- Banned
- #1
My position generally is that thinking people should aspire to intellectual consistency.
By that, I mean that we should consider our principles and then do our best to apply them consistently and hopefully live accordingly.
Sometimes this will force us to acknowledge a gap between our avowed principles and whether we indeed live up to them. If you aspire to intellectual consistency, you should seek to close this gap when you identify it.
For me, I cannot avoid my own ethical hypocrisy when it comes to animal welfare and my own habit of eating them.
I abhor the mistreatment of animals. I agree largely with the arguments of Peter Singer on this topic. One day in the future, people may well look back on the way we currently treat animals, and our indifference to their suffering, with absolute moral disgust, maybe not so far removed from the way we now regard slavery. An Animal Holocaust that lasted centuries.
When I see reports of someone who has tortured or killed an animal for no reason, I have an intense reaction. I think big game hunters who pose with photos of dead elephants and other species are absolutely grotesque. I feel total moral disgust. If someone killed or seriously harmed my dog, no punishment would be sufficient. I'd want them treated by the law as child murderers. I would be willing to administer state-sanctioned corporal punishment myself. It is perhaps my most illiberal impulse.
That said, I eat pigs, cows, chicken and fish. But if folks in Korea and China and elsewhere eat dogs, that's disgusting. That should be banned.
All of this is of course irrational but I'd still like to think that I am broadly committed to ethical principles of animal welfare.
And yet, I eat meat that has probably been factory-farmed, which we know inflicts gross and unnecessary suffering on animals. I participate in an economy that derives profit from their suffering on an industrial scale.
I don't accept arguments about "the food chain". We've moved beyond that.
And that's before we even get to questions about sustainability, which I also like to think I take seriously. But we can't have 6 billion people eating beef twice a week. If you're worried about the environment, one simple modification would be to curtail the global demand for beef, which would start with everyone eating it less.
To this effect, I also look at folks who oppose bullfighting, which I dislike as a ritual. But the reality is that bulls who are reared to die in the ring have a far better quality of life than beef cattle, and probably suffer less when they are killed.
And I eat plenty of beef.
This is ethical hypocrisy on my part.
What are your areas of ethical hypocrisy?
By that, I mean that we should consider our principles and then do our best to apply them consistently and hopefully live accordingly.
Sometimes this will force us to acknowledge a gap between our avowed principles and whether we indeed live up to them. If you aspire to intellectual consistency, you should seek to close this gap when you identify it.
For me, I cannot avoid my own ethical hypocrisy when it comes to animal welfare and my own habit of eating them.
I abhor the mistreatment of animals. I agree largely with the arguments of Peter Singer on this topic. One day in the future, people may well look back on the way we currently treat animals, and our indifference to their suffering, with absolute moral disgust, maybe not so far removed from the way we now regard slavery. An Animal Holocaust that lasted centuries.
When I see reports of someone who has tortured or killed an animal for no reason, I have an intense reaction. I think big game hunters who pose with photos of dead elephants and other species are absolutely grotesque. I feel total moral disgust. If someone killed or seriously harmed my dog, no punishment would be sufficient. I'd want them treated by the law as child murderers. I would be willing to administer state-sanctioned corporal punishment myself. It is perhaps my most illiberal impulse.
That said, I eat pigs, cows, chicken and fish. But if folks in Korea and China and elsewhere eat dogs, that's disgusting. That should be banned.
All of this is of course irrational but I'd still like to think that I am broadly committed to ethical principles of animal welfare.
And yet, I eat meat that has probably been factory-farmed, which we know inflicts gross and unnecessary suffering on animals. I participate in an economy that derives profit from their suffering on an industrial scale.
I don't accept arguments about "the food chain". We've moved beyond that.
And that's before we even get to questions about sustainability, which I also like to think I take seriously. But we can't have 6 billion people eating beef twice a week. If you're worried about the environment, one simple modification would be to curtail the global demand for beef, which would start with everyone eating it less.
To this effect, I also look at folks who oppose bullfighting, which I dislike as a ritual. But the reality is that bulls who are reared to die in the ring have a far better quality of life than beef cattle, and probably suffer less when they are killed.
And I eat plenty of beef.
This is ethical hypocrisy on my part.
What are your areas of ethical hypocrisy?
