The beauty of this logic is that the wrongness of something falls into what we define by “cruel” which fits better into our actual moral arguments and lets room for changes in opinion without changing all the logic.
For instance for a person to move from not being vegan into being began only would need to consider that eating meat without need is indeed cruel, and then wrong. But the whole structure of trying to avoid cruelty stands.
I find it more “elegant” that a moral solution that tries to give animal rights, because then you would need to move into big changes in logic to move from one position to another.
Enh. I don’t personally see the issue with the rights argument - although I think the environmental damage/inefficiency argument is probably the most effective. Plenty of places have animal cruelty laws, often protecting cats/dogs/pets above farm animals. These are legal rights that these animals have been given. We can then point to research on animal cognition - e.g. that pigs have been shown to be as smart as many dog breeds - to demonstrate the hypocrisy.
Personally, it boils down to this: being violent towards less powerful beings is almost universally considered to be evil. We have quite a lot of laws about this. Extending these rights to non-human beings is just as natural as extending it to your neighbors, and done for the same reason - a society that commits wanton acts of cruelty in one legal arena will be more willing to commit them in others. It is self-defense as much as goodwill towards others.
The beauty of this logic is that the wrongness of something falls into what we define by “cruel” which fits better into our actual moral arguments and lets room for changes in opinion without changing all the logic.
For instance for a person to move from not being vegan into being began only would need to consider that eating meat without need is indeed cruel, and then wrong. But the whole structure of trying to avoid cruelty stands.
I find it more “elegant” that a moral solution that tries to give animal rights, because then you would need to move into big changes in logic to move from one position to another.
Enh. I don’t personally see the issue with the rights argument - although I think the environmental damage/inefficiency argument is probably the most effective. Plenty of places have animal cruelty laws, often protecting cats/dogs/pets above farm animals. These are legal rights that these animals have been given. We can then point to research on animal cognition - e.g. that pigs have been shown to be as smart as many dog breeds - to demonstrate the hypocrisy.
Personally, it boils down to this: being violent towards less powerful beings is almost universally considered to be evil. We have quite a lot of laws about this. Extending these rights to non-human beings is just as natural as extending it to your neighbors, and done for the same reason - a society that commits wanton acts of cruelty in one legal arena will be more willing to commit them in others. It is self-defense as much as goodwill towards others.