Chickens, pigs, bears, and raccoons are omnivores. The very animals we eat (chickens and pigs) do the same to other species lower on the food chain. There's a balance to our ecosystem. Don't get me wrong I think there needs to be great reform in how we consume animal products so that they are treated in a right manner up to their consumption.

The issue is rather that you seem so uncomfortable with entertaining the notion that humans are not special or unique in moral value that you'd rather stoop to petty insults.

Edit: Sure, go ahead and block me rather than have to have a conversation that brings you face to face with the idea that maybe just maybe humans are not that special among animals and maybe just maybe that means you cannot just go around harming other animals. You'd rather insult me and block me and uncharitably assume I think we should harm humans than raise the status of other animals and think that maybe just maybe you should change your own habits. Just shows to go ya how deeply entrenched your ideology is.

I eat meat, but I’m pretty sure that non-meat eaters would point out that animals have a central nervous system and can feel pain. A stalk of corn doesn’t suffer the same way a cow does, for example.

Either they're special and you can't eat a human or eating humans is okay = "false dichotomy." Okay, I can see you're not particularly keen on having a dialogue, you're just being toxic at this point.

That's what we call a false dichotomy.

Isn't that all it boils down to or is eating a human being ok?

Well, does your monologue boil down to anything other than: "I think humans are special for really vague and spurious reasons, so I think their dead bodies are also strangely and inexplicably special." ?

Uh huh..

I don't think you've addressed the issue at all.

Plant "desires", lifeform hierarchies, and murder all are irrelevant to the question at hand of cannibalism.

Hey I'm new to existentialism. Can you please help me understand the concept of "Absurd"?

Please, go on. I've not heard this criticism before.

Lol, I've not done anything but ask questions to discover if it was inherently wrong to eat meat, apparently not. I then asked whether it was inherently wrong to eat a human being, apparently it isn't. The problem is that I agree with the first but not the second.

As a human I can express my will not to be eaten (or have my organs harvested) in the event of my death. Animals don't seem to have the capacity for this particular will. But then again you can see even plants demonstrate a desire to survive/live in the way they reach deeper in search of water and stretch towards the sun. That desire to live doesn't seem to stop anyone from cutting them down in their prime and consuming them. Similarly when I watch videos of microorganisms moving around, hunting and eating under a microscope it becomes obvious that even they have a desire to survive/live but no one seems to mind consuming fermented foods and beverages. It seems to me that a desire to survive/live isn't enough to explain whether something should be eaten or not. Nonetheless I still believe it's okay for me to survive at the expense of other living things and at the same time I don't believe in cannibalism.

I imagine now that the real justification is something like: the more dissimilar from me something appears the more excusable it is for me to destroy for my benefit. As a result you get a hierarchy of value that goes something like humans>animals (mammals on top)>plants>simple organisms>molecules>... In terms of consumption I guess some people think it's okay to organize this as "humans>everything" and some people like to take it to "humans + animals > everything." I'm not so sure I'm content by that hypothesis. I think how far you decide you want to go down that ladder, what a person decides to consume, is entirely arbitrary; it's all wrong or it's all right.

I may think cannibalism is wrong but what if someone asked to be cannibalized? A man can't give their consent to be murdered. There must be something objectively wrong with the act of murdering another human so that it's not even okay if the "victim" requests to be murdered. Cannibalism is wrong, but is it OK if the dead man wills it? So does that make it different than murder somehow? I don't know if it is. I think once you eat a human, willed or not, your consumption changes from "human>everything" to "me>everything." Once you have established yourself as "me>everything" then whether a man wills to be eaten or not becomes irrelevant, just as the desire for survival/life of everything else isn't enough to save them. So, at that point, what makes eating humans different than eating other animals or a plants? It may be that murder and cannibalism aren't so different in this context. It may be as simple as "cannibalism is wrong."

As I said in another reply, if you're hunting for survival then you're engaging in an activity too primordial for the preconditions for ethical behavior to even exist.

If you're killing animals just because the taste and texture of their flesh gives you pleasure, then you're going to have a hard time finding an ethical argument for doing so.

That being said, hunting is significantly better than factory farms.

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Is it more ethical when the animals are hunted, rather than farmed?

The article disregards the suffering of plants. Why should we only concern ourselves with the suffering of animals? Is it because they’re biologically closer to us?

The problem woth hot fusion is that it's not clean energy. Hot fusion required a fusion reaction to Jumpstart the fusion reaction, this is how a hydrogen bomb works. If there's a clean way to do hot fusion then yeah, I'd be on that, but so far as I can tell, thered be no point to hot fusion that fission doesn't already solve

Or hot fusion - hot fusion is quite likely with sufficient further development. If we collapse as a civilization that won't happen of course.

Nuclear needs to be on the table. It needs to be treated with due diligence, of course, but so does everything else. That's not reason to keep it categorically off the table. It is funny because if you asked me this 16 years ago I would have been talking a lot of raving anti-nuke nonsense.

Okay, you've clearly run out of arguments to contribute meaningfully to the conversation. Let me know if you think of something of value to add.

For what it's worth, that argument only really applies if God is transcendent. If God is purely immanent, it makes little sense.

I don't believe in cannibalism.

I think this line of reasoning is still contentious. It might have been correlative rather than causal. It might have been coincidental or accidental. After all, plenty of pea brained animals also eat meat.

Even if it's true, it's still not a very convincing argument for meat consumption being ethical.

Are you going to elaborate?

I'm not so sure.

But it's generally the considered consensus in evolution that our brains became large because our archaic ancestors started eating meat.