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Jay520 on 23 October 2012
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Immortal said:
Jay520 said:


You're right that humanity specifies which animals are okay to harm and which aren't. However, you did not specify any certain animals. You just said harming/killing animals wasn't a problem with you. So if you were driving down the road and accidentally ran over your neighbor's dog then it wouldn't be a problem with you. Perhaps inhumane is the wrong word, but most people wouldn't consider you mentally healthy.


I'm not sure I'm understanding the rest of your argument, but there's a different reason for which running over my neighbour's dog is immoral. For me, it's immoral because the dog was very valuable to my neighbour; not because the dog's life was valuable to me, but because my neighbour's sentiments for his dog should be valuable to me. Mind you, I'm saying this in a hypothetical moral state for me because, since I've been raised in a society that appreciates dogs, I can't help but feel horrible about killing one.

That feels morally incoherent to me, though. I know I'm alright with killing chickens. I wouldn't lose any sleep over accidentally killing a chicken so why should I do differently for killing a dog? Sure, there's certain objective differences between killing a dog and a chicken, but there's no real logic towards being selective here. If I were raised in a Chinese culture (I heard somewhere that they eat dogs), then I wouldn't regret killing a dog. Therefore, if I see killing dogs as wrong, I'm effectively calling all Chinese culture inhumane, which I'm rather unwilling to do.



Fine, it could be stray dog and people would still think you are strange for not feeling bad. I'm not saying whether OT is immoral or not. I'm saying most people wouldn't debate with you about the subject (responding to your original point) because they would acids you of being too weird to reason with. You don't have to explain your logic to me, I'm just answering your question and telling you the arguments that people would use -which is probably none at all.