By the way. One question I always wanted to ask a pro-animal-rights type: would you support a program for the extinction/reductions of the population of predatory animals on the grounds that they cause large amounts of unnecessary suffering to their prey?
I’ve heard this posed as a “gotcha” question for vegetarians/vegans. The socially acceptable answer is the one that caters to two widespread and largely unexamined assumptions: that extinction is just bad, always, and that nature is just generally good. If the questioned responds in any other way, he or she can be written off right there. Who the hell thinks nature is a bad thing and genocide is a good thing?
But once you get past the idea that nature is somehow inherently good and that ending any particular species is inherently bad, there’s not really any way to justify allowing the natural world to exist the way it does if you can do something about it.
It’s a “gotcha” question for vegetarians because vegetarians in the real world are seldom vegetarians in a vacuum; their vegetarianism is typically associated and based on a cloud of other ideas that include respect for nature. In other words, it’s not a “gotcha” because you would write off the vegetarian who believes it, it’s because believing it would undermine his own core, but illogical and unstated, motives.
I’ve heard this posed as a “gotcha” question for vegetarians/vegans. The socially acceptable answer is the one that caters to two widespread and largely unexamined assumptions: that extinction is just bad, always, and that nature is just generally good. If the questioned responds in any other way, he or she can be written off right there. Who the hell thinks nature is a bad thing and genocide is a good thing?
But once you get past the idea that nature is somehow inherently good and that ending any particular species is inherently bad, there’s not really any way to justify allowing the natural world to exist the way it does if you can do something about it.
It’s a “gotcha” question for vegetarians because vegetarians in the real world are seldom vegetarians in a vacuum; their vegetarianism is typically associated and based on a cloud of other ideas that include respect for nature. In other words, it’s not a “gotcha” because you would write off the vegetarian who believes it, it’s because believing it would undermine his own core, but illogical and unstated, motives.