I think you can put all life on an equal footing (leaving the icky word morality out of it) and say that all things that are alive wish to remain alive when they are not in extreme suffering. Further, we can observe that different levels of consciousness exist in different organisms. Some organisms are very close to us, and others are alien- we do not, for example, understand the intelligence of plants- I have no doubt they have intelligence, in terms of system intelligence, but I don't understand it, and no one else does either.
Now we can also observe that suffering and killing are built into the system on this planet. Plants eat energy, animals eat plants, animals eat each other. It's a brutal system- but that's the basics we start with.
Now if we want to minimize suffering we wouldn't want to inflict pain on the things we eat. We would (I think) if we ate meat want the meat to be raised humanely (most of it isn't) and killed humanely (most of it isn't). Although I think vegetarianism is probably more humane, since in some aspects plant eating is encouraged by the plants themselves (plants have evolved to be eaten and reproduce themselves that way- animals really haven't, no animals that I know of have anything akin to the eat me eat me come on that plants have), I think one could eat animals and still minimize suffering. Of course one would have to care about animals to do it. |
