Subject:
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Flesh eaters stole my brain (was Re: Why is cockfighting bad?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Mon, 24 Jul 2000 02:42:30 GMT
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Viewed:
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1828 times
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This debate has been churning along (very) nicely (and quite civilly, as these
go, I think the same old players are getting better at debating nicely)
without too much input from me since I ducked and ran (:-) but one nugget here
got me to thinking. Not sure I am making any definitive statement, take it as
grist for the mill and that's all.
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Christopher L. Weeks writes:
> But not all animals; how about insects? If we could grind up a zillion
> drosophila and harvest the protein, would we, by your paradigm, be morally • able
> to eat it? Somewhere else on this thread it was asserted that fruit flies
> don't feel pain--if not, and since their responses (as many insects') are
> autonomic, then is there any moral wrong commited in consuming them? That
> might be worth considering--the ants in an acre of topsoil outweigh the soil,
> so they'd provide a nearly limitless source of nutrition to those willing to
> consume them.
Cite please! More ants than everything else put together? Even earthworms?
Wow. That doesn't sound right, somehow. Amazing if true, though. (neat fact
for winning drinks from your friends if referenceable!!! not that I'd ever
take drinks from my friends, oh no, not me)
> > > In addition, if we breed animals with no brains or pain receptors, are we
> > > then free to slay them for food, since they won't feel pain or know anything
> > > about their environments?
> >
> > Yes. Absolutely.
>
> Whoa! I didn't expect you to say that. I'll have to think about
> where to go from there...
Here's one place... I agree with Chris that I'd rather not have to be in the
biz of raising animals to eat them. He'd rather we didn't eat meat, I'd rather
we got our meat from vats (the tissue cultures are, in a sense, animals with
no brains).
Stangl got it right, shrewd farmers have nothing to fear from vats... and the
non shrewd ones ought to have the props knocked out from under them... a high
rate of bankruptcies in farm country, while personally painful for the
bankruptees, is a good thing at the macro level, as I see it... We need to fix
70 years or more of distortions
How do we get from here to there correctly?
Leaving aside the morality of the genetic manipulation aspects of things, to
me there is a bit of a question I haven't satisfactorily analysed about
animals contributing stuff. If it's not OK to eat them (to me an open
question, at best, remember, I say it is) is it OK to slice them up and get
stuff out of them? That is, where is this nice KC marbled steak tissue that we
grow in our vat to come from in the first place? Some cow is going to have to
go under the knife to give up a sample. Or under the needle to lose an embyro
to be transmogrified into the tissue through developmental and growth stage
(see, there's my cousin and her fruit flies again) manipulation.
I'm thoroughly OK with that. (Animals don't have rights the way we do) But is
Chris?
And where is Dave going to get his new kidney? Pigs? Some convict? If it's not
his own tissue, do we need a waiver on file from the donor? Again, to me, no
problem, organs are sellable as are tissue samples, but clear title must be
established to avoid problems. Something that includes a test of "sound mind"
will be good. (Once we move away from our current government monopoly on organ
sale (and a "donation" is a sale, the seller just isn't the donor) and get the
organ market opened a bit wider so the free market can reduce the waiting lits
for organs, I can forsee a new market for something like title insurance to
help organ recepients clear their conscience and avoid lawsuits)
Another tangential point...
I guess I'd be mentally OK with ritualistic consumption of human flesh, if the
flesh was given up voluntarily by the human in question because the human
WANTED me to eat it (c.f. _Stranger in a Strange Land_, where Michael
Valentine Smith relates how the Martians all eat their dead to honor them...).
But I'd have a hard time choking it down. Heck I had a hard time choking down
a shrimp at an IBM awards lunch (back when I was a lot younger) which I was
eating because I wanted to show respect. (long story). My brain has a
particularly poor control connection to my gorge reflex, almost anything can
make me a bit nauseated. *There's* something I'd rather have edited out of my
genes, but too late, my kids got it already.
++Lar
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