https://nitter.net/PeterSinger/status/1722440246972018857
No, the art does not depict bestiality, don't worry.
This has gotta be the worst thread this website has ever had. I'm not pretending I'm not part of the problem, but damn. Literally no one is benefiting, we're just all thinking about something disgusting and repulsive. Terrible job everyone, we really screwed the pooch on this one.
Terrible job everyone, we really screwed the pooch on this one.
I gotta admit I started reading this thread ready to engage in our latest struggle session but actually I've decided I simply won't be reading it.
Please do not fuck your dog or horse or cow or sheep or hen or whatever.
Sweet not missing much then. I can get my disgust and vegan struggle sessions elsewhere haha
Knew it was gonna be singer before i even clicked on it. Fucking utilitarians lol
always strange to me when people start trying to talk about bestiality like it's a real moral question and not just a fantasy fetish.
real people don't actually do that, 99.9999% of allegations are literally just made up, even an anonymous essay about why someone should be allowed to fuck a dog, that's someone writing themed smut it's not moral philosophy. the only academically interesting thing about bestiality is why it's had cultural purchase in myth, rumour, and storytelling for thousands of years.
Uh unfortunately that's not true, people do actually fuck animals and have since time immemorial probably. Just this year there was a case in my country where they're prosecuting a dude that sexually assaulted his dogs and filmed it.
Also being a dumb teenager with unrestricted internet access in the early 2000's, I've seen stuff I would have preferred not to.
i'm not saying nobody has ever done bestiality but the rare un-faked examples have to be extraordinarily rare. like all the animals people talk about it with, besides like sheep are dangerous and these people would be assaulting them, probably while naked. no fucking way people manage to do that at any appreciable rate.
but there's a lot of fictional depictions of bestiality, a million lurid rumors and taboo tales. makes you think it's more common & possible than it is, but there simply never were 'donkey shows' or bestiality executions in ancient rome.
I happen to have a textbook that has some citations for the incidence.
Kinsey and colleagues found 8% of men and 3% of women did it at least once, and 17% of men raised on a farm (all self reported). This was in the 50s, but more recent studies have also found that a fair number of people have done it at least once. The large majority only did it once or a few times, often as a dare, initiation, or out of curiosity. And clinical zoophilia (where it's the primary means of arousal) is extremely rare and usually has a lot of comorbidities.
It doesn't happen often, clearly, but the research we have suggests that it's common enough to where you almost certainly have met someone who has done it.
but there's a lot of fictional depictions of bestiality, a million lurid rumors and taboo tales. makes you think it's more common & possible than it is, but there simply never were 'donkey shows' or bestiality executions in ancient rome.
You, uh, got like any evidence to support a negative?
there needs to be evidence of donkey shows, evidence of welsh people fucking sheep, evidence of Catherine laying a horse, and evidence of coliseum bestiality, before i should take any of that seriously
evidence of donkey show
you mean like multiple textual sources? You're not going to find photos of it.
You're not going to find photos of it
gee i wonder why, despite cameras existing the entirety of their alleged existence? i'm being assured there's loads of video and camera evidence for every other bestiality so why would this be different
Literally everything, even the most baby brained shit, you should ask why we do or do not do it. If you don't have an answer past "because it's wrong" you don't have a set of ethics and morals, just gut impulses and whatever you were taught was normal growing up.
my answer to bestiality would be "because you can't" animals won't fuck you and they'll probably kill you if you try to fuck them.
uhhhh that's just (unfortunately) very well-documented to be false. like, extremely well documented.
edit: also that's an incomprehensible answer to the question. why would something being impossible make it wrong? I don't think it would be morally wrong to sidestep through the 8th dimension to get to work faster
I don’t think it would be morally wrong to sidestep through the 8th dimension to get to work faster
I recently had an argument with my boss when something similar was said, so they would steal even more of your labour.
i guarantee someone would have a moral stance against teleportation if it existed. but it doesn't so i don't very much care to speculate.
but handfuls of unverified and whispered-about videos doesn't constitute 'extreme' documentation, i'd welcome an actual study proving there's more than dozens of actual bestia--uh--tists? and a widespread occurrence of the act, but i know of no such studies and no opinions on it that aren't painted by the cultural baggage attached
it's akin to people wingsuit flying through a suspension bridge and getting cheese-grated, there's certainly footage of it and it was a bad idea but i don't think it's a very pressing concern for most people
so, bestiality is wrong because you can't do it, in other words it's impossible. therefore the people who have done it on video are evil because they're doing something impossible.
my op was 99.99%, that is not absolute, i was never making an absolute rule, my claim is that discourses about bestiality are mostly talking about the imaginary and fetishes but failing to recognize that. the article/tweet we're talking about is a thinly disguised sexual fantasy with no interface with material reality. and people itt are conflating that with the extraordinarily rare real world acts, that are nothing like that sexual fantasy.
in the 'article' they're imagining a consensual sexual relationship with a dog, which the dog consents to. this is impossible not just from a dog's faculty to consent, but because dogs do not experience sexual attraction to humans. if a male dog has ever fucked people, which i seriously doubt, it'd be through transparently nonconsensual training or something. it's not a real argument or a real situation, and i think it's silly when people give it the airs of a moral debate
if a male dog has ever fucked people, which i seriously doubt
ok, so you're just talking from a position of ignorance. when i say this is extremely well-documented, i mean that there used to be a subreddit called /r/sexwithdogs where people were posting hundreds of videos of precisely this.
it'd be through transparently nonconsensual training or something
this is true, yeah, you have to groom animals for stuff like this, just like any other vulnerable party.
if a male dog has ever fucked people, which i seriously doubt, it'd be through transparently nonconsensual training or something.
When I was growing up, we had a family dog that was constantly humping legs. This isn't a defense, mind, since "but they made the first move" isn't any more justifiable with animals than it is with children, but it does happen.
First, right off the bat, you can and I've seen it. With that out of the way, you're not addressing if it is moral or not. Morality is about what it is right or wrong to do, not what is possible to do. If I could, with a sweep of my hand, either kill every poor person in the US or slaughter every millionaire, then there is a moral reason why I should perform the latter and not the former.
Because if you’re too undesirable to fuck your fellow species, you don’t get to just move on to the next species. You either fuck a non-living sex toy produced in a factory or don’t fuck anything and live with it.
Also there has not been a single normal human being who’s been exposed for bestiality. Usually they’re serial killers, abusers, pedophiles, and so on. So not a lot of good representatives in the Animal Sex Having population
Your first argument is restating the concept, not presenting why it is wrong. It's tautological. Actually it's a little worse than tautological, it sneaks in a motive. If someone was desirable and had sex with humans, would it be okay? I don't think you or I think that.
Your second is also not an argument.
If someone was desirable and had sex with humans, would it be okay? I don't think you or I think that.
What? If someone was desirable and fucked humans, why wouldn’t it be okay?
Actually it's a little worse than tautological, it sneaks in a motive.
And why is this wrong?
Your second is also not an argument.
What the fuck are you talking about? How is “action has only been done bad people, therefore action bad” not an argument?
You're not good at this.
The antecedent to it was bestiality. You know, the thing we were talking about. You said people can't fuck animals because if they can't fuck humans they can't fuck animals. This not only didn't answer the question, but added unnecessary and potentially wrong information. If someone was fucking humans, could they fuck animals? Is not having sex with humans the motivation? Or eat makes it wrong? You didn't address the problem at all.
And I can't believe I have to explain the second one. "It's bad because only bad people do it" is insane. If bubble gum was only chewed by bad people then chewing gum wouldn't be evil. Moreover, people are bad for doing bad things, things are not bad for having been done by bad people. Your answer is fairy tale logic. I do think everyone who's had sex with animals is a bad person, but because they've had sex with animals, every other detail is irrelevant. Your statement would make it permissible to have sex with animals if I found even one person who didn't do anything else bad and just fucked animals. Do you see how that does not define the action as wrong?
Anyway, the reason it is wrong is because animals cannot give informed consent, so any action non-medically necessary actions between humans and animals is automatically bad. This is because violating consent makes it impossible for two people to interact in a society fairly and have good outcomes. At the core of my argument is an axiom, that we should uphold a society which produces good outcomes. You can disagree with it, but just asking why to it will not reveal a deeper truth nor dispute my argument. Murder is also wrong because it unjustly removes the ability of someone to interact with society.
Asking why something is wrong is not the same as saying it is okay. It's actually a good thing to take a step back and consider why certain things are right and wrong ON PRINCIPLE, not gut reaction or associations. That's the only way to have a developed moral code and draw meaningful conclusions about the world. Asking why something is pious was literally the foundation of philosophy in the west, when Socrates was being killed for questioning things.
Bro you're on a socialist forum, I really don't give a shit about being normal. Are you in fucking high school?
always strange to me when people start trying to talk about bestiality like it's a real moral question
everything can be a moral question, how is that hard to understand?
you don't have to have a bestiality fetish to think about the morality of it lmao
Most people in animal husbandry would argue that artificial insemination is better for the health of the animals involved, for both the cow and the bull. Animals don't really follow the concept of consent, and the cow or bull could get seriously injured, or worse, otherwise.
Though the argument could easily be made that it would be better not to breed cows at all, and that would be the best health outcome.
Yes, as a vegan, my stance is we should stop breeding cows.
By the way, I've heard the argument "oh, it's better for the health of the animal to do ... whatever" in quite a few contexts that I think are just plain wrong. Such as, for example, farrowing crates. Apparently it's "better" for the sow and her babies if she is stuck in a crate so small she can't even turn around. I don't buy that farrowing crates are good for pigs and I don't buy that artificial insemination is good for cows either.
Hey we're not better people, we just have better habits. Nothing intrinsic. I encourage you to try and reduce your animal consumption. I'd learned about farmed animal suffering years before, and when I went vegetarian it was a weight off my shoulders that I hadn't even realized was there.
I will but only if the parent commenter I replied to also moves their self flagellation from here with me
carnists, if this somehow gives you pause, consider that if it is morally permissible to kill and torture animals for enjoyment...
huh what the hell does this bullshit have to do with anything
so carnists also condone bestiality?
what the fuck
What fucking solar system are you living in
so carnists also condone bestiality?
Functionally, yes. Do you know how the beef industry keeps getting more cows?
what the actual fuck is wrong with you
god yall are fucking gahhhh
WHAT THE FUCK
hexbear is great but this is a very bad moment from them
so that means I fucking support this weirdo who wants to fuck animals? What the fuck does this have to do with this?
fucking weirdos
I don't think you do, but I think it's a contradiction to be sure. I'll say that I think it's fine to eat animals, but also I think it's not okay to have sex with them, and somewhere in between those two beliefs is artificial insemination of pigs and in practical terms that's a practice that just makes me shrug, so I suppose that my belief that it's not okay to have sex with animals is weaker than my belief that it's fine to eat them.
i have only ever heard vegans extend the definition of bestiality to include actions that are not for the sexual gratification of the person.
Yes, how dare I point out the material realities that make your consumption choices possible
You have to take up a finger-wagging "how dare you" stance and strawman my argument because you can't offer any coherent defense of your actions
I'd tell you to watch Dominion, but you clearly have no interest in examining the reality behind your decisions
Honestly if you'd just said "Yes, I know my decision to eat meat is predicated on horrific suffering on an industrial scale, but I don't care" I'd have at least a modicum of respect for you for acknowledging the choice you're making rather than acting like other people are beyond the pale for bringing it up
Honestly if you'd just said "Yes, I know my decision to eat meat is predicated on horrific suffering on an industrial scale, but I don't care" I'd have at least a modicum of respect for you for acknowledging the choice you're making rather than acting like other people are beyond the pale for bringing it up
carnists also condone bestiality
yes, you do. Your diet requires humans to breed animals on factory farms: collecting semen from male animals and inseminating female animals. Those actions are mechanically the exact same thing as people committing the crime of bestiality. This is why most bestiality laws (and animal cruelty laws, for that matter) read something like "you can't fuck or mutilate animals, unless it's for a farming purpose".
Don't eat em, don't fuck em.
This is why most bestiality laws (and animal cruelty laws, for that matter) read something like "you can't fuck or mutilate animals, unless it's for a farming purpose".
Well OBVIOUSLY that doesn't count because flails arms wildly
Carnists stop misrepresenting our arguments challenge (rating: impossible)
Getting sexual gratification from an act is not the crime here lol. Is this protestant brainworms or something? If now on starting tomorrow via some magical means, all humans started orgasming after biting into a steak, would it then now suddenly be morally wrong to consume steak?
no it's the common usage of "bestiality." outside of vegan standard english i guess.
Find a better argument other than "Torturing and exploiting animals is okay as long as you're not horny while doing it"
I would argue there is a distinction between the two because bestiality is performing these actions for sexual gratification. Your overall point I do agree with, that the way we interact with animals in factory farms is sexual violence, but it is a different sort
Sure and that's how the law categorizes it: your "purpose" when committing the act is what matters. I personally think the particular categorization of different purposes (so that economic reward is valid, gustatory sensual pleasure is valid, and sexual/sensual or sadistic pleasure is not) is arbitrary in a nakedly self-serving way. I have never seen any moral reasoning that one specific kind of sensory pleasure should justify sexual contact with animals but another should not; carnists usually fall back to arguments that eating animals is one way to satisfy a physical need. (Such arguments are of course inadequate to explain harm done simply to make food taste better, like restricting animal movement or gavage). In general we do give weight to purposes when people commit acts that they thought were good, or did not expect to result in negative consequences, so in theory intention is a valid thing to consider.
I personally reject the "we didn't explicitly want this subset of results, but we took this action knowing full well it was going to cause these results" liberal apologia that we see for military collateral damage and such.
I don't think all of this is wrong, but there's a blending between discussing concepts and actual practice. "Is it wrong to harm animals for pleasure?" is a useful question, but separate from "is it wrong to fuck animals for sexual pleasure?" and both of these are distinct from "can certain kinds of pleasure justify harm generally?" I don't think you're necessarily wrong to put them together because you are making a good point about complicity in atrocity, but it is not the kind of conversation I want to have.
mhm. all reasonably different questions. I hew consequentialist, so I don't really see why one's state of mind (anticipating gustatory pleasure or experiencing sexual pleasure) while fucking the animal makes a moral difference. I think that the distinction you see between the first two questions is largely informed by custom: in pre-modern times a function of what was "normal", and today a byproduct of how industrial agriculture sanitizes the process of raising animals for food to give us neat blocks of commodity on the grocery store shelf.
Tangential but you might find Why I'm Not a Negative Utilitarian interesting. I was gonna write something about utilitarian view of pleasure types but it's not really important.
Good luck in the posting war against anti-intellectualism. Honestly I'm kind of surprised by the comments here. Since the issue affects almost nobody directly I feel like everybody should be able to dispassionately debate-bro about it even though it's taboo.
Honestly could apply to the majority of comments in this thread. People here have seriously lost touch with reality with some of the arguments in here. Reading this makes me want to never comment on general hexbear again. No one should seriously debate what Peter Singer says. He's been a crank for longer than I've been alive.
I think he should be dunked on, but I don't like the idea we shouldn't question why things we think are wrong are wrong.
Genuinely curious, how do vegans think of indigenous diets and their consumption of animals? Many of the critiques I see here apply to industrial consumption of meat.
And how would you respond to the argument that vegans are propagating an unscientific belief in the supercession of nature by humans in a way similar to Christian dominionists, that sees us as unique actors capable of transcending a mutual relationship with nature whereas our inferiors (all other animals that eat animals) are incapable of moral action?
Also I've heard people argue that consuming plants also causes them distress and should be avoided. Would you reply to that in any way or is it silly?
Not here to argue, genuinely just want to know how vegans think about these questions. If you want.
I've seen vegans disagree on the matter of indigenous diets. I'm not sure what most agree on, but I can say vegans are way more focused on ending animal-eating in the context of industrialized society.
Not a vegan but we crossed that bridge the moment agriculture was invented. As for animals incapable of moral actions... I have yet to see a vegan seriously propose the end of natural predation. You're fighting ghosts or I'm misunderstanding.
You can check the r/vegan threads from when that was making the rounds. Plants don't feel pain. Even if they did, you'd cause more beings pain eating meat cause animals eat plants.
When the last vegan subthread dies on this website, Yog-Sothoth emerges from their million year slumber to devour our world.
I have yet to see a vegan seriously propose the end of natural predation
This is what they were saying, humans eating animals is natural predation, or at least could be in a deindustrial setting, like wolves eating deer or whatever. Vegans, they were suggesting, believe in a very Eurocentric/Christian way that humans aren't animals when our engagement with them as predators is as natural as predators eating us. As long as you minimize the industrialized suffering, that is, they were envisioning small holder communal farming and hunting as their counterexample.
We won't "return to nature" that would be fascist. Humans will not eat "natural" food. Humans eat industrial food. Thinking "but what if they wouldn't" is fictional.
Okay, that ship has sailed in other words. I think he would just object, he's kinda a Graeber guy, but that makes sense to me. Thanks!
Dunno, I told people I was curious and wasn't here to argue, I could argue anyway but I'm trying to engage in a way that encourages folks to respond.
a vegan seriously propose the end of natural predation
Brian Tomasik considers it, but he's a wingnut. There is very little literature on wild animal suffering.
Indigenous people get trotted put in defense against veganism all the time. The defense treats indigeneity like some kind of monolith, it's very off-putting.
Indigenous people in the US are vegan more often than white people, same with most BIPOC people. I would recommend asking a vegan indigenous person these questions, or even just imagine yourself doing so, and consider whether it comes across as stereotyping.
Anyways, vegans are generally not focused on going after indigenous diets. They're focused on the vast majority of people who consume animal products because they were simply socialized to do so and never had to question it growing up, but have no sacred attachment to their sloppy joes or slightly more durable shoes or whatever. It's just food or products consumed out of habit and folks pitch an absolute fit when you point out that, say, it's a contradiction to say you're an animal lover because you love your pets but you go absolutely apeshit on someone that asks you to not eat or otherwise consume (entirely as a luxury, a form of entertainment) pigs that are just as smart and cuddly.
Industrialized agriculture produces sufficient vegan food such that animal products are no longer necessary dietarily. Same for materials and other animal products. The question is whether it continues to be acceptable to harm animals because the products have entertainment value.
I think for most people the answer is pretty obviously no, but they reeeeaally don't want to self-crit, so they fight for a while first.
Yeah it does kinda seem like weaponizing indigenous experiences to defend a boutique consumer choice. I think he aspires to hunter-gathering or considers it to be the superior way for humans to live, which I think contributes to trying this approach.
He also said he would starve to death if the revolution happened and meat was abolished. I guess vegetables are really that bad to some people.
plants can suffer but it's not an argument against veganism since every animal also eats plants, you are killing more plants (by like 10-100x) by eating meat
somehow
oh just morally bankrupt as satan because we've been doing THE SAME THING AS ALL FUCKING HUMANS SINCE BEFORE WE WERE HOMO SAPIENS YOU HAOLE ASS BITCH
Factory farming has not been around as long as homo sapiens. Hell, animal husbandry and domestication of animals has only been around for at most 15000 years. Sure we've been eating meat for millions of years, but aside from some edge cases (arctic peoples are the first example that comes to mind) meat made up very little of the average diet.
If you're still driving predators off their kills so you can scavenge some meat or persistence hunting antelope then you can say you're doing the same thing that we've been doing since before we were homo sapiens sure, but I would argue even the modern practice of raising animals as opposed to hunting drastically alters the amount of animal products we consume.
Apologies for the rambling post but early hominid diets is something that interests me deeply
I'm also someone who isn't vegan (yet) but fully admit they're basically always right
it's been over a decade, and maybe the laws were changed in response, but i remember some news story about specifically necrobestiality not being illegal in several US states.
Perhaps the assumption was that you shouldn't need a law against intercourse with animal corpses? Because holy fuck
TW: bestiality, honestly just some really rotten humor
Technically the rules don't band him fucking a dog's corpse on the basketball court
Omg true. He's a vegetarian right? Bruh... Actually that checks out tbh
He's the guy that came up with the original concept of specieism, and yes, he did it in a similarly deranged manner to this article. Most modern vegans and vegetarians distance themselves from any of his ramblings and have come up with their own definition of specieism that actually makes some sense.
The deer who consents to me feeding him does not understand – and does not have the cognitive capacities to understand – my complex motivation to hand him food or the stories that I will later tell to my friends about this unusual encounter. The range of information that animals can learn differs from that of humans. This is not a problem though, because information that we do not have the capacity to grasp cannot constitute a deal breaker.
Read the article, thought it was interesting, my most direct philosophical objection was here. I think that information that we do not have the capacity to grasp can constitute a deal breaker. For instance, animals are incapable of understanding that they are being "fattened up" for slaughter, but if they could they would likely refuse to eat. It is permissible to do acts an animal does not consent to, like bringing my cat to the vet (scary) and having him vaccinated (painful), only when such acts are clearly in the animal's own best interests so that a "rational" animal would surely consent if it existed. If my cat could understand the purpose of going to the vet he would agree to it.
More broadly, I think
- we are lacking philosophical (or at least cultural) ways to talk about the difference between consent to sexual activity and consent in general. Consent can be given under a spectrum of coercion, from being economically coerced to work a job to being physically coerced to perform a sexual act. Under which circumstances is it valid? Is there a spectrum of acts that require different circumstances for consent to be valid? Capitalism encourages us to ignore "weak" economic coercion and pretend that all decisions were made of our own free will. I think vocabulary is impoverished here. Socially, these concepts are floating under the surface: it's not illegal to fuck your employee, but you might get fired for it. It's not illegal to date a much younger adult, but you may be ostracized. Socially, we recognize that a large majority of such unions are impermissible and impose various lesser consequences/taboos. Unlike the author, I am willing to accept an explanation for inability-to-consent laws that says they are all heuristic-based and not based on some inherent part of the act*. It should be illegal for a cop to fuck his ostensibly-consenting prisoner: even though 0.000001% of the time it's fine and the coercion truly isn't significant, the cop can lie and there's no objective way for an onlooker to evaluate whether it's permissible. That's a sound enough argument for me to blanket ban sexual contact in large age/power/understanding differentials - with minors, animals, prisoners, severe mental disabilities, etc. - without requiring some ineffable component of the act to be wrong.
- Coming up with a coherent moral rule for animals doesn't really mean anything when 99% (by mass) of animals exist under conditions of absolute human domination. As has been pointed out in this thread, animal agriculture requires sexual contact with animals. I would go as far as to say that there are so few zoophiles that most acts of bestiality are already legal, carved out by the animal husbandry exceptions in the bestiality laws. If you made it legal everywhere you'd have the same 10 million farm pigs being inseminated a year, and maybe a dozen new pet pigs. So I don't see a practical point to this proposal except for shock value
* whoops, this is deontology with extra steps. Ah well I'm a man of the people
Yeah, that sentence you quoted is just obviously untrue. The obvious counterexample to me is grizzly bears in Yellowstone. There's a reason every trash can in Yellowstone is specially engineered to be bear-resistant. If bears start to associate humans with dumpster food, they get too comfortable around humans and once a bear no longer has the proper fear of humans, they get shot, because the park rangers at Yellowstone can't have bears hanging out too close to humans and posing massive danger to human life.
So, the information a bear doesn't have about dumpster food can absolutely affect them, even to the point of causing their death!
I'm a little annoyed that a so-called "philosopher" writing about animals and consent doesn't understand even this basic example.
if they could they would likely refuse to eat.
I'm not sure fundamentally changing the situation like that keeps things applicable to situation. a lot of people here don't validate that logic in other situations.
putting that aside i'm not even sure it's true. homer simpson would keep eating. probably some real people would as well, maybe me if the food tasted good enough and escape didn't seem possible. Plenty of people refuse to do things to their own benefit equivalent to what going to the vet is to your cat.
i agree on the heuristic analysis, sometimes those relationships are even the less powerful person's idea but that doesn't eliminate the risks of those power dynamics... maybe your boss is hot but if they're a shitty partner for months how able to dump them will you be? and are they going to not retaliate? maybe in one of the good star trek shows, but even in the optimistic TNG the writers had picard dump his subordinate because their relationship was affecting his judgement.
putting that aside i'm not even sure it's true. homer simpson would keep eating
Yeah we're being charitable here and imagining that my supernaturally-smart cat is his best self, a "rational" actor acting in his own best interest. We want basically the same yardstick parents use when they make their kids eat their vegetables and go to the doctor and such. If we override agency, we must make the decisions they would make if they were wiser. Otherwise you can just say "oh whatever this pig has poor impulse control, if he could understand he'd still probably just do [whatever I want / whatever he was already doing]" and then why bother with the thought experiment, you can just treat animals as property and ignore their agency altogether.
That is how the law works for both children and animals - parents are allowed to make arbitrary decisions for their kids, down to what clothes their 17-year-old wears to school, and owners can do almost anything to their animals. I think this is wrong; I think (a) we should not override the agency of others unless (b) we are making a choice that their best self would want us to make (c) we often have an affirmative responsibility to make these choices. It's neglect if you don't get your kid their shots, but it's shitty if you control every tiny aspect of their lives. Another example of the "best self" thing: you should put your drunk friend to bed instead of letting him drive back to the club even if he's a shithead and will still be mad you didn't give him his keys once he sobers up.
beastiality is not at all permissible because they have no desire to do anything like that with human beings.
See, the author's article gives examples of an animal eagerly mounting a human. You have probably had a dog try to hump your foot or a stray cat in heat brush up against you and lift her tail. They certainly express this desire. Your formulation does not allow us to forbid bestiality in such cases, which is a serious problem. We must instead explain away the desire via interpretation, which is not trivial: animals masturbate and do all sorts of things in nature, so we can't say their true goal is procreation or even sex with others animals of the same species. It becomes an exercise in motivated reasoning.
Similar objections apply for humans, since there is no objective way for an external party to tell the difference between "what they actually want" and "a fleeting impulse". I think it is far better to use a standard that is separate from any individual. Courts routinely compare actions against those of a hypothetical "reasonable person", and you can have a fiduciary duty to act rationally in another entity's best interests. It's possible to agree on what these legal fictions require. Your test is doubly unknowable. It asks us to first to know the true desires of the party in question, which is an interpretive task. We then must apply that desire to the definitionally-incomprehensible-to-the-party decision at hand, which is also interpretive. If we interpret the pig as having a desire to be free, does that mean that it really wants to go on some kind of hunger strike, or put its babies out of their misery? Totally abstract and impossible to agree on.
I suppose you could argue that I’m just rephrasing your point, but I think it’s an important way to rephrase it, because the logic of “best self” could be used to override eg kid’s consent to HRT and tell them they can’t get it, despite them wanting to, because as a Christian you think they just lack impulse control and need to be disciplined.
Yeah like you say, I think the way you rephrase this idea is ultimately not different. The bad decisions now come through the interpretive power given to the guardian, who can say e.g. "my kid is showing a desire to live a healthy life, and because they're a kid they simply do not understand that HRT will hamper that goal, therefore I'm gonna withhold HRT". It's a terrible thing to be responsible for another: if they are granted any power at all to override immediate consent, guardians will always be able to mistakenly make bad decisions on behalf of their wards. But I think they can at least be given responsibilities that people can reasonably agree on.
suicide CW
I do agree that we are not always obligated to override the suicidal desires of our wards. It might well be in their best interest to die, e.g. unbearable mental or physical suffering with no hope of respite. We might even have a responsibility to euthanize a painfully dying pet or to refrain from performing traumatic CPR on a dying elder.
For people with similar levels of capacity over whom we have no power, my theory weakly suggests we should not interfere (the default of respecting others' agency). Of course there might be other, stronger principles that justify interference, like the negative effects of suicide on others.
Did you hear a certain Rusty Cage sing about it?
He's just out here asking questions like
- Your dog, is it single?
- Can you leave me unsupervised in this stable please?
- Does it count as crossing state lines to commit a felony if it's only a misdemeanor in the state I travel to?
Intellectual: "Come, join me in pondering [this depraved shit I've been jacking off to]."
ah, anti-intellectualism. Like, asking this question is not a bad thing. Asking why we don't do some things and do do others is the foundation of thought.
Grooming animals for sex is the same as grooming children for sex.
The people that want to permit one are also the people that debate age of consent laws.
![[CW: bestiality] Professional "moral philosopher" ponders whether it's OK to sexually assault animals, featuring AI art](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/f26b2dce-7254-4537-acd1-5de623b591e0.png){kind=link}