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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (7342)	3/4/2001 2:50:26 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I have no particular opinion on killing minks, most of whom are bred for the purpose. If one leaves them to their fate, it is likely enough they will suffer from disease, debilitation, or violence on the way to death anyway. I doubt that many minks die a comfortable death in their beds, as it were. I have a brother with cerebral palsy. He is profoundly disabled, confined to a wheelchair, with spastic limbs. He became ill after birth, and suffered oxygen deprivation due to a bad flu when he was an infant. He is of normal intelligence. And he likes being alive, despite deprivation, indignity, and periodic pain caused by problems with his hips. All I ask is that you not impose your beliefs about life and death on those not in a position to speak for themselves, such as the unborn. You are rarely, if ever, in a position to know if their life will not be worth living. As far as denying someone an exit from suffering goes, well, most of them, if they are serious, are capable of killing themselves. If they cannot bring themselves to do it, they should not drag anyone else into it. In the rare instances where they could not do it without aid, it seems to me that society has a right to discourage the practice, lest people be pressured by their families to die, or lest euthanasia be used as a cover for murder, but I think that assisted suicide should be treated more leniently than ordinary murder.

To: Lane3 who wrote (7342)	3/4/2001 3:41:04 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I think you can put all life on an equal footing (leaving the icky word morality out of it) and say that all things that are alive wish to remain alive when they are not in extreme suffering. Further, we can observe that different levels of consciousness exist in different organisms. Some organisms are very close to us, and others are alien- we do not, for example, understand the intelligence of plants- I have no doubt they have intelligence, in terms of system intelligence, but I don't understand it, and no one else does either. Now we can also observe that suffering and killing are built into the system on this planet. Plants eat energy, animals eat plants, animals eat each other. It's a brutal system- but that's the basics we start with. Now if we want to minimize suffering we wouldn't want to inflict pain on the things we eat. We would (I think) if we ate meat want the meat to be raised humanely (most of it isn't) and killed humanely (most of it isn't). Although I think vegetarianism is probably more humane, since in some aspects plant eating is encouraged by the plants themselves (plants have evolved to be eaten and reproduce themselves that way- animals really haven't, no animals that I know of have anything akin to the eat me eat me come on that plants have), I think one could eat animals and still minimize suffering. Of course one would have to care about animals to do it.