Everything's debatable! But there are pretty strong arguments for "killing sentient beings is wrong".
Most morality stems from the Golden Rule (treat others as you'd want to be treated). If we take that as a given (a reasonable non-controversial starting point imho), then we can easily agree that breeding and killing other humans for food is immoral.
The Golden Rule is generally applied to a small subset of sentient beings, of course. However, one thing is observable throughout history, which is that the group of beings included in the Golden Rule has generally gone up with time. It used to be only a subset of humans, and has progressively grown to include most (and yet still not all) humans in most (still not all) cases. But it continues to grow. And already some types of treatment are considered abhorrent even when applied to non-humans.
For example, we may debate eating pigs, but we would presumably all agree that deliberately torturing a pig for your own personal satisfaction is immoral (hence all the laws against cruelty to animals).
This progress of history seems pretty constant - it may be the only progress we can measure as far as the question "are we getting more civilised" goes. Our measure of progress is, how many more groups do we include under the shield of this Golden Rule.
It's pretty reasonable to predict that, unless things go very badly for humanity, eventually many animals that we currently breed and kill for food will come join us on the safe side of the Golden Rule. We may start with the more inspiring or cuddly ones like Dolphins or Whales, but can you doubt that humanity from 500 years in the future will consider eating a dolphin as abhorrent as we would consider, say, eating someone's pet labrador?
Did eating someone's pet become less moral over time, or has it always been immoral, but before it was tolerated? What about eating other humans? What about other applications of the Golden Rule?
Obviously you can respond that morality is a moving target... and you're right. But then you're still agreeing that the topic we're discussing is something that could easily be conceived as immoral in the future (unlike, say, petting a cat or painting a nice painting, which are unlikely to ever be considered immoral as far as we can predict without resorting to extreme scenarios).
I take the view that something which will be immoral in 500 years is already immoral, we're just too undeveloped to realise it yet, much in the same way that I'd say that death penalty or torture were always immoral, but people weren't civilised enough to realise it in the past.
> It's pretty reasonable to predict that, unless things go very badly for humanity, eventually many animals that we currently breed and kill for food will come join us on the safe side of the Golden Rule. We may start with the more inspiring or cuddly ones like Dolphins or Whales, but can you doubt that humanity from 500 years in the future will consider eating a dolphin as abhorrent as we would consider, say, eating someone's pet labrador?
Interestingly, humans rarely live as a solo species. Most concentrations of humans are part of a larger menagerie of symbiotic utility and pest animals that rely on human existence and activity and despite the constant presence, it's rare that those animals ever enter even the most carnivorous human diet outside of very specific cases.
Most morality stems from the Golden Rule (treat others as you'd want to be treated). If we take that as a given (a reasonable non-controversial starting point imho), then we can easily agree that breeding and killing other humans for food is immoral.
The Golden Rule is generally applied to a small subset of sentient beings, of course. However, one thing is observable throughout history, which is that the group of beings included in the Golden Rule has generally gone up with time. It used to be only a subset of humans, and has progressively grown to include most (and yet still not all) humans in most (still not all) cases. But it continues to grow. And already some types of treatment are considered abhorrent even when applied to non-humans.
For example, we may debate eating pigs, but we would presumably all agree that deliberately torturing a pig for your own personal satisfaction is immoral (hence all the laws against cruelty to animals).
This progress of history seems pretty constant - it may be the only progress we can measure as far as the question "are we getting more civilised" goes. Our measure of progress is, how many more groups do we include under the shield of this Golden Rule.
It's pretty reasonable to predict that, unless things go very badly for humanity, eventually many animals that we currently breed and kill for food will come join us on the safe side of the Golden Rule. We may start with the more inspiring or cuddly ones like Dolphins or Whales, but can you doubt that humanity from 500 years in the future will consider eating a dolphin as abhorrent as we would consider, say, eating someone's pet labrador?
Did eating someone's pet become less moral over time, or has it always been immoral, but before it was tolerated? What about eating other humans? What about other applications of the Golden Rule?
Obviously you can respond that morality is a moving target... and you're right. But then you're still agreeing that the topic we're discussing is something that could easily be conceived as immoral in the future (unlike, say, petting a cat or painting a nice painting, which are unlikely to ever be considered immoral as far as we can predict without resorting to extreme scenarios).
I take the view that something which will be immoral in 500 years is already immoral, we're just too undeveloped to realise it yet, much in the same way that I'd say that death penalty or torture were always immoral, but people weren't civilised enough to realise it in the past.