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That's precisely why we need to change this sort of thing. When good people do bad things, there might be a bigger problem. Perhaps meat is not meant to be chea
by damoncali 14y ago
That's precisely why we need to change this sort of thing. When good people do bad things, there might be a bigger problem. Perhaps meat is not meant to be cheap.
- sophistroll 14y agoHe is not describing good people. Good people can reason that hurting others is not how to improve mood.
- damoncali 14y agoThat's exactly the opposite of my point.
- JabavuAdams 14y agoYou seem to be missing a crucial point. As far as our whole history and our current system are concerned, (food) animals are not people. That's the crux of the issue. When you say "others" you're implicitly ascribing personhood to those animals. I'm not arguing whether this is right or wrong, but it's where we are now as a society. In general, most people do what's socially acceptable and avoid doing what's not. It is socially acceptable to kill animals, which involves some level of cruelty. It is not, except in war, socially acceptable to do that to humans (although we concoct all kinds of excuses for special circumstances).
- katbyte 14y ago> It is socially acceptable to kill animals, which involves some level of cruelty. Yes, but its not socially acceptable or lawful to be excessively cruel and torture them. Animals aren't people, and most people don't think they are. However they are alive, they do feel pain, and they do deserve to be treated with some level of kindness and respect.
- jlgreco 14y ago> its not socially acceptable or lawful to be excessively cruel and torture them. For better or worse, that seems to depend entirely on the animal in question. Nobody laments the treatment of sea-sponges, the fact that they are animals instead of plants is basically just a curiosity of biology as far the majority is concerned when considering the ethics of them. Moving up from there: few (though probably more than in the case of sponges) worry about how we treat insects. We kill them with industrial grade chemicals (this concerns people, though not for reasons that are relevant), electricity, lasers, etc. There is little thought put into determining how to kill them ethically. Continuing on, rodents, snakes, and other medium sized pests: I would say that probably most people don't care how these are killed. Glue traps are very popular for instance, even though they are very cruel. These are the animals that we really start to see people caring in numbers worth paying attention to; humane killing devices and even live-capture traps are becoming increasingly popular for these sorts of animals. Once you get larger than rats and snakes it seems most of the general public becomes fairly concerned about how the animals are killed. We have laws about what sort of traps trappers of small animals are supposed to use, and even most trappers are very serious about the ethics of what they are doing (for instance, they are typically very strict about how often they check their lines, so that animals are never trapped for excessively long periods of time.) As you get bigger and cuter more and more people start to care. Of course all of this is basically just my observations of American cultures. The knobs on these different value settings are turned one way or the other for other cultures (in particular I think you can probably point to examples of both extreme settings of these values in various Asian cultures).