From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Mon May 05 2003 - 19:48:48 MDT
Greg wrote:
> If we were going to auction off public land to the highest yield use,
> we'd have mass acres of coca fields. I have a suspicion you'd think
> that'd be fine.
### Well, I think you are going of at a tangent here, but yes, I do think
hard drugs should be legal, provided that the duty to obtain adequate
informed consent is imposed on their providers.
Just curious, how many millions of acres of coca would you imagine would be
planted in the US?
I'd day, not enough to force even a single deer out of business.
----------------------------------
>
> I don't propose policy, because I am in no position to create public
> policy or even affect it by any significant amount. I suspect the
> same is true of you.
### You suggest sterilization not as a policy, but merely as an exercise in
imagination and rhetoric, never to be the basis of your voting or lobbying?
Somehow I can hardly believe it.
-------------------------------
>
>>> Also, whereas natural predators (not being heavily armed) pick off
>>> the weak and inferior, trophy-hunting hunters pick off the largest
>>> and healthiest specimens, a reverse culling that is obviously
>>> detrimental to the herds.
>>
>> ### What kind of evidence would you like to offer in support of this
>> claim?
>
> What evidence would you expect? I have a cousin who is a hunter and
> I've never heard him exclaim, "Wow, I caught a really scrawny, young,
> lame one today! Me big hunter!"
### Hearsay!
-------------------------------
>
>> ### Tell me more. How low cost is it? Is it cheaper than the
>> negative price of hunting? Will its proponents be willing to outbid
>> (with their own money) the hunters? Are you talking about hormonal
>> methods? What is their impact on the psychology of the deer?
>
> If a veterinarian volunteers everything, it's free. I'm sure a
> hunter's lobby could outbid them, which obviously makes the hunters
> right. *rolls eyes*
### If enough people are really concerned about the welfare of deer and
truly want to help them by sterilization, you will be able to gather enough
funds. Of course, it's easier to ask the local congressman to do pay for it
with other people's money, but I think I might be digressing here.
----------------------------------
>
>> Also, death of a sterilized animal of old age, disease, or
>> predation, is still more shocking than having its brains shot out,
>> even if starvation were not a problem.
>
> Everything dies sometime (for now). You're making a case for shooting
> every animal (and human) in the head right now.
### Me an agitator for the Endloesung of Earth's living problems? That
couldn't be true!
-------------------------------
>
>>> I don't feel any need to remunerate hunters for loss of "hobby", any
>>> more than I would feel the need to remunerate child molestors for
>>> depriving them of the ability to molest children.
>>
>> ### Ah, here is the true belief at last. Hunting is evil. Hunters
>> are evil. They are scum, to be wiped off the earth if possible.
>
> Hmmm. You've moved from my statement on nonremuneration to putting
> words in my mouth like evil, scum, and wiping off the earth.
>
> I *do* believe hunting is evil, by my definition of evil. But that
> doesn't necessarily make hunters purely evil, since there is
> presumably more to hunters than hunting. It may even be, as Augustine
> said, that evils are imperfect goods - in this case, the motives that
> lead hunters to hunting may actually be good, but just not carried
> out to the fullest extent. Thoreau attributed his love of nature to
> hunting, a practice he said he later outgrew and gave up. Perhaps
> what he really liked about hunting was not exactly the killing of the
> animals, but a lot of the other things associated with it, like being
> outdoors, having contact with wild animals, testing his abilities,
> whatever.
### If you were to say that hunters actually are *not* like child molesters,
I could retract my assessment of your beliefs.
----------------------------------
>
>> You understand that this is the archetypal in-group vs. out-group
>> trick that manipulators of all kinds use to attack their enemies.
>> You don't feel the need to treat others like human beings (i.e. no
>> need for Rawlsian reciprocity, no moral symmetry, no empathy) once
>> you manage to put them into the same group as child molesters. No
>> limits now, all year hunting season on hunters.
>
> In real life, I don't bother hunters. But if I feel like saying what I
> think, I will. People who enjoy looking at paintings and people who
> like to slash them can't live together peaceably in the same world.
> I'm the one who is living in the world where people who slash
> paintings have more power than the people who like to look at them. I
> have a right to say that I wish they would stop - stop themselves, of
> their own volition. And I'm exercising that right.
### Oh, of course you have this right, I'd be the last person to ever demand
that it be taken away from you. I also exercise my right to assess the
eristic content of your speech, just so it's meaning becomes quite clear.
---------------------------
>
>> You see, the form of ethical reasoning that you are using, the
>> ethics of repugnance ("makes my stomach turn"), the type of thinking
>> exhibited by Leon Kass, and by Jeremy Rifkin, is a way of answering
>> questions which has no place in the civilized society. If unopposed,
>> it promises bad outcomes to all those against whom it is directed,
>> even you, once you find yourself in the "repugners" crosshairs.
>
> My ethics involves a lot more than stomach-level "repugnance" :) But
> my reaction was to your imagination that hunting is pleasant, a gut
> reaction itself, so to speak. It would take a long time to explain my
> ethics, more than emails could sustain.
>
> And I just think my ethics and yours would be incommensurable. Yours
> would apparently involve whoever has the most money can do what they
> want, and mine would start somewhere around human happiness...
### As in: "We just voted that you can't hunt, here or everywhere. It makes
us quite happy to vote, you know."
I noted before that your ethics is incommensurate with mine, but I think the
difference lies not in the superficialities of money but in the value of
freedom - this is the bedrock of my ethics, but not yours. It leads to
happiness, too.
-------------------------------------------
>
> Let me explain:
>> Blowing holes in animals does not cause significant suffering
>> (compared to their usual experiences), and this is a finding of fact.
>
> This is preposterous. You are an animal, does blowing a hole in you
> cause you no significant suffering? If you're going to try to argue
> that all nonhuman animals are robots that feel no pain and don't care
> what happens to themselves, you've already made a mistake, IMHO.
> Everything else you build on that assumption depends on it.
### Blowing a hole in the brain isn't painful. Being shot in the chest with
a large caliber hunting rifle for a human is hardly painful at all in the
beginning (there are descriptions of survivors), so animals couldn't feel
much pain, either. Much less than the pain of being eaten alive by a
wildcat.
--------------------------------------
>
>> ### I do not see how a rational person could assign "blame" to
>> animals, or see their killing as punishment. Deer are shot not out
>> of spite, but as a pragmatic action, similar to spraying for
>> mosquitoes, removing weeds, and clearing stones from a road.
>
> But previously you argued that hunters hunted for fun, which I think
> is closer to the truth. "Rational wildlife management" is just the
> political excuse to back up the desire to have this particular kind of
> fun. If this excuse was not available, another would be found.
### You can have fun doing the rational thing, too.
Only Puritans though anything that feels good must be bad.
----------------------------
>
>> If humans decide to halt population growth, consensually, and based
>> on sound ethical principles (not some green-ish sentimentalism),
>> well have all the beauty we need. And enough deer to shoot, too.
>
> To me, this is like saying, if our museum is big enough, we can burn
> some of the paintings!
### But deer are fungible automatons, not irreplaceable individuals or
sentimentally important works of art.
-----------------------------
I agree with the suggestion that we should
> decide how much of the earth we are going to inhabit and how much
> should be left wild, and then stick to it. But that suggestion will
> never be taken on, since there will never be such a consensus. Those
> with the most money, the developers, will have the final say. They
> will develop every square inch of the earth, and humans will expand
> to fill every inch (even arctic and undersea), unless something else
> stops them. Then they will no longer be able to hunt or hike in the
> wild woods to observe anything. Something like the Deathstar, a
> sphere of full human "development" (mechanical or nano-buildover),
> this is how I envision earth's future, on the present trajectory.
> It'll probably be a big weapon, too.
### The developers have only as much money as their clients are willing to
pay. If clients become rich enough to dream about unspoiled nature, they
will build it, too. It's all a question of demand and supply. If human
happiness demands the last inch to be built up, or every inch to be turned
into a forest, the market will provide. Really.
Rafal
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