I'm not unwilling to admit anything. I dont believe flies feel pain, I believe they have reflexes . My comfort also comes first and if there was nothing else to eat I would have to kill to survive.
People going on about the moral high ground or holier than thou stuff make me laugh. I am making an argument. I think it's fair to say my outlook on life is negative and that includes myself. The game is pointless and full of waste, and acknowledging that is hard.
People are getting uppity because you're proclaiming your argument as the only logical one (which it isn't) and that is makes you morally superior (which it doesn't) and others are too blind to see it. I just choose to concentrate on your argument because I believe it to be logically rather than ethically flawed.
You don't believe flies feel pain but have reflexes. The distinction between pain and reflexes is an incredibly blurry one, something that I don't think you appreciate scientifically. Most people working in the field for decades have an extremely hard time differentiating, both are just reactions based to external stimuli.
I believe that the expression of genetically learned reflexes is an expression of pain. This is a belief and not a fact because something you haven't mentioned is that there's no such thing as pain in animals as a fact. Pain is a name we give to certain stimuli of the human brain and whilst it's logical to assume that animals must feel something close to this, we don't KNOW. We just work under the assumption that the human reaction to pain is also the animal reaction to pain because we're anthropologically driven to understand the world by our own biology, as I pointed out in the thread where I posted a pic of Earth at different light wavelengths. Pain in animals isn't as clear cut as you have made out in your argument. Consciousness is even more murky and the scientific consensus at present is that animals do not possess consciousness as we understand it or that is in any way comparable to humans.
As a man who puts a bit of stock in scientific consensus, this is good enough for me until compelling evidence from an unbiased source changes my mind.
My overall point though is simple. You don't understand pain in animals because no person in the world does. Therefore it's extremely likely that your line is just as bogus and arbitrary as everybody else's unless you're carrying a PhD in Animal Behavioural Psychology and 30 years of published research in your back pocket, and you're murdering animals that feel pain or have some form of consciousness and doing so without giving it a second's thought.
So the only options ethically are to classify consciousness as we understand it or by reclassifying consciousness as life itself which means everything from washing yourself to any sexual excretion is immediately considered unethical, or to classify the development of language and intelligence to a human standard as the bearer for where we draw the line.
I'd argue that my stance that no animals have consciousness and are all subject to the laws of nature is much more developed as an argument then yours which is some animals are exempt based on arbitrary guidelines that are completely invented, not supported by anything scientifically and have no defining quality to them apart from your own subjectiveness.
