of self, or other properties people fall back on when they try to draw moral distinctions between rational humans and animals.
It is pretty hard to make an argument that eating animal flesh is wrong/immoral when nature made us omnivores.
In other words,
appeal to nature. You know, the exact same argument fundies use when they say homosexuality is immoral because its unnatural.
Ok, that was too easy, maybe even glib. Nevermind the fact that the naturalistic fallacy is, well, a fallacy. Let's actually consider the argument for a moment: we not only evolved to compete against other animals, but competing against members of our own species. Sure, I can cooperate with you for my own benefit, or I can enslave you, take your property, and harvest your organs for my own benefits. That's the scary thing about an appeal to nature: we can use it justify eating meat in exactly the same way we can justify slavery, ethnic nationalism, every manner of human cruelty ever inflicted to grant a survival advantage over any other person.
We evolved in a lot of ways, but no one takes evolution seriously as a normative moral theory, and certainly not a human rights moral theory at that.
Eating meat =/= cruelty to animals. Unethical treatment of animals is an entirely different issue.
Correct, eating meat is not necessarily equivalent to animal cruelty. I'm often asked whether I would eat a dead animal found the forest, or roadkill for that matter. I probably wouldn't for sanitation reasons, but the general argument against animal slaughter doesn't really carry over, there's no obvious objection.
The problem here isn't necessarily with eating meat, its that the justifications for doing so aren't very good, they fail a test for logical consistency on even cursory examination, something you've no doubt realized seeing how quickly you're "nature made us omnivores" argument went south.
That's really all I care about, that people understand the principles they hold, and apply their principles consistently. I don't think many people hold very consistent ethics with regard to how they treat animals.
