Comment by DoreenMichele

In the west, the generally accepted public narrative is that only humans have souls, not other organisms. And whether or not it is acceptable to eat something is frequently more or less tied to intelligence.

I really enjoyed your above comment. I sometimes give push back to the vegan moral superiority stance where they act like eating animals is evil, but eating plants is totally fine. I tend to view all organisms as "having a soul" so to speak and I don't think there is anything inherently morally superior from that perspective in eating only plants, not animals. (I think there are some other bases for arguing that it is morally superior wrt to preventing war, etc.)

But when you see these arguments in public (among "westerners," for lack of a better word), they are almost always based on the idea that plants don't have brains, thus they don't have awareness, so this somehow makes it not a problem to kill them that we might live, where killing animals is posited to be a bad thing.

If you take that argument to its logical conclusion, than perhaps it is morally acceptable to eat other people if they are in a vegetative state. It is one of my objections to such framing.