"What is your favourite unusual food?"
"What's your favourite unusual food from another culture?"
"Dog is a popular dish in some parts of Thailand, but is it OK to eat dog?"
"Is it OK to eat elephants if they were farmed for that purpose like the pigs that provide pork?"
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| Mmm ... Roquefort! |
For our class, I immediately thought of a question about cultural differences, which is what we've started reading about in Quest, but as I walked along Silom Road, last term's reading by philosopher Stephen Law, "Carving the Roast Beast," in which he presents a very strong argument that eating meat is morally wrong (2003), also came to mind. The connection was dog meat. And that is a story.
A year or two after I had first moved to live in Thailand, my youngest brother came to visit. Naturally, we did the touristy things: the Grand Palace, National Museum, and a visit to the north, to Chiangmai and Chiangrai, where we also did the usual things, all most enjoyable and well worth seeing: Doi Suthep, the night bazaar, and so on. But we also got off the regular tourist track a little. My Thai was pretty limited, but I it was enough for us to get by, and of course there were Thai people around who spoke some English. One day, we had been visiting somewhere (the Princess Mother's gardens? I don't remember - it was a long time ago) and feeling hungry, we stopped off at a restaurant in a small village. The owner recommended the duck, and we've both loved that forever, so ordered it and a couple of other things. The duck arrived. It didn't look like any duck we'd had before. The bones were definitely not duck bones. We grew up on a farm where we raised and killed ducks, and could recognize duck, and not duck, when presented with it. This "duck" was definitely not duck. Further discussion with the owner clarified the confusion: he had not said "duck," but "dog." It simply never occurred to us that he might have been offering us dog, so we heard "duck." My Thai was very limited at the time, but had the owner offered us sunak, I might have picked up that that was not ped (I was already very fond of Kaeng Phed Ped Yang and other duck delights in Thai food). Having already sampled it and found it quite tasty, we continued to enjoy our first meal of dog. It was also my brother's last dog dish, but when I've visited friends in Chiang Rai, they sometimes delight in making sure I get at least one meal featuring that local speciality.
Although my family has always had dogs both for work and as pets, I have no problem eating dog, but I realise that many people find it offensive, even thinking it's wrong. But this seems illogical to me: why would it be any worse to eat dog than to eat pig? If you have a look at the first pages of Law's essay, you'll see a possibly more shocking variation on this question. But I don't want to be too shocking, and elephants seemed to fit well with the topic of cultural differences that runs through chapter 1 of Quest, hence my question.
And yes, I did replenish my cheese supply while I was at Top's Silom Complex.
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My question is:
Is it morally acceptable to eat the meat of elephants that have been raised for that purpose?
If my verb form worries you as a result of the discussion that Poy prompted in class yesterday (Thursday, Sept. 24), you can answer this version of the question:
Would it be morally acceptable to eat the meat of elephants that had been raised for that purpose? But especially in response writing, we do not want to get hung up on grammar.
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Reference
Zimmer, C. (2015, September 24). That stinky cheese is a result of evolutionary overdrive. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/science/that-stinky-cheese-is-a-result-of-evolutionary-overdrive.html
It depends on which ethics you have submitted. but for me it's not wrong. the buddhism thinking is meat is the consumption for living but not for indulgence. that don't mean I'll try it because I've heard it's not tasty and very stincky. yep, our race, Chinese, have the taste profile every kind of living things. Sadly it's also include human but I'm not cannibalism since my impulse is quite bad. haha! I'm kidding.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, the crucial key word of this question would be the word “morally”. To answer your question, I think there are two points to be considered.
ReplyDeletePoint 1: The eaten (Elephants raised for food and even typical elephants in a forest)
Unlike human, they—and other kinds of animal as well—have no sense of enjoying their lives and no sense of morality all the period of their lives. So, we would be able to morally eat them.
Point 2: The eater (Any human)
This definition and scope of the morality of eating meat depends on individual point of view, culture, belief, or even religion. To illustrate, some countries like Thailand closely involve elephant which Thai people believe it has been a valuable and sacred animal since the ancient time, so Thai people would think it is morally wrong to eat them. In contrast, Zimbabwe—a country in Africa—can eat them morally due to no culture like Thailand.
As a consequence, the answer of this question would rely on both points I mentioned.
Although I disagree, I like Feem's analysis of my question that, like Union, focusses on an important concept, and breaks the issue down into two parts.
DeleteI immediately thought of a (possibly tasteless to some) reply to Feem's first point. Did you?
Does his second point, in line with Union's point, resolve this possible counter argument?
In reply to your no. 1 point, I disagree with you here. We cannot say that elephants, or any other animals, do not have a feeling. We are not them. We do not have the right to judge that because they cannot feel, it's ok to eat them. That is not fair. Eating them is eating them. Saying because they cannot feel is like making a righteous excuse, it is just a way to appease your guilt. Killing them is wrong in a way no matter how you see it because we are taking a life. There is no other way to make it right, but I think the way that we can admit the wrong is important. It means that every life we take is not simply a meaningless one. We live in a world that the stronger lives. It is already a harsh truth, but we don't have to make it more ugly by belittle all the weak ones.
DeleteAlthough I mostly disagree with her comment below, I mostly agree with Na's reply here. And that makes me wonder if she agrees with herself!
DeleteSaying it right or wrong will depend on where that situation occurs. If it's in Thailand where elephants are viewed as a sacred animal, then the answer to this question is; no it's morally wrong to do so. This is because the concept of morality depends on the grooming of each person, where that person was raised and what kind of belief they hold. So in reverse, if this situation occurs outside of Thailand, I, as an observer, will not consider it morally wrong because those people do not hold the same belief and have the same standard of moral as I do.
ReplyDeleteFor similar reasons, I disagree with Feem, Union, and now Na's usefully clear statement of a popular (in some groups, but not among philosophers or religious people) idea about the nature of moral beliefs and statements.
ReplyDeleteI think a useful question (an example) here is: if someone visits Thailand from a culture where it is acceptable to own slaves and treat them in any way you like, including killing them for fun, would that person be doing anything morally wrong if they did the same to the slaves they brought with them to Thailand, and which slaves also think it perfectly normal? These slave owners certainly don't think it's wrong to own and use slaves in any way they like, so the ideas about what makes something morally right or wrong suggested in the comments seem to me to suggest that he writers would all agree that owning and killing slaves for fun would be perfectly moral if a culture accepted it as such.
I don't agree: I think slavery was always wrong, irrespective of what a culture believe. I think societies, entire societies, can be as wrong about moral beliefs as they are about any other kind of belief: the world was not flat because 100% of some societies once sincerely believed that it was, and slavery, (or killing gays, or treating women as property, or killing people of a different religion,) was never morally right because 100% of some societies (including ancient Greece, where Aristotle wrongly thought slavery natural) truly believed it to be so. We do make moral progress, and the very concept of moral progress means that we move forward to something better, which must entail the old beliefs and practices of a society were less good, were in fact less moral, than the new ones. Worse, the belief that social customs make morals right or wrong would mean that all who fight for improvement must be doing what is morally wrong, for example, in a society that accepted slavery, it would be morally wrong to free slaves! And that sounds seriously wrong to me. Was Abraham Lincoln an immoral person because he went to war in part to free slaves? And then there is Thailand's history of slavery, and the great progressives who went against social custom and values to change it.
Which means that in the case of eating elephants, it could be morally right or wrong independently of what individuals believe or of what an entire society believes.
The disagreement is, as usual, very helpful - it forces me to reconsider my ideas, and to test them by trying to present them in a way that answers the opposing ideas. This is one reason free speech is so very important: errors of opinion cannot otherwise be corrected.
It's hard to present an argument in one paragraph.
DeleteTomorrow's reading in Quest also covers some ideas that you might think relevant here.
DeletePoy's comment on "Do we have a 'right to be forgotten'?" also seems to disagree with the popular belief (popular with whom? And why?) belief that moral ideas are nothing more than the set of current social prejudices.
Delete