This seems like the same logic that says shooting and eating a non-endangered wild deer is less ethical than eating a cow that someone else killed for you. (Whi

This seems like the same logic that says shooting and eating a non-endangered wild deer is less ethical than eating a cow that someone else killed for you. (Which is a viewpoint I've encountered in real life. Basically anyone who is not vegetarian but thinks hunting/hunters are gross.) I would say that many humans have a natural empathy for suffering things, but it can be short-circuited by emotional distance (you never see the cow as anything but a ready-to-cook steak) and social pressure (everyone knows it's okay to eat cows). We're really good at finding moral justifications for things we really want to do. (I am not vegetarian, for whatever that's worth. I admit I have the same emotional/non-logical responses I described here. But I see perfectly civil attempts at debate being downvoted to hell and accused of "virtue signalling" purely for going against groupthink, and that bugs me.)