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If the young human death rate was 99.9%, would that make killing adult humans okay? If a human has cancer, and is going to die in a month, would that make kill
by casenmgreen 4y ago
If the young human death rate was 99.9%, would that make killing adult humans okay?
If a human has cancer, and is going to die in a month, would that make killing that human okay?
I am sure the humans in the above examples would wish to live, and if we killed them, against their wishes, it would be murder.
I think those octopi - including the young who die - all wish to live; and that all creatures either behave to live (plants and bacteria, for exmaple) or, and the more so as their brains become more capable, have a specific and individual wish to live, be it purely instinctive, emotional, or with higher creatures such as elephants, dolphins and gorillas, an actual personal self-conscious wish to live.
- bell-cot 4y agoHeartfelt...but the less like humans a creature is, the more that anthropomorphism starts to read like allegory, irony, sarcasm, or farce. (Admitting that vegans likely feel otherwise.) Philosophically, you sound eager to campaign against octopi being eaten by humans. Do you similarly oppose octopi being eaten by the many non-human predators which currently do so? Those octopi also wish to live, do they not? Are humans somehow morally inferior to every fish in the seas (which freely partake of octopus), so that even 0.1% is forbidden to us?
- throwuxiytayq 4y agoI get your point, but I’m still not sold on the idea that this line of thinking justifies farming octopi in factory conditions by the millions.
- bell-cot 4y agoMorally, I figure that the octopus factory will be roughly as horrible as the current generation of pig factory. Certainly no field of daisies. But not an Evil Demonic Nazi Temple of Genocide, either.
- DangitBobby 4y agoProbably closer to the latter than the former.
- DangitBobby 4y agoMy moral philosophy also amounts to "even if I try to be good, bad things will happen, so there's no point trying to be good."
- twelve40 4y agoI guess two counterpoints would be: * people can choose to eat something else (arguably the veggies) but the fish can't, and * the fish don't artificially breed the octopuses, they hunt them down in a "natural" process, which presumably keeps the balance in nature I happened to not really like octopus meat too much so i don't have a horse in this race : )
- casenmgreen 4y agoNature is appalling, in that billions of creatures which wish very much to live are constantly killed and eaten by other creatures. I would like for all creatures not to die violent deaths, but it's hardly a practical proposition. But I myself personally can do something about what I do, and so I do not eat food which would have to be killed.