The Conflict Between Conformity and Individuality in - amazonia.fiocruz.br

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By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies. Sign up. You are browsing in private mode. Animal rights activists from dressed as rats sit inside a cage during a protest on 28 November Show Hide image. This attitude seems a world away from that of the tender-hearted vegan who abstains jn honey out of respect for the property rights of honeybees.

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But the outlook that leads one person to speak out against the mistreatment of animals has surprising similarities to the outlook that leads another to hunt them in the wild. To begin with, the hunter and vegan are both mindful of where their food comes from and tend toward a do-it-yourself, locally sourced ethic. They often share a deep respect for animal life and think it distasteful to buy plastic-wrapped cuts of meat from a supermarket. This respect is usually couched within a broader affinity for nature and discomfort with the cold efficiencies of industrial food production.

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And yet when it comes to putting these principles into practice, hunters and vegans evidently reach diametrically opposed conclusions about the proper treatment of animals. What explains these differences? Although both view animal life with concern, they look upon it from different perspectives: the vegan with an individualist ethic and the hunter with an ecological ethic. I also think CConflict of them is wrong. The most influential expression of the individualist perspective is utilitarianism. Utilitarians, and other mainstream advocates of animal welfare and animal rights, focus on the well-being of individual animals.

In particular, they argue that many of the considerations we owe to other people are also due to at least some non-human animals. As a more recent utilitarian, Peter Singer, puts itmoral consideration is owed to any being that has interests, which means any being for whom things can be said to go better or worse. If you can suffer, you have an interest in not suffering. Advocates of link welfare and animal rights have demanded an end to factory farming and some forms of animal experimentation in laboratories.

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This last point is questionable. Trophy hunting is easy to condemn but what about the hunter who eats venison Individuzlity than supermarket steak? What if that hunter is an indigenous person struggling to preserve a way of life that has been systematically marginalised by a society of farmers, city dwellers and utilitarian philosophers? Yet when you widen your perspective, this stance comes into conflict with the inescapable fact that animals do suffer. If your concern is for suffering, the natural world is a place of unspeakable horrors. Prey animals are eaten alive by the predators that hunt them.

Predators that fail in the hunt die slowly of starvation. Social animals establish hierarchies through systematic bullying that would make the American president blench. To start, predators would need to be eradicated, confined, or perhaps reprogrammed to prefer vegetable matter. Condormity ensure fair treatment for all, teams of ethicists would have to flatten out dominance hierarchies.]