#73: What’s Morals? (PART 5)

【Our Responsibility】
To put it bluntly, we have reasons to eat meat, but our meat-eating custom is morally wrong.
 
And we can say the same about our fish-eating custom.
 
In 2017 alone, roughly 1.2 trillion aquatic animals were killed for us to eat, worldwide. To put this in context, an average person kills roughly 150 fish every year to eat, a far greater casualty than that we impose on land animals.
 
The terrible truth is that even this mind-numbing level of atrocity is likely an underestimate due to bycatch, the “accidental” catch of unintended kind or size whom fishermen catch in their nets and most often kill.
 
Many of these bycatches are thrown back into the ocean dead, which makes it all the more troubling to grasp the full magnitude of the casualty. According to numerous studies, when bycatch is included, an average person kills an estimated 500 fish every year to eat.
 
As our life expectancy is approximately 80 years, it means that each person kills on average 40 thousand fish to eat during our lifetime.
 
Without a doubt, we cannot conclude that It would be perfectly acceptable for me, you, our loved ones, and everyone else to be suddenly killed while enjoying our day.
 
Consequently, despite how wonderfully appetizing our favorite seafood dishes may be, our fish-eating custom is morally wrong.

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Our meat-eating and fish-eating customs. When talking about them, we observe a mixed sentiment of agreement and disagreement. Among those who disagree, we often come across two broad types of objections.
 
The first usually takes the form of “That’s non-sense! Animals eat other animals. Why should humans do any different?”
 
To be sure, when we grasp the sweeping tide of our evolutionary past, we see that mankind was born into the wilds some 5 million years ago. The rigor of the wilderness and the beauty of Mother Nature. They’re like two sides of the same coin, but the wilds present us with the sobering reality that the weak are victims of the strong.
 
So that’s where mankind set sail for our journey. From there, we gradually puzzled together a civilization, and today we find ourselves as the dominant force on Earth. 
 
Humans cut the forests, reclaim the land by filling the seas, and build our extravagant cities – all the while taking the natural habitats from other animals. In many cases, we also dominate the food on Earth, securing the most fertile grounds to ourselves. And the human-induced global warming only exacerbates this trend.
 
When we find ourselves in the overwhelmingly dominant position as we do today, we have the moral responsibility to show greater compassion to other animals.
 
That is, to stop the Strong victimizes on the weak. Instead, to shape the world where Those who are fortunate take better care of Those who are less-fortunate. For us to connect our intelligence to expand our hearts.
 
As such, we humans must not behave in the same way as other animals, especially when it comes to killing and eating.

Read Next: What’s Morals? (6)【Avoiding Change】
Read Previous: What’s Morals? (4)【Truth About Our Kills】
 
Complete Series: What’s Morals? (1)～(8)
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Read Theme: Morality