The ethics of flogging a dead horse

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Sy Borg
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

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Steve3007 wrote: March 9th, 2021, 12:21 pm If instead of just sitting on it, he'd skinned it and stretched the skin across a wooden frame and then sat on that, would that be more respectful to the dignity of the dead horse?
It seems worse to sit on a cadaver. The fact that we must kill to live is something we tend to avoid thinking about. Each degree of separation from a warm corpse to a processed animal product results in less disturbance. So, back when people worse fur coats, many would baulk at having the animals head still attached. It is confronting to be faced with our entropic existence, so we tend to like meats to packaged in such a way that the animal is unrecognisable. People can find ox tongue offputting, as with Chinese food shop displays of throttled ducks dangling off hooks. Chop it all up and put it in a plastic pack and no probs!
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

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Sy Borg wrote: March 10th, 2021, 9:06 pm
Steve3007 wrote: March 9th, 2021, 12:21 pm If instead of just sitting on it, he'd skinned it and stretched the skin across a wooden frame and then sat on that, would that be more respectful to the dignity of the dead horse?
It seems worse to sit on a cadaver. The fact that we must kill to live is something we tend to avoid thinking about. Each degree of separation from a warm corpse to a processed animal product results in less disturbance. So, back when people worse fur coats, many would baulk at having the animals head still attached. It is confronting to be faced with our entropic existence, so we tend to like meats to packaged in such a way that the animal is unrecognisable. People can find ox tongue offputting, as with Chinese food shop displays of throttled ducks dangling off hooks. Chop it all up and put it in a plastic pack and no probs!
But does "respect" lie in internal attitudes or externally viewed behaviors?
"As usual... it depends."
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by Pattern-chaser »

LuckyR wrote: March 11th, 2021, 2:29 am But does "respect" lie in internal attitudes or externally viewed behaviors?
Doesn't the former lead directly to the latter?
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

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LuckyR wrote: March 11th, 2021, 2:29 am
Sy Borg wrote: March 10th, 2021, 9:06 pm
Steve3007 wrote: March 9th, 2021, 12:21 pm If instead of just sitting on it, he'd skinned it and stretched the skin across a wooden frame and then sat on that, would that be more respectful to the dignity of the dead horse?
It seems worse to sit on a cadaver. The fact that we must kill to live is something we tend to avoid thinking about. Each degree of separation from a warm corpse to a processed animal product results in less disturbance. So, back when people worse fur coats, many would baulk at having the animals head still attached. It is confronting to be faced with our entropic existence, so we tend to like meats to packaged in such a way that the animal is unrecognisable. People can find ox tongue offputting, as with Chinese food shop displays of throttled ducks dangling off hooks. Chop it all up and put it in a plastic pack and no probs!
But does "respect" lie in internal attitudes or externally viewed behaviors?
The external is evidence of the inner.

Not sure why a dig at China is apposite here. I've seen phesants offered for sale in the UK stung by the neck, though you do not see that so much these days.
The plasticising of meat products is a way to separate the reality of meat eating from the public. The industry has shot itself in the foot I think. When people find out the truth, they are horrified and go vegetarian.
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by Papus79 »

I didn't really see this thread until recently but I think my own read of what's happening - I think, at least somewhere subconsciously, people realize that human depravity has - in potential - almost no bottom. A lot of people's outrage at someone sitting on a dead horse would be at what sort of slippery slope it represents. I actually don't think it's necessarily wrong to be alarmed or disgusted by that sort of thing, just that people's reactions can be quite offkey if they don't grasp where that anger is coming from (and as well they end up violating these rules in their own lives constantly in less pronounced ways but which still damage public goodwill).
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

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Papus79 wrote:A lot of people's outrage at someone sitting on a dead horse would be at what sort of slippery slope it represents.
I think you're right that that is the source of a lot of outrage. It's a point that's been made by several other posters. But one point I raised was one of consistency. Do you think there is any value in being consistent in what we find outrageous and what we find acceptable? If so, would you see any inconsistency in, for example, sitting on a leather chair, eating a burger made from intensively reared beef, and shouting with outrage at the TV when a story comes on the news about a man sitting on a dead horse?

If you don't think there is value in that kind of consistency, it's understandable. We're almost all inconsistent in that respect to some extent. For example, most people are, for obvious reasons, inconsistent in our attitudes towards human life and non-human animal life. We'd regard sitting on a dead human as even worse! So if we're also inconsistent in our attitudes towards horses and cows, that's understandable.
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by Papus79 »

Steve3007 wrote: March 11th, 2021, 1:22 pm Do you think there is any value in being consistent in what we find outrageous and what we find acceptable? If so, would you see any inconsistency in, for example, sitting on a leather chair, eating a burger made from intensively reared beef, and shouting with outrage at the TV when a story comes on the news about a man sitting on a dead horse?
The lovely US outrage mobs we have which are trying to cancel just about everything that's not nailed down at least shows me that there's as much motivation to twist this impulse in hyperbolic directions as there is to understate it.

I don't think consistency will be possible for as long as people keep this to emotional disgust. The number of 'nerds' lets say (thinking of people like Bret Weinstein or Sam Harris) who can pull themselves back from highly emotionally charged things, analyze them, and pull a principle out that helps straighten what would have otherwise just been sensed as an isolated emotional reaction (non-nerds), we'd have to move as a culture to being nerdier. It's not to say we we should be assaulting our emotions, emotions as far as I can tell adjust to incoming information and the better that information is the better our house-keeping on information inform us.

With eating meat or using leather - its an open question as to whether all of humanity can survive well as vegans. It's also an open question as to - if we have to kill for food because it's just part of what's required for maintaining our species - what uses of an animal's body are actually optimizing our utility and causing us to be less destructive vs. which applications of animal product give us a more sadistic or psychopathic contextual framing for non-human life. Eating Jell-O or me taking collagen hydrolase for my shoulders probably won't do it, leather's a funny thing because when it's cured enough it doesn't give away any obvious sense that it's an animal skin.

The parsing difficulty is that there are immovable objects, such as some people needing to eat meat, and there are the dials of human motivation which have to be calibrated very carefully not to have societies filled with arms races which aim at maximizing defection.
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by Papus79 »

Papus79 wrote: March 11th, 2021, 1:33 pm It's not to say we we should be assaulting our emotions, emotions as far as I can tell adjust to incoming information and the better that information is the better our house-keeping on information inform us.
Oops - meant to say the better housekeeping we do on information the better the information that our emotions give us.
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by Sy Borg »

Sculptor1 wrote: March 11th, 2021, 6:22 am
LuckyR wrote: March 11th, 2021, 2:29 am
Sy Borg wrote: March 10th, 2021, 9:06 pm
Steve3007 wrote: March 9th, 2021, 12:21 pm If instead of just sitting on it, he'd skinned it and stretched the skin across a wooden frame and then sat on that, would that be more respectful to the dignity of the dead horse?
It seems worse to sit on a cadaver. The fact that we must kill to live is something we tend to avoid thinking about. Each degree of separation from a warm corpse to a processed animal product results in less disturbance. So, back when people worse fur coats, many would baulk at having the animals head still attached. It is confronting to be faced with our entropic existence, so we tend to like meats to packaged in such a way that the animal is unrecognisable. People can find ox tongue offputting, as with Chinese food shop displays of throttled ducks dangling off hooks. Chop it all up and put it in a plastic pack and no probs!
But does "respect" lie in internal attitudes or externally viewed behaviors?
The external is evidence of the inner.

Not sure why a dig at China is apposite here. I've seen phesants offered for sale in the UK stung by the neck, though you do not see that so much these days.
Not a dig, just an observation. It's extremely important at this fraught time to tell the difference. It was a harmless observation that, back in the day, it was only ever Chinese food shops that hung ducks up in that way. I don't see that much any more but it used to be pretty common - but only in Chinese food shops.

But, as you said, the point of the nice packaging is to hide the truth of meat eating. It's so pretentious, when you think about it, how many of us put on these refined airs and then we mindlessly chow down into the bodies of animals that had been tortured and slaughtered on our behalf. We remain beasts, no matter how much we want to pretend we are different to other beasts.
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by LuckyR »

Sy Borg wrote: March 11th, 2021, 8:10 pm
Sculptor1 wrote: March 11th, 2021, 6:22 am
LuckyR wrote: March 11th, 2021, 2:29 am
Sy Borg wrote: March 10th, 2021, 9:06 pm
It seems worse to sit on a cadaver. The fact that we must kill to live is something we tend to avoid thinking about. Each degree of separation from a warm corpse to a processed animal product results in less disturbance. So, back when people worse fur coats, many would baulk at having the animals head still attached. It is confronting to be faced with our entropic existence, so we tend to like meats to packaged in such a way that the animal is unrecognisable. People can find ox tongue offputting, as with Chinese food shop displays of throttled ducks dangling off hooks. Chop it all up and put it in a plastic pack and no probs!
But does "respect" lie in internal attitudes or externally viewed behaviors?
The external is evidence of the inner.

Not sure why a dig at China is apposite here. I've seen phesants offered for sale in the UK stung by the neck, though you do not see that so much these days.
Not a dig, just an observation. It's extremely important at this fraught time to tell the difference. It was a harmless observation that, back in the day, it was only ever Chinese food shops that hung ducks up in that way. I don't see that much any more but it used to be pretty common - but only in Chinese food shops.

But, as you said, the point of the nice packaging is to hide the truth of meat eating. It's so pretentious, when you think about it, how many of us put on these refined airs and then we mindlessly chow down into the bodies of animals that had been tortured and slaughtered on our behalf. We remain beasts, no matter how much we want to pretend we are different to other beasts.
But which is better: pretending to not be a beast, or embracing one's beastliness?
"As usual... it depends."
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by Sculptor1 »

Sy Borg wrote: March 11th, 2021, 8:10 pm
Sculptor1 wrote: March 11th, 2021, 6:22 am
LuckyR wrote: March 11th, 2021, 2:29 am
Sy Borg wrote: March 10th, 2021, 9:06 pm
It seems worse to sit on a cadaver. The fact that we must kill to live is something we tend to avoid thinking about. Each degree of separation from a warm corpse to a processed animal product results in less disturbance. So, back when people worse fur coats, many would baulk at having the animals head still attached. It is confronting to be faced with our entropic existence, so we tend to like meats to packaged in such a way that the animal is unrecognisable. People can find ox tongue offputting, as with Chinese food shop displays of throttled ducks dangling off hooks. Chop it all up and put it in a plastic pack and no probs!
But does "respect" lie in internal attitudes or externally viewed behaviors?
The external is evidence of the inner.

Not sure why a dig at China is apposite here. I've seen phesants offered for sale in the UK stung by the neck, though you do not see that so much these days.
Not a dig, just an observation. It's extremely important at this fraught time to tell the difference. It was a harmless observation that, back in the day, it was only ever Chinese food shops that hung ducks up in that way. I don't see that much any more but it used to be pretty common - but only in Chinese food shops.
What - you never seen a pigs head in an English butchers. What's the issue here?

But, as you said, the point of the nice packaging is to hide the truth of meat eating. It's so pretentious, when you think about it, how many of us put on these refined airs and then we mindlessly chow down into the bodies of animals that had been tortured and slaughtered on our behalf. We remain beasts, no matter how much we want to pretend we are different to other beasts.
Farm animals are no often "tortured" though the vegan brigade like to spread the myth.

We are beasts, true. But we have the potential to kill our food with less pain and suffering than nature offers.
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by Pattern-chaser »

Sy Borg wrote: March 11th, 2021, 8:10 pm
Sculptor1 wrote: March 11th, 2021, 6:22 am
LuckyR wrote: March 11th, 2021, 2:29 am
Sy Borg wrote: March 10th, 2021, 9:06 pm
It seems worse to sit on a cadaver. The fact that we must kill to live is something we tend to avoid thinking about. Each degree of separation from a warm corpse to a processed animal product results in less disturbance. So, back when people worse fur coats, many would baulk at having the animals head still attached. It is confronting to be faced with our entropic existence, so we tend to like meats to packaged in such a way that the animal is unrecognisable. People can find ox tongue offputting, as with Chinese food shop displays of throttled ducks dangling off hooks. Chop it all up and put it in a plastic pack and no probs!
But does "respect" lie in internal attitudes or externally viewed behaviors?
The external is evidence of the inner.

Not sure why a dig at China is apposite here. I've seen pheasants offered for sale in the UK stung by the neck, though you do not see that so much these days.
Not a dig, just an observation. It's extremely important at this fraught time to tell the difference. It was a harmless observation that, back in the day, it was only ever Chinese food shops that hung ducks up in that way. I don't see that much any more but it used to be pretty common - but only in Chinese food shops.

I disagree. In the UK, "back in the day" when I was a lad, butchers and game merchants displayed their wares in exactly that way, as Sculptor1 describes. I used to see them as I walked to school. Lines of pheasants, rabbits, sheep, ducks, and other assorted corpses, hanging up with hooks through them.
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by Pattern-chaser »

LuckyR wrote: March 12th, 2021, 2:16 am But which is better: pretending to not be a beast, or embracing one's beastliness?

Well the latter is at least honest, and isn't honesty "better" than pretence?
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by Steve3007 »

I think the mini-argument that's broken out between Sculptor1, Sy Borg and Pattern-chaser about who openly displayed dead animals when is probably just a matter of different cultures. The question of whether there were slightly different cultures in the UK and Australia isn't really relevant to the general principle. The general principle is about the honesty with which the origins of meat products are displayed - neatly wrapped in clingfilm versus hanging upside-down, dead-eyed, from a blood-stained hook.
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Re: The ethics of flogging a dead horse

Post by runaway »

I think it is disrespectful to sit on a horses corpse. However, I wouldn’t say it was immoral as the horse is gone and isn’t going to be suffering for it. I would only say it was immoral if it was done to deliberately upset the owners of the horse or something as that would be unnecessary cruelty to people who are still alive.
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