alt Hacker NewsEverything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.
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I agree with you but think you miss that the common concern is with the farming process. The fact to eat another animal usually comes as
- a shortcut : “I don’t eat animals” instead of “I avoid encouraging the farming process by consuming the product of those farms: […]”
- and/or a following philosophic stance, that seems logical (debatable) when someone avoid encouraging the farming process.
Few are the vegans that claims that an animal eating another animal is not natural, or that they cats wouldn’t eat them in the condition you describe (which to be honest, rarely happens).
This seems like a category error. We don't typically assign moral agency to animals the same way we do to humans. No one is saying "one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical." Some people are saying it is unethical for humans, who we typically do believe have moral agency, to eat other animals. Just as no one would say it is unethical for a snake to kill someone with its venom, but we would say it is unethical for a human inject someone with snake venom in order to kill them.
What's wrong with indicting nature? Male animals regularly rape female animals. We shouldn't hold animals morally culpable, as they aren't moral agents, but humans are moral agents. There is no human act in this world for which "this is commonplace in nature" is a moral defense.
I think the problem with this argument is the assumption that nature is inherently good. Nature is cruel and uncaring. Moving beyond it is a good thing imo. We’re just lucky that as a species by the roll of the dice we were given the power by nature to usurp it.