'Hunting' goes on all over the world...should it all be stopped ???. I guess i am glad that the labour goverment had the balls or even just caved in because 'we' don't like it... and are one of the few european countries that have banned it. I guess the 'toffs' do themselves no favours .. because they just bang on about 'human rights' 'history' blah blah blah.. come on admit it you just like it and wish to continue ... nothing fundementaly wrong with that. ok i am on the fence with this ????
Bollocks. That's like saying that you may as well let a rapist walk the streets so long as he's not very good at it. An estimated 20-25,000 per year. When you conisder that an estimated 100,000 foxes are killed on the roads each year, the car is actually a better method of fox population control than hunting. Of course if they just wanted a jolly jape with friends, there's no reason why drag hunting shouldn't be an acceptable substitute. As I said, it comes down to what sort of values we want to promote in our society - compassion or cruelty.
Well of course they do! Are you suggesting we should adopt the same standards of morality as animals? If they were actually eating the fox, it would be an entirely different issue.
I have to agree.... out of my sight out of my mind..so i can 'think' about this all day... yeah that solves all the issues ... you would have thought. yeah i agree this is why 'at the end of the day' i am glad this 'sport' is now against the law. but evryone has some 'human right' so i guess i still am swayed . On this particulart issue i think i will be on the fence..because looking at the foxes eyes i can say come on it has no reason to be killed..wich is emotional blackmail...but even so !!!!!!
we are animals ..... no its not 'another issue' because we kill other animals in the pursuit of catching fishes ...but fishing will never be banned.
So you think murdering each other should be legal too? I beg to differ. Killing for food and killing for fun are not the same thing.
no.... this is why i was saying killing and murdering. People that say this should be banned use ther term murder but the people that do it say kill.It all boils down to animals dieing wich is wrong but that's life. [ no they are not the same thing i agree.. but if those 20-25,000 are going to be dead anyway putting poison out so they curl up and die is not realy any more 'humane'. Do you know of any 'humane' ways foxes are killed. The 'fun' element is immaterial.
OK, you lost me. Your point seemed to be that killing foxes was no different to foxes killing other creatures. I then asked if we should have the same moral standards as animals. So I'm not sure how the above quote relates to this....? Well this comes back to the earlier point. I'm not so interested in what's humane and what isn't. For me, it's about the general moral principle of whether killing for sport is something that we should sanction as a society. Aside from which, fox hunting isn't about controlling the fox population at all. That whole argument is a diversion on the part of the pro-hunt lobby.
Please stop addint to posts once you've made them dude! I disagree with this. I think that the principle of whether we allow people to pursue cruelty for fun is quite important.
what i think i mean is that both sides use rhetoric that is so 'horse chestnutty' this is why in IMHO a good thing this whole issue has been finaly resolved.. yeah but our society is cruel in so many diffrent ways ..we just gloss over lots because we eat them . but i do see (sadly) that animals dieng is a fact of life ..us being on the top of the food chain and all.
I agree. That's no reason for us to accept killing them for sport as a fact of life though. If we accept that, we accept that our society is doomed to barbarity for ever. Lol, s'ok. Just makes the conversation hard to follow.
I guess we are always trying to make our animal behavior more civilised ... so any little thing that makes us seem less barbaric is a good thing..it is all a little hypocritical in the grand scheme of things though..its a nice 'front' but deep down were not that way as a whole. But my apathy is even worse i guess. I would not vote on this issue given a choice..because it is a huge waste of effort..and i don't mean that harshly honestly. ok you ticked me off for doing that before :& i should know better. thats just another bit of rhetoric used by anti hunt protestors...they are as bad as each other..but i guess this 'battle' has been going on for years...their is not a lot of new material..again i am glad this issue has been resolved..only partly because of the death of foxes.
Firstly i don't want anyone to think that i suport foxhunting with or without dogs, like the majority of people here i feel it is done in a foul and overly violent way and that there are more humane ways to kull vermin. but though i beleive these things i am not from a hunting culture and do not know that way of life, and in the same way as i would like all people to respect my veiws as a hippie, as a christian or any of my views i also must respect all those with other veiws. this doesn't mean that i sit back and let people do things that are wrong but i don't take things out of context and decide that this person has these wrong veiws, this person is wrong. Just as i protested against War so the hunters felt the need to protest over hunting and i respect them for standing up for their beleifs and more importantly for the most of them to have done it using peaceful protest. what i respected even more is seeing many protesters trying to calm the crowds and to keep things peaceful, something i have to say i have seen the very oposite of at anti-war protests. what did upset me with this situation was seeing Policemen streching over baracades to strike protesters, Streching because the protesters were out of reach because they were not coming close to try an riot or do anything wrong instead the police were streching over to stike many people who were just protesting peacefully. and Zonk just for you, and you're lickle anarchy avatar, i've never met an anarchist pleased to see more laws put in place???
It all depends on how much importance you attach to killing animals for pleasure. I agree that if a person holds different views to my own, that doesn't make them a bad person. For example, I can understand people being pro-war in Iraq. Although I disagree with them, I don't think this defines their character. However, if someone derives pleasure from killing, this is a different matter. Looking at your above statement, would you feel the same way about someone who raped for fun?
Of course I'm against more laws. I LONG for a society that doesn't live by them, a society that is mature enough to accept a certain amount of its own moral justice and code of conduct-I personally dont need a law to tell me not to kill someone or to steal from my local newsagent. The law doesn't stop me from doing it-I learnt it. The same moral behaviour I try to instill gently into my kids. Most of society is as far as I'm aware (but hey, i know fuck all) just like me and don't need these laws either. To say that I shouldn't support this law because I have libertarian views is frankly stupid. It's not that I'm FOR a law on this issue but at present there is a legal format in place. We have been trying to stop them from doing this for years or haven't you noticed? Also on this issue its not just that I find the slaughter of animals disgusting IT IS also a class issue. The fact is that most of these idiot landowners come from the same class that are 'supposedly' custodians of the law. And isn't it funny how they declare that they will break this law? But we always knew that, it's nothing new. Just as if some poor woman on a council estate calls the police because she's been threatened with violence and the police say they can't help until the violence occurs. Then three streets away on the posh side of town when the same situation occurs the police install cameras and hold a stake out to catch the culprit in action. You going to tell me this isn't the reality? If you are then you're from the other side of town to me obviously. It's alright for me on a scum council estate to have to live by their laws but they appear to be above them. The fact that during mayday protests, the poll tax riots etc peoples faces were in the press with demands that the people are identified. Has this happened on this occasion? Has it fuck. Through out this thread I have made it clear what I think about these people. Until you have been on the recieving end of their violence on just one occassion (as opposed to hundreds) you can stick your gobby and confrontational comment where the sun don't shine. Know what I mean?
This was all already covered in my description of abstracted empathy and our very-hard-to-ignore sense of internalised morality. People feel their sense of right and wrong extremely powerfully; it has been internalised to such an extent that we even believe it to be part of our fundamental nature. We feel it viscerally. Our minds are powerful that way. Your ability to transgress moral codes such as public nudity indicate that you have arrived at a different standard than the majority of society on this issue. The issue of public nudity is not subject to such intense taboo-conditioning as the notion of how unacceptable murder is, so it is far easier to transgress. Were you to arrive at a different moral standard from the rest of society on the issue of murdering people (through imperfect socialisation, perhaps) you may well see at as perfectly acceptable to go around killing people. Or you may just enjoy doing it despite knowing it was wrong, if your moral code allowed you to value your own pleasure above the reluctance to transgress a taboo. I am again repeating myself here. I've deleted what I believe to be cheap pointscoring elements of this 'debate' and focused on the issues which apparently still need clarification. I have no desire to keep repeating myself; my argument is extremely intellectually robust. Feel free to disagree but it does not fail as a logical extention of the rational-materialist worldview beginning from the assumption that there is no such thing as the non-physical. I too find the paradigm of a meaningless universe quite disturbing. But also liberating: my behaviour is an issue of my own choice rather than an issue of absolute laws which I must obey. Again, to redundantly and tiresomely repeat; the only reason we have to oppose fascism is that it offends our firmly-held moral codes. If I had internalised the idea that it's OK to persecute people of a different race, then I would feel absolutely no compunction in doing so (as we saw in Nazi Germany, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and many more places). My sense of morality makes this for me unacceptable, and as such I feel very strongly that it should not be done. We have no absolute right to oppose fascism or persecution as if it in some way offends the universe. It just offends me personally and most members of my society. We make the choice to oppose fascism for this reason. We have moral agency. I respect your assumption of a spiritual basis for morality and the position that you don't exactly know where it comes from. But I find myself repeatedly asking the question: What makes it absolutely wrong to murder a person? If that is a general moral law, who or what made it the law? It seems you would need some kind of underlying meaning, if not consciousness in the universe for such moral laws to be absolutes. Is that your position?
I beg to differ. I don't believe that you've sufficiently explained this at all. As I have already pointed out, you've demonstrated how a mechanism might exist that would allows us to empathise with another species, but you've not provided a single reason demonstrating why such a theoretical mechanism would be employed in such a fashion. You're trying to have your cake and eat it. You're postulating two theories: firstly, that empathy serves a survival function, and is therefore evolutionary in origin. Your second argument is that our empathy is derived from an internalised social norm. If we assume the former argument to be correct, then having arrived at empathy via evolution, we should find it very difficult to overcome. And yet you seem to be suggesting that some people have no problem at all with this. If we assume the latter argument to be correct, then our empathy should be relatively easy to discard, which would seem to be in keeping with your recent argument, re: nudity. But then why should one moral imperative be more or less compelling than another? If we take this statement: .... we can see it to be factually incorrect. For example, were I to still believe in the social norm that precludes nudity, I would argue that I would still find it infinitely easier to strip bollock naked and walk down the street than I would to cause suffering to another living creature. But wait! What's this? Again, I beg to differ. Murdering animals has no great social taboo attached, and yet I'd always have had more trouble harming an animal than stripping naked. And that's before I'd arrived at any personal opinion on the issue. Well that's because I don't believe you've sufficiently explained yourself. If you feel you have, then you're free to walk away from the debate. So by 'cheap point-scoring', are we including such tactics as transparent attempts to capture the moral high ground, and presenting the word 'debate' in inverted commas to imply that you're simply humouring someone who's arguments are beneath you? Me neither. When you've answered the questions that I'm posing to my satisfaction, I'll stop asking them. Has someone stolen your ID? I'm sure a little while back you were saying that you'd never be so arrogant as to assume that you were right? Surely this can't be the same Showmet??? Doesn't the above statement strike you as arrogant in the extreme? However, if your behaviour is a matter of your own personal, with nothing external by which to measure it, then you may as well be a total ****! There's no right and wrong. Everything is subjective. Why not just behave in the manner that most effectively pursues our own personal advancement? Also, who mentioned "obeying" laws? In fact, who mentioned laws? My concept of spirituality is that it informs our behaviour, not controls it. If we accept your view of the universe, you're still subject to laws: it's just that your are evolutionary and socially internalised! Look, I'm sorry if you find it tiresome to have to explain yourself to someone else's satisfaction, but if you don't want to do so, then you're in the wrong place. You've already threatened to leave the thread once and then come back for more, so you've not really got grounds for getting shitty. I'm not trying to argue with you. I'm interested in having an adult conversation about this issue. Your views interest me. It seems to me that you're getting unnecessarily petulant about the whole thing though. Right. But fascists kill Jews because Jews offend their firmly held moral codes. So just to be clear, what you're actually arguing is that we have no more moral authority than fascists? Right, ok, you just answered the last question. So, in your terms, we're no different to fascists. We just have a different idea of morality. Glad we cleared that one up. Yes. Except that I don't regard them as 'laws'. There's nothing that tells me how to behave. But rather something that informs my decisions in an empathic fashion.
No. The emotion of empathy has come about as a survival function. Monkeys feel empathy for their young. Its application has been extended beyond its mere survival function as a result of our development into rational, social beings and our consequent social internalisation of wider moral standards. Here is how I have previously explained the phenomenon. Post 61: There is evolutionary advantage to us caring about each other. We have also evolved higher brain function which allows us to engage in abstract thought - there is evolutionary advantage to this, too. Abstract thought has allowed us to come up with concepts such as morality, "right" and "wrong" and to extend our abstracted "selfish gene" empathy to other species. While this proclivity may well be part of our "fundamental nature" in terms of its genetic origins (a combination of empathy with abstract thought), that doesn't stop it being purely the result of random processes and as such not a universal absolute. Post 63: It offers us no direct evolutionary advantage to care about a fox. It doesn't need to. I suggested that caring about foxes is a result of abstract thought. Abstract thought is what gives us the evolutionary advantage. And it may well prove to be a disadvantage in evolutionary terms to use our abstract thought in this way, it's quite a new development. Doesn't negate the hypothesis that it has come about as a result of evolution. Evolution is a series of accidents - some work, some don't. Post 66: I understand that foxes feel pain, I think it's bad to subject them to this unnecessarily. This is the result of me abstracting my genetically-driven ability to feel empathy. It's a mistake when thinking about evolutionary biology to require that everything any animal does has a direct advantage to the longterm survival of the species. Many kinds of behaviour evolve for perfectly understandable reasons but prove to be calamitous mistakes. The naive timidity of the Dodo would be a classic example. Doesn't stop everything they do being the result of the evolutionary process. In my conception, consciousness and thinking is the result of the evolutionary process. As a species we seem to be extending our empathy and moral agency outwards as a result of our increasing rationality. In it we include more and more members of our society, with such concepts as the welfare state. We are treating people's pain and keeping people alive based upon empathy for their suffering. Even those to whom we have no direct genetic relation. Even people whose survival does not benefit the longterm survival of the race, and who in the wild would have died out, thereby strengthening the genepool. This activity, which we do purely because we can act upon our empathies and understand the notion of suffering is driven by our nature, which is to feel sympathy for those who suffer. Arguably this has no advantage in terms of the biological evolution of mankind. Neither does caring for foxes. But the emotion of empathy you feel when you look into the eyes of a fox suffering pain looks an awful lot to me like the empathy you feel when you look into the eyes of a suffering human; its genesis is the same. It's the same feeling. Some of us feel empathy towards foxes because of our capacity for the emotion of empathy combined with our abstract understanding that the animal is feeling pain in much the same way we experience it. We know pain to be bad in others about whom we care. We choose to care about the fox. Both a capacity for empathy and the ability to think abstractly can be identified as results of the evolutionary process. Their combined effect include, for us as rational beings, caring about things not directly related to our survival. The longterm effect of this upon the evolutionary success of mankind is as yet unproven. Taboo-conditioning and level of socialisation vary according to the taboo-level of the activity (murder is a bigger taboo than pooing in public), the upbringing of the person, and the acceptance or not of the moral standards of society. Furthermore, evolution gives us the capacity to feel empathy. Some don't. This is the way you have been socialised, it's largely an unconscious process. Your opinions on the matter are probably, from what you describe, a result of your emotional attachment to the issue, rather than the other way around. Many do not share our moral standard which states that harming animals for fun is a bad thing to do. You are free to be a total **** if you wish to choose that way of life. I don't, because I've decided that these things matter to me. Again, in the absence of any higher meaning I create my own standards for behaviour. Objectively speaking, none. Nobody other than other humans will judge us for murdering Jews. You live alone in the world with only your own conscience. (Notwithstanding the laws and moral standards of your society.)
Postscript: When I state that empathy is applied to other species as a result of abstract thought, I should explain that this is shorthand. It doesn't need to be a conscious process on our part, the original thinking does not need to have been done by us. Many people do not even examine their opinions further than the emotion they feel. They have a visceral reaction to seeing cruelty in animals as a result of internalised moral principles. It is these moral principles or standards of behaviour which originally come about because we are creatures capable of extending our understanding beyond not only our blood relatives to other members of our species, but even to other species.
