peter singer. wow if all men looked that good at 60. damn.
and more genius from him ::::
"For nomadic societies, there was no point in owning anything that one could not carry, but once humans settled down and developed a system of money, that limit to acquisition disappeared. Accumulating money up to a certain amount provides a safeguard against lean times, but today, it has become an end in itself, a way of measuring one’s status or success, and a goal to fall back on when we can think of no other reason for doing anything, but would be bored doing nothing. Making money gives us something to do that feels worthwhile, as long as we do not reflect too much on why we are doing it."
and from his interview:::::
Some people might reject your characterization of the pleasure or pain animals experience in relation to human beings and for that reason don’t feel the need to become vegan or vegetarian. How would you appeal to such people to change their lifestyles?
I’m not sure why they’re rejecting what I say about animal pleasure and pain. Pretty much everyone agrees animals can feel pleasure and pain. It’s hard to find anyone, scientists or anyone else, who would deny that animals can feel pain. The only real issue is how much pain can they feel and is the pain of being at a somewhat lower cognitive level to be taken as seriously as the pain of beings at a higher cognitive level.
But I would ask them to think about humans at lower cognitive levels, whether they’re newborn babies or humans with serious intellectual disabilities and say, do we really want to ignore and overlook their pain just because they can’t use language or are not able to tell us about their pains in detail? I guess I would try and convince people by asking them to get over their bias against nonhuman animals and treat nonhuman animals at least as well as you’d treat humans at a similar cognitive level.
How do you respond to those who argue that since humans are still animals in the biological sense of the word, it doesn’t make sense to make an “unnatural” switch to becoming herbivores, especially given the omnivorous nature of our genetic relatives like many of the great apes or other mammals?
What is wrong with that argument is the fallacy that you can argue what is supposedly natural to what is right. All sorts of things may be natural if you look at human evolutionary history. You could say war is natural, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to prevent war. You could say that male dominance of society is natural; you could possibly even argue that slavery is natural. But none of these things are right. We intervene in nature all the time, and the question is when we’re justified in doing so.
This is one case where even if it is natural for us to be omnivores, we know we can live very well without eating animal products and that’s a better thing to do. Incidentally, for those who do talk about what’s natural, of course, factory farming is totally unnatural by any stretch of the imagination. It’s contrary to the nature of animals, it’s unnatural to take animals off grazing land and then have to grow grain to feed them.