In Switzerland, it's now illegal to boil a live lobster

Post by jackfraser » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 7:28 AM UTC

wallace_f wrote: post #251

lawl wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it wouldn't, they could easily change it as everybody can submit a law change suggestion (sorry, I don't know the correct term) Referendum to kill an existing law, popular initiative to propose a new one. They use different tricks when they're extending their power. This is definitely not one of them. Laws they suspect could be overturned by voters they create 2 simular but separate ones shortly after each other…

It's not that anyone ever sat around a board room with an evil plot involving the protection of guinea pigs. It's that it is so normal that the state act as your parents, which was never the intention of Western democracies, that nobody even thinks "should we really be letting ourselves hand over so many decisions to a monopoly on violence?"

Post by wildmusings » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 7:34 AM UTC

bufferout wrote: post #246

wildmusings wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is the option you're omitting: d) animals suffer, we should care, but we should not pass laws when their sole purpose is to prevent that suffering. There is more to a society that what it compels at gunpoint. We can abhor behavior without proscribing it by law.

What is law if not the ability to arrest controversy?

Post by tluyben2 » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 7:51 AM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #190

tptacek wrote: post #4

It's at this point you'd probably want to go read David Foster Wallace's essay "Consider The Lobster", an assignment he took from (I shit you not) Gourmet Magazine, which begins with a sort of Illinois Country Fair style travelogue from the Maine Lobster Festival and "ends", if you can call the back 2/3rds of an essay "ending", in a discussion of the meaning of pain and its applicability to the specific nervous syste…

Great reference. I will note that he seems to shrug, especially in footnote 19, as if to confess that whether lobsters feel pain or merely express reflexes is basically unknowable, not for any lack of humans trying to figure it out. He seems genuinely conflicted, rather than firmly opinionated, certain only that people should take these questions more seriously. Or maybe he's being coy, to avoid alienating the gourma…

Post by thisisandy » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:15 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #256

brownbat wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great reference. I will note that he seems to shrug, especially in footnote 19, as if to confess that whether lobsters feel pain or merely express reflexes is basically unknowable, not for any lack of humans trying to figure it out. He seems genuinely conflicted, rather than firmly opinionated, certain only that people should take these questions more seriously. Or maybe he's being coy, to avoid alienating the gourma…

Why would you kill spiders? I wondered after reading your comment. I never had the urge or need to kill one; do other people and why?

Post by nurettin » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:37 AM UTC

c_shu wrote: post #228

nurettin wrote: post #216

So some humans think they finally have the luxury of seriously considering animal ethics while some other humans would still kill for survival. Meanwhile, the earth or the universe continues to not care.

I agree that we should pay more attention to people that are suffering. But I think the rationale of such laws is somewhat valid. Can you imagine a person who is totally emotionless when torturing an animal but is also very compassionate towards human beings? I think in some ways human ethics and animal ethics are connected. Though if you ask me whether Switzerland has gone too far, I'm still hesitant about yes/no.