Have you read The expanding Circle by Peter singer? If what you want is a direct examination of the ethics, and thus the politics, of animal exploitation, its a good read.
My thoughts, which might be re-iterating someone else's above (I have yet to read the sub threads) is that the feeling of pain and suffering exist on a sliding scale. There is a difference between experiencing pain, and mechanistically reacting to mechanical cellular damage. Plants exist on one end of the spectrum, we on the other. I think the typical farm animals are very very much closer to our end than the plant side.
As we move along this sliding scale, and as the experience of suffering analogous to ours becomes more inescapable, our ethical responsibility to mitigate and prevent that suffering also increases. I have no ethical problem with the farming of vegetables. I have little ethical problem with the farming of fish. I have a large ethical problem with the farming of pigs.
Yet I eat meat. I have lived with and loved vegans, and have spent years that way myself. But I lapse, just like I lapse back to smoking. I know its bad, but do it anyway.
I look forward, somewhat cowardly, to a technological solution which might free me from the forked choice between self-loathing on the one hand, and escape into self deception via moral rationalization on the other. Cultured meat! Meat grown from cells into mere tissue that is no part of a system that has awareness and experience... a vat grown commodity toward which the term 'suffering' is little more applicable than toward the wheat and sugar we feed it. I hope that the obvious economic advantages of such (why waste resources on building/maintaining a brain?) might free me.
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Date: 16/2/11 01:37 (UTC)My thoughts, which might be re-iterating someone else's above (I have yet to read the sub threads) is that the feeling of pain and suffering exist on a sliding scale. There is a difference between experiencing pain, and mechanistically reacting to mechanical cellular damage. Plants exist on one end of the spectrum, we on the other. I think the typical farm animals are very very much closer to our end than the plant side.
As we move along this sliding scale, and as the experience of suffering analogous to ours becomes more inescapable, our ethical responsibility to mitigate and prevent that suffering also increases. I have no ethical problem with the farming of vegetables. I have little ethical problem with the farming of fish. I have a large ethical problem with the farming of pigs.
Yet I eat meat. I have lived with and loved vegans, and have spent years that way myself. But I lapse, just like I lapse back to smoking. I know its bad, but do it anyway.
I look forward, somewhat cowardly, to a technological solution which might free me from the forked choice between self-loathing on the one hand, and escape into self deception via moral rationalization on the other. Cultured meat! Meat grown from cells into mere tissue that is no part of a system that has awareness and experience... a vat grown commodity toward which the term 'suffering' is little more applicable than toward the wheat and sugar we feed it. I hope that the obvious economic advantages of such (why waste resources on building/maintaining a brain?) might free me.