4 ms·

Are you also horrified by videos of kittens eating live mice?

• wk_end 3y ago
  Er, I'd say most people would find that pretty unpleasant, yeah. Well, that is: there's two different ways a video like this might be horrifying. There's a kind of visceral horror: blood, guts, and also a kind of instinctive empathy for the suffering that the creature getting killed might be going through (great time to point out that octopuses are much more intelligent than mice and, depending on how you feel about a bunch of tricky philosophical questions, there's probably more "there there" to be suffering). Like I said, I think most people would be pretty horrified, in this sense, by a video like that. The other kind of horror is a moral horror. And in that case...well, a cat is a cat, not a human, I don't expect them to act humanely. So in that particular moral sense the "cat eats mouse" video isn't horrifying. Whereas: I do have a moral expectations that humans should act humanely, which a Youtube video featuring people eating a live octopus violates, triggering moral horror.