[sgk284]

As a vegetarian you do the same thing. You kill living things to eat them, you simply choose to kill living things that don't have a nervous system. That is, you kill living things that you perceive are unable to appreciate that they are alive. Although plants do transmit electro-chemical signals across their regions, which could be argued as a rudimentary nervous system. They also get damaged and heal, they get sick, grow, reproduce, and respond to interactions with the environment.

We're not talking about whether or not killing is wrong, but rather where on the gradient of developed nervous system-like behavior is it ethically okay to kill something. Many people have chosen a higher point on the gradient than you have, but that by no means implies that it's okay to kill anything along the full spectrum. You've simply chosen a lower cut off point than others.

[adventured]

Either direction is entirely arbitrary. There is no objective basis to claim it's morally better to kill plants instead of animals. These moving lines are being made-up as people go along, and it's almost strictly an issue that exists in the very wealthy first world (ie it's invented by people with nothing better to do, who believe they're superior to the rest of the planet). The best that can be said is: vegans have arbitrarily created a personal moral line, wherein they are ok with killing plants but not animals. Anything else is just subjective argumentation.

And the obvious reason why vegans and others do what they can mentally to avoid facing the plant vs animal hypocrisy, is because if you take that to its logical conclusion, you end up with nutjobs that claim it's as evil to kill an ant as a human baby.

[boulos]

He might be a Level 5 Vegan though...