Thanks for the chance to renew this thread, komireds.
I myself despair of "intelligent" debate regarding morals and ethics, because I think that morals and ethics are ultimately based on emotions rather than intellect, despite all efforts to show the contrary. Hence, all debate on ethics becomes emotional because it has to: there is no real objective reason at the core of ethics, just disgust at "evil" things and delight at "good" things. It is thus no wonder that people flail about wishing for some other more respectable foundation for their ethics, grasping at ideas from nature, or religious scripture, or science, or notions of divine authority, or culture, or whatever. Innate or inculcated human disgust/delight is a much better explanation of the origin of ethical precepts than any of those.
How does the name calling start? Quite naturally and normally: rhazz claimed repeatedly that her vegginess was about avoiding cruelty, period - meaning that she was calling meat-eating and meat-eaters cruel and immoral, both literally and by implication. I noted that her stance on intestinal length, etc., mimicked word-for-word that of a particular religious group that she (not I) called a "fruity cult", making me a name-caller by her proxy. Others may have noted that meat is essential - not optional, ESSENTIAL - for brain development, and that some versions of vegetarianism have been linked to childhood disease, starvation, and death - hence, the dual implications 1) that vegetarians are mentally off, and 2) that their children would be better off elsewhere. The legitimate issues of this debate - cruelty, religious rationalizations, mental development, childhood nutrition, etc, are so incendiary that any mention of them in an open forum, on an emotional issue, MUST lead to name-calling because they ARE name-calling.
Both camps do seem to be obtuse, but that is because they are both wrestling with a horrible conundrum: to justify logically their own emotionally-driven eating behavior. (It's called "being human".) Just as religion is the human attempt to abide with the painful awareness that one day we will die, so is this eat-ligion debate a human attempt to abide with the knowledge that what we must eat causes harm to other living things (plant or animal) that we hold in awe and respect.
In the context of this anguish, the anger and name-calling are not surprising - only the lack of them would be.
The only real question is this: does the veal taste better than the guilt feels? Depends on one's tastes and feelings, I guess.
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