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mwengler comments on The Ethical Status of Non-human Animals - Less Wrong
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If ethics is simply the logical deductions from a set of axioms that you think you feel (or you feel you think, I find this confusing), then is ethics really any different from aesthetics? Could we have a similar post and discussion about the optimal policy of the metropolitan museum of art in admitting and excluding various works of art? On whether it is better to paint a room green or blue?
I'm as happy as the next person to feel righteous anger at someone who "wrongs" me in certain ways, and to kill the person and feel good about it. But my opinon that my actions and desires are the result of natural selection keeps me from thinking they have some status higher than aesthetics does.
It's not really any different, no. I suppose the aesthetic analogue would be trying to generalise from my own preferences to what I thought other people would like. There would be a difference between my own tastes, and how I was defining "good". Mapping back to ethics, there's a distinction between my own preferences (i.e. the predictors of my actual actions), and my sense of how the best world might be defined if I gave myself no more stake in deciding things than anyone else.
There's no objective reason for caring about the latter more than the former. I just do, and other people seem to care a lot too.