[quote]Why is it not logical? Because you cannot support a moral claim without making other moral claims beforehand, and then those claims have no grounding unless you create more moral claims before them etc. etc. ad infinitum.[/quote]This is, quite clearly, false. Any moral act or question can be reduced to facts about how conscious minds work. It is a fact about conscious minds that getting stabbed in the foot is undesirable; to then ask why it [i]should[/i] be undesirable is an exercise in redundancy. It has nothing to do with whether we [i]should[/i] or [i]shouldn't[/i] value something, but rather acknowledging the way we, as conscious organisms, have evolved to function. Morality is concerned with these facts about conscious experience, and thus is not illogical at all. Minds are just as much parts of nature as stars, trees, and apples. People commonly like to cite the learned is/ought problem, as though on autopilot, but this is simply a case of mental heuristics that have caused a great deal of philosophical insincerity over the years. Thankfully, the western intellectual community is rejecting this idea with increasing agreement (although I think it took far too long). There is no divide between facts and values when it is a [b]fact[/b] that minds have [b]values[/b]. Hume was, simply, wrong in separating the mechanisms of minds from the mechanisms of the rest of the universe. [quote]None of these moral judgements can be empirically verified in and of themselves[/quote]Of course they can. Not only can we observe when others are in pain (there is usually an obvious difference in expressions between someone getting stabbed in the foot and, say, smelling a bed of roses), but we are becoming increasingly able to detect responses in the brain to certain stimuli using neuroimaging. And it is clear that at some point in the future all subjective experiences will be able to be tracked and verified by studying changes in brain activity. [quote]Question: if an animal had been killed by another animal, say a deer by a tiger, but for some reason the tiger went away, would it be OK to eat the deer? If so it is presumably because you think the immorality is in the human action of killing an animal, rather than just eating an animal which has died. I don't see how you could object to eating the deer; there is no moral grounding to do so anyway.[/quote]That's because I wouldn't object to eating the deer. [quote]Therefore, so long as I do not kill any animal myself, eating one is not morally reprehensible of me.[/quote]The flaw in your argument is that I wouldn't condone supporting the tiger to kill the deer -- just so you could eat meat without getting blood on your hands directly. If you stumbled upon a deer corpse and needed food to survive, then it would be foolish to pass it up -- otherwise, probably best to leave it for hygienic reasons. A case can also be made for killing a deer yourself if you were in an extreme survivalist situation. The problem is, neither of these are applicable to us. And by purchasing and eating animal products, you are supporting the tigers of the food industry. [quote]If you think that by doing so I'm condoning the wrongdoing of other humans then that is an argument, but it is also an opinion, and in my opinion it is much more wrong to be against the killing of animals and then to let the animals who are already dead go to waste.[/quote]The crucial issue here is that some opinions are more valid than others. A child rapist and mass murderer can show up at an ethics convention -- if there is such a thing -- and start rambling on about how, in their opinion, molesting children and then killing them is an absolutely wonderful way to spend one's spare time. Are their views on equal footing with the academics in the room who vehemently disagree with them? The answer should be a resounding no. If anyone actually wanted to argue that the rapist/murderer duo are equally valid in their views of living ethically, then I doubt their intellectual sincerity and have no interest pursuing further discourse with them. [quote]You brought up points against the meat industry and I'd like to state here (in case you didn't notice the first time) that I do not have any problem with arguments against the meat industry. But simply killing animals and eating them is not what the meat industry's about.[/quote]Any arguments against the meat industry are, by extension, against the consumers who support it. I'm somewhat interested in what else the meat industry exists for besides killing animals for profit, but it isn't of huge importance because it cannot exist without it. And it is not just the meat industry that is unethical.