Morality applied to humans wasn't universal either. Slaves were common in basically every society, and they had no rights. Some Greek polities would make token laws like "killing a slave is an affront to the gods" but sexual, physical, and emotional abuse was basically guaranteed.
Societies that have a caste system still apply different standards of morality to some people. Thieves and serial killers have a very different standard for morality than you or I.
> Morality applied to humans wasn't universal either.
Yes it was. Always. It's just that morality, being a human invention/illusion, varied from culture to culture and from era to era. Your examples ( slaves, caste system, etc ) isn't a lack of morality or non-application of morality, it's just different morality applied in different cultures. India has/had morality and the south has/had morality, just different morality than we do today in the US.
Regardless, morals can only be applied to humans. Try to apply it to animals and you get nonsense. I asked basic questions in my comment. If an elephant has 'moral weight' then killing it is wrong. So must we arrest and prosecute lions who kill elephants? Do we arrest everyone working for national geographics for profiting off of snuff films?
The key argument is not that we ought to expect non-human animals to abide by human morals (although animals do seem to have their own moral codes that they abide by) but that human moral codes (which we hold humans to) ought to assign non-human animals a value much closer to the value that we assign humans than they often do.
> Regardless, morals can only be applied to humans. Try to apply it to animals and you get nonsense.
This seems overly simplistic. For the sake of argument, I'll accept that moral judgments can only be made for human actions. But when those actions involve animals, they can still be made. People clearly make moral judgments about human cruelty to animals - every US state makes some version of animal cruelty a felony offense. The distinction between the presumed agency of the actor and the acted upon seems important here, and you are conflating them.
You misconstrued the lead comment. The “moral weight” of animals is conferred upon them by humans. Sure we do a bad job and are inconsistent. Pigs fine to slaughter and eat—-dogs not in our culture.
But almost all human culture gives some weight to life forms.
Dam, the angry backlash mindset shows up like clockwork, complete with my favorite triad of its hallmarks - vague references to "philosophers", invocation of numbers with the specific intent of saying buckwild unquantifiable shit, and the combination of personal attacks frothing with derision while simultaneously accusing me of thinking with "mindless emotions" for, I'm pretty sure, using language you've pattern-matched as overly compassionate toward things you don't respect
Anyway, I'm trying to get into less pointless arguments with people who open by demonstrating themselves unamenable to reason this week. Shoo, fly
I knew it. If you think modern industry is bad, it's 100000000x worse in nature. It is conservatively estimated that many quintillions of animals are killed by other animals in the wild each year.
Try using reason and logic rather than mindless emotions.
Well, not sure where they're getting their numbers from but a lot of animals (Ants/Flys) have very short lifespans so if there's 10,000 trillion ants I could easily see more than 0.005 quadrillion ants deaths a year (but not more than 0.06 quadrillion for ants).
