Skywritings - ethics

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die?

(Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 05 May 2013 18:36:02 +0100

And if you have the courage
to face the cost of your lunch:

This is how it's done
day in and day out
24/7
worldwide,
industrially

-- and for ye "faithful,"
scripturally

Philip Wollen's Impassioned Plea Against Animal Slaughter

(Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 04 May 2013 10:54:00 +0100

The Monstrous Milk Industry

(Stevan Harnad) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:27:33 +0100

If this does not make you a vegan,
you need to ask yourself whether you have a heart...

Anyone who replies that this is natural or justifiable
makes an equally good case for torture, rape, slavery and murder.

All in our genes. All practiced in self-interest.

But wait for the day when it is for you and yours
that you must plead for mercy
from the monstrousness you have ignored, tolerated and drawn upon
lifelong.

And from which you avert your gaze now

"Samuel was less than a day old when he was torn away from his mother. He was a young jersey calf whose mother was kept continually pregnant in order to keep her milk production unnaturally high so it could be sold for human consumption. Although nature intended the milk for Samuel, none was afforded him. Samuel was penned alone, chained at the neck and unable to interact with the other calves.

"The day I found Samuel, he had been loaded into a transport trailer with many other young calves and taken to a Canadian livestock auction. But Samuel was very sick and should never have been loaded and transported. He was so sick, in fact, that he could not even make it through the auction ring.The auction workers dragged Samuel to the back of the auction and discarded him there with no food, water or medical attention. There he was left to die alone, just as he had lived alone.

"I saw Samuel buried in the straw with only his small face poking out and thought he was dead until he started convulsing. My first thought was to load him into my car and get him to a vet who could peacefully end his suffering but he was too far gone. Samuel died in my arms while I stroked and comforted him. Sometimes this is all we can do for the animals we find - provide them with the dignity, care and comfort that they've never been shown.

"Samuel is the hidden face of the dairy industry - one that profits off the milk of a mother who will never nourish her child. Veal calves are sickly, traumatized and lonely. Their mothers are forced into a life of production and are heartbroken, forced to endure an endless cycle of birth and loss."

Source: Twyla Francois, director of investigations at Mercy For Animals Canada.

PHOTO: is of Samuel (R.I.P.) dying and discarded at a Canadian livestock auction

Paschal Pagan Psychopathy: Agnus Dei

(Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 14:41:20 +0100

How can anyone with a shred of decency believe that deliberately causing suffering to the innocent creatures that are the symbol of Christ's suffering can be the way to atone for Christ's suffering?

Trading Recipes vs. Righting Wrongs

(Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 18:56:33 +0000

Vegans.

Bless them for abstaining from the horrors most people uncaringly impose on innocent animals.

But I wish they were less interested in trading tasty recipes than in righting animal wrongs.

After all, it's because of the uncaring drive to satisfy their tastes -- and not because of the needs of survival or health -- that people keep imposing those horrors on innocent animals.

Facts

(Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:58:29 +0000

"Science" -- testing truth experimentally -- is certainly preferable to telling and believing tall tales.

But that's not enough to fill the gap the tall tales fill.

The tales are not just about what's true but about what's right. They mostly get that wrong too, but that's where the real work lies -- and "science" does not show the way.

Banging on about tales of hell-fire being worse than rape is not showing the way.

Nor is scolding elderly church-goers.

"Science" is psychopathic, or at best autistic and actuarial. Ethics is incomparably more important: A planet where people are doing right, even if they are believing tall tales, is infinitely better than a scientistic juggernaut driven only by experimental facts.

And that fact is not a "scientific" one.

The Meaning of Life

(Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 15:29:10 +0100

The meaning of life is:

If you and yours are healthy, safe, well-sheltered and well-fed then life is about helping those who are not.

Pannonian Paté

(Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 19:06:35 +0100

Pannonias Poster-PM, Viktor Orban, has found yet another scapegoat to blame for Hungarys economic and social problems.

No, it still cant be the fault of his own inspired policies of appropriating peoples private pensions, imposing a flat income tax on the populace, inflating taxes on foreign companies and banks, dismantling the independence of the banks and the judiciary, punitive press control laws, government-side FUD campaigns against philosophers critical of Mr. O, crony political and commercial appointments, property appropriation, self-enrichment and corruption, self-perpetuating rigging of electoral boundaries, covert and overt support to irredentist and fascistic groups and sentiments and using his unearned but technical super-majority to ram through an undemocratic and self-serving new constitution designed to keep his party, appointees and sentiments in power for decades to come.

None of these are to blame.

Now that its not the Russians with their uniforms who are responsible for Hungarys malaise, but the Europeans with their suits (joining a long line of prior oppressors Turks, Austrians, Reds, Whites, other political parties, foreigners, gypsies, and, of course, the Jews) Mr. Orban now ascribes magyar malheurs to Europes preoccupation with protecting geese and pigs from maltreatment. The lament will sell well with the ladies who spend their time with geese heads firmly wedged between their thighs, forcing food down their throats till their livers get sufficiently diseased to cater for the French appetite for paté de foie gras. Hungary is one of the last European paté suppliers but the supply of putative perpetrators of Pannonias problems (always excepting, of course, themselves) is inexhaustible.

Meditations on Mortality: Opting-In To No-Opt-Out Apoptosis

(Stevan Harnad) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:51:15 +0000

Dan Dennett [DD] thinks (now) that there would be more peace of mind in one's last years (or maybe in one's earlier ones too) if everyone were signed up ab ovo for a no-opt-out 80-85 apoptosis policy.

When I was in my sophomoric teens, I contemplated having a vasectomy, "It is selfish and wrong for people to reproduce -- to create, out of nothing, a potential for suffering, with the patient being someone other than themselves. (No potential for pleasure can compensate for this.)"

Friends said: Are you sure? What if, when you get older, you start to feel broody. You may rue this decision. It's irreversible. You can't opt out afterwards.

My (sophomoric) reply: "If I change my mind later on, it serves me right. What I think and feel now is right. If I feel otherwise at a later date, then I'll be wrong, then. I disavow my later avatar."

But I never got 'round to having that vasectomy. And I did reach the broody age, when I was glad I had not, and declared my prior callow incarnation to have been the one that was wrong.

But I never got 'round to breeding either. (And now I've reached an age where I think I was right the first time.)

All by way of an analogy with Dan's stance. What about freedom? And variations and variability in the life cycle? Is humankind to be pre-inscribed in a genetically engineered, no-opt-out 80-85 apoptosis policy? Without consultation? After a plebiscite? Does everyone feel that's right for them?

Will Dan feel that way in the hale, compos mentis and creative '90s that I fervently wish upon him?

If Chris Hitchens had remained alive, compos mentis and creative till his '90s, would he not have opted to keep struggling to live, think and write till the very last moment, as he did, mortally ill in his '60s?

§ § CODA § §
DD: "Stevans response is all very sensible and heartfelt but he never gets around to addressing the question of whether his vision of freedom could actually be counterproductive. All the people vegetating away in nursing homes probably share (or shared, when they were compos mentis) his vision of unshackled freedom. Odysseus showed us that if there are some things, some adventures, you want to have, you have to tie yourself to the mast so that you can avoid the negative after-effects of getting what you want."

I might be willing to pin myself to a biometric mast, but not to a chronometric one!

DD: "A question for those who just dont see the point Im trying to make: suppose today you got a credible offer of a two hundred year lifespan by taking a purple pill (and its free, if that matters). You have to take the pill now, and you dont get any guarantees at all about what sort of life youll be living after, say, your 90th birthday. Do you take the pill? Think of how knowing something about your longevity will probably distort the rest of your life if you take the pill. Is it obvious that you should opt for the pill?"

Yes, it's obvious, dead obvious. (And opt for euthanasia -- elective or biometric -- if ever you opt to opt out.)

Neda (Iran, June 21)

(Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:07:00 +0100

meaning of martyr
innocent victim
just cause - not
monster
or moron
murdering innocents
with bullet
or bomb belt

Sociopathic Sanctimony

(Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:41:29 +0000

It is hard to say whose brand of betrayal is the most repugnant: that of the pitiless pedants, or the well-meaners purporting to be prolonging sufferers' pain to protect others, or the metaphysical monsters who solemnly invoke the sanctity of the "right" of another to continue suffering on account of an article of faith to which the monster subscribes but the sufferer does not.

The sociopathic sanctimony of those who raise the slightest justification for the unforgivable denial of Chantal Sébire's escape from her relentless suffering is beyond words.

Sarkozy, meanwhile, confirms both his jadedness and his jejuneness.

Laws are rational base-camps on the slippery slopes of life

(Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 13:34:23 +0100

It is right that Dr. Kevorkian has been freed, and it was a cruel miscarriage of justice to have imprisoned him in the first place. He is part-quack, but for the most part hero, and for a just and timely cause. He is naive and irresponsible on the criteria for euthanasia (that's the quackish part), but right and brave on the basic need for and right to euthanasia. Let us hope that the reactivation of his campaign will help rather than hinder the spread of the Netherlands, Swiss and Oregon policies.

Bombing from near babies draws bombing near to babies

(Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 15:37:42 +0100

Inadvertently sending bombs near to babies is tragic, indescribably tragic; intentionally sending bombs from near babies is treacherous, psychopathic and unforgivable.

Is this causal chain too complex for the world to apprehend, in its well-meaning but simplistic calculus of "proportionate response"?

If we don't read the sinister, cynical handwriting on today's terror-tech wall, no one's babies will be safe.

Extermination vs. Expropriation

(Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 22:23:39 +0000

No one has written an ethics/etiquette book on:

(1) How 15 million people, dispersed as a stateless and oppressed minority all over the planet for 2000 years, are supposed to react to having a third of their number systematically exterminated on the grounds of their race by various European states within one half-decade

(2) How 1.5 million other people, having nothing at all to do with that extermination, are supposed to react when the land they have been living in for 2000 years is expropriated and given as a state to the remainder of the exterminated people by the same European states that allowed (or helped) them to be exterminated

(3) How those of the exterminated people who emigrate to the expropriated state are supposed to react to the expropriated people, who form a fifth column within and around their expropriated state

(4) How either side is supposed to react after almost 60 years of ensuing bloody tit-for-tat vendettas

My guess is that the ethics/etiquette book for such a case has not been written because the case is unique, tragic, and no one knows what right or wrong is, or what to do about it. Onlookers simply fixate selectively on the injustices and atrocities (on either side) that affect or disturb them most. And, as usual, they offer criticism and solutions without having the responsibility of testing whether they will really work, or of suffering the consequences if they do not.

U.S. Defaults to Denmark

(Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 17:07:18 +0000

September 11 2001

Gershwin's gay garish Gotham
today has joined the ranks
of Gaia's tragicopoles,
London, Dresden, Gdansk

for evermore.

An unhallowed razor,
thrust,
so savagely,

into the apple`s core.

But please,

spare us the braying
of the semioticians of symmetry.

Let them stay huddled,
paretically,
in Zeno's corner,
ruminating,
endlessly,
on the etymology and etiology
the means/ends mission statements
of "horror," and "counterhorror,"
lateral, collateral, and full frontal,
the feudal bloodline
of our selfish genes,
even unto the Big Bang,

while we chew instead
on whether high-tech sociopathy
and low-tech superstition
were indeed always slated
to win the day,
eventually,
in life's no-sin, no-sum
game
of Gaussian roulette.

Coda: Homage to William of Ockham
(Or, The Hazards of Passive Exposure To Involuntary Co-Martyrdom)
(Or, Trumping Pascal's Wager)

our forebears had it right
the fewer gods the better
monody just undershot
the optimum by
one