Well, first of all, this is just false. People do things for the barest, most trivial of reasons all the time. You’re walking along the street and you kick a bottle that happens to turn up in your path. What’s it in for you? In the most trivial sense you could say that “I felt like it” is what’s in it for you, but then the concept rather loses its meaning.
In any case, that’s a tangent, because you mistook my meaning: I wasn’t talking about the motivation for doing something. I (and davidpearce, as I read him) was talking about the moral justification for eating meat. His comment, under my intepretation, was something like: “Exploiting and killing nonhuman animals carries great negative moral value. What moral justification do we have for doing this? (i.e. what positive moral value counterbalances it?) None but that we enjoy the taste of their flesh.” (Implied corollary: and that is inadequate moral justification!)
To which my response was, essentially, that morally neutral acts do not require such justification. (And by implication, I was contradicting davidpearce by claiming that killing and eating animals is a morally neutral act.) If I smash a rock, I don’t need to justify that (unless the rock was someone’s property, I suppose, which is not the issue we’re discussing). I might have any number of motivations for performing a morally neutral act, but they’re none of anyone’s business, and certainly not an issue for moral philosophers.
(Did you really not get all of this intended meaning from my comment...? If that’s how you intepreted what I said, shouldn’t you be objecting that smashing ore-bearing rocks is not, in fact, unmotivated, as I would seem to be implying, under your interpretation?)
Well, first of all, this is just false. People do things for the barest, most trivial of reasons all the time. You’re walking along the street and you kick a bottle that happens to turn up in your path. What’s it in for you? In the most trivial sense you could say that “I felt like it” is what’s in it for you, but then the concept rather loses its meaning.
In any case, that’s a tangent, because you mistook my meaning: I wasn’t talking about the motivation for doing something. I (and davidpearce, as I read him) was talking about the moral justification for eating meat. His comment, under my intepretation, was something like: “Exploiting and killing nonhuman animals carries great negative moral value. What moral justification do we have for doing this? (i.e. what positive moral value counterbalances it?) None but that we enjoy the taste of their flesh.” (Implied corollary: and that is inadequate moral justification!)
To which my response was, essentially, that morally neutral acts do not require such justification. (And by implication, I was contradicting davidpearce by claiming that killing and eating animals is a morally neutral act.) If I smash a rock, I don’t need to justify that (unless the rock was someone’s property, I suppose, which is not the issue we’re discussing). I might have any number of motivations for performing a morally neutral act, but they’re none of anyone’s business, and certainly not an issue for moral philosophers.
(Did you really not get all of this intended meaning from my comment...? If that’s how you intepreted what I said, shouldn’t you be objecting that smashing ore-bearing rocks is not, in fact, unmotivated, as I would seem to be implying, under your interpretation?)