I've thought about this recently, and the thing here is that to have a serious moral code, you must make sure that the code is at the very least consistent, even if it's not complete.
However, there is moral absolutism. There is an answer to this question, even if it's really complex and even if we may never find it. Opinions are simply opinions and are of no value but to the person who holds such opinion. To come to a consensus, we must think of these types of moral problems rationally. In a way, it's like constructing a mathematical theory.
As another person already pointed out, people feeling bad for hurting the animals but who still think it's ok to raise them and eat them are very confused and don't think about this well enough. I have not been presented with a reasonable and logical explanation of how this can be.
So I'm not concerned with the treatment of animals, since the answer to this problem follows directly from the answer to the following one: I am mainly concerned with whether it's fine to raise, enslave, and then eat and exploit animals. This is a very difficult question with far reaching implications with the answer being yes or no. In my post in the mentally challenged abortion topic, I assumed the answer to be "yes, it's fine to do all this", because that is what I personally believe at the moment while I haven't sorted out the details of the problem yet. If the answer is "yes" to this problem, as well as a few other reasonable assumptions, then I firmly think logic demands that it's fine to abort mentally challenged individuals. An answer of "no" to this problem, however, would invalidate my conclusion, and in fact, the contrary would follow, since it makes sense that the most mentally challenged humans are probably still more capable than the average mammals.
But I have thought about the implications of saying "yes" to the problem. If it is indeed fine to raise and kill the animals, then there must be a reasonable explanation to conclude this to be fine. Either:
1. Animals have no conciousness
2. Specism is fine (i.e. thinking that morals only assign rights to individuals of your own species)
3. Animals do have some form of conciousness, but their level of intelligence is so low compared to us that they can not be thought of as valuable in any intellectual sense (here, intellectual broadly refers to at the level of human activities) .
But I don't think 1 and 2 are the case, not in the way that conciousness should be defined. 2 empathically cannot make sense because that implies it would be morally negligible at worst to mass murder intelligent beings of other species, which I have a problem with (here, intelligent is taken to mean "as intelligent as us in average"). I think 3 makes the most sense.
But if 3 is true, we also have that if there exists an alien species with a much higher intelligence level (a level where the best of us can't keep up with the worst of them), then they can rule over us and eat some of us if that's what they wish. At first, this appears immoral. I believe it's not so though, since the alien species are much, much more intelligent than us (think of the difference between a worm and a human) and therefore their happiness is more important than ours, in average.
This may sound like I'm a very twisted individual, but I also believe that there can be no such alien species. This is a belief though, and I base it on the idea that I can't conceive of an individual with a thought process that is so much more capable than a smart human's that a smart human is considered worthless intellectually.
Anyways, that is all for today, I'm tired and I have to sleep now. In the meantime, I believe the answer is "yes" to this question, but I still have this stinging feeling that my reasoning is being used to rationalize my actions as opposed to the other way around, reasoning dictating my actions.
