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Nattily dressed anarchists on bicycles

The Cypher Nine wrote:Because if I believe that you are participating in immoral acts its not enough to just not do them myself I must also convince you to give up on your ways. You know who else made the same argument you are? Slave owners. “Oh no what will happen to our economy?” Well, maybe you shouldn’t have based your economy on something horrific and immoral?

I was going to go into how the simile to human slavery doesn't work since it implies that humans and non-humans are necessarily of equal ethical status, which probably isn't a tenable position. To be fair, when put under stress, the claim that all humans are of equal ethical status doesn't really hold up either (IRL trolley problems, like mass casuality triage decisions and the like, are the go to example). At the very least, opposition to grotesque animal abuse doesn't actually require such equality anyway. But I'll have to get my copy of Singer out, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution is almost finished loading, and I've only got an hour to play, and I'll probably not convince anyone anyway, so.

edit: I quit early to tl;dr it - rubbing shampoo into a rabbit's eyes to test irritability, or electrifying the floor of a dog's cage to scientifically determine that it dislikes pain, is unethical. Killing a chicken to feed multiple hungry humans, in the absence of any alternative, or testing a viable treatment for a fatal disease on a monkey first, probably isn't. A consequentialist approach will probably be required to accept these statements.

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