“we are biologically programmed to not care when eating animal flesh”
this isn’t obvious or intuitive to me. It seems like our attitudes toward eating animals are largely culturally conditioned. Regardless, even if it is “innate”, a personal insensitivity to animals is not a moral reason to treat them as interchangeable, expendable, or offsetable.
It seems your justifications for offsets are bit of fanatic consequentialism and a belief that animals do not deserve similar moral status as humans.
Two points in response. First, many vegans were similarly callous towards animals before they became vegan. Cognitive dissonance is incredibly powerful. It’s why many vegans first went vegan for health reasons, then were able to earnestly consider animal moral status, and then stayed vegan for the animals. Second, I think you should be horrified at how some animals are treated as if they were human. Pigs for example are similar enough in biology that they are used for organ transplants and to test painkiller efficacy. There don’t seem to be good reasons to think the experience of pain to a pig is all that different from that of a human infant.
“we are biologically programmed to not care when eating animal flesh” this isn’t obvious or intuitive to me. It seems like our attitudes toward eating animals are largely culturally conditioned. Regardless, even if it is “innate”, a personal insensitivity to animals is not a moral reason to treat them as interchangeable, expendable, or offsetable.
It seems your justifications for offsets are bit of fanatic consequentialism and a belief that animals do not deserve similar moral status as humans.
Two points in response. First, many vegans were similarly callous towards animals before they became vegan. Cognitive dissonance is incredibly powerful. It’s why many vegans first went vegan for health reasons, then were able to earnestly consider animal moral status, and then stayed vegan for the animals. Second, I think you should be horrified at how some animals are treated as if they were human. Pigs for example are similar enough in biology that they are used for organ transplants and to test painkiller efficacy. There don’t seem to be good reasons to think the experience of pain to a pig is all that different from that of a human infant.