I just wanted to say “Thank you” to all for coming in and commenting. I’m not much of a weekend poster, so I apologize for the lateness of my replies.
So it seems the most popular idea is based in morality.
Regarding the guilt aspect, I’d like to say that I see no hypocrisy in killing animals for food. Torturing an animal for fun is different from killing it for meat. Why? The outcome of the said torture is pain and suffering for the sake of enjoying pain and suffering. The outcome of killing an animal for meat is lunch.
To answer some other points:
Beeblebrox asks “Why ask why?”
We seem to be the only predator/carnivore/what-have-you that is concerned with whether or not our prey feels pain or suffering before making the transition from frolicking antelope to lunch. I presume this has to do with our “elevated” sense of self. I was interested in what others would say.
msmith457 says
Yes, but if I were to be eaten by a shark or lion or crocodile, would the animal care that I was alive and kicking and screaming and feeling pain and terror? Or would it eat? How does my preference relate to the question at hand? Are you saying that I should not skin a cow alive because I would not like being skinned alive? If that’s the case, should I also not eat cows since I would not like to be eaten? What is the reasoning behind your “Do unto others…” philosophy?
Deb2world
Most of your post had nothing to do with the question I asked, specifically “Why is there a difference?” I don’t know where you got your serial-killer analogy, as I didn’t suggest we take up live-cow-skinning as a hobby. I also don’t seem to recall suggesting that the difference does not exist. While it’s often construed in this way, merely asking “Why” something exists does not necessarily imply that it should not exist.
So we’ll accept that skinning and butchering a live cow constitutes “unneccessary suffering”, but where do you draw the line? One could argue that it’s all unnecessary, as we don’t absolutely require meat for survival. Would you say that I’m not “morally stable” if I enjoy steak, as it’s not necessary? Or am I OK because I’m removed from the actual killing process? Is a hunter not “morally stable” because he is willing to personally inflict pain and suffering onto animals by shooting them? At what point does ones participation in the death of a living creature degenerate into moral instability?
Sure, like saying we care for animals but kill them anyway. It isn’t that much of a stretch.
Well, I think the matter of “necessity” may be in dispute. It is my understanding that it is possible for humans to live on plant matter alone, given a sufficiently varied assortment of plant matter to choose from.
In those examples we aren’t professing something then turning our back on it. “Hate” as an emotion doesn’t imply a desire to kill someone. “Fear” is a varied emotion. And even if it weren’t, climbing a ladder woulndn’t imply hypocracy, for you may certainly be scared as you climb each rung of the ladder. Much like one might feel guilty about killing an animal even though one would justify it by indicating its death as necessary for your survival. And not just its death, really, but the actual act of killing it.
You certianly can. But without admitting the subordination of animals period I find that the argument is lacking. You are welcome to develop it, however.
There isn’t any. they are subordinate. This is the crucial comment, IMO.
(Warning, joke approaching)
Hey…are you asking me out here???
Work on buggering? Well, if she’s willing…
(OK, joke is over)
Probably.
Certainly, once we’ve admitted that other creatures are subordinated to us in some way. While it would certainly distress me to see a guy whacked out on PCP trying to kill you, I think we can agree that the desire I would feel to stop the event from happening would pale in comparison to what I would feel had the whacko been attacking me.
Certainly it is, but I think it is worded wrong. Really, I think it should say that feeling something is wrong is the reason one might apply to decide to not torture an entity. Guilt would come from doing that act anyway.
However, even might want to make her own case.
And in all circumstances given above you would be making a moral decision on which course of action is wrong. should you perform the wrong action anyway, you would feel guilt. On the other hand, perhaps your morals don’t really dictate so explicitely what the preferred course of action would be. Couldn’t we then find that we do in fact feel a little guilty when we watch a cow get butchered or plugged in the head (that is, couldn’t there be some people this happens to— a not-so-all-inclusive “we”) and in hindsight realize that we shouldn’t kill animals this way?
No no no. It isn’t mutually exclusive of compassion. It is a necessary condition for violating whatever rights we give them, and for finding that our compassion isn’t really what dictates the situation exclusively.
Are you telling me I’m painting my argument pink???
Sharks and lions incapable of showing compassion. Even if they could, they don’t have the means of instantly killing their prey (short of biting their heads off, which is not always practical).
It has not really a matter of ‘doing onto others…’. It has to do with assuming that having one’s skin removed feels as painful for the cow as it would for us. Therefore, since we are going to kill the cow for food and sneakers anyway, we mind as well give it the courtesy of not torturing it.
I don’t know it comes from an ‘elevated sense of self’, whatever that means. But I think that humans have a greater ability to empethize than most animals. As far as I know, a shark doesn’t think about the prey in the sense of ‘I’ll try to kill this walrus quickly so it doesn’t suffer’. If they think anything at all its ‘I’m hungry. Walrus=food’.
Killing an animal can be, but is not always an indicator of emotional/psychological instability (I don’t think there is actually such thing as moral instability). Much in the same way a headache can be, but is not always, an indicator of a brain tumor. Too much killing can also lead to emotional instability.
Example:
There is an article in the July issue of GQ (the one with Julliane Moore on the cover) about the epidemic of hoof and mouth disease in British cows. Because of the panic caused by this disease (which is harmless to humans and the equivalent of getting a cold and rash for cows) the British government has put down millions of head of cattle. There are two takeaways from the article that I feel were relevent to this topic:
Many of the farmers, even though many of the cows would have been taken to slaughter anyway, form an emotional bond with their herds. They can pick their cattle out of a heard of cattle and were very distraught by having their herds wiped out.
Killing millions of cows, throwing them into mass graves, and burning the bodies takes a psychological toll on the cattle inspectors. There was even an incident where one of them walked up to another inspector and without a word shot him in the head with his bolt-gun (the device they use to kill the cows. I don’t know how it works).
To me that is one hell of a stretch. In what way does my stating that I feel compassion for an animal preclude me from killing it. What belief, feeling or virtue am I professing that I don’t have? If I genuinely do feel compassion then stating that there is any hypocrisy involved is simply the incorrect use of an emotive term. Not a great debating tactic. That’s a huge stretch.
Incorrect. Given a massive expenditure of energy people in first world countries can survive solely on plant matter and microbial dietary supplements. This is not an option on the third world.
the second flaw is that as the world stands it is impossible to feed even a samll raction of the population without the use of nematicides, insecticides, acaricides, rodenticides and in many cases simple shooting of birds and mammals. I can quite easily defend the statement that we must kill animals to survive. Now if you want to discuss the relative values and suffering levels of a locust poisoned with bendiocarb versus a steer shot with a pneumatic hammer then we can open another thread.
Exactly. Hate is a feeling of hostility, yet I don’t need to act on that hostility to it’s ultimate conclusion (murder) at the expense of all other considerations. Compassion is an understanding of and desire to end suffering, yet I don’t need to act on that desire to it’s ultimate conclusion (freeing my food supply) at the expense of all other considerations.
Compassion is a varied emotion. And even if it weren’t, killing a beast wouldn’t imply hypocrisy for you may certainly understand an animal’s pain as you load the gun.
You are doing a brilliant job of arguing my case heer erislover. The whole pint of my analogies is not that I believed they should be held up as example of hypocrisy. Quite the opposite, they are so ludicrously not hypocritical so as to paint sven’s argument in it’s true light. sven stated that " our society has compassion towards animals, but not enough to make us forgo our steaks and baseball gloves, so instead of acknowledging our hypocrisy…". Notice the logical fallacy here? We feel an emotion (compassion) but not sufficiently so to allow it to over-ride all other concerns, and must therefore acknowledge that we are professing a feeling we do not have. As your above ladder analogy makes o clear it is possible to feel an emotion, yet not allow it to override all other concerns. this being he case sven’s assertion is groundless unless she is able to provide some evidence for believing that this must be so in this case.
You appear to have missed the whole thrust of my argument here. If you re-read the thread you will notice that this particular argument is aimed squarely at sven’s assertion that if we feel compassion, yet kill despite this, we are hypocrites. Whether we additionally feel guilt, joy, anger or dizzy is irrelevant. We never professed a feeling we didn’t have. Until someone can provide some sort of logical link that fill the gap in this argument of sven’s “1)we feel an emotion :- 2)it is overridden by other concerns 3)??? 4)We must acknowledge hypocrisy” I think I can safely say it is totally unsupported and unsupportable.
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We seem to be in total agreement on this at least. If I feel compassion, yet am still able to kill an animal because I accept it’s right to life is insubordinate to my own, where is the hypocrisy? What emotion am I professing that I do not feel?
There isn’t any. they are subordinate. This is the crucial comment, IMO.
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Agreed completely. Then where exactly is the hypocrisy?
Goddammit. Why don’t you people understand perfectly simple ‘Strine’
It seems to me erislover that you have predicated your entire argument upon the assumption that those who oppose flaying animals alive aren’t accepting that animals are subordinate. I don’t think anyone has done that. It may never have been stated by anyone other than me, but I’m going to say right now that it is implicit in all the statements given in this thread and in legislation. If we can accept that as a truism, then would you accept the following statement: “Suggesting those who wish not to torture animals in order to eat them are hypocritical is groundless and illogical” If the answer is no could you please provide your grounds and logic in light of your statement that " There isn’t any." (Yeah, I know this is a loaded question but I just want to be certain that we agree on this)
[quote]
Nor is feeling guilt the only reason why one might decide not to torture said entity.
/
Nope, I’m just hoping sitting on a horse will make my arguments more convincing.
Beelzebubba
I can’t speak for others, but I’m saying exactly that.
We accept that animal’s rights are to some degree subordinate and this in and of itself justifies killing them to feed ourselves. If we didn’t need to kill to survive you may have an argument against killing animals at all on the basis of your not enjoying it. However we have to accept something is going to die for my dinner. Similarly we may accept a prisoner’s rights are subordinate to that of lawful citizens and so we may morally imprison her. That however does not mean that we shut off all empathy and treat the prisoner how we damn well please, starving her and locking her in a solitary 8’ x3’ cell because it’s convenient. Our empathy tells us that this is wrong even if it is easier. We don’t do this to her because we wouldn’t want to be treated that way. Acknowledging that something has rights and feels pain does not mean that we have to apply the ‘do unto others’ rule to the level of insanity. Our society, and indeed the human brain, functions on levels of relative moral values. It does mean that we endeavour to accord said entity whatever rights we reasonably can while still acknowledging its necessarily subordinate stature
And this would have legs, except that we do need to kill animals to survive and it becomes really morally vague in my mind if we say we can kill 2000 mice to extract gluten protein from wheat, but not 1 steer to extract muscle protein.
I guess that could be calculated by a formula along the lines of:
MD = RS- RN
Where
MD= moral damage
RN = necessity
RS= suffering
If something scores a 100 on your Sufferometer, say boiling a human alive and scores a 2 on your Necessiometer, say doing it for shits and giggles then the moral damage is 98 and you’re a pretty fucked up individual. If it scores a 2 on your sufferometer (clean head shot to a solitary deer that never knew you were there) and scores a 98 on your Necessiometer (feeding starving children who will absolutely die without this meal) them it scores a -96 and you’re morally well clear. If you score a positive it’s probably morally degrading. Obviously moral necessity and perceptions of suffering will vary with individual, but I think that we’d all agree that skinning an animal alive rates well over 80 on the Sufferometer. You’d have to do some work to justify to me or any other sane person that anything short of feeding a starving person could necessitate that. Considering it is only being done out of laziness or greed , there being no reason not to cut the beast’s throat or knock it out, it rates a whopping 4 on my Necessiometer giving a score of 76. Anyone doing this is one sick mofo. Considering I have to kill something to eat I personally rate killing a steer in a painless manner about 25 on my Sufferometer, largely due to the stress of transport and the smell of blood on the kill floor. I rate having to eat beef about 40 on my Necessiometer, largely because I know I need to eat something and the alternative would cost as many lives. Gives me a morality score of 15. Not something to be encouraged perhaps, but something I can do with a clear conscience. If someone could demonstrate to me that I could eat other foods with 0 animal deaths then perhaps I’d re-evaluate.
I think everyone does these types of calculations every day whether we realise it or not.
Whew, allow me:
PREVIEW. (like I’ve never made a coding error or 7 in my SDMB life)
A few things first.
Well, I suppose that it hinges on the idea that killing is not a compassionate act. YMMV, though.
Irrelevant. It is possible for a person to survive without killing animals. I agree, though, that not everyone can live like this. Yet.
Hopefully she’ll have better luck than I. But then, I’m not great at arguing points I don’t agree with.
Nah, I haven’t missed it. I think the best illustration is this (to support your side):
We couldn’t feel guilt if we didn’t feel it was wrong. We couldn’t feel it was wrong if we didn’t have concern for them in some way. So, impossible to be hypocritical once we’ve felt guilt over the act. QED. IMO. YMMV. Not available at all locations…err, oops.
I hope I haven’t. I wanted to show that accepting that animals are subordinate is a sure-fire way to avoid guilt and give them rights at the same time. Indeed, since we can certainly give animals whatever rights we want, we might consider “freedom from not being flayed” a right, though we certainly wouldn’t put them on welfare (if we’ve accepted subordination). Even if we hadn’t accepted that animals are worth less than people I suppose one could develop an idea about animals rights that doesn’t include hypocracy. I’m just not sure I can think of how, is my point.
This is purely hypothetical. I demonstrated above that, in a morally ambiguous situation, one person performs an act. Afterwards, this person feels guilty about this act. Thus, this person concludes that the act must have been wrong in hindsight. In this case, the guilt originated the “wrongness.”
At any rate, I tried to defend sven’s point (even though I disagree). This has clearly not been possible to do (for me). I eagerly await her attempt.
Sorry about that. The boards were so slow today that I honestly forgot that I hadn’t previewed. Don’t normally have that problem down here.
Even if it isn’t a compassionate act, so long as we genuinely feel compassion the label hypocrite cannot be applied. Hitting someone cannot be considered a compassionate act. Does that mean that any parent who has ever hit their child is a hypocrite for claiming compassion? It seems to me they genuinely feel compassion but allow it to be over-ridden by a sense of duty. This is not hypocrisy.
Can we at least agree that the definition of hypocrisy I posted is the one we’re using? Or could you post whichever one you would prefer to use.
Agreed. We then get into the argument about whether it is more morally just to condemn some else to death because I waste resources that could have been used by them. But that’s another argument entirely. Suffice it to say I believe, and can argue quite strongly, that if I don’t kill I or someone else will die. We, people, mankind, the human race, H. sapiens as a species, must kill to survive.
You’ve done a bloody good job so far.
Errant logic and dangeously close to a strawman. It is impossible to be hypocritical so long as we genuinely feel as we profess to feel. We do not need to feel guilt not to be hypocritical. We only need to feel compassion.
All else is irrelevant unless one can somehow support the notion that guilt is an unavoidable part of compassion. I don’t feel that is so. I certainly feel compassion for my dog, but I’ve never felt a moments guilt for justly disciplining it. I don’t think that makes me a hypocrite.
It may well be imposible to be hypocritical once we’ve felt guilt, but that doesn’t mean guilt is the sole, or indeed primary, reason people who opose torture aren’t hypocrites.
It may well be impossible to vote once we’ve served a jail term, but that doesn’t mean serving a jail term is the sole, or indeed primary, reason people don’t vote. If someone asked why peole don’t vote I certainly coldn’t justifiably say “It is because we have all served jail terms”.
I fail to see any logic here that comes close to justifying the concept that the only reason people oppose the torture of animals is out of guilt.
True, but how does this in any way justify the notion that people only oppose animal torture because of guilt and shame. Or justify that anyone who does oppose torture is a hypocrite. We accept lawbreakers as subordinate and use this to avoid guilt and give them rights at the same time. How does this make us hypocrites if I believe we shouldn’t torture prisoners? And what sort of sicko only refrains from torturing prisoners because he wants to avoid feelings of guilt? I fail to see any logical connection between your above post and my dispute with svens statements.
Now I’m playing devils advocate, since we both accept that animals are subordinate.
It’s quite easy to do the above. So long as one does not profess feelings one doesn’t have one is not a hypocrite. If I believe animals have all the rights of people, I feel compassion for them, and then kill one to save my life I may be a murderer, I may feel guilt, I may even change my POV, but I am not hypocritical so long as I genuinely felt as I professed to feel.
Quite true, but this does not validate the concept that guilt is the sole reason for not wanting to commit acts of torture. I could equally easily demonstrate situations where a person decides something is wrong because he reads it in the “Bhagavad ghita”." . That does not mean that in response to the question "Why do people object to torturing cattle’ I can justify a statement like “It is because we read it in the “Bhagavad ghita”.” and “we have a code of values regarding animal cruelty that allows us to remain good Hindus in the eyes of Krishna and to continue without hurting our chances of attaining Nirvana.”
This may be true in a very limited number of cases (almost certainly is in fact), but I beleive that most Hindus know intuitively that torture is wrong and, more importantly, the legistlation states this. To suggest that all people refrain form torture because of Hindu principals is patent nonsense, as is saying that all people do so out of guilt.
As do I.
You gave it a damn good shot BTW. Good debating you.
Really, we are talking about a matter that is clearly up to personal interpretation of events. You say you feel compassion for animals. I see you punch a hole in a cow’s head. I begin to question whether or not you really feel compassion, or merely say that in order to get me, Mr.PETA, off your back. Somewhere in the objective world of subjective perception (heh) we must come to a resolution about what is actually going on. You will know in your heart that you are certainly not a hypocrite; there is also evidence that you are a hypocrite, depending on how any one individual understands “compassion.”
Make it so, Number One.
Overall, there must be killing. Any particular individual can get away without ever killing provided that there are others who are willing to. Honestly, I’ve never killed an animal in my life.
Yeah, I know. What I’m saying is that once you’ve admitted a person feels guilt you know that they feel compassion.
It isn’t unavoidable since we both agree that neither of us feel guilty and both of us condone the killing of animals. But just because A doesn’t imply B we can’t automatically assume that B doesn’t imply A as well. I think it does. I may need to develop the point more, but I think that the very act of feeling guilty betrays (that is, demonstrates) a feeling of compassion, albeit in hindsight.
It can’t. You’re better than a dog. I can’t do anything about “implied hypocracy” until we forego that bit of understanding.
I admit it isn’t quite as obvious as I first thought. I think I did show that it can be true in the hindsight case, where the person found it wrong after the act through a feeling of guilt. I cannot make the claim stick in the general case, though.
Because there isn’t one, and wasn’t meant to be.
From this point on, it is presumed that I am attempting to argue even’s perspective exclusively…
Easier said than done. Again, I would suggest that to you, who knows your feelings, it seems as obvious as a head wound. The rest of us, however, don’t have that luxury. It seems quite obvious, from the simple act of killing an animal, that you aren’t quite as compassionate as we thought originally. We have no special glasses which can show us you aren’t, in fact, a hypocrite. It is entirely possible that anyone who would kill an animal even in the face of saying they felt compassion for it may well want to torture them as well. This conclusion is not one of necessity, it is merely another possiblility based on observation and analogy to compassion among humans [note: remember, we don’t have the subordination principle to fall back on]. Quite simply we have two pieces of evidence presented before us which are, in many ways, contradictory. Our impression of one of them may be, and probably must be, wrong.
Out of necessity you killed? I’ve never killed. Do you have special needs?
Spanking a child doesn’t give way to a lck of compassion? Certainly, but we are spanking the child in an attempt to make him better. Killing an animal does not accomplish this at all.
[Man, I got [next to] nothing. After I said the above about guilt implying compassion in some sense, and therefore removing the chance for hypocracy, I can’t see around it.]
Though I appreciate your mention of religious-style morality, I am not sure I can see that they are seperate from the guilt-feeling. If I may make an analogy… do we not cut ourselves because we know it is bad for us or because it hurts? While I admit, somewhat sheepishly, that this is a false dichotomy I do still want it to illustrate a point. Irrelevant of how we got our morals, part of having them (IMO) is that to act against them produces a bad feeling, ie-guilt. We don’t like feeling bad, and this is motivation to avoid bad behavior.
Actually, let me restate what I am defending here, then (in the part after the *****). Not that we are hypocrites; I have convinced myself otherwise of that. But, that guilt is indeed a motivator to avoid behavior based on moral judgements. How primary of a motivator is definitely a question, but I don’t think that question can be answered in the general case since so many different ideas about morality may have so many different motivators. Shit, in fact, hedonism is a prime example of a moral system which doesn’t use guilt (let’s say negative reinforcement) as a motivator, and the hedonist would refrain from killing or torturing animals (if he chose to do so because it didn’t please him, and so was pretty much a pointless act.
I am close to giving up even trying. This exersize is fast-approaching futility.
Wow erislover. I could not ask for a more ardent yet ambivilent champion.
It is established that we are a little squeamish about killing animals for food. Take a look at the packaged meat at the supermarket. It is packaged to look like it never came from an animal. Or look at how many vegetarians were converted by a tour of a slaughterhouse (I personally know quite a few). I would even venture to say that our culture would prefer not to think about the animals that it gets its meat from.
We are not so squeamish that we do not stop killing animals for food. I do not believe your arguments that we absolutely need to. There are vegans who eat solely organic food. There is a religious sect that wears hospital masks to avoid accidently inhaling bugs. And, there are countless casual vegetarians around the world. Despite what Gaspode thinks, most of the third world is largley involuntarily vegetarian because meat takes a lot of resources to produce. Going to a non-animal-killing diet may require a few ajustments (like population control on our part), but it is certainly doable, and would be done if we were more strongly commited to the cause (and I have no opinion either way if wether we should or should not).
So, why is killing animals acceptable. Is it because that is the natural way (then why isn’t humping everything in sight acceptable? it certainly is natural)? Is it because we don’t mind killing them (invite your aunt to a slaughterhouse tour and see if she accepts)? Or is it, as I suspect, that we simply don’t want to do without our meat. Nothing wrong with that.
So how do you propose that we on such a regular basis do something so distasteful in order to get something that we don’t truely need? Surely there is at least some bad feelings that needs to be dealt with so that we can eat our hamburger in peace and get on with our day.
I am nothing if not consistent…er, not not consistent… er…
Hmmm. Interesting idea. But then, isn’t yogurt packaged the same way? To look like it doesn’t come from bacteria? Hmmm, and for the same reason. I’d love to hear a theory or two about head cheese, sweatbreads, or blue cheese dressing… however, the question then becomes: what food exactly is packaged to represent where it is from?
Well, we mostly don’t actively participate in the act of getting meat from the animal, sure.
I don’t know about this (not disagreeing, just saying I can’t agree or disagree).
I don’t think that can be disputed. I’m not sure we’d need population control either, but it would require both an attitude change and a shift in food production. I seem to remember that converting grazelands to farmlands would increase the amount of food produced. No cite for that, though.
Boy, I’m getting hit on all over the place!
Agreed.
Err. I don’t know that it is “so distasteful.”
Ehhh, maybe some bad feelings for some people, but clearly there are some people who don’t feel bad about it at all. Hunters, butchers, and probably even people who like rare steaks. And, as testimony portrays, gaspode and I.
Why is this conversation reminding me of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe? If I ever end up in CA again I’ll buy you a burger
No, no, no. This is where the problem is coming from. Having accepted the definition I posted there can’t be any room for asking the child. What the child believes is totally irrelevant to the truth. So long as I genuinely feel compassion for my son I can hit him and not be hypocritical. That is simple fact. Any other interpretation goes against the distionary definition. Now you may say that no-one can ever know how how I feel towards my (hypothetical) son, so I may be hypocritical. That is fair enough but considering that the majority of parents discilpline their children you would need to demonstrate that the majority of parents don’t feel compassion towards their children. If this isn’t the case (and I think we both know it isn’t) then the concept that performing an inherently incompassionate act requires requires hypocrisy is an obviously flawed one. Therefore any statement to the effect that all people who oppose animal torture are hypocrites is likewise flawed when based on this line of reasoning.
No, there is no ‘evidence’. That is the whole problem with this line of argument. Any evidence would have to be predicated on knowing that I don’t feel as I profess. Not only is their no way of obtaining this evidence, but we have both given numerous examples of where feeling an emotion does not mean that we can’t act counter to it, as in your ladder example above. We’re back where we started. You say you feel fear of heights. I see you climb a ladder. I begin to question whether or not you really feel fear, or merely say that in order to get out of cleaning out the gutters. No of course I don’t. I know people can override their emotions for the greater good. We don’t have any evidence for or against your stated emotional state, but experience tells us that ther is no raeson to disbelieve this.
How about "You say you feel compassion for animals. I see you hit your dog because it chews up your shoes. I begin to question whether or not you really feel compassion, or merely say that in order to get me, Mr.PETA, off your back. Of course I don’t. I acknowledge that the two (emotion and act) are not mutually exclusive.We don’t have any evidence for or against your stated emotional state, but experience tells us that ther is no raeson to disbelieve this.
Or "You say you feel compassion for animals. I see you trap a mouse becasue it shits in your breadbin. I begin to question whether or not you really feel compassion, or merely say that in order to get me, Mr.PETA, off your back. No I don’t. In none of these examples is any normal person going seriously to question that the person feels the emotions stated. We have no evidence, the act goes against the emotion but as we have demonstarted time and again in this thread one can over-ride an emotion for the greater good wihtout being hypocritical.
That is perfectly true, but I fail to see the relevance of this to the argument. Those who do kill do must do so in order that some person somewhere does not die. A human life is saved wheteher it be the slaughterman’s or the life of someone he never met in Somalia. If we accept human life has priority then this is all the justification we need.
Never sprayed a fly or cockroach, never poisoned or trapped a rat or a mouse, never squashed a mosquito? Man I’ve gotta move out of the tropics.
And this argument is as flawed as the one from whish it flowed. How are we able to determine the emotion of guilt with any more accuracy than we can determine the emotion of compassion? If you can’t then why not just simplify thinhs and say “once you’ve admitted a person feels compassion you know that they feel compassion”. You’re just shunting the problem downstream, and I’m afraid it really is turtles all the way down.
I can’t see how this can be developed. This is a clear case of a logical paradox thus:
A)We can never determine what someone’s emotions are.(goto B)
B) Hypocrisy is professing emotions we don’t feel. (goto C)
C)Carrying out acts that run contra to a professed emotional state may imply hypocrisy. (goto D)
D)In order to disprove such implied hypocrisy all we need to do is find some evidence that the emotion is genuinely felt but overridden. (goto E)
E)Evidence that an emotion is felt but overridden can be obtained if we can only determine that a person is feeling a secondary emotion that could result from combining the acts from (C) with said primary emotion. (goto A)
And therefore this particular line of defence of sven’s argument can not be advanced. Her argument is groundless because the people referred to in the OP understand that aniamls are less important than people. The statement that all people who aoopose torture are hypocrites apparently hinges on the fact thata ll people who oppose torture believe that they are no better than cattle. Since this is clearly nonsense the argument is equally nonsensical. Case closed I think.
Which is exactly what my religious argument was intended to demonstrate. It may be true in some cases (we have no evidence of course) but to make the blanket statement that “It is because we feel ashamed” is utter rubbish. As you said it cannot be made to stick.
And that is the telling phrase. We have already acknowledged levels of emotional commitment. No-one ever said as compassionate as possible, or compassioante to the maximum limits of human emotion. We just said compassion. Again we have a logical paradox. If you can’t know that I felt an emotion in the first place how can you hope to determine the level of that emotion? We have no initial level of compassion to use as a standard and so that sentence must be either rephrased as “It seems quite obvious, from the simple act of killing an animal, that you aren’t ** compassionate” or discarded.
If it’s discared then the line of argument terminates.
If not then we’re now right back to the original argument that feeling an emotion necessitates letting it over-ride all other considerations. Since we both acknowledge that this isn’t the case the above conclusion isn’t obvious at all. The re-phrasing is simply a restatement of the original assertion and is about as justifiable as saying “It seems quite obvious, from the simple act of killing a homicidal maniac on PCP who has stabbed you 16 times with a blunt spoon, that you aren’t ** compassionate” Would you like to then argue that anyone feeling compassion for a prisoner is hypocritical because they imprison him? It seems at least equally obvious from the simple act of incarceration and handcufiing, that they aren’t compassionate"
This is far from obvious to me, from your above posts it is far from obvious to you. I think it is far from obvious to anyone.
And without said glasses we can’t determine a level of compassion so this whole line of reaosning becomes hinged on a pre-supposition of obtaining said glasses. SInce this is obviously faulty logic the line of argument is invalid.
Of course it’s possible.
It is entirely possible that anyone who would spank a child even in the face of saying they felt compassion for it may well want to torture them as well.
It is entirely possible that any police officer who would use a trucheon attackers even in the face of saying they felt compassion for them may well want to torture them as well.
It is entirely possible that anyone who would kill a homicidal maniac on PCP even in the face of saying they felt compassion for him may well want to torture him as well.
It is entirely possible that anyone who would climb a ladder, even in the face of saying they felt fear of it may well want to commit suicide by leaping of the tower bridge as well.
You can see the obvious flaws in this argument can’t you.
Something may be possible but that doesn’t constitute evidence of its existence.
2)The two acts, painless death and torture are in no way related. The whole successs of this argument will depend upon demonstrating that compassion excludes killing as strongly as it does torture . What you are doing here is pre-supposing that this is the case: “If you can kill for a given reason you can torture for it just as easily” is what you are implying. This is not only unproven, but contrary to everything we know about psychology and all our experience teaches us. Most people kill mice for eating their food. Do you really believe that they would skin one alive for the same reason? I certainly hope that is not the case.
If this conclusion )If you can kill for a given reason you can torture for it just as easily) is based on obseravtion and analogy would you care to trot those observations out. It has been my experience that only complete wacko’s torture animals.
Again you are presupposing the end peice of your argument. If you could prove that killing and compassion are contradictory then I would have to concede that it is hypocrtical. But you haven’t done that any more than you have proven that climbing a ladder and fear of heights are contradictory. To be contradictory they would need to be opposed and inconsistent. They are totally in agreement with the known facts. I feel fear yet I climb. This could only be contradictory if I had said I had an all consuming fear (or all consuming compassison). I have made it quite clear that I believe in relative emotional commitments therfore this is not contradictory.
But again only if one presupposes the emotional state to be all consuming. If one acknowledges the existence of levels of emotional commitment, with emotions running against each other why can’t both be right, with hunger over-riding compassion.
1)No special needs required. Had you been cut off by flood waters you too would need to eat pig.
2)You are defining killed here only in the first person sense. I thought it obvious this is not what I meant. Allow me to resubmit “I have been resonsible for the deaths of other living creatures out of necessity”
Do you consider saving the life of another human being to be a necessity? If no then you probably don’t need to kill. If yes then the above staemnt is true of every person on this planet.
And your point is? What I sought demonstrate is that engaging in an inherently incompassionate act is not, as you implied, evidence of not feeling compassion. What you have conceded above is that it is possible to let compasion be overridden by other concerns (the child’s future, the continuation of a human’s life) yet still feel compassion. Once we accept this all arguments that rely on a blanket assumption that engaging in an in-compassionate is in any way evidence of hypocrisy must be prove this is so on a case by case basis.
As stated I agree. The problem is it goes no way at all to justifying the blanket assertion “that the sole reason people don’t torture animals is out of fear of feeling guilt and hurting their consciousness”. The two statements only related in the vaguest and most tangential manner and certainly one can not be used to support the other.
1)that’s highly speculative at best.
2)Can you se the massive difference between that and saying that the sole motivation for avoiding bad behaviour is guilt? If you try to use the above staement as justification you run into more circular logic. You reasoning runs: 1)We know that act A is morally wrong. 2)Performing act A produces guilt. 3)Such guilt feels bad. 4)We therfore know therfore that Act A is morally wrong -----> goto 1).
Circular raesoning. The reason for not performing the act cannot be guilt based on this logic because we had to know it was wrong first.
And stated like that I might well agree. This is a huge leap from saying guilt is the sole or even primary motivator. sven made such a statement, and in order to defend it you have been forced to resort to cirular logic and pre-supposition. I think this speaks volumes for the strength of that argument. Considering that every peice of legislation sattes that guilt is not the reason I’d call the assertion unsupported BS.
sven
No it isn’t. I’m not in the least squeamish. I doubt anyone on a kill floor is squeemsih and they’re the one’s we’re dealing with here. About 80% of the male population of Australia are fishermen. I assume few of them are squeemish so there’s another 2.5 million or so. This is just another groundless assertion.
Unless Australia is very different it’s not. It’s boned, sliced, butchered and places on a styrofoam tray with a clear polyethylene film over it. It’s packaged to meet health department regulations and ensure consistency of quality, but how does the packaging I’ve described make it look less like a hunk of animal carcass?
Is meat packaged differently in the US?
And in the category 'best attempt at argument from assertion and anecdote" the winner is: Wild Bill’s “most christians are de-converted because of evolution”. Runner up is…
Baseless assertion.
Even if this were true how is this related to the concept we only refrain from torture out of guilt?
As I stated above vegans can survive only because an awful lot of energy and resources are expended preparing nutrient supplements for them so they don’t die from, amongst other things, b12 deficiency.
Aside from this are you implying that the porduction of plant amtter doesn’t cost animla lives? If you are i can quite easily provide links to on-line agriculture forums.
Or are you suggesting that maybe we could produce sufficient food organically to feed the entire world? Again I’m sure a quick ggogle search will demonstrate how erroneous this belief is.
BTW the sect you refer to are the Jains, and of course can only do this because someone else kills the bugs and deer and elephants for them. But that doesn’t mean they have to kill animals to live does it?
1)Cite please. Most Chinese and other North Asians eat quite large quantities of fish. Most Indonesians also eat whatever protein they can get their hands on, whether beef, fish, freshwater crab, chicken or whatever. That’s about half the world’s population. I can’t think of anywhere in South Am where people don’t include regular animal protein in their diet. Certainly few places in Africa if anywhere. North America and Australia aren’t even in the equation. So I assume you’re basing this on the mistaken belief that all Indians are vegetarian. Even were that so I can’t imagine for a second how you could manage a figure of 50%. I really wnat to see a cite for this.
2)You’ve fallen into the common trap of assuming resources means human utilisable resources. This is a common ‘misrepresenation’ told be vegetarian and vegan groups. Most meat is produced using resources that aren’t available to humans. Areas that are too seasonal or infertile to crop are given over to grassland. These can only be utilised by grazing animals. Waterways and rice paddies are given over to crustacean and fish production. Again resources not utilisable for humans. Chickens, pigs and dogs in Asia eat waste scraps taht humans can’t tolerate. In this way most third world people have access to animal protein because the don’t need to worry about the resources used.
3)See above for the ludicrousness of equating vegetarian with not killing animals.
No it would require that the world’s popultion be slashed by in excess of 75% IIRC. See the problem is that if the grasshoppers and moths and deer and buffaloe were allowed free range over the cornbelt their would be almost no corn. We’ve created a monoculture that pets would simply decimate. Ditto for the elephants and locusts in Africa, the nematodes in Indonesia, the waterfowl in China and so on and so forth. Of course then we have the moths and rodents in our storage and processing facilities. The flies and cockroaches in our perpetually heated supermarkets and homes. Think about it for a second, how much food do you think would actually make it to the human consumer if we never kille don insect. Even with the best non-lethal exclusion and sterile release programs all the estimates I’ve seen come in well under 25%. This would of course be unreliable and unpredictable and require a huge shipping network to distibute it from whatever regions managed not to get hit by a pest plague. The diet would be hideously unvaried and in all probability malnutrition would be rife. Most tropical areas, including all savannahs, would need to be depopulated entirelys since the erratic rainfall means the only possible means of agricultural production is grazing. Since it would no longer be possible to control eitehr snails or worms in rice paddies schistosomiais would ru rampant, making paddy rice production impossible unless you’re prepared to tolerate this disease. See how ludicrous an assumption that it may be possible with a little commitment is in light of the facts.
erislover Your suggestion that we wouldn’t need population control is ludicrous. How could we allow locusts to ravage crops over three quarters of the tropics and still be able to support the same population? Converting grazing lands to farming lands, far from increasing the amount of food produced would reduce food production over 80% of the worlds rangelands to nil. Compare:
“Without a doubt most of the worlds rangelands could never support any agricultural system other than grazing and would thus be lost to human agriculture’
Westoboy, M 1979/1980. Elements of a theory of vegetation dynamics in arid rangelands. Israel J. Bot 28:169-94
Or
“Climatic effects dominate both the ecology of the plant community and animal production system. Despite the large impact of grazing on the land, these factors reduce the number of management options available and virtually no other productive use of these lands is possible.”
Wilson, AD and Harrington, GN. 1984 Grazing Ecology and Animal Production. Management of Australia Rangelands. Cmwlth. Govt. Printing Service.
A better question would be what is the relevance of this strawman.
The question is why is torture less acceptable. If we take it as given that killing animals is unacceptable then the answer is torture isn’t acceptable for the same reasons.
It is taken as read that killing is acceptable then the answer so far given is quite simple: Animal life is lower on our list of priorities than human life.
Has the question been answered to your satisfaction?
Humping everything in sight is acceptable.
Where did you get the idea that having casual sex isn’t acceptable. Some religious groups have an objection to this just as some have an objection to killing animals. Some people have ethical objections just as some have objections to killing animals. Maybe a majority of the population objects to one more than the other but both are acceptable in our society. What sort of sheltered upbringing led you to believe otherwise.
Well first let me say that all of my Aunts, coming from a rural background, have assited in the slaughter of livestock so they wouldn’t object to much.
Are you intending to imply that because some people wouldn’t watch something for fun it indicates that you object to it? By that you object to open heart surgery, amputating a girl’s arm to save her life in a car crash and cleaning blocked toilets. That is truly bizzarre.
Do you have any reason at a;; for believeing it is for the stated reasons, that we accept that animals are subservient to humans our scale of rights?
If you do could you trot them out. If you don’t why are you refusing to acceot this as being so?
1)We do truly need to kill as posted above.
2)You’re making he assumption that the killing itself is distasteful. The actual slaughtering etc. isn’t the most pleasant job. Like I said, it’s like stripping down an engine, but certainly no worse. I’d like to see any support at all that carnivores find the killing distasteful, otherwise your pre-supposing the outcome of your argument: ie that people inherently find killing as or more distasteful than torture.
3)This has been answered so many times in this thread I can’t even be bothered doing a count. It is becasue we accept that animals are sunservient to us on our scale of rights.
4)This is the same logical incoherency demonstared above.
So how do you propose that we clean toilets on such a regular basis when it is so distasteful in order to get something that we don’t truely need?
So how do you propose that we strip engine blocks on such a regular basis when it is so distasteful in order to get something that we don’t truely need?
So how do you propose that we cap oil wells on such a regular basis when it is so distasteful in order to get something that we don’t truely need?
Could you answer those questions please?
1)NO there isn’t if we accept that animals are subordinate.
2)The debate is not about eating hamburgers. It’s about torturing animals. What is the relevance of the above comment?
2)Let’s assume above is re-written “Surely there is at least some bad feelings that needs to be dealt with so that we can flay our steer alive in peace and get on with our day”. There are some bad feelings that would have to be dealt with for you burn my house down, torture my girlfreind to death, have sex with my dog and kill me, are you saying the prime reason you don’t do these things is because you’re worried about guilt? Are you implying anyone with short term memory problems would cheerfully do these things because tehy know they won’t feel guilt?
If the answer is no could you explain how the staemnt goes to justify the assertion that said guilt feelings are our sole or prime motivator in not torturing animals?.
If the answer is yes you’re one sick puppy.
How the hell does one respond to a post that long???
Instead of the quote game, I think were having difficulty about hypocracy and perceived hypocracy. We also, seemingly, need to get straight why killing isn’t generally a compassionate act. For your insistance on tossing the word sick out I am frankly shocked at your stand on this point. Ending a life prematurely is generally not a compassionate act; it is certainly not a compassionate act toward the kill-ee (sheesh) if the purpose of this killing is for our own survival. We are performing an act based on our interests; this does not in any way demonstrate compassion towards whatever we are acting on.
In fact, I would say it appears to act against compassion. We may, of course, use our compassion as a guide in dictating how we should kill once we’ve resolved it, but again, that resolution to cause death is not a compassionate act (not in the sense we’re discussing here).
I simply see that the willful klling of an animal or a person for purely personal reasons, even should those reasons be based in survival, is not and cannot be a compassionate act. It is killing. I do not demonstrate compassion by killing. This is a very simple statement.
Secondly, there is certainly the problem of determining statements of fact with regards to an ethical situation. You may know damn well you aren’t a hypocrite, and would certainly be offended at such a claim. That doesn’t change the fact that there is no compassion in the act of killing (again, in these cases). The resolve to kill an animal is not founded in compassion. I cannot stress this enough.
Now, we agree on staggared levels of feeling. Thus, while we may be compassionate, we find reason enough to kill. Fine. No dispute there. Never was, really, between you and I.
I wasn’t aware insects were considered animals in common usage of the term. I have not killed a rat or mouse, no.
This is true to a point. We certainly cannot know with arbitrary accuracy, as spiritus mundi (gotta give credit where credit is due) very eloquently pointed out to me recently, that a person feels a certain way. The answer to the question “Is gaspode a hypocrite?” will have, quite likely, different results depending on who exactly is asking and answering the question.
This is, even more infortunately, ultimately dependant on the perception of the events and what we are willing to link to what. I hope to Eris I have demonstrated that killing is not an act of compassion (again, in this conversation’s context) and cannot even be construed as one. You gave a definition of “hypocritical” as: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness. Now, we profess compassion (defined thusly: sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it) and we kill, which is an act which is not compassionate. Did you feel compassion? Yes. Do you when you kill it? I really can’t see how. Now, depending on how we are understanding a hypocritical act, this is possibly one of those. You certianly professed an emotion which you did not hold to at a later time. Whether this makes you ultimately hypocritical or merely just stayed compassionate right up through the act even though the act does not come from a feeling of compassion is ultimately a question of perspective on how we understand the word hypocritical. It is NOT ultimately based on your feelings, unless we are talking about your feelings on the hyp word itself. The situation, at best, is (to use sven’s word) ambivalent. At worst, you are a hypocrite.
I don’t know that I can continue the argument on any other level until we get this worked out.
That was one long freakin’ post.
Sorry but I’ve gotta play the quate game again. I’d like to avaoid it, the problem is your argumets, IMHO, seem to be flowing from building on illogical conclusions, and have to be dismantled as such.
Are yo really shocked that I would believe someone sick if the only reason they didn’t indulge in the most revolting acts imaginable was out of guilt. A person like that is true sociopath. I certainly didn’t men to imply sven was such a person, merely point out what would happen if anyone actually followed her professed code of ethics and logic.
How many times do I need to agree with this before you stop feeling the need to say it. A quick count reveals no less tha four times so far. The problem is that hitting is not a compassionate act either. Yet almost anyone would willingly strike their child or dog. Your logic requires that they feel no compassion towards their children. You have conceded that soemone can feel compassion yet engage in what you would say appears to act against compassion. Accepting that on what grounds can you assume that the case of killing an animal is any different.
Can I convince you that I agree with this entirely and wholeheartedly. I simply see that the willful climbing of a ladder for purely personal reasons, even should those reasons be based in survival, is not and cannot be an act of fear. See the problem with your stream of logic now? The fact that someones action at any given moment is not entirely consistent wth every single emotion they are feeling at that moment does not in any way demonstrate that they are not feeling that emotion. I actually thought that we had nutted this out. That you accepted that we couild have levels of emotional commitment. Let me try a few more examples to see if you cn find one you can relate to.
I simply see that willfully walking away from a beautiful woman for purely personal reasons, even should those reasons be based in survival, is not and cannot be an act of lust. Therefore you have never walked away from someone you felt lust towards?
I simply see that the willfully remaining quiet about your achievements for purely personal reasons, even should those reasons be based in survival, is not and cannot be an act of pride. Therefore you have never felt proud of something yet remained silent?
I simply see that the willful shaking of hands for purely personal reasons, even should those reasons be based in survival, is not and cannot be an act of anger. Therefore you have never shaken hands with someone you were angry with?
I simply see that that willfuly yelling at someone for purely personal reasons, even should those reasons be based in survival, is not and cannot be an act of love. Therefore you have never yelled at someone you love?
I simply see that that willfully touching something for purely personal reasons, even should those reasons be based in survival, is not and cannot be an act of revulsion. Therefore you have never touched something that revolted you?
I hate to take up so much space but I hope one of those examples struck home. You see the flaw in this line of reasoning. You are concluding because killing is not an act of compassion, a compassionate person cannnot carry out such an act. This does not logically follow. Speaking to a person of another race is not a racist act, yet racists can still force themselves to do it.
Ever won a game of chess? There is no aerobic stress involved in the act of playing chess. The ability to win at chess is not founded in aerobic fitness. Can I conclude from this that you are unfit. Of course I can’t because the two are unrelated. One is not a requirement of the other. You don’t have to be unfit to win at chess, therfore winning at chess does not make you unfit. I don’t have to feel incompasionate to kill therefore killing does not make me incompassionate.
Your argument is making the massive leap of logic that says that killing is not a compassionate act (true) and therefore commiting that act requires a lack of compassion. This simply does not follow. Chess is not a game of strength, but playing chess doesn’t require weakness. Since you have conceded that in numerous other cases we perform acts that go against our emotional stae (climbing a ladder when afraid) you will have to demonstrate why it can not be so in this case for your argument to have any legs.
Colour me confused.
You accept that hypocrisy requires one to profess feelings one does not have.
You accept I profess compassion.
You accept I may feel compassion and still kill.
On what grounds then are you arguing that killing is evidence of hypocrisy. You seem to have just shot down your whole argument in one sentence.
They certainly are. Like I said if you want to discuss the relative morality of killing a slug versus a chimp then fine. But that’s a completely seprate argument. My statement stands. we must kill to eat.
None of which affects the truth, which is what we’re trying to get at isn’t it? If this was an opinion poll I could see the relevance of the above but as it stands I don’t. The answers to the questions “Is Elvis dead?”, “Are dinosaurs extinct” and “Is ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ synched with ‘Wizard of Oz’” will also have, quite likely, different results depending on who exactly is asking and answering the question. But their is still only one logical and true answer.
Added to this if I ask such a question and someone says the answer is is definitivly yes, they have to be able to back this up with some sort of logic. Otherwise I can reasonably call the answer groundless and illogical.
But only if we’re doing an opinion poll. If we’re out to determine the truth and eliminate ignorance it is solely and totally dependant on whether I am ‘professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that I do not hold or possess’. That’s it, total. No room for subjectivity. The true answer will always be either yes or no and that will hold true for all people for all time. If we can’t detemine, then the answer “I don’t know” may be appropriate, but declaring that the answer is an emphatic yes, not just for me but for all people who don’t support skinning cattle alive, as sven did, is a backwards step in the fight against ignorance.
In exactly the same way that you can feel fear while you climb that ladder. Practicality outweighs emotion. Why is it that you accept one can override fear, anger and lust for personal reasons, but not compassion. What is so magical about compassion that it exits in a binary all-or-none state when no other human emotion does? Or to put it another way, for this to have any relevance to the argument it is up to you to demonstrate why compassion is different from every other emotion. I have already demonstarated to your satisfaction that no other emotion is all encompassing. Whatever your reasons for believing this, it will in no way support your assertion that ‘those who eat meat yet abhor torture are hypocritical’ unless it is logically or factually based. From what you’ve said above your argument seems more based on gut feeling than any sort of logical consistency.
Huh. What do you mean? We have an agreed upon definition of a hypocritical act. For tis to possibly be one of those you have to demonstrtae some logic underlying the assumption that killing is mutually exclusive of compassion. Otherwise there is no possibility it is one of those.
And again you presuppose the outcome. Once you can demonstrate this then you will have me concede the debate. The problem is there is no evidence for this other the your inability to understand how overidden compassion can’t be as true as for every other emotion. Your argument thus hinges on compassion being for some reason a special binary emotion.
Can you really not understand that I can be angry with somebody, could give them a gift, and still stay angry right up through the gift giving ceremony, even though the act does not come from a feeling of anger. Is that so hard to understand? If you can understand it why do you not accept this can be equally true of compassion/killing?
And this I just don’t understand, Can you re-phrase it? Ambivalenc fellt by whom towards what?
I’m not sure there is another level. This all hinges on you somehow demonstrating logically or with supporting facts that either:
a)Compassion, alone among human emotions, exists in a binary state. That it cannot be overridden while still being expeienced,a s we do every day with fear, boredom etc.
You seem to have said above that you accept that I can feel comapssion and still kill so you really do need to prove this argument.
or
b)All carnivores who oppose torture do not feel compassion despite professing to do so. This is the only other way we’ll get hypocrisy oput of this carcass.
If you can’t achieve one of the above then their can be no grounds for arguing that all carnivores opposing cruelty are hypocrites. It really is that simple. What a Gallup poll may indicate on the topic is irrelevant to the basis and logic behind that statement.
I thought my point was rather simple. The term “hypocritical” has a freedom of interpretation associated with it. This freedom can cause people to feel that when does something which acts against compassion though that person has expressed compassion s/he is, in fact, hypocritical.
Your examples belie that once a person has truly felt compassion, to act against it in any way does not counter-act that feeling. I find that those examples are just as bad as what you are accusing me of saying.
In one method of understanding, just feeling compassion even though you are acting agaisnt it is not hypocritical. In another form of understanding it is. There is no capital-T Truth here that the entire world must, or can, agree upon.
Yes, actually, I am. I think it is obvious that fear of a negative in their life stops many people from doing many things. I think this is, in fact, pretty normal behavior. It is not necessary that a person base their actions on fear of a negative; it is also not irrational to do so. I certainly avoid doing many drugs because of fear of punishement. I drive close to the speed limit because I don’t want to pay high insurance rates. I haev avoided using violence against people because, in fact, I know that I would feel guilty about it aftewords even though, by most people’s standards, violence was in fact called for in the situation.
You are searching for an ultimate proof of a hypocritical or non-hypocritical behavioral assessment. Such a thing does not exist. It really doesn’t matter whether or not you expressed compassion three years ago, three days ago, or just in the previous breath. You did an act which goes against compassion after doing so. Many people would, in fact, consider that hypocritical. Frankly, I think they are justified in thinking so. I also understand that that doesn’t require that a person actually be hypocritical to another’s judgement (say, for example, their own). It might even cause a few people to reserve judgement on the matter (though I really doubt it in such a cut-and-dry case).
Being ethically inconsistent can rightfully be viewed as hypocritical. No, it is not rock-solid proof of hypocracy because there is not a universally agreed upon standard for hypocracy, none the less a tried and true method of determining it. My inability to gauge your feelings with 100% accuracy does not stop me from using what I do understand to form a judgement.
I vote that you aren’t a hypocrite and that I am right in this; I also believe even might think you are, and she would also be right in that.
Incidentally, I am really enjoying this. I do love GD.
Well I was going to post a lot of nitpicking (including an invitation for me and erislover to do the adult on your lawn as a demonstration of the unacceptablitly of humping everything in sight)
But, I finally figured out my problem.
I have been assumeing that killing is ethically worse than torture.
Think about it- would you rather be tortured or killed? Would you rather be tortured twice or tortured and then killed?
Therefore, to kill with abandon, but not torture, seems a little strange to me. My conclusion was that we would prefer to do neither (after all, if you would rather not one thing, how could we be okay with something that is more destructive?) But because we would rather not give up the benefits of killing, we uneasily let that pass. We have no use for torture, however, so we react extraharshly to it, partially to “make up” for the unease we feel at killing. I take that we feel unease at torture to mean that we also feel unease at killing.
Perhaps this belief is flawed when thinking about non-sentient creatures, who can feel pain, but who do not feel the existential fear of death.
No it doesn’t. The interpretation is entirely down to the definition. If you wish to interpret it any other way then that is your right, but it makes debate impossible simply because we have a tower of Babel situation. You can do this but since it cannot be based on any supportive argument or logic beyond “I feel it is so” I can quite justifiably state that the argument is groundless and illogical. This is what I did initially and this is what you have been attempting to argue against. If your argument is ultimately based on personla imterpratation you have no grounds for argument that I can see.
And that freedom, in your case, is based on a supposition that compassion is the onkly emotion where this applies. You readily admit that it does not apply to fear.
Yet since you have conceded that "once a person has truly felt any other emotion including fear, to act against it in any way does not counter-act that feeling. " you must give some reason as to why you believe this doesn’t equally apply to compasssion. Otherwise your argument runs counter to what we accept is true. Let me ask you a question. Do you feel compassion for children? Do you believe children should be prevented from knifing Grannies even if the only way of doing this is incarceration?
I’m afraid there is. In order to defend the extraordinary accusation that all carnivores who oppose torture are hypocrites one must demonsrate some evidence of hypocrisy. Evidence of hypocrisy will be evidence that a person does not feel compassion as stated. That is the “Truth” in this matter. Anything else is opinion and assertion. If you can’t provide such evidence then I can legitimately say that the staement is illogical and groundless, which I have done.
SO I will ask you, since sven refuses to answer. If I could arrange for you to feel no guilt, would you commit acts of rape? Surely if guilt is the only reason you refrain your answer must be yes.
If what you say above is true then I’m glad neither myself nor anyone I know is normal. We don’t do those things becasue we’ve made a moral decision that they are are wrong.
You’re not saying that you acted against an emotion here are you? You hypocrite. You should have smacked the guy in the nose.
If you really can’t see the moral difference between punching an adult and skinning a child alive then you have my pity. Do you really think that striking an adult is one of the most vile acts imaginable, on par with rape, torture and murder?
Cite?
I’m searching for any proof based outside of opinion that every single carnivore, or even a majority of them, that opposes flaying cattle alive is a hypocrite. Nothing more nothing less.
And many people would consider that that homeopathy works. And many people think irregardless is a word. But if they make statements to that effect in great debates they have to back it up with some sort of facts or logic. Simply presenting a poll saying many people beleive that we never landed on the moon won’t get you far in GD if you want to use it to support an assertion that such is in fact true. What many people believe is irrelevant to the truth. Their is one definition of hypocrisy in use and if you can’t demonstrate it’s applicability for even one person, much less a majority, then your initial statement is predicated upon data extrapolated from revealed self-evident facts (ie Sven Made It Up!). The rest of that paragraph is just more “I think” statements with absolutely no logical argument or factual suport.
Wrong. Being ethically inconsistent can no more be accurately viewed as hypocritical than giving money to beggars can be accurately viewed as robbery. Their are definitions for robbery and hypocrisy available in any good dictionary. Someone might choose to describe the situations that way but if they want to make blanket statements in GD they have to present some evidence or logic.
We don’t need a universal standard, we only need a standard agreed upon by the participants of this debate. We agreed on the dictionary.com standard. What you are trying to say I think is that their is no unviversally agreed upon standard for quantifying hypocracy. That may be true but only demonstrates that any statement about the hypocrisy of a whole group is necessarily groundless.
Tried certainly but you have accepted, as is the case of the ladder climbing excercise, that being ethically inconsistent has been proven in many cases to be untrue. I ask again, what evidence do you have that it is true in this case? Tried and untrue would be a more accurate description of the technique.
No, but it does prevent you from making blanket statements about them without it being challenged as unsupported BS. This is what I have done and what you objected to.
NO, Either I do or do no feel as I profess. It must be one or the other. Since we have agreed that a dictioanry definiton is in use then I either am or am not hypocritical dependant on that one factor. There’s no room for both of you to be right. Belief doesn’t enter into it. I believe in the Saquatch, Sven doesn’t. Are you saying that you’d accept that “I vote that there is a sasquatch and that I am right in this; I also believe even might think there is, and she would also be right in that.”
Does the saquatch exist in some uncertain state like Schroedingers cat? Do my emotions?
You are making the logical error here of confusing belief with the fact of that belief.
(I swore I’d never post this but…)
ME TOO.
Please tell me you see the logical flaw in that? Acceptance of an act in no way necessitates acceptance of said act at all times and under all circumstances. You can accept having sex with your boyfreind but not accept doing it in the supermarket. You can accept someone’s right to set up a cookie bakery, but not in your driveway. You can accept someones’ right to own pet hyaenas, but not in your backyard. Suggesting that accepting casual sex requires accepting people doing it in front of a school is not a logical equation because accepting the slaughtering of animals does not in any way require that I accept people to be allowed to do it in an operating theatre. Therfore this argument is illogical rubbsih and can be discarded out of hand.
To put it in language you understand, you almost certainly accept buses travelling at in excess of 50km/hr. Does this mean that you must accept them doing it through a park? If you don’t does that mean you don’t accept public transport? OR is the truth that the acceptability of any action is based upon time and location? :rolleyes:
Actually that was the whole point of the OP. Why is killing considered worse than torture?
If the torture involved is flaying alive the answers are b) d) a) and c) in descending or of preference. How does this support the notions that all peope who oppose torture are hypocriets and the sole rason for not indulging in torture is guilt?
Fair enough, but how does this support the notions that all peope who oppose torture are hypocrites and the sole rason for not indulging in torture is guilt?
I’ll accept that. It may not be true for tha majority, but I’ll accept it.
The flaw here is that torture and killing are not mutually inclusive. We are OK with one because it is necessary and not OK with the other because it is not. If you read my reply to Beelzebubba above you would note that it is the level of necessity vs. the level of benefit that these decsiions are based on. This was stated fairly clearly by Mattk in his initial post. Their is no necessity in this instance for flaying an animal alive beyond greed or laziness. The level of ‘destructiveness’ doesn’t outweigh the level of benefit. I assume you’re implying killing an animal is more destructive than torturing an animal. I don’t accept that as so, but that’s beside the point. How does this support the notions that all peope who oppose torture are hypocrites and the sole rason for not indulging in torture is guilt?
Cite.
As I have demonstrated above I personally don’t let it pass at all uneasily. It was a decision, I made it, I accept that. No guilt, no unease required. I have seen no evidence that people on the kill floor feel any unease. I have seen no evidence the abbatoir owner feels unease. Do you feel unease when you squash a mosquito?
Your whole argument is predicated on the assumption that people feel unease at their actions. Could you please reference this for us so we can see what it is based on.
Cite?
That’s very simplistic. We can see no justifiable benefit to torture so we reject it out of hand. It’s not extra harsh. We see no justifiable benefit to rape so we reject it out of hand as well. That doesn’t mean we treat it extra harshly, the penalties are about the same or even slightly less than for similar crimes of unjustifiable physical assualt and deprivation of liberty. I could name any number of other crimes that are also dismissed out of hand because their is no justifiable benefit, including murder, incest and slander. There is no evidence that they are treated “extra-harshly”. They simply aren’t tolerated at all if there is no benefit.
So you keep saying over, and over, and over again.
You have so far provided neither supportive facts or logic to back up this claim.
We have no evidence we react extraharshly to torture. It stands alone and is comparable to nothing I can see. What is your standard for comparison. What is it judged harsher than?
We have considerable evidence from animal welfare legislation and the statements of posters on this thread that the reason we do it is because we acknowledge that causing pain is wrong, yet necessary for life.
We have demonstarted that there are any number of possible reasons, including religious beliefs.
Can you support that statement in any way at all.
By logical extension if the sole or primary reason we don’t torture is to make up for the unease and guilt we feel over killing then more vegans should torture than anyone else, since they have no guilt at all. More vegetarians should torture than carnivores, and hunters and kill-floor workers should torture least of all. Is their any evidence of this. Can you find even one instance of a vegan indulging in torture?
And that is based on what exactly? The two acts are in no way dependant.
Torture is the infliction of pain. Killing is the removal of life.
True one can stem from the other and both involve the physical body, but then the same is true of surgery, car racing and having sex. Do you feel unease at those as well? You seem to be making a huge logical jump here that killing and torture are necessarily linked in the mind of normal humans. Since we have no evidence of that any argument based on it seems spurious at best.
The argument is just as flawed when dealing with humans. Their is no logical connection I can see between torture and painless killing that cannot equally be drawn between those two acts and sex.
gaspode, you are taking comments that represent my opinion exclusively and using them to combat comments that I make in reference to another view. It will be no suprise, then, that they are inconsistent.
At any rate, I’m afraid that your firm definition of hypocracy simply doesn’t hold up. I cannot think of an application of the word that doesn’t involve interpretation of events on the part of the accuser. Because of that, ethical inconsistency can very well imply hypocracy.
And therefore you can never factually support a statement that all meatatatrians who reject the torture of aniamls are hypocrites. sven’s staement is therfore based entirley on opinion and is as such unsupportable.
Adedd to this you haven’t even given a logical reason why you believe the interpretation of events concerning compassion must be different to the interpreteation of events concerning all other human emotions.
Well, sure, but I can’t support the opposite either. Since the final judgement of “hypocrite” or “not hypocrite” ultimately rests on one man’s perception of another, neither can ever be supported in anything but a subjective way, unless the person declares themself to be a hypocrite, in which case we must merely take his word for it and then be puzzled with the paradox (“I am lying” style).
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Well, sure, but I can’t support the opposite either.
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1)I don’t need to. I called Sven on the unsupportable assertion that all carnivores are hypocrites.
You jumped in with :
What we have demonstrated is that your conclusions in support of sven’s assertions are based entirely on opinion. Therefore we can safely call the argument illogical and groundless.
2)This is an argument from ignorance. All the legistlation and everyhting written in this thread states rather clearly that compassion is genuinely felt but over-ridden by needs. Arguing that this is all just a lie requires firstly that you provide even a tiny bit of evidence.
This is starting to sound like SoO_uGlY’s argument re the synching of “Dark Side of the Moon”. Everyone involved who could possibly know the facts denies it is true. Logically it falls down at every stage. There is absolutely nothing to support it. Sure you can continue to believe it, but that doesn’t mean that such a statement has any place in GD.
Hell by this particular argument if someone could provide evidence and told you it wasn’t so then THEY might be lying. So you’d have to do the test yourself. But the bloke who showed you how to operate the machine could be lying. So you’d have to learn how to build the machine yourself. But then the books on electricity could be lieing so…
See how crazy this is and how little it does to fight ignorance. If we’re prepared to accept that everyone involved is lying at every step of the process I could state that the Earth is flat because you can’t disprove it. Does such a statement or line of ‘reasoning’ actually have a place on a board dedicated to fighting ignorance?
No the point of your argument must be to demonstrate why you can use an emotion/over-ride situation as evidence of hypocrisy in the case of compassion when we have proved that it is not so for any other human emotion. Having conceded that we can never establish a factual basis for claims of hypocrisy you need to establish a reasonable and convincing logical basis for such a statement. You presented the compassion/over-ride situation as such a basis. Now you must demonstrate that it logically follows. If you can’t do this the statement concerning hypocrisy has no place in a debate intended to eliminate ignorance.
Any statement should be based on supporting facts, or logic. Anything else can be rightly called groundless.
Well, I don’t think that that naturally follows. the whole thing is that perception of hypocracy itself is based on moral perception, personal opinion, and perception of actual events. It is certainly logical to call someone a hypocrite if they stand up to our understanding of it. In my (our) case, just because we perceive an ethical inconsistency doesn’t imply that one has detected hypocracy. On the other hand, it isn’t a stretch of the definition at all to see that someone might, in fact, see that ethical inconsistency is the equivalent of hypocracy.
Doesn’t have to be a lie. One simply needs to say, “If you were really compassionate you wouldn’t kill.”
This is very, very true. Intellectual laziness and a sense of “good enough” prohibits us from doing such a thing. A truly stout intelligence wouldn’t settle for anything less than personal confirmation.
It does quite a lot. It points out, unequivocally, that two people can perceive the same event and view it as comprising of different moral standards.
quote]If we’re prepared to accept that everyone involved is lying at every step of the process I could state that the Earth is flat because you can’t disprove it.
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It has nothing to do with lying in all cases. It has to do with the idea of demanding (what some people may call) an unreasonable demand for consistency. It could also have to do with the idea of personal betrayal based on standards that are opposite from what originated the betrayed emotion (this is using B to prove why we can abandon A instead of sufficiently developing A so that it doesn’t require rationalization to override it). It could have to do with any number of interpetations that one person sees in an ethical situation. There is, possibly, logic involved in any moral system. The logic of your moral system doesn’t necessarily apply to the logic of another’s.
I don’t think we proved it in the general sense. It involved making cetain assumtions about emotions and opinions which aren’t necessarily fundamental or universal throughout humans.
Because, at its core, the assessment of hypocracy is based entirely on opinion.
