Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
Hang on. It's not that arbitrary . We're not simply projecting our feelings onto animals. We've feeling empathy for them, they're living creatures and we can relate to feelings of suffering that they may feel. Surely it's borderline psychopathic if we didn't feel such empathy for them. I also think it's rather patronising, albeit quite funny, to suggest that this phenomenon is confined to a Disneyfied view of the world where they sing and dance for us.
I admit there is a degree of hypocrisy to the fact I am not a vegetarian which I mostly get away with because the killing is abstracted away from me but also because I try not to buy products where the animal suffers and because I view the use of some animals for food as ethical different to killing them for sport.
Anyway unlike four years ago I probably wouldn't oppose this ban being lifted. Not because I think fox hunting is a good thing but because I dislike the idea of the Government passing laws and criminalising people unless there is a really good reason to so. My own view of the ethicality of Fox Hunting is certainly not a good enough reason.
However we've had this discussion before haven't we? I am surprised you're arguing about arbitrary morality and illiberal legislation because I think that we were on opposite sides of this debate when it came to Gay Marriage. Unless I misunderstood your position (which is possible) you were against the legalisation of it because of your own moral code whereas I was both for it in terms of morality but also believed that it wasn't the Governments place to enforce your/their morality on other people. What's the difference between the Government enforcing someone's moral view of Fox Hunting and the Government enforcing someone else's moral view of Marriage? Surely you already accept there is a such a thing as morality derived from a 'higher power'. Be it God or empathy for animals.
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You throw terms like "borderline psychopathic" around far too freely. It simply shows a severe lack of awareness of your own culture's history and development. You can't, at a stroke, classify whole swathes of the past and present population of these islands as "borderline psychopathic" just because you find their behaviour distasteful.
And you say you're not simply reading your own feelings on to animals while at the same time saying you want to "relate to suffering they may feel" .... "may" being the operative word here. You don't know, so what feelings are you assuming to be at play? Can you put yourself into the mind of a fox, or can you in fact only ever hope to put yourself in the mind of a person trying to imagine what it might be like to be a fox? No amount of method acting is going to get you close to understanding what being an animal is like, not least because animals lack a sense of self which would enable them even to decide for themselves how they feel.
The read-across to the gay marriage debate is, I believe, the opposite of what you have suggested. Marriage as an institution predates our culture and our legislature. Until the 18th century you could be married without relying on any statute at all: the phrase "common law wife/husband" is only now beginning to fall out of common parlance, despite it having been legislated away centuries ago.
All over the world, throughout history, human societies have recognised a lifetime pairing between one man and one woman. In a small part of the world, at one particular moment in history, a few states with a common, largely post-religious, materialist philosophical outlook, have sought not simply to extend a legal privilege - reform to the civil partnerships laws could have achieved that - but to legislate against an ancient belief, still current in most of the world, regarding what marriage, fundamentally, is. If you think that is not what is proposed, then bookmark this thread and we'll take up the discussion the first time Stonewall finds a test case to take to the ECHR.
I digress.
I should make a point about your conflating arbitrary morality and religious belief. Again, that's a myopic position to hold; the judgments of right and wrong that an individual makes for himself are simply not on the same philosophical plane as the external, absolute truth claimed by any of the world's major religions, whether or not you believe in the God that stands behind them. Even taken as mere philosophies of life, they have been around for millennia and have survived the rise and fall of empires , and will survive the fall of ours. Arbitrary morality, it isn't.