toxic waste dumping in the Third World >From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Oct 12 19:58:19 MDT 1994 >From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Oct 12 19:58:19 1994 Received: from SCSUD.CTSTATEU.EDU (scsud.ctstateu.edu [149.152.40.2]) by csf.Colorado.EDU (8.6.9/8.6.9/CNS-3.5) with SMTP id TAA19054 for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Wed, 12 Oct 1994 19:58:13 -0600 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 12 Oct 1994 17:19:42 -0400 (EDT) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: humans, others Tj writes about understanding people CHOOSING to eat meat (whether for spiritual, cultural, personal, or habitat influenced reasons) and suggests that may be the origin of splits on vegetarinism. Sure, there are different reasons [causes?] for why people do that. My question has been [as part of wondering what ecofeminism is] whether from the ecofeminist perspective(s) one OUGHT to eat meat. The question was posed to find out whether people on ECOFEM thought that non-human animals had any moral standing. My sense of the discussion is that they don't [most answers are from the point of view of humans' interests--this is interesting in the context of ECOfeminism--and suggests to me much work needs to be done]. Jim writes: "About morals and nature. Morals are a human invention. Enough said, except...That means our morals are disconnected from evolution. So the consequences of evolution do not inform us how to make moral decisions." (1) In one sense it's obvious that "morals are a human invention" is true. But what follows? Nothing, unless one wants to commit a standard fallacy, i.e., the genetic one [a thing's origins determine its...]. (2) Rather than showing the disconnection from evolution, the "human invention" idea might suggest the exact opposite [although I'm not much of a fan of them, the sociobiologists think the opposite, and at least are not refuted by surface logic]. (3) Since we're part of the evolutionary process, there might be some connection between whatever we do [including ethics] and evolution. Rachels's CREATED FROM ANIMALS proposes interesting links, including some substantive features for morality, for example, that the set a creature is in is morally irrelevant. (4) Most important, even though morals might be a human invention it wouldn't follow there are not rules [etc.] in it which are "objective" [that is, about which we might be wrong], such as there are in physics, math and baseball. Prof. Gadfly
