And now, it's the left's turn ...
Monday, August 15, 2005
... to oppose scientific progress, now that we have the technology to artificially grow meat without the need for livestock.
Researchers in the U.S. say the technology now exists now to produce processed meats such as burgers and sausages, starting with cells taken from cows, chickens, pigs, fish or other animals.As soon as I saw the headline for this one, I knew the vegetarians would hate it. This may understandably surprise some, though.
...
But butchers and vegetarians [bold added] are just two groups of people who are yet to be convinced."
To he honest anything they can do with test tubes or whatever, it can't be made," butcher Rodney Macken said.
"I don't like eating a cow that's been pumped full of growth hormones that artificially grow it so it gets onto our plates quicker," a diner said. " I would feel the same about a lump of meat that had been pumped full of chemicals and that had been artificially modified."
The most widespread justification for avoiding meat among environmentalists is Peter Singer's contention (outlined in Animal Liberation) that animals "feel pain" and that this capacity (as opposed to rationality, as Ayn Rand argued) is a basis for their having "rights". Animal "rights" activists thus hold that killing animals for meat is murder. Given that the left raises no objections to stem cell research for humans, this new technology should be a slam-dunk, right?
But no. It's "artificial". The fact that this meat would be a product of man's mind is what is really at issue: "I would feel the same about a lump of meat that ... had been artificially modified." The leftists not wanting man to "play Nature" thus end up sounding remarkably like the mystics of the religious right who oppose stem cell research because man shouldn't be "arrogantly" "playing God". And so both movements prove to be anti-reason.
But there is a twist at the end:
Supporters also said growing meat would reduce the number of animals killed and cut environmental waste that comes from livestock.The supporters of the technology, even before it has attracted widespread opposition, may already be conceding the moral premise of environmentalism! Rather than citing the benefits that this technology could offer humans in terms of cost, uniformity of quality, and convenience, do they think they will sound convincing if they concentrate entirely on "environmental" benefits? This last could be reading a bit much into one sentence, but I often see new technology touted for such incidental reasons while the real benefits are assumed or even mentioned as an afterthought.
I hope that if this technology gets developed in the near futture that its promotors focus on its real virtue: its ability to feed human beings.
-- CAV
3 comments:
*** "And now it's the left's turn to oppose scientific progress ..."
Well, I am almost tempted to ask where you have been all this time!
These people starting clogging newly invented machines since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution -- because, allegedly, machines deprive people of work ... work which they did not have before the introduction of machines.
What passes today as "environmentalism" -- the mother philosophy of animal rightism -- is merely a logical consequence of that anti-inddustrial revolution which began centuries ago.
I'd say that what the left is demonstrating now, is not -- as they have claimed for a long time now -- that they hate technology only to the extent that it harms human life, but that they are ascetic monks who despise human welfare, and therefore by extension, hate anything that leads to it ... technology being one such thing.
Hence, as you've shown, the real reason they oppose the human consumption of meat -- and only the HUMAN consumption of meat -- is not that animals might feel pain in the process, but that they hate the benefit that humans might derive from the consumption of meat ... as such.
"Well, I am almost tempted to ask where you have been all this time!"
Heh!
Thanks for making part of my point more explicit. I found this particular instance interesting because it exposes the animal "rights" advocates for what they are. We finally come up with a way to avoid what they claim is their main beef with using animals as food and they immediately find an excuse not to use the idea.
Yes. Environmentalists do this sort of thing all the time (Note that, of all the things we could recycle, efforts to reuse one of the few that makes sense, spent nuclear fuel, is (or at least has been) hysterically opposed.) But here, a major premise is stripped naked and exposed as the excuse it is.
Also, this example, occurring at the same time as the stem cell debate, shows parallels between the environmentalists and the religionists. The two technologies are fundamentally the same and are being used for very similar purposes. Cells are being grown in artificial environments to produce animal/human tissue for economic use (as food or medical material). And yet each opponent opposes it for nominally different reasons that boil down to a renunciation of reason.
Gus
"Also, this example, occurring at the same time as the stem cell debate, shows parallels between the environmentalists and the religionists."
Yep -- same premises must lead to the same logical concluisons eventually. I suppose in philosophy in general, and in politics in particualr -- parallels really do meat. :P
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