Today A Chicken Saved My Life

[steve_bank]

You may wonder how a chicken saved my life. The answer is simple, I ate it.

Is there morality involved in eating animals? Is a lion immoral for eating a water buffalo instead of eating grass? If you watch video of a lion bringing down a large prey it aint pretty, by our sensibilities. Tearing at the flesh of the fleeing prey with claws.

Is our sympathy misplaced for the prey?

 

[skepticalbip]

Today A Chicken Saved My Life

 

[Politesse]

You may wonder how a chicken saved my life. The answer is simple, I ate it.

And you took its.

Which of you had a choice?

 

[Eldarion Lathria]

Today A Chicken Saved My Life

View attachment 35707

Super Chicken, meet the Colonel

View attachment MTY1NzI5NjE2MzYxNjk0MzAx.webp

Eldarion Lathria

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

You may wonder how a chicken saved my life. The answer is simple, I ate it.

Is there morality involved in eating animals? Is a lion immoral for eating a water buffalo instead of eating grass? If you watch video of a lion bringing down a large prey it aint pretty, by our sensibilities. Tearing at the flesh of the fleeing prey with claws.

Is our sympathy misplaced for the prey?

Apparently you've never watched The Matrix. If you had, you would know that there is no chicken.

 

[Bomb#20]

Scientists temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a human body and watched it begin to work, a small step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants.

Pigs have been the most recent research focus to address the organ shortage, but among the hurdles: A sugar in pig cells, foreign to the human body, causes immediate organ rejection. The kidney for this experiment came from a gene-edited animal, engineered to eliminate that sugar and avoid an immune system attack.

Surgeons attached the pig kidney to a pair of large blood vessels outside the body of a deceased recipient so they could observe it for two days. The kidney did what it was supposed to do — filter waste and produce urine — and didn’t trigger rejection.

“It had absolutely normal function,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led the surgical team last month at NYU Langone Health. “It didn’t have this immediate rejection that we have worried about.”​

https://apnews.com/article/animal-human-organ-transplants-d85675ea17379e93201fc16b18577c35

 

[steve_bank]

You may wonder how a chicken saved my life. The answer is simple, I ate it.

And you took its.

Which of you had a choice?

My choice is eat or die, like any creature. Is my eating chicken any less moral that a lion taking down a prey?

If I wandered naked in parts of Africa without weapons odds are sooner or later I'd be on the menu of a predator.

If you believe evolution made creatures through mutation and natural selection then we are what we are, omnivores.

 

[Politesse]

My choice is eat or die, like any creature. Is my eating chicken any less moral that a lion taking down a prey?

No, your choice is what to eat. You didn't even kill the chicken personally, you ordered it killed for you. You'd eat chicken a lot less often if the labor involved in killing and processing it were up to you. Your choices were driven by aesthetic preference and convenience, not necessity. In fact, if you gave up chicken, you'd save money on your groceries and ultimately benefit in most respects, as would the environment that is exploited to sustain your lifestyle.

If I wandered naked in parts of Africa without weapons odds are sooner or later I'd be on the menu of a predator.

Only if you were really stupid. And why would you want to do that anyway?

If you believe evolution made creatures through mutation and natural selection then we are what we are, omnivores.

I don't believe that personifying and reifying natural processes is a suitable guide to moral reasoning. You're picking and choosing what you want to see in the natural record anyway. Which ancestors are you elevating as the type example of the ideal human diet? Did they buy processed farm chickens at the local supermaket in exchange for a portion of their wage income in the form of monetary exchange?

 

[skepticalbip]

.... snip ....

Which ancestors are you elevating as the type example of the ideal human diet? Did they buy processed farm chickens at the local supermaket in exchange for a portion of their wage income in the form of monetary exchange?

They likely were ancestors that either trapped or stalked wild chickens. "Colonel Sanders" with a loin cloth and spear.

 

[Bomb#20]

No, your choice is what to eat. You didn't even kill the chicken personally, you ordered it killed for you. You'd eat chicken a lot less often if the labor involved in killing and processing it were up to you. Your choices were driven by aesthetic preference and convenience, not necessity. In fact, if you gave up chicken, you'd save money on your groceries and ultimately benefit in most respects, as would the environment that is exploited to sustain your lifestyle.

It sounds like you're in favor of him doing that. What do you have in mind for how the part of the environment Steve's no longer exploiting to sustain his lifestyle would be deployed? Increased human population? More wilderness? More lawns?

 

[Politesse]

No, your choice is what to eat. You didn't even kill the chicken personally, you ordered it killed for you. You'd eat chicken a lot less often if the labor involved in killing and processing it were up to you. Your choices were driven by aesthetic preference and convenience, not necessity. In fact, if you gave up chicken, you'd save money on your groceries and ultimately benefit in most respects, as would the environment that is exploited to sustain your lifestyle.

It sounds like you're in favor of him doing that. What do you have in mind for how the part of the environment Steve's no longer exploiting to sustain his lifestyle would be deployed? Increased human population? More wilderness? More lawns?

How would that be any of my business to decide? Steve is asking a question of ethics, not land tenure, unless I am quite mistaken.

And I'm not actually making an argument for what Steve should decide to do, just questioning the assumptions attached to the stated parameters of his decision. As one would expect in the philosophy subforum. Philosophy is more so about studying how we engage in reasoning, make moral decisions, and so forth, as opposed to engaging in blind advocacy for some point or other.

 

[Bomb#20]

... if you gave up chicken, you'd save money on your groceries and ultimately benefit in most respects, as would the environment that is exploited to sustain your lifestyle.

It sounds like you're in favor of him doing that. What do you have in mind for how the part of the environment Steve's no longer exploiting to sustain his lifestyle would be deployed? Increased human population? More wilderness? More lawns?

How would that be any of my business to decide? Steve is asking a question of ethics, not land tenure, unless I am quite mistaken.

I wasn't asking a question of land tenure either. Describing my question as asking about "land tenure" amounts to giving an ethics answer: the answer that that part of the environment should be deployed as its owner sees fit.

And I'm not actually making an argument for what Steve should decide to do, just questioning the assumptions attached to the stated parameters of his decision. ... Philosophy is more so about studying how we engage in reasoning, make moral decisions, and so forth, as opposed to engaging in blind advocacy...

Fair enough. Your use of the loaded terms "benefit" and "exploited" suggested advocacy, so I asked.

 

[Politesse]

I wasn't asking a question of land tenure either. Describing my question as asking about "land tenure" amounts to giving an ethics answer: the answer that that part of the environment should be deployed as its owner sees fit.

The difference I see is that by creating a market for chicken, Steve and other chicken consumers are specifically encouraging land to be used in a certain way by adding monetary incentive for doing so. We as a species consume roughly 55 million chickens a day, so any change to consumer behavior regarding chicken would have a fairly significant impact, even if it were only a partial reduction.

What ought to instead be done with the same land seems like a much more abstract and general question than had originally been posed, given that both chickens and their food are raised in a bewildering array of different environments around the world. If Foster Farms were to off-sell all of its existing properties, for instance, I would not expect or recommend that all of those former properties be put to the exact same use.

our use of the loaded terms "benefit" and "exploited" suggested advocacy, so I asked.

I see your point, though I meant both terms literally.

If your generalized goal is to avoid loaded language in forum discussions, you might have some advice to give the OP, who referred to a chicken dinner rather dramatically as "saving his life".

 

[J842P]

No, in most cases, it is not.

 

[J842P]

You may wonder how a chicken saved my life. The answer is simple, I ate it.

And you took its.

Which of you had a choice?

My choice is eat or die, like any creature. Is my eating chicken any less moral that a lion taking down a prey?

If I wandered naked in parts of Africa without weapons odds are sooner or later I'd be on the menu of a predator.

If you believe evolution made creatures through mutation and natural selection then we are what we are, omnivores.

You aren't a lion, Steve. Lions also kill the children of lionesses to induce them to mate again. Would you consider using the example of a lion as an excuse if you killed the child of some woman?

All of this is a basic reasoning fallacy. It should be obvious. I think you actually are probably grappling with feelings of guilt.

 

[Bomb#20]

Your use of the loaded terms "benefit" and "exploited" suggested advocacy, so I asked.

I see your point, though I meant both terms literally.

If your generalized goal is to avoid loaded language in forum discussions, you might have some advice to give the OP, who referred to a chicken dinner rather dramatically as "saving his life".

Not my goal at all. Loaded language provides a marvelous opportunity to question the assumptions attached to the language loading parameters and study how we engage in reasoning, make moral decisions, and so forth.

 

[none]

It's a bird, get over it.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Today a package of tofu saved my life.

You may wonder how a chicken saved my life. The answer is simple, I ate it.

Is there morality involved in eating animals? Is a lion immoral for eating a water buffalo instead of eating grass? If you watch video of a lion bringing down a large prey it aint pretty, by our sensibilities. Tearing at the flesh of the fleeing prey with claws.

Is our sympathy misplaced for the prey?

I don't think our sympathy is misplaced. I just think things in life lie on a spectrum. So, killing and eating a chicken in certain circumstances may be not wrong or just a little bit wrong. If your claim was really genuine and you actually HAD to eat a chicken or die, then I'd say it was not wrong. If you had other choices involving less suffering of less intelligent animals or plants, then I'd say, it was a little bit wrong.

Here are some other things in a spectrum. Let's suppose you created two alternative threads:
Today a package of tofu saved my life
Today a chimpanzee saved my life

How would you feel morally about those?

 

[excreationist]

From Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (they disabled embedding)
Youtube - talking pig

it was decided to cut through the whole tangled problem by breeding an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly

 

[Coleman Smith]

You may wonder how a chicken saved my life. The answer is simple, I ate it.

Is there morality involved in eating animals? Is a lion immoral for eating a water buffalo instead of eating grass? If you watch video of a lion bringing down a large prey it aint pretty, by our sensibilities. Tearing at the flesh of the fleeing prey with claws.

Is our sympathy misplaced for the prey?

The answer is based on personal belief.

There is no way for science to come up with an objective verifiable test for moral principles.