Yes but it’s a fuzzy term, what I meant was more in the “animal” realm of living.
Just to give an example, I (and I think most humans) feel negatively about deforestation or destruction of plant life because it is destroying or profaning something beautiful. It’s like burning art.
Same with the chickens. I’m not sure I consider factory farming immoral, and I definitely don’t consider killing animals for food immoral. I grew up raising chickens (laying hens, it was a family hobby and not a business)and don’t feel any moral or aesthetic issue with killing them. I also hunt and fish a lot, my freezers are full of wild game whose lives I personally ended.
Still, certain kinds of factory farming, like the raising of chicken-blobs, disturb me because they take something I find beautiful and make it ugly. Not sure what to make of the disturbed feeling tho, it’s not a moral condemnation or political position.
> I definitely don’t consider killing animals for food immoral.
This is a highly interesting standpoint-- would you consider it morally problematic to kill more intelligent animals for food, like dogs?
What about human children (younger than a year? younger than 6?).
Is there a line for you somewhere? Where approximately and why?
This is drastically different from myself and most meateaters I know which concede moral problems with killing animals for food in general but ignore them in favor of enjoyment of food, so I'm very curious about how your framework looks like.
The line Peter Singer draws, which I found quite elegant, is "things that can suffer". You can have aesthetic opinions about what we do to plants, but a major difference with what we do to chickens is that the plants don't suffer.
I’m not convinced the elegance here doesn’t derive from imprecision. I have some opinions about which sorts of life forms can suffer, but I don’t really have a justification for them, and there are people out there who honestly seem to believe that (for example) bugs don’t suffer, or lobsters don’t suffer. This seems like a fairly ridiculous proposition to me, but hey, it just depends on how we’ve anthropomorphized lobster thoughts, I guess.
Oh there is certainly imprecision, but I don't think that's where the elegance comes from. Especially given that most actual moral quandaries you might find yourself in are clearly not in the grey areas, and so the few that you do encounter can relatively easily be dealt with via either "better safe than sorry" or "worth the risk", depending on your personal inclination.
