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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Mexico is bursting at the seams with dogs. These dogs are not family members. They are alarm systems, beasts of burden to be used, abused, and thrown away. Locals will sometimes say, “They are working dogs,” but this is not a good enough reason to chain your dog to your roof and neglect it for years. Walking down streets full of starving, chained-up dogs exposes one to a constant stream of psychic pain much like that which famously drove Friedrich Nietzsche insane. As the story goes, one day in 1889, Nietzsche saw a horse beaten to death in the streets of Turin. He lost his mind, had a mental breakdown in the street, and never wrote again. (Of course, Nietzsche may have actually lost his mind because untreated syphilis ate his brain.)

I find this pearl-clutching a little hollow when most Westerners eat animals for breakfast lunch and dinner. Close the factory farms first, then you can get all high and mighty about Mexican dogs.

Do you really not understand the difference in how people perceive pet species and food species, or are you ignoring it to make a point?

Yeah but the point is that I don't think there's any genuine moral difference there, so it doesn't really make sense as a stick with which to beat Mexican society.

I take it you don't hold with Newtonian Ethics?

While I suppose it's a plausible moral system, where our obligation to pets fits in in that scheme doesn't seem obvious. Which is to say that lets say most Mexicans subscribe to something resembling Newtonian Ethics, they could simply and quite plausibly regard dogs as further from them (or maybe in Newtonian terms they exert less of a pull than humans) such that their obligation is sufficiently small as to not worry too much about mistreatment.

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