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chimera comments on Richard Dawkins on vivisection: "But can they suffer?" - Less Wrong
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My reason for being* a vegetarian is that I claim it's not fair to raise animals with a low quality of live and slaughter them - I'm sure you know about this argument so I'm curious as to any way to discharge it?
(* I'm not yet a vegetarian but I beleive I should be and will be soon)
Fairness as a concept only applies to beings of equal moral status, its not fair that rocks are treated differently from humans, but thats irrelevant as they don't possess qualities that make humans morally significant. The question is what these qualities are and whether animals share them.
What experiment could we run that would give us evidence for whether two beings have equal moral status or not?
I approximately go by Bentham's criterion for what makes humans morally significant: we can suffer, as can animals. Rocks cannot. There is no reason to believe one configuration of a rock is "better" for it than another, as it has no kind of mind. I see no reason to believe a plant has any kind of mind either.
A pig, however, does prefer some states of reality over others, to quite a great degree. I think it's reasonable to say that the conditions we raise most pigs in mean their lives are a net negative: they'd be better off experiencing nothing than experiencing the lives and deaths we create for them.
I suggest you've tied together two questions. You're working backwards from "I'm going to keep eating meat", and have wound up at a conclusion that animals must not be morally considerable, because of that. Instead, separate the issue into two questions:
1) Are animals morally considerable? Is there anything I can do to an animal that is unethical? Is it okay to kick a dog, if I gain some momentary amusement at listening to it yelp?
2) How should the trade-off between my benefit and moral consideration to others work, exactly?
I must be misusing the word fair, I'm not familiar with the usage you're hinting at.
I'm not trying to anthropomorphise but it's a reasonable extrapolation that they experience their own lives (certainly we have no real understanding of consciousness to apply to measure and prove or disprove this yet, but we cannot wait for it). With that assumption the life of (for example) a cow as livestock can be seen as a significantly worse experience for the animal than their natural/wild lives would have been, although still not optimal since they are subject to predators and other bad things. To not accept this as unkind or "unfair" treatment seems to be based on the assumption that they are really unconscious automatons that regulate some meat hanging off them - essentially a algorithmic restatement of the "they don't have souls" view from the past.