[JCharante]

Have you seen the movie "The Island"? A organ supplier fakes a post apocalypse for the humans living in the bunkers. They still live a nice life and when they need organs they hold a lottery to see who gets to go to the surface where they've built a resort on an island as they supposedly repopulate.

These humans live fairly happy lives and were bred (cloned) to be harvested for the organs. Would you oppose the real world implementation of this system? The people could even not find out what happens to them, they could be gassed during the transit.

It really stems down to whether you think it's okay to kill living beings. I don't care too much for life forms smaller than 1cm and that's one of my biases, but I don't think it's okay to kill living beings larger than 1cm.

You could say that we are humans and those are non-human animals, therefore it's okay. I'm not a fan of this line of thinking because that is how caste systems work in societies that exploit different groups of people. They're of a lower caste so it's okay to treat them like dirt. They're of a different skin color so it's okay to treat them bad. It's okay to kill them.

If we discovered aliens, what would have to be different about them to make it not okay to raise them to be killed for our tastebud enjoyment? The ability to do calculus? Plenty of people can't do calculus. The ability to speak? We're still trying to learn how certain whales communicate or how crows seem to have a memory for previous bad actors /abusers in studies. We don't eat handicapped people nor people with severe mental problems. If it's not okay to farm humans, what about our predecessors? We have a common ancestor with other life forms on earth, so where do we draw the line? Bipedalism?

[KSteffensen]

I would not be ok with such a dystopia.

However I don't think there's a clear line to be drawn. Why do most people object to eating dog or cat while they have no problem with pork? Pigs are about as intelligent as dogs (and can also learn to recognize individual humans).

Extrapolating that line of thought there is also no fundamental difference between eating plants and animals, but most people argue that it's morally wrong to kill animals for meat but ok to eat plants.

[boston_clone]

> Why do most people object to eating dog or cat while they have no problem with pork?

Cognitive dissonance, plain and simple. This was explained in the Wikipedia article I linked above.

[saghm]

> You could say that we are humans and those are non-human animals, therefore it's okay. I'm not a fan of this line of thinking because that is how caste systems work in societies that exploit different groups of people. They're of a lower caste so it's okay to treat them like dirt. They're of a different skin color so it's okay to treat them bad. It's okay to kill them.

I don't find this a super compelling reason not to eat meat because humans being a separate class than other animals is essentially a precondition to arguing that eating meat is immoral since plenty of other animals also eat meat. Applying a higher moral standard to humans compared to other animals is only reasonable if there is some sort of intrinsic intellectual capacity that we have but they lack. Once you open that door, there are still arguments to be made that eating meat is immoral, but the issue is much less clear cut, and I don't think it requires cognitive dissonance to come down on the other side.