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Among those few other intelligent species, there are honorable animals and dishonourable ones. Honorable animals are both intelligent and have moral worth. Dolphins are dishonorable. Orangutans are honourable. Chimpanzees are dishonorable. Elephants are honorable. Humans are mostly honorable, especially for omnivores.
Among the meat animals, octopuses are morally neutral, although they are regular cannibals, and I have no qualms with eating an animal that eats its own kind. That said, I consider octopus the least justifiable regularly consumed meat to eat. Likewise, pigs (including wild boar) are often honorable, but are also cannibals at high frequency, and if even they eat each other all the time, then so can I.
Most other meat (and other) animals are not intelligent, and so lack the same moral valence in either direction.
Your classification of honorable/dishonorable is totally foreign to me. Out of all the animals you list, I would have classified dolphins as the most "honorable". Is there really a major culture/ethnicity that thinks eating dolphins is okay but eating octopus is bad? It's hard for me to imagine.
Dolphins practise gang rape.
I second @4bpp - this anthropomorphising of animals is and pretty much always will be extremely suspect. Mallards are one of these infamous species that supposedly participate in gang rapes - several males will pursue a female and attempt to forcibly mate with her, and as a result males' penises can shoot out with surprising speed, whereas females' vaginas will be corkscrew-shaped so as to make it more difficult to mate. Clearly something to feel disgusted about, right?
Except that female mallards actually covertly elicit this behaviour by intentionally flying over the territory of other males and initiating a chase, drumming up a fight over her, and the corkscrew turns of female mallards' vaginas actually are meant to let her influence the males which get to fertilise her egg.
Do mallards deserve death for this? Does the concept of "rape trauma" exist in such a species? Should the very emotionally-laden human concept of rape even apply? If it doesn't, how can you even tell what is rape and what is not in the animal kingdom? Animals in many cases are basically alien species and should be treated as such.
I don't know, but it makes me feel a whole lot better about ordering the Peking duck.
Thoroughly unbased, you don't need a moral excuse to order Peking duck. It's delicious! I would eat a human if it tasted like Peking duck.
Still, I think the point stands - animals can't be anthropomorphised so easily, and behaviour that's aesthetically displeasing to us as humans can't necessarily be judged as immoral within its context.
Cannibals from Papua New Guinea tell us that human flesh tastes just like pork. "Long pork", if you will. I like bacon, and I'm not averse to alternative sources. Maybe lab-grown meat will let me have a me-burger, kinda removed the ethical downsides.
I would do that. To be honest I'm not inherently against the idea of eating human meat; this has always seemed to me like a nonsensical moral line people draw.
In fact there are hypothetical situations where I think it's only rational to do so - if I was in a survival situation involving a lack of food and somebody died, I would be a proponent of eating the body. Seems very anti-utilitarian for others to die just for the sake of a moral taboo.
As an aside, how was London?
I ended up extending my stay for a week! I'm due to fly out this Saturday morning, but only so I can make it to the Edinburgh ACX meetup.
I've had a good time. I haven't written up everything that happened, but highlights include a trip to Cambridge, Dover, catching up with @Corvos at a Wetherspoons and getting happily drunk in his company.
Overall, I've warmed to the city quite a bit. And it certainly makes where I currently live seem like a village. If only it didn't cost an arm and both of my legs. Maybe when I finish my current stage of training, and have a CV competitive with the strivers, I might try my luck.
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