^Ah, I heard about that. It is an interesting case! Just goes to show, you should never draw an uncompromising ethical line anywhere, because chances are it's fucking things up in ways you never imagined! Just better to accept that we are all monsters!
ByrdMan wrote:
Sector 7 wrote:
Why is it OK to eat fish, but not other meat... or chicken, but not beef? This is something I really don't understand. [Remember, I'm not trying to be offensive, but to learn.]
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thestrangequark wrote:
As for other lines, I think some people draw the line at meat but continue to eat fish and poultry for health reasons. Others, because their arbitrary line of morality extends only to land animals. For some, it's about the environment the animal lived in: a fish caught from the ocean was not exploited all its life for food. The truth is, no matter where we draw our personal ethical lines it is pretty much arbitrary in the end. Vegans eat mushrooms even though they are far more closely related to animals than to plants, for example. Morals are a choice, and some people just choose differently along the scale. I think every point on the meat-eater to fish-eater to veggie to vegan scale has good moral arguments for it, and good arguments why the line should be somewhere else, so I figure people should be allowed to settle wherever they feel most comfortable and justify their position as they will. |
Also, it's possible to be a vegetarian for health, economic or environmental reasons rather than moral ones. I've followed a mostly vegetarian diet at times (not currently), with no moral qualms whatsoever about eating one species over another |
Oh yes, I agree completely. As I said earlier, my default position is vegetarian, though I personally do not have an ethical problem eating meat.