Comment on Why is the consumption of Meat considered bad

• NeuralNerd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Swatting a mosquito generally doesn’t induce suffering, if it’s done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won’t suffer from the loss.

  This is like saying it is okay to kill a lonely person with no friends and family, as long as it is an instant death.

  No, it is more like saying it doesn’t cause suffering, which is true. Whether it’s ok or not is another matter, but some could argue can be.

  I don’t agree with you that suffering is the single center concept to base your moral judgement on these issues. Not all living things that i care about are able to suffer, and I do not care about all living things that do suffer.

  I didn’t say suffering is the single center concept to base moral judgment on, although some moral philosophers argue it is (negative utilitarians). But suffering is the main problem with speciesism: we accept much more suffering on non-human animals than we do on on humans, for no good reason.

  If you care about things that cannot suffer, then you do not care for their well being, since they can’t experience well being. It may be a semantic problem here, because I thought caring was about the other’s well being.

  Anyway what you do care about is not really relevant unless you consider we should just follow our instinctive morality. What I was discussing is what we should care about.

  I do not care that i cause a mosquito suffering by killing it (wounding it), if it is sucking my blood, or even just being annoying when flying around me, because I value my comfort above its existence (and suffering). I expect you do the same? This is speciesism.

  No, I would avoid causing suffering to the mosquito (for example by moving it our of the room or protecting myself). And if killing it is the only practical way to make it stop being an unacceptable annoyance I would still try to minimize its suffering. It’s not speciesism because I would apply the same logic if it was a human or any other species.

  That’s like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don’t look like them: racism.

  Except we both agree that racism is wrong. We do not both agree that speciesism is wrong.

  And yet speciesism is very similar to racism. It’s the same mechanism. Racism is a discrimination on irrelevant characteristics like skin color, and speciesism is a discrimination on irrelevant characteristics like cognitive ability, cuteness, ability to talk, etc.

  In both cases these characteristics are irrelevant when we try to decide whether we can cause suffering to these beings. The only relevant characteristic is whether they can suffer.

  source