Exactly. But just as desensitization to Action X does not make Action X less immoral, neither does it make Action X immoral. You consider cow-eating as equally monstrous as murder for your own reasons (which I'd charitably assume are not *purely* sentimental), reasons that may not apply to us.

Instead of appealing to sentimentalism, try to realize that this is matter of what people hold as sacred (e.g. human life and, in your case, farm animals) and what they do not (e.g. tasty, tasty pig and, in the case of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, humans), and realize that it will be impossible to change people's minds unless you understand where their priorities lie. In my case, as of this very minute, having a nice bacon cheeseburger is high on my priority list. See you guys later!

Question:

is zero part of the natural numbers?

Answer:

No. Zero is a dwarf number.

*rimshot*

Rights are given to individual humans, not to their component parts. The sperm and the egg that formed me didn't individually have rights in the same sense that my liver does not have rights. The fact that there was no individual living thing that could possibly be called *Me* until the moment of my conception invalidates your reasoning altogether.

The AC's point can be restated thus: There was a point in time where a living thing already existed with my DNA. It would grow and develop my nervous system and all my other organs. It would be born and be given my name. All evidence suggests that this newly-formed embryo was me and no one else. It wasn't my mother nor my father. It wasn't some subhuman Other. It was Me. If I have intrinsic human rights*, like the right to life, I must (by the definitions of intrinsic and human) have had those right for as long as I existed, i.e. since I was a mere human embryo.

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*Reading the comments here, it would seem that the assumption of intrinsic human rights is not held by everyone on Slashdot. It seems for some of us human rights are not given to a human being unless some arbitrary requirement assigned by the Enlightened is accomplished, like being an Aryan, or something... oh wait, was that the Nazis? Sorry, I can't see clearly due to all the murdered subhuman punishments lying around.