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Member (Idle past 4839 days) Posts: 400 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: When does killing an animal constitute murder? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
In Message 60
crashfrog writes: Infanticide has always been practiced in human cultures, and I can envision circumstances in which it's a morally-indicated act of mercy. Not even just for the infant. Now don't be modest! Or you could swiftly be the target of satire! - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0
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In Message 84
jar writes: Which wife? Oooo. That's definitely better than Jack Benny's "...wait, I'm still thinking." - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
Thank you for describing what Straggler has been unable to see in Jar & Ringo's posts. With the subjective statistical variance so high in these hypothetical things for what people use to decide what to do, average is not dependable enough to formulate a rule of thumb. While the average may sit significantly higher for humans than for cockroaches in anyone's ordering, the variance of these situations is so huge, it is foolish to formulate a behavior before gathering the specifics of the situation.
Getting back to Melindoor's OP, I suspect we all do harbor what are quite simply specieist prejudices. This almost reminds me of the difference between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Lennon was assassinated. McCartney can never, ever be assassinated. He can only be murdered. Or at least so the saying goes. If a violent psycho shoots and kills in cold blood, then, as we move down the list of species as ordered by the already known specieist humans, when is it no longer murder but something like reckless destruction or poaching or something else under the umbrella of animal cruelty? I would probably emotionally go with what the scientific community now perceives as the intelligence of the species in question. And probably have a similar known-to-be-faulty-but-it's-mine system as Straggler and frako have. Douglas Hofstadter, in his "Godel, Escher, Bach" on page 314, introduces a character Aunt Hillary, who is a sentient ant colony, the individual ants being mere cells to her whole. Killing certain ants is akin to getting a haircut, perhaps, but killing off the colony - in this case of the intelligent Aunt Hillary, would be murder? - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
Artemis writes: I thought god gave us all the animals to do what we want with them. You thought wrong. BTW, what is this garish caricature of the Black Dahlia? Is it because Obama is black? - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
Dogmafood writes: I would say that while I respect all living things my compassion for an animal is proportional to it's intelligence. And yesterday I would have agreed. But now I think, for me, the more accurate term is "awareness". BTW nice irony in your screen name.... - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
Straggler writes: There are times when individual animal lives are valued higher than individual human lives. If that is what you mean with your "complex" argument then you will get very little disagreement. OKAY!!!! You DO understand where Ringo & Jar are coming from! HooRay. Straggler continues:
Equally obvious however is the fact that generally humans consider human life as being worthy of more moral consideration than animal life. Yes, and I understand that you are trying to help Melindoor's thread along. The first thing that should be flatout ruled Off Topic are those weird hypothetical tests of ant versus disgusted pedophile murderer questions. Joan Baez had a very funny, but piercingly devastating, answer to a typical Draft Board question she had heard about. The question was to imagine driving on a mountain highway with a wall of rock on one side, a cliff on the other. You have your own darling family in the car with you as you are coming around a curve. Suddenly as you come around the curve, you see your grandmother trying to get a dozen babies off the road! - now, do you just slam into them all willy-nilly or do you rip the car violently to the right and down the cliff or into the wall of rock on your left (American road rules)?? Baez looks at the guy and says: I go into a high state of panic, I freak out! I try to stop the car on a dime, but because I'm so freaked out I plow into my grandmother & the babies anyway and still go fatally shooting over the cliff, whereupon I land on a village church in full attendance for some family who lost a child to cancer, killing them all along with my family, and then starting a fire that burns the whole village down and ruptures a container holding vile chemicals that bursts downstream polluting hundreds of villages below for 100,000 years. So rule out those preposterous scenarios!!! Please - we've had enough. - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
OK
I have decided what my view on the OP is: Everything involving the consumption of DNA from other things is, in fact, MURDER. The extent to which we forgive ourselves for committing such murder is derived from our stupid "learned" vanity over the DNA we consume. It is impractical to enforce "Thou Shall Not Murder" at such a wide scale of course! Furthermore, we would all die if it were enforced at the death row level. So it's the stupid ingrained vanity. If it wasn't for vanity, we'd all be dead. - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
CS writes:
If group A is less likely to X than group B, then that means that group B is more likely to X than group A. except that the clarification is more properly phrased: If group A is less likely to X, then group A is less likely to Y. - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0
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GodDidIT writes: Are you for abortion? Choice is valid reason for some to kill humans. Yes. I think the mother should be able to abort up to 21 years. - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
Straggler writes: Now I ask you if you have a moral problem with the infamous Nazi experiments on humans? Ah, yes, Felix Mengele. Some might say, "just now", we've reached the Godwin event in the thread. But, hold on, to linger here a bit longer...of course these experiments were perhaps the most reprehensible actions ever taken by humans. Ever. Although Emperor Nero has some lengthly, and maybe equal record, of *matching* Felix in foul Reprehensibility, carving up the bodies of boys alive to satisfy his depravities and so on. Straggler - you are trying to draw an absolute line and I commend you for the effort. You are looking for a backbone of civilization that should cut across all humanity. I look for that too. Suppose someday way up ahead the civilization we live in decides that killing animals for food is wrong (a sort of vegan view point). What about harvesting beef from cows. Take some, let the cow grow it back.... YOW! does that hit us with negatives. But wait - the cow lives on. Yes, only to be harvested again, like a corn field. Can we make it more like an apple tree? Egods, even amongst vegetables there are connotations. So now there may be problems morally with killing certain vegetable life? Play Mozart to your house plants? We have seen "meat" grown in laboratories - like eating cardboard - not at all like chicken, I've heard - is this the way of the future? Anybody here seen "Silent Running" with Bruce Dern as the hero? He grows real tomatoes on the space-born solariums preserving the last remnants of the earth's garden species. His co-astronauts are just up for a temporary tour and cannot grok his viewpoint. Joan Baez does the music. R2D2 was inspired by Huey, Dewey & Luis. - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
Onifre writes: I said I didn't have a problem with humans being farmed for food... I think I have a problem with it. Maybe H.G.Well's depiction of the Morlocks. Maybe Soylent Green. I dunno. Maybe just a shiver up my spine. I cant go there, Oni. Call me irrational. - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
Here is the original text:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. First off, the United States, after WAY TOO LONG A TIME, granted these rights to women and black people and so forth. They are still bogged down in stupid religiously fucked up brains on the issue of gay rights. This did not go far enough. And even if it were at last extended to all of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, it would still not be far enough. In the Science Fiction world you may run across the acronym HILF, which stands for Highly Intelligent Life Form. Even this is not enough. We rightly protect the rights of those among us who have damages or conditions of the brain that some may construe as judging them "not highly intelligent". I suggest we use the term SALF, Self-Aware Life Form. Therefore,my first recast of the Declaration of Independence quote would thus look like this: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all self-aware life forms are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, the best health care available, and the pursuit of happiness, but there may be others that are too hard to write down in a cogent way here*, and that is why we only say "among". That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among self-aware life forms, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the self-aware life forms to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. * to allude to Fermat's Last Theorem But there is room for more of this sort of thing here. I think we might consider, in this wonderful forum, some ideas to improve on the various governmental documents around the world so far. The bit about the Creator is perfect. No God need be mentioned specifically or even needed. ("Hi, Ma and possibly Dad and possibly THuihuiygkca numbers 4,5,6,7,8 and 9!) It is the words Inalienable and Endowed that make the US Founding Fathers (probably Jefferson as attributed, but with people talking into his ears in each side) statement so POWERFUL. - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2587 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
jar writes: Does that really cover those lifeforms that are so highly evolved that they no longer separate self from all life? While I would like the opportunity to recast it again should that situation arise, I remember another SF story about an alien lifeform that sent a representative individual. Turns out all the individuals were telepathically connected and each one was expendable in the manner of trimming fingernails or cutting hair. When the species finally figured out that humans were not so connected and thus the investigative experiments of killing individual humans in various different manners for observation became woefully understood as the egregious killing of isolated entities, the species quickly terminated the earth-bound representative. Perhaps reminiscent of Douglas Hofstadter's character, Aunt Hillary, in Godel, Escher & Bach. - xongsmith, 5.7d
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