Meat also tastes really good, sometimes. Which is why I am feeling so conflicted.
This myth that mammal and avian lives are somehow worth more than vegitable and fungal lives is exactly that: a touchy-feely myth perpetuated by people who view life in a heirarchy based on how much a life form looks like a human.
Is it a myth? That's not a rhetorical question. My knee jerks towards the idea that, the more complex, the more (morally) valuable a life-form is.
As I've said a couple of times now (in response to others), I think morality is a strictly theoretical construct. I do think there is more (moral) value in a cow than there is in a fungus - or maybe I just feel that there is.
No, I think it. In a universe in which life eats life, complexity is the only scale that even approaches being an objective measure of a living thing's "worth".
A mouse's suffering is more morally significant than a fungi's because it has a nervous system and at least a rudimentary consciousness. So far as we know, fungi don't have either. The mouse feels pain, and maybe more complex emotions and we have little or no reason to believe the same is true of the vegetable kingdom.
"Life" is not sacred, it's a way of describing discrete objects we share DNA with. Everything we eat was alive. Some lives are not better than others simply because they have eyes.
Arguably though, some lives are better than others, because they have brains.
Two Reasons, Not Just One
This myth that mammal and avian lives are somehow worth more than vegitable and fungal lives is exactly that: a touchy-feely myth perpetuated by people who view life in a heirarchy based on how much a life form looks like a human.
Is it a myth? That's not a rhetorical question. My knee jerks towards the idea that, the more complex, the more (morally) valuable a life-form is.
As I've said a couple of times now (in response to others), I think morality is a strictly theoretical construct. I do think there is more (moral) value in a cow than there is in a fungus - or maybe I just feel that there is.
No, I think it. In a universe in which life eats life, complexity is the only scale that even approaches being an objective measure of a living thing's "worth".
A mouse's suffering is more morally significant than a fungi's because it has a nervous system and at least a rudimentary consciousness. So far as we know, fungi don't have either. The mouse feels pain, and maybe more complex emotions and we have little or no reason to believe the same is true of the vegetable kingdom.
"Life" is not sacred, it's a way of describing discrete objects we share DNA with. Everything we eat was alive. Some lives are not better than others simply because they have eyes.
Arguably though, some lives are better than others, because they have brains.