Edit: Surprised at all the vegans in this thread. I didn’t think there were so many of you. I’m glad you care so much about animal rights, that you’re willing to forego eating them and using products made from them. If you’re not vegan and have moral objections for this, maybe you should look at yourself first and all the animal abuse you sanction by eating animals and using animal products. Did you know dairy cows have to be pregnant to produce milk? They’re artificially inseminated throughout most of their lives. I hope everyone complaining about this also complains about ice cream and cheese. Or else they would be hypocrites who just want to blame others but never look at themselves.
We are, but being a part of the ecosystem doesn’t really mean much. Ecosystems aren’t obligations, authorities, sources of morality or subject to it. They’re just systems of relationships between organisms in a particular place. Whatever humans do, as long as it involves other organisms, that is our role in the local ecosystem. If we start doing something else, we aren’t forgetting our role in the ecosystem, no role was ever assigned to us, our “role” is merely descriptive of what impact we have.
There are plenty of carnivores in the ecosystem. But I can’t think of another one that keeps prey suffering in a box from birth to death in order to feed itself.
It’s funny that we consider ourselves higher organisms because only we can even think about ethics or have ethics. But is it ethical to treat those incapable of ethics unethically?? If we are the only one in the picture with ethics, don’t we have a double responsibility to apply them for all?
If other predators were even capable of animal agriculture, I’d bet that there’s a good chance that they would do it, but that’s of course not really possible to know for sure. If we were going to apply ethics to things like animals that don’t naturally have them, though, wouldn’t we basically be obligated to destroy the natural ecosystem even more than we already do? The natural environment is, for something living it, absolutely horrendous. Not in the same way as things for a farm animal, but still, natural ecosystems tend to result in a situation where organisms must constantly fend of starvation, predation, parasites and infection, and few creatures live as long as they potentially could. If we really cared much about the well being of all the animals out there, we’d basically have to destroy the natural biosphere completely and keep all remaining animals in idealized captive conditions, like pets or zoo animals, to keep them free of predators and disease.
We can’t call other species unethical because they are either ethical nor unethical.
And so no, although nature is brutal, we are not obligated to destroy it (though some actually do hold this position on the grounds that it would reduce suffering).
The only creature we can judge ethically is ourselves. My point is that we ket ourselves off the hook on treatment of animals. Because they have no ethical function, they are like objects to us, and we do (vaguely gestures at this post) whatever to them. Our logic seems to be “until you’re capable ethics I don’t need to treat you with any, even though I’m capable.” It’s a neat little self-serving loophole we love to exploit.