No.

Nonsense.

It depends on what qualitative moral difference there is between cows and dogs. What is it in your eyes?

Cows are evil.

Cows and other livestock have been used for food for eons across pretty much all cultures, dogs on the other hand have been evolutionary engineered to be pets & various other utilitarian uses that they've become quite good at.

Russian should feel stupid for invoking logic because a logical person would come to the conclusion that different commodities have different utilities. A cow has the utility of milk and meat. A dog has the utility of companionship, guarding, protecting, etc. Each respective commodity (for lack of a better word) maximizes it's utility to a human when used as traditionally humans have decided to use them.

You're applying silly essentialist notions to the roles of livestock.

Give it fifty years and we'll have giant muscle, fatty dogs ready for slaughter with the appropriate selective breeding.

Doesn't really answer my question of what what is the moral distinction between the species that permits is to torture/kill one and not the other.

Cuz cows taste better and dogs are cuter isn't morally relevant.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Jan 2 2018 09:48pm

For a supposed scientist you sure make a lot of unscientific faux pas, it would take a lot longer than 50 years to genetically engineer dogs that are optimal to harvest for meat.

Once again that would be illogical because logic demands efficiency, dogs serve a different utility which isn't meat. Utilitarianism is not silly, it's dictated by logic. Things developed to be they way they are because trial and error worked towards efficiency.



Why are you injecting morality and ethics into this? It's the way it is out of utilitarianism. The moral aspect came into play when dogs adapted to be a "humans best friend".

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Jan 2 2018 09:54pm

It depends what you mean by "optimal". Virtually all breeds of dogs you know today were bread into existence from 1900 to 1970. It wouldn't take longer than 50 years to create a dog suited for slaughter and consumption.

I don't see it was specified before that we were working within a utilitarian perspective, but if you are taking a utilitarian perspective then ALL meat consumption in industrialized countries is immoral.

...what? You're making statements that make no sense, you either don't understand what some of these words mean or you're really bad at common sense.

Utilitarianism doesn't have much to do with morality. We as humans have evolved and adapted to be able to consume animal protein, therefore a utilitarian would say that if eating cow provides high utility to humans then we should eat cow.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Jan 2 2018 10:06pm