Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see any problem with eating meat, given that I'm an animal and some animals eat other animals' meat. Some animals rape other animals in packs, have territorial wars resulting in killing for nonfood reasons, and torture and/or kill other creatures for sport. Some animals eat their young if possible. Juvenile females are impregnated and give birth as soon as it is biologically possible. Some animals keep slav…
My point is that pigs would eat me if they could, so there is no mercy to reciprocate by refusing to eat them myself. By contrast, not every human would rape or murder me, in fact very few humans would do, depending on circumstance; so there is good reason not to do those things myself. More to the point, there is no good reason to do those things. This is not to justify anything; it is to point out that there is no…
My argument would be that we shouldn’t determine mercy based on what something else would do to us, but on what we can do in pursuit of a worthy goal. Basically what the “right” thing is independent of how we’d be treated in a similar circumstance.
In this case the goal would be reducing suffering of other living things.
If we had to eat meat to live then I’d understand the tradeoff, but we don’t so it seems wrong.
> “ And I, in turn, have seen no justification for not eating meat better than "you shouldn't eat meat".”
The justification I’m trying to make is that reducing suffering of living things is a worthwhile goal and something we can do by not eating meat.
> “ it is to point out that there is no reason not to eat other animals and there are very good reasons to eat them”
I’d argue this isn’t true for the reasons above.