What a beautiful picture. Pigs are really magnificent animals. I owned a couple for awhile, and taught one of them to do tricks (sit, stay, around, etc.)
They also pretty much have it the worst of any animal in US factory-farming practices (except laying hens, they probably have it worse, but they're chickens so I have trouble caring that much). I had to cut out factory-farmed pork after that. It's one thing to have cows walking around in their own shit eating corn and animal byproducts and pretty much anything else instead of grass... at least they are outside, and anyway, being herbivores, cows are pretty stupid. Pigs, though... these are animals as smart as dogs (in some ways, smarter.. I found my pigs learned tricks faster than my dogs, although in fairness a dog will do a trick out of loyalty while a pig will only do it for food, heh) and some of them are spending their whole lives indoors in awful conditions, to the point where they basically become crazy.
Anyway, end of sermonizing. I will also admit that bacon and prosciutto are two of the tastiest foods in existence. Dammit, why do they have to be so smart AND so tasty?!? :(
Awww... that's so soooeeeeeet! Sorry mama, but baby's going onto the spit in 3 months.
I love pigs though; if they didn't scratch the floor and eat my garden I might even consider keeping one as a pet.
I've had "free-range" pigs (grown in captivity but with plenty space to run around); they taste so different from the usual bulk-bred pigs. It's such a pity that raising them to be tasty seems to conflict with raising them to feed more people.
Uh... why is this decision giving you trouble? It's just selfish vs. ethical. The blood-splatter patterns from shooting people may exhibit interesting aesthetic properties, but...
Uh... why is this decision giving you trouble? It's just selfish vs. ethical. The blood-splatter patterns from shooting people may exhibit interesting aesthetic properties, but...
I recently visited a small farm north of me that's working on sustainable polyculture principles for meat - they were using the pigs to till the garden, and happier pigs I have never seen.
Whatever, Cai. So you tear into me because I make an ethical choice with some regret for what I am giving up, but you leave everyone else alone who hasn't even considered the ethics of it?
Man, for a bunch of so-called atheists, people on this blog sure have a lot of dogma. I think I'm going to stop reading the comments altogether. While the grammar and spelling is better, beneath the surface half of you are no better than youtube commenters. Self-righteous flame-compulsive morons...
Why does intelligence persist in the factory-farmed pig? Is it hard to breed out? Does it aid somehow in the production of or the quality of the final product?
Why does intelligence persist in the factory-farmed pig? Is it hard to breed out? Does it aid somehow in the production of or the quality of the final product?
I doubt that's a factor in what factory farms consider when breeding.
I recently visited a small farm north of me that's working on sustainable polyculture principles for meat - they were using the pigs to till the garden, and happier pigs I have never seen.
Sounds nice. I can rarely remember what I read in Fast Food Nation and what in The Omnivore's Dilemma, but the description of factory pig farming (especially the part about tail docking) in one or both was horrific.
@Rev BDC #19 -- Yeah, I know, but I guess my point is that I am so far somewhat dissatisfied with the ratio of dumbflame to stuffWorthReading in the comments in this blog. heh... I suppose it's vastly better than most of teh interwubz in that respect, but that's like saying "I suppose is David Irving is vastly less anti-semitic than Hitler". heh...
@AG #21 and Rev BDC #22 -- Actually, I think I heard somewhere that something vaguely like this was being done. Even from the pure profit perspective, smart sensitive animals are a royal pain in the ass to process in that fashion. Pigs in particular go batshit crazy under those conditions, and it makes them hard to control and causes all sorts of health problems. If the pigs were dumber and more complacent, the thinking goes, they wouldn't go so crazy.
If the suffering of the pigs were the *only* concern, one could make an argument for moving in this direction (although I'm sure it would strike some people as a ghastly solution to the problem, but I'd be willing to entertain it at least). But of course, factory farming has all sorts of environmental issues as well, not to mention the fact that large scale farming in the US is petroleum-intensive -- and I need not remind people of the long-term geopolitical implications of that...
actually, Rev., veg/AR has *everything* to do with atheism. both are grounded in ethical systems that aspire toward rationality.
the idea that it's okay to continue with an action that is aesthetically pleasing tho ethically or rationally compromised is itself ethically compromised - and the same class of error that many theists and creationists make. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris talks about noncruelty as the fundamental value of any ethical system, and discusses medieval people burning cats for fun, and Descartes' grotesque dissection of conscious dogs (all the while claiming that they were soulless automatons) as examples of how religion can take us away from that fundamental precept. And Harris goes on to say, correctly of course, that it's a short step from abusing animals to abusing humans.
The people here who are boasting about loving bacon even though they are fully aware of the pain and suffering that goes into producing it (not just of the animals, btw, but the seriously-oppressed slaughterhouse workers AND the local environment and communities, and BTW the commenters' own health) are no different than creationists who proudly flout their ignorance and the consequences thereof. They are just choosing a different vector with which to express their determined ignorance.
Look, none of us is perfect - I'm certainly not. But if you're going to make a claim towards striving for a rational/ethical basis to live your life, then you don't have the luxury of flouting a huge nonrational/nonethical area of your life like it's a good thing, esp. in a forum devoted to rationality. At least show some humility, and recognize that cynicism is not an admirable or empowered reaction to a depiction of tender love. (btw, I'm not talking specifically to you, Rev!)
Not quite as good as bacon, but have a look at the Swedes revenge for the prosecution of The Pirate Bay http://www.internetavgift.se/
If you cannot read it, it is in short a fee every Swede will pay to the law firm that represents the music industry, but since there is no such fee, everybody will claim back their money.According to Swedish law, the law firm must refund the money, and that will cost them a small fortune (or a large one if enought Swedes participate), both in bank fees and administration time.Swedes are encouraged to pay 1 Swedish krona, which is equivalent to 30 cents. The administration fees and bank's refund fees will amount to something like 5 dollars equivalent, at least for each transaction.
This is a valid point, of course - but is it ethically valid to stop the discussion/analysis there? You have the right to do so, but is it right?
Ethically valid?
Yes I can stop the discussion anywhere and it has nothing to do with ethics. I'm not ethically bound to continue talking to you about anything. You are using that term as a weapon instead of an idea. Please don't try and passive aggressively bully me into anything.
HOWEVER, the truth is I was / am in the process of typing out a longer response but I'm at work and I don't want to rush it.
Even on this hot button topic though, the thread contained info well worth reading. Sometimes you just have to wear your fire-fighting gear when go in.
At least two people now have compared eating pigs to eating people. Now, I do not currently eat pigs so I am not trying to say there are no ethical issues with doing so. But this comparison with cannibalism is absurd.
#1 Humans are smarter than pigs.
#2 There is a significantly elevated problem (both ethically and evolutionarily) when one eats a member of one's own species rather than a member of a closely-related species.
#3 Domestication significantly muddies the waters, because, as a species, the pigs have made a bargain of sorts with humanity to increase their collective reproductive success at the cost of a shortened individual lifespan. This does not make it okay to torture them (that was never part of the evolutionary bargain), and one could even continue to reject our very right to eat them (even though to do so would undermine the reproductive success of the species)... but one should not pretend the issue is the same as eating or killing a person. Puh-leez.
the comment still betrays an ignorance of domestication. Say what you will
"And values are inflexibly capricious without rationality.
I could see this thread going into reductio eternity..."
Even less rational animals value certain resources and relationships as inferred from their behavior.
Human's share some values, and those of us that value rationality and evidence reasoning have a tool for reaching agreement about facts and theories. But we need to share more values than that to reach further agreement. We may not be able to agree on the criteria and values by which different possible ethical systems will be judged. If we care about the extent to which certain ethical systems are practical, we may want to know more about human nature.
Oh, bleh! Another blog being taken over by "if you're vegetarian you're good, if you're not you're bad." Was a vegetarian myself for many years and still lean towards it, but I do not agree with vegetarians doing the self-righteous bit.
Work for animal rights, yeah, but don't go so far as to demonize non-vegetarians as the unethical Other.
And, Hillary, you may not have intended to use the term "ethics" as a weapon, but it certainly came off that way.
In one of the previous blogs that included a lot of discussion about bacon, I brought up the problem with factory farms and lots of people agreed and chimed in with possible solutions. Seems to me that's where the emphasis should be.
Comfort probably tastes like nasty ass. But yes, it would be specifically more ethical to eat Ray Comfort (if you could purge later and get access to an EMDR machine for trauma therapy).
I'm with James on the "puh-leeze" when it comes to throwing human blood spatter around as an equivalent to killing pigs for food. If vegetarians go back to eating some meat, do they immediately start killing humans because they don't see any difference between cows and humans? Not in my case ... not so far anyway.
Uh, no. SOME (or even MANY or MOST, but definitely not all) humans are smarter than pigs.
And pigs ain't superstitious, they only believe in what they see and smell: food (including truffles).
#44. I agree with most of your position except I would say that less rational animals (non-humans) gravitate towards behaviors rather than possess values. It is difficult for less cognitively evolved creatures to obtain subjective integrity. However, resonating with your point, some less rational animals (like Kirk Cameron) have values and no rationality.
Depending on the answer, that may prompt another question: Would it be tasty to eat Ray Comfort?
Hmmm....
You could do worse than rubbing the carcass down with a little olive oil, a bit of garlic and some fresh ground black pepper. Smoking him over the wood of your choice for several hours, and then at the end basting with whichever sauce you find toothsome. I'm thinking "Sweet Baby Ray's." I wonder if there's a banana chutney recipe floating around out there.
So is a banana and peanut butter sandwich. I don't think it would be ethical to eat Ray Comfort, but I could be persuaded that it would be ethical to stop feeding him.
It's all very well taking a high moral stance over not eating meat, but it may be easier for some than for others.
I tried not eating tetrapods for about one year, for ethical reasons. The problem was, I've never much liked fish or fruit or vegetables. Then, when I was on a Polish liner crossing the Atlantic, & saw the menu, I abandoned the meat-free diet.
We evolved as omnivores, & maybe some of us are just more carnivorous than others?
Yeah, Hillary, you are right. The distaste for your self-righteous, I'm-queen-of-the-high-moral-ground stance is not the same as addressing the facts of the argument for vegetarianism.
Ugh, there are so many reasons to eat something beyond its taste. Ken Ham would taste awful. However, because he has the power to tame and control large reptiles, eating him would imbue the consumer with the power to do the same (if I remember my first year physiology courses at Liberty U correctly.)
Eating Ray Comfort, unfortunately, would only have the benefit of imbuing the power to control Kirk Cameron, an effect one could presumably achieve with a laser pointer and a wall: "Follow the magical Jesus dot, Kirk, follow the magical Jesus dot!"
Ugh, there are so many reasons to eat something beyond its taste. Ken Ham would taste awful. However, because he has the power to tame and control large reptiles, eating him would imbue the consumer with the power to do the same (if I remember my first year physiology courses at Liberty U correctly.)
By that line of reasoning, would you then become a piglet rapist as well if you at him?
Thank you for your comment and willingness to discuss the issue on the level of facts, instead of just attacking me. I think it's great that you have tried to spare the tetropods.
>maybe some of us are just more carnivorous than others?
this could be true, however I wouldn't discount the cultural role and also the fact that the corporations work hard to disguise the nature of their product and its origins.
To be honest I do come across as more judgmental in these writings than I do in person because in writing precision counts more than in speech. But I truly admire people who strive for ethical living in any area of life (including atheism), even if their success is only partial or even temporary, as my own often is.
Thank you again - your comment was a kind of oasis.
There is no ethical argument for vegetarianism, except that it makes you feel *icky* to eat another animal...But that's not logical.
I disagree. Given that at this point in human history (and all points before)* our continued existence depends on the killing and consumption of some other living things, there are all sorts of ethical reasons to choose to not eat meat, such as the minimisation of cruelty (which depends on some knowledge of the ability of the things we eat to feel pain or not), the reduction of environmental impact (a side-effect of large-scale factory farming and consumer culture), and etc.
You're of course free to disagree with vegetarians and vegetarianism, but most vegetarians that I've ever known have made their choice based more on ethical reasoning as emotion.
FWIW, I didn't find Hillary's comments particularly self-righteous. I disagree with her on a number of points, but nothing she said rose to the absurdity of equating carnivorism with cannibalism. It was a bit of a low-blow to compare bacon-lovers with creationists... But everything else she said seemed like well-reasoned commentary, that I just happen to disagree with on a few points.
By that line of reasoning, would you then become a piglet rapist as well if you at him?
No. Past acts are not transferred, but the power to commit them is.
This does bring up an interesting theological question though: if one were to consume Ken Ham in the attempt to gain herpetological power, would one be able to overcome the compulsion to cruise past pigpens with ears of baby corn, asking litter runts for help in finding one's 'lost puppy'?
Of course there's a rational ethical argument--a pretty good one--to be made for a vegetarian diet. I don't think that Ms. Rettig has presented it here, but it exists. There are also many completely irrational, wholly emotional "arguments" that are made for veg*nism (I like that), all the time. There are rational, arguably ethical arguments that could be made in favor of factory farming, too (perhaps Walton will drop by and offer one). Then there are people whose ethics steer them to spending more $ on free-range/less-cruelty meats (bacon, as a randomly chosen example), since you really vote with your money in the USA.
The tricky thing about atheist ethics, see, is that just beyond the large areas of broad general agreement are these metaphorical badlands where everybody is drawing a different line, and for various ethical and nonethical reasons.
Make the arguments and argue about them if you must, but do not claim the sole possession of "ethics;" you're dead wrong if you do.
"It's interesting (but not surprising) the way people are attacking my motives rather than the facts of what I wrote."
"The people here who are boasting about loving bacon even though they are fully aware of the pain and suffering that goes into producing it (not just of the animals,..."
We are not fully aware of the pain and suffering of the pigs, and much of it may be just transference from identifying with how we would feel. Are you certain that these pigs are not just food addicts by nature or breeding and loving every minute of it, despite the decreased mobility? This is different than the forced feeding that some ducks undergo.
" btw, but the seriously-oppressed slaughterhouse workers AND the local environment and communities,"
Presumably these workers prefer to have the option to work in the slaughter houses to whatever other alternatives they have. There are environmental concerns that should be addressed.
"and BTW the commenters' own health) are no different than creationists who proudly flout their ignorance and the consequences thereof. They are just choosing a different vector with which to express their determined ignorance."
Most alleged evidence I've seen of the dangers of saturated fat, were studies that did not control for Calories. When the evidence is further broken down into the specific saturated fatty acids, some were statistically associated with benefits and others with increased risk. Total Calories and the induction of insulin by the carbohydrate component are viable alternatives to the high saturated fat hypotheses. The risks from the iron component of red meats can be mitigated by consuming tea, which significantly reduces the absorption of iron. Nutrition is still more art than science.
This does bring up an interesting theological question though: if one were to consume Ken Ham in the attempt to gain herpetological power, would one be able to overcome the compulsion to cruise past pigpens with ears of baby corn, asking litter runts for help in finding one's 'lost puppy'?
Perhaps the bad side effect of the herpetological powers is the acute need to rape piglets.
Or maybe even raping piglets gives you the mana for reptile domination?
"""
Are you certain that these pigs are not just food addicts by nature or breeding and loving every minute of it, despite the decreased mobility?
"""
Yes, actually; or at least as certain as I ever can be about the suffering of another being besides myself. It's pretty obvious that pigs in factory farmed conditions are behaving pathologically.
If you spend any time around pigs, and then see/read descriptions of their behavior in these large scale farming operations, it's disturbing to say the least. These are NOT happy pigs, and they are behaving in a WEIRD way.
The description of the sustainable farm in the Omnivore's Dilemma, on the other hand, with pigs digging through layers of mud to find kernels of fermented corn... well, again, if you've spent any time at all around pigs, this is pretty much a porcine paradise, as their two favorite things are digging in mud and alcohol (one of mine would lick bourbon off my fingers, hehehe).
So yeah, I gotta zero in on that. Yes, we know for certain (again, as certainly as we can ever know the suffering of a being other than ourselves) that factory-farmed pigs are not happy.
Africangenesis #70 - if you are seriously interested in these questions, I suggest you do some research, including visiting a livestock sanctuary. Many of our farmed animals demonstrate similar emotions and emotional ranges and pain responses to humans, and in particular show similar traumatic symptoms. Then you need to decide what to do with that information, if you choose to agree, even in part.
re slaughterhouse labor, although some would defend the choice of "horrible job with high injury rate and documented awful treatment" versus "no job / starve to death" as an ethically valid one, I would not.
hey all, got to sign off now, but thanks for the discussion.
"If you spend any time around pigs, and then see/read descriptions of their behavior in these large scale farming operations, it's disturbing to say the least. These are NOT happy pigs, and they are behaving in a WEIRD way"
Are there estimates of the relative costs of the more humane (porcine) approach? If the cost advantages of the factory model are significant, a breeding program to alter those characteristics that contribute to the suffering should be justifiable.
Only tangentially-related (because this does nothing in and of itself to inform our ethics, but it does make you think), it occurred to me a year or two ago that pigs are the only omnivorous mammals that Western culture deigns it acceptable to eat. We eat other omnivores, we eat other mammals, but the only omnivorous mammal is the pig.
I did find goat at an Indian restaurant one time, so I suppose you could count that too... but in America we usually don't.
One question to ask yourself: Would you be okay with eating a dog if it tasted as good as a pig? Because in terms of intelligence, personality, etc., they are similar.
Different people will come to different conclusions about this question. For me personally, I would, but only if the dogs were given an opportunity to have a wonderful dog-appropriate life. For my wife, the answer is no -- she can't even bring herself to eat pasture-raised pork. For others, the answer may be, "Bring on the mutt meat!" But whichever way you go, we should all be aware of the decision we are making.
Humans and pigs have been ecological competitors for as long as their ranges have overlapped (a real long time). We eat the same stuff, and also each other, and ~always have. Our teeth (adapted to diet in mammals) are so similar that fossils used to be commonly confused, and our guts are so similar that we share Ascaris parasites (google-image that one, I dare ya).
AG #76: There is some merit to that line of thinking, but as I mentioned before, there are other long-term costs associated with intensive factory farming besides the cruelty issue.
The cost advantages of the factory model in the short term and for the meat producer are quite high. I mean, there's a reason sustainably-raised meat costs so much more, right? But there are significant negative externalities to the process, both long-term and short-term, that aren't being properly reflected in the cost to the consumer or in the profits of the producer. This is troublesome to say the least.
I should mention that I do not hold the dogmatic opinion that nobody should eat factory-farmed meat. To assert this when I am able to afford more ethically-raised meat and other people aren't would smack of elitism. We can debate whether the availability of this cheap meat is actually good for poor people (there's a reason poverty and obesity have such a high correlation), and that might lead us to say that factory-farmed meat is bad for everybody, end of sentence. But I don't hold that opinion dogmatically. This is a difficult subject with many intangible costs&benefits, as well as a whole host of tangible but non-obvious costs&benefits. When such nuance abounds, absolutism gets us nowhere.
Domestication significantly muddies the waters, because, as a species, the pigs have made a bargain of sorts with humanity to increase their collective reproductive success at the cost of a shortened individual lifespan. This does not make it okay to torture them (that was never part of the evolutionary bargain), and one could even continue to reject our very right to eat them (even though to do so would undermine the reproductive success of the species)...
There's no such thing as "species." It's an artificial kludge that humans invent for simplicity and abstraction when modeling population genetics, but the metaphor strains and breaks when it's used for other purposes like morality. http://tinyurl.com/dawkins-species
An individual pig does not care about "pigs" as a category. The pig cares about herself and the other individuals she is acquainted with. Her own interests are seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Breeding is not among her individual interests, it's an interest of her selfish genes.
If you're going to place moral consideration at the level of the selfish gene, then it is immoral to refuse any potentially reproductive intercourse. Consent is a concern of individuals, not genes and certainly not "species," so no one would be allowed to fight against heterosexual rape if both individuals were of breeding age.
Species do not have interests. Genes have interests, but their interests include rape, murdering a neighbor's offspring, etc. We are individual organisms, and individual organisms' interests are all that we should consider.
Ben #79: Fair 'nuff, but I'd be willing to wager that if you polled a hundred random Americans and asked them "Would you eat a pig?" and "Would you eat a bear?", you're going to get wildly different results. You can't go to MacDonald's and get a bear burger after all ;D
So yeah, goats, bears, probably a couple of others I am not thinking of, but none of these mammillian omnivores are part of the mainstream American diet -- except pigs.
Again, doesn't mean anything... just makes ya think.
The cost advantages of the factory model in the short term and for the meat producer are quite high. I mean, there's a reason sustainably-raised meat costs so much more, right? But there are significant negative externalities to the process, both long-term and short-term, that aren't being properly reflected in the cost to the consumer or in the profits of the producer. This is troublesome to say the least.
First of all, I was using the term "species" loosely. There are multiple porcine species anyway, though in America we pretty much eat only one.
The rest of your post pretty much distorts everything I said in about three different directions :D Let me put it succinctly and clearly: Domestication is an adaptation that increases genetic proliferation at the cost of individual freedom. Ask any evolutionary biologist (hell, ask PZ!), this is a non-controversial notion at this point. Further, one can observe that if all six billion humans stopped eating pigs today, the pig population would drop dramatically in a very short period of time.
How this impacts the ethical/moral debate is non-obvious. Some animal rights advocates have gone so far as to advocate that the extinction of certain domestic species is preferable to their enslavement. Others might argue differently.
My point was not that the pigs' collective evolutionary bargain inherently justified anything we do to them; my point was just that it is one of several factors which makes a comparison to eating (non-domesticated) humans ludicrous.
I'm sorry! I had no idea. They're not really? Thank you for the correction.
Actually, since pigs have high intelligence, and yet we eat them anyway just because we, as smugly superior beings, can, does this mean that we can eat intelligent space creatures when they arrive in their spaceships because they are not human? And why can a more intelligent human not eat their way through a home for the mentally retarded? Is it because human life is sacred? Are we fearful of going to prison? Is it because there are no recipe books available? Or is something else holding us back from devouring the kiddies in special ed? Kindly illuminate, as I'm a bit stupid, and worry about this every waking moment.
@Lynna 85: Nope, don't live in bear-eating country, though I would absolutely try bear if given the opportunity. A friend of mine got bear sausage at some sort of Native American festival around here, but that's the last time I've heard of it being available. I think you have to "know somebody."
Since Alaska represents less than 0.23% of the US population, I don't think this has any bearing on my characterization of mainstream American gastronomy ;)
@felixthecat: Congratulations, you have now made the fatal animal rights advocate mistake of comparing the mentally retarded with animals. Good job. I bet you feel really great about yourself now.
Despite their reputation, goats are not omnivores they are herbivores. They're just pretty indiscriminate herbivores that will eat just about anything that grows out of the ground. As for whether I'd eat one, even though I have pet goats I have and will eat goat but I far prefer goat milk and cheese over meat. I know plenty of people who raise goats for meat as well as milk, not uncommon around here.
I HATE factory farms and have cut out my consumption of meat and eggs from them as much as possible. My family raises chickens and usually a piglet each year and buy beef from my uncle who raises a small herd of pinzgauer cattle. We try to buy all our other meat from other local farms, a much easier solution when one lives in the country than for you city folk. Obviously I'm not a vegetarian nor do I have any ethical issues with eating an animal that has been raised in a humane manner. Also they taste better because they're usually slower growing breeds that have been fed a healthier diet.
OT to Rev BDC:
Last night somebody inside Shoreline had a camera pointed at the big vid screen and was live-streaming video (with surprisingly good sound) of the show. Awesome setlist too. They'll no doubt do it again on Thursday (DeadVids.com).
I see they're streaming audio of last night's show right now over there.
Male grizzly bears sometimes eat other grizzly bears, especially cubs. That's an omnivore mammal eating an omnivore mammal. Maybe they need a lecture on the virtues of vegetarianism.
I just want to say this again: The debate over whether, how, and how much we raise and consume domesticated animals is a complicated and subtle one, with many intangible costs&benefits, and many tangible-but-non-obvious costs&benefits. I have trouble imagining how a reasonably-minded person with a reasonable knowledge of the facts could possibly be an absolutist about this.
I HATE factory farms and have cut out my consumption of meat and eggs from them as much as possible. My family raises chickens and usually a piglet each year and buy beef from my uncle who raises a small herd of pinzgauer cattle. We try to buy all our other meat from other local farms, a much easier solution when one lives in the country than for you city folk. Obviously I'm not a vegetarian nor do I have any ethical issues with eating an animal that has been raised in a humane manner. Also they taste better because they're usually slower growing breeds that have been fed a healthier diet.
Pretty much right in line with me ('cept for the raising chickens thing, they frown on that in the city limits here). The link I posted above is a good source of small farm products for those who don't have access locally.
@91: yes, I'm in absolute agreement on the factory farms. Even though I'm hovering near poverty level all the time, I cut back on meat and eggs so that I can buy free-range, small-farm products. For me, it's very difficult to maintain that standard. Some of my neighbors do the backyard-chicken thing.
@92: Did you just inject Grateful Dead news into a discussion about eating pigs? Okay, good.
Sven #98: "given the chance" is probably too strong (most pigs are not lying in wait for humans to turn their backs so they can jump them for a tasty tasty morsel of homo sapien chops), but yes, pigs have been known to feast on people, just as dogs have.
Felixthecat, you'd do well to avoid emotional reductio ad absurdum arguments to make your point.
There are some of us here that would not a priori freak out when confronted with the idea of consuming humans given different cultural predilections, of course. And surely you're not basing your emotion claim on human cultural predilections, are you?
Besides, the error you're making (among others) is equating speciesism with some sort of unethical stance. Clearly there are some species you eat. Do you feel smug when you wolf down that broccoli? Does crunching lettuce make you feel like a tough guy? Kindly illuminate.
We're doing the CSA thing for produce, but it's tougher for meat. I plan to do the backyard chicken thing eventually, but probably not until after we move. There are lots of opportunities around here, but it requires advance planning, extra driving, and freezer space that I haven't been able to manage yet... :/ I am probably going to invest in a chest freezer soon, though, and that will take care of a lot of the problem.
It's especially hard because I live about a quarter of a mile from the flagship store of THE best supermarket chain in the country. If I lived in a part of the country where Walmart was the primary supermarket option, it would be an easy choice to go with local farmers. But when two minutes away is a massive selection of fresh produce, quality meat -- and some of this local too! just not all of it... -- it is really hard to avoid the temptation :/
I was much chagrined to discover that at the same time they started carrying frozen locally raised grass-fed beef (woo hoo!) they also started carrying fresh organic grass-fed beef -- from ARGENTINA. Argh... So we fix half the environmental and ethical issues, and then spew petroleum exhaust over half a hemisphere? Dammit...
Sven #98: "given the chance" is probably too strong (most pigs are not lying in wait for humans to turn their backs so they can jump them for a tasty tasty morsel of homo sapien chops), but yes, pigs have been known to feast on people, just as dogs have.
Let me put it succinctly and clearly: Domestication is an adaptation that increases genetic proliferation at the cost of individual freedom. Ask any evolutionary biologist (hell, ask PZ!), this is a non-controversial notion at this point.
Rape is an adaptation that increases genetic proliferation at the cost of individual freedom.
How this impacts the ethical/moral debate is perfectly obvious. The answer is: not at all.
Genetic proliferation means nothing. It serves only the "interests" of genes, and genes do not have minds.
To pretend that genes have any moral significance is to stumble toward an atheist's version of "every sperm is sacred."
@Syn Ack #108: If rape was the only way to keep 90% of the human population from dying out, then actually how it impacts the ethical/moral debate might not be obvious after all. But of course it doesn't work that way, hence this analogy is not apt.
"If you're going to place moral consideration at the level of the selfish gene, then it is immoral to refuse any potentially reproductive intercourse..."
Generally NOT. Given the females greater investment, it usually pays for her to select a mate with the best genes to better assure the evolutionary success of her own progeny. Of course, animals (including humans) can't directly assess the quality of genes each potential mate is offering, and even the "best" genes by some standard, might not co-exist as well with her own as some other choice. The choice is usually made based upon physical or behavioral proxies for good genes, things like symmettry, quality of territory, and victory in battle. In humans, males are somewhat selective also, perhaps reflecting their greater investment in their children than other species. Even in casual, opportunistic matings standards of beauty may come into play. Poor skin condition may be a marker of disease, and in many cultures the opportunistic encounter may have high costs if discovered later, that cultures equivilent of child support, or the shotgun wedding for instance. When more serious investment is being considered cultural evidence of the females purity and likely fidelity will be important to give some assurance of paternity.
"Consent is a concern of individuals, not genes and certainly not "species," so no one would be allowed to fight against heterosexual rape if both individuals were of breeding age."
No, preserving the chance to associate with better genes and the chance of securing paternal investment is worth some risk for the female. Opportunistic rape may have contributed to male success in the past. It is a high risk strategy, but may be the "best" strategy in circumstances such as some wars, where the male is likely to die without access to "normal" reproductive opportunities. Of course, these types of "strategies" are not necessarily conscious, but appear to what our genes have been selected to implement. Men at the lowlife margins of society may rape pretty women to gain access to higher quality genes than they could "earn" based upon their own qualities. Even this "strategy" may be no more conscious, than the greater feelings of attraction and temptation associated with female beauty, those signs of health, youth and fertility.
"Rape is an adaptation that increases genetic proliferation at the cost of individual freedom"
While I get your point about genetic proliferation not being an excuse, the idea that rape is done or has anything to do with proliferating a species is a huge mistake and makes for a very weak analogy. If rape were the only way for the human species to survive we would most likely not exist anyomre. It is a very unlikely way to do anything but destory a society and injure people. There is simply no comparison between domestication of a species and rape any more than there is a comparison between surgery and stabbing some one with a knife.
@Syn Ack #108: If rape was the only way to keep 90% of the human population from dying out, then actually how it impacts the ethical/moral debate might not be obvious after all.
And now you are a rape apologist. That's where this argument from genetic proliferation will take you.
But of course it doesn't work that way, hence this analogy is not apt.
The analogy worked well enough to out you as a rape apologist, showcasing the fundamental error in your reasoning.
And it is apt, because an individual organism, an individual pig, does not care whether "pigs" are reduced to 1/10 their current population.
LOL I'm a rape apologist now, huh? Wow. Seriously, do you extremist animal rights folks really wonder why people don't take you seriously? Well there's your answer: In a reasoned rational debate, you start calling people rape apologists. That's why nobody takes you seriously.
If we're going to use that tormented logic, then check it out, in my example you just endorsed the extinction of 90% of the human race. So you must be a genocide apologist! Right?
No, clearly not. Because that kind of reasoning is really stupid.
If rape were the only way for the human species to survive we would most likely not exist anyomre. It is a very unlikely way to do anything but destory a society and injure people.
It's probably a major reason why our society is so damaged. Rape is so common (1 in 4 women a victim) that the chances are very high that every one of us is the descendant of at least one rape in the last 10000 years.
LOL I'm a rape apologist now, huh? Wow. Seriously, do you extremist animal rights folks really wonder why people don't take you seriously? Well there's your answer: In a reasoned rational debate, you start calling people rape apologists. That's why nobody takes you seriously.
It is a fact that you just presented a case when rape might be acceptable. That makes you a rape apologist.
If you don't want to be called a rape apologist, then don't defend rape. It's very simple. You had the option of saying "rape would not be acceptable even to preserve the human lineage." You still have the option, even now, of backtracking, admitting you made a mistake, condemning rape in all circumstances, and ceasing to be a rape apologist.
If you were the last man on Earth, and the last woman or women did not want to have sex with you, then would rape be acceptable to preserve the human lineage? If you answer yes, then you are a rape apologist. If you answer no, then you admit "genetic proliferation" means absolutely nothing, because it's not even sufficient to justify the last chance of human survival.
If we're going to use that tormented logic, then check it out, in my example you just endorsed the extinction of 90% of the human race. So you must be a genocide apologist! Right?
Not at all a similar issue, because you're talking about the dying out of 90% of a domestic animal population, not the slaughter of them.
Analogously, the dying out of 90% of human beings would not be genocide. Directly to the point, many people believe that the Earth is already beyond its carrying capacity, and we may have to reduce the population to approximately 1 billion people, through contraception. But contraception is not genocide, and reducing the population by 5/6 through contraception is not genocide, unless "every sperm is sacred."
Syn. Do you know what a rape apologist does? A rape apologist makes up reasons and ways that rape would be acceptable, or uses rape as a tortured way to prove a logical point. YOU ARE A RAPE APOLOGIST. Your analogy is the dumbest and most disgusting one I have ever heard here. You beat Pete and his miniskirt with this one. Your statistics are ridiculous. While many women are raped it is insane to assume the correlations between it and the human population. For instance, areas where women are raped most often also tend to have the highest child mortality rates. This is no accident. Societies with high incidence of rape are usually not healthy and do not provide good care for women if they should become pregnant. Secondly, your weird projections about how many of us are descendents of rape are completely out of your ass.
"If you were the last man on Earth, and the last woman or women did not want to have sex with you, then would rape be acceptable to preserve the human lineage? If you answer yes, then you are a rape apologist."
Then perhaps there is a need for different degrees of rape apologist. This level would be called "humanist". It would be a logical fallacy to assume they are all equivilent. Of course, if the woman was like that, it would explain how humanity got in that circumstance.
"""If you were the last man on Earth, and the last woman or women did not want to have sex with you, then would rape be acceptable to preserve the human lineage?"""
I don't think this question has a clear-cut answer. I am not answering yes or no. I think one might make an interesting argument either way.
And that's the last I will say to syn ack. This ludicrous "rape apologist" line of reasoning speaks for itself. Any reasonable person reading these comments will see that syn ack is batshit crazy, so I no longer need to defend myself from his/her attacks.
Ugh. It's so disappointing when my fellow vegetarians throw out the animal rights card so early and so fervently. It dilutes the argument to sensationalist hyperbole, and really doesn't do a very good job of promoting the cause. It's essentially the equivalent of pro-lifers distributing pictures of aborted fetuses.
There are so many other valid and compelling arguments for vegetarianism, not the least of which is the environmental impact of eating meat. It's downright inefficient, requiring much more intense resources than vegetables. As a result, rainforests are being cut down to plant soy fields to feed chickens, for example. It's also highly polluting, as hormone- and antibiotic-rich manure from factory farms poison the ground and leach into groundwater. The global warming impact is also worth mentioning, as the methane from livestock contributes greatly to greenhouse gas accumulation.
Beyond the environment, there are human quality of life issues as well, including rampant obesity, heart disease, and diabetes that could be prevented with a more plant-based diet.
There are significant ethical considerations to vegetarianism beyond those that have been described thus far in these comments.
Interesting that Hillary's points have been mainly left unaddressed.
Her use of a creationist analogy:
"But if you're going to make a claim towards striving for a rational/ethical basis to live your life, then you don't have the luxury of flouting a huge nonrational/nonethical area of your life like it's a good thing, esp. in a forum devoted to rationality."
... is actually completely valid. Virtually all animal production involves suffering. It's not just about the dreadful quality of life, it's the slaughter methods too. 53 billion farm animals are killed every year, and millions, probably billions of those die in great pain and fear (based on statistics collected by EU vets visiting European slaughter houses). These are facts, not emotional rhetoric.
If people pride themselves on their clever rational reponses to creationist thinking, how come other rational debates are off-limits or inappropriate? Vegans get accused of being self-righteous and superior all the time, but isn't that what atheists get accused of by the religious, for the 'crime' of stating the reasoned arguments for their case which upsets the comfortable world view of others.
I am not advocating a particular response or stance, I am just saying that people get awfully tetchy here when challenged on something they've not spent nearly enough time thinking about. God-bashing is easy when you're surrounded by like minds, how about facing up to the ethics of killing sentient beings for aesthetic reasons. How about someone try to give an ethical argument for meat eating outside of survival situations. Tradition, "naturalness", taste and might-is-right are invalid, just as "god-did-it", arguments from complexity etc are not valid in creationist debates.
"If you're going to place moral consideration at the level of the selfish gene, then it is immoral to refuse any potentially reproductive intercourse..."
Generally NOT. Given the females greater investment, it usually pays for her to select a mate with the best genes to better assure the evolutionary success of her own progeny.
Following this, if you're going to place moral consideration at the level of the selfish gene, and if a man can present his DNA sequence as evidence that his genes would produce higher reproductive fitness for a woman's offspring than her current chosen mate, then courts should uphold his ability to impregnate her, even against her will.
Thankfully, we reject this, because genetic proliferation is simply worthless as a moral consideration.
A rape apologist would say, "In this contrived circumstance, rape would be acceptable." What I said was, "If rape had a particular side-effect, it might be acceptable, but by its very nature rape could never cause that particular side-effect."
It would be kind of like if I said, "Well, if the Nazis had decided to give every Jewish child a pet bunny instead of sending them to the gas chambers, then that would have been very nice of them," and in response you called me a Hitler apologist. That's insane!
See, now Benny comes along in post #123 and actually says some stuff that is worth saying, and while I'd love to engage him on a couple of points, I'm all worn out from arguing with insane extremists.
Benny, mostly good points all around. The "inefficiency" argument has an asterisk, but given current factory farming practices the asterisk is purely theoretical right now. I'd love to discuss it, but I'm too tired from defending myself against accusations of being a "rape apologist". hehehe...
The asterisk to the "inefficiency" argument comes in where you have a sufficiently diversified operation such that some amount of livestock can coexist with the plants without negatively impacting yield, and in some cases potentially even increasing yield.
For instance, if cattle were grazing on wide-open fields of grass, and knowing that we can't very well turn every square inch of open land into arable farmland, then that could be an efficient way to generate nourishment. We can't eat the grass; we can't plant crops there... but the cows can eat the grass, and we can eat the cows.
Alas, that's not how it works most of the time... :(
Syn. Do you know what a rape apologist does? A rape apologist makes up reasons and ways that rape would be acceptable, or uses rape as a tortured way to prove a logical point. YOU ARE A RAPE APOLOGIST.
No, I'm not, because my entire point is that rape is never acceptable.
Your analogy is the dumbest and most disgusting one I have ever heard here.
And yet, look, africangenesis and James Sweet immediately come out as actual rape apologists:
Then perhaps there is a need for different degrees of rape apologist. This level would be called "humanist". It would be a logical fallacy to assume they are all equivilent. Of course, if the woman was like that, it would explain how humanity got in that circumstance.
I don't think this question has a clear-cut answer. I am not answering yes or no. I think one might make an interesting argument either way.
In the bolded sentence, africangenesis even suggests that women failing to consent may actually make rape necessary.
The analogy is valuable because it brings out what people are willing to justify when they start valuing genetic proliferation. But I appreciate your objection, blueelm, and moreover I believe I made a mistake because I did not warn anyone about a possible PTSD trigger. There is no need for me to continue now that James Sweet's fundamental error has come out.
Becky @124: very good post. We've been over these good reasons for being a vegetarian before, but they bear repeating. Because we've been over the pro-vegetarian issue many times, it might seem like we are being facetious in a reply to the "human blood spatter" post, when really we're just weary of re-hashing, and weary of being accused of killing animals for "aesthetic reasons."
BTW, I did respond with distaste (repeated from a previous thread) for factory farms, and proposed that actively looking for ways to reduce factory farming was a good goal.
So what happens? The holy-warrior vegetarians ignore that part and slam me for not loving their tone and for not backing them up 100 percent. Sheesh.
"It's interesting (but not surprising) the way people are attacking my motives rather than the facts of what I wrote."
The complaint about using "ethics" as a weapon is based on your use of that word in a written statement, not on your internal motivations.
It's interesting, but not surprising, that you don't accept responsibility for the words you have written and instead accuse others of unjustly questioning your motives.
"then courts should uphold his ability to impregnate her, even against her will. Thankfully, we reject this, because genetic proliferation is simply worthless as a moral consideration."
Of course it is worthless, but the genes we have influence the types or morals that are common, and those morals in turn influence the kinds of genes that are selected. Humans are social animals. But "courts" or what ever the societies equivilents of this, did enforce this in the past. Marriages were often arranged by parents or leaders were often enforced upon people that had other mates in mind. Parents probably argued based on merits of the match that did correlate with likely reproductive success: wealth, power, health, benefits to siblings sharing many of the same genes, etc. They weren't thinking of genes, but they were thinking with genes. We live in more fortunate times, but our genes were selected in different social environments. We may be descended from men who raped if necessary in such arranged marriages if stuck with reluctant or frightened partners. However, those with powers of persuasion and reassurance may also have had success.
If you don't want to be called a rape apologist, then don't defend rape. It's very simple. You had the option of saying "rape would not be acceptable even to preserve the human lineage." You still have the option, even now, of backtracking, admitting you made a mistake, condemning rape in all circumstances, and ceasing to be a rape apologist.
I really didn't see any support of rape in the post from this person.
Let's say from the start of the human race that rape was the only way to reproduce. The way ethics surrounding reproduction may be viewed and formed completely different from they way they have. To say that there is no other possible ethical standards than the ones that are current as of today is to deny that there is a difference in ethics between cultures or that ethics themselves evolved. In this, no one is supporting rape, but given a different set of circumstances to some of the base assumptions about humanity, things have the potential to be different.
Let's look at killing. Who would ever say that it is perfectly ethical to kill another human being? Of course, humanity has always done this, and found arguments that appear to them to be reasonable for killing another person. By today's ethical standards, killing humans for sport is no longer acceptable, but there have been points in history where it was not only deemed acceptable, but promoted. Some may view those who saw it as sport to be sick people, yet will be the first one to promote war. Both are essentially killing people. Killing alone should show how fluid human ethics are.
Even those who claim they have some ethical "base set by God" can't claim they aren't fluid, because they too have found cases where they deem it acceptable to kill. In fact, they claim the anti-christ will promise peace, which tells me that to be a good Christian you must do the opposite of promote peace, which then makes the promotion of killing acceptable.
@felixthecat: Congratulations, you have now made the fatal animal rights advocate mistake of comparing the mentally retarded with animals. Good job. I bet you feel really great about yourself now.
Errrrrrrr, the mentally retarded are animals, since, you know, all humans are animals. You're not really getting this whole biology thing are you?
Secondly, having read Felix's comment, it looks like you don't get his analogy. He's saying that the justification of meat-eating that pigs or whatever are less intelligent than us, can lead to the justification of cannibalism of people with lower IQs. Most people reading Pharyngula would turn their nose up at that idea.
As for this "rape apologist" meme - you may argue you're not one, but when say things like:
"""If you were the last man on Earth, and the last woman or women did not want to have sex with you, then would rape be acceptable to preserve the human lineage?"""
I don't think this question has a clear-cut answer. I am not answering yes or no. I think one might make an interesting argument either way.
you're as bad as those who defend the use of torture in "certain" situations. If you don't want to leave yourself open to being called a rape apologist, then the correct answer to syn ack's question would've been an emphatic "NO".
If you don't want to be called a rape apologist, then don't defend rape. It's very simple. You had the option of saying "rape would not be acceptable even to preserve the human lineage." You still have the option, even now, of backtracking, admitting you made a mistake, condemning rape in all circumstances, and ceasing to be a rape apologist.
I really didn't see any support of rape in the post from this person.
Let's say from the start of the human race that rape was the only way to reproduce. The way ethics surrounding reproduction may then have formed completely different from they way they have currently. To say that there is no other possible ethical standards than the ones that are current as of today is to deny that there is a difference in ethics between cultures or that ethics themselves evolved. In this, no one is supporting rape, but given a different set of circumstances to some of the base assumptions about humanity, things have the potential to be different.
Let's look at killing. Who would ever say that it is perfectly ethical to kill another human being? Of course, humanity has always done this, and found arguments that appear to them to be reasonable for killing another person. By today's ethical standards, killing humans for sport is no longer acceptable, but there have been points in history where it was not only deemed acceptable, but promoted. Some may view those who saw it as sport to be sick people, yet will be the first one to promote war. Both are essentially killing people. Killing alone should show how fluid human ethics are.
Even those who claim they have some ethical "base set by God" can't claim they aren't fluid, because they too have found cases where they deem it acceptable to kill. In fact, they claim the anti-christ will promise peace, which tells me that to be a good Christian you must do the opposite of promote peace, which then makes the promotion of killing acceptable.
Please note that no where in this argument do I actually say I think either rape or killing is acceptable. Ethically, both are reprehensible, and both can easily be reasoned to be bad things without being told.
Let's say from the start of the human race that rape was the only way to reproduce. The way ethics surrounding reproduction may then have formed completely different from they way they have currently. To say that there is no other possible ethical standards than the ones that are current as of today is to deny that there is a difference in ethics between cultures or that ethics themselves evolved. In this, no one is supporting rape, but given a different set of circumstances to some of the base assumptions about humanity, things have the potential to be different.
Yes, different cultures at different times have had different ethical standards, but when a person has an ethical standard, they mean for it to apply in all times and places, not just in this one culture. I, like you, believe that rape is never acceptable, however I can certainly envisage growing up with an ethical standard in some other time or place that said that rape was acceptable. So, yes, there is no single ethical standard, you're quite right, but when individual considers how their ethical principles might've been different in different times and places, they would still look at this hypothetical and go, "Well, in another time and place I may well have advocated rape or whatever, but from my own real ethical standpoint, that is awful, and this hypothetical me is awful". While things have/had the potential to be different, doesn't mean we still shouldn't condemn what they could've been. Someone who believes that rape is wrong in all circumstances will condemn it no matter the upbringing of the person.
Becky at @124 wrote, "Interesting that Hillary's points have been mainly left unaddressed."
Lots of her points have been addressed, it's just that you and Hillary redefine "addressed" as being "agree with me completely, and acknowledge that you are all unethical swine if you don't agree with me." I liked some of the points you made in post #124, and said so.
Objections to jokes are not really well-received here. If I joke that I've decided not to eat my excellent progeny because they recently fed me other tasty treats, that's my response to the overblown "human blood spatter" and "cannibalism" comments. Jokes don't signify that the issue is not taken seriously, but they might signify that the holy warriors should get a sense of perspective.
MTran @131 is right in saying that the complaint about using ethics as a weapon were based on what had been written, and were therefore legit. You've got a battering ram presentation method going and, as James Sweet noted more than once, it smacks of absolutism.
Doesn't sound like you want answers or dialogue or joke exchange or conversation or anything similar. You want submission and you want it now.
I want to mitigate the harm done by factory farms. How shall we go about that?
Someone who believes that rape is wrong in all circumstances will condemn it no matter the upbringing of the person. I'm going to play a bit of a devil's advocate here, so please don't see this as an attack.
Let's envision for a moment that we come across aliens at some point that have rape as their mode of procreation, and that they have reasoned it out in their culture to be, in their view, ethically sound, and that it is accepted by their entire race, or species, or whatever they may be. To blindly condemn without some serious thought about the arguments for and against it and looking at it from all possible sides would be the same as accepting the ethics that a person is taught with no questioning. All ethics must be questioned and put to the test. That is the only way that human ethics can evolve.
Again, use the killing analogy. Somewhere someone had to have found a reason for deciding that killing people for sport was bad, but to get to that, they had to question what they were taught first. Once they reach that conclusion, the conclusion must repeatedly be put to the test to ensure the conclusion is valid.
The aliens may be saying to not rape is unethical no matter what, and until one of them says, "why?" their views would never change. They also may be intending that their ethics to be the way it is forever and ever.
I guess what I'm saying is that to really question something thoroughly, one has to step outside of one way of viewing things and look at it from all angles. Just like the recent elephant story.
Why does intelligence persist in the factory-farmed pig?
It probably doesn't -- domestication for most species reduces intelligence. Give 'em a few thousand years, and you can bet that just as wild animals are distinguishable from their domesticated brethren, the factory farmed forms will be clearly less intelligent than either.
frog @#140: cows have been bred for docility (read stupidity) and that makes them so dumb that they often don't move to lower elevations in the autumn. Ranchers have to help them make up their minds.
In Idaho, free-range cattle have the right of way on all roads. So there they are, staring at an approaching vehicle which does not register in their synaptic sludge until it is right on top of them, or even just past them. Delayed startle effect. Makes them good food for grizzly bears too.
It's probably a major reason why our society is so damaged.
doesn't have a fucking thing to do with
Rape is so common (1 in 4 women a victim) that the chances are very high that every one of us is the descendant of at least one rape in the last 10000 years.
Someone who believes that rape is wrong in all circumstances will condemn it no matter the upbringing of the person.
Rape is so common (1 in 4 women a victim) that the chances are very high that every one of us is the descendant of at least one rape in the last 10000 years.
Put the fucking crack pipe down. Is it possible that that sexual assault is being misconstrued as rape? Sexual assault includes rape, but can be other things besides just rape. I thought the stats for sexual assault were something like 1 in 6. The thing is that the stats don't clearly define what they are counting as sexual assault. I don't know of a single girl that when in grade school, as soon as they began to develop, the boys starting grabbing their chests at every opportunity. The teachers I grew up with laughed it off and said "boys will be boys." Are they counting that as sexual assault? (BTW, I still would love to pummel every teacher that ever blew that off as "nothing.") Are they counting childhood abuses where an adult may touch a child, but the child runs away knowing to not touch that adult further? Both of these cases could fall under sexual assault as well as under child abuse. Some sexual assaults are successfully fought off, but they still count as a sexual assault.
Anyway, if one counts all the possibilities, the statistics are very, very high. Also, remember that this also have to cover back 60+ years, and all the rural areas where the ethics are about 80 years behind everyone else.
"In the bolded sentence, africangenesis even suggests that women failing to consent may actually make rape necessary.
The analogy is valuable because it brings out what people are willing to justify when they start valuing genetic proliferation"
Logically necessity occurs in a context. If the last woman or women don't consent and genetic proliferation is the overriding value, then rape may be empirically necessary. The alternative may be giving up the overriding value.
It is interesting that among dolphins, the females become tolerant of the rapes. They still try to escape from being herded, but perhaps that assures that her rapists have a modicum of health and strength. There is evidence from scars and injuries that in dolphin societies with gang rape, that most of the aggression is male on male. While females get raped, what happens to the males may be worse. But since it is in competition for females, is the male on male violence "voluntary" and not analogous to rape? Hmmm, what if the males would prefer to have the females without having to fight other males to keep them? Aren't the male attacks upon them involuntary?
Is there a similar pattern in human societies? When the incidence of rape of females is high, it male on male violence also high? War certainly seems to fit the pattern, but what about less extreme circumstances. Is rape more common in violent inner cities, where male on male violence is high? Is rape more common in male subcultures like fraternities or sports teams where abusive hazing is tolerated?
James @127 and Lynna @133, thanks for the praise. This is probably the first bit of commenting on Pharyngula I've done that isn't just cheap wisecrackery. Feels good to feign intellectualism for a change.
James, with regards to inefficiency (@128), I have read those studies, and they do have merit. There is simply not enough arable land suitable to grow produce everywhere, and hence using "less desirable" land (namely pastures) for other purposes such as livestock herding does seem to make sense. Of course, the vast majority of livestock isn't raised that way; there's also not enough pasture land area to support the amount of livestock currently being bred (or, should I say, breaded?)
My main point with efficiency has to do with the amount of resources required to grow X calories of meat versus X calories of vegetables. Cattle and other livestock are incredibly water- and feed-intensive products. If we were to cut out the middle man (aka, that juicy ribeye), we'd be able to feed far more people.
Of course then, you're running into overpopulation issues, and believe you me, you don't want me starting in on that. I'll start channeling Malthus and John Swift simultaneously, and it gets ugly fast.
Alex Dream: Yes, different cultures at different times have had different ethical standards, but when a person has an ethical standard, they mean for it to apply in all times and places, not just in this one culture.
No, only arrogant little monotheists and their metaphorical brethren do that. You'd have to be an idiot to think that the ethical standards that are relevant for the US circa 2009 are even meaningful or translatable to 3rd millenium BC Uruk. Wouldn't you dismiss the ethical judgments of stone age cannibals regarding our discussion of political appointments? So why do you think we are in any better place to discuss their situations?
Let's envision for a moment that we come across aliens at some point that have rape as their mode of procreation, and that they have reasoned it out in their culture to be, in their view, ethically sound, and that it is accepted by their entire race, or species, or whatever they may be. To blindly condemn without some serious thought about the arguments for and against it and looking at it from all possible sides would be the same as accepting the ethics that a person is taught with no questioning. All ethics must be questioned and put to the test. That is the only way that human ethics can evolve.
No offense, but you're not making any sense. It is logically impossible to have an entire culture or civilization that sees rape as being morally acceptable. Rape, by definition, is sex without consent. If there was some hypothetical alien that could only procreate via rape, and then that alien's culture came to accept rape because of this inability to procreate otherwise, then that alien is accepting rape, not only of other aliens, but also of "himself". How can someone accept being raped? It is a logical impossibility to consent to something that is by definition not "consentable" (if thats a word). The statement, "I wouldn't mind receiving a good raping" is as nonsensical as the statement, "This sentence is false."
Secondly, to say people here are "blindly" condemning actions is wrong. Most people who have a certain ethical view that they hold (and I'm not including most religious people here for obvious reasons) tend to do so because they have had "some serious thought about the arguments for and against it and looking at it from all possible sides". When I say, "rape is never acceptable", it's because I've considered every possible hypothetical I can think of. There may well be someone out there who has some hypothetical I haven't thought of. However to use an analogy, Stephen Jay Gould says that, "In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."" In a similar way, just because another hypothetical might exist in the mind of someone out there that undermines an ethical principle I believe in, doesn't mean I should act as if such a principle does a exist. Such a method of going about ethics would turn us all into moral nihilists.
The piglet is one day old and crippled. The mother had more babies than nipples to feed them. The farmer talked about putting this one out of its misery but decided to let some Swazi orphan children take care of it and feed it with a bottle instead. Now the little pig has grown big and strong!
If there was some hypothetical alien that could only procreate via rape, and then that alien's culture came to accept rape because of this inability to procreate otherwise, then that alien is accepting rape, not only of other aliens, but also of "himself". How can someone accept being raped?
Good question, but the scenario is predicated on "that alien" really being "that male alien." You'll find that all kinds of improbable things become perfectly acceptable when male is the default. My question is: If africangenesis were the last male left on earth and none of the females wanted to have sex with him (highly probable) and they all had guns, so rape was an impossibility, would he finally support gun control?
It is a logical impossibility to consent to something that is by definition not "consentable" (if thats a word).
I have to concede on that one. I hadn't looked at it that way.
Secondly, to say people here are "blindly" condemning actions is wrong.
Sorry if you took that to mean I said you never considered it. This all came out of a previous post where you accused someone of promoting rape, when I read it to mean that maybe we should look more closely to see if there would ever be possibilities where this could be seen as ethical.
"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.""
I would agree on facts. This is still only true in the world we live in now. What was suggested was if some of the base assumptions were changed.
Would you say that the fluidity of human ethics shows humans to actually be moral nihilists? Again, we claim killing is bad, but lots of people get positive reinforcement for killing, such as with our military.
"When I say, "rape is never acceptable", it's because I've considered every possible hypothetical I can think of."
Perhaps we need to know what you mean by "never acceptable". If rape is not acceptable in Saddam's rape rooms, does that mean war is justified? If an unacceptable rape has occurred, but the state cannot meet the the proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard, should the government be able to put the suspect in prison anyway? If a rape isn't acceptable but it occurred so long ago that the statute of limitations has been exceeded, do we repeal the statute of limitations retroactively? If a date rape has occurred and the victim refuses to report it, do we prosecute friends that knew of it and didn't report it? Or are some of these rapes acceptable? Does "never acceptable" mean you have to do something or is it just so much hot air?
Alex Dream: Rape, by definition, is sex without consent. If there was some hypothetical alien that could only procreate via rape, and then that alien's culture came to accept rape because of this inability to procreate otherwise, then that alien is accepting rape, not only of other aliens, but also of "himself". How can someone accept being raped? It is a logical impossibility to consent to something that is by definition not "consentable" (if thats a word).
Not at all. Agreeing that something is ethical doesn't mean personally consenting to it. Kant was wrong.
Simple case: a family member is killed/raped/whatever. You are ethically against the death penalty as a global phenomena. Does that imply that you wouldn't wish for, and even possibly act on, the opportunity to kill the criminal? Ethics is about what we should do, what are good "rules" for the community; that is quite distinct from what we will do, want to do, or try to do, where our personal interests lie.
Ethics isn't about you. It's about community standards, regardless of your personal feelings.
No, only arrogant little monotheists and their metaphorical brethren do that. You'd have to be an idiot to think that the ethical standards that are relevant for the US circa 2009 are even meaningful or translatable to 3rd millenium BC Uruk. Wouldn't you dismiss the ethical judgments of stone age cannibals regarding our discussion of political appointments? So why do you think we are in any better place to discuss their situations?
Expertise matters.
You seem to be advocating the ethical standpoint of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do".
When I say that, "when a person has an ethical standard, they mean for it to apply in all times and places", I don't mean that such a ethical standard wouldn't be fluid. Take the religious right. A lot of them cling to their belief that homosexuality is immoral, because the Bible says so, and ignore all the philosophical and scientific work thats been done on the subject in the last 2000 years. Their morality tends not be fluid. However, I like to think that my ethical standpoint is fluid (whether actually it is or not is for others to judge). So if someone gives a very good argument against a moral I hold, I am (hopefully) likely to go away with an altered morality. However, that doesn't mean that if I went to (say) Iran I would suddenly advocate beheading as a punishment, or if I went to the Stone Ages I would suddenly advocate cannibalism. I believe that cannibalism is wrong almost always (the only exception being for self-preservation when stuck on a desert island with a companion, in my book).
So I guess then I am an idiot, because I do think that, "the ethical standards that are relevant for the US circa 2009 are even meaningful or translatable to 3rd millenium BC Uruk." For starters, these Stone Age tribesmen have missed out on thousands of years of cultures, of history, social studies, philosophy, science, mathematics, good lord the vast majority of human understanding. If you can't see that someone who can feed on the ethical arguments of the entirety of human history, who can draw on the ideas of Marx or Rand whoever depending on his ethical taste, has at least as good a standing for arguing against Stone Age cannibalism than the cannibals themselves, then you're not thinking straight.
Never mind that your "when in Rome" attitude would justify homophobia against AIDs victims 30 years ago, slavery 200 years ago, and all manner of other practices we now consider vile. Not to mention it's a grave violation of the naturalistic fallacy.
Seems like you've forgotten the meaning of the word "principles" as in "ethical principles". Someone who has principles means for them to apply in all times and places. I don't see why my principles are adequate to condemn a real life Hannibal Lecter, but not adequate to condemn a hypothetical cannibalistic Stone Age culture. If that's how you view your principles, then they aren't principles at all.
Not at all. Agreeing that something is ethical doesn't mean personally consenting to it. Kant was wrong.
I don't see how that follows. Please explain.
I don't think your analogy showed that well. I think ethics do apply at the individual level as well as the community level. That sounds a lot more like "do as I say and not as I do." If I want people to not kill other people, then I cannot justify me doing any killing of other people.
Admittedly, I'm being very general because it suits me. If we dig down further, I'm totally going to go the route I learned when studying Kant, which is to rewrite everything until I come up with something moral.
For example, one should not lie. But, if I qualify it to an exact instance, then lying can become moral. If Hitler's soldiers come to my door and demand I report any jews in my house, when I might have a dozen hidden in my basement, then it becomes ethical to lie and say there are none in the vicinity than to hand them over to be killed.
Alex Deam accused me of being "just like the people who condone torture 'in some circumstances'" because of my tentativeness in response to the last-man-on-Earth/rape thought experiment. FWIW, while I do think torture is unacceptable under any circumstances, I also think there is meaningful conversation to be had regarding the thought experiment "would you torture a single person if you knew it would save a thousand lives?"
In setting policy, we don't even need to answer this question, because all evidence points to the fact that torture is an ineffective means of obtaining information -- thereby invalidating the thought experiment to begin with. But if that were not the case, it would be an interesting question to discuss.
Cuz you know, since I'm an atheist I don't have any taboos, and am willing to entertain any reasonable thought experiment. If that makes me a "rape apologist" or a "torture apologist," well, you are fucking insane.
Alex: Never mind that your "when in Rome" attitude would justify homophobia against AIDs victims 30 years ago, slavery 200 years ago, and all manner of other practices we now consider vile. Not to mention it's a grave violation of the naturalistic fallacy.
What gross anachronism. First of all, slavery was wrong by American standards of 200 years ago, and numerous people recognized it, and once again, homophobia was quite problematic 30 years ago. Both were questioned even though they were the standard bias precisely because they were in direct conflict with the ethical standards of the day.
That's quite different from the status of slavery in the Roman Republic, or homophobia in 1850s America. If you're going to be treating this argument as a vulgar "When in Rome", at least have the honesty to face the question straight on. In the latter two cases, the practices were beyond question. No one of any influence whatsoever questioned slavery in Rome 100 BC -- most slaves didn't question slavery as an institution (even if they worked on ending their own personal slavery). The economic system of the day demanded it; without slavery, the energetic demands of civilization would have collapsed it, since slaves were the primary power source for those kinds of civilization.
So, what's more ethical? Mass starvation, or slavery? Or maybe it's a damn silly question to be morally judging at all people who are so incredibly distant from us, who have no commonality of culture, language, art, economics, or technology? Why would you even put our ethics against theirs? What could that possibly mean, other than feeling a smug superiority over our benighted ancestors?
Kantian type ethics are stupid because there is no universal point of view; it's useless to pretend there is, it produces nothing that can inform our actions or our research that is in any way meaningfully distinguishable from an ethics that recognizes that it's our ethics. If anything, it leads us away from an ethics that faces the real world, the substance of folks' lives, by spinning yards about "universal reason" and other such nonsense. I don't care what some mythical alien would think of my ethics -- any more than the Romans cared what I think about their ethics. Ethics is an activity, not some nonsense about universal laws which is only a step away from revelatory nonsense about the One True God (tm).
If that makes me a "rape apologist" or a "torture apologist," well, you are fucking insane.
James, I never said that you were a "rape apologist", but when your answer to syn ack's question is effectively the definition of "sitting on the fence", you don't do yourself any favours. As I said, you didn't answer "no" in any kind of way, and still haven't. Taking this long to consider a question like that must mean that you think there's a half-decent argument for rape in that scenario. If you don't like someone like syn ack calling you a "rape apologist", then the smart thing to do would've been to realise that there isn't a "half-decent argument for rape in that scenario".
To summarize: if you think there is such a half decent argument, and continue to sit on the fence, you leave yourself wide open to be called a "rape apologist" by someone like syn ack. If you don't think there's a half decent argument, then why haven't you come out and answered "no" to this question?
And by the way, I'm an atheist too, so I don't know why the fuck you're playing the atheist card to me.
I'm playing the atheist card because to me atheism is about not having dogma or taboos, but I don't find that to be the case with you.
Okay, I'll bite: I'll make an argument that if only one man and one woman remained on earth, and for whatever reason the woman was unwilling, then rape would be justified.
The key here seems to be the lack of consent, right? However, consent is not sacred, and sometimes must be sacrificed for other purposes. For instance, if a highly contagious and deadly disease were running rampant, mandatory quarantines could be justified -- even without the consent of the quarantined.
So if consent can be ignored in cases of dire emergency, then the question is, does the thought experiment in question represent such a dire emergency? Well, we now get down to the question of the value of preserving the human race, which I suppose is ultimately subjective. I would argue, though, that since much of what we consider moral and ethical is informed by mechanisms that are the result of selective pressure, it is not entirely arbitrary to place a high moral value on an act to preserve the human race. After all, if let's say I and all of my offspring were among the six billion dead in our thought experiment, and therefore I had no possibility of passing on my exact DNA, I could still say that more of the genes I share would be preserved if the human race were to continue than if it were to end. The same would be true of all of the rest of the dead.
So, it seems to me that a desire to preserve the human species is not that much different from the altruistic instinct we all share. I for one would place a very high value on the preservation of humanity.
Hence, we are weighing the consent of a single person vs. the perpetuation of the human race. From a purely theoretical view, I don't really have a big problem favoring the latter. In my mind, it's not tremendously different from forcible quarantine.
(BTW, in practice, if I were that hypothetical "last man", I don't think I could do it.)
I see a couple of potential flaws in that argument, but there may be rebuttals I haven't thought of. I don't think it's a crazy argument, and if it will avoid accusations of "fence-sitting", I'll go ahead and take this position. Call me a "rape apologist" then -- since there has never been a situation where there was only a single male and single female human (the evolution of homo sapiens would have been gradual, so no point where the reproductive potential of humanity hinged solely on two individual organisms), and since I don't imagine this is ever likely to occur in a situation where those involved would know they were the last, I can still assert the following: There has never been and probably never will be any circumstance that comes close justifying rape. If that statement makes me a "rape apologist" in your mind, then so be it.
I just want to say this again: The debate over whether, how, and how much we raise and consume domesticated animals is a complicated and subtle one, with many intangible costs&benefits, and many tangible-but-non-obvious costs&benefits. I have trouble imagining how a reasonably-minded person with a reasonable knowledge of the facts could possibly be an absolutist about this.
you could say the same about slavery or any other evil (and people have, about slavery at least). many of us actually see the ethics of veganism as simple compassion and sustainability, which wipes out concerns of the "subtle" issues you raise. This doesn't mean the implementation of the idea on a personal or societal level is necessarily simple, though - just that the ethics is.
"If you don't like someone like syn ack calling you a "rape apologist", then the smart thing to do would've been to realise that there isn't a "half-decent argument for rape in that scenario"."
A smarter thing to do would be, not to sweat what syn ack calls you. There are decent arguments for rapes in just about any scenerio, depending up which values you assume, just as there are decent arguments against rape. While most people believe in right and wrong just like they believe in God, right and wrong are not written in stone someplace in the universe, they are culturally relative with some cross-cultural patterns that might be characteristic of human's social nature.
What is unacceptable even in extreme times in our culture may be acceptable in normal times in other cultures. Do we want to search for a minimal set of ethical standards common to all cultures, or do we want to retain some maximal non-contradictory set, so that nothing wrong in any culture is ever acceptable?
I don't like lists of standards, and like many am interested in a minimum set of principles from which all standards can be derived. Religion made similar attempts, "the golden rule", "love thy neighbor as thyself". The libertarians have a prohibition against fraud and coercion. The marxists have "from each according to his ability to each according to his need". The Amercan center-left doesn't seem interested in principles, but in situational ethics, apparently based upon some feelings they trust.
The economic system of the day demanded it; without slavery, the energetic demands of civilization would have collapsed it, since slaves were the primary power source for those kinds of civilization.
So, what's more ethical? Mass starvation, or slavery?
An economic system that required slavery to be maintained is an economic system that could not have been developed in the first place without slavery. You end up with an argument that slavery must continue because slavery was used in the past, the same argument Southern American sugar plantation owners used.
What's more ethical is not to start using slavery in the first place.
Why would you even put our ethics against theirs? What could that possibly mean, other than feeling a smug superiority over our benighted ancestors?
Arguments that "X wasn't wrong then" quickly become arguments that "X is not wrong now" when circumstances are claimed to be similar. Judging the past is how we decide the future.
"What's more ethical is not to start using slavery in the first place."
Such an absolutist. At one time, making prisoners of war slaves was considered more ethical than killing them. It was also at one time considered ethical, because it was an appropriate punishment for allowing oneself to be captured instead of dying in battle. Slavery has also been considered an honerable way to pay debts that one had been unable to otherwise pay. There are even large numbers of people in the western world that advocate various forms involuntary servitude, conscription and mandatory public service.
"Please create a scenario where I can make a decent argument for raping you with a large baton."
Easy, you are Saddam Hussein, as a sovereign recognized by the UN, you have a right to oppress your own people. I am one of your people, and you take me to you rape room and exercise your right to indulge your disgusting passions and whims. Enjoy your wet dream.
A smarter thing to do would be, not to sweat what syn ack calls you. There are decent arguments for rapes in just about any scenerio, depending up which values you assume, just as there are decent arguments against rape. While most people believe in right and wrong just like they believe in God, right and wrong are not written in stone someplace in the universe, they are culturally relative with some cross-cultural patterns that might be characteristic of human's social nature.
Agree that moral objectivism is false, and so that someone somewhere has a moral code that says that rape is okay, however, if you wish to deny that you are a "rape apologist", you tend not to accept such moral codes, unless you're a "repressed rape apologist".
Such an absolutist. At one time, making prisoners of war slaves was considered more ethical than killing them. It was also at one time considered ethical, because it was an appropriate punishment for allowing oneself to be captured instead of dying in battle. Slavery has also been considered an honerable way to pay debts that one had been unable to otherwise pay. There are even large numbers of people in the western world that advocate various forms involuntary servitude, conscription and mandatory public service.
Yes, and in most people's opinions, they are/were wrong.
What gross anachronism. First of all, slavery was wrong by American standards of 200 years ago, and numerous people recognized it, and once again, homophobia was quite problematic 30 years ago. Both were questioned even though they were the standard bias precisely because they were in direct conflict with the ethical standards of the day.
Well I'm fairly sure there were lots of people who were homophobic to AIDs victims back in the Eighties. It was after all known as the "Gay disease".
And 200 years ago, plenty of Americans were justifying slavery on the very basis you justify it later on in your comment in ancient Rome: that it was economically viable to do otherwise. You remember the Civil War?
I don't see what I've said as "gross anachronism".
No one of any influence whatsoever questioned slavery in Rome 100 BC -- most slaves didn't question slavery as an institution (even if they worked on ending their own personal slavery). The economic system of the day demanded it; without slavery, the energetic demands of civilization would have collapsed it, since slaves were the primary power source for those kinds of civilization.
So, what's more ethical? Mass starvation, or slavery?
Firstly, false dichotomy. Economic systems can be changed. What was there exactly to stop the Roman leaders declaring slavery illegal, and that you do not own workers, you have to pay workers? Only their own prejudices. With paid workers, the workers then go out and buy things and spend on the economy, with that money then ending back in the hands of employers again. It's not that revolutionary a concept.
Besides, even if I accept your false dichotomy, and that ending slavery in Roman times would certainly have led to mass starvation, I fail to see how that still justifies slavery. Why should some member of the Roman aristocracy enslave me? Why should they have me as their property against my will? This kind of logic would justify someone with kidney failure forcibly removing a kidney from somebody else.
If you mean that the newly freed slaves would also starve, well then surely that's for the individual slaves to decide? If Roman slaves were better off not being paid a wage like a slave than being set completely free, then they can decide that for themselves, without being forced into bondage.
Again, like rape, slavery isn't consensual. It is forced. That's what makes slavery unethical in most people's books. Why should the nobleman enslave me, rather than me enslave him? Why shouldn't the nobleman share his wealth with his slaves? Your economical arguments both don't hold up under economic scutiny, and are immoral anyway.
Or maybe it's a damn silly question to be morally judging at all people who are so incredibly distant from us, who have no commonality of culture, language, art, economics, or technology? Why would you even put our ethics against theirs? What could that possibly mean, other than feeling a smug superiority over our benighted ancestors?
Your argument fails because it forgets the existence of something called "education" or "learning". I may not know much about Roman culture, but I can go and learn about it. Once I've learnt about it, I am then in exactly the same position as when asked one of several hypothetical questions that have appeared in this thread. Otherwise, your comment suggests that all those historians are just wasting their time trying to understand the Romans. I should just go and tell all the Classics students that they should stop what they're doing, as there's no possible way they can understand a culture that existed around 2000 years ago. It's just so different! I tried reading the Wikipedia page on Julius Caesar, but it was just impossible to understand this guy when we have "no commonality of culture, language, art, economics, or technology", him and I.
Kantian type ethics are stupid because there is no universal point of view; it's useless to pretend there is, it produces nothing that can inform our actions or our research that is in any way meaningfully distinguishable from an ethics that recognizes that it's our ethics. If anything, it leads us away from an ethics that faces the real world, the substance of folks' lives, by spinning yards about "universal reason" and other such nonsense. I don't care what some mythical alien would think of my ethics -- any more than the Romans cared what I think about their ethics. Ethics is an activity, not some nonsense about universal laws which is only a step away from revelatory nonsense about the One True God (tm).
I've read this four times, and I've still no idea how any of this applies to anything I've said. I don't think there's a "universal point of view", I merely posit that I hold ethical standard X, and that I mean for it to be applicable no matter the situation. If someone comes along with some situation or argument which defeats my standard, then I will have to modify X so it can't succumb to this new argument.
So far, no-one has come up with a single argument or scenario that makes me think that Roman or Confederate slavery, 1980s homophobia, Stone Age cannibalism or whatever, are in any way moral. Those are my standards. They so far can withstand any hypothetical I have come across as far as I can remember. They also, incidentally, do apply to the real world.
an individual organism, an individual pig, does not care whether "pigs" are reduced to 1/10 their current population...
Not at all a similar issue, because you're talking about the dying out of 90% of a domestic animal population, not the slaughter of them.
Analogously, the dying out of 90% of human beings would not be genocide.
If we keep on farming pigs for meat, effectively 100% of the population gets slaughtered, generation after generation. And the population stays high: slaughter has nothing to do with genocide or extinction.
For all the similarities between humans and pigs including diet, physiology and intelligence, once can argue that the most significant factor in deciding whether to eat them is the difference in life history strategy: pigs are adapted for fast reproduction and short lifespan, while humans have evolved to an extreme in the opposite direction. You could fairly say that pigs have evolved to be eaten.
This does not address the individual-ethics/ickiness issues of veg*nism (to which the pig's interest in reproduction is, as pointed out above, irrelevant), but is an important part of the population-ethics/ecology of human impact on the planet. It's why we don't breed or kill bears for food, and why Diprotodon and Mammuthus but not Macropus or Bison went extinct in the late Pleistocene. We've had the same discussion before (with a bit less heat) about cephalopods.
Do the ethics of pig-slaughter change if we switch completely from petroleum to solar? Veg*ns presumably say no, it's irrelevant; I say probably, it's the biggest number in the equation.
(Speaking of numbers, I've browsed up to comment #120 so far. Veg*ns equating carnivory to murder, cannibalism and rape is... sooo typical)
Anonymous: An economic system that required slavery to be maintained is an economic system that could not have been developed in the first place without slavery. You end up with an argument that slavery must continue because slavery was used in the past, the same argument Southern American sugar plantation owners used.
One case is completely different from the other. As we saw after 1864, American society was perfectly functional without slavery. The ant-bellum slavery apologists were either stupid, ignorant or liars.
The fact that the same argument was used does not imply that it was equally good in both cases. In the case of Rome, we are talking about a society that lacked the technology to exploit coal to produce steam engines. The limits of free labor are shown by Egypt -- they were simply incapable of integrating a larger society, since instead of using slavery, they used religion and river power to organize their society.
The fact that slavery is nasty and brutal doesn't change the facts of the matter -- we couldn't get here from there without it. You can honestly argue that we shouldn't be here, and should have stayed horticulturalists with societies limited to the 100s of thousands, a hundred Egypts spread over the planet.
But it was slavery that powered the Graeco-Roman expansion, it was slavery and serfdom that energized the flowering of China, and it was slavery and genocidal thievery that powered the scientific revolutions of the 16th to 18th centuries (our oh-so-worshipped Enlightenment). History sucks like that.
Slavery disappeared when it was no longer economically necessary, not because of some grand moral awakening. Or in reverse, the moral awakening only occurred after the economics made it possible. Have you never wondered why moral revulsion toward slavery exactly tracks with a delay the exportation of the steam engine from Scotland to England to continental Europe and the Americas?
No slavery, no Newton, Galileo, or Darwin -- the European economy stays stillborn in its boom-bust cycles of economic development followed by reactionary Christian response. No slavery, no interest in funding expanded astronomical observations to improve shipping across the oceans. No slavery, and England economy never develops beyond its pathetic agrarian history, eventually outstripping available labor (some shipped out to oversee slavery) and thereby leading to the industrial revolution, which finally eliminates the need for slavery and it's many local variants.
What's the point of discussing the ethics of it? What you should do depends on today, not the ten-thousand years of horror that freed us.
I'm playing the atheist card because to me atheism is about not having dogma or taboos, but I don't find that to be the case with you.
I don't know what in particular I've said that exhibits "dogma", but regardless, your conception of atheism is flawed. Atheism, is nothing more, and nothing less, than the denial of the existence of god or gods. Atheism says nothing about ones morality, or whether they subscribe to taboos or not. There are dogmatic atheists, and then there are atheists such as yourself, who see rape as acceptable in at least one circumstance.
If it's dogmatic to insist that, as far as I can tell, rape is never acceptable, then I hold my hands up, guilty as charged: I am dogmatic.
Now onto your justification of rape:
The key here seems to be the lack of consent, right? However, consent is not sacred, and sometimes must be sacrificed for other purposes. For instance, if a highly contagious and deadly disease were running rampant, mandatory quarantines could be justified -- even without the consent of the quarantined.
Different sort of consent. People are quarantined to prevent other people from catching the disease i.e. to protect others from the harm you would cause to them by sitting next to them on the bus for instance. But I've never heard anyone justify rape of a particular person to protect other people from harm.
In fact, in your case, you're arguing for the preservation of your DNA. So with the disease case, you violate someone's consent to protect others from harm, yet in the rape case, you violate someone's consent to preserve your DNA? These aren't the same ethically at all.
Anyway, as syn ack says, "Thankfully, we reject this, because genetic proliferation is simply worthless as a moral consideration." The point he was making was that a gene-centred morality leads to uncomfortable propositions, like rape is justified in that hypothetical. So, instead of assuming that proposition is true, me and syn ack throw out the gene-centred view of morality, and opt for a more person or life-centred view, which doesn't justify rape. This also makes sense when you consider that morality is a social construct anyway.
There has never been and probably never will be any circumstance that comes close justifying rape. If that statement makes me a "rape apologist" in your mind, then so be it.
You're really not getting the concepts of "hypotheticals" or "philosophy". An ethical standpoint, if someone is trying to justify it, should be able to withstand scrutiny, both from things that have really happened, and events that are hypothetically possible. It's possible that a world with only two human beings, or two humans who thought they were the last left (or three humans, or four...; how many humans does it take before you decide rape is suddenly not acceptable?), could exist, therefore it's a valid hypothetical. It's hypothetically possible, though unlikely, that I could meet George W. Bush. Does that mean that if I advocated hitting Bush (which I don't) in such a situation, that because it's a hypothetical and unlikely, that doesn't make me have violent tendencies?
The game is "What if?". You're meant to play as if it's real. If you think it's ethically justified to rape someone in that situation, then however unlikely the situation, you are a rape apologist. If you don't like the term, then don't defend rape.
(Speaking of numbers, I've browsed up to comment #120 so far. Veg*ns equating carnivory to murder, cannibalism and rape is... sooo typical)
Anti-vegans distorting vegans' arguments is sooo typical.
No one made any moral equation of meat-eating with rape. The point was that "genetic proliferation" should be discarded as an argument for anything, because if allowed as an argument, it could justify rape.
The argument that "X should not be allowed to justify A because then it would also justify B" presumes that B is worse than A (in this case, rape is worse than meat-eating), or else the argument could not even be hoped to be persuasive. A Catholic would never say "X should not be allowed to justify murder because then it would also justify masturbation." The form of the argument depends upon a unidirectional non-equivalence.
It appears that the mentions of murder and cannibalism were implied in the same form, though these were made less explicitly, so perhaps an equation was intended. However, the entire question is whether the slaughter (and eating) of nonhuman animals is similar enough to the murder (and eating) of humans that it should be considered immoral, and to what extent. So not only are these comparisons legitimate, they are absolutely necessary to the discussion. One can make a comparison without making an equation, and I believe this is what was done. But an equation must at least be permissible, even though I would not agree with that strong an argument.
No one made any moral equation of meat-eating with rape.
Let the reader judge the truth of that. What does 'similar enough' mean, if not 'morally equal'?
Anyway, thanks for totally ignoring the ecological view of food-raising I and others have brought up. I live in a tropical savannah region where cows and kangaroos eat grass, and feral pigs (free, however nasty, brutish and short their lives) eat native vertebrates towards extinction. These conditions are ethically relevant to me: I gladly eat kangaroo, and if I could exterminate the unenslaved pigs I'd commit that genocide without hesitation (if they suffered, it would only be once). If I also have the odd bit of bacon that was raised in a shed and trucked across the country, that's probably more efficient use of fuel than trucking vegetables the same distance. And tastier.
Alex Deam: So far, no-one has come up with a single argument or scenario that makes me think that Roman or Confederate slavery, 1980s homophobia, Stone Age cannibalism or whatever, are in any way moral. Those are my standards.
Serious question: who gives a fuck what your standards are? Who cares whether you think that the Romans were evil? Do you even care?
The functions of ethics is to constrain your choice, individually and as a community -- in what ways does it make one whit of a difference whether you think that Paleolithic cannibals were wicked? What does that even mean, other than as a masturbatory exercise?
You're talking in arbitrary abstractions about "your standards". No one has ever asked you to refrain from enforcing ethics against the ancient Romans. You know why? And if ethics aren't a code to be enforced by legal or social sanctions, then what are they but smug self-righteousness?
If one says -- it is wrong for you to eat a pig, that must mean something. At one end, it may mean -- "And therefore I will make you uncomfortable whenever you're around me eating bacon", and at the other end it means "And therefore I will use violence against you to stop you". But for it to be an empty judgment -- if you're just a universal goody-two-shoes with no means or desire to enforce some sort of sanction and take responsibility for it -- you're just full of Sunday-school platitude shit.
So, once again, are you saying you intend to travel back in time and battle the ancient Romans? Or to the Pleistocene to engage our ancestors in philosophical discussions to convince them to give up cannibalism? Is all your ethics just platitudes, like Kant's nonsense, another search for objectivity and abstraction in the realms of the subjective and specific?
"If you were the last man on Earth, and the last woman or women did not want to have sex with you, then would rape be acceptable to preserve the human lineage? If you answer yes, then you are a rape apologist."
I'm sorry but this hypothetical is crap. The implication that if someone says "yes" to this, that they are are a rape apologist and secretly support rape in all scenarios is absurd. Alternatively, if they answer "no," they are haters of the human race, blahdy blahdy blah.
If you are going this route, you really need to go all the way with it, so don't leave out the assumptions. Par example: that the women not only does not want to have sex with you at this moment, but could never, ever be persuaded to have sex with you; she could never be persuaded to find an alternative to receptive (or perhaps not-so-receptive?) intercourse; she does not care about the future of the human race; she has no desire to be mother or raise a family and no issues ignoring her so-called biological clock; manual stimulation will be sufficient for her gratification needs and this will never change; she is inpenetrable to a rational discussion on the matter, she hates you and will never be affected by being the loneliness of being the last of her kind (she hates you so you certainly can't comfort her) etc. In THIS situation, assuming I haven't left out something, is it acceptable to rape her?
No! Rape's never acceptable! Lolzorz! You are an evil misogynist and believe rape is ALWAYS acceptable. I've trapped you with my impossible scenario because I've implied these assumptions are there, without saying them so you could have picked one of these alternatives all along, but you didn't, so shame on you! I win!
I'm sorry but this hypothetical is crap. The implication that if someone says "yes" to this, that they are are a rape apologist and secretly support rape in all scenarios is absurd. Alternatively, if they answer "no," they are haters of the human race, blahdy blahdy blah.
No, that's not syn ack's intended point. He's saying that if you take a gene-centred view to what your morality should be, then that logically leads to the idea that rape in that hypothetical is justified. The argument is not some catch 22 where if you choose the "not rape" option you therefore hate the human race, rather the argument says that since for most people, rape is unacceptable in all situations, then the gene-centred view of morality is undesirable for most people. It's an argument against the gene-centred view to deciding morality, that's all.
If you are going this route, you really need to go all the way with it, so don't leave out the assumptions. Par example: that the women not only does not want to have sex with you at this moment, but could never, ever be persuaded to have sex with you; she could never be persuaded to find an alternative to receptive (or perhaps not-so-receptive?) intercourse; she does not care about the future of the human race; she has no desire to be mother or raise a family and no issues ignoring her so-called biological clock; manual stimulation will be sufficient for her gratification needs and this will never change; she is inpenetrable to a rational discussion on the matter, she hates you and will never be affected by being the loneliness of being the last of her kind (she hates you so you certainly can't comfort her) etc. In THIS situation, assuming I haven't left out something, is it acceptable to rape her?
No! Rape's never acceptable! Lolzorz! You are an evil misogynist and believe rape is ALWAYS acceptable. I've trapped you with my impossible scenario because I've implied these assumptions are there, without saying them so you could have picked one of these alternatives all along, but you didn't, so shame on you! I win!
I'm assuming the second paragraph quoted is a parody?
And as for you listing those assumptions, are they that big? Is it that unremarkable to find a woman who doesn't want to have sex with you? I mean, all your other assumptions lead from that one. If you really think it's impossible for a woman to simultaneously care about the future of the human race, but still not want to have sex with you, then you're either sexist, arrogant, ignorant or a stud.
If I also have the odd bit of bacon that was raised in a shed and trucked across the country, that's probably more efficient use of fuel than trucking vegetables the same distance. And tastier.
It's been a long day, and I am a bit on the grumpy side. So, please excuse the gratuitous snark.
If you really think it's impossible for a woman to simultaneously care about the future of the human race, but still not want to have sex with you, then you're either sexist, arrogant, ignorant or a stud.
Actually, the answer is none of the above. I'm gay, so unless there's a turkey baster involved and this woman is receptive, that'd be the extinction of the human race.
I gave no indication that I believe that it's ever acceptable to rape a woman, regardless of the situation. I guess I disagree with presenting a ridiculous, hypothetical, overly simplistic, false dichotomy and then accusing people of being rape apologists (a pretty serious allegation) in all situations based off of one pretty extraordinary situation just to make a point.
I was trying to make a point here, but my eyes are crossing and it will probably come out less coherent than I've already been this evening, so, I'll stop.
"Thankfully, we reject this, because genetic proliferation is simply worthless as a moral consideration." -- syn ack
"The point was that "genetic proliferation" should be discarded as an argument for anything, because if allowed as an argument, it could justify rape. " -- anon
"So, instead of assuming that proposition is true, me and syn ack throw out the gene-centred view of morality, and opt for a more person or life-centred view, which doesn't justify rape." -- Alex Deam
But the analysis was simplistic, and neglected complicating factors such as the extent of female investment, and in humans also male investment in provision for and education of the children. You continued to neglect this even after I pointed it out. The fact of the matter is, that while rapes are still attempted, human ethical systems generally don't accept it, at least within the in-group. While rape is frequent in a few life forms, most have settled upon some more mutual form of reproduction. So while at a simplistic level, rape may seem a good strategy, in gene-centered nature something else seems to happen, and something else happens in humans. No matter what ethical system we make up, it would be wise to take our genetic tendencies and preferences into account.
Perhaps rape doesn't exist in many species because females have are fast, or have claws and large canines. Males might find rape to risky a choice. This may apply to humans too, if attempts at a male strategy became more common, perhaps human females didn't and wouldn't choose tolerance as a strategy, instead they choice to fight for their choice in which genes they invest in. They can arm themselves and fight well enough to make rape a losing strategy, they can also become more security conscious, and as social animals can form alliances. There are natural gene-centered allies. Given the low fecundity of humans, parents have an interest in their female offspring investing only in the best genes, and with mates that will also invest. Parents and mates in a social group have interests in allying with each other to preserve their investment choices. A gene-centered analysis can result in rape being pushed off to a dangerous, marginal periphery or to exploitation of vulnerable poorly protected females in outgroups. So why does this mysticism about rape being "wrong" persist? Perhaps it is because those humans that developed a tendency to think that some norms of their cultures were what was right and wrong, without questioning them much, did a better job of proliferating.
Humans are intelligent enough to be able to adopt higher level uber norms. How did western societies manage to get rid of much of the honor violence common in many societies? Dueling existed well into the 19th century. Slavery certainly wasn't against the human nature, it was supported by right of conquest, property rights and by acceptance of social stratification. If anything, slavery was a less sophisticated form of stratification than what humans developed elsewhere. Yet we also got rid of slavery, except in the service of nationalism. What uber norms allowed these "advances"? It is actually by these norms that the suppression of slavery, and honor violence are considered "advances". I suspect the successful uber norms also appeal to something in human nature, despite being higher level artificial constructs of the mind. After all, ice cream is artificial too.
"um, how is that a decent argument in favor of rape?"
It is an argument justifying the acceptance of rape. It is an argument so powerful that it was also used to justify acceptance of genocide and torture and the suppression of minorities. It is the respect for sovereignty even of dictators encoded in international law, and frequently cited in the global culture, not just by the representatives of sovereigns in the UN itself, but in the supposedly anti-nationalism, left wing of western culture. It was implicit in the first president Bush's "New World Order". Sovereignties of the world unite, but remember you only have the right to oppress your "own".
You're talking in arbitrary abstractions about "your standards". No one has ever asked you to refrain from enforcing ethics against the ancient Romans. You know why? And if ethics aren't a code to be enforced by legal or social sanctions, then what are they but smug self-righteousness?
If one says -- it is wrong for you to eat a pig, that must mean something. At one end, it may mean -- "And therefore I will make you uncomfortable whenever you're around me eating bacon", and at the other end it means "And therefore I will use violence against you to stop you". But for it to be an empty judgment -- if you're just a universal goody-two-shoes with no means or desire to enforce some sort of sanction and take responsibility for it -- you're just full of Sunday-school platitude shit.
So, once again, are you saying you intend to travel back in time and battle the ancient Romans? Or to the Pleistocene to engage our ancestors in philosophical discussions to convince them to give up cannibalism? Is all your ethics just platitudes, like Kant's nonsense, another search for objectivity and abstraction in the realms of the subjective and specific?
The first time you asked this question, it may have been an honest question. You've been given an answer now and chosen to ignore it, so you are full of shit.
Arguments that "X wasn't wrong then" quickly become arguments that "X is not wrong now" when circumstances are claimed to be similar. Judging the past is how we decide the future.
Actions, like buying products from factories that utilize wage slavery, do not happen out of the blue. They are dependent upon social attitudes about what is moral and what is not. Most people are willing to constrain their behavior to what they believe is moral. This occurs even when no one else is watching, that is, without the enforcement of sanctions you claim are necessary, as long as the person agrees with the social standard.
So just talking about what our standards should be has an effect. Judging past actions and coming to a consensus of what was right and what was wrong has an effect. The judgments we make now may influence future actions when circumstances are felt to be similar. Convince everyone that we cannot judge the Romans, and Roman economics will be on the discussion table during the next economic crisis.
Talking and building consensus happens before any sanction. If eating meat is wrong, it will be necessary to convince many people of this, in order to influence their own behavior. If legal sanctions will be necessary, then it will first be necessary to reach a critical mass that can influence democracy. Talking is how we get there, or how we decide not to go there.
By refusing to judge Roman slavery, you may be enabling future slavery.
I gave no indication that I believe that it's ever acceptable to rape a woman, regardless of the situation. I guess I disagree with presenting a ridiculous, hypothetical, overly simplistic, false dichotomy and then accusing people of being rape apologists (a pretty serious allegation) in all situations based off of one pretty extraordinary situation just to make a point.
You're being dishonest. No one said "in all situations" except you.
The hypothetical was not all that was offered. That was merely meant to illustrate that rape would not be right even if the alternative was extinction. I did not expect africangenesis and James Sweet to be so eager to invent rationalizations for rape. But an apologist is an apologist. A defense is a defense. A limited context does not negate the label. Africangenesis in particular is eager to imagine many other rationalizations for when rape should be acceptable. It is clear he is a rape apologist in general, in the normal context of life. James Sweet, perhaps not so generally. But it is clear he is willing to remove the rights of women if he deems it necessary. It is not much of a credit to him that he rarely deems it necessary.
But the hypothetical was not all that was offered. Rape is so common that in everyday life it is a cause of "genetic proliferation." Pro-life women choose to give birth to the children of their rapists. That is genetic proliferation. Marital rape has been the norm through centuries of Western civilization, maybe others I'm less informed about. Married women could not refuse sex. Marital rape has recently been legalized again in Afghanistan. Some of these rapes lead to impregnation. This is genetic proliferation. A moral view that values genetic proliferation as good in itself, trumping individual consent, must excuse marital rape.
No hypotheticals: James Sweet can have no coherent objection to current Afghan rape laws. He may object, but not without abandoning his valuation of genetic proliferation, if he is to be coherent.
"But it is clear he is willing to remove the rights of women if he deems it necessary. It is not much of a credit to him that he rarely deems it necessary."
Hey what gives? I don't mind being a rape apologist since you use the term so indiscriminately, but you are making it sound like I'm more willing to remove the rights of women than you are, which I seriously doubt. You aren't giving me much credit.
I find it interesting that anyone is so vehemently equating the momentary, objective evaluation of a purely theoretical situation relating to an act/circumstance that we can all agree is a BAD THING with supporting (consciously or unconsciously) that BAD THING, as if discussion implies approval.
Also, James @ 84, this isn't so much directed at you as it is a response to your mention of an opinion held by others: I doubt I'm the only person to have ever thought of this, but the attitude of many animal rights activists that the extinction of domesticated breeds of animals that we raise for food is preferable to their continued "enslavement" isn't really miles away from the attitude held by certain fundamentalist Christian soldiers who feel it's better for Afghans to convert to Christianity and be killed for it (since they'll go to HEAVEN) than it is for them to stay alive following the wrong religion, or that it's better for a 9-year-old, pregnant after having been raped by her step-father, to die as a result of the pregnancy than to abort the child. I'm not saying they're exactly the same thing, but they're not miles away, at the very least in terms of the logic used.
Similarly, in response to one of Hillary's last comments before signing off: Arguing that it might be better (or more "ethical") to have no job and potentially starve to death rather than hold a questionable or unethical job isn't miles away from the pro-life argument that it's better to go right on ahead and have that baby regardless of how negatively it might affect your life, because it's more ethical/moral than aborting the pregnancy. (Not to mention that it invites the question of whether YOU have ever had to make a choice like that, and if you're justified in passing such an absolute judgement on those who HAVE had to.)
It might just be me, but I find these comparisons far more logical than the idea that eating bacon is akin to being a creationist.
Possibly a little late to respond now everyone's been asleep for a night but still...
Lynna #130
"it's just that you and Hillary redefine "addressed" as being "agree with me completely, and acknowledge that you are all unethical swine if you don't agree with me.""
Kind of like how atheists get pissed off when creationists won't argue on a reasoned level and use lots of excuses to avoid the central issues?
I don't want anyone to say they are unethical "swine" (pigs are cool after all), just that people should be big enough to admit their own cognitive dissonance at work in the arena of food.
I have no problem with jokes- the Rev's one about raping a pig before eating it is pretty funny in the context of the comments going on. But harping on about how tasty bacon is whenever a pig is referenced on the blog isn't funny, it's lame attempts to make out that the taste of bacon is the most important factor, thus justifying arguments about not being able to "give it up", like its somehow different to other ethical choices you make at the supermarket.
"You've got a battering ram presentation method going and, as James Sweet noted more than once, it smacks of absolutism."
This comment and complaints about using ethics as a 'weapon' are again very similar to those from creationists who come here and can't take the heat of being shown that they don't have a leg to stand on.
It's not an absolutist position, just as atheism isn't; but it IS the only rational position based on the scientific evidence which everyone here purports to hold as gold standard. If there was good evidence that animals like pigs did not have the capacity to feel pain or fear or suffer as a result of what we do to them, hell I'd be frying up some bacon. I am not some kind of self-flagellating nutter, I love food, I just realised the implications of eating animal products and based on that reasoning, decided not to do it anymore.
How many people here would say the same, that given the rational arguments that causing unnecessary suffering is unjustifiable, that they will just TRY living without animal products for a while? Its certainly easier than giving up religious belief which we all encourage.
I am happy to have a conversation and a joke but I'm also going to challenge people parading their choices to ignore suffering on an unimaginable scale because they don't want to give up something comfortable.
As you say, I want to mitigate the harm done by factory farms too, trouble is there is harm whether it's intensive or organic as the slaughterhouses are the same.
the attitude of many animal rights activists that the extinction of domesticated breeds of animals that we raise for food is preferable to their continued "enslavement"
Don't take this as snark, because I am actually interested: what evidence do you know of, or links you can provide (or anyone else reading this), that suggest that if domesticated animals were freed they would become extinct?
I gave no indication that I believe that it's ever acceptable to rape a woman, regardless of the situation. I guess I disagree with presenting a ridiculous, hypothetical, overly simplistic, false dichotomy and then accusing people of being rape apologists (a pretty serious allegation) in all situations based off of one pretty extraordinary situation just to make a point.
I disagree that such a situation is "ridiculous, hypothetical, overly simplistic, false dichotomy". It's certainly not a false dichotomy: you either rape or you don't rape. There's no middle ground. And it's not particularly unlikely. Do you think that humanity will definitely never come close to extinction? It's actually highly likely that one day in humanity's history we will at least come close to extinction. I'm sure someone who knows more about evolutionary history will know the exact details, but aren't about 99.9% of all species that have ever lived extinct? It's not that hard to imagine it happening to us.
So as far as I can tell, the hypothetical makes two assumptions:
1. The humans involved are near extinct, or perceive that they are.
2. The rate of sexual intercourse is low enough to threaten the survival of the species or perceived survival of the species, due to refusal to consent by individual(s).
Pray tell what's so ridiculous about those assumptions.
Besides, you're missing the point. A hypothetical doesn't have to be "likely", just so long as it's possible. That's what hypotheticals are. That's how individuals and societies can decide ethical standpoints. That's how philosophy (and in some respects science too) works.
If you truly believe that it's never acceptable to rape "regardless of the situation", then you would believe that no matter the hypothetical, either it's unacceptable to rape in that hypothetical, or the hypothetical is impossible. You've chosen to argue that the hypothetical is "ridiculous", and to my mind, attacking the foundations of the hypothetical makes a lot more sense than answering that rape would be acceptable in that situation, as James has done. James, instead of attacking the hypothetical like you, has chosen to grant that the hypothetical might be valid, and yet answered in the affirmative to "is rape acceptable in that situation. You may believe that rape is unacceptable "regardless of the situation", but James' response cannot possibly tie in with that notion.
Oh, and has already been said, no-one is accusing anyone of being "rape apologists in all situations". Only in this one situation.
The arguments about not allowing more domesticated animals to be bred is because they only exist to be used as human property, therefore their rights will always be open to abuse. There is not an option on the table for domestic animals to have a good life (from their point of view) unless we stopped treating them as property and hurting/killing them when we liked. The option was there for human slaves to be emancipated and treated as citizens with full rights.
I can't see how you can compare that to supporting the death of an abused 9 year old child to save her baby. The ethical imperative is what is best for the girl, not the fetus which doesn't feel or have an "existence" yet. Just like the ethical imperative for domestic animals is not what is best for us or future animals that don't exist yet, but for those alive now. The rational response is to to stop making more pigs/cows/sheep whose only purpose is to be treated in any way we see fit because they are just 'commodities' there to be eaten.
I didn't think Hillary was trying to say people should choose between unemployment and working at slaughter-houses, but if that is what she meant then I disagree.
Whatever, Cai. So you tear into me because I make an ethical choice with some regret for what I am giving up, but you leave everyone else alone who hasn't even considered the ethics of it?
Oh, sounds like I hit a nerve. I'm sorry to offend you, James, truly. But what, you expect me to sit-tight when I read something that offends me? It does genuinely offend me when people bring up taste as a qualification in these considerations. I don't leave everyone else alone, I just threw a comment your way. If you don't want to talk about it, nobody's making you; but if you say something like what you did, expect people to respond.
Man, for a bunch of so-called atheists, people on this blog sure have a lot of dogma. I think I'm going to stop reading the comments altogether. ... Self-righteous flame-compulsive morons...
Uh, whatever, James. You're the one doing the name-calling here. Your disagreement with me doesn't make what I have to say dogmatic. Anyways, if it comforts you, this is like the second or third comment I've made on this blog, and now I don't plan on making any more, so feel free to keep reading.
You're being dishonest. No one said "in all situations" except you.
I agree that no one said that explicitly. Perhaps, this is my interpretation of it (with a slightly fried brain at the end of a long day at work), but the phrase "rape apologist" is very much loaded, and the implications really don't limit themselves to just this hypothetical situation. "An apologist is an apologist," right? It seems to me to be an overly dramatic way to make a point (says the pot to the kettle).
I think I'm trying much too hard to play devil's advocate in my own brain, and it's causing something to short out. I don't think this situation is all that unlikely. I don't think that this represents a false dichotomy. I think the heart of the issue I have is this: that by calling someone a rape apologist for answering in the affirmative to this particular dilemma, this is not really an argument against using a gene-centered view of morality to determine a course of action in a challenging situation; it's more of an ad hominem attack against the individual responding to the scenario as such. An attack which in this case carries the collateral damage of implying support of rape in multiple situations, which may are may not be warranted.
This is a situation in which the arguments and potential consequences which demonstrate that rape is not justified even in this extreme circumstance should be self-evident, but perhaps they are not to everyone. It seems that name-calling has resulted in less in AG and James reflecting on the reasons their logic may be faulty in this case, and more in them being defensive more than anything else.
I'm having difficulty articulating the point I would like to make, and it's frustrating me greatly. So, my apologies for my uncouthness, thus far.
Dirty swine!
oh wait
that's kinda cute
Piglet shouldn't sit in the swill trough, or mummy might make a mistake.
Mmm, bacon...
Mmm, BACON and bacon.
cute
What a beautiful picture. Pigs are really magnificent animals. I owned a couple for awhile, and taught one of them to do tricks (sit, stay, around, etc.)
They also pretty much have it the worst of any animal in US factory-farming practices (except laying hens, they probably have it worse, but they're chickens so I have trouble caring that much). I had to cut out factory-farmed pork after that. It's one thing to have cows walking around in their own shit eating corn and animal byproducts and pretty much anything else instead of grass... at least they are outside, and anyway, being herbivores, cows are pretty stupid. Pigs, though... these are animals as smart as dogs (in some ways, smarter.. I found my pigs learned tricks faster than my dogs, although in fairness a dog will do a trick out of loyalty while a pig will only do it for food, heh) and some of them are spending their whole lives indoors in awful conditions, to the point where they basically become crazy.
Anyway, end of sermonizing. I will also admit that bacon and prosciutto are two of the tastiest foods in existence. Dammit, why do they have to be so smart AND so tasty?!? :(
Tender and not so tender hamhocks.
Good call. Plus small farm pork is better.
I know... i know.
Rev.BigDumbChimp @ 4
Rev.BigDumbChimp @ 4
The pig might be thinking: "Gad, puke breath!"
It's sad to think that, to Ken Ham, this is porn.
winner
Awww... that's so soooeeeeeet! Sorry mama, but baby's going onto the spit in 3 months.
I love pigs though; if they didn't scratch the floor and eat my garden I might even consider keeping one as a pet.
I've had "free-range" pigs (grown in captivity but with plenty space to run around); they taste so different from the usual bulk-bred pigs. It's such a pity that raising them to be tasty seems to conflict with raising them to feed more people.
Uh... why is this decision giving you trouble? It's just selfish vs. ethical. The blood-splatter patterns from shooting people may exhibit interesting aesthetic properties, but...
Uh... why is this decision giving you trouble? It's just selfish vs. ethical. The blood-splatter patterns from shooting people may exhibit interesting aesthetic properties, but...
here we go
I recently visited a small farm north of me that's working on sustainable polyculture principles for meat - they were using the pigs to till the garden, and happier pigs I have never seen.
Awww, that is so adorable.
Whatever, Cai. So you tear into me because I make an ethical choice with some regret for what I am giving up, but you leave everyone else alone who hasn't even considered the ethics of it?
Man, for a bunch of so-called atheists, people on this blog sure have a lot of dogma. I think I'm going to stop reading the comments altogether. While the grammar and spelling is better, beneath the surface half of you are no better than youtube commenters. Self-righteous flame-compulsive morons...
James Sweet #17:
Reluctantly, James, when it comes to their bellies over their ethics I have to agree with you.
James, the vegetarian / animal rights crowd has nothing to do with so-called atheists.
It's their own thing.
"My second hundred days will be so successful, I anticipate being able to complete them in 72 days." awesome
Why does intelligence persist in the factory-farmed pig? Is it hard to breed out? Does it aid somehow in the production of or the quality of the final product?
I doubt that's a factor in what factory farms consider when breeding.
Hilarious.
Sounds nice. I can rarely remember what I read in Fast Food Nation and what in The Omnivore's Dilemma, but the description of factory pig farming (especially the part about tail docking) in one or both was horrific.
@Rev BDC #19 -- Yeah, I know, but I guess my point is that I am so far somewhat dissatisfied with the ratio of dumbflame to stuffWorthReading in the comments in this blog. heh... I suppose it's vastly better than most of teh interwubz in that respect, but that's like saying "I suppose is David Irving is vastly less anti-semitic than Hitler". heh...
@AG #21 and Rev BDC #22 -- Actually, I think I heard somewhere that something vaguely like this was being done. Even from the pure profit perspective, smart sensitive animals are a royal pain in the ass to process in that fashion. Pigs in particular go batshit crazy under those conditions, and it makes them hard to control and causes all sorts of health problems. If the pigs were dumber and more complacent, the thinking goes, they wouldn't go so crazy.
If the suffering of the pigs were the *only* concern, one could make an argument for moving in this direction (although I'm sure it would strike some people as a ghastly solution to the problem, but I'd be willing to entertain it at least). But of course, factory farming has all sorts of environmental issues as well, not to mention the fact that large scale farming in the US is petroleum-intensive -- and I need not remind people of the long-term geopolitical implications of that...
actually, Rev., veg/AR has *everything* to do with atheism. both are grounded in ethical systems that aspire toward rationality.
the idea that it's okay to continue with an action that is aesthetically pleasing tho ethically or rationally compromised is itself ethically compromised - and the same class of error that many theists and creationists make. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris talks about noncruelty as the fundamental value of any ethical system, and discusses medieval people burning cats for fun, and Descartes' grotesque dissection of conscious dogs (all the while claiming that they were soulless automatons) as examples of how religion can take us away from that fundamental precept. And Harris goes on to say, correctly of course, that it's a short step from abusing animals to abusing humans.
The people here who are boasting about loving bacon even though they are fully aware of the pain and suffering that goes into producing it (not just of the animals, btw, but the seriously-oppressed slaughterhouse workers AND the local environment and communities, and BTW the commenters' own health) are no different than creationists who proudly flout their ignorance and the consequences thereof. They are just choosing a different vector with which to express their determined ignorance.
Look, none of us is perfect - I'm certainly not. But if you're going to make a claim towards striving for a rational/ethical basis to live your life, then you don't have the luxury of flouting a huge nonrational/nonethical area of your life like it's a good thing, esp. in a forum devoted to rationality. At least show some humility, and recognize that cynicism is not an admirable or empowered reaction to a depiction of tender love. (btw, I'm not talking specifically to you, Rev!)
Rev -- see what I mean? hahaha...
Being a vegetarian has something to do with not believing in a god?
Um no.
Had you just said both are grounded in rationality you'd at least have an argument. The other part of that is nonsense.
Atheism says nothing about ethical systems. Rationality leads one there but Atheism says nothing about it.
Not quite as good as bacon, but have a look at the Swedes revenge for the prosecution of The Pirate Bay http://www.internetavgift.se/
If you cannot read it, it is in short a fee every Swede will pay to the law firm that represents the music industry, but since there is no such fee, everybody will claim back their money.According to Swedish law, the law firm must refund the money, and that will cost them a small fortune (or a large one if enought Swedes participate), both in bank fees and administration time.Swedes are encouraged to pay 1 Swedish krona, which is equivalent to 30 cents. The administration fees and bank's refund fees will amount to something like 5 dollars equivalent, at least for each transaction.
Oh, - the swines ;^)
"Atheism says nothing about ethical systems. Rationality leads one there but Atheism says nothing about it."
This is a valid point, of course - but is it ethically valid to stop the discussion/analysis there? You have the right to do so, but is it right?
James #17 and Spud #18:
You'll be sooooo missed. Not.
Ethically valid?
Yes I can stop the discussion anywhere and it has nothing to do with ethics. I'm not ethically bound to continue talking to you about anything. You are using that term as a weapon instead of an idea. Please don't try and passive aggressively bully me into anything.
HOWEVER, the truth is I was / am in the process of typing out a longer response but I'm at work and I don't want to rush it.
"Dammit, why do they have to be so smart AND so tasty?!? :("
Cannibals may say the same thing.
All you bacon eaters need a Peter Singer fatwah.
"Atheism says nothing about ethical systems. Rationality leads one there but Atheism says nothing about it."
Rationality leads nowhere without values.
And values are inflexibly capricious without rationality.
I could see this thread going into reductio eternity...
>You are using that term as a weapon instead of an idea. Please don't try and passive aggressively bully me into anything.
Simply not true, Rev. With all respect, you really have no basis at all for analyzing my motives (versus behavior).
I also want to re-emphasize that even though I responded to your post, I wasn't addressing you in particular, or even primarily.
If you choose to post a longer reply later on, I'll be interested to read it.
James, if you really want to see lean toward the emotional side in comments, leaving reason behind, see the thread at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/i_am_pro-test.php
Even on this hot button topic though, the thread contained info well worth reading. Sometimes you just have to wear your fire-fighting gear when go in.
"Look, none of us is perfect - I'm certainly not"
Why does that statement always precede a rant about how we're not as perfect as the speaker.
At least two people now have compared eating pigs to eating people. Now, I do not currently eat pigs so I am not trying to say there are no ethical issues with doing so. But this comparison with cannibalism is absurd.
#1 Humans are smarter than pigs.
#2 There is a significantly elevated problem (both ethically and evolutionarily) when one eats a member of one's own species rather than a member of a closely-related species.
#3 Domestication significantly muddies the waters, because, as a species, the pigs have made a bargain of sorts with humanity to increase their collective reproductive success at the cost of a shortened individual lifespan. This does not make it okay to torture them (that was never part of the evolutionary bargain), and one could even continue to reject our very right to eat them (even though to do so would undermine the reproductive success of the species)... but one should not pretend the issue is the same as eating or killing a person. Puh-leez.
the comment still betrays an ignorance of domestication. Say what you will
Ok fine. But my point aside from your perceived motivation stands.
If I finish this reply later I'll post it. But it's more than likely a rehash of what has been said ad nauseum.
Which has exactly zero bearing on this.
Pigs are not humans.
You guys and gals, these snarky insults are purely pyrrhic victories. It is tantamount to carrying coals to Newcastle.
Pigs are much smarter than Ray Comfort. Trust me.
"And values are inflexibly capricious without rationality.
I could see this thread going into reductio eternity..."
Even less rational animals value certain resources and relationships as inferred from their behavior.
Human's share some values, and those of us that value rationality and evidence reasoning have a tool for reaching agreement about facts and theories. But we need to share more values than that to reach further agreement. We may not be able to agree on the criteria and values by which different possible ethical systems will be judged. If we care about the extent to which certain ethical systems are practical, we may want to know more about human nature.
Oh, bleh! Another blog being taken over by "if you're vegetarian you're good, if you're not you're bad." Was a vegetarian myself for many years and still lean towards it, but I do not agree with vegetarians doing the self-righteous bit.
Work for animal rights, yeah, but don't go so far as to demonize non-vegetarians as the unethical Other.
And, Hillary, you may not have intended to use the term "ethics" as a weapon, but it certainly came off that way.
In one of the previous blogs that included a lot of discussion about bacon, I brought up the problem with factory farms and lots of people agreed and chimed in with possible solutions. Seems to me that's where the emphasis should be.
@JD #43: Which prompts the question -- would it be ethical to eat Ray Comfort?
Depending on the answer, that may prompt another question: Would it be tasty to eat Ray Comfort?
Hmmm....
Comfort probably tastes like nasty ass. But yes, it would be specifically more ethical to eat Ray Comfort (if you could purge later and get access to an EMDR machine for trauma therapy).
I'm with James on the "puh-leeze" when it comes to throwing human blood spatter around as an equivalent to killing pigs for food. If vegetarians go back to eating some meat, do they immediately start killing humans because they don't see any difference between cows and humans? Not in my case ... not so far anyway.
#1 Humans are smarter than pigs.
Uh, no. SOME (or even MANY or MOST, but definitely not all) humans are smarter than pigs.
And pigs ain't superstitious, they only believe in what they see and smell: food (including truffles).
Could you get Trichinosis if you ate Ken Ham?
And get the religious spongiform encephalopathy ? How ethical would be helping the religious prion to spread ?
#44. I agree with most of your position except I would say that less rational animals (non-humans) gravitate towards behaviors rather than possess values. It is difficult for less cognitively evolved creatures to obtain subjective integrity. However, resonating with your point, some less rational animals (like Kirk Cameron) have values and no rationality.
Uh oh. Stay away from Lynna at dinner time!
#51. But we have a vaccine for that.
Two out of Three Little Pigs isn't bad.
James Sweet @ # 46
You could do worse than rubbing the carcass down with a little olive oil, a bit of garlic and some fresh ground black pepper. Smoking him over the wood of your choice for several hours, and then at the end basting with whichever sauce you find toothsome. I'm thinking "Sweet Baby Ray's." I wonder if there's a banana chutney recipe floating around out there.
Now I'm all hungry.
All mammals eat other living things to get their energy.....what's the big deal? It's tasty!
#43:
So is a banana and peanut butter sandwich. I don't think it would be ethical to eat Ray Comfort, but I could be persuaded that it would be ethical to stop feeding him.
Hillary Rettig @ # 25.
It's all very well taking a high moral stance over not eating meat, but it may be easier for some than for others.
I tried not eating tetrapods for about one year, for ethical reasons. The problem was, I've never much liked fish or fruit or vegetables. Then, when I was on a Polish liner crossing the Atlantic, & saw the menu, I abandoned the meat-free diet.
We evolved as omnivores, & maybe some of us are just more carnivorous than others?
Rev @#53: Damn straight. I'm rethinking my position.
>And, Hillary, you may not have intended to use the term "ethics" as a weapon, but it certainly came off that way.
It's interesting (but not surprising) the way people are attacking my motives rather than the facts of what I wrote.
Accusing veg*ns of self-righteousness - even when justified - is not the same as addressing the facts of the argument.
Yeah, Hillary, you are right. The distaste for your self-righteous, I'm-queen-of-the-high-moral-ground stance is not the same as addressing the facts of the argument for vegetarianism.
There is no ethical argument for vegetarianism, except that it makes you feel *icky* to eat another animal...But that's not logical.
I'd even try a bite of human meat just to see what it tasted like and not feel bad about it.
Ugh, there are so many reasons to eat something beyond its taste. Ken Ham would taste awful. However, because he has the power to tame and control large reptiles, eating him would imbue the consumer with the power to do the same (if I remember my first year physiology courses at Liberty U correctly.)
Eating Ray Comfort, unfortunately, would only have the benefit of imbuing the power to control Kirk Cameron, an effect one could presumably achieve with a laser pointer and a wall: "Follow the magical Jesus dot, Kirk, follow the magical Jesus dot!"
By that line of reasoning, would you then become a piglet rapist as well if you at him?
To Richard Harris #58
Thank you for your comment and willingness to discuss the issue on the level of facts, instead of just attacking me. I think it's great that you have tried to spare the tetropods.
>maybe some of us are just more carnivorous than others?
this could be true, however I wouldn't discount the cultural role and also the fact that the corporations work hard to disguise the nature of their product and its origins.
To be honest I do come across as more judgmental in these writings than I do in person because in writing precision counts more than in speech. But I truly admire people who strive for ethical living in any area of life (including atheism), even if their success is only partial or even temporary, as my own often is.
Thank you again - your comment was a kind of oasis.
I disagree. Given that at this point in human history (and all points before)* our continued existence depends on the killing and consumption of some other living things, there are all sorts of ethical reasons to choose to not eat meat, such as the minimisation of cruelty (which depends on some knowledge of the ability of the things we eat to feel pain or not), the reduction of environmental impact (a side-effect of large-scale factory farming and consumer culture), and etc.
You're of course free to disagree with vegetarians and vegetarianism, but most vegetarians that I've ever known have made their choice based more on ethical reasoning as emotion.
FWIW, I didn't find Hillary's comments particularly self-righteous. I disagree with her on a number of points, but nothing she said rose to the absurdity of equating carnivorism with cannibalism. It was a bit of a low-blow to compare bacon-lovers with creationists... But everything else she said seemed like well-reasoned commentary, that I just happen to disagree with on a few points.
No. Past acts are not transferred, but the power to commit them is.
This does bring up an interesting theological question though: if one were to consume Ken Ham in the attempt to gain herpetological power, would one be able to overcome the compulsion to cruise past pigpens with ears of baby corn, asking litter runts for help in finding one's 'lost puppy'?
Of course there's a rational ethical argument--a pretty good one--to be made for a vegetarian diet. I don't think that Ms. Rettig has presented it here, but it exists. There are also many completely irrational, wholly emotional "arguments" that are made for veg*nism (I like that), all the time. There are rational, arguably ethical arguments that could be made in favor of factory farming, too (perhaps Walton will drop by and offer one). Then there are people whose ethics steer them to spending more $ on free-range/less-cruelty meats (bacon, as a randomly chosen example), since you really vote with your money in the USA.
The tricky thing about atheist ethics, see, is that just beyond the large areas of broad general agreement are these metaphorical badlands where everybody is drawing a different line, and for various ethical and nonethical reasons.
Make the arguments and argue about them if you must, but do not claim the sole possession of "ethics;" you're dead wrong if you do.
Hillary Rettig,
"It's interesting (but not surprising) the way people are attacking my motives rather than the facts of what I wrote."
"The people here who are boasting about loving bacon even though they are fully aware of the pain and suffering that goes into producing it (not just of the animals,..."
We are not fully aware of the pain and suffering of the pigs, and much of it may be just transference from identifying with how we would feel. Are you certain that these pigs are not just food addicts by nature or breeding and loving every minute of it, despite the decreased mobility? This is different than the forced feeding that some ducks undergo.
" btw, but the seriously-oppressed slaughterhouse workers AND the local environment and communities,"
Presumably these workers prefer to have the option to work in the slaughter houses to whatever other alternatives they have. There are environmental concerns that should be addressed.
"and BTW the commenters' own health) are no different than creationists who proudly flout their ignorance and the consequences thereof. They are just choosing a different vector with which to express their determined ignorance."
Most alleged evidence I've seen of the dangers of saturated fat, were studies that did not control for Calories. When the evidence is further broken down into the specific saturated fatty acids, some were statistically associated with benefits and others with increased risk. Total Calories and the induction of insulin by the carbohydrate component are viable alternatives to the high saturated fat hypotheses. The risks from the iron component of red meats can be mitigated by consuming tea, which significantly reduces the absorption of iron. Nutrition is still more art than science.
But about the MMM pic:
Awwwwwwwwwwww! Baby bacon!
Perhaps the bad side effect of the herpetological powers is the acute need to rape piglets.
Or maybe even raping piglets gives you the mana for reptile domination?
Africagenesis:
"""
Are you certain that these pigs are not just food addicts by nature or breeding and loving every minute of it, despite the decreased mobility?
"""
Yes, actually; or at least as certain as I ever can be about the suffering of another being besides myself. It's pretty obvious that pigs in factory farmed conditions are behaving pathologically.
If you spend any time around pigs, and then see/read descriptions of their behavior in these large scale farming operations, it's disturbing to say the least. These are NOT happy pigs, and they are behaving in a WEIRD way.
The description of the sustainable farm in the Omnivore's Dilemma, on the other hand, with pigs digging through layers of mud to find kernels of fermented corn... well, again, if you've spent any time at all around pigs, this is pretty much a porcine paradise, as their two favorite things are digging in mud and alcohol (one of mine would lick bourbon off my fingers, hehehe).
So yeah, I gotta zero in on that. Yes, we know for certain (again, as certainly as we can ever know the suffering of a being other than ourselves) that factory-farmed pigs are not happy.
Oops, anon #73 was me.
James #67 - thanks, really appreciate it.
Africangenesis #70 - if you are seriously interested in these questions, I suggest you do some research, including visiting a livestock sanctuary. Many of our farmed animals demonstrate similar emotions and emotional ranges and pain responses to humans, and in particular show similar traumatic symptoms. Then you need to decide what to do with that information, if you choose to agree, even in part.
re slaughterhouse labor, although some would defend the choice of "horrible job with high injury rate and documented awful treatment" versus "no job / starve to death" as an ethically valid one, I would not.
hey all, got to sign off now, but thanks for the discussion.
"If you spend any time around pigs, and then see/read descriptions of their behavior in these large scale farming operations, it's disturbing to say the least. These are NOT happy pigs, and they are behaving in a WEIRD way"
Are there estimates of the relative costs of the more humane (porcine) approach? If the cost advantages of the factory model are significant, a breeding program to alter those characteristics that contribute to the suffering should be justifiable.
Only tangentially-related (because this does nothing in and of itself to inform our ethics, but it does make you think), it occurred to me a year or two ago that pigs are the only omnivorous mammals that Western culture deigns it acceptable to eat. We eat other omnivores, we eat other mammals, but the only omnivorous mammal is the pig.
I did find goat at an Indian restaurant one time, so I suppose you could count that too... but in America we usually don't.
One question to ask yourself: Would you be okay with eating a dog if it tasted as good as a pig? Because in terms of intelligence, personality, etc., they are similar.
Different people will come to different conclusions about this question. For me personally, I would, but only if the dogs were given an opportunity to have a wonderful dog-appropriate life. For my wife, the answer is no -- she can't even bring herself to eat pasture-raised pork. For others, the answer may be, "Bring on the mutt meat!" But whichever way you go, we should all be aware of the decision we are making.
@77
Plenty of bear hunters eat the meat.
Humans and pigs have been ecological competitors for as long as their ranges have overlapped (a real long time). We eat the same stuff, and also each other, and ~always have. Our teeth (adapted to diet in mammals) are so similar that fossils used to be commonly confused, and our guts are so similar that we share Ascaris parasites (google-image that one, I dare ya).
AG #76: There is some merit to that line of thinking, but as I mentioned before, there are other long-term costs associated with intensive factory farming besides the cruelty issue.
The cost advantages of the factory model in the short term and for the meat producer are quite high. I mean, there's a reason sustainably-raised meat costs so much more, right? But there are significant negative externalities to the process, both long-term and short-term, that aren't being properly reflected in the cost to the consumer or in the profits of the producer. This is troublesome to say the least.
I should mention that I do not hold the dogmatic opinion that nobody should eat factory-farmed meat. To assert this when I am able to afford more ethically-raised meat and other people aren't would smack of elitism. We can debate whether the availability of this cheap meat is actually good for poor people (there's a reason poverty and obesity have such a high correlation), and that might lead us to say that factory-farmed meat is bad for everybody, end of sentence. But I don't hold that opinion dogmatically. This is a difficult subject with many intangible costs&benefits, as well as a whole host of tangible but non-obvious costs&benefits. When such nuance abounds, absolutism gets us nowhere.
There's no such thing as "species." It's an artificial kludge that humans invent for simplicity and abstraction when modeling population genetics, but the metaphor strains and breaks when it's used for other purposes like morality. http://tinyurl.com/dawkins-species
An individual pig does not care about "pigs" as a category. The pig cares about herself and the other individuals she is acquainted with. Her own interests are seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Breeding is not among her individual interests, it's an interest of her selfish genes.
If you're going to place moral consideration at the level of the selfish gene, then it is immoral to refuse any potentially reproductive intercourse. Consent is a concern of individuals, not genes and certainly not "species," so no one would be allowed to fight against heterosexual rape if both individuals were of breeding age.
Species do not have interests. Genes have interests, but their interests include rape, murdering a neighbor's offspring, etc. We are individual organisms, and individual organisms' interests are all that we should consider.
Ben #79: Fair 'nuff, but I'd be willing to wager that if you polled a hundred random Americans and asked them "Would you eat a pig?" and "Would you eat a bear?", you're going to get wildly different results. You can't go to MacDonald's and get a bear burger after all ;D
So yeah, goats, bears, probably a couple of others I am not thinking of, but none of these mammillian omnivores are part of the mainstream American diet -- except pigs.
Again, doesn't mean anything... just makes ya think.
Yep
@Syn Ack:
First of all, I was using the term "species" loosely. There are multiple porcine species anyway, though in America we pretty much eat only one.
The rest of your post pretty much distorts everything I said in about three different directions :D Let me put it succinctly and clearly: Domestication is an adaptation that increases genetic proliferation at the cost of individual freedom. Ask any evolutionary biologist (hell, ask PZ!), this is a non-controversial notion at this point. Further, one can observe that if all six billion humans stopped eating pigs today, the pig population would drop dramatically in a very short period of time.
How this impacts the ethical/moral debate is non-obvious. Some animal rights advocates have gone so far as to advocate that the extinction of certain domestic species is preferable to their enslavement. Others might argue differently.
My point was not that the pigs' collective evolutionary bargain inherently justified anything we do to them; my point was just that it is one of several factors which makes a comparison to eating (non-domesticated) humans ludicrous.
I know lots of Alaskans who are willing to eat bears. James, you just don't live in bear-eating country.
@82 James, I agree. I wouldn't eat bear meat. I love pork. I wouldn't taste dog or horse.
"'Cannibals may say the same thing.'
Which has exactly zero bearing on this.
Pigs are not humans."
I'm sorry! I had no idea. They're not really? Thank you for the correction.
Actually, since pigs have high intelligence, and yet we eat them anyway just because we, as smugly superior beings, can, does this mean that we can eat intelligent space creatures when they arrive in their spaceships because they are not human? And why can a more intelligent human not eat their way through a home for the mentally retarded? Is it because human life is sacred? Are we fearful of going to prison? Is it because there are no recipe books available? Or is something else holding us back from devouring the kiddies in special ed? Kindly illuminate, as I'm a bit stupid, and worry about this every waking moment.
@Lynna 85: Nope, don't live in bear-eating country, though I would absolutely try bear if given the opportunity. A friend of mine got bear sausage at some sort of Native American festival around here, but that's the last time I've heard of it being available. I think you have to "know somebody."
Since Alaska represents less than 0.23% of the US population, I don't think this has any bearing on my characterization of mainstream American gastronomy ;)
Ah yes sarcasm! Yet you still said it as if it was some sort of valid analogy.
Not human. Very easy. You don't have to agree with that line of demarcation but that is a line.
@felixthecat: Congratulations, you have now made the fatal animal rights advocate mistake of comparing the mentally retarded with animals. Good job. I bet you feel really great about yourself now.
Despite their reputation, goats are not omnivores they are herbivores. They're just pretty indiscriminate herbivores that will eat just about anything that grows out of the ground. As for whether I'd eat one, even though I have pet goats I have and will eat goat but I far prefer goat milk and cheese over meat. I know plenty of people who raise goats for meat as well as milk, not uncommon around here.
I HATE factory farms and have cut out my consumption of meat and eggs from them as much as possible. My family raises chickens and usually a piglet each year and buy beef from my uncle who raises a small herd of pinzgauer cattle. We try to buy all our other meat from other local farms, a much easier solution when one lives in the country than for you city folk. Obviously I'm not a vegetarian nor do I have any ethical issues with eating an animal that has been raised in a humane manner. Also they taste better because they're usually slower growing breeds that have been fed a healthier diet.
OT to Rev BDC:
Last night somebody inside Shoreline had a camera pointed at the big vid screen and was live-streaming video (with surprisingly good sound) of the show. Awesome setlist too. They'll no doubt do it again on Thursday (DeadVids.com).
I see they're streaming audio of last night's show right now over there.
Male grizzly bears sometimes eat other grizzly bears, especially cubs. That's an omnivore mammal eating an omnivore mammal. Maybe they need a lecture on the virtues of vegetarianism.
Nice!
I just want to say this again: The debate over whether, how, and how much we raise and consume domesticated animals is a complicated and subtle one, with many intangible costs&benefits, and many tangible-but-non-obvious costs&benefits. I have trouble imagining how a reasonably-minded person with a reasonable knowledge of the facts could possibly be an absolutist about this.
Pretty much right in line with me ('cept for the raising chickens thing, they frown on that in the city limits here). The link I posted above is a good source of small farm products for those who don't have access locally.
If you are going to eat omnivorous mammals, go for goat.
It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking some up.
Don't think that pigs won't eat people given the chance. Anybody recall Wong's pigs in Deadwood?
@91: yes, I'm in absolute agreement on the factory farms. Even though I'm hovering near poverty level all the time, I cut back on meat and eggs so that I can buy free-range, small-farm products. For me, it's very difficult to maintain that standard. Some of my neighbors do the backyard-chicken thing.
@92: Did you just inject Grateful Dead news into a discussion about eating pigs? Okay, good.
Sven #98: "given the chance" is probably too strong (most pigs are not lying in wait for humans to turn their backs so they can jump them for a tasty tasty morsel of homo sapien chops), but yes, pigs have been known to feast on people, just as dogs have.
That'll do, pig. That'll do.
Wild pigs will kill and eat just about any morsel they can find or stumble across, including fawns. Our feral pig population in Texas is booming.
James @#88: you did the math! LOL.
We'll you're right and you have a point, but that will all change when I start factory-farming bears.
Felixthecat, you'd do well to avoid emotional reductio ad absurdum arguments to make your point.
There are some of us here that would not a priori freak out when confronted with the idea of consuming humans given different cultural predilections, of course. And surely you're not basing your emotion claim on human cultural predilections, are you?
Besides, the error you're making (among others) is equating speciesism with some sort of unethical stance. Clearly there are some species you eat. Do you feel smug when you wolf down that broccoli? Does crunching lettuce make you feel like a tough guy? Kindly illuminate.
We're doing the CSA thing for produce, but it's tougher for meat. I plan to do the backyard chicken thing eventually, but probably not until after we move. There are lots of opportunities around here, but it requires advance planning, extra driving, and freezer space that I haven't been able to manage yet... :/ I am probably going to invest in a chest freezer soon, though, and that will take care of a lot of the problem.
It's especially hard because I live about a quarter of a mile from the flagship store of THE best supermarket chain in the country. If I lived in a part of the country where Walmart was the primary supermarket option, it would be an easy choice to go with local farmers. But when two minutes away is a massive selection of fresh produce, quality meat -- and some of this local too! just not all of it... -- it is really hard to avoid the temptation :/
I was much chagrined to discover that at the same time they started carrying frozen locally raised grass-fed beef (woo hoo!) they also started carrying fresh organic grass-fed beef -- from ARGENTINA. Argh... So we fix half the environmental and ethical issues, and then spew petroleum exhaust over half a hemisphere? Dammit...
In fact, Robert Pickton counted on it.
I like pigs. Dogs look up to you. Cats look down on you.
Pigs treat you as an equal.
Winston Churchill
(or something like that)
Rape is an adaptation that increases genetic proliferation at the cost of individual freedom.
How this impacts the ethical/moral debate is perfectly obvious. The answer is: not at all.
Genetic proliferation means nothing. It serves only the "interests" of genes, and genes do not have minds.
To pretend that genes have any moral significance is to stumble toward an atheist's version of "every sperm is sacred."
Quickly followed by this favorite quote.
James F #101
And listen to the music.
Saint Saens Symphony No.3 in C minor "Organ".
@Syn Ack #108: If rape was the only way to keep 90% of the human population from dying out, then actually how it impacts the ethical/moral debate might not be obvious after all. But of course it doesn't work that way, hence this analogy is not apt.
"If you're going to place moral consideration at the level of the selfish gene, then it is immoral to refuse any potentially reproductive intercourse..."
Generally NOT. Given the females greater investment, it usually pays for her to select a mate with the best genes to better assure the evolutionary success of her own progeny. Of course, animals (including humans) can't directly assess the quality of genes each potential mate is offering, and even the "best" genes by some standard, might not co-exist as well with her own as some other choice. The choice is usually made based upon physical or behavioral proxies for good genes, things like symmettry, quality of territory, and victory in battle. In humans, males are somewhat selective also, perhaps reflecting their greater investment in their children than other species. Even in casual, opportunistic matings standards of beauty may come into play. Poor skin condition may be a marker of disease, and in many cultures the opportunistic encounter may have high costs if discovered later, that cultures equivilent of child support, or the shotgun wedding for instance. When more serious investment is being considered cultural evidence of the females purity and likely fidelity will be important to give some assurance of paternity.
"Consent is a concern of individuals, not genes and certainly not "species," so no one would be allowed to fight against heterosexual rape if both individuals were of breeding age."
No, preserving the chance to associate with better genes and the chance of securing paternal investment is worth some risk for the female. Opportunistic rape may have contributed to male success in the past. It is a high risk strategy, but may be the "best" strategy in circumstances such as some wars, where the male is likely to die without access to "normal" reproductive opportunities. Of course, these types of "strategies" are not necessarily conscious, but appear to what our genes have been selected to implement. Men at the lowlife margins of society may rape pretty women to gain access to higher quality genes than they could "earn" based upon their own qualities. Even this "strategy" may be no more conscious, than the greater feelings of attraction and temptation associated with female beauty, those signs of health, youth and fertility.
"Rape is an adaptation that increases genetic proliferation at the cost of individual freedom"
While I get your point about genetic proliferation not being an excuse, the idea that rape is done or has anything to do with proliferating a species is a huge mistake and makes for a very weak analogy. If rape were the only way for the human species to survive we would most likely not exist anyomre. It is a very unlikely way to do anything but destory a society and injure people. There is simply no comparison between domestication of a species and rape any more than there is a comparison between surgery and stabbing some one with a knife.
And now you are a rape apologist. That's where this argument from genetic proliferation will take you.
The analogy worked well enough to out you as a rape apologist, showcasing the fundamental error in your reasoning.
And it is apt, because an individual organism, an individual pig, does not care whether "pigs" are reduced to 1/10 their current population.
LOL I'm a rape apologist now, huh? Wow. Seriously, do you extremist animal rights folks really wonder why people don't take you seriously? Well there's your answer: In a reasoned rational debate, you start calling people rape apologists. That's why nobody takes you seriously.
If we're going to use that tormented logic, then check it out, in my example you just endorsed the extinction of 90% of the human race. So you must be a genocide apologist! Right?
No, clearly not. Because that kind of reasoning is really stupid.
It's probably a major reason why our society is so damaged. Rape is so common (1 in 4 women a victim) that the chances are very high that every one of us is the descendant of at least one rape in the last 10000 years.
It is a fact that you just presented a case when rape might be acceptable. That makes you a rape apologist.
If you don't want to be called a rape apologist, then don't defend rape. It's very simple. You had the option of saying "rape would not be acceptable even to preserve the human lineage." You still have the option, even now, of backtracking, admitting you made a mistake, condemning rape in all circumstances, and ceasing to be a rape apologist.
If you were the last man on Earth, and the last woman or women did not want to have sex with you, then would rape be acceptable to preserve the human lineage? If you answer yes, then you are a rape apologist. If you answer no, then you admit "genetic proliferation" means absolutely nothing, because it's not even sufficient to justify the last chance of human survival.
The subtitle of this PZ blog was "Mothers Matter." Maybe we should debate that.
My excellent progeny sent me tasty treats for Mother's Day, therefore I have decided not to eat my excellent progeny.
Not at all a similar issue, because you're talking about the dying out of 90% of a domestic animal population, not the slaughter of them.
Analogously, the dying out of 90% of human beings would not be genocide. Directly to the point, many people believe that the Earth is already beyond its carrying capacity, and we may have to reduce the population to approximately 1 billion people, through contraception. But contraception is not genocide, and reducing the population by 5/6 through contraception is not genocide, unless "every sperm is sacred."
Syn. Do you know what a rape apologist does? A rape apologist makes up reasons and ways that rape would be acceptable, or uses rape as a tortured way to prove a logical point. YOU ARE A RAPE APOLOGIST. Your analogy is the dumbest and most disgusting one I have ever heard here. You beat Pete and his miniskirt with this one. Your statistics are ridiculous. While many women are raped it is insane to assume the correlations between it and the human population. For instance, areas where women are raped most often also tend to have the highest child mortality rates. This is no accident. Societies with high incidence of rape are usually not healthy and do not provide good care for women if they should become pregnant. Secondly, your weird projections about how many of us are descendents of rape are completely out of your ass.
Really.
"If you were the last man on Earth, and the last woman or women did not want to have sex with you, then would rape be acceptable to preserve the human lineage? If you answer yes, then you are a rape apologist."
Then perhaps there is a need for different degrees of rape apologist. This level would be called "humanist". It would be a logical fallacy to assume they are all equivilent. Of course, if the woman was like that, it would explain how humanity got in that circumstance.
"""If you were the last man on Earth, and the last woman or women did not want to have sex with you, then would rape be acceptable to preserve the human lineage?"""
I don't think this question has a clear-cut answer. I am not answering yes or no. I think one might make an interesting argument either way.
And that's the last I will say to syn ack. This ludicrous "rape apologist" line of reasoning speaks for itself. Any reasonable person reading these comments will see that syn ack is batshit crazy, so I no longer need to defend myself from his/her attacks.
Ugh. It's so disappointing when my fellow vegetarians throw out the animal rights card so early and so fervently. It dilutes the argument to sensationalist hyperbole, and really doesn't do a very good job of promoting the cause. It's essentially the equivalent of pro-lifers distributing pictures of aborted fetuses.
There are so many other valid and compelling arguments for vegetarianism, not the least of which is the environmental impact of eating meat. It's downright inefficient, requiring much more intense resources than vegetables. As a result, rainforests are being cut down to plant soy fields to feed chickens, for example. It's also highly polluting, as hormone- and antibiotic-rich manure from factory farms poison the ground and leach into groundwater. The global warming impact is also worth mentioning, as the methane from livestock contributes greatly to greenhouse gas accumulation.
Beyond the environment, there are human quality of life issues as well, including rampant obesity, heart disease, and diabetes that could be prevented with a more plant-based diet.
There are significant ethical considerations to vegetarianism beyond those that have been described thus far in these comments.
Interesting that Hillary's points have been mainly left unaddressed.
Her use of a creationist analogy:
"But if you're going to make a claim towards striving for a rational/ethical basis to live your life, then you don't have the luxury of flouting a huge nonrational/nonethical area of your life like it's a good thing, esp. in a forum devoted to rationality."
... is actually completely valid. Virtually all animal production involves suffering. It's not just about the dreadful quality of life, it's the slaughter methods too. 53 billion farm animals are killed every year, and millions, probably billions of those die in great pain and fear (based on statistics collected by EU vets visiting European slaughter houses). These are facts, not emotional rhetoric.
If people pride themselves on their clever rational reponses to creationist thinking, how come other rational debates are off-limits or inappropriate? Vegans get accused of being self-righteous and superior all the time, but isn't that what atheists get accused of by the religious, for the 'crime' of stating the reasoned arguments for their case which upsets the comfortable world view of others.
I am not advocating a particular response or stance, I am just saying that people get awfully tetchy here when challenged on something they've not spent nearly enough time thinking about. God-bashing is easy when you're surrounded by like minds, how about facing up to the ethics of killing sentient beings for aesthetic reasons. How about someone try to give an ethical argument for meat eating outside of survival situations. Tradition, "naturalness", taste and might-is-right are invalid, just as "god-did-it", arguments from complexity etc are not valid in creationist debates.
Following this, if you're going to place moral consideration at the level of the selfish gene, and if a man can present his DNA sequence as evidence that his genes would produce higher reproductive fitness for a woman's offspring than her current chosen mate, then courts should uphold his ability to impregnate her, even against her will.
Thankfully, we reject this, because genetic proliferation is simply worthless as a moral consideration.
Okay, I lied, I have one more thing to say:
A rape apologist would say, "In this contrived circumstance, rape would be acceptable." What I said was, "If rape had a particular side-effect, it might be acceptable, but by its very nature rape could never cause that particular side-effect."
It would be kind of like if I said, "Well, if the Nazis had decided to give every Jewish child a pet bunny instead of sending them to the gas chambers, then that would have been very nice of them," and in response you called me a Hitler apologist. That's insane!
See, now Benny comes along in post #123 and actually says some stuff that is worth saying, and while I'd love to engage him on a couple of points, I'm all worn out from arguing with insane extremists.
Benny, mostly good points all around. The "inefficiency" argument has an asterisk, but given current factory farming practices the asterisk is purely theoretical right now. I'd love to discuss it, but I'm too tired from defending myself against accusations of being a "rape apologist". hehehe...
The asterisk to the "inefficiency" argument comes in where you have a sufficiently diversified operation such that some amount of livestock can coexist with the plants without negatively impacting yield, and in some cases potentially even increasing yield.
For instance, if cattle were grazing on wide-open fields of grass, and knowing that we can't very well turn every square inch of open land into arable farmland, then that could be an efficient way to generate nourishment. We can't eat the grass; we can't plant crops there... but the cows can eat the grass, and we can eat the cows.
Alas, that's not how it works most of the time... :(
No, I'm not, because my entire point is that rape is never acceptable.
And yet, look, africangenesis and James Sweet immediately come out as actual rape apologists:
In the bolded sentence, africangenesis even suggests that women failing to consent may actually make rape necessary.
The analogy is valuable because it brings out what people are willing to justify when they start valuing genetic proliferation. But I appreciate your objection, blueelm, and moreover I believe I made a mistake because I did not warn anyone about a possible PTSD trigger. There is no need for me to continue now that James Sweet's fundamental error has come out.
Becky @124: very good post. We've been over these good reasons for being a vegetarian before, but they bear repeating. Because we've been over the pro-vegetarian issue many times, it might seem like we are being facetious in a reply to the "human blood spatter" post, when really we're just weary of re-hashing, and weary of being accused of killing animals for "aesthetic reasons."
BTW, I did respond with distaste (repeated from a previous thread) for factory farms, and proposed that actively looking for ways to reduce factory farming was a good goal.
So what happens? The holy-warrior vegetarians ignore that part and slam me for not loving their tone and for not backing them up 100 percent. Sheesh.
"It's interesting (but not surprising) the way people are attacking my motives rather than the facts of what I wrote."
The complaint about using "ethics" as a weapon is based on your use of that word in a written statement, not on your internal motivations.
It's interesting, but not surprising, that you don't accept responsibility for the words you have written and instead accuse others of unjustly questioning your motives.
"then courts should uphold his ability to impregnate her, even against her will. Thankfully, we reject this, because genetic proliferation is simply worthless as a moral consideration."
Of course it is worthless, but the genes we have influence the types or morals that are common, and those morals in turn influence the kinds of genes that are selected. Humans are social animals. But "courts" or what ever the societies equivilents of this, did enforce this in the past. Marriages were often arranged by parents or leaders were often enforced upon people that had other mates in mind. Parents probably argued based on merits of the match that did correlate with likely reproductive success: wealth, power, health, benefits to siblings sharing many of the same genes, etc. They weren't thinking of genes, but they were thinking with genes. We live in more fortunate times, but our genes were selected in different social environments. We may be descended from men who raped if necessary in such arranged marriages if stuck with reluctant or frightened partners. However, those with powers of persuasion and reassurance may also have had success.
Best post so far from the vegetarian side of the aisle goes to #123.
I really didn't see any support of rape in the post from this person.
Let's say from the start of the human race that rape was the only way to reproduce. The way ethics surrounding reproduction may be viewed and formed completely different from they way they have. To say that there is no other possible ethical standards than the ones that are current as of today is to deny that there is a difference in ethics between cultures or that ethics themselves evolved. In this, no one is supporting rape, but given a different set of circumstances to some of the base assumptions about humanity, things have the potential to be different.
Let's look at killing. Who would ever say that it is perfectly ethical to kill another human being? Of course, humanity has always done this, and found arguments that appear to them to be reasonable for killing another person. By today's ethical standards, killing humans for sport is no longer acceptable, but there have been points in history where it was not only deemed acceptable, but promoted. Some may view those who saw it as sport to be sick people, yet will be the first one to promote war. Both are essentially killing people. Killing alone should show how fluid human ethics are.
Even those who claim they have some ethical "base set by God" can't claim they aren't fluid, because they too have found cases where they deem it acceptable to kill. In fact, they claim the anti-christ will promise peace, which tells me that to be a good Christian you must do the opposite of promote peace, which then makes the promotion of killing acceptable.
@James Sweet:
Errrrrrrr, the mentally retarded are animals, since, you know, all humans are animals. You're not really getting this whole biology thing are you?
Secondly, having read Felix's comment, it looks like you don't get his analogy. He's saying that the justification of meat-eating that pigs or whatever are less intelligent than us, can lead to the justification of cannibalism of people with lower IQs. Most people reading Pharyngula would turn their nose up at that idea.
As for this "rape apologist" meme - you may argue you're not one, but when say things like:
you're as bad as those who defend the use of torture in "certain" situations. If you don't want to leave yourself open to being called a rape apologist, then the correct answer to syn ack's question would've been an emphatic "NO".
I really didn't see any support of rape in the post from this person.
Let's say from the start of the human race that rape was the only way to reproduce. The way ethics surrounding reproduction may then have formed completely different from they way they have currently. To say that there is no other possible ethical standards than the ones that are current as of today is to deny that there is a difference in ethics between cultures or that ethics themselves evolved. In this, no one is supporting rape, but given a different set of circumstances to some of the base assumptions about humanity, things have the potential to be different.
Let's look at killing. Who would ever say that it is perfectly ethical to kill another human being? Of course, humanity has always done this, and found arguments that appear to them to be reasonable for killing another person. By today's ethical standards, killing humans for sport is no longer acceptable, but there have been points in history where it was not only deemed acceptable, but promoted. Some may view those who saw it as sport to be sick people, yet will be the first one to promote war. Both are essentially killing people. Killing alone should show how fluid human ethics are.
Even those who claim they have some ethical "base set by God" can't claim they aren't fluid, because they too have found cases where they deem it acceptable to kill. In fact, they claim the anti-christ will promise peace, which tells me that to be a good Christian you must do the opposite of promote peace, which then makes the promotion of killing acceptable.
Please note that no where in this argument do I actually say I think either rape or killing is acceptable. Ethically, both are reprehensible, and both can easily be reasoned to be bad things without being told.
Yes, different cultures at different times have had different ethical standards, but when a person has an ethical standard, they mean for it to apply in all times and places, not just in this one culture. I, like you, believe that rape is never acceptable, however I can certainly envisage growing up with an ethical standard in some other time or place that said that rape was acceptable. So, yes, there is no single ethical standard, you're quite right, but when individual considers how their ethical principles might've been different in different times and places, they would still look at this hypothetical and go, "Well, in another time and place I may well have advocated rape or whatever, but from my own real ethical standpoint, that is awful, and this hypothetical me is awful". While things have/had the potential to be different, doesn't mean we still shouldn't condemn what they could've been. Someone who believes that rape is wrong in all circumstances will condemn it no matter the upbringing of the person.
Becky at @124 wrote, "Interesting that Hillary's points have been mainly left unaddressed."
Lots of her points have been addressed, it's just that you and Hillary redefine "addressed" as being "agree with me completely, and acknowledge that you are all unethical swine if you don't agree with me." I liked some of the points you made in post #124, and said so.
Objections to jokes are not really well-received here. If I joke that I've decided not to eat my excellent progeny because they recently fed me other tasty treats, that's my response to the overblown "human blood spatter" and "cannibalism" comments. Jokes don't signify that the issue is not taken seriously, but they might signify that the holy warriors should get a sense of perspective.
MTran @131 is right in saying that the complaint about using ethics as a weapon were based on what had been written, and were therefore legit. You've got a battering ram presentation method going and, as James Sweet noted more than once, it smacks of absolutism.
Doesn't sound like you want answers or dialogue or joke exchange or conversation or anything similar. You want submission and you want it now.
I want to mitigate the harm done by factory farms. How shall we go about that?
Someone who believes that rape is wrong in all circumstances will condemn it no matter the upbringing of the person. I'm going to play a bit of a devil's advocate here, so please don't see this as an attack.
Let's envision for a moment that we come across aliens at some point that have rape as their mode of procreation, and that they have reasoned it out in their culture to be, in their view, ethically sound, and that it is accepted by their entire race, or species, or whatever they may be. To blindly condemn without some serious thought about the arguments for and against it and looking at it from all possible sides would be the same as accepting the ethics that a person is taught with no questioning. All ethics must be questioned and put to the test. That is the only way that human ethics can evolve.
Again, use the killing analogy. Somewhere someone had to have found a reason for deciding that killing people for sport was bad, but to get to that, they had to question what they were taught first. Once they reach that conclusion, the conclusion must repeatedly be put to the test to ensure the conclusion is valid.
The aliens may be saying to not rape is unethical no matter what, and until one of them says, "why?" their views would never change. They also may be intending that their ethics to be the way it is forever and ever.
I guess what I'm saying is that to really question something thoroughly, one has to step outside of one way of viewing things and look at it from all angles. Just like the recent elephant story.
Why does intelligence persist in the factory-farmed pig?
It probably doesn't -- domestication for most species reduces intelligence. Give 'em a few thousand years, and you can bet that just as wild animals are distinguishable from their domesticated brethren, the factory farmed forms will be clearly less intelligent than either.
frog @#140: cows have been bred for docility (read stupidity) and that makes them so dumb that they often don't move to lower elevations in the autumn. Ranchers have to help them make up their minds.
In Idaho, free-range cattle have the right of way on all roads. So there they are, staring at an approaching vehicle which does not register in their synaptic sludge until it is right on top of them, or even just past them. Delayed startle effect. Makes them good food for grizzly bears too.
doesn't have a fucking thing to do with
Put the fucking crack pipe down.
msg 139:
sorry, the first line was a quote
"In the bolded sentence, africangenesis even suggests that women failing to consent may actually make rape necessary.
The analogy is valuable because it brings out what people are willing to justify when they start valuing genetic proliferation"
Logically necessity occurs in a context. If the last woman or women don't consent and genetic proliferation is the overriding value, then rape may be empirically necessary. The alternative may be giving up the overriding value.
It is interesting that among dolphins, the females become tolerant of the rapes. They still try to escape from being herded, but perhaps that assures that her rapists have a modicum of health and strength. There is evidence from scars and injuries that in dolphin societies with gang rape, that most of the aggression is male on male. While females get raped, what happens to the males may be worse. But since it is in competition for females, is the male on male violence "voluntary" and not analogous to rape? Hmmm, what if the males would prefer to have the females without having to fight other males to keep them? Aren't the male attacks upon them involuntary?
Is there a similar pattern in human societies? When the incidence of rape of females is high, it male on male violence also high? War certainly seems to fit the pattern, but what about less extreme circumstances. Is rape more common in violent inner cities, where male on male violence is high? Is rape more common in male subcultures like fraternities or sports teams where abusive hazing is tolerated?
James @127 and Lynna @133, thanks for the praise. This is probably the first bit of commenting on Pharyngula I've done that isn't just cheap wisecrackery. Feels good to feign intellectualism for a change.
James, with regards to inefficiency (@128), I have read those studies, and they do have merit. There is simply not enough arable land suitable to grow produce everywhere, and hence using "less desirable" land (namely pastures) for other purposes such as livestock herding does seem to make sense. Of course, the vast majority of livestock isn't raised that way; there's also not enough pasture land area to support the amount of livestock currently being bred (or, should I say, breaded?)
My main point with efficiency has to do with the amount of resources required to grow X calories of meat versus X calories of vegetables. Cattle and other livestock are incredibly water- and feed-intensive products. If we were to cut out the middle man (aka, that juicy ribeye), we'd be able to feed far more people.
Of course then, you're running into overpopulation issues, and believe you me, you don't want me starting in on that. I'll start channeling Malthus and John Swift simultaneously, and it gets ugly fast.
Alex Dream: Yes, different cultures at different times have had different ethical standards, but when a person has an ethical standard, they mean for it to apply in all times and places, not just in this one culture.
No, only arrogant little monotheists and their metaphorical brethren do that. You'd have to be an idiot to think that the ethical standards that are relevant for the US circa 2009 are even meaningful or translatable to 3rd millenium BC Uruk. Wouldn't you dismiss the ethical judgments of stone age cannibals regarding our discussion of political appointments? So why do you think we are in any better place to discuss their situations?
Expertise matters.
No offense, but you're not making any sense. It is logically impossible to have an entire culture or civilization that sees rape as being morally acceptable. Rape, by definition, is sex without consent. If there was some hypothetical alien that could only procreate via rape, and then that alien's culture came to accept rape because of this inability to procreate otherwise, then that alien is accepting rape, not only of other aliens, but also of "himself". How can someone accept being raped? It is a logical impossibility to consent to something that is by definition not "consentable" (if thats a word). The statement, "I wouldn't mind receiving a good raping" is as nonsensical as the statement, "This sentence is false."
Secondly, to say people here are "blindly" condemning actions is wrong. Most people who have a certain ethical view that they hold (and I'm not including most religious people here for obvious reasons) tend to do so because they have had "some serious thought about the arguments for and against it and looking at it from all possible sides". When I say, "rape is never acceptable", it's because I've considered every possible hypothetical I can think of. There may well be someone out there who has some hypothetical I haven't thought of. However to use an analogy, Stephen Jay Gould says that, "In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."" In a similar way, just because another hypothetical might exist in the mind of someone out there that undermines an ethical principle I believe in, doesn't mean I should act as if such a principle does a exist. Such a method of going about ethics would turn us all into moral nihilists.
The reward for clicking on the photo:
The piglet is one day old and crippled. The mother had more babies than nipples to feed them. The farmer talked about putting this one out of its misery but decided to let some Swazi orphan children take care of it and feed it with a bottle instead. Now the little pig has grown big and strong!
...and then the orphan children ate him?
If there was some hypothetical alien that could only procreate via rape, and then that alien's culture came to accept rape because of this inability to procreate otherwise, then that alien is accepting rape, not only of other aliens, but also of "himself". How can someone accept being raped?
Good question, but the scenario is predicated on "that alien" really being "that male alien." You'll find that all kinds of improbable things become perfectly acceptable when male is the default. My question is: If africangenesis were the last male left on earth and none of the females wanted to have sex with him (highly probable) and they all had guns, so rape was an impossibility, would he finally support gun control?
My guess is yes.
I have to concede on that one. I hadn't looked at it that way.
Sorry if you took that to mean I said you never considered it. This all came out of a previous post where you accused someone of promoting rape, when I read it to mean that maybe we should look more closely to see if there would ever be possibilities where this could be seen as ethical.
I would agree on facts. This is still only true in the world we live in now. What was suggested was if some of the base assumptions were changed.
Would you say that the fluidity of human ethics shows humans to actually be moral nihilists? Again, we claim killing is bad, but lots of people get positive reinforcement for killing, such as with our military.
Alex Deam,
"When I say, "rape is never acceptable", it's because I've considered every possible hypothetical I can think of."
Perhaps we need to know what you mean by "never acceptable". If rape is not acceptable in Saddam's rape rooms, does that mean war is justified? If an unacceptable rape has occurred, but the state cannot meet the the proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard, should the government be able to put the suspect in prison anyway? If a rape isn't acceptable but it occurred so long ago that the statute of limitations has been exceeded, do we repeal the statute of limitations retroactively? If a date rape has occurred and the victim refuses to report it, do we prosecute friends that knew of it and didn't report it? Or are some of these rapes acceptable? Does "never acceptable" mean you have to do something or is it just so much hot air?
Alex Dream: Rape, by definition, is sex without consent. If there was some hypothetical alien that could only procreate via rape, and then that alien's culture came to accept rape because of this inability to procreate otherwise, then that alien is accepting rape, not only of other aliens, but also of "himself". How can someone accept being raped? It is a logical impossibility to consent to something that is by definition not "consentable" (if thats a word).
Not at all. Agreeing that something is ethical doesn't mean personally consenting to it. Kant was wrong.
Simple case: a family member is killed/raped/whatever. You are ethically against the death penalty as a global phenomena. Does that imply that you wouldn't wish for, and even possibly act on, the opportunity to kill the criminal? Ethics is about what we should do, what are good "rules" for the community; that is quite distinct from what we will do, want to do, or try to do, where our personal interests lie.
Ethics isn't about you. It's about community standards, regardless of your personal feelings.
No, Alex Deam
You seem to be advocating the ethical standpoint of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do".
When I say that, "when a person has an ethical standard, they mean for it to apply in all times and places", I don't mean that such a ethical standard wouldn't be fluid. Take the religious right. A lot of them cling to their belief that homosexuality is immoral, because the Bible says so, and ignore all the philosophical and scientific work thats been done on the subject in the last 2000 years. Their morality tends not be fluid. However, I like to think that my ethical standpoint is fluid (whether actually it is or not is for others to judge). So if someone gives a very good argument against a moral I hold, I am (hopefully) likely to go away with an altered morality. However, that doesn't mean that if I went to (say) Iran I would suddenly advocate beheading as a punishment, or if I went to the Stone Ages I would suddenly advocate cannibalism. I believe that cannibalism is wrong almost always (the only exception being for self-preservation when stuck on a desert island with a companion, in my book).
So I guess then I am an idiot, because I do think that, "the ethical standards that are relevant for the US circa 2009 are even meaningful or translatable to 3rd millenium BC Uruk." For starters, these Stone Age tribesmen have missed out on thousands of years of cultures, of history, social studies, philosophy, science, mathematics, good lord the vast majority of human understanding. If you can't see that someone who can feed on the ethical arguments of the entirety of human history, who can draw on the ideas of Marx or Rand whoever depending on his ethical taste, has at least as good a standing for arguing against Stone Age cannibalism than the cannibals themselves, then you're not thinking straight.
Never mind that your "when in Rome" attitude would justify homophobia against AIDs victims 30 years ago, slavery 200 years ago, and all manner of other practices we now consider vile. Not to mention it's a grave violation of the naturalistic fallacy.
Seems like you've forgotten the meaning of the word "principles" as in "ethical principles". Someone who has principles means for them to apply in all times and places. I don't see why my principles are adequate to condemn a real life Hannibal Lecter, but not adequate to condemn a hypothetical cannibalistic Stone Age culture. If that's how you view your principles, then they aren't principles at all.
I don't see how that follows. Please explain.
I don't think your analogy showed that well. I think ethics do apply at the individual level as well as the community level. That sounds a lot more like "do as I say and not as I do." If I want people to not kill other people, then I cannot justify me doing any killing of other people.
Admittedly, I'm being very general because it suits me. If we dig down further, I'm totally going to go the route I learned when studying Kant, which is to rewrite everything until I come up with something moral.
For example, one should not lie. But, if I qualify it to an exact instance, then lying can become moral. If Hitler's soldiers come to my door and demand I report any jews in my house, when I might have a dozen hidden in my basement, then it becomes ethical to lie and say there are none in the vicinity than to hand them over to be killed.
Alex Deam accused me of being "just like the people who condone torture 'in some circumstances'" because of my tentativeness in response to the last-man-on-Earth/rape thought experiment. FWIW, while I do think torture is unacceptable under any circumstances, I also think there is meaningful conversation to be had regarding the thought experiment "would you torture a single person if you knew it would save a thousand lives?"
In setting policy, we don't even need to answer this question, because all evidence points to the fact that torture is an ineffective means of obtaining information -- thereby invalidating the thought experiment to begin with. But if that were not the case, it would be an interesting question to discuss.
Cuz you know, since I'm an atheist I don't have any taboos, and am willing to entertain any reasonable thought experiment. If that makes me a "rape apologist" or a "torture apologist," well, you are fucking insane.
Alex: Never mind that your "when in Rome" attitude would justify homophobia against AIDs victims 30 years ago, slavery 200 years ago, and all manner of other practices we now consider vile. Not to mention it's a grave violation of the naturalistic fallacy.
What gross anachronism. First of all, slavery was wrong by American standards of 200 years ago, and numerous people recognized it, and once again, homophobia was quite problematic 30 years ago. Both were questioned even though they were the standard bias precisely because they were in direct conflict with the ethical standards of the day.
That's quite different from the status of slavery in the Roman Republic, or homophobia in 1850s America. If you're going to be treating this argument as a vulgar "When in Rome", at least have the honesty to face the question straight on. In the latter two cases, the practices were beyond question. No one of any influence whatsoever questioned slavery in Rome 100 BC -- most slaves didn't question slavery as an institution (even if they worked on ending their own personal slavery). The economic system of the day demanded it; without slavery, the energetic demands of civilization would have collapsed it, since slaves were the primary power source for those kinds of civilization.
So, what's more ethical? Mass starvation, or slavery? Or maybe it's a damn silly question to be morally judging at all people who are so incredibly distant from us, who have no commonality of culture, language, art, economics, or technology? Why would you even put our ethics against theirs? What could that possibly mean, other than feeling a smug superiority over our benighted ancestors?
Kantian type ethics are stupid because there is no universal point of view; it's useless to pretend there is, it produces nothing that can inform our actions or our research that is in any way meaningfully distinguishable from an ethics that recognizes that it's our ethics. If anything, it leads us away from an ethics that faces the real world, the substance of folks' lives, by spinning yards about "universal reason" and other such nonsense. I don't care what some mythical alien would think of my ethics -- any more than the Romans cared what I think about their ethics. Ethics is an activity, not some nonsense about universal laws which is only a step away from revelatory nonsense about the One True God (tm).
James, I never said that you were a "rape apologist", but when your answer to syn ack's question is effectively the definition of "sitting on the fence", you don't do yourself any favours. As I said, you didn't answer "no" in any kind of way, and still haven't. Taking this long to consider a question like that must mean that you think there's a half-decent argument for rape in that scenario. If you don't like someone like syn ack calling you a "rape apologist", then the smart thing to do would've been to realise that there isn't a "half-decent argument for rape in that scenario".
To summarize: if you think there is such a half decent argument, and continue to sit on the fence, you leave yourself wide open to be called a "rape apologist" by someone like syn ack. If you don't think there's a half decent argument, then why haven't you come out and answered "no" to this question?
And by the way, I'm an atheist too, so I don't know why the fuck you're playing the atheist card to me.
I'm playing the atheist card because to me atheism is about not having dogma or taboos, but I don't find that to be the case with you.
Okay, I'll bite: I'll make an argument that if only one man and one woman remained on earth, and for whatever reason the woman was unwilling, then rape would be justified.
The key here seems to be the lack of consent, right? However, consent is not sacred, and sometimes must be sacrificed for other purposes. For instance, if a highly contagious and deadly disease were running rampant, mandatory quarantines could be justified -- even without the consent of the quarantined.
So if consent can be ignored in cases of dire emergency, then the question is, does the thought experiment in question represent such a dire emergency? Well, we now get down to the question of the value of preserving the human race, which I suppose is ultimately subjective. I would argue, though, that since much of what we consider moral and ethical is informed by mechanisms that are the result of selective pressure, it is not entirely arbitrary to place a high moral value on an act to preserve the human race. After all, if let's say I and all of my offspring were among the six billion dead in our thought experiment, and therefore I had no possibility of passing on my exact DNA, I could still say that more of the genes I share would be preserved if the human race were to continue than if it were to end. The same would be true of all of the rest of the dead.
So, it seems to me that a desire to preserve the human species is not that much different from the altruistic instinct we all share. I for one would place a very high value on the preservation of humanity.
Hence, we are weighing the consent of a single person vs. the perpetuation of the human race. From a purely theoretical view, I don't really have a big problem favoring the latter. In my mind, it's not tremendously different from forcible quarantine.
(BTW, in practice, if I were that hypothetical "last man", I don't think I could do it.)
I see a couple of potential flaws in that argument, but there may be rebuttals I haven't thought of. I don't think it's a crazy argument, and if it will avoid accusations of "fence-sitting", I'll go ahead and take this position. Call me a "rape apologist" then -- since there has never been a situation where there was only a single male and single female human (the evolution of homo sapiens would have been gradual, so no point where the reproductive potential of humanity hinged solely on two individual organisms), and since I don't imagine this is ever likely to occur in a situation where those involved would know they were the last, I can still assert the following: There has never been and probably never will be any circumstance that comes close justifying rape. If that statement makes me a "rape apologist" in your mind, then so be it.
James #95 said
you could say the same about slavery or any other evil (and people have, about slavery at least). many of us actually see the ethics of veganism as simple compassion and sustainability, which wipes out concerns of the "subtle" issues you raise. This doesn't mean the implementation of the idea on a personal or societal level is necessarily simple, though - just that the ethics is.
"If you don't like someone like syn ack calling you a "rape apologist", then the smart thing to do would've been to realise that there isn't a "half-decent argument for rape in that scenario"."
A smarter thing to do would be, not to sweat what syn ack calls you. There are decent arguments for rapes in just about any scenerio, depending up which values you assume, just as there are decent arguments against rape. While most people believe in right and wrong just like they believe in God, right and wrong are not written in stone someplace in the universe, they are culturally relative with some cross-cultural patterns that might be characteristic of human's social nature.
What is unacceptable even in extreme times in our culture may be acceptable in normal times in other cultures. Do we want to search for a minimal set of ethical standards common to all cultures, or do we want to retain some maximal non-contradictory set, so that nothing wrong in any culture is ever acceptable?
I don't like lists of standards, and like many am interested in a minimum set of principles from which all standards can be derived. Religion made similar attempts, "the golden rule", "love thy neighbor as thyself". The libertarians have a prohibition against fraud and coercion. The marxists have "from each according to his ability to each according to his need". The Amercan center-left doesn't seem interested in principles, but in situational ethics, apparently based upon some feelings they trust.
An economic system that required slavery to be maintained is an economic system that could not have been developed in the first place without slavery. You end up with an argument that slavery must continue because slavery was used in the past, the same argument Southern American sugar plantation owners used.
What's more ethical is not to start using slavery in the first place.
Arguments that "X wasn't wrong then" quickly become arguments that "X is not wrong now" when circumstances are claimed to be similar. Judging the past is how we decide the future.
There are decent arguments for rapes in just about any scenerio[sic]
Please create a scenario where I can make a decent argument for raping you with a large baton.
My imagination simply isn't up to the task.
"What's more ethical is not to start using slavery in the first place."
Such an absolutist. At one time, making prisoners of war slaves was considered more ethical than killing them. It was also at one time considered ethical, because it was an appropriate punishment for allowing oneself to be captured instead of dying in battle. Slavery has also been considered an honerable way to pay debts that one had been unable to otherwise pay. There are even large numbers of people in the western world that advocate various forms involuntary servitude, conscription and mandatory public service.
Ichthyic,
"Please create a scenario where I can make a decent argument for raping you with a large baton."
Easy, you are Saddam Hussein, as a sovereign recognized by the UN, you have a right to oppress your own people. I am one of your people, and you take me to you rape room and exercise your right to indulge your disgusting passions and whims. Enjoy your wet dream.
Agree that moral objectivism is false, and so that someone somewhere has a moral code that says that rape is okay, however, if you wish to deny that you are a "rape apologist", you tend not to accept such moral codes, unless you're a "repressed rape apologist".
Yes, and in most people's opinions, they are/were wrong.
Seriously AG, naturalistic fallacy? Heard of it?
Well I'm fairly sure there were lots of people who were homophobic to AIDs victims back in the Eighties. It was after all known as the "Gay disease".
And 200 years ago, plenty of Americans were justifying slavery on the very basis you justify it later on in your comment in ancient Rome: that it was economically viable to do otherwise. You remember the Civil War?
I don't see what I've said as "gross anachronism".
Firstly, false dichotomy. Economic systems can be changed. What was there exactly to stop the Roman leaders declaring slavery illegal, and that you do not own workers, you have to pay workers? Only their own prejudices. With paid workers, the workers then go out and buy things and spend on the economy, with that money then ending back in the hands of employers again. It's not that revolutionary a concept.
Besides, even if I accept your false dichotomy, and that ending slavery in Roman times would certainly have led to mass starvation, I fail to see how that still justifies slavery. Why should some member of the Roman aristocracy enslave me? Why should they have me as their property against my will? This kind of logic would justify someone with kidney failure forcibly removing a kidney from somebody else.
If you mean that the newly freed slaves would also starve, well then surely that's for the individual slaves to decide? If Roman slaves were better off not being paid a wage like a slave than being set completely free, then they can decide that for themselves, without being forced into bondage.
Again, like rape, slavery isn't consensual. It is forced. That's what makes slavery unethical in most people's books. Why should the nobleman enslave me, rather than me enslave him? Why shouldn't the nobleman share his wealth with his slaves? Your economical arguments both don't hold up under economic scutiny, and are immoral anyway.
Your argument fails because it forgets the existence of something called "education" or "learning". I may not know much about Roman culture, but I can go and learn about it. Once I've learnt about it, I am then in exactly the same position as when asked one of several hypothetical questions that have appeared in this thread. Otherwise, your comment suggests that all those historians are just wasting their time trying to understand the Romans. I should just go and tell all the Classics students that they should stop what they're doing, as there's no possible way they can understand a culture that existed around 2000 years ago. It's just so different! I tried reading the Wikipedia page on Julius Caesar, but it was just impossible to understand this guy when we have "no commonality of culture, language, art, economics, or technology", him and I.
I've read this four times, and I've still no idea how any of this applies to anything I've said. I don't think there's a "universal point of view", I merely posit that I hold ethical standard X, and that I mean for it to be applicable no matter the situation. If someone comes along with some situation or argument which defeats my standard, then I will have to modify X so it can't succumb to this new argument.
So far, no-one has come up with a single argument or scenario that makes me think that Roman or Confederate slavery, 1980s homophobia, Stone Age cannibalism or whatever, are in any way moral. Those are my standards. They so far can withstand any hypothetical I have come across as far as I can remember. They also, incidentally, do apply to the real world.
If we keep on farming pigs for meat, effectively 100% of the population gets slaughtered, generation after generation. And the population stays high: slaughter has nothing to do with genocide or extinction.
For all the similarities between humans and pigs including diet, physiology and intelligence, once can argue that the most significant factor in deciding whether to eat them is the difference in life history strategy: pigs are adapted for fast reproduction and short lifespan, while humans have evolved to an extreme in the opposite direction. You could fairly say that pigs have evolved to be eaten.
This does not address the individual-ethics/ickiness issues of veg*nism (to which the pig's interest in reproduction is, as pointed out above, irrelevant), but is an important part of the population-ethics/ecology of human impact on the planet. It's why we don't breed or kill bears for food, and why Diprotodon and Mammuthus but not Macropus or Bison went extinct in the late Pleistocene. We've had the same discussion before (with a bit less heat) about cephalopods.
Do the ethics of pig-slaughter change if we switch completely from petroleum to solar? Veg*ns presumably say no, it's irrelevant; I say probably, it's the biggest number in the equation.
(Speaking of numbers, I've browsed up to comment #120 so far. Veg*ns equating carnivory to murder, cannibalism and rape is... sooo typical)
Anonymous: An economic system that required slavery to be maintained is an economic system that could not have been developed in the first place without slavery. You end up with an argument that slavery must continue because slavery was used in the past, the same argument Southern American sugar plantation owners used.
One case is completely different from the other. As we saw after 1864, American society was perfectly functional without slavery. The ant-bellum slavery apologists were either stupid, ignorant or liars.
The fact that the same argument was used does not imply that it was equally good in both cases. In the case of Rome, we are talking about a society that lacked the technology to exploit coal to produce steam engines. The limits of free labor are shown by Egypt -- they were simply incapable of integrating a larger society, since instead of using slavery, they used religion and river power to organize their society.
The fact that slavery is nasty and brutal doesn't change the facts of the matter -- we couldn't get here from there without it. You can honestly argue that we shouldn't be here, and should have stayed horticulturalists with societies limited to the 100s of thousands, a hundred Egypts spread over the planet.
But it was slavery that powered the Graeco-Roman expansion, it was slavery and serfdom that energized the flowering of China, and it was slavery and genocidal thievery that powered the scientific revolutions of the 16th to 18th centuries (our oh-so-worshipped Enlightenment). History sucks like that.
Slavery disappeared when it was no longer economically necessary, not because of some grand moral awakening. Or in reverse, the moral awakening only occurred after the economics made it possible. Have you never wondered why moral revulsion toward slavery exactly tracks with a delay the exportation of the steam engine from Scotland to England to continental Europe and the Americas?
No slavery, no Newton, Galileo, or Darwin -- the European economy stays stillborn in its boom-bust cycles of economic development followed by reactionary Christian response. No slavery, no interest in funding expanded astronomical observations to improve shipping across the oceans. No slavery, and England economy never develops beyond its pathetic agrarian history, eventually outstripping available labor (some shipped out to oversee slavery) and thereby leading to the industrial revolution, which finally eliminates the need for slavery and it's many local variants.
What's the point of discussing the ethics of it? What you should do depends on today, not the ten-thousand years of horror that freed us.
I am one of your people, and you take me to you rape room and exercise your right to indulge your disgusting passions and whims.
um, how is that a decent argument in favor of rape?
once again, you missed the point.
Nice of you to try the exercise, though.
I don't know what in particular I've said that exhibits "dogma", but regardless, your conception of atheism is flawed. Atheism, is nothing more, and nothing less, than the denial of the existence of god or gods. Atheism says nothing about ones morality, or whether they subscribe to taboos or not. There are dogmatic atheists, and then there are atheists such as yourself, who see rape as acceptable in at least one circumstance.
If it's dogmatic to insist that, as far as I can tell, rape is never acceptable, then I hold my hands up, guilty as charged: I am dogmatic.
Now onto your justification of rape:
Different sort of consent. People are quarantined to prevent other people from catching the disease i.e. to protect others from the harm you would cause to them by sitting next to them on the bus for instance. But I've never heard anyone justify rape of a particular person to protect other people from harm.
In fact, in your case, you're arguing for the preservation of your DNA. So with the disease case, you violate someone's consent to protect others from harm, yet in the rape case, you violate someone's consent to preserve your DNA? These aren't the same ethically at all.
Anyway, as syn ack says, "Thankfully, we reject this, because genetic proliferation is simply worthless as a moral consideration." The point he was making was that a gene-centred morality leads to uncomfortable propositions, like rape is justified in that hypothetical. So, instead of assuming that proposition is true, me and syn ack throw out the gene-centred view of morality, and opt for a more person or life-centred view, which doesn't justify rape. This also makes sense when you consider that morality is a social construct anyway.
You're really not getting the concepts of "hypotheticals" or "philosophy". An ethical standpoint, if someone is trying to justify it, should be able to withstand scrutiny, both from things that have really happened, and events that are hypothetically possible. It's possible that a world with only two human beings, or two humans who thought they were the last left (or three humans, or four...; how many humans does it take before you decide rape is suddenly not acceptable?), could exist, therefore it's a valid hypothetical. It's hypothetically possible, though unlikely, that I could meet George W. Bush. Does that mean that if I advocated hitting Bush (which I don't) in such a situation, that because it's a hypothetical and unlikely, that doesn't make me have violent tendencies?
The game is "What if?". You're meant to play as if it's real. If you think it's ethically justified to rape someone in that situation, then however unlikely the situation, you are a rape apologist. If you don't like the term, then don't defend rape.
Anti-vegans distorting vegans' arguments is sooo typical.
No one made any moral equation of meat-eating with rape. The point was that "genetic proliferation" should be discarded as an argument for anything, because if allowed as an argument, it could justify rape.
The argument that "X should not be allowed to justify A because then it would also justify B" presumes that B is worse than A (in this case, rape is worse than meat-eating), or else the argument could not even be hoped to be persuasive. A Catholic would never say "X should not be allowed to justify murder because then it would also justify masturbation." The form of the argument depends upon a unidirectional non-equivalence.
It appears that the mentions of murder and cannibalism were implied in the same form, though these were made less explicitly, so perhaps an equation was intended. However, the entire question is whether the slaughter (and eating) of nonhuman animals is similar enough to the murder (and eating) of humans that it should be considered immoral, and to what extent. So not only are these comparisons legitimate, they are absolutely necessary to the discussion. One can make a comparison without making an equation, and I believe this is what was done. But an equation must at least be permissible, even though I would not agree with that strong an argument.
Let the reader judge the truth of that. What does 'similar enough' mean, if not 'morally equal'?
Anyway, thanks for totally ignoring the ecological view of food-raising I and others have brought up. I live in a tropical savannah region where cows and kangaroos eat grass, and feral pigs (free, however nasty, brutish and short their lives) eat native vertebrates towards extinction. These conditions are ethically relevant to me: I gladly eat kangaroo, and if I could exterminate the unenslaved pigs I'd commit that genocide without hesitation (if they suffered, it would only be once). If I also have the odd bit of bacon that was raised in a shed and trucked across the country, that's probably more efficient use of fuel than trucking vegetables the same distance. And tastier.
Alex Deam: So far, no-one has come up with a single argument or scenario that makes me think that Roman or Confederate slavery, 1980s homophobia, Stone Age cannibalism or whatever, are in any way moral. Those are my standards.
Serious question: who gives a fuck what your standards are? Who cares whether you think that the Romans were evil? Do you even care?
The functions of ethics is to constrain your choice, individually and as a community -- in what ways does it make one whit of a difference whether you think that Paleolithic cannibals were wicked? What does that even mean, other than as a masturbatory exercise?
You're talking in arbitrary abstractions about "your standards". No one has ever asked you to refrain from enforcing ethics against the ancient Romans. You know why? And if ethics aren't a code to be enforced by legal or social sanctions, then what are they but smug self-righteousness?
If one says -- it is wrong for you to eat a pig, that must mean something. At one end, it may mean -- "And therefore I will make you uncomfortable whenever you're around me eating bacon", and at the other end it means "And therefore I will use violence against you to stop you". But for it to be an empty judgment -- if you're just a universal goody-two-shoes with no means or desire to enforce some sort of sanction and take responsibility for it -- you're just full of Sunday-school platitude shit.
So, once again, are you saying you intend to travel back in time and battle the ancient Romans? Or to the Pleistocene to engage our ancestors in philosophical discussions to convince them to give up cannibalism? Is all your ethics just platitudes, like Kant's nonsense, another search for objectivity and abstraction in the realms of the subjective and specific?
syn ack @117
I'm sorry but this hypothetical is crap. The implication that if someone says "yes" to this, that they are are a rape apologist and secretly support rape in all scenarios is absurd. Alternatively, if they answer "no," they are haters of the human race, blahdy blahdy blah.
If you are going this route, you really need to go all the way with it, so don't leave out the assumptions. Par example: that the women not only does not want to have sex with you at this moment, but could never, ever be persuaded to have sex with you; she could never be persuaded to find an alternative to receptive (or perhaps not-so-receptive?) intercourse; she does not care about the future of the human race; she has no desire to be mother or raise a family and no issues ignoring her so-called biological clock; manual stimulation will be sufficient for her gratification needs and this will never change; she is inpenetrable to a rational discussion on the matter, she hates you and will never be affected by being the loneliness of being the last of her kind (she hates you so you certainly can't comfort her) etc. In THIS situation, assuming I haven't left out something, is it acceptable to rape her?
No! Rape's never acceptable! Lolzorz! You are an evil misogynist and believe rape is ALWAYS acceptable. I've trapped you with my impossible scenario because I've implied these assumptions are there, without saying them so you could have picked one of these alternatives all along, but you didn't, so shame on you! I win!
Do I have the gist of it?
If I rape a pig before I eat it, is that OK?
No. I'll explain:
No, that's not syn ack's intended point. He's saying that if you take a gene-centred view to what your morality should be, then that logically leads to the idea that rape in that hypothetical is justified. The argument is not some catch 22 where if you choose the "not rape" option you therefore hate the human race, rather the argument says that since for most people, rape is unacceptable in all situations, then the gene-centred view of morality is undesirable for most people. It's an argument against the gene-centred view to deciding morality, that's all.
I'm assuming the second paragraph quoted is a parody?
And as for you listing those assumptions, are they that big? Is it that unremarkable to find a woman who doesn't want to have sex with you? I mean, all your other assumptions lead from that one. If you really think it's impossible for a woman to simultaneously care about the future of the human race, but still not want to have sex with you, then you're either sexist, arrogant, ignorant or a stud.
Somehow I doubt the later.
Not really. Have a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Environmental
However, you're right on the money with the tastier bit though!
It's been a long day, and I am a bit on the grumpy side. So, please excuse the gratuitous snark.
Actually, the answer is none of the above. I'm gay, so unless there's a turkey baster involved and this woman is receptive, that'd be the extinction of the human race.
I gave no indication that I believe that it's ever acceptable to rape a woman, regardless of the situation. I guess I disagree with presenting a ridiculous, hypothetical, overly simplistic, false dichotomy and then accusing people of being rape apologists (a pretty serious allegation) in all situations based off of one pretty extraordinary situation just to make a point.
I was trying to make a point here, but my eyes are crossing and it will probably come out less coherent than I've already been this evening, so, I'll stop.
"Thankfully, we reject this, because genetic proliferation is simply worthless as a moral consideration." -- syn ack
"The point was that "genetic proliferation" should be discarded as an argument for anything, because if allowed as an argument, it could justify rape. " -- anon
"So, instead of assuming that proposition is true, me and syn ack throw out the gene-centred view of morality, and opt for a more person or life-centred view, which doesn't justify rape." -- Alex Deam
But the analysis was simplistic, and neglected complicating factors such as the extent of female investment, and in humans also male investment in provision for and education of the children. You continued to neglect this even after I pointed it out. The fact of the matter is, that while rapes are still attempted, human ethical systems generally don't accept it, at least within the in-group. While rape is frequent in a few life forms, most have settled upon some more mutual form of reproduction. So while at a simplistic level, rape may seem a good strategy, in gene-centered nature something else seems to happen, and something else happens in humans. No matter what ethical system we make up, it would be wise to take our genetic tendencies and preferences into account.
Perhaps rape doesn't exist in many species because females have are fast, or have claws and large canines. Males might find rape to risky a choice. This may apply to humans too, if attempts at a male strategy became more common, perhaps human females didn't and wouldn't choose tolerance as a strategy, instead they choice to fight for their choice in which genes they invest in. They can arm themselves and fight well enough to make rape a losing strategy, they can also become more security conscious, and as social animals can form alliances. There are natural gene-centered allies. Given the low fecundity of humans, parents have an interest in their female offspring investing only in the best genes, and with mates that will also invest. Parents and mates in a social group have interests in allying with each other to preserve their investment choices. A gene-centered analysis can result in rape being pushed off to a dangerous, marginal periphery or to exploitation of vulnerable poorly protected females in outgroups. So why does this mysticism about rape being "wrong" persist? Perhaps it is because those humans that developed a tendency to think that some norms of their cultures were what was right and wrong, without questioning them much, did a better job of proliferating.
Humans are intelligent enough to be able to adopt higher level uber norms. How did western societies manage to get rid of much of the honor violence common in many societies? Dueling existed well into the 19th century. Slavery certainly wasn't against the human nature, it was supported by right of conquest, property rights and by acceptance of social stratification. If anything, slavery was a less sophisticated form of stratification than what humans developed elsewhere. Yet we also got rid of slavery, except in the service of nationalism. What uber norms allowed these "advances"? It is actually by these norms that the suppression of slavery, and honor violence are considered "advances". I suspect the successful uber norms also appeal to something in human nature, despite being higher level artificial constructs of the mind. After all, ice cream is artificial too.
Ichthyic,
"um, how is that a decent argument in favor of rape?"
It is an argument justifying the acceptance of rape. It is an argument so powerful that it was also used to justify acceptance of genocide and torture and the suppression of minorities. It is the respect for sovereignty even of dictators encoded in international law, and frequently cited in the global culture, not just by the representatives of sovereigns in the UN itself, but in the supposedly anti-nationalism, left wing of western culture. It was implicit in the first president Bush's "New World Order". Sovereignties of the world unite, but remember you only have the right to oppress your "own".
The first time you asked this question, it may have been an honest question. You've been given an answer now and chosen to ignore it, so you are full of shit.
Arguments that "X wasn't wrong then" quickly become arguments that "X is not wrong now" when circumstances are claimed to be similar. Judging the past is how we decide the future.
Actions, like buying products from factories that utilize wage slavery, do not happen out of the blue. They are dependent upon social attitudes about what is moral and what is not. Most people are willing to constrain their behavior to what they believe is moral. This occurs even when no one else is watching, that is, without the enforcement of sanctions you claim are necessary, as long as the person agrees with the social standard.
So just talking about what our standards should be has an effect. Judging past actions and coming to a consensus of what was right and what was wrong has an effect. The judgments we make now may influence future actions when circumstances are felt to be similar. Convince everyone that we cannot judge the Romans, and Roman economics will be on the discussion table during the next economic crisis.
Talking and building consensus happens before any sanction. If eating meat is wrong, it will be necessary to convince many people of this, in order to influence their own behavior. If legal sanctions will be necessary, then it will first be necessary to reach a critical mass that can influence democracy. Talking is how we get there, or how we decide not to go there.
By refusing to judge Roman slavery, you may be enabling future slavery.
You're being dishonest. No one said "in all situations" except you.
The hypothetical was not all that was offered. That was merely meant to illustrate that rape would not be right even if the alternative was extinction. I did not expect africangenesis and James Sweet to be so eager to invent rationalizations for rape. But an apologist is an apologist. A defense is a defense. A limited context does not negate the label. Africangenesis in particular is eager to imagine many other rationalizations for when rape should be acceptable. It is clear he is a rape apologist in general, in the normal context of life. James Sweet, perhaps not so generally. But it is clear he is willing to remove the rights of women if he deems it necessary. It is not much of a credit to him that he rarely deems it necessary.
But the hypothetical was not all that was offered. Rape is so common that in everyday life it is a cause of "genetic proliferation." Pro-life women choose to give birth to the children of their rapists. That is genetic proliferation. Marital rape has been the norm through centuries of Western civilization, maybe others I'm less informed about. Married women could not refuse sex. Marital rape has recently been legalized again in Afghanistan. Some of these rapes lead to impregnation. This is genetic proliferation. A moral view that values genetic proliferation as good in itself, trumping individual consent, must excuse marital rape.
No hypotheticals: James Sweet can have no coherent objection to current Afghan rape laws. He may object, but not without abandoning his valuation of genetic proliferation, if he is to be coherent.
syn ack,
"But it is clear he is willing to remove the rights of women if he deems it necessary. It is not much of a credit to him that he rarely deems it necessary."
Hey what gives? I don't mind being a rape apologist since you use the term so indiscriminately, but you are making it sound like I'm more willing to remove the rights of women than you are, which I seriously doubt. You aren't giving me much credit.
I find it interesting that anyone is so vehemently equating the momentary, objective evaluation of a purely theoretical situation relating to an act/circumstance that we can all agree is a BAD THING with supporting (consciously or unconsciously) that BAD THING, as if discussion implies approval.
Also, James @ 84, this isn't so much directed at you as it is a response to your mention of an opinion held by others: I doubt I'm the only person to have ever thought of this, but the attitude of many animal rights activists that the extinction of domesticated breeds of animals that we raise for food is preferable to their continued "enslavement" isn't really miles away from the attitude held by certain fundamentalist Christian soldiers who feel it's better for Afghans to convert to Christianity and be killed for it (since they'll go to HEAVEN) than it is for them to stay alive following the wrong religion, or that it's better for a 9-year-old, pregnant after having been raped by her step-father, to die as a result of the pregnancy than to abort the child. I'm not saying they're exactly the same thing, but they're not miles away, at the very least in terms of the logic used.
Similarly, in response to one of Hillary's last comments before signing off: Arguing that it might be better (or more "ethical") to have no job and potentially starve to death rather than hold a questionable or unethical job isn't miles away from the pro-life argument that it's better to go right on ahead and have that baby regardless of how negatively it might affect your life, because it's more ethical/moral than aborting the pregnancy. (Not to mention that it invites the question of whether YOU have ever had to make a choice like that, and if you're justified in passing such an absolute judgement on those who HAVE had to.)
It might just be me, but I find these comparisons far more logical than the idea that eating bacon is akin to being a creationist.
Possibly a little late to respond now everyone's been asleep for a night but still...
Lynna #130
"it's just that you and Hillary redefine "addressed" as being "agree with me completely, and acknowledge that you are all unethical swine if you don't agree with me.""
Kind of like how atheists get pissed off when creationists won't argue on a reasoned level and use lots of excuses to avoid the central issues?
I don't want anyone to say they are unethical "swine" (pigs are cool after all), just that people should be big enough to admit their own cognitive dissonance at work in the arena of food.
I have no problem with jokes- the Rev's one about raping a pig before eating it is pretty funny in the context of the comments going on. But harping on about how tasty bacon is whenever a pig is referenced on the blog isn't funny, it's lame attempts to make out that the taste of bacon is the most important factor, thus justifying arguments about not being able to "give it up", like its somehow different to other ethical choices you make at the supermarket.
"You've got a battering ram presentation method going and, as James Sweet noted more than once, it smacks of absolutism."
This comment and complaints about using ethics as a 'weapon' are again very similar to those from creationists who come here and can't take the heat of being shown that they don't have a leg to stand on.
It's not an absolutist position, just as atheism isn't; but it IS the only rational position based on the scientific evidence which everyone here purports to hold as gold standard. If there was good evidence that animals like pigs did not have the capacity to feel pain or fear or suffer as a result of what we do to them, hell I'd be frying up some bacon. I am not some kind of self-flagellating nutter, I love food, I just realised the implications of eating animal products and based on that reasoning, decided not to do it anymore.
How many people here would say the same, that given the rational arguments that causing unnecessary suffering is unjustifiable, that they will just TRY living without animal products for a while? Its certainly easier than giving up religious belief which we all encourage.
I am happy to have a conversation and a joke but I'm also going to challenge people parading their choices to ignore suffering on an unimaginable scale because they don't want to give up something comfortable.
As you say, I want to mitigate the harm done by factory farms too, trouble is there is harm whether it's intensive or organic as the slaughterhouses are the same.
Don't take this as snark, because I am actually interested: what evidence do you know of, or links you can provide (or anyone else reading this), that suggest that if domesticated animals were freed they would become extinct?
I disagree that such a situation is "ridiculous, hypothetical, overly simplistic, false dichotomy". It's certainly not a false dichotomy: you either rape or you don't rape. There's no middle ground. And it's not particularly unlikely. Do you think that humanity will definitely never come close to extinction? It's actually highly likely that one day in humanity's history we will at least come close to extinction. I'm sure someone who knows more about evolutionary history will know the exact details, but aren't about 99.9% of all species that have ever lived extinct? It's not that hard to imagine it happening to us.
So as far as I can tell, the hypothetical makes two assumptions:
1. The humans involved are near extinct, or perceive that they are.
2. The rate of sexual intercourse is low enough to threaten the survival of the species or perceived survival of the species, due to refusal to consent by individual(s).
Pray tell what's so ridiculous about those assumptions.
Besides, you're missing the point. A hypothetical doesn't have to be "likely", just so long as it's possible. That's what hypotheticals are. That's how individuals and societies can decide ethical standpoints. That's how philosophy (and in some respects science too) works.
If you truly believe that it's never acceptable to rape "regardless of the situation", then you would believe that no matter the hypothetical, either it's unacceptable to rape in that hypothetical, or the hypothetical is impossible. You've chosen to argue that the hypothetical is "ridiculous", and to my mind, attacking the foundations of the hypothetical makes a lot more sense than answering that rape would be acceptable in that situation, as James has done. James, instead of attacking the hypothetical like you, has chosen to grant that the hypothetical might be valid, and yet answered in the affirmative to "is rape acceptable in that situation. You may believe that rape is unacceptable "regardless of the situation", but James' response cannot possibly tie in with that notion.
Oh, and has already been said, no-one is accusing anyone of being "rape apologists in all situations". Only in this one situation.
La Tricoteuse #185
The arguments about not allowing more domesticated animals to be bred is because they only exist to be used as human property, therefore their rights will always be open to abuse. There is not an option on the table for domestic animals to have a good life (from their point of view) unless we stopped treating them as property and hurting/killing them when we liked. The option was there for human slaves to be emancipated and treated as citizens with full rights.
I can't see how you can compare that to supporting the death of an abused 9 year old child to save her baby. The ethical imperative is what is best for the girl, not the fetus which doesn't feel or have an "existence" yet. Just like the ethical imperative for domestic animals is not what is best for us or future animals that don't exist yet, but for those alive now. The rational response is to to stop making more pigs/cows/sheep whose only purpose is to be treated in any way we see fit because they are just 'commodities' there to be eaten.
I didn't think Hillary was trying to say people should choose between unemployment and working at slaughter-houses, but if that is what she meant then I disagree.
Oh, sounds like I hit a nerve. I'm sorry to offend you, James, truly. But what, you expect me to sit-tight when I read something that offends me? It does genuinely offend me when people bring up taste as a qualification in these considerations. I don't leave everyone else alone, I just threw a comment your way. If you don't want to talk about it, nobody's making you; but if you say something like what you did, expect people to respond.
Uh, whatever, James. You're the one doing the name-calling here. Your disagreement with me doesn't make what I have to say dogmatic. Anyways, if it comforts you, this is like the second or third comment I've made on this blog, and now I don't plan on making any more, so feel free to keep reading.
I agree that no one said that explicitly. Perhaps, this is my interpretation of it (with a slightly fried brain at the end of a long day at work), but the phrase "rape apologist" is very much loaded, and the implications really don't limit themselves to just this hypothetical situation. "An apologist is an apologist," right? It seems to me to be an overly dramatic way to make a point (says the pot to the kettle).
I think I'm trying much too hard to play devil's advocate in my own brain, and it's causing something to short out. I don't think this situation is all that unlikely. I don't think that this represents a false dichotomy. I think the heart of the issue I have is this: that by calling someone a rape apologist for answering in the affirmative to this particular dilemma, this is not really an argument against using a gene-centered view of morality to determine a course of action in a challenging situation; it's more of an ad hominem attack against the individual responding to the scenario as such. An attack which in this case carries the collateral damage of implying support of rape in multiple situations, which may are may not be warranted.
This is a situation in which the arguments and potential consequences which demonstrate that rape is not justified even in this extreme circumstance should be self-evident, but perhaps they are not to everyone. It seems that name-calling has resulted in less in AG and James reflecting on the reasons their logic may be faulty in this case, and more in them being defensive more than anything else.
I'm having difficulty articulating the point I would like to make, and it's frustrating me greatly. So, my apologies for my uncouthness, thus far.