Claim: I base my morality on the intelligence of the species
Details
We don't just base morality on intelligence or species, but on the combination of the two: what matters is the mean intelligence of the species as a whole.
Problems With This Argument
1. Each of the individual arguments is countered on the respective pages
But to summarize, carnist ethicists do the following:
- Create a set of rules as a standard for moral behavior based on well-being and suffering
- ... Ignore that standard in an act of special pleading to base the morality of eating food
- Create an arbitrary rule about intelligence as the criterion for which animals are ok to kill, and continue the special pleading in picking a subset of intelligence, such as verbalization (as understood by humans) or math
- ... Ignore this distinction anyway in assigning what species is ok to kill (e.g. in the intelligence of a pig vs cat, for instance)
- Create an arbitrary rule about how animals are grouped together based on interbreeding (again, an arbitrary property)
- ... Ignore this grouping anyway (e.g. wolves vs dogs) in assigning the selection rules left in step 5 that weren't ignored.
- And then apply an additional set of rules to make further adjustments for the rules in step 1 that include everything other than what animal is ok to kill as a part of eating.
And when this entire Byzantine formula is plugged into the calculator of morality, everything else we decided in step 1 applies, but now bacon is conveniently okay to eat.
The inclusion of the train of logical fallacies in steps 2-7 doesn't represent a sophisticated advancement over avoiding the pointless animal cruelty which step 1 would lead you to.
[Claim: I base my morality on the intelligence of the species](http://www.carnist.cc/intspec)