Is meat-eating morally wrong?

[Immortal]

Jay520 said:

Ultimately, it's subjective there's no objective line that everyone will agree on. People are going to have their own opinions on how intelligent/conscious a creature must be in order to be valuable. Some people say that only mammals are smart enough to be valuable. Some people say only humans are truly valuable. While others say every creature with any sense of consciousness (certain insects and rodents) is too valuable to be used as food. As for me, I'm not sure what to think. I think I'm learning toward holding certain intelligent mammals as being too valuable for mere food. 

Plants have no brain/CNS and thus have no consciousness whatsoever, so I really give them no value other than for food, oxygen, etc. 

Also, I wouldn't have a problem with killing meat if they were are only choice for a quality life. However, we have plants as a perfectly effective alternative. So even if animals have much lower consciousness than humans, we could still choose to only eat plants with no consciousness at all. 

Using consciousness as a measure doesn't seem acceptable to me, though. I mean, are humans in a coma immediately renderred worthless? One of the most important general rules of morality in practically all cultures is that human lives are (immensely) valuable. Of course, many will still disagree, but this is probably as close to an objective moral as we're going to get. Therefore, I'd say that any moral theory should have to be able to meet the requirement of never contradicting this statement in order to be acceptable.

Anyway, I think I have a decent enough idea of your view on this subject now. We needn't continue this debate since it's only going to circle back to the same points now as far as I can tell.

Always fun having ethical and philosophical arguments with you, :D.