Exactly so. I suspect that, in earlier times, these people would have been puritans, inquisitors and flagellants. If they lived in the Middle East, they'd all be in ISIS. For a lot of them, it's about holier-than-thou purity more than it's about the cuddly-wuddly ickle animals.
Nonsense. There is nothing remotely indefensible, intellectually or otherwise, about not wanting to eat meat. About a third of the world manage to do it without drivelling on about it.
It is people who turn it into an ideology and the main reason for this is to establish a moral superiority to make up for the fact that they can no longer have a bacon sandwich.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked'dont you feel better than everybodyelse' by a vegan. They seriously, seriously hate my answer
Well quite. It's impossible to justify prioritising the suffering of animals while living a modern life that invariably involves involvement in the suffering of millions of our fellow human beings. If you are using an iPhone to tweet about the iniquities of the dairy industry, you are effectively admitting that you care more about the suffering of cows than you do about the suffering of the untold numbers of humans horribly exploited to facilitate your moral grandstanding. That to me is an ethically indefensible (indeed almost sociopathic) position and the selectivity of conscience involved in it requires a level of cognitive dissonance I find intellectually repugnant.
Everyone's hands are dirty, I'm afraid. Suffering is the sine qua non of existence. We need to learn to accept that we make moral choices all the time - consciously or unconsciously - to accept the suffering of others as a price worth paying for our pleasure. In that context, getting het up about animals is simply ridiculous.
Last edited by Burney; 01-04-2018 at 10:26 AM.
You need to get away from this notion of innocence. It is a meaningless concept in moral or ethical terms. Animals are neither innocent nor guilty. They simply are.
Is a mosquito innocent or guilty when it's giving you malaria? When rats spread the Black Death were they guilty? No. They're just doing their mosquito and rat thing just as we are doing our human thing.
Nonsense. We are doing our human thing from a position of awareness. We have knowledge of the consequences and morality of our actions. The mosquito does not.
People choose to be fundamentally awful. Corbyn chooses to support the IRA or whichever oppressive dictator takes his fancy on the day. Owen Jones chooses to be a repulsive little gimp and consciously tries to use his position to encourage turning this country into a socialist hellhole, even though he knows the effect this will have on his fellow citizens. peter chooses to support these monsters. sw chooses to spunk his wages on Guinness, beat his children and píss in his wife's wardrobe.
All conscious choices. All guilty.