Michael Pollan FTW
Michael Pollan frames my views on the ethics of eating meat. Then hits the nail on the head, hits it again with a sledgehammer, and hangs that framed view on the nail.
I get some really strange reactions from people who are surprised that I curtail my meat, dairy, and egg consumption, yet still love meat and don't mind hopping down to a farm to butcher a chicken or sometimes enjoy plucking my fish from the ocean myself.
But the most important line in the whole essay is this:
"We certainly won't philosophize our way to an answer."
Yes. It is my sincere belief that our sense of ethics is an outcropping of our emotional reactions...our feelings of "goodness" and "badness" given logical legs with which to walk. This is why empirical tests will show people ethically opposed to things that they can't logically conclude unethical (it's the famous "boo-yaay experiment"). The human relationship to animals has a schizophrenic appearance by design-- emotions, as reactions to images, exist by their own inner logic separate from what we have come to see as "the normal logic". This apparent schizophrenia of values is a valuable part of our humanity, and our struggle to reconcile one with the other is also part of it.
I get some really strange reactions from people who are surprised that I curtail my meat, dairy, and egg consumption, yet still love meat and don't mind hopping down to a farm to butcher a chicken or sometimes enjoy plucking my fish from the ocean myself.
But the most important line in the whole essay is this:
"We certainly won't philosophize our way to an answer."
Yes. It is my sincere belief that our sense of ethics is an outcropping of our emotional reactions...our feelings of "goodness" and "badness" given logical legs with which to walk. This is why empirical tests will show people ethically opposed to things that they can't logically conclude unethical (it's the famous "boo-yaay experiment"). The human relationship to animals has a schizophrenic appearance by design-- emotions, as reactions to images, exist by their own inner logic separate from what we have come to see as "the normal logic". This apparent schizophrenia of values is a valuable part of our humanity, and our struggle to reconcile one with the other is also part of it.