[JonnyBGood]

Originally Posted by horn

the reason i would advocate "callous" action towards other "lifeforms" is because not all life is the same. for instance, if a particular lifeform isn't self aware nor can it feel pain then i'm not going to have a huge problem "killing" it.

I think a lot of the problem here is we don't think about pain in the same way. Certainly I dislike your point over self-awareness given the fact that animals don't recognise themselves in mirrors and so on (I think dolphins, elephants and some apes can so if you want to restrict cruelty to these animals in the name of respecting self-awareness I don't think I'd object too much). However to return to the issue of "pain" you mentioned I think we have to understand that sometimes we may really be taking about different things. I mean I'm sure we can develop an appropriately anthropomorphic computer program which reacts to certain stimuli as if in pain but would we really say that it is in pain? Does "pain" just involve reacting in a certain way? Equally if we injected chickens with large doses of <inserteuphoriacausingdrughere> before doing anything which without those drugs would cause pain would we still be doing anything wrong? They're certainly not experiencing pain then but I doubt PETA would be over the moon about it.