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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

I'm an omnivore. all meat or no meat is not what i'm evolved to eat. Perhaps I eat too much meat, but zero meat isn't the right answer.

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Just because you evolved to do something doesn't provide a moral justification to do that thing. Whether you evolved to or not, animals suffer extraordinarily in the farms of torture we've made for them. It is well accepted that you can eat healthily on a vegan diet, and it would only really take a couple articles to figure out how to have a healthy plant-based diet. You could do it at Walmart.

Who's moral justification? Yours?, My families?, my community?, my government? my god?

I maybe too much of a individualist, so I get a little triggered when I see claims from others about the moral justification of what I should eat, what job I should have, who I should vote for... When these things that I do are not hurting myself or other humans.

Now I'm sure you could take an example of each one of these and "butterfly affect" to some example of hurting another human, but I could do the exact same thing to any one of [your] lifestyle choices.

The moral justification comes from the understanding that the brain is an organ which integrates information to form this profound feeling of presence that you and I share. There is zero evidence to suggest that we don't share this feeling with animals. This is a scientific argument. I'm a professional neuroscientist working in brain simulation, and even the complexity of a ringworm is out of the grasp of the field. The complexity of the brain is unrivaled anywhere else in nature, and it has this wonderful emergent property that I feel like something. Animals feel like something. It feels like something to be a cow, a chicken, and a pig. They understand and relate to the world. That is why it is wrong to kill them unless you have to.

> no meat is not what i'm evolved to eat

why do you think this? I've lived seven healthy years with zero meat and am in superb physical shape. how many 30+ year olds do you know that can run a five minute mile? can you?

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