Just a thought...

Just a thought that kicked into my brain today when we were talking about the "animals are friends" attitude that children have, and how part of growing up is letting go of that idea, and moving to the "animals are food" attitude:

I eat meat. But I refuse to eat certain meats: veal, lamb, and venison. I have my reasons for each, but the reason for venison is the one that is most pertainant to today's discussion. I don't eat venison because of the way it was first offered to me. Here's the scene:
I'm maybe five or six years old, and my cousin David, an avid hunter, offers me some venison.

Me: What is it?
David: Venison.
Me: What's that?
David: It's deer. Just like Bambi.

Every Human Being Wants to Live?

Derek made the statement in class yesterday that “every human being wants to live,” while we were discussing the morality of eating meat, in extreme situations where it’s man or beast. In my brain, this instantly raised the question of “what about suicide?” I know that begging the questions of the exceptions to what could be a rule can get rather annoying. I hate arguing semantics, but I think that the safer bet would be to say “most human beings want to live” or “human beings in a right state of mind and body want to live.” To say that “every human being wants to live” is to disregard people who are suicidal, or even calls into question euthanasia. In the case of Terry Schaivo (everyone remembers that, right?) there was a huge controversy on whether or not she should be kept on life support. Would she want to live? If anyone were in a vegetative state, would they really want to be kept alive? What do you guys think? Would you stand by the “every human being wants to live” if you were in a vegetative state?

Tiiiiime is on our side...(webcomic)

Here are a couple comics from Boy on a Stick and Slither, another webcomic I read.
I thought it was relevant to our recent discussion on time.




Another post soon with actual content to it.

Scribblings from class yesterday

Yesterday, while we were discussing skepticism, a student (whose name I don't know) was posing the question to the class of if a fish bites a lure, would that be seen as a mistake? The consensus that the class seemed to come to was that it would not be viewed by the fish as a mistake, but to a human being it would be. Professor Johnson asked about the Siberian tiger mauling a human in the zoo: is that viewed as a mistake, or was the tiger following its instincts? I think however that a valid point was lost in class, so here's a brief thought that I jotted down amidst my notes:

a tiger mauling a human -- is that "bad"? We should not try to apply our morals or our logic to species that we cannot understand. If a human being mauled another human being, we would rightly hold that human being as responsible for his actions, because we can legitimately assume that he possesses the same sense of logic and morality as his society. We cannot justifiably transfer our morality to creatures that do not possess the same sense of reason or logic as mankind.

(This is not taking into account things like culture or mental state. (of the human, not the tiger.))

What does the rest of the class think?

Philosophically yours,
Lisa

A comic philosophy

So, I'm admittedly a bit of a webcomic junkie. This comic by Jeffrey Rowland is one of my favorites, it's called "Overcompensating" and I read it daily. Imagine my surprise yesterday morning when I logged onto the site and was instantly reminded of the terms and such we were discussing in class. Weedmaster P (the blonde) seems to be taking a subjective sort of route (I see it so it's true to me, but since you don't see it, it may not be true to you, but you can't argue that my perceptions aren't valid simply because you can't see them) whereas Jeffrey (the not-blonde, but not-Jesus) is taking the opposing objective side, going the "universal truth" method.

Ah, well, I don't really remember where I was going with this post -- let's just leave it be I suppose.

Philosophically yours,
Lisa