Eating animal meat purely for pleasure is unethical.

====== Case Con ====== Contention 1: Rights and Preferences "From where do rights flow? Clearly, there is no consensus on this. I agree with my opponent that suffering should be minimized, and I agree to an extent about the idea of preferences. But I disagree that animals can truly have preferences. Very few animals are self-aware (. http://www.wiu.edu......) (. http://www.americanchronicle.com......) (. http://earthtrust.org......); all other animals are incapable of having true preferences. They may have evolutionary directives, but that is a much more superficial concept. Self-awareness is necessary to have true preferences. Therefore by my opponent's ethical standard, it is ethically possible to eat meat purely for pleasure. " I completely agree with you. This doesn't detract from my argument in the slightest. It merely adds to the list of exceptions I have already carved out. There is nothing absolutist about my position and I've never claimed that all animals can hold preferences. The resolution is not "consuming meat for pleasure is always wrong regardless of circumstances". Snails probably aren't self aware therefore I wouldn't be opposed to eating them for pleasure. Chickens, cows and pigs however are self-aware, however primitively, and thus can be included in our moral purview. And even if certain animals weren't self aware, by your standards, they would still be capable of feeling pain insofar as they had evolved a nervous system. Contention 2: The Moral Imperative "Humans have no loyalties to members of other species. In survival of the fittest, we may do whatever we please to further our own goals. " A. )This is a very dangerous slippery slope that my opponent is going down. I'm reasonably confident that I could overpower my antagonist if not physically then certainly with the aid of a gun and take his money. Insofar as this increases my chances of survival then why shouldn't I do this? If my own selfish desires were all that's relevant to questions of ethics what moral boundaries would prevent me from subjugating the weak or using slavery to further my own goals? What's to prevent me from raping women that I find to be attractive? After all, I would be propagating my genes and thus acting naturally. Chimps do this all the time in the wild and even in captivity. [1] On top of all this my opponent also committed the naturalistic fallacy. (. http://en.wikipedia.org...) In other words he posits that if X is natural then X is good. In this view survival of the fittest is a natural principle and therefore it is a moral principle for guiding our decisions about ethics. B. )My opponent apparently views membership in a species as being significant to questions of ethics. At the potential expense of your patience allow me to take you on a thought experiment. Imagine that a mad scientist took your brain and placed it inside the body of a chimpanzee. You would still be the exact same person with the same mind, desires and goals except now you would be trapped into the body of a chimp. Would I be right in locking you in a cage and treating you as my pet merely because you are now a member of a different species? I think not and unless my opponent is willing to defend the view that he should be removed from our moral sphere if he were in the body of a chimp then my contention stands. Contention 3: Eating Meat and Suffering "I can provide several cases in which eating meat for pleasure is not unethical, and in doing so I win this debate. " A. Come on stop playing around. You know full well that I wouldn't be opposed to eating meat if it didn't lead to the death or suffering of a conscious creature. I've already stated that there is nothing prima facie wrong with the consumption of meat if it doesn't lead to animal suffering e. g. (eating road kill), (eating tissue grown in a lab) etc. Insofar as an animal is incapable of suffering then I wouldn't be opposed to eating it. Ergo I wouldn't be opposed to eating ants because I'm fairly confident they can't suffer their own destruction in any meaningful way. Your casuistry does nothing to further the debate. B. The argument you brought up about painlessly euthanizing livestock is quite interesting but it doesn't reflect reality. Its first fault lays in the fact that it is flagrantly unrealistic. This just isn't the way factory farms operate. Its second, and more crucial fault is that it disregards the importance of animal's future abilities to feel happiness. The future potential to experience happiness, insofar as that ability had been previously present, is relevant to questions of ethics. If I were to painlessly murder everyone in a city in their sleep I would be acting in a way that did absolutely nothing to increase my victims suffering. Therefore by your own standards there would be nothing wrong with this action. I'm tempted to say Q. E. D. but I think I overuse it sometimes. This is a reductio ad absurdum argument. Contention 4: Source of Morality "Morality is but a code of conduct that is useful for communal creatures. These communities that we live in consist of humans, so morality relates to humans and humans alone. We do not cooperate with other animals (although sometimes we force them to do our labor), so conventional morality does not apply to them. " Contention number 4 makes the exact same mistake that contention number 2 makes. It views membership in a species as inconsequential to questions of ethics. So, allow my previous arguments to carry over. ====== Case Pro ====== Contention #1 Humans do not need meat to survive. Contention #2 It is wrong to cause a conscious creature to needlessly suffer. Contention #3 Eating animal meat for pleasure is unethical insofar as the animal eaten has the capacity to suffer. Contention #4 Membership in a species is no more relevant to questions of ethics than skin color or gender. Contention #5 We share a responsibility in the suffering and death of animals when we eat meat because we empower factory farms when we buy the meat they produce. Best, Freeman Sources [1] . http://www.thesun.co.uk...