Random: April 2008 Archives

A conversation last week between two very exhausted, frazzled women. One of whom is me. 

"Our task must be to free ourselves by widening the circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

I found the following quotes quite interesting as they were spoken by Matthew Scully, a Conservative Republican, former senior speechwriter for George W. Bush, author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, and contributor to the American Conservative:

"When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets his demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice."

"The standard vegetarian argument that the average person eats meat, and yet could not bear to see how it was produced, actually speaks well for the average person. Imagine a world in which most people enjoyed hearing and seeing the details."

"The factory farm is an economic necessity, cuts costs for the consumer, unavoidable in the global economy, a fact of life, a way of life, a livelihood, blah, blah, blah, all this to justify an obvious moral evil so sick and horrendous it would leave us ashen, producing goods now replaceable, and employing people who could be making those alternative products instead. All this so we can have our accustomed veal or lamb or fried chicken or pork chop or hot dog at the ball park."

Giving equal consideration of interests to all beings capable of having interests is how one takes equality seriously. This isn't Leftist, Rightist, Conservative, Liberal, or radical; it's the absence of prejudice, it's mere logic, it's moral courage - these values are Universal.  

I don't intentionally kill spiders, or bees, or ants, or any other insect that I find in my home. If I come upon an insect in my bedroom for example, I take the position of "live and let live." If I feel threatened, irrationally of course, I carefully remove the insect from my home and place him/her outside.

This must strike you as awfully strange. Why? Most of the evidence I have seen suggests that most insect species are not sentient; however, the jury is out as it were, and as I have observed crickets, for example, fleeing from painful stimuli it would appear that they have an interest in not being harmed. Although I don't know (the evidence would say that my intuition is wrong). But what if I am not and a fly is capable of subjectively experiencing the magazine crushing him; the crushing is the moment when the fly can no longer experience what gives him pleasure because he is dead, which is of course an important harm to consider in our moral decision-making.    

We don't know if 'Megan the spider' is sentient but in our observations we see actions to suggest that she is (e.g., she run's from an approaching foot), so what does it say about you that in the brief moment it would take to remove the spider from your bedroom and place her outside - and thus not unnecessarily murder her - you chose to crush her with a shoe and watch tv. 

There is power in fundamentally dominating a living creature, isn't there? That's a disturbing sickness not uncommon to our species.        

One of the most interesting things I've discovered since going vegan is the extent to which animals are considered to be not living beings but property. It sounds weird at first because obviously your dog is a dog and not a chair, or a 1965 Ford Mustang, but in the eyes of the law and of most people animals are property. Think about it. We buy, sell and trade them, dispose of them at will. Not the kind of things you do with people. I hope.