I think you’re missing a distinction that I did make here. I said not a majority but a large super majority, and for this very reason. Event though at times a majority of people may have supported the following causes, I doubt 90% of the people in this country every supported slavery, or oppose gay rights to marry, or who thought those above statements should be banned (and as to the last, even if they did the 1st Amendment covers that one).
Yup, I caught that:
It still does not make sense to me to try to use an arbitrary percentage----whether 90%, 95%, 81.7%, or any other arbitrary number—to distinguish between moral issues that can be addressed in law and moral issues that have to remain private.
This is way out of line. Amarone was not equating slavery with hunting. In fact, he or she explicitly said so. He was demonstrating that your argument was illogical by applying it to another set of facts.
Hmmm. I understand what you’re saying. How about if I put it this way: Moral issue upon which the vast majority of the population agree are things that deserve to be codified as law, while moral issues upon which there is a large disagreement are subjective and should remain the business of each individual to determine for themselves?
Not sure that really helps—then we’re just stuck with the question “How big is a vast majority?”
I’m more comfortable drawing the distinction between public and private morality on the grounds of “compelling state interest”. If a moral issue has a significant impact on society, then it’s subject to legislation even if we don’t have “a vast majority” agreeing about it. On the other hand, if it’s confined to personal and private life, then it’s off-limits to legislation even if there’s 100% agreement.
Yes, there are gray areas about how you determine “compelling state interest”, but IMHO it’s still better than trying to establish a quantitative guideline like “vast majority”.
God you’re a fucking neanderthal moron. I never suggested that the need for meat had changed.
In fact, you’re making my point for me. Because you are correct that “the delivery method” has changed. And the fact that it has changed means that the vast majority of people in the United States don’t need to wander the forests killing animals for meat. Your argument stands up only if you equate raising beef cattle, hogs and chicken on farms with hunting.
What i personally think is moral is irrelevant to the argument. I was addressing not the morality of hunting, but your juvenile claim that the question of hunting for sport is not, in and of itself, a moral issue.
Exactly how much of the animal you eat (or don’t eat), and the relationship of this to morality, are irrelevant to my argument. You seem to assume that i’m trying to make my own argument against hunting here. I’m not. I was merely addressing the stupidity of your particular claims about whether or not hunting for sport is a topic that is susceptible to moral claims and arguments.
I never denied that morals exist on several levels. A rudimentary course in reading, once you extract your fat head from your arse, would have made that clear to your simple-minded self.
Let’s look at the implications of your idiocy more closely. You say:
So, is it your argument that, as long as enough people agree about something to pass a law about it, this is a societal moral and not an individual one?
What about drugs? We’ve passed laws that forbid drug use, and yet why should it be anyone else’s business if i want to toke up now and again? Why shouldn’t this be as personal a choice as, say, abortion or same sex marriage?
And you contradict yourself. In an earlier post, you say that sex, homosexuality, and marriage are issues of personal morality. Yet there are plenty of people who believe that we should pass laws against same sex marriage, and anti-same sex marriage initiatives passed on ballots in, i think, 11 states during the last federal election. If the rednecks of America manage to swing enough votes to pass laws against gay marriage, does that automatically remove the issue from the realm of “personal morality” and make it an issue of societal morality that gay folk are just gonna have to live with?
But your assertion of what constitute societal morals and what constitutes personal morals does not constitute any sort of logically coherent system. It’s a set of arbitrarily designed categorizations drawn up by you and you alone.
You said earlier that:
So i guess that in America around the period of the Civil War, the question of slavery was not a “truly…a moral issue.”
Maybe not, but around the time of the Civil War there’s also no way that anywhere close to 90% of the American population would have supported the abolition of slavery either. Hell, i’m not sure what the actual numbers are (or if they’re even knowable), but i’d be willing to bet that well under 90% of Northerners in 1860 would have called for the banning of slavery in the southern states. Many Northerners simply wanted to prevent the spread of slavery into new territories and states, and had no qualms about the already-existing slavery of the South.
So, if you didn’t have a supermajority arguing that something was wrong (which was your original argument, if you’ll remember), can it then be said that slavery back then was merely an issue of personal morals, something that no-one had the right to judge anyone else about?
Learn to read, dickwad.
Yes, they are judging them, and they are condemning them. But the word i used was “coercion.” There’s nothing wrong with disapproving of what other people do, and letting them know. But it’s a far cry from calling for them to be prevented from doing it.
And you accused me of authoritarian and dictatorial tendencies?
Say that a “vast majority” of Americans agree that drugs are bad and should be banned. Why should the fact that the majority agrees about this stop me from doing something that hurts no-one except myself?
And again we can bring up the issue of slavery. It’s certainly true that there was “large disagreement” over this issue in the antebellum years. Should slavery, then, have remained a “subjective” issue for “each individual to determine for themselves”?
Ever heard the concept of “tyranny of the majority”? Read some John Stuart Mill if you haven’t.
Huh?
So, the fact that our eyes are attracted to movement proves that we are genetically predisposed to hunting? By your logic, the eyes of non-hunting animals such as herbivores are not attracted to movement. And, as anyone who has hunted deer will know, this is far from the case. The slightest movement can be enough to send your quarry bounding off into the bush. I guess that deer must be predators, then?
Well, i thought that TwistofFate’s suggestion was tongue-in-cheek, but i could be wrong about that. Even if it wasn’t, he’s one person in this debate, and most others here—even those who find hunting morally problematic—have not called for it to be banned.
So statistically the odds are heavily *against * getting this permit? Interesting. It’s becoming clearer odds wise why daddy put his 8 year old daughter into play.
Unfortunately, some people aren’t intelligent enough to understand that concept.
Maybe. Nothing wrong with that.
I maintain that eating is a process of the killing. You are simply making a point of logical disconnect that you want people to adhere to out of some aesthetic sensibility you hold to. The term ‘joy’ is very nebulous. Some people enjoy being sad, some people enjoy being angry. There is nothing morally objectionable about a hunter feeling a sense of visceral satisfaction in the kill.
I tend to agree about trophy hunting as I said before, it seems kind of pointless and grotesque to me, but if that trophy was gained in the process of gathering food, then I don’t see anything wrong in taking pride in it. It’s not wasting life for the sake of wasting life, and then showcasing the carcass to point out that you wasted life just cuz you could. I think that visceral satisfaction is completely healthy in the case of food acquisition, and I totally support it, I think if it’s fun, then it should be fun. You don’t know the feeling that the person had when they shot the deer. Maybe they missed hunting season last year, and they had to tighten their budget until the next hunting season, and this year they got a big buck and get to have lots of barbeques, and can be a provider for their community. I don’t see what’s so amoral about having that satisfaction.
Erek
Yup. Sure do. they serve the exact same purpose.
And you still haven’t demonstrated how it is, on anything other than a personal level.
snort And you lecture me about my reading comprehension. Nowhere have I said “enough people agreeing about something to pass a law about it” is any sort of an indicator of weather something is moral or not
Gee, since I specifically used drug use as an example of something that wasn’t a moral issue for society as a whole but rather a matter of personal morals, I’d have to say that it should be. This is just sad. ElviL1ves sad. Attributing to someone something the opposite of what they have posted and then berating them for it is pathetic. I never thought I’d see the day you’d stoop to those levels.
And again you misrepresent what I’ve said. Shame on you.
Since slavery is a practice that denies one group of people their rights and freedoms, it never passes the test for being a moral issue in the first place, unless you are able to produce statistics showing that 9 out of 10 Americans supported slavery as a right and just institution. You can’t do it. Those conditions have never existed in America. Slavery was never a moral institution to begin with.
Wow, you actually did notice that I have been talking about a super majority then. Why all these straw men about recreational drug use and same sex marriage then? You’ve just demonstrated that you knew all along what I was talking about, why the smoke and mirrors? Could it be because you realize that you’re full of shit?
<redundant bullshit snipped>
Gee, maybe that concept is why I have taken great pains to make it clear that a simple majority has no right to determine anything for society. Just a thought.
And you have still to demonstrate that there is actually a logical difference between personal and societal morals in the ways that you arbitrarily conceive them.
Huh? You said, very specifically:
You draw, in these sentences, a direct link between societal morals and legislation. You say that some things are societal morals, things that we all agree are wrong, and that we pass laws about.
Have you, once again, resorted to the cowardly and dishonest tactic of lying about what you’ve said? I thought you would have realized by now the futility of doing this, given that we can actually go back and see your previous posts.
But you have made a point that you believe that societal morals are things on which a supermajority of the population agree. If someone took a poll and found that 90% of Americans supported the bans on drugs, would you not have to concede that this is not, in fact, a matter of personal morals?
If there are any low levels here, they’re the ones set by your stupidity. I’m just sorry that you can’t comprehend your own arguments, let alone anyone else’s.
I’ve misrepresented nothing. Address the issue, if you understand it, coward.
Huh? You’re just descending into complete dribbling idiocy.
While i completely agree that slavery was never a moral institution, your own emphasis on connecting societal morality with “supermajorities” makes your current position completely untenable. The fact that slavery was allowed to emerge and thrive in America suggests that there were, in fact, enough people supporting this institution.
I don’t have to produce statistic showing that 9 out of 10 Americans supported slavery. You’re the one making the claim about slavery not being a moral issue. And, as you’ve previously made clear, for something to banned as immoral the banning needs a supermajority. So the burden is on you to show that there was a supermajority supporting the abolition of slavery.
You are about the most dishonest person i’ve ever encountered on these boards. I was quite that i understood that you were arguing about a supermajority. But i was also clear that your argument had all the weight of a feather, and was simply a reflection of your own idiocies and biases.
Now i’m just laughing at you.
Mill’s tyranny of the majority was not just a “simple majority.” For Mill, and those who adopt a similar viewpoint, even a supermajority is not necessarily sufficient reason to ban or proscribe something. If you want to read what someone intelligent has to say about morality and its place in society, in contrast with your own drivel, i suggest you take a look at On Liberty, particularly the chapter “On the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual.”
Mhendo, go fuck yourself. I am tired of you continually misrepresenting my posts, and then like the shit eating dog you are, coming back and attacking me based upon the lies that you made up in the first place. You did say one thing correct, however, my posts are there for everyone to read. What I’ve said is clear and concise. Anyone who wants to know how I feel on these matters can read what I’ve written and see how wildly different that is from the shit that you claim I said.
Yes, they can. And you’re the one who will come out looking like the liar and coward that you are.
in your opinion
I think “satisfaction”, whether visceral or not, is a very different thing from actually taking enjoyment from the hunting and killing process. I can understand people gaining satisfaction from having provided for their families. In a more trivial example, I take satisfaction from the end-result of having mowed the lawn, but I do not enjoy the actual mowing itself. The people that I know that hunt (which includes all my male in-laws and my wife up until she met me) do not do so to provide for their families (they are all well-off). They do so because they enjoy it.
I don’t see anything amoral (or immoral, which is my accusation) about hunting to provide food. I repeat - it is killing for fun that I find objectionable.
Can someone clarify for me, please, what is meant by “killing for fun?” To me, the guys in Ye Olde Frontier days who rode the Iron Horse through the Great Plains taking potshots at buffalo from the caboose were “killing for fun”. The kills weren’t used. The hunters in “Bambi” firing at everything that moved were “killing for fun” (how much meat can there possibly be on a chipmunk?). The hunters I know kill for meat, either for themselves or the local food banks. They find hunting satisfying, but it’s more like, “Mmm. Clean shot, good food.” than “WOOHOOO!!! Didja see the size of the hole I blew in that sumbitch! His head’s gonna look raht purty up on my wall!”
In my case I am referring to the activity of hunting where the main purpose is enjoyment of the hunting itself. Yes, the dead animal may be eaten or its death may bring other benefit, e.g. population control, but the reason the person goes hunting is because the act of hunting is what they enjoy doing.
armarone I simply find your idea of some kind of objective guilt over the act of killing to be insipid. I don’t agree that it shouldn’t be fun to kill. I don’t think one should kill unecessarily, but if they enjoy the killing, then that’s fine.
Define “unnecessarily”. I agree with your statement, but I just think that when the primary motivation is enjoyment, then that does not make the killing “necessary”.
Yup. I get satisfaction in a kill. I enjoy the stalking, and the moment of the kill. I don’t enjoy the act of killing, for the sake of the act, but it would certainly be fair to say I get a certain amount of primal pleasure out of the accomplishment.
So I guess I enjoy killing.
Oooooooooo! I’m daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaangerous, and eeeeeeeeeeeevil!
:rolleyes:
You can’t possiblt understand unless you’ve been there, so hush.
Besides, how can you possibly think you’re not complicit in the killing, if you eat meat (do you eat meat)? Your money helps pay for the slaughtering of animals. You just don’t have to watch it. I personally think the world would be better off if more people did see the consequences of their choices. It’d make their appreciation for life more profound.