At what point can it be said that behavior wholly subsumed in the nature of a species of animal can be wrong, unethical to practice? To even ask the question requires an introspective, intelligent conscience—the qualitative aspect of our being that differentiates us from other animals. Because otherwise, the question we’re asking demands first that we identify and explain how ethics could arise external to our own natural experience, from some super-existent realm sporting an external authority that trumps our own individual authority over our own behavior. In simpler terms: we are ethical beings. Ethics, a sense of right and wrong, is as much a part of what makes us human as the consumption of other animals along the way made us human. It’s all baked into the cake: meat gave us the nutritional density to evolve big brains, big brains gave us the intelligence to introspect, and conscious introspection gave us ethics. Eating meat made us ethical beings. As such, eating the flesh of non-ethical beings can’t logically be unethical.
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