| > Ultimately the point is that meat is tasty. If it was only about avoiding suffering/pain and not the dying, would you be okay with farming children for eating? They will live happy lives pampered and cared for, running around in the backyard until you press a button and child drops dead. Takes 1 microsecond to die. It's obviously absurd, but you're making that decision with the animals you eat all the time. A chicken (probably) is less self aware than a cow, but we do eat cows. But how do you decide that another being is un-self-aware enough to be eaten? Which takes me back to the absurd. If human meat was tasty (I read it isn't), would someone with downs syndrome be morally ok to eat? How about someone in a vegetative state? If the sliding scale of self awareness is the deciding factor, we might as well eat less aware humans. |
If a child grows up and does nothing more than put together a single shoddy chicken coop that lets water in and falls over in a mild breeze it has infinitely out-performed the chicken. People with disabilities are still infinitely more capable than chickens, cows, most any animal we eat.
There's also the problem of disease transmission too if you really want to hash out the idea. Most diseases don't transfer between species (at least not in catastrophic ways), if we were eating other humans there would be a lot of new diseases we'd need to fight or die from. See also BSE [1] and CJD [2] as examples of problems that occur through cannibalism.
[1] Bovine spongiform encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
[2] Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_dise... - particularly the "Cannibalism" section of Transmission.