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| quote: | Originally posted by Enigmatik
I've got a question. Where is the injustice, in killing the animal, or in eating it (or both)? Why? |
It's not about justice, really - our sense of what is 'injust' is, similar to what Arbiter said earlier, merely a comparative factor accomodating for what people do not like. All creatures live with things they do not like, human and non-human alike, human beings are just exceptional in that they have the ability and compulsion to make social industries and complexes out of them; I believe that empathy is one such complex, something most everybody is imbued with from the very start, and even in the most cynical of lights, a firing of pleasurable chemicals in the brain that allow for cooperation and emotional communication on a level that is scantly understood by us, but is every bit as imminent a factor in consequential situations as greed, hatred, avarice and contempt, albeit far subtler. To apply this sort of respect to all animals, be they human or otherwise, is not an unnatural thing in the least and indeed there is a potent, historical legacy of animal husbandry, cooperation, and co-dependency that our species would be remiss to ignore or forget. Even a slight understanding of proto-mythological faculties would indicate that ancient man placed an immense amount of significance in animal and plant life, and it's very likely that the mysticism surrounding our frequent reachings for the meaning of this vital coordination is where religious thought spawned from in the first place, however mistaken modern man might suppose this to be.
Where we have lost respect, where things have gone terribly awry, is in the mass production of animals as a product of convenience, and in this light, absolutely nobody is innocent. It is no more a symptom of laziness than it would be 'lazy' to take a shortcut to work some morning, if you ask me, rather, it is the product of apathy and intentional ignorance to the plights of progression and irresponsible industry. But once more, not a one of us is innocent, nor is any solution going to be a smooth (read: profitable) one. If we do not proceed with a cautious future (which we will probably not), unrestricted conditions and biological crowding finally will bring 'justice' to us in the form of contamination and viruses that are even more effecient killers than we are. Perhaps this will happen no matter what we do - or perhaps it will not. Our capacity to understand the value of responsibility in the first place puts us above the 'lion on the savannah' scenario; If sentience is worth anything at all, we are not just mindless killers brought to the brink of hunger merely to act out our reptilian impulses. Much less is it any bit excusable for us to live in ignorance of massive farms of habitually abused animals living in squalid conditions any more than it is ok for us live in a world of concentration camps and slavery and mass murder and any other multitude of ways humans have thought of torturous ways to treat one another.
But I can understand why one would like to ignore all of that and live in convenience. It's much easier that way, so long as it happens far away from you.
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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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