Well said Gryzor. I was poised to start rebutting all of these fallacies, but you did it already (and much more succinctly I think
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One thing i will expand though, idrougge....
>it's acceptable to kill animals for food.
I think so too. But if that is acceptable, then killing them for any other purpose is all right, too.
Not so.
I will use extreme examples, simply to prove that there can be a difference:
a) You are starving to death, your children are starving to death, and there is no food around. So you hunt for food, and kill a rabbit.
z) You are bored. You take a machine-gun and start slaughtering a field of cows.
Now, I'm sure you could come backwards from those two extremes with example b) and y), c) and x), etc and find a line or grey area somewhere in the middle, but anyone can see that would be a big exercise. All I wanted to do there was establish that there is a difference. If you deny that z) is worse than a), I can take you no further, as you obviously don't want to trade in logic.
To break it down just a little more, let me say this.
In both cases we have:
1) a requirement, and 2) an action.
What makes something right or wrong depends very much on the weight of those two elements.
How important is the requirement? Can the requirement be met in other ways that have less impact?
For instance, if in example a), the starving man and his children were actually standing in a cold-room full of meat, yet they still found an animal to kill, we can't justify that in the same way. His requirement was still as urgent, but there were less extreme actions available.
I think one of the rules behind "common sense" (which we don't realise) is you start with the requirement, then look for the action you can take that has the least impact on world around us. If that action doesn't exist, look for a more extreme action.
You stop looking for actions when your requirement is not worth the action.
For example, with z), the requirement was merely to satisfy a passing emotional dissatisfaction, yet the action to meet this requirement created much more "emotional dissatisfaction" in other creatures that, ended their lives, and wasted their resources. While not as important as a person, cows certainly have a higher value than "boredom".
Now let us go back to the seals.
requirement: To look pretty, impress your friends. To spend more money than other people can afford and feel sophisticated and important. To possess something exotic.
action: kill thousands of creatures with much suffering and trauma in an uncontrolled and unaccountable manner, and after doing that letting the animals meat rot.
This scenario upsets our common sense because the requirement is
not important, and it's actually quite unhealthy (vain, pretentious).
The action to meet this requirement causes extremely excessive impact, and could be done with less impact.
I'm finished....
But just for "fun", let's look at some other issues in the world.
requirement: To wipe crap from our asses when we go to the toilet
action: chop down thousands of acres of rainforest and turn it into toilet paper, while sending tonnes of paper to the tip, which could have been recycled
requirement: Keep car cool while you're shopping on a hot day
action: leave it running in the car-park with the air-conditioning on.
requirement: To have shelter and transport
action: Live in a mansion and drive a Mercedes.
Can this be justified while people around you live in poverty, and people somewhere in the world starve to death?
requirement: To make light, so that we can stay up late at night
action: Use a significant % of an industry that mines coal and plutonium, damages the environment, and whose resources are finite.
requirement: To do word-processing, play some games, and communicate
action: Make bigger, fatter operating systems, spend $billions on new, faster hardware that uses more power (which we get from coal or plutonium) , uses more silicon and chemicals to manufacture, and will be out-dated in 2 years.
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