You’re right about dogs of course, but the really important question is why is it not OK to eat people. The reason we don't feel right about eating dogs is we feel that they are sort of like people. We have a three tierred moral heirarchy that operates like this. (All of this is from my forthcoming series of articles on the abortion question, hence the references to fetuses)
1) Life:
Anti-choice people like to say “science has proven that life begins at conception.” This is true, but being alive does not grant something the rights connected to being human. Carrots are alive, but not even vegetarians think that carrots have a right to life, or a right to anything else. A motorcycle or a carrot has no moral significance in itself. If I steal or mutilate either, I haven’t done anything morally wrong to the motorcycle or carrot. There is harm only if someone owns the carrot, in which case the harm is to the owner, not to the carrot itself. This is because the carrot has no consciousness, even though, unlike the motorcycle, it is alive.
2) Consciousness:
Once consciousness enters as a factor, some intrinsic moral questions arise. A conscious being can have harm done to it, not just to someone who owns it. Torturing a dog is wrong even if no one owns the dog. Nevertheless, Consciousness does not grant all the moral rights that are granted to human beings. We can do wrong to some animals, who are thus referred to as “the higher animals”, but the animals themselves are not held morally accountable for their actions. Creatures with this kind of moral status are known as Moral Patients. This means that they can have morally wrong things done to them, but cannot do moral wrong themselves. That is why, although it is wrong to torture a dog, we do not arrest the dog for murder if it kills a rat. The dog is a Moral Patient because it can be the passive recipient of moral wrong, but it is not a Moral Agent because it cannot perform morally significant actions. Although there are some private citizens who believe otherwise (i.e. vegetarians), the consensus of all American governments is that, although being a Moral Patient does grant an organism certain rights, you have to be a Moral Agent in order to possess:
3) The Right to Life
Sometimes the other rights of a Moral Patient actually conflict with the right to life. Because it is morally wrong to let an animal suffer, we feel a moral obligation to kill an animal if it is in great pain it cannot otherwise escape. We also regularly kill and eat animals, and kill animals that we call pests because they interfere with our plans in some way. Consequently, we do not believe that all conscious creatures possess the right to life. Even if we could prove that a fetus or embryo is conscious, that consciousness does not grant the Right to Life unless it is a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the animals we slaughter for food.
