Well, let me engage with asking more questions. Would you be ok with killing another human to consume in a non-emergency scenario? If yes, then I understand your confusion. If not, then why not? Is it legal repercussions? Do you worry that you may upset the people who care about them? Is it just an ingrained idea that eating human bad, but eating animal good? Why is eating a human different than eating another animal?

Alternative question around a similar idea: does picking asparagus or cutting down a tree give similar feelings as gutting an animal for meat?

Self preservation. I am uneasy with killing a human for food because that means they could kill me for food. It is unlikely I will be killed by a cow anytime soon.

I find that an odd explanation. After all you could start eating babies or kids.

I didn't mean the specific humans I eat could fight back. I meant that I wouldn't want to live in a world where humans eat humans because it would be dangerous.

Human flesh could probably give you very nasty infections as well. After all, it is the same flesh as yours.

We can catch diseases by eating other animals, but with human flesh, the contagion would face much lower hurdle to get across.

Assuming human farms, we could likely breed out most contagions like we have been doing with existing farm animals. So that wouldn't be an issue.

I’m able to enjoy local cuisine.

Human meat is not one.

That is the extent of my logic and mine personally has not included hypotheticals.

I have the same questions for others actually, because I don’t understand the logic path: if it was shown in the future that “asparagus and trees” and even their separated fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?

So then it is my third question, which I admittedly reworded. Originally I meant to ask if it was a cultural distinction of about what is food, and that seems to be the answer then.

Essentially you seem to have said that what you consider to be ok to eat is what you have already ate or what has been accepted to be eaten by those around you.

I find that conclusion lacking, as it gives no room for future food discovery (unless you are ok with being passive and just eating whatever others tell you is ok to eat).

But back to your question.

> if it was shown in the future that “asparagus and trees” and even their separated fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?

If it is believed that “asparagus and trees” have the ability to feel joy, feel pain, feel compassion, live some definition of a fulfilling life, and that harvesting them effectively killed all of that. Then yes, I think it would certainly bring into question the morality of mass farming, killing, and eating them.

Of course, if it turns out that everything has this capability, from the smallest nanobes to the largest mammals, and we haven't worked out how to produce nutrients at scale, then maybe we just need to throw our hands up and say "whelp, survival of the fittest".

> if it was shown in the future that “asparagus and trees” and even their separated fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?

Shmaybe? It seems pretty reasonable view for me, and my adherence to it would probably depend on availability of alternative food sources. Or perhaps people would dig deeper to identify the discriminating factors that would determine whether or not something can be eaten with clean conscience.

> That is the extent of my logic and mine personally has not included hypotheticals.

My feeling is that it's not the logic path you're having trouble with, but with internalizing the concept of updating your moral framework based on independet reasoning.

Human sense of morality comes partially built-in, and is partially supplied by the groups you live in. That second part is mostly your local culture, i.e. the assumptions and patterns of behavior in the background. Most people tend to keep to those two sources - independent reasoning about morality, while a well-known concept since the times of ancient philosophers, doesn't seem all that common. Perhaps it's because it's difficult - it often hurts thinking about it (i.e. you probably wouldn't be wondering about some chain of reasoning having moral implications if you knew you're in the clear with respect to those implications).

Culture changes pretty slowly - on the order of decades. That humans and animals are the same thing, that animals aren't as dumb as they look, that animals can feel - those are relatively recent scientific insights. What you see as a minority of people using this knowledge and logic to stop eating meat, is the process of our culture slowly updating itself to catch up with the last 200 years of science. It'll take a few more generations, but climate or not, I'd expect that in 100 years people would be mostly vegetarian by cultural pressure. Right now, it's mostly independent reasoners (ok, and some virtue signallers too).

My ability to update my moral framework is based on an articulated logic path.

It seems that I have already accepted the probability that most organisms have the things that people are just discovering.

“Well I eat this because it doesn’t have central nervous systems and cant feel pain”

Narrator: it can feel pain and other consumers already assumed that

I think most people just weren't aware or simply ignoring it. Similar to how most people would not eat a dog or a cat - they're cute and people know they can be quite smart, so they anthropomorphise them.

Once you push/force them to realize that the difference between a cow and your dog or even a toddler is not that big, they start seeing cows in a completely different light and possibly loose appetite.

A few decades ago, this was less of a problem, as people were close to the animals they were eating later on and it was always a fact that those animals would be eaten at some point. In our times, though, people can live for quite some time without seeing the intermediate steps in meat production or even interact with a cow for extended period of times. Therefore, this realization might come as quite a shock.

There are a variety of ways to rationalize human behaviors, one common one is to assume that while causing suffering is wrong, we're not living in a global horror story because the animals don't actually suffer.

That's easy to believe if you were taught like I was as a very young boy that it's OK to catch a fish with a fishhook and cut it up to eat because fish are not sufficiently intelligent to feel pain, be hurt, be scared, or suffer. It's easy to generalize that incapability of suffering to extend to all animals when you eventually learn that the same kind of big-eyed cow that says moo is what we eat as beef or hamburgers. Supermarkets make the default behavior to take home shrink-wrapped cuts of meat without ever getting the chance to gauge for yourself whether a cow can suffer; humans are shockingly good at not re-evaluating their priors.

How do you rationalize it? There are lots of ways, you've ruled out that they not intelligent, which is a common one. But are they intelligent but not suffering? Is non-human suffering not wrong? Does the wrongness of causing suffering require the victim to have an undetectable soul, which only humans posses? Is "wrongness" scalar, contingent on need, or mitigated by intelligence, or by an intensity of suffering, or by some other factor not considered? Is tradition and the natural order relevant? Is justice preserved by karmic retribution in an afterlife or reincarnation? Are chickens just really evil and deserving of suffering? Are we actually villains in a global horror story?