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Comment by deepvibrations | Hacker News Reader

That's great for you. However, animals do not have a voice, despite being intelligent and feeling the same emotions as us. I am sure if you saw somebody harming a mentally disabled person who could not communicate, you would try to stop them. In the same way, I don't see any harm in being a voice for the animals.

For all we know, in the future we may look back on modern animal agriculture/ factory farming in the same way as we look back on slavery now.

If I can reduce harm in the world to sentient beings at the cost of something tasting slightly different then I will do my best to go down that path personally.

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I respect your intentions, but the leap you’re making, comparing animal farming to slavery or abuse of disabled people, relies on swapping out real-world complexity for clean moral hypotheticals. Humans have always lived in tension between empathy and necessity. Culture, environment, and biology shape our choices more than abstract equivalence does. If you choose to avoid harm, great. But turning that into a universal moral indictment flattens history, species difference, and the human condition. We’re animals too, and sometimes we forget how messy that is.

Necessity is a flimsy justification. You could argue eating a little bit of meat is necessary for nutrition and survival. I wouldn't agree, especially if you live in a technically advanced nation, but you could argue it. What you can't really argue is that each American could possibly need to eat 200 chickens every year, or that the incredibly cruelty of their environments are warranted.

And if you stop elevating human sentience over everyone else for (??) reasons, it does become pretty black and white. Some people are still in the "recognizing it's an attrocity but still participating" stage, others are in the "actively (poorly) rationalizing the attrocity" stage, and many are in the "not yet realizing it's an attrocity" stage. Really only the people in the last one should get a pass, morally speaking.

You’re not describing moral clarity, you’re describing moral exceptionalism. You draw a clean line and then declare everyone outside it as ignorant, complicit, or cowardly. That’s not ethics, that’s dogma. Most people aren’t “rationalizing atrocities”, they’re living in the real world, where values collide with circumstance, biology, and culture. The “enlightened” always assume their version of truth is the final one, and they always seem to have the luxury to do so. That’s not moral progress, it’s just another flavor of certainty, polished by privilege and detached from the messiness of life. I am not justifying anything beyond refuting the clear lines you draw in your version of enlightenment.

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