RE: Experiences with Atkins diet

From: Greg Jordan (jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 08:03:47 MDT

  • Next message: Greg Jordan: "RE: Experiences with Atkins diet"

    On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Keith Elis wrote:

    > > I do not believe in morality, but I have an aesthetic
    > > appreciation for animals, not just as a class, but as
    > > individuals. It's a definite lift for me to know animals are
    > > getting along well, and it's a tragedy when one is lost
    > > unnecessarily, by something I did and could easily have
    > > avoided. It's not so much about minimizing suffering as
    > > maximizing happiness. Nature already kills and tortures
    > > animals every day - including humans - but humans have the
    > > capacity, rarely used, to empathize with others, including
    > > animals. This empathy is a plus, an expansion of potential happiness.
    >
    > I think you would probably fare better if you stuck to the aesthetic
    > argument. At least that can be reduced to personal preference, which
    > cannot be disputed. Here, you're making an odd argument which
    > anthropomorphizes animals, exacerbated by the equally odd implicit claim
    > that you know what makes animals happy. This argument would apply
    > equally well down the food-chain until, at some arbitrary point in the
    > taxonomy -- say, just below the nematode and just above blue-green algae
    > -- it becomes absurd.

    My argument is pretty much entirely aesthetic. But that doesn't
    necessarily make it "personal preference", either. I have a feeling that
    aesthetic principles tend to be quite similar across large numbers of
    human beings. Lots of people obviously have the ability to appreciate
    animals - one look at our culture tells us that. Many people just
    arbitrarily stop caring about animals when it interferes with an activity
    (eating meat) that is a nearly universal meme in the society and
    considered impossible to break (and the connection between
    store-packaged meats and real-live animals is heavily suppressed in the
    minds of many people).

    The "anthropomorphizing" critique is flawed because nonhuman animals *do*
    have many characteristics in common with humans, not surprising given our
    common evolutionary history. But again, many people deny evolution, and
    many people also deny that humans are a type of animal.

    It's not *too* mysterious to guess that getting shot or throat-slit is not
    in the top 10 of a deer or cow's daily activities, it seems to me the
    burden of proof is on those who argue that animals are just robots that
    don't feel pain or care about what happens to themselves.

    The food chain, the chain of living things, is a continuous spectrum of
    sentience and intelligence, from humans fading down into things like
    nematodes and algae, which are so little sentient or intelligent that most
    people do not use those terms to describe them. It's a judgment call where
    you stop eating - whether you eat humans and everything else, or whether
    you eat only nonhuman animals, or just chicken not beef, or fish and not
    chicken, or insects but not fish. It ought to be a judgment at least
    partially based on what you know, or can reasonably infer, about the food
    source's value to you and the aesthetic consequences of eating it. Is one
    grasshopper different enough from another that eating it removes a unique
    and precious source of value in the world? Does it feel enough that
    killing it and eating it would bring enough trauma into the world to
    disturb your sense of your own self-efficacy? I tend to think the more
    value we can keep in the world, the better, and the less
    suffering and destruction we can cause, the better. But there are often
    other considerations...

    gej
    resourcesoftheworld.org
    jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu



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