Boiling lobsters while they are alive and conscious will be banned as part of a government strategy to improve animal welfare in England.
Government ministers say that “live boiling is not an acceptable killing method” for crustaceans and alternative guidance will be published.
The practice is already illegal in Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand. Animal welfare charities say that stunning lobsters with an electric gun or chilling them in cold air or ice before boiling them is more humane.
You think very lowly of other animals if you think they have no morals, or no discerning of good and bad.
Or are you valuing your specific moral more than theirs? Because that’s a very classic specist reasoning, with no basis whatsoever except human arrogance.
Also, humans rape other humans too, so how do you justify this? Are rapists not moral agents? You consider them beasts, different animals than yourself?
Then what makes a human a human, what makes them the moral agent you talk about? Is it the respect of the law? Is it a particular neurological state?
More importantly, do you really need this sort of validation to be “good”? Do you need to believe that you are different? That you have a responsibility? That you are “better” than other animals?
Are you not capable of being equally “good” even knowing that morals are relative? That there is no actual universal good? That you have nothing more than other animals?
I don’t know what sort of gotcha you’re trying to make. Yes those humans are immoral moral actors.
And also, no, I do not adhere to moral relativism, that is a position I outright reject. I definitively think that there are moral positions more “correct” than others. That is your position. Not mine.
Does that make me “better” than other animals? “Better” in what sense, though? Better in terms of discerning right from wrong and able to think about these abstract concepts? Yes. Abstract thinking is something that humans are quite uniquely better at, as far as we know. Better as in having more moral value, though? No I would not say so. If an animal has capacity for suffering, then that animal has a moral worth. And we should avoid causing it suffering if possible.