My usual thought when people complain about useless eaters is useless to who? Sure they don't think my 85 year old dad is important. But if I have to chose between between them and my dad, dad wins.
Another observation is prosocial 'useless eaters' live quiet lives and don't consume much. And a lot of them mostly pull their own weight. More, lot of super dupers seem mostly good at socially engineering a bigger share than they entitled to. If we're talking my special needs brother vs some tech bro working on spyware and adtech the choice for me isn't close as with my dad.
See: Developmentally Disabled Burger King Employee Only Competent Worker
Seriously though, I think it's folly to evaluate something's value based on its intelligence. I think ethical judgements about what to eat should be based on its subjective experience, with a goal of harm reduction and minimization of suffering. Of course, the only way to cause no harm by eating is to be dead, so it will never be perfect.
I think he’s simply saying that a subset are not able to even understand that there is a choice to be made, and that the logic then would be that you can eat people from that subset.
If you prove, convincingly, to a "locavore" that the stated benefits of their choices are in fact better achieved by (say) acquiring all your food from Wal-Mart, will they thank you and be glad that they know this now? Of course not, they'll get angry. And that's because the actual desire for "locavore" eating is not about the stated benefits, it's about being able to feel superior to others.
Now me, I don't see the point of this. But that's probably just because I have plenty of other reasons to feel superior to others. But if I were denied these then, heck, maybe I'd be tempted to engage in this sort of hair-shirt behaviour too.
What I say is: let the baby have his bottle. If someone wants to feel superior to others due to whatever random harmless activity he's engaging in, then give him a pat on the back and try to avoid bringing logic and reason into the conversation. Everybody has a deep-seated psychological need to feel like they're better than others, and if denied this fairly harmless sort of outlet then these folks will start lashing out in other, probably more harmful, ways.
Sure it does. And since most smart people prefer eating over starving as well, that preference also suggests that you are smart. If you combine these suggestions with an assertion of excluded third, you can say that a preference for eating over starving implies a qualifiable intelligence.
That is to say, suggestion is not implication. I can reasonably suggest that you are stupid without it being the most reasonable suggestion.
If you're going to go by whatever "academic philosophers"[1] say instead of thinking for yourself, I really don't know what to tell you.
[1] By and large, over-privileged people who've never done anything useful in their lives. It's easy to preach to people about what they should eat when you've always had plenty of food.
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