We do seem to treat animals differently. We eat them, but some people think they ought to be slaughtered humanely. On the other hand, people who kill and eat other humans are not excused because the people were slaughtered humanely.
Whoever quotes a movie in the combox will be summarily shot.
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Well, in the movie The 10th Victim, it imagined a future society in which murder was legal as long as it was consensual. If I remember correctly, there were "game preserves" set up where murder enthusiasts could hunt each other with no legal consequences.
OK, Victor, I'm waiting for my bullet....
No no, you were doing fine. You were courteous and receptive to courtesy...
Like Star, sometimes I feel the need for a random story (thanks for the story about your father Starhopper): One of my clients has a specialty hog farm. He caters to the large Laotian population in my area. It's traditional in the Laotian culture to go down to his farm, choose a pig and butcher it themselves for special events like weddings or New Year's.
I sell products from manufacturers to my clients. Representatives of those manufacturers like to meet the customers using their products and ask to ride along with me as I visit my clients.
I take some sort of grim humor by taking the manufacturer's representatives to the hog farm. The client always meets me where the Laotians are killing and butchering the pigs. God help me, I do like watching the representatives try to talk to the production manager about their packaging products while a pig is being killed and processed.
"I feel the need for a random story"
Stories contain more truth than libraries of textbooks. It's why we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John instead of "1st Theology" and "2nd Theology".
Soylent Green is people?
I feel safe when a gun-grabber threatens to shoot me.;-)
I feel safe when a gun-grabber threatens to shoot me.;-)
But maybe he meant with Moderna! :-O
We might ask the question of why we value human life as something valuable in itself, as opposed to the preservation of life as something that will sustain the overall balance of pleasure over pain. With animals, we consider animal pain to be something to avoid, but animal death is not taken as seriously, even by the likes of Peter Singer.
Strictly speaking, for utilitarians, life is not a value. If you kill someone, and you spare them or the world a pleasure-pain deficit, then it is a good act. If you kill someone, and it hurts the balance of pleasure over pain, then of course it's a bad thing.
so a pure utilitarian could say of the pro-life movement, "The trouble with your pro-life movement is that it places an inordinate value on human life." Someone from Utilitarianland might say "In our society, if there is a homicide, we calculate utilities to see if the homicide produced an overall benefit or an overall deficit. If we determine that the homicide was beneficial, we don't punish it. Why do you punish homicides without checking to see if the homicide maximized utility.
Of course the utilitarianism practiced in utilitarianland is Act Utilitarianism.
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