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Because it's speciesism. If we started giving birth to humans to eat them, that would be absolutely outrageous, but to do that to animals seems perfectly fine to most people. Animals have the same desire as we do not to be killed or abused, and to live a happy life.
This argument also implies that "dominionism" is wrong, i.e. all life has a right to not be killed or abused. Yet human life is impossible without killing and consuming other living organisms, be it plants, animals og fungi. Thus it is unethical to continue living.
This argument is bad, because for human life to be possible, you must draw the line between life that you consider ethical to kill and life that you consider unethical to kill.
It's not about "all life" but about "all sentient life". Only beings that are able have pleasant and unpleasant experience should be considered. If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can't harm it, by definition.
Sentience is studied scientifically. It cannot be stated with absolute certainty but scientists have good sets of criteria and experiences that helps identify it. With the current knowledge it's almost certain that all mammals are sentient, like us. Fishes and birds are also very likely to be sentient. Some species of insects are probably sentient while others may not be. And plants are likely not sentient.
But even if all living things are sentient, it doesn't change very much. Speciesism means treating beings differently only because they belong to some specific species. There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings' interests, not their species (and studying sentience helps identifying these interests). It's very likely that we do less harm by growing plants than by breeding animals. And even if it was the same amount of suffering we would still do less harm by avoiding eating animals because breeding them to eat them actually requires more plants than just eating plants. We should seek to minimise suffering and avoiding eating animal is a good way to do that.
I don't agree on your analysis of sentience. The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this? Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to "feel" things.
This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.
And this is one of those reasons. A human's (or any other animal's) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food's continued existence. If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
I've heard this tired argument that plants and sentient mammals have the same capacity for suffering so many times. I think it is a disingenuous way of excusing the suffering your choices support.
A plant does not grieve when it's offspring is removed from it. It does not have fear, or joy. Plants don't play with each other and bond.
Yes. They communicate, and react to stimuli. So does a computer, but neither are sentient
I don't think it is disingenuous at all. You may draw the line at sentience, but you have provided no argument for why this is correct. Why must we consider the harm exactly up to sentience? Why must we only consider conscious pain resulting from harm, and not nociception? It is easy to dismiss people as disingenuous, especially if you don't really have any arguments for your case.
I don't see how there can exist any good arguments for where to draw the line, which is why it bothers me when people claim the moral high ground, but cannot offer any arguments on why their behaviour is most morally correct. You can say "reduce suffering of sentient beings", and most people probably agree, but I think it is completely natural to prioritise yourself, your family and friends and your species above other animals. So how much suffering of yourself is as important as the suffering of a chicken. Probably substantially less. I don't think you will ever convince anyone of your beliefs by simply denying that their weightings of human-to-animal suffering is wrong and yours is right.
That's a lot of rationalization with no facts to back it up.
I'm getting a "well ackchually" vibe from your comment. If I put a mouse on the ground next to a flower and told you to stomp one of them to death, You would be comfortable with either option equally?
Yes plants respond to negative stimuli, that doesn't imply suffering on the level of a conscious being.
You're making a lot of assumptions about my beliefs in your comment. I do not believe any animal has more right to life than any other animal. With that said if you are in the woods trying to survive like our ancestors then your biological needs take priority, you can't survive on plants in winter. The thing is that is not our reality. We are wolfing down red meat giving ourselves colon cancer needlessly. Trading suffering for joy, not suffering for survival
The line you mention is sentience, for many
Sure, so then they should instead be arguing that sentience is the morally correct line to draw.
This is kind of a straw man argument. I don't feel guilty at all eating a carrot I pulled out of the ground.
So we can all agree that it’s morally ok to eat a carrot, but not to eat a human. The difference is sentience. The hard part is where exactly to draw the line. Which side of the line is a cow on? A fish? A bug?
This guy thought about that question, if you wanted to see that perspective.
https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/#Summary
I don't believe this is a straw man argument, I never claim that they believe these conclusions. Quite the opposite, I am showing how their argument, not their conclusion, is not good. As I understand their argument, it is basically this:
(i) If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it. (ii) Animals do not want to be killed. Thus, it is morally wrong to kill animals.
I do not agree with (i), which I try to explain by reductio ad absurdum, arguing that if (i) is true it leads to obviously incorrect conclusions, thus (i) must be false.
The straw man argument comes from your point about combining plants and animals as food, and stating that they were both living. If you compare a cow to parsley, it is silly to say that we shouldn't eat parsley for the sake of it being a living organism. With cows in the same argument, they get dismissed since they're in the same group as plants.
Plants are the straw man in this case because it's easy to dismiss the argument that we shouldn't eat plants, for some reason. Animals are conscious creatures that experience suffering. Plants don't experience the same pain.
A straw man argument is when the other person believes A and you act like they in fact believe B, so you argue against B.
I am not claiming they believe it immoral to kill plants. Quite the opposite, I don't think anyone believes this in general. Therefore, it is not a straw man.
Not quite. From https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Strawman-Fallacy:
With this in mind:
You are misunderstanding my argument. I am not arguing against their conclusion, "it is morally wrong to kill animals", I am arguing against the validity of their argument, "If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it". Therefore, I am not restating their claim, I am saying that their argument leads to this absurd conclusion, thus it must be wrong. I have already explained this in a previous comment. You appear to be ignoring what I am writing.
I'd call it a non sequitur.
I don't feel guilty at all eating animals. Kind of a subjective point, no?
It is indeed about morality. Morality is about what is "good" and "bad", so it's perfectly in line with OP's question "why is the consumption of meat considered bad".
Religions have arbitrary morality so it doesn't seem very interesting to discuss why these religions allow or forbid to eat their specific set of animals, unless you're studying these religions.
Moral philosophy on the contrary tries to study morality with real arguments. In almost all cases they agree it's bad to harm others while it's not necessary. Even with our intuitive morality most people would agree with that. And in most cases eating animals products contributes to harming them and is not necessary. It was not necessarily the case in the past, but today it is. So eating animal products nowadays is immoral.
The environmental problems only adds additional harms on top of that by causing harms to even more animals, including humans.
In your example the "bad weather" means "bad for me/us" (a farmer would probably disagree, for example, as would some animals). Indeed morality is about what's "bad to others" or to everyone. But since OP didn't specify to whom, I considered it meant "bad in general", for the one eating and for the others.
OP included "Ethical reason for consuming animals" in the accepted answer, so answering about morality doesn't seem wrong.