Quote:
Originally Posted by maskedmelonpai
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What should be done about other fleshing-eating creatures?
If animals deserve personhood and killing sentient things for foodis unethical, then aren't all carnivorous things unethical?
i understand they do not have the same brains we do, but neither do psychopaths or paranoid schizophrenics and we don't allow them to wander around killing persons. at the very least, shouldn't we seek to quarantine all flesh-eating creatures to protect the personhoods of prey aminals?
is that a longterm goal? if we don't care, why not? how do a hungry aminal differ in its capacity to behave ethically from a mentally ill person?
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"I believe I have omitted mentioning that , in my first voyage from Boston, being becalmed off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I considered, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanced some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs. Then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I dined upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet."
-Benjamin Franklin