Alcon's strange fixation on animal rights is baffling, isn't it? Migrants are drowning in the Mediterranean, literal fascists are on the verge of taking power in municipalities throughout Europe and he chooses to invest his time in discussing the morality of meat. That's all well and good, we all have our interests but I'm not going to be lectured by a man who seems to care more about animals than he cares about immigrants or racial minorities or income equality.
Do you post about, or think about, issues in exact proportion to how important you think they are? No? Me neither. Do you sometimes post more about issues you find particularly interesting, or where you find the counter-arguments particularly lacking? Me too. For instance, I'd never look at your post history and infer you think immigration in the U.S. is a more serious issue than the crisis than the Sudan. Why are you doing that with me?
To be clear, I do not think animal rights is an insignificant issue. There's serious suffering of sentient beings at stake here, and it's on the mass scale. I would rank it above a decent number of political issues that I post less about, but also below some. If you want to know how relatively important I think it is, ask. But, unless your meat consumption is somehow contingent on how important gay marriage is, I'm not sure why it's relevant.
Also, if you genuinely think I'm an unfeeling person who doesn't care about human suffering -- which, man, you actually think that? -- it doesn't matter. My arguments stand completely independent of what kind of person I am. That is literally the same crap pulled by people who wouldn't engage arguments about civil rights or gay rights because "distasteful" people were advancing them. You know that's nonsense, dude.
I cop to the fact that my post is pure garbage and has no value whatsoever. It's just a visceral reaction.
I've thought about animal rights since our discussion and I can't bring myself to care about animal rights. This is a source of frustration for me. I recognize that animals are deserving of some concern and deserve a framework for evaluating their welfare but I cannot convince myself that they deserve rights. This might be because of the relationship between sentiments and morality. I'd argue that most people have some sense that people are intrinsically valuable, that this transcends culture and that this is the root of attempts to forge universal moralities. Do people have the capacity to care for animals in the same way that they care about their fellow man? I'd wager that this is hard to believe. Tony's claim has a basis of truth to it: human evolution was founded upon eating meat. The taste of animal fat lights up the brain, which is why, in times of relative material scarcity, meat has been reserved for important rituals/events. This is part of the human experience. No amount of reason can negate this.
This isn't an appeal to tradition or convention so much as it's an appeal to the human condition. I find it hard to believe that we can ever transcend some aspects of our biology, a key feature of which is meat-eating. I suppose that we could place restraints on this desire so that we can promote about animal welfare but it remains an aspect of being human.
