The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten

I'm not sure if I follow you on the theological purposes. Do you mean like whether it's ethically right of the guy to eat the pig? That is indeed a good question. I guess I'm having a hard time grasping your thought process because I assume we approach religion a bit differently. Anyways I eat pig, but the next time I have one then I'll definitely think about this passage. Douglas Adams is just great!

The question is even a bit more complicated than that, Joe. It involves the question of what is the teleological purpose of people vis a vis that of pigs (or other people). In other words, if one of the teleological purposes for people is to help pigs (or other people) fulfill their teleological purposes, then the morality of our actions is directly related to helping or hindering others to fulfill that purpose, whether or not they want it fulfilled.

It's a complicated question, but in general, I think that we are supposed to help others fulfill their purposes by persuasion, not by coercion; that is, the primary means of helping others to fulfill their purpose is by offering them the gospel.

That isn't an excerpt from The Restaurant at the end of the Universe. It does parallel very closely a scene from Restaurant, so hopefully Baggini cited Adams.

Matt:
A pig could legitimately live out its horizontal ordering by trying to be the best pig it can be in a eudaimonistic way. At the same time, the pig may live out its vertical ordering by serving as food for a higher order.

Interesting. In the past, Joe has defended the idea that revulsion can help to guide moral reasoning. In this case, I feel significant revulsion regarding the idea that humans would create a rational, thinking being whose purpose is to serve them rather than itself.

You seem to be arguing that this sort of moral ordering is unobjectionable and parallels our relationship with God (potters, clay, and all that).

Joe,

To what extent do you think that the moral issues depend on the cognitive abilities of the animal? Compare Priscilla with the decerebrate chicken.

To go along with kbiel in saying that there is an attempt to determine morals without reference to God:

The desire of the pig to be eatten, what we have been calling its "telos," is a purely physical physical telos, i.e., it is genetically determined. Usually, a teleology may be used to judge whether something is moral or immoral depending on how it relates to a spiritual telos, something in the realm of what Matt Lytle argues above. If there are no spiritual implications for the pig's telos (which in this case is physical), then the moral implications may be said to be neutral, with respect to the pig.

In essence, the pig has simply been given a new instinct, and nobody really judges the morality of birds flying south for the winter or building nests. (What it means that a human has instilled this instinct instead of God via nature is another issue).

Again, all that I have said above is with respect to the pig. The issue of morality with respect to the Max is whether or not eatting the pig is a depreciation of God's creation. As the Old Testament allowed people to eat meat, and as the tradition of eatting meat has been well founded in most other civilizations (almost as if it has been a part of general revelation from God), one could argue that eatting meat does not depreciate God's creation.

After being a vegetarian for two years, I ate a steak at my Dad's barbecue.

The pain in my stomach the next day was excruciating.

Not all cerebral or philosophical, sorry, but I thought I'd let everyone know - Mr. Pork Feast is in for a rough couple of days.

Does this strike anyone as odd in view of the fact that God supposedly commanded the Jews not to eat pigs? Now, what's the pig's purpose under that scenario?

That 'supposedly' is a real killer isn't it? How do we know that it wasn't somebody's misinterpretation of what God wanted? After all, the Jews were a stiff-necked people. Maybe somebody in charge of the interpretation had a learned revulsion response to eating pig and made up their own rules like somebody else did with divorce, eh? Or maybe the pigs were being saved to tempt Gentiles to accepting the Way.

Lets say we didn't need to kill the animal at all, but we could grow the pork in a lab in big sheets by using pig stem cells? [This is something scientists are already experimenting with] How would that be viewed from a Christian perspective?

Church of Integrity: He said teleological, not theological.

Joe: I'm wondering why you would assume that a pig's teleological purpose would require the pig to remain conscious. The very possibility of something's purpose being to be eaten shows that a teleological purpose need not require its continued consciousness. Just because the pig's purpose exists and is not just to be eaten does not mean that its purpose requires its being conscious. Or am I missing something?

You're not really talking about pigs here, are you? Are you trying to suggest a teleological basis for not killing fetuses in cases where people argue that the fetus would (if it could reason at that level) recognize that its life would not be worth living?

fabulinus: The fundamental teleological purpose cannot be mere reproduction. Reproduction involves the perpetuation of something, but it's not mere perpetuation that makes it good. You can perpetuate bad things. It's the perpetuation of good that's good. So you need to ground the purpose of reproduction in some other good. Once you do that you'll have some more fundamental purpose for pigs.

Actually though, I believe degradation is quite a bit different from dehumanization. While I can agree with the possibility that pornographic material would degrade both viewer and participant, I hardly think pornography is any more dehumanizing than the film industry as a whole in as much as it has a tendency toward reduction of watchers into demographic statistics. With the exception of live concerts, the music industry is not too very different. While I think people accept the fact that the film and music industry dehumanize them, I can only imagine people actively seeking to participate in being degraded.

Does the pig want to be eaten? Not necessarily, but I think the pig accepts that death is part of life, and doesn't worry over much about what happens to it after death since it cannot change that. By the same token, I don't think pigs put much consideration into determining whether they are the victims of degradation or not, which is only implicit consent, and not explicit consent.

Obviously, I think he's wrong. But while I think it is an easy case to make on a personal level ("Individuals shouldn't dehumanize other individuals" is just a variation of the Golden Rule) I wasn't sure how to frame it in a broader moral prohibition that we shouldn't even allow the dehumanization of people, even if they have consented.

Joe,

Perhaps you may want to pull from the Buddhist idea of karma. Karma is not judgement but more like cause and effect. If you are violent, for example, it will cause you spiritual harm. This has nothing to do with a judgement of your violence. You may have needed to hack 20 people with an axe for 'moral reasons' yet that doesn't change the fact doing so will harm you just as much as someone working in a radiation lab is going to be exposed to rays that will harm his health.

Dehumanizing other people, therefore really leads to dehumanizing yourself. I'm not sure this applies to the consumption of pornography as a rule. Why not movies in general? We expect actors to put on a show to entertain us by fooling us into believing the story on the screen is real. We don't care about the actor's 'real life'. You watch Tom Cruise in, say, "A Few Good Men" you expect him to show you someone else. If he started talking about scientology you'd decare the movie a failure and his acting pathetic.

I think the danger of dehumanizing others (and therefore onesself) comes not so much in the consumption of media but in our actual interactions with other humans. I'm not really 'dehumanizing' Tom Cruise when I expect his movie to entertain and fool me into thinking he is someone other than Tom Cruise. The movie is just an image of light and sound that Tom helped create. If I expected Tom to show up at my house and perform skits for me regardless of his needs as a human being that would be dehumanizing.

You may want to explore the link between consuming media and how it impacts our relationships with others. This will not lead to easy rules that I think you want to see "pornography always wrong, always dehumanizes". I think you'll find it varies on an individual basis. All people have problems relating to other people properly, some are better than others though.

Smm
Does the pig want to be eaten? Not necessarily, but I think the pig accepts that death is part of life, and doesn't worry over much about what happens to it after death since it cannot change that. By the same token, I don't think pigs put much consideration into determining whether they are the victims of degradation or not, which is only implicit consent, and not explicit consent.

I'm not sure I like this reasoning. Certainly if I tried to apply this to Terry Schiavo you'd be aghast but the pig has a functioning brain and its behavior certainly seems to indicate it doesn't want to die, that it doesn't 'accept death' but fights it as any other human or animal does. I've read that slaughterhouses have to insulate the sounds of the cows final screaming because should that sound reach the ears of cows on trucks headed to the slaughterhouse or cows outside it on the way in they will become uncontrollable. It's hard for me not to believe these animals don't feel terror at the face of death.

In both the Muslim and Jewish religion the rules for slaughtering animals were designed to end the animal's life as painlessly and quickly as possible. I think this was done for two reasons. One to minimize the suffering of the animals which means they are entitled to respect as living things. The second was to recognize that humans, being animals, are almost always going to eat meat but at least the spiritual harm humans do to themselves by killing would be minimized. If you doubt that imagine a sick, sadistic person working in a slaughterhouse indulging himself day after day in killing the animals in long, drawn out ways. What type of person would he be after a year at such a job? (Native Americans also had their own ceremonies where the animals were 'thanked' for donating their lives to help people)

I'm not going to advocate one should be a vegetarian but I do think it is a good thing for one's character. On the other hand I eat meat and I don't think I could get away from that any time soon. Most of the world's religions seem to have found a comprimise where the damage done by killing is contained and minimized as much as possible. The analogy here I would use is OSHA regulations telling companies that they have to limit their employees exposure to harmful chemicals. There's no getting around that we need to use harmful chemicals and we probably can't eliminate the risk but it is at least contained and controlled to a degree.

So while I agree the Old Testament doesn't demand vegetarianism, I doubt it commands the eating of meat. Instead I think it tried to minimize the harm from eating meat as much as was reasonable with human nature. Whether your God building a religion or a human making one up human nature puts certain constraints on you. Make your religion too hard for normal humans to follow and it will be forgotten about and never passed down. Make it too easy and there's no point to it.

Certainly if I tried to apply this to Terry Schiavo you'd be aghast but the pig has a functioning brain and its behavior certainly seems to indicate it doesn't want to die, that it doesn't 'accept death' but fights it as any other human or animal does.

And sometimes a pig is not a proxy for a human.

I've read that slaughterhouses have to insulate the sounds of the cows final screaming because should that sound reach the ears of cows on trucks headed to the slaughterhouse or cows outside it on the way in they will become uncontrollable.

PETA propaganda. Don't get too carried away anthropomorphizing animals, you'll start sounding like a shill for them as well.

In both the Muslim and Jewish religion the rules for slaughtering animals were designed to end the animal's life as painlessly and quickly as possible.

So when in Zabiha the muslim cuts the cow from ear to ear across the jugular veins, this is as painless as possible?

Okay, so maybe it was father-in-law propaganda instead of PETA. I don't know how long ago your father-in-law was looking at taking that type of job, but slaugther houses (yes, even non-halal or non-kosher) usually stun the animals prior to cutting the throat. This has been recommended practice for a few years. The mechanical difference between halal and non-halal, is that the non-halal system recommends as small an opening as possible (typically the normal width of the vein) to bleed the cow from the jugular and can be done with a mechanical knife whereas the halal system requires a non-mechanical knife drawn completely across the neck of the beast. Sounds to me like there is the possibility that the halal slaughter may carry the risk of being less humane if the knife doesn't happen to stay sharp enough. Be that as it may though, you're anthropomorphizing when you suggest cows feel terror in the same way a human would.

Well you have me there, my father-in-law had visited that slaughterhouse many decades ago, probably in the early 50's. On top of that NJ isn't exactly a livestock capital so even then it is possible the slaughterhouse was behind the times.

I don't mean to anthropomorphize cows but they do react to threats. I can't say what they experience as 'terror' is what we experience. I suspect that since we are both mammels the reaction is similiar but you're right we don't really know.

I don't think this impacts the arguments above. Killing does dehumanize the person doing the killing even if the animal really is some type of unfeeling machine that only appears to be feeling pain, terror, etc. Since this is mostly unavoidable, though, we do and should try to kill animals in a way that limits their pain and suffering if only for our own sakes.

Again all you are saying is true but I would say that such killing is so trivial that it does next to no harm.

The analogy I would use is workers in a plant that uses lots of dangerous chemicals. They will almost certainly be exposed which will cause them some degree of harm. Since we need products made by dangerous chemicals there is going to be some exposure no matter what but we can at least minimize it.

So yes people who don't eat meat because they don't want to lessen killing are not idiots and are doing a good thing. I don't think most of us are ready for that though. Yes I acknowledge even non-meat eaters have to kill plants, microbes etc. to survive.

Likewise we no longer make lead paint but we still need paint and other things that are toxic so that's life. I'm not really sure what you're arguing about with me (unless its just habit for you now). Are you saying we should just be as sadistic as some of us would like to be when killing animals? How exactly are you being harmed here smm?

Not quite, I said that the dehumanization is harmful but steps can be taken to contain and minimize it. It will still exist and still be harmful but at a much lower level (just as it is a lot safer to work in a factory with toxic chemicals today than it was 45 years ago but it still will harm your health).

At some levels killing is trivial enough to have no measurable harm, IMO. This would include plants, bacteria killed by your soap or antibiotics etc. So yea I would tell the vegan not to lose sleep over his consumption of a carrot just as a doctor would tell a patient not to worry that they live 300 miles away from a chemical factory.

I think there can be a lot of dehumanization when people slaughter animals which is why almost every culture in history has developed procedures to counter this. In Jewish and Islamic cultures rules attempt to minimize pain and suffering, in Native American cultures rituals were developed to recognize & thank the 'donation' the animals made of their lives etc.

buy animals raised in a humane environment, fed organic food (not McCrap which is cows fed to cows) and slaughtered humanely.

Genesis states that we are to be stewards of the earth. we are doing a very poor job. know where your food comes from and respect it.

I think you're trying to say if you act like your food is a living person then you'll dehumanize yourself because eventually you have to eat and doing so you will believe you have killed another person.

No, that was not what I was saying. If all you are doing is guessing, guess again.

You're not going to like this answer but it is true. They do not believe they are killing a child therefore they are protected from 'dehumanization'.

Why am I not going to like what answer? What was the question that you supposedly answered? The dehumanization in abortion happens when people believe an abortion is not killing a child, when an abortion is performed, when an abortion is obtained, when an abortion is sold, or even when trying to justify abortion. The unborn child is the victim of that dehumanization. Do you think you are protected from it?

Sincere ignorance is a defense against sin. If you take an aspirin, believing it to be harmless, and it causes a miscarriage you are not guilty of anything. If, though, you know it may cause one then you cannot claim innocence.

You are confusing accidental with purposeful. When you walk into an abortion clinic whether as a patient or a provider, you know what you are there for. No pregnant woman takes an aspirin planning to kill her unborn child.

And how does sincere ignorance protect those that have been told what they are doing is wrong but choose not to believe it is wrong anyway?

You mean like how some people are told global warming is a very serious thing but insist on not believing it?

You sound like a Jack Chic tract here. I just told you aspirin may cause a misscarriage. Someone else can very well tell you taking an aspirin may prevent one (thereby saving a life if you believe the fetus is a full human beign).

Perhaps the people doing the telling lack credibility. Perhaps they did not present convincing arguments. Perhaps the people just didn't have the time to think about or examine their arguments in any detail (as I'm sure you will spend no time examining the question of whether aspirin has any impact on miscarriages)

But it is serious... just as serious as the subject of global cooling was 30 years ago.....

Actually it's much more serious. 'Global cooling' 30 years ago was a handful of journal articles and a single Newsweek cover. Even at the time it was treated very skeptically by the scientific community. But the point holds, you've been warned about global warming...if 30 years from now all hell is breaking loose you can't say you didn't hear about it just as the person who had an abortion didn't hear the pro-life protester screaming 'murder' back then.

You probably will not care to know that global cooling's proposed mechanism was particulates from pollution would block out the sun. Since the 70's, though, pollution laws have been very successful at clamping down on particulates so that is also part of the story.

So perhaps the people that do the telling in that case really do lack the credibility and convincing arguments, eh? But then again, they've convinced you haven't they? So you think maybe if they can silence all the rest of the critics of their theory they can become more credible?

You seem to be under the delusion that Al Gore single handedly came up with the theory of global warming and has been the only person saying anything about it. In reality it has emerged from at least two decades of scientific debate and observation. So no I'm not going to be hung up on whether or not Gore reduces his CO2 use (actually he says he purchaes offsets but then I don't really care).

So where does that leave us? Oh yeah, you don't think the Church's arguments are convincing concerning whether abortion is murder or not, and you certainly question their credibility right? Perhaps it's because some unbelieving person somewhere says the fetus is not a person. I wonder what it was about their credentials that made them more credible to you.

YOu seem to be hyperventiliating over human nature. Fact is we all hear lots of things every day and it is also a fact that they cannot all be true because they usually contradict each other. As for the Church's arguments, it seems to be you that are rejecting them. To be a sin a person must be aware that an act is morally wrong. No the Jack Chic routine of "what do you mean you didn't know, don't you remember that smelly guy trying to hand you a piece of paper at the train station 45 years ago! That was your warning!!!" don't cut it. If a woman went to the Church to confess having an abortion the process of penance would require the priest to counsel her and determine what her mindset was at the time and help her understand the nature of what she did in the eyes of the Church. The actual degree of her sin could range anywhere from very minor to very grave. (Another Church argument you seem to selectively ignore; an individual cannot judge another person's sin, only God can. This is why the Church doesn't just make up lists of penalties for various sins like 1 abortion = 1 year of mass every day or 1 one night stand = 30 days of volunteer work....it doesn't work like a legal code).

So again I'll state whether or not the arguments are convincing are not relevant. There may be an article in a medical journal showing aspirin causes miscarriages. The arguments in t his article may be unimpeachable...perfectly convincing. It doesn't mean, however, that you're guilty should you give your wife an aspirin if you're not aware of it or even if you are but never bothered to really check it out. Now if you did check it out and give your wife the aspirin because you want a miscarriage then you have a totally different story.