My girlfriend’s cat looks very much like the one in the photo, albeit shorter-haired, and is definitely not deaf. Next chance I get, I’ll try to see if she’s slightly deafer on her blue-eye side, though I don’t expect too much cooperation since she doesn’t really like me.
No, Curtis. That’s your logic. Remember? Here, let me give you a little reminder:
I see two issues with this as applies to the OP. First, as regards sentience, this is a dubious proposition for animals. If they’re intelligent enough for the concept of consent to be meaningful, then it should be possible to get consent. If they’re not intelligent enough to consent, then are they really sentient?
Secondly, who the hell cares? It’s not like we ask their consent before we spay or neuter them. Is spaying and neutering ethical? If so, then why is it we can remove their sex organs(doing all kinds of things to their biochemistry in the process) without their consent? It’s not like eating them, where we at least have a biological imperative of our own that we’re sacrificing them to fill. It’s not even the poor excuse of needing clothing, glue, or Jell-o made from them. We spay and neuter animals for our own convenience, nothing more. If I ever get kidnapped by space aliens and kept as a pet I’d much rather lick nutella off some alien’s junk for their pleasure than have my twig n berries chopped off for their convenience.
Enjoy,
Steven
Well then how would you determine morality?
Each person defines what is and isn’t moral, and lives his life accordingly. The issue at hand is different: that we should not legislate based on morality. Big can o’ worms, that.
Maybe that’s already happening but their society is so advanced that your primitive human mind can’t comprehend it.
Therefore murder should be legal since some don’t consider it immoral.
You’re almost there, but you need a semicolon instead of a period. Regard:
Murder should not be illegal since some don’t consider it immoral; it should be illegal because legislators have come to a consensus that murder is a detriment to society and deprives people of their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
True, certain individuals may come to this conclusion based on their personal moral code, but it is not necessary for everybody to agree that murder is morally wrong in order to agree that is needs to be outlawed.
It’s illegal to park on a traffic circle in my city. Why should that be? It’s certainly not immoral.
It poses a hazard to public safety.
Wait a tick… d’you suppose this “murder” stuff might do that too…? Gawrsh!
That is a moral argument as you would believe people having the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is a moral right.
Well, it’s a moral right with solid empirical evidence behind it, namely that the lives of people in societies that don’t embrace some form of LL and the P of H are worse in many ways, what with living in fear of being arrested by the secret police and whatnot. Would you trade your comfortable safe opportunity-rich life in what I assume in the U.S. for citizenship in Burma?
Not really. I want to live in a society that guarantees life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, because I will be happier, freer, and less dead than in a society that doesn’t. Therefore, it’s entirely in my best interest to support laws that help promote those things.
Now, how does this apply to a law against dog-fucking, which is most assuredly something that I don’t want to engage in? Surely, since being able to fuck a dog does not increase my personal happiness, I should have no problem with a law against it, right? Except, there are things that I do want to do, which other people don’t want to do. And if they passed laws telling me I couldn’t do those things, well, I’d be pretty pissed, wouldn’t I? How do I prevent them from passing laws against things I like, that they don’t? One way of doing this is to point out that just about everyone has an interest of some sort that’s not particularly mainstream, and that if we pursue a social policy of banning things we don’t like as individuals, simply because we don’t like them, then sooner or later, everyone is going to get bitten in the ass. A better standard, I think, is asking, “Who is harmed by this action?” Beastiality is certainly an unsavory activity, and one that I find repulsive on many levels. But is anyone harmed by it? Not that I can see - not even the animal, by the standards we established as acceptable for the treatment of animals in our society. If no one is being harmed by this, then the state has no business stepping in and telling people they can’t do it. This applies to everything from having sex with a goat, to playing violent video games, to worshiping Allah - all activities that are enjoyed by a minority of the population, viewed with disdain by some percentage of the mainstream, and yet, ultimately cause no direct harm to anyone else.
One guy in my fraternity used the juice from a can of tuna, and his cat. In case you ran out of peanut butter, I guess.
I still think that liberty and happiness are things that people can disagree on. Sure, you’ve been indoctrinated into vowing for freedom, but lots of others would want to give that up for safety. Yet others would want to give up safety for freedom.
For example, you are essentially arguing that you want to take away people’s freedom to live in the society that they want – a society free of dogfucking. Seeing or knowing that people fuck dogs makes them sad. So even here, freedom and happiness are relative moral concepts.
We’re not talking about safety versus freedom, though. This argument is specifically tailored to activities which harm no one, but are considered distasteful by some segment of the population. It also assumes a basic acceptance of Enlightenment ideals - this argument is not going to get any traction with a Wahabbist fundamentalist, for example. But I don’t think anyone in this thread is a militant religious fanatic. I’m pretty sure we’re all from North America or Western Europe in this thread, so we’ve all received more or less the same “indoctrination” in the concept of the value of liberty. We all agree that liberty is a good thing. If someone does not accept that premise, then we need to address that disagreement on a broader level, but that’s well beyond the scope of this thread.
Yes, of course. That’s a fundamental part of my argument, which is that if you want to live in a free society, you have to accept that some people are going to be free to do things you don’t like. Assuming we are all agreed on that premise, how do we determine which things we don’t like are acceptable in a free society, and which things are unacceptable? I’m proposing simple harm as that standard. If someone is doing something that does not harm anyone else, they should be allowed to do that. If you want to define “harm” as “being in a society where people do things you don’t like,” then you’ve invalidated the premise of a free society, because now you’re talking about a society where people can only do things you approve of. If you want to argue for that sort of society, that’s fine, but as I said above, that’s a much larger issue than what is at stake in this thread.
Hey remember Old Scratch? Only in this case, the dog was on the receiving end…
Oh my, I never realised that not playing games was the cure for debilitating diseases! :dubious:
Maybe I’m being contrarian, but people routinely pass laws against things which they merely don’t like. And I wouldn’t be so quick to take away their right to do it.
Look, if you start rationalizing everything about human culture, start cut away everything that can’t be justified by some reasoned-through axioms, what will you get? NOTHING
Though I can’t prove it, I’m pretty sure that even your axioms will melt away under enough Vulcan analysis.
I can’t help but wonder if lying in bed playing wow might be as much a CAUSE as a result of muscular dystrophy.
I’m not pulling this out of my ass, although the truth of it must be bleedin’ obvious common sense to anyone not deluded by their own addictions. From wikipedia re Muscular Dystrophy:
Who said anything about taking away people’s rights to pass laws?
I don’t know what you’re trying to say here.
Or here, either.
A) No one said anything about muscular dystrophy. While that certainly might be what the (possibly apocryphal) girl had, it’s hardly the only muscular disorder out there.
B) No, playing video games is not, in any rational sense of the word, the “cause” of muscular dystrophy. It’s not be an effective treatment for the disease, obviously, but taking that very short, second hand (at best!) description, and assuming from it that she was not taking any sort of therapy is a really astoundingly dumb thing to do.