Having Your Animal Friends Over For Dinner...

Sometimes people ask me some strange things about how I'd treat animals (full disclosure: I engage discussions on veganism fairly often). As you might glean from the excerpt shared here, my view of certain types of "adventurous vignettes" (if you will) is that they're occasionally entertaining and/or interesting, but generally don't aid in understanding our day to day relationship with animals.

What do you think? Does exploring imagined circumstances in which "extreme/unlikely conditions have to be overcome" help in discovering what really "makes us tick", so to speak?

Or, if you prefer, what would you do on the desert island? =oD

+Deth Eeter: "If one kills an animal and eats it only for the sole purpose of survival is that wrong or should they starve to death?"

That would depend heavily on the moral context of the situation. In the abstract, I personally will always choose life. If that means killing and eating an animal, I have the know-how, so assuming I have the means to kill and eat him or her, then I'm going to do so. If killing and eating a fellow human is my only means of survival, I may likely do that as well... unless it's my wife... or my niece... or someone with a horrifying disease I'd rather not catch...

However, +Deth Eeter, it's probably important to keep in mind that these "desert island" scenarios don't tell us very much about the morality of the person answering the question. Sure, fantastic scenarios will require fantastic actions, but these fantasies do not represent the context we're living in from day to day. It is unlikely in the extreme that I personally will ever be in a situation where my sole option for survival is killing an eating another individual.

As I see it, if we're trying to determine what is "right" or "wrong", we'll do much better to deal with the situations we're actually living in.

+Deth Eeter: "So for you, eating an animal for means of self preservation so as not to starve to death would be acceptable only if it were a matter of survival."

To be clear, I actually didn't make the claim that doing so would be moral per se. I asserted that, regardless of morality, I would choose to live if I found myself in such a bizarre and desperate situation. Nevertheless, I stand by my assertion that this particular thought experiment has little applicability to the overall conversation.

At least, that's how I see it -- I am very interested in what you think about this though?

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This post is one in a series in which excerpts of discussions on veganism from other threads are reposted (or paraphrased) for the sake of expanding the conversation. As always, your thoughts and questions are welcome. See the full collection via the #spommveganchats hash (or perhaps with a more robust search, such as goo.gl/JoxZC).

(For anyone requiring/desiring more context, the original conversation can be found at goo.gl/A6RFrx [EDIT: the original post was was deleted by its creator at some point])

#animalrights #philosophy #health #vegan﻿