- Campaigns against an ambit of exploitation/killing (animal circuses, vivisection, horse racings…).
- Campaigns against a single form of exploitation/killing (Canadian seal hunting, Japanese dolphin drive hunting…).
- Regulationist campaigns (Ban Live Exports…).

“Indeed, in the Ban Live Exports campaigns in Australia, from what I have been told that is exactly what people were saying to the people who wanted to frame that campaign in terms of veganism.”

In the BLE campaign people were abusing vegan campaigners because they were confronted with the fact that the very same atrocities happen in Australia, due to their own demand for cow flesh, rather than being able to blame, as many were, the “dirty Indos”, in an attempt to renounce their own involvement.

When there is a campaign run by the biggest animal “protection” org in the country, which endorses and even encourages such attitudes, and displays of abuse toward vegan advocates, including the holding of signs such as:

“Please let me die at home”

I think we can safely assume that such people are not considering the rights of the other individuals they claim to be speaking up on behalf of.

I don’t imagine the people being showcased as the “heroes” of this campaign by Animals Australia, such as the slaughterhouse worker featured on their national TV ads, asking:

“Ban Live Export so we can keep jobs in Australia”

would have considered the individual rights of cows or other animals, and more if there had been no vegan presence at these campaigns.

In fact, allowing these people to believe that their self-indulgent foray into the world of advocacy made any positive difference to the lives of other animals, or had anything other than a negative effect on other individuals, is awfully wrong.

Cognitive/belief systems can be a sad joke on us.

My deep appreciation,
Marla

Happy New Year and thanks for commenting. I’ve been thinking about your thoughts on consequences, and here’s what I think.

Were I to give money to a person in need, they would be free to do with it as they might please. Were they take that money and spend it on drugs, then my giving of the money would have contributed to their ability to buy drugs, but the simple act of my giving them money would not be sufficient to cause them to buy drugs, even if it might be the case that my contribution of money was necessary in order for them to buy drugs. There would have to be something else in play that caused them to buy drugs, and that something would be their agency. It seems to me then that to refuse to give money to a person in need, out of suspicion that they will spend it unwisely, is to deny such a person their agency. However, holding all else constant, I think that denying another person their agency is something that ought to be avoided.

Of course, just in case I might choose to not give a person in need some money, or some other kind of help, the same thing is true. My refusal to act is a contributing factor in their continued state of homelessness (or hunger, etc.), while something else must be in play to cause them to remain that way, despite my inaction, and that something is their agency. However, as before, it may be that my contribution might be a necessary part of the solution to their problem – we can easily imagine situations wherein a person is in desperate need and we might be their only, or best, hope. There is, then, a choice to be a part of the solution, and if I choose not to be, then I am contributing to the problem. So, by refusing to give money (or some other help) to a person in need I contribute to their continued misfortune while by offering some form of help I at least have a chance at contributing to their good fortune. (There are of course cases where the person in need has no agency at all – a person unconscious drowning in a shallow pool, for example – and I would say then that, holding all else constant, refusing to act to save a person would be effectively the same as causing them to die.)

tim

This is an interesting (and almost impossible to solve) problem. What DO we do if we find someone on a park bench who we could potentially try to help?

Whilst it’s true that by NOT doing something we may be doing harm, we may also be doing harm if we DO do something, even with the best of intentions.

Say we decide to act and we give them some money for a cup of coffee and something to eat, but they spend it on drugs or something instead and make themselves sick and make their situation even worse.
In that case NOT doing something (i.e. not giving them the money) would have been less harmful.

It’s just impossible to always know whether an action (or lack of action) will have a good or bad consequence.

Not sure that that helps to clarify things, in fact it’s probably just muddied the waters even more. But, like I said it does get you thinking about the consequences of what you do (or don’t do)!

Cheers

I’m only half kidding, thank you for commenting George, I appreciate your insights into this. Happy holidays!!

Save that appearance! (Which one?)

Is mind found only where the peculiar configurations we call the brain found? While the stuff of our brains is different from other stuff, it is not that different…is it? It’s made of the same sort of atoms that are subject to the same laws found in matter generally. The organization is certainly different from a tree, a blade of grass, or a stone.

Sentience isn’t based on material being as such, but upon some special distribution of its particles. It’s no mere rearrangement of chemical atoms that creates a new dimension of reality, such as feeling or consciousness. As life emerges from chemistry, mind emerges from life. At my most speculative, I borrow a distinction from modern physics between kinetic and potential forms of energy. This is from the panoramic conception of a physical system as opposed to the close-up view of charting the motion of an object instant-by-instant as Newtonian mechanics does; the motion is revealed as the minimum or maximum of a quantity known as the action connecting the initial and final positions. (The definition of the Lagrangian is L = K – U; the Hamiltonian is K + U {U is the symbol for potential energy}.) This automatic balancing between kinetic energy (of a forward pass, for instance) versus the potential energy stored until the football reaches the top of its arc and begins to fall, makes the parabola spring forth as perfectly natural. Because of this specific numerical quantity, the route is known immediately. Action is now regarded as more fundamental than force. (The unit of Planck’s constant is action, not energy.)

When you find a dime in the parking lot and pick it up, you are adding to the dime’s potential energy as it is stored in the gravitational field. If it falls out of your pocket it recovers this potential energy in the form of kinetic energy until it reaches ground level again. Here the potential energy is like a memory. This is the missing link in Cartesian dualism. Like consciousness, potential energy is invisible; it exists as the possibility of motion in the future, it is a record of an action in the past. What we know directly from our mental states, an external observer would have to classify as a form of kinetic energy into which the neural currents from sensory stimuli is transformed in the brain.

Is the mere reactivity of a bacillus equivalent to an inner experience? If not, where does sentience begin? Does it require specialized cells such as neurons? How complex must the synaptic connections of these neurons be? Or is more involved? Does the electrotonic state of our precious colloids exhibit quantum coherence? Neurons will fire under the influence of graded action potentials, not just the spiked action potentials limited to the synapses. As for storage in the form of potential energy, at what point do these become self-referential, or self-interactive? Is it a question of meta-levels? Of what order? Kinetic energy can be expressed as an equation of any order, mere linear motion, accelerations, third-order “jerks.” Can these higher orders be stored as potential energy also? What degree would count as the “envelope” which encompasses the lower orders and “knows” them? Does consciousness emerge as a kind of super-memory containing the mere records of our experiences? A closed system? And I can’t forget that life is anti-entropic locally, even while it increases global entropy. Does that give potential energy built up under negentropic conditions a special quality? This part is bad philosophy. Maybe all of it is. But the football maximizes entropy, not all of the potential energy is recovered; some of it is lost to friction, any number of things. In a vacuum the energy is lost in the form of gravitational waves (all wave solutions are the result of the arrow of time or entropy and the finite speed of light). [For a real headache google the advanced solutions of Maxwell’s equations as opposed to the retarded solutions.]

Happy festiva Yuletide etc. I plan to dine on pita and garlic hummus while my betters view spectator sports, the surrogate for warfare in which those who get too little exercise vicariously experience the meaningless endeavors of those who get too much.