Quote:
Originally posted by Barry the Sprout:
quote:
Originally posted by Timber Loftis:
Which is where I differ from you, and most of my fellow hairless monkees. I recognize my extreme weirdness on this point.
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Completely off topic:
Don't suppose you've ever read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" Timber? Its quite interesting, and comes to pretty much the same conclusion you appear to have done about animals and humans. Basically that as we are constantly motivated in our relationships by self interest we cannot appraise our internal goodness or badness by studying them. Instead we can only appraise our conduct by looking at our relationships with those who have absolutely no power at all, as only then do we have no self-interested motivation. And the only sentient beings with absolutely no power? Animals. So the only way we can know if a person is good or bad is by studying their treatment of animals.
Not sure I entirely agree, but its an interesting point nonetheless. [img]smile.gif[/img] [/QUOTE]On a related note, I vaguely remember that even the Bible tells us that a society is judged not by how it treats its most privileged members, but by how it treats the least privileged members. I just put animals in with humans as fellow "lesser privileged" creatures. Except predatory birds and dolphins -- they're cooler than we ever could be.
