The Penn and Teller episode is really, really bad. I encourage you to watch it again a little more critically:
First, Penn and Teller outright lie in the beginning of the show. The people in the beginning that criticize the use of euthanasia on animals are not PETA people (Dr. Jerry Vlasak and Pamela Ferdin). They are members of the animal defense league, a different organization. But Penn and Teller falsely say they are PETA and then proceed to show how they are hypocritical. It pretty much just goes downhill from there.
Most of the show involves Penn and Teller pointing to PETA’s advocacy of animal rights and rhetorically rolling their eyes and just calling it crazy. They never offer a serious argument against animal rights, and all of their cussing and handwaving is irrelevant without some reflection on the case for animal rights. For those of you that don’t know, there is a fairly rigorous philosophical argument in favor of animal rights than cannot simply be brushed of with a flippant remark from a libertarian magician.
Among the other hypocritical parts of this show, they showed a video PETA had obtained of animal abuse and then dismissed the abuse as already illegal, completely ignoring the fact that if PETA hadn’t obtained the video the practice would have continued.
It was a stupid show to make people that already agree with Penn and Teller feel better about themselves. Criticizing PETA isn’t particularly difficult, and it can be done intelligently.
I grew up till fifth grade doing duck and cover drills. I knew the Soviets could launch any day, and at that point, I was living more or less exactly where the fallout would cover after Manhattan was turned to ash.
I grew up knowing evacuation plans in case the nuclear plant not far away (Indian Point) went china syndrome.
I grew up where every few years, someone would escape from Sing Sing and start roaming the streets. And yes, that’s what ‘up the river’ means.
I grew up in a world where adults were never to be talked to, because they kidnapped children.
I grew up in a school system of conflict. I still have a knife scar here and there from one or two fights. Every few months, there was a bomb threat. Every few years, one of them was real.
Climate of peace my ass. Achille Lauro. Israel going boom randomly. Pan-Am Locherbie. Anyone who wasn’t expecting terrorist action wasn’t thinking straight. It just wasn’t organized.
Zhao, could you kickstart your old thread? We were busy deconstructing… or constructing… your philosophy on care of animals. I think we’d decided that ‘from first principles’ wasn’t that useful, as you can use logic to prove anything from first principles, true or not, depending on your starting points.
You dodged the issue quite neatly, but the priorities I refer to are not how one spends their time in advocacy, but simply on what people’s ranking of moral concerns are. The issue is more basic: it isn’t simply that some people have chosen stem-cells as their issue du-jour, it’s that they litterally don’t think the suffering and killing of animals is wrong (or anywhere near as wrong as stem cells) and yet do think the killing of stem cells or even fetuses is wrong. To me, that’s truly bizarre, and seems to miss the entire point of having a morality at all.
People that emotionalize and personalize stem cells are, in my opinion far more bizarre and comical than those that emotionalize and personalize animals. At least animals have feelings and emotions to begin with, even if they are far less like our own than they might seem and far less complex.
I take no certain position on this other than to note that it’s really pretty irrelevant to the question. Whether rights are inherent self-evident things we discover through reason or things we impose as legal protections that codify our moral values, it’s still deeply fucked up to look to stem cells before looking to animals when you are considering whether to grant something rights.
We have people in Congress right this very moment who believe that stem cells should be given rights but whom would laugh at the same being suggested for animals. All I’m saying is that something has gone deeply, fundamentally wrong with their moral compasses.
Like Will says, I think the moral thinking on animals is driven far more by simply a desire not to think about the issue or follow where we know the logic is going to go. But this is only made more clear by those who believe non-feeling beings require the same rights and protections that human individuals enjoy, passing right over a far vaster class of feeling beings that seem far more relevant to morality.
I’m assuming you mean the animal rights thread and not the PETA thread. I’d rather not start it back up until we find someone who believes in animal rights to defend it. Devil’s advocacy can only go so far.
Since stem cells can theoretically be coaxed into any particular cell or tissue, why not take some bovine stem cells and culture them into forming pure muscle tissue? It would be the tenderest veal around, have no skeevy connective tissue or blood vessels, would be a lot more efficient than feeding food to an entire cow, and sidestep all the ethical issues. Case closed, everybody wins.
And why stop there? You like blubber? You can have all the blubbery goodness you crave, and the whales can swim free. FREE!!! Beef? We can reduce global warming by make beef without the cow farts. Think of the millions of acres that would be freed up, and say goodbye to bovine spongiform encephalitis.
So what sort of hopes and dreams do veal calf normally have? :rolleyes:
The OP implies that one can’t care about both things, but that simply isn’t true. I don’t think we ought to eat veal and I don’t think we should do embryonic stem cell research until we’ve exhausted the possibilities cord-blood stem cells present. I’m not sure why you would think people would overwhelmingly tend to be concerned about one and not the other, especially given that both issues boil down to doing preverse things to the very young.
Where do you draw the line, once you start to expand the arena of life we should not eat? There are people who believe plants have feelings. Virtually everything we eat was alive at some point. Also, humans and our ancestral proto-humans have served as prey to animals. People who believe as you do display a bizarre ignorance of life that I find truly bewildering.
I am in lockstep with Apos regarding the necessity of setting moral priorities. Permit a quibble:
I agree. But I don’t think it’s unarguable. Anti-abortionists believe that first trimester fetuses have moral value. I disagree (for the reasons given by Apos), but I believe that is is possible to argue otherwise. Then again, I’m not sure I could do so without further thought.
Separately, I also find the arguments of PETA more plausible than those of the anti-abortionist. And I am (colloquially and roughly) anti-animal rights as well as a meat eater.
Local public radio is a lower priority than curbing weapons of mass destruction or finding a cure for AIDS.
That doesn’t imply, “Don’t support local public radio”. Rather, it means, “Don’t pretend that local public radio is more important than vital concern X, Y or Z.”
Opponents of stem cell research aren’t arguing that, “It raises troubling issues.” No, their contention has higher octane, along the lines of murder.
But there is an entirely different argument here, which would be, well, the one that springs to MY mind right away. If you NEED the fruits of stem cell research, then this all immediately stops being a fascinating philosophical issue. The other arguments will be dust in the wind. You will stop caring about them, because for you, this research is it. This is your one chance. This is your survival. This is your shot at normal life, at being able to walk again, at living without constant pain, at having normal vision (that one would be ME…) I would truly like to see someone whose life would be SAVED or vastly changed for the better by stem cell research argue AGAINST it. I’m not trying to be snippy; I really WOULD. I would like to know if ANYONE can keep making philosophical arguments when THEIR survival, THEIR life, is on the line. I might admire them, but I can’t do it, and I’m not going to feel guilty about it, either. I have suffered enough so that I’m just not going to do that. And I don’t think there are very many other people who could.
I agree with the OP, and note once again that PETA is discussed on these boards (and on the Internet) more than Amnesty International, Operation Rescue, the Humane Society of the United States, The Red Cross, and Habitat for Humanity combined.
They’re like 90% attention whores. If you don’t like them, quit giving them attention.
The ones within their capacity: the ability to long for their mothers, the ability to fear the ebb and flow of severity in their near constant maltreatment, etc.
I didn’t claim that it can’t be true. There are people that care about both. But they are vanishingly rare.
Again, my interest isn’t precisely in levels of concern (back to the activism issue again) but rather that when trying to consider what beings to extend rights to next, somehow people have their wires so crossed that they end up considering stem cells before they get to animals.
I didn’t say anything about where one should draw the line. What I said was that stem cells are clearly, unequivocally, way farther over the line than most animals. Liver flukes have more moral capacity than a stem cell.
This is not an argument, but an insult. Your sentances don’t even logically connect into any sort of point. I said nothing about “alive” being the sole or even the key criteria for something having moral capacities or it making sense to be concerned about their well-being.
What’s to argue? You have a very strange philosophy which could easily be extended to include plants by those who believe plants have feelings. Humans eat animals (including other humans when necessary) and animals eat us (when opportunity knocks). Too bad, too sad.
Absolutely–just like your strange philosophy could easily be extended to include plants by those who believe that plants are really just the Hardy Boys, cleverly disguised.
There’s the small fact that people who believe that plants have feelings are relying on spurious science. Facts carry weight in philosophical discussions, you know.
Nonsense. Your counter argument not only makes no sense whatsoever in relation to my argument, but it completely dodges the question at hand which is simply this: if you are going to claim that there is any meaning to morality, then you should have an account of to whom it applies and why it applies to them. Posturing about who eats who is not answering the question at all. I at least have given some account of why I think we have moral feelings and concerns and why we might apply them to particular beings and not others.
You on the other hand, have not contributed anything useful to that discussion other than to introduce an absurdity and then blame me for it. If people “believed” that rocks owned real estate that doesn’t mean that the government could start charging them property taxes. If plants did have feelings we might well then consider them. But I don’t think they do and neither do you. So you are simply being dishonest in bringing it up. Animals, on the other hand, we both agree DO have feelings and concerns. Stem cells, we again both agree, don’t.
Again, since you are apparently too stupid to catch on after the third go round so far, I’m not making a case for anyone having to consider the lives of animals to be special or deserving of protection. I’m instead making the case that it’s insane to be concerned about the well-being of stem cells when you aren’t concerned about the well-being of beings with far more capacity to feel and hurt and even worry about their fate.
The first sentence here is incorrect, at least as a blanket statement. Some animals may have something which we anthromorphosize into feelings and concerns. Your second sentence is indeed correct - we do agree on that.