Sublette County Sheriff K.C. Lehr has received more than 7,000 emails about a Wyoming man who reportedly captured and tormented a wolf before killing it, he told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday.
Some of those are threats.
Lehr said people in his office, as well as Sublette County and Wyoming Game and Fish Department personnel, have been receiving threats — including death threats — stemming from Daniel, Wyoming, man Cody Roberts’ reported capture, torment and killing of a wild wolf in late February.
People hate anyone who wants to shove stuff down their throat. Religious proselytizers, people with strong opinions about meat… Rapists…
For what it’s worth, no, I don’t think it’s wrong to pay for dong meat. Our culture doesn’t like that, but some do. It’s funny how you can say our culture normalizes not viewing dogs as objects. You’re SO close to the point. Just expand that a little bit, and you’ll find that we just hit moral subjectivism.
You’re not a cultural/moral relativist. In the other comment thread I’ll explain the philosophy behind objective morality slowly by helping you build a framework for understanding how we arrive at any piece of knowledge.
In this thread I’ll take a different approach, which is to say functionally nobody is actually a moral relativist. A moral relativist would believe that in Islamic countries, it’s fine that they stone gay people to death because that’s a cultural norm they arrived at. They would believe that raping slaves in the 1840s in America was fine because that was a cultural norm they arrived at.
Nobody actually believes these things in our society, they just use the abstract concept of subjective morality to justify whatever current atrocity they fancy indulging in. For past atrocities that no longer interest you, there’s no moral subjectivism.
People obviously have preferences and tendencies, but sometimes those preferences are wrong. Raping slaves, stoning gays, etc. are not sometimes right based on some subjective collective framework for understanding interactions. Again, I’ll explain the actual philosophy behind this in the other thread, but in this comment I’m just pointing out how nobody actually functionally thinks this way in our society.
It’s similar to how in our society we understand the earth is round, but in past societies they understood it to be flat. The interesting thing is those other societies were wrong, even though they had a different understanding. Personal or even collective understanding is not always the basis for true knowledge. Probably getting too philosophical for what I intended for this comment though, since the other one will get into this more.
And in that other thread I made a simple rebuttal to that view. There are certain things that almost every culture has arrived at as “wrong”. This is the closest thing to moral objectivism as you can get. So, all of your examples here, raping, slavery, killing gays. Notably, they’re almost always crimes against PEOPLE. This is because morality is a system, for humans, to be used for the benefit of humans.
Morality only exists because of the social nature of humans. If we lived entirely alone, we’d just do whatever we want. Because humans don’t function very well like that, we have a series of standards, mostly brought about by the simple idea of empathy for the position of another human. I can put myself in this spot, and it sucks. I don’t want that to happen to me, so I can’t let it happen to anyone else.
Humans, and animals, worldwide have agreed that it’s permissible to eat other species of animal. It’s simply nature. Where we run into issues, and where I think you DO have a moral leg to stand on, is the absolute worst slaughterhouse conditions, factory farms… The “hunter” in this post. People who kill animals to excess, often without intention of actually using the meat. That’s just wasteful and causing suffering for no reason. This is why I said I advocate for reduction of meat use, for sourcing your meat when possible.
Let me pose you a couple of scenarios. What do you think about a subsistence hunter, who lives off the land. Someone who hunts, yes, but uses as much of the animal as they can?
Second scenario, a survival situation. Someone who has been left in an unfortunate situation, where they’re hungry, about to starve, and they happen upon a deer or rabbit they can hunt.
In both of these scenarios, if you believe that morality is objective, then both people are in the wrong. The first shouldn’t use any part of any animal ever, and the second should just die. If morality is objective, and eating meat is objectively wrong, both of the above scenarios are in the wrong. I don’t think you believe that, though. At very least the second scenario, I don’t think any reasonable person would believe the person is in the wrong for killing an animal so that they might survive.
I will admit that there is one angle that I could be swayed on. I’ll give you moral objectivism, if you also give up that morality is relative, as opposed to absolute. Perhaps you can say with certainty that a specific scenario is right or wrong, even if they both include something that is normally morally wrong, such as eating meat. In which case sure, you can make a claim about objectivity, but we still fall flat on the epistemological side. I don’t know the situations of most people who eat meat, and thus I cannot make any kind of true moral claim.
It all boils down to, let people live their lives as long as they’re not doing something completely insane like this person did. You can make the sacrifices it takes to not eat meat, good for you. Others aren’t in that situation for any of a number of reasons, and I’m not going to try to claim superiority to them. If you want to actually spread your gospel, because that’s what it is, then do so with grace and dignity, not vitriol and venom. You might actually change some minds.
My guy, I didn’t even express my view yet when you made that comment. This really comes across as bad faith, because I even expressly said I was going to express my view (future tense). Sometimes it’s okay to actually have a discussion and not try to dismantle the other person’s view before they even had a chance to express it
That’s a crude reduction. If you have conflicting wrongs (e.g a human dies or a rabbit dies), then you choose the one that is less wrong, because you have no other option. This isn’t a moral question, it’s a functional one with a very basic moral consideration (is a human worth more than a rabbit). It should be obvious to you by the very existence of people who abstain from animal products that modern western society is not the kind of place where we’re constantly choosing between the life of a pig and a life of a human.
This should stay in the confines of the other thread, because like I said I didn’t even express my view before you made this comment or the other one. I gave you a chance to express your view, and once you have a chance to understand and internalize mine, then you can try reframing this in that thread, though I think you’ll understand why this doesn’t make sense after you read my other comment.
Exactly, and to be more specific, what you mean by “completely insane” is “morally unjust” and I entirely agree. Let people live their lives as long as what they’re doing isn’t morally unjustified.
Veganism isn’t activism. It’s not a sacrifice. Or I’ll put it another way, it’s only a sacrifice in the way that not raping is a sacrifice. I have a biological urge to eat and have sex, and I want to engage in these acts in a consensual way. Some people might view consent here as unnecessary, and that you should just follow your biological urges and take what you want so long as nature allows it. As I understand it, that’s a disgusting and incorrect way to go about the world.
I propose we simply keep this to one thread from here out, then. It’s hard to keep track of when anything is posted when it’s back and forth in two threads, and if you’re going to accuse me of arguing in bad faith because of that, then keep it to one.
This will be my last reply to this thread.
This is the only part of this I want to really engage with.
I would buy that it’s not a sacrifice, for someone raised in a culture that values not eating meat. If you’re raised from birth to simply eat a vegan diet, you’re right - that’s just life.
It becomes a sacrifice when you ask someone raised in a society that DOES eat meat, for say, 40 years, to not eat meat. You’re asking them to completely change one of the biggest facets of day-to-day life, their diet. I was raised in America, in a family that ate meat 3 times a day. All of my favorite foods have (well, had) meat as the primary ingredient. All of the things I know how to properly prep? Meat-based. You bet your ASS it takes sacrifice to go from meat daily to anything else, just like any other diet change takes sacrifice.
I’m not saying that because woe is me. It’s a sacrifice that is worth making, if not for the moral element, then for the ecological element. It’s also not one I intend to make further sacrifices for. My efforts in changing my diet, the willpower that I can expend doing so, can be better used elsewhere, both for my benefit and society as a whole.
THIS is what I mean when I say that half-measures are fucking great. You can get people on board with half-measures. It’s hard to get anyone on board with a strict all-or-nothing. And, from my perspective, any reduction in meat consumption is undeniably a win. Let’s celebrate wins, instead of obsessing over losses, eh?
I admit, I’m less interested in the moral objective vs moral subjective argument we have going on. Were running into unknowables, and we clearly have a different belief on those unknowables. That’s fine. I’m interested in action. I’m interested in what sort of impact my actions, my rhetoric, have on the world and views of those around me. Those are similarly unknowable, but they have real-world effects, versus just “idk, mortality.”
Agreed on the first part, one thread sounds fine.
I just want to say I was a meat eater for my entire life too up until being a vegan. I wasn’t raised vegan, my family wasn’t vegan, nobody around me was vegan. I still don’t hold that it was a sacrifice. Even if you lived in a society where everyone raped (sounds far fetched but this was allowable 150 years ago to your “property”), it’s not a sacrifice to forego those urges and not engage in what’s been normalized. It’s the bare minimum moral requirement.
Except that it is a sacrifice. Period.
If every person around you is at a BBQ enjoying a fantastic rump roast, and all you got is some… I was gonna say Cole slaw, but that isn’t even vegan usually… idk lettuce? This is EXACTLY my point. It’s a sacrifice because you don’t participate the same way. You don’t get to enjoy the same food, one you may have loved initially. People will be asking you why you aren’t eating. People will be making snide remarks. All of this is friction you do not have to go through, ergo it is a sacrifice.
It may be one that’s worth it -for you- to make. It may be one that brings -you- more joy than the pain it causes. But to pretend it’s not a sacrifice is just… Wrong. A lot of people won’t get that same enjoyment, and a lot of people will feel a lot of pain.
And, the uncomfortable truth I KNOW will be jumped on and attacked - yes, unfortunately, if you live in a society where rape is the norm, to not rape is a sacrifice. Let me state again that sacrifices can, and often should, be made, particularly to lessen human suffering.
The cool thing is, in BOTH of these cases, you can make that sacrifice easier for others by just being decent. Live your life, make the sacrifices, and encourage those around you to make whatever small sacrifice they can, heap praise on them for that, and just… Let the other bits go. Eventually, enough people will make enough sacrifices that society as a whole is different. That’s where we are today, or at least the direction we’re moving in, with things like unconditional support for SA victims and things like the MeToo movement. We’re making it easier for every individual to “sacrifice” so that progress actually happens.
Good on you for choosing the path you have. It’s a good one, just try to be empathetic of those around you. They have different struggles and different priorities, and they may not be in the position to make that sacrifice.
Sorry, I know I said I wouldn’t reply to this thread again, but then I got a reply here first lol. This will be the one I stick to.
I won’t be offended if you don’t reply to this, partially because we both want to focus on the other thread, but mostly because this is an argument of semantics, which is just us trying to align on the way we use words, and not actually a discussion about something important like what’s right or wrong to do.
You’re entirely ignoring the connotation of the word sacrifice. The connotation of sacrifice is so powerful, it’s mentioned in some definitions, e.g:
“A sacrifice is a loss or something you give up, usually for the sake of a better cause”
I wouldn’t call not raping a slave a sacrifice, even though (to use your words) “you don’t participate the same way, you don’t get to enjoy the same [biological pleasures], one[s] you may have loved initially. People will be asking you why you aren’t [satisfying your primal desires]. People will be making snide remarks. All of this is friction you do not have to go through, ergo it is a sacrifice”. Yet, in common English, it’d be ridiculous to say someone who stops raping their slaves is sacrificing something, because it heavily implies that they’re giving something up for the sake of some grand cause, when really all they’re doing is not engaging in morally reprehensible behavior. It’s not virtuous to not inflict suffering, it’s a moral obligation.
It may be something you say at a technical level given some definition you find, but if you’re actually out with your friends, and someone mentions “oh did you know [some slave owner] stopped raping his slaves because he found religion?” you wouldn’t unironically say “damn what a sacrifice”.
And my point is, those things may be absolutely massive for one person, enough that they’d rather just go with status quo, instead of trying something else. Be the light that lets them see outside of status quo.
Done with this thread, forrealz this time.