Tag: ethics

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עַיִן תַּחַת עַיִן

ANON: “Is co-habitation and occupation of land an equal sin to that of murdering another human?”

Taking and losing life and taking and losing “land” are all done by, and done to, individual people. You can’t quantify or equate “sin” without counting individual doers and individual done-to’s, individual victims and individual perpetrators, on “both” sides. 

Taking “land” includes taking everything else that individual lives are lived for (including family and freedom).

Perhaps the most telling detail of this tragedy — which has individual victims on “both” sides – is that there aren’t just two sides: 

The individual victim-counts and the individual perpetrator-counts, for both “land”-taking/losing and life-taking/losing, start long before 1949 and beyond “Palestine” (which I take to be a geographical region, not a further metaphysical or moral entity). 

The “takings”  are not just local, in either place or time, although individuals remain individuals and local (when it comes to counting victims and perpetrators). 

All of this could have been said of the taking of both life and “land” throughout the entire history of humanity (and inhumanity), planet-wide. It even has a biological basis (and it goes beyond the boundaries of species): 

Life necessarily entails conflicts of interest – vital (i.e., life-or-death) interest. And “land” covers a multitude of vital interest, not just real-estate or geometry: it covers just about everything that life is worth living (or dying or killing) for. 

So, no, if there were a measure of degree of  “sinfulness”, it could not be expressed as life vs. land.

There is, of course, more to say; much more. But it’s best to expose simplistic metrics before starting the counting.

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Taste

It will come, 
and I rejoice
(for the victims). 

But even if I live to 120, 
I want none of it. 

I want a clean break 
from the blood-soaked 
2000-millennium history 
of our race.

Nor is it to our credit
that we wouldn’t give up the taste
till we could get the same
from another brand.

It makes no amends,
to them,
were amends possible.

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A Whimper

I have of late 
lost all my faith 
in “taste” of either savor: 
gustate 
or aesthete. 
Darwin’s “proximal 
stimulus” 
is  just 
the Siren’s Song 
that 
from the start 
inspired 
the genes and memes 
of our superior 
race 
to pummel this promontory 
into 
for all but the insensate 
a land of waste.
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Singer/Salatin Debate About Meat Eating

The host of the Munk debate was terrible. Verbose, with silly sallies into “agency” and other trivia.

The farmer, Salatin, was neither intelligent, nor well-informed, nor consistent; he was selling something (non-factory farming), and he justified what he was doing by appeals to superficial, under-informed environmentalism and religion, so he did not do a very convincing job on his end of the debate.

Singer is far more intelligent, has given it all a lot more and deeper thought, yet in the end I think he could have done a better job. He is very phlegmatic, and seemed to be basing his many valid points on a vague ethical premise that “we can and should do better” — that instrumentalism is somehow intrinsically wrong.

It’s not really a debating matter, but an ethical matter. Singer’s analogies with slavery and the subjugation of women are all valid. Supernatural justifications from religion are obviously nonsense (regardless of how many  cling to them). 

What’s needed is a coherent moral criterion, but one that is grounded on what most of us feel is morally right (without appeal to the supernatural).

And I think what most  of us feel is right is that it is wrong to cause suffering unnecessarily. For if that’s not true, then nothing is wrong, and psychopathy rules.

Of course the devil is in the details about what is “necessary”. 

A Darwinian would say that what an animal has to do so it and its young can survive is a biological necessity. A carnivorous predator like a lion has to kill its prey (and much the same is true for its prey, in their vital conflict of life-or-death necessity).

So the point is that in the human evolutionary past the killing and eating of animals may have been biologically necessary for our species. But in much of the world today (except the few remaining hunting/fishing subsistence-cultures) it is no longer necessary (entirely apart from the fact that it is also detrimental to the environment and to human health).

Singer pointed out, again correctly, that the only living organisms that can suffer are the ones that can feel (i.e., the sentient species) and that plants are, on all evidence, not sentient. So Salatin’s point that all life feeds on life is irrelevant (and in fact false in the case of most plants!)

So Singer made all the pertinent points except the all-important one that integrates them: the one about biological necessity.

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Taste

Re: Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human (R Dunn & M Sanchez)

My (shamefully late) moral awakening has made me unable to read most of what I used to consider our classical literature. The flagrant and unquestioned abuse of animals is everywhere. 

I feel the same way about the historical and biological past of human (gustatory) taste. In broad strokes, I know the story, but the details are not titillating. 

In fact I think that in a much broader sense I have renounced most “taste” of  all sorts, both gustatory and aesthetic/cultural. It’s so imbued with pleasure at the expense of the suffering of others, human and animal.

Of course there’s no rejecting Darwinian facts – but there’s no pleasure in rehearsing, replicating or revering them.

tasteYes, this does superficially resemble some sort of ascetic, killjoy puritanical cult. But although it would take a while to explain it, I don’t think it’s that at all — and in some fundamental ways the opposite: the enemy is not pleasure itself, but pleasure at the expense of the suffering of others.