Black Friday special duh ! <| sep |> You always find excuses to the things you do but shouldn ' t do . <| sep |> At it ' s fundamental level , this is an issue of ethics . Humans and nonhuman animals are not of equal moral value . Human beings are moral agents , and nonhuman animals are not . Therefore , any ethical position we take with regards to eating meat should reflect this understanding . That isn ' t to suggest that veganism or vegetarianism should be disregarded entirely , but to suggest that human and nonhuman animals are of the same moral worth is dangerously wrong . The ethical position that humans and nonhuman animals are of the same moral value is called biocentrism . Biocentrism is an philosophically contradictory position . First and foremost , in my opinion , the biggest contradiction in biocentrism is its misanthropy . If human and nonhuman life is of the same moral value , then human beings are morally worth as much as mosquitos carrying malaria , to give an extreme example . With this sort of moral standard , the monstrous becomes ethically permissible . To give another extreme example , consider Dave Foreman advocating for AIDS in Africa as a means of population control . Or , consider the reverence for nonhuman nature in Nazi Germany in stark contrast to the human life lost in the holocaust . And furthermore , the idea that women are somehow innately more tied to nature is ESSENTIALISM .