Madness to give it any objectivity? That is almost a contradiction in terms isnt it. Anything, no matter how subjective can still be viewed objectively.
Well, you can always say "this is what he thinks", or "this is how human morality works". What I mean is that there is no set of moral rules that are inherently better than the others and remain constant through time and culture.
Our concept of cruelty is evolved, this is true. I mean, it is obvious that it comes from someone saying "I wouldnt want x to happen to me" then realising that they cannot reasonably expect that x wont happen to them if they are inflicting x upon other people. But this still allows for objective analysis. Slavery was always cruel. It was just accepted because people didnt realise it was immoral, or they just didnt care and believed they could get away with it.
It was less immoral than it is now. It's not a matter of people "realizing" that something is moral or immoral: they simply change their minds and look back using a new perspective. You'll always think you've improved, even though the truth is that the scale doesn't exist. From your modern morals, slavery is inacceptable and it has always been. From an ancient perspective, slavery was acceptable. And there's no reason to think that slavery won't become acceptable again in the future, perhaps using more sophisticated arguments.
You could argue that a modern man could convince an ancient man that modern morals are superior. Maybe, but not always. If you're clever enough, you can really twist morals any way you like.
So the question here should be "If I were a dog, would I approve of dog fighting". This is kind of a difficult question since none of us know what it is like to be a dog. Does a dog really give a shit if it gets hurt or is it just a machine that squeals when you pull its tail or whatever? Well, as far as I know, all evidence points to the fact that dogs do give a shit. Therefore dog fighting is cruel.
If a machine squeals when you pull its tail, you'd think it gives a shit. And under the surface, a dog is a machine and we're machines too. If you ask a supporter of dog fighting what he would think of it if he was a dog, he'd probably just scoff and tell you "man, it's just a dog". He would find it as ridiculous as if he was asked to imagine himself as a tree. When you say that dogs give a shit, it's that you can empathize with the dog, you can imagine being a dog and going through the same thing you would go through as a human. You see a dog machine and a human machine and you tell yourself "we're the same" (where applicable). Some people
don't. What can you expect from them?
But clearly there is a point where this ceases to be the case. Colin was saying the other day that insects do not give a shit. I didnt bother to check if he is right, but if he is, then bug fighting is ok.
How do you evaluate if a bug gives a shit or not? What if it gives a shit in a way we can't relate to? It can also be argued that hampering the reproduction of any living being is cruelty towards nature. Or isn't cruelty just related to any sort of suffering or distress a human can relate to?
Plants definitely do not. It's ok to fight plants.
They can react to the fight in some ways, so I assume that whatever reaction they have you're ok with?
The reason you should obey this is despite the fact there is no risk of you becoming a dog, there are comparable situations. For instance, you could suffer a brain injury that causes you to become as intellegent as a dog. Also your child at a point in development might be as intellegent as a dog, and you may find yourself unable to protect it if you died or something. Or you might have a pet dog that you could be unable to protect.
"Being a dog" is pretty much what defines the situation. There isn't really any comparable situation you could be put in. You might become "less intelligent" later on, but you wouldn't be a dog. As far as I know, there are no rings where retarded people are forced to fight each other. People will leave you alone. The last example is probably the best, but even in that case, you might be against dogfighting not because of the cruelty but to be respectful towards dog owners.
As for vegetarianism. If animals are treated well, I dont have a problem with them being killed for food. If the life of a cow is valuable, farming and killing cows for eating actually results in far, far more cow lifes than otherwise. And the animal isnt suffering. It isnt able to understand its position nor is it aware of its fate.
I could carefully inbreed humans to ensure that all resulting humans are retarded and use them as slaves to do manual labor. When they get old, I would kill them and eat them. I could also buy brain-damaged people from all over the world for the same purpose. If I treat them well, that's ok, isn't it?
It's really the same thing, yet a lot of people would feel uneasy about it because it's done to humans. Even when they have cow brains, people relate with human beings a lot more easily than they can relate with cows. That is the real reason we give humans a greater value than cows.
If I were a cow I would support farming. I only eat free range eggs though (I am utterly unsure if chickens are capable of suffering, so rather than putting in the effort to find out I err on the side of caution).
Of course they are. If an animal doesn't "suffer", when you kick it, it'll keep coming back. The whole purpose of suffering is to be able to adapt one's behavior to avoid hurtful things. Suffering is a way of learning (or behaving) - any animal or machine that learns or chooses a behavior through rewards or penalties can be said to feel joy or suffering.
Let me elaborate on the idea: what we call suffering is a particular method of transforming an input into a "penalty" that tells the brain how to behave next. From a purely abstract point of view, the function of suffering is so general that a lot of computer programs could already be said to suffer. That's why cruelty towards dogs is relative to how "close" we think we are to dogs - if an animal has a mechanism that is fundamentally different from how we suffer but has the same purpose, we won't call it suffering, even though it's actually the same damn thing. How do we determine how "close" an animal is to us? How they look. The sounds they make. Their intelligence. There's nothing very scientific in this.
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