I was not justifying it, like you I am a creature of modern NA, obviously I see both of those as wrong. That is not the point, the point is that at different times and different places what people consider right or wrong changes. Which is what you fail to realise. I am not god it is not to me to decide what is right or wrong, I was pointing out that if you asked those people at that point in time their answer would have been different.


what you fail to realize is that ethics always has an “us/them” aspect to it. You say cows are not human while we are and so Nazi/Jew, master/slave is humans and so a different subject, but the subject is ethics after all, the reason you see a difference is because you defined, in this context, us to be human and them cow so there is a difference in your eyes, but to the Hindu above he would describe us as animal and a carrot as plant so the same rules don’t apply to carrots but do to cows so his us is a lot wider. While to a Nazi us was the Aryan race and so the same rules did not hold for them Jews (or anyone else thrown in the gas chambers, since it was not only Jews) and to the people a few centuries ago there was a difference between a slave owner and a slave and so the same rules did not apply to both of them.


My personal opinion, us=animal and them=plants is just as “wrong”. Why is killing a cow bad but killing a carrot any more OK? The simple reality is that in order to have life death must exist (especially with animal life). I can choose to have a cow die for me so that I can eat and live or a potato or a carrot or many other vegetables. Yes not all plant/animal products require death, (I can eat an apple but the tree survives, I can cut some leaves of mint to eat but the mint plant survives, I can have a glass of milk or an egg…..) but then most of those imply some form of torture, so not really any better.