http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/05/02/maine-teenagers-deny-animal-cruelty-charges-alleging-put-kitten-in-running/
A few months ago we had a discussion of whether non-human animals can be the subject of morality.
Over on UD, Mung opined that animals are meat robots, incapable of suffering.
EDIT: Wrong UD poster. Mapou, not Mung. Apologies.
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part Two)
Apparently the Bible neglects to mention the possibility that animals can be the subject of morality, or that torturing animals can be a sin. But some IDists have declared that torturing babies is self-evidently wrong.
So is microwaving kittens self-evidently wrong? Or self-evidently okay, because it isn’t forbidden by scripture? What Would William Do? Or Mung? Apparently we have secular laws against this. Why?
I’d like to ask this at UD, but I can’t.
Why is “why would anyone care?” the default or seemingly obvious question here? I mean, why wouldn’t someone care?
It seems to me, quite frankly, that if someone is unable or unwilling to acknowledge that inflicting pain on a suffering creature is intrinsically wrong, then he or she is just a sociopath, full-stop. It is probably best that we protect ourselves from such people by persuading them that they will be punished or rewarded after death in light of their actions of this life.
Those of us who are not so damaged as to be devoid of empathy do not need the illusion of an afterlife in order to be properly motivated to care about the well-being of our fellow sentient and sapient creatures.
Semi-rhetorical question. It shouldn’t require an answer, but I am not kidding when I say there are people we know and debate with, who have posted on this forum, who do not think animals can suffer and who do not think torturing them is immoral.
I’ve lost all patience for debating with pseudo-Christians aka ‘Christianists‘ — among whom their leading light, Sarah Palin, thinks that torture ought to be inflicted on anyone suspected of being a terrorist. And we must not forget how many of the UD crowd were enthusiastic Palin supporters in 2008 — quite a number of whom, as I recall, thought that McCain should step down immediately upon winning so that Palin could take over.
The deep connection between Christianism and creationism/intelligent design is fascinating in numerous respects. Firstly, of course, that the creationists/design proponents think that Darwinism is a grave moral danger because it led to such terrible ills as women having greater reproductive freedom and gays and lesbians having the right to visit their sick and dying partners in hospitals.
(As a critical theorist in the Frankfurt School tradition of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, it seems obvious to me that this amounts to scapegoating ‘Darwinism’ for the social upheaval that contemporary capitalism has brought upon pre-capitalist familial structures, and the nostalgic fetishizing of ‘freedom’ prevents them from recognizing that their beloved ‘free market’ is in fact opposed to all of their ‘ethical’ values.)
Secondly — and this is also fascinating to me — Christianism is just as deeply embroiled within postmodernism as is the ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ Christianity that it opposes, and nowhere is this made more evident than the “teach the controversy” strategy adopted by the creationists/design proponents. This strategy is the right strategy for dealing with complicated issues in the humanities, not in the sciences, because in the humanities there is no right answer because in the humanities, unlike in the sciences, reality doesn’t get a vote in what we say about it. The “teach the controversy” strategy, applied to the sciences, collapses the sciences/humanities distinction such that everything becomes a matter of opinion, “belief,” or “faith” — it’s an epistemological catastrophe that is just as much part of postmodern culture as what they oppose.
Other than KN demonstrating that USAmerican parents would be silly to send their children to study philosophy under him (which is probably why he posts under pseudonym – his HEI would likely disown him for such ‘ideas’ as what he writes here), this thread simply shows that the author is myopic. Doesn’t he know about Saint Francis of Assisi or the blessing of animals? He sounds stuck in a Cartesian mechanistic view of animals, content to blame IDists from his nihilistic bully pulpit here at TSZ. Sad.
http://www.st-francis-medal.com/st-francis-blessing-of-the-animals.htm
Wow, calling out Palin for her enthusiastic support of torture and Johnson for his epistemological nihilism really hit a nerve with you, didn’t it? That tells something about where you. None of my Christian friends in the States and elsewhere leap to the defense of torture-as-baptism or the epistemological nihilism that is teach-the-controversy. But apparently, when I criticize these things here, you get really upset with me. That’s interesting.
I must be a magnet for unintended flame wars.
Lighten up, folks. The thread is about torturing kittens, not important stuff like epistemology.
petrushka,
Well, Gregory enjoys taunting and provoking me, and sometimes he pushes me over the edge, but I should exercise more self-control and not let him get to me so much.
So, back to kitten torturing?
I guess I’m having a bit of trouble seeing exactly what’s philosophically interesting about this — it seems to me that if inflicting needless pain on a sentient creature isn’t wrong, then nothing is. It would take a remarkable kind of disconnection from one’s own bodily experience to not feel revulsion at this and be motivated to act on that revulsion.
@ Gregory
Play nice and think of the kittens!
I don’t see anything philosophically interesting either, but I think the question of how we decide what is good or evil is important.
To me if to no one else.
I’m pretty consistently on record as favoring consensus and law over divine authority or Platonic idealism. Even though it means I’m unhappy with the results much of the time.
Do nihilist atheists care more than just sociologically?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-m-sweeney/blessing-our-pets-st-francis-judaism_b_951906.html
Gregory,
Mess with my beloved 19-year-old cat and you’ll find out pretty quickly.
keiths,
So just psychologically for a nihilist atheist? Sad.
Perhaps your “nihilist” is a misattribution.
Gregory,
Yes, on Planet Earth caring is a psychological function. How about on your home planet?
Neil Rickert,
keiths answered openly to it. TSZ is likewise sadly full of nihilism. KN is at least honest about it with his disenchanted escapist-philosophist views.
LOL
Gregory,
I answered to the ‘atheist’ part. The ‘nihilist’ part I dismissed as a typical tendentious Gregoryism.
ETA: Before you get too excited, Gregory, no, Gregoryism is not an ideology. It’s more of an affliction.
Microwaving a kitten is clearly wrong. Obviously, you should use a convection oven.
keiths,
Most atheists are nihilists depending on scale. How can there be meaning without actual meaning? KN flirts with nihilism regularly at TSZ. But he’s just more open and reflexive than most of the atheist ‘scientists’ (or scientist wannabes) here.
Whatever ‘Gregoryism’ might mean, that would technically be an ideology.
keithsism, however, is just sad trite. People should care to save their children from that.
I dont undertand the problem. Animals dont feel pain because they dont have a pre-frontal cortex, so we can do what we like to them. Willaim Lane Craig explains it better.
WJM: not funny.
It’s hard to be serious with people that claim morality is subjective and then debate as if they have some kind of moral high ground, referring to others as “damaged” simply because they don’t feel and act like them. I guess categorizing those with empathies unlike yourself as “damaged” offers the illusion of a substantive difference between yourself and those you abhor.
I wonder if KN also thinks that those with a different skin color than his are “damaged”? Or those of a different sexual orientation?
I agree, although I find it interesting (and even more disturbing) that apparently not everyone feels the same. See bullfighting, for example. Possibly cockfighting and dog fighting also?
Not to mention until recently, bear baiting, among others. It wasn’t really that long ago that the torture and dismemberment of humans was a respectable spectator sport, with events sponsored and attended by the moral elites of society.
Gregory, you really hate atheists don’t you?
This post of yours put your already nonexistant crediblity into the negatives.
Atheism is a logical consequence of skepticism when dealing with an invisible, immeasurable, inaudible and (deliberately made to be) completely imperceptible and untestable proposition. The two simply go hand in hand.
You proudly associate with those would would treat homosexuals as criminals at UD. While you, to your credit, have indicated that you would vote in favour of equality I don’t have much time for the sort of cowardice displayed when you say one thing here but act another way there.
If you have in fact called out the bigots at UD then by all means link to that. Until then could I suggest you consider why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
OMagain said:
There’s nothing quite so amusing as watching the incessant hypocrisy on display when an admitted moral subjectivist attempts to apply moral judgement on others as if their own personal views reflect some kind of significant standard. What is the point of such subjective moral outrage, if not just to fan the flames of drawing a line between “us” and “them”?
Anti-Christian bigots expressing admittedly subjective moral outrage over the supposed anti-gay bigotry of Christians is such delicious irony.
Absolutely! Oddly enough, though, some skeptic organizations shy away from applying the tools of the scientific method, broadly construed, to religion. The motivation seems similar in some ways to the “big tent” strategy of the IDCists.
Petrushka says:
The glaring misplaced concept here, though, lies in the word “wrong”. If “wrong” = “that which my empathy causes pain to do”, then “wrong” is entirely a subjective emotional feeling. Nothing more.
But if I torture a kitten, and feel bad about it emotionally, so what? The moral subjectivist’s “wrong” has no teeth. If I have no such empathetic feeling, or train myself not to, then it is no longer “wrong” to torture a kitten, because the wrongness of it is nothing more than the emotional feeling generated by the act. If I can desensitize myself or rationally justify it so I don’t feel bad about euthanizing idiots, sterilizing blacks or gassing jews, then it is no longer wrong to do so – by the subjectivist “empathy” standard of right and wrong. If I don’t feel bad about it, then it is no longer wrong.
KN calls those who experience empathy sufficiently different from himself “damaged”; petrushka tries to employ some rhetorically-implied objectiveness with “remarkable kind of disconnection from one’s own bodily experience”. Damaged or remarkable in what way? By what comparison? Billions of people have harmed others and animals throughout history. Remarkable in that they don’t share Petrushka’s degree and scope of empathy? Why should that difference be considered “remarkable”? “Damaged” because they are physiologically different from KN? So what?
Obviously I don’t hate atheists. Nihilistic atheism is nevertheless sad both for individuals and societies. And as one commenter here agreed: “there are too many atheists” at TSZ. Lizzie, the blog’s founder, is an eclectic mix of beliefs, but she does not seem to be an atheist (except for when she plugs Buddhism).
Blessing animals and even treating them kindly (though obviously not as ‘humans’) is consistent with the Abrahamic faiths. Radical skepticism and anti-theism, of course, are not.
In fact, by the subjectivist “empathy” standard of “what is wrong”, the sociopath represents human moral perfection. Nothing the sociopath does is wrong because he doesn’t feel bad about any of it.
I was trying to lay off, but I am weak.
So radical skepticism and anti-theism are not consistent with the Abrahamic faiths.
I did not know that.
Like wise:
Interesting claim. I wonder if you are scholarly enough to support it with evidence. I wonder if you are erudite enough to have had any basis for making the claim when you did. Note the distinction. Then I re-parse the final three words: “Oh, Gregory’s escape hatch! How cute.”
Say WHAT? Whatever it might mean?
You really seem to think that “if a word ends in -ism, then it is an ideology”
Like magnetism, masochism, alcoholism, or malapropism.
You continue your epic performance as an ambassador for HPSS amongst the heathens. Keep up the good work!
Your misdirection is noted. Who mentioned “Christians?” It’s interesting when I say “anti-gay bigot” you go to “Christians”.
I specifically mentioned the people you associate with at UD, not “Christians”.
Here is a challenge for you.
Please find an example of me being an “Anti-Christian bigot”. I know you have trouble supporting your claims but this time I really strongly suggest that you do so.
Then I will find for you examples of anti-gay bigotry from the people you associate with at UD.
Fair?
Yes, because treating people as equals regardless of their individual status is not a significant standard nor something worth striving for.
SOCLE
See bullfighting, for example. Possibly cockfighting and dog fighting also?
Should sport fishing be included in the list of possible animal torture categories?
DNA_jock
priapism?
It is remarkable how quickly standards regarding treatment of animals (and our fellow humans) have changed.
Even the use of animals in research and medicine is gradually evolving. I understand that experimentation on chimpanzees is essentially being phased out, for example. And while I might have been ok with these experiments 20 years ago, I’m now losing the ability to see how it was ever acceptable.
If I could look several hundred years into the future, I would be very interested to see how our standards continue to change. Would any of primates, dogs, rats, and so forth still be used as experimental subjects? How about birds or fish?
William,
Clearly no one here will be able to honestly address your obvious observation, that if morality is based on feeling bad, those with the least feelings are the most moral.
They have created their philosophy of materialism, but they refuse to take credit for it.
I don’t know. I probably would not use the term “animal torture category”, simply because I find it needlessly provocative. A colleague of mine (who is catholic, incidentally) and I have discussed the issue of sport fishing a little, and we are both of the opinion that it’s a legitimate question at least. Disclaimer: I don’t currently fish, but I have in the past, although not for sport purposes.
Speaking of honesty, are you planning to address the refutations of your ridiculous assertion that UD is a better venue for open discussion (in this thread)? Or is this just another drive by spew on your part?
Thank you for your opinion. I disagree and think that there should be more of them.
How many are too many, and why is it a problem?
And the relevance of this is?
I don’t have any particular objection to this. It seems to me one can square the abrahamic faiths with both being for or against kind treatment of animals. I have seen examples of both.
Radical skepticism is the epistemological position that knowledge is impossible. I don’t think anyone here is committed to such a view. Of course, I know what you meant to say, which is that when I posit that atheism is a logical consequence of skepticism, then this is somehow a “radical” or “fundamentalist” kind of skepticism. Unfortunately you have not argued for this position, so I’ll just let it stand as another one of your unfounded opinions on something you dislike.
Not what? Compatible with abrahamic religion? I agree. Compatible with kind treatment of animals? Why the fuck not?
More irony as the moral subjectivist attempts to objectify his/her personal moral preferences. Why should I consider “equal treatment” a moral standard in the first place? Why should I consider it “worth striving for”?
Maybe you could correct your mistake of thinking everyone here adheres to this ludicrous and simplistic strawman of a secular or “philosophically materialist” morality.
Also, you should correct your mistake of insinuating that this kind of reasoning is intrinsically linked to materalistic philosophy.
Why should you consider ANY standard moral or worth striving for, whether theistic or secular?
What is your morality based on, rumraket?
Of course the atheists here don’t adhere to this materialistic philosophy, that is the whole point William has made,which seems to have gone right over your head.
There is no logical reason to place morality in the suffering of anyone, under a purely materialistic belief-and yet the materialists don’t want to own this philosophy. Its their hypocrisy William points out, not their lack of a moral compass. They have a moral compass, they are just unable to account for where it comes from.
That you don’t get this is not so surprising, but it is telling anyway.
The capacity to suffer and the desire for most sentient organisms to avoid it.
But that is simply your desire. If someone doesn’t have that desire, by your admission they are as moral as you.
No, his point was that “materialistic philosophy” commits one to a moral view based on the empathy of individuals, and that (according to him) inevitably follows that an absense of empathy is moral perfection on that view.
Basically everything you said is wrong, and William’s reasoning commits the non-sequitur fallacy.
What does this even mean? “place morality in the suffering of anyone”? Can you rephrase it? – it doesn’t make sense to me.
I’m going to assume you meant “base morality on the suffring of anyone”. In which case, there most certaintly is a logical reason: Most of us want to avoid suffering. Given that this is the case, it seems perfectly legitimate and reasonable for us all to agree to take steps to avoid suffering.
Basic biology of a social species, basically. It’s a simple survival strategy that works well. Proven in game theory decades ago, by the way.