Burney, your analogy between our treatment of animals and prostitution seems flawed

[Monty92]

It wasn't an analogy, it was a benchmark of how, as a species, we are disinclined to allow questions of ethics to dominate our need to satiate our natural desires for pleasure. The point is that, after 10,000 years of civilisation, if we have only come that far on the commoditisation of human beings, how much further away do you think a worldwide moratorium on the commoditisation of animals is?

But I'm not talking about a moratorium. I'm talking about a shift in attitudes whereby eating dead animals comes with a social stigma.

In the case of prostitution, many people believe it should be legalised on the basis of libertarian values and/or pragmatism, whereby prostitutes would be better treated and safer if it was legal.

In other words, we are pretty close to a scenario in which being a licensed brothel owner or a pimp would go some way to losing its social stigma. But if you operated out of these regulatory parameters, say as a sex trafficker, the stigma would remain. And equally for those who use illegal or sex trafficked prostitutes instead of legal ones.

In a world in which animal farming was more strictly regulated, is it not possible that treating chickens as terribly as we do now would come with a similar social stigma?