Society/Culture Are you an ethical hypocrite?

Jun 30, 2009
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Deroesfromgero
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east perth
How do you meet these people?
Live in the country, get to know farmers. Be good at fishing, crayfishing, squidding so you have something to offer.

Or start hunting ferals - thats a good guilt free way of collecting good meat you can swap with others.

We also have a 2600sqm block and grow funktonnes of fruit trees and swap fruit in season.

Tree/sea change has improved my life so much - not all our meat is sourced this way but a huge percentage is.

Also remember when apples were just amazing as a kid - they actually still are - its just that colesworths sell us 6 month old apples - get them off the tree daily for absolutely gorgeous apples.
 
Dec 20, 2014
26,333
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Hong Kong
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West Coast
Live in the country, get to know farmers. Be good at fishing, crayfishing, squidding so you have something to offer.

Or start hunting ferals - thats a good guilt free way of collecting good meat you can swap with others.

We also have a 2600sqm block and grow funktonnes of fruit trees and swap fruit in season.

Tree/sea change has improved my life so much - not all our meat is sourced this way but a huge percentage is.

Also remember when apples were just amazing as a kid - they actually still are - its just that colesworths sell us 6 month old apples - get them off the tree daily for absolutely gorgeous apples.
You hunt ferals? Or do you meet them online?
 
Jun 30, 2009
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Deroesfromgero
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east perth
You hunt ferals? Or do you meet them online?
I used to - notsomuch these days although im thinking about getting a coupla guns and getting back into it when the wind is too high for fishing.

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I think when it comes to online ferals i would be a target….
 

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mr bagcroft

Norm Smith Medallist
May 19, 2017
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I love animals, and I love eating meat,chicken etc.
It gives me ZERO ethical issues.
I'll continue to eat them too, in plenty of delicious quantity.
Some people need to get a life/hobby and something else to think about.
 
Apr 12, 2010
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Melbourne
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Geelong
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?


A really good post - and I agree that in the future, we'll look back on the whole idea of eating animals as repulsive.

My take on this is that the suffering or 'using' of animals needs to be measured alongside the benefit it brings. There was a time when having animals for meat, work, milk and eggs could be argued as a strong necessity.

Even today, my personal moral position is that it's okay for animals to be used like this - the bit I have a problem with is the shortcuts, mass production, etc etc that seems to be a necessary by-product of a free, competitive market - coupled with consumers that are sufficiently separated from the 'uglier' aspects of it all and are greedily wanting more for the lowest price. It's similar to something like greyhound racing - as a hobby with small prizes I think it's great. The dogs do love running. But when hyper-competitiveness and greed take over we get over-breeding and mistreatment.

As to your broader topic - I guess I categorise myself as less of a moral perfectionist - and therefore, somewhat of an ethical hypocrite. I like eating meat, I like flying overseas and I like a bet on the races. I care that progress is made in all of these areas to get ethically better - but to be honest I get too much joy/benefit out them to stop me from abstaining altogether based on moral grounds.

I also believe that moral positions are a very personal thing, and preaching too aggressively to others about it is fraught with exposing one's own hypocrisy. When the vegans show me footage of animal cruelty on an ipad, I could go all relative privation on their arses and start up a conversation about mistreatment of workers in Chinese factories or the murders and rapes that arise out of coltan mining to produce that ipad; but that itself would be aggressively preaching. We can pick holes in each other's morals until the cows come home.

Same with vegans who are happy to take an aspirin or a vaccine. They have not taken a 'perfect' moral stance but I applaud them for considering their position and living by it.

Environment is another great one - the west, having established a base of wealth over generations of polluting the planet love to point the finger at India and China, who are doing nothing more than trying to have better lives the same way we did. Morals/ethics can only be judged in the context of benefits.
 

Osho

We haven't changed our position.
Jul 9, 2021
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Buffy has forgiven me for jumping off my vegetarian diet, which I persisted with for several years. I treat her extra well as penance. I dropped the diet because at my age, late 50s, i was dropping muscle mass severely and skin was drooping all over the show. Back to lean meat, I am much stronger and alert, and don't suffer any digestive issues at all. The vegie diet was much tougher on the innards.

I was years ago advised to feed my kids meat to assist brain development. I see this is still advised by many health authorities. Meat is chockers with essential vits and minerals, in a tasty neat package, easily digestible, and the lack of it at early ages, and perhaps in later ones, may inhibit health.

It's worth noting Buffy is also a meat eater, how hypocrital of her to point the paw at me.
 

Madas

Norm Smith Medallist
Aug 16, 2020
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Fremantle
My Hypocrisy is localism .
I’m not sure whether this weird human trait manifests itself in other facets of society but it certainly does in surfing.
I can’t stand multiples of tourists coming to my home town and crowding up the few waves that we have .
Yet I have travelled and surfed for 35 years all over the world partaking in the same behaviour albeit respectfully .
I think it’s an age thing though , as you get older and less fit you don’t want more competition for waves because you’ll never keep up with 20 year olds .
 

hiking

Rookie
Nov 13, 2021
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I agree with the OP, and I'm in the same position to a degree.

However, I still think there should be a significant point of difference made between locally and "respectfully" killed farmed animals, and then commercial factory farming slaughter. Both, in most cases (in this country) are a legitimate choice. But the cost really adds up for the consumer if going with the former.
 
Aug 12, 2012
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sv_cheats 1
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Going from being a hypocrite to being ethical is simply one or two steps of rationalisation away. For example, you could argue that you abhor the mistreatment of animals, but killing and eating them isn't mistreatment as you're a human and on top of the food chain, giving you moral/ethical legitimacy as the eater-of-all-things. We are just heterotrophic multicellular organisms after all. And we don't chase down poor baby gazelles in the savannah in front of its mother and maul it with our friends.

Or you could just take the Wint absurdist approach:
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Contra Mundum

To Know Nothing is the Happiest Life
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Everyone is a hypocrite to some degree aren't they. It's an intensely human thing to do. I like the Pelagian heresy version of original sin - its just people's capacity to fail their own standards. We all hate consumerism until there is a new iphone and then the one you have seems passé
 

i like ram-man

Draftee
Nov 24, 2021
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14
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A psychologist friend once said he was tending to think there weren’t necessarily good and bad events in your life, just events. The surrounding attitudes and circumstances determine how they affect you and the people around you.
 

Contra Mundum

To Know Nothing is the Happiest Life
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A psychologist friend once said he was tending to think there weren’t necessarily good and bad events in your life, just events. The surrounding attitudes and circumstances determine how they affect you and the people around you.

That's Stoicism: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
 
Sep 15, 2007
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Everyone is a hypocrite to some degree aren't they. It's an intensely human thing to do. I like the Pelagian heresy version of original sin - its just people's capacity to fail their own standards. We all hate consumerism until there is a new iphone and then the one you have seems passé
You have confused consuemrism with wanting an iphone.

you are also mistaken in that everyone hates consumerism. collectors and hoarders clearly dont hate it. Nor do those obsessed with clothes And purchasing status symbols.
 
Sep 15, 2007
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That's Stoicism: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
I agree with the sentiment but its not 100 percent accurate. If you body is deficient from things it consumes from the external world then that creates pain. its not physically possible to seperate everything that happens in our bodies from what is happening in the external world. Although i agree it is possible to seperate a lot of it.
 

Contra Mundum

To Know Nothing is the Happiest Life
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I agree with the sentiment but its not 100 percent accurate. If you body is deficient from things it consumes from the external world then that creates pain. its not physically possible to seperate everything that happens in our bodies from what is happening in the external world. Although i agree it is possible to seperate a lot of it.

I think they are talking about attitudes rather than physical ailments
 
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