this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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If I don't murder people, people will still get murdered. Therefore it doesn't make a difference if I choose not to murder people?
No. First of all the tenses are wrong, then the equivalence is wrong.
If people stopped getting murdered, they'd still be killed by illness, parasites, old age, accidents. Basically the loss of life will not stop simply because humans stop taking that life. Are you going to start telling lions not to kill gazelle? Or parasites, viruses, and bacteria not to infest hosts?
Why is it OK for other animals to prey on other living beings, but not humans? You think humans are cruel? Read about what happens in the animal world. Hyenas eating buffalo alive, snakes eating their prey whole (while alive), parasites of course needing live hosts: one eats a fishes tongue and takes its place, another eats a whale's eyes, yet another takes over the motor functions of ants and forces it clamp down on a plant where the ant dies of hungers and the fungus grows from the corps, the parasitic wasp that lays its eggs within tarantulas and the worms eat the tarantula alive, and so many more gruesome ways to die in the animal kingdom.
So it's okay for me to murder, because those people would die anyway? If not, then there's no point in bringing it up.
Just like there's no point in saying that, unless it's intended as some kind of justification.
In other words, why should we hold humans to a higher moral standard than lions? Are you really asking that?
If so, I can give you an answer but it seems like a ridiculous thing to ask and I'm just about positive you don't actually believe that if the standard is good enough for lions and sharks it's good enough for humans.
Think about it for 30 seconds and I bet you can come up with two really good reasons why there should be a different standard. If you give up, I can tell you the answer but it's really obvious. I'm confident you can come up with them if you try.
This is also reframing the problem in a weird way. Living isn't the same as having interests, preferences, emotions, being able to suffer, etc. The majority of people who are against (unnecessarily) eating animal products don't take that position just because animals are living, but because they're sentient.