Bill Snedden

And some of your categorizations have been wrong. I will reprint here, now for the third time, my rational for not considering the eating of meat to be immoral. You ignored it the first two times I posted it. Perhaps now you'll actually see fit to make a material response.

Human consciousness is specifically and materially different from non-human animal consciousness. There is no evidence of which I'm aware that supports the idea that any non-human animal can engage in the type of abstract reasoning necessary to develop complex ethical systems. Therefore, animals have no conception of ethics or morality and such concepts are moot when applied directly to them.

Animals have no conception of "murder" or "cannibalism". Lions don't murder gazelles. If a non-human animal were even capable of conceiving its place in the "food chain", it would still have no conception of the rightness or wrongness of any actions taken by the other animals above or below it.

Animals, therefore, lack what I would call a "right of self-determination" simply because they do not possess the ability to conceive it.

Humans, on the other hand, do possess this ability and ethical systems created by humans will therefore acknowledge it.

In other words, there are specific and material differences between human and non-human animals that allow us to make ethical differentiation between the two. These differentiations are obviously not based on preference, or desire, nor are they "arbitrary" as you like to claim. They are matters of objective fact and therefore cannot be other than as they are.

And, as I and PB have pointed out repeatedly, your assessment and understanding of contract theory is simply wrong. I will reprint here again, the objective facts that you have so far seen fit to ignore.

1) Read Hobbes, Locke, & Rousseau. You will find no mention of animals. You will find a great deal of mention of Man and his rational facilities. You will find mention of what a "contract" is and what it isn't. You will find mention of how "rights" are explicitly formalized and guaranteed via contract and not by any other method. You will see that their true aim was to develop an ethical/political system in which individual citizens (that would be humans) could be ensured of the protection of their freedoms without having to surrender to tyranny.

2) Read Rawls, Gauthier and their critics. You will find them defending essentially the same ideas that Hobbes, Locke, & Rousseau developed. Again, non-human animals are not part of the construct. In fact, one of the major criticisms of contractarian ethics is that it excludes those who are unable to enter into contracts. I suppose that might even include non-human animals.

The point, of course, is that PB and I are not distorting this theory. It explicitly excludes, and was designed to exclude, those who are unable to contract. Non-human animals are unable to enter into contracts and are thus excluded from this theory.

Your desire to somehow expand the theory to cover animals can only be understood as a criticism or attack upon the theory. In no way does your line of thinking represent contractarian ethics.

The very name illustrates your error: Contractarian Ethics. Non-human animals cannot enter into contracts. They lack the necessary reasoning abilities. They are therefore, by design, excluded.

Your claim that PB & I are somehow distorting this theory is therefore objectively disproven. Q.E.D.

The red face is an indication of displeasure. Your obfuscatory approach is not appreciated. You repeatedly ask for serious arguments and upon receiving them repeatedly, ignore them completely, or mangle your reponses to them so utterly as to make us all wonder if in fact you are interested in discussion at all.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Pomp

spin,

PB needed to respond to this:

You, the master of the non-response, have the gall to take me to task for not responding to one of your points? Tell you what, pal, you answer my three numbered questions honestly and without changing the subject and I'll respond to that for you.

Edited because I quoted the wrong line.

[ March 16, 2002: Message edited by: Pompous Bastard ]</p>

99Percent

spin: Neither are your young children, but that won't help them, will it?

Children are protected by their parents.

And I wouldn't hold the constitution up as you do. This was the consitution under which black Americans had almost no rights until about thirty five years ago, and under which the Native American population was decimated. So much for theories.

Actually, the Native American population was (mostly) decimated precisely because they did not enter this contract, for unfortunate reasons.

[ March 16, 2002: Message edited by: 99Percent ]</p>

DRFseven

Where did you get this information, toto? It is dead wrong. There is nothing holy about meat or vegetables; they are nutrients. If the body gets the nutrients it needs, and barring other health problems, it is theoretically able to function correctly, no matter where those nutrients come from. In the U.S., as far as protein goes, most vegetarians get twice as much as they need. In addition, they avoid the harmful effects of too much protein and fat because there is a health advantage to fruits and vegetables that is not present in meats, which is now even recognized by mainstream medicine. You may be interested in the following <a href="http://www.eatright.org/adap1197.html" target="_blank">Position Statement by the American Dietetic Association</a> in 1997:

They further state in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association:
I don't consider that any of this has anything to do with morality, but I didn't want the point to be lost in all the hubbub over spin's argument.

Not Prince Hamlet

I'm not going to bother, Spin. You haven't listened to anything I or anybody else has said on this forum, why should you start with my next post.

You seem to confuse speaking vehemently with speaking convincingly. Perhaps you're the best debater in whatever grade you're in, but it's really not cutting it here.

Basically, a number of people (not just myself) have torn your arguments to shred, to which you say: "No, they didn't." Sort of like the Monty Python Argument Clinic sketch, to wit, "You're not arguing; you're bickering."


That is correct. At that point, I merely wanted to establish the difference.


That's a facile and ineffective statement to avoid answering the question.

Anyway, it was a rhetorical question, so it's a good thing you avoided it. Obviously, if you presume to tell me that I'm wrong, yet will give no justification other than your assertion, then you are implying that you think your morality is superior to mine.

Heh. Now you're claiming you're more intelligent than I am. Care to put that to a vote?


*yawn* Same old pattern. Anything that doesn't prove your point, you declare it as irrelevant or meaningless.

Oh, so now we're resorting to picking on typos, are we? Why is it that when people are losing debates badly, they always fall back to the old "you made a typo so you're wrong" defense?

Don't be obtuse, kid. It was a typo and you know it.

Society was a criterion, by which I showed that cannibalism is not equivalent to eating meat. Putting it into set terms: cannibalism is proper subset of meat eating.


Ha! I was waiting for that! Thank you very much for walking right into that trap.

Nope, Nazi Germany and McCarthism were not the same. Why? Because the failings there were not ubiquitous and, on a global, weren't even the majority.

Of course, you'll retort with, what if they were everywhere?

And answer to that is, obviously, they couldn't be. Because both of those depend on the persecution of a minority group, and if it were ubiquitous, there would not be a minority group to speak of.

However, even though I set you up for it, I still want to congratulate you on the first valid logical argument that I've seen you produce.

Anyway, this has proven to be a frightfully pointless exercise. I'm sure that even now you think that you're the soul of reason and that all the others who have disagreed with you are just spouting nonsense.

You can continue to think that way if you want, but I'm going to take the approach that I know a number of other members have taken, which is to ignore you. So you go on and post your dogmatic soapboxing, but I'm going to save my posts for people who utilize logic instead of mere insistence.

You can reply to this if you want, but I'll likely only skim it at best.

Jeff

P.S. I thought of you this evening while I had my chicken dinner. It made it taste even better. Yum yum!

mattmattmattmattv

If God didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?

matt

Malaclypse the Younger

Amazingly enough, I enjoy this thread more just reading the responses.

-DM-

... so we could sacrifice them in burnt offerings.

GE 8.20-21: Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. The LORD smelled the soothing aroma;

-DM-

Hello SD. It really is entertaining to watch a real Spinmeister at work, isn't it?

--Don--

spin

Chimpanzees usually get their protein intake from a variety of young leaves in their arboreal habitat and can happily survive on that source of protein if it is available all year round. However, climatic changes have made it difficult to procure their normal source of protein all year round and so they resort to the eating of meat to supplement their diets. This is called opportunism. As I said, had they a permanent supply of young tender leaves, they would live on that.

[ March 17, 2002: Message edited by: spin ]</p>