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RE: a chat about luncheon
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nick day - i'll accept your arguments on diet, and meat being unhealthy too,
but if we are to eat a truly balanced diet then i still maintain meat is
necessary.its true that some people may be able to eat a purely vegan diet
and be entirely healthy but i'm not sure this is universal - either way,
from what i've read the science is far from conclusive on either side so
lets stick with the philosophy:
i've got 2 points to make i think. firstly, killing is not necessarily a bad
thing.for one, it saves the animal the suffering involved with old age, and
although i'm aware its a bit much to claim killing for food is mercy
killing, its not a straightforward case of death increasing their suffering
more than living longer.for all we know, they might go straight to paradise.
or be reincarnated as something better.
secondly is a point made by someone over the summer when we argued about
this - what about all the animals killed for leather and other goods? does
it make any difference to the moral status if we use the whole animal or
just the meat once we've killed it?on a utilitarian basis it would.
actually there is a third point. there is no way of removing suffering from
the world, but our calculations about levels of suffering seem a bit one
dimensional so far, though this is probably necessarily so. is all
suffering equal?does the relative sentience of an animal make it suffer
more or less? on this basis, arugably human pleasure is so much higher that
it compensates for a smaller amount of animal suffering, though that could
really be reversed.as wittgenstein's beetle in a box analogy proved, we
can't know for sure about other people's experiences of pain, let alone
animals.so i think what i'm trying to say is that it will probably all come
down to how we conceive of the human race, in terms of importance and
significance.
oh and one interesting side-effect of humans being animals - if that is all
we are, does it make any sense to talk of us in terms of having moral
obligations at all? nobody criticises a tiger for killing, or for that
matter a family cat catching mice for fun.
nick
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