[Avodah] anti-meat rhetoric "according to Judaism"

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 11:26:15PM -0400, T613K at aol.com wrote:
: Animals do suffer.  It is a cruel person who deliberately causes pain  to 
: an animal for no good reason, or for fun.  We will just have to agree to  
: disagree about this.

I think you simply don't see the basic chiluq I'm making. So, I'll try
to make it in a very different way.

An animal can feel pain. Conversely, it can get positive feelings when
aided.

: Our literature, our tefillos and so on, are full of references to Hashem's  
: chessed and goodness to all His creatures.

Yes, as above.

:                                             According to you, animals  
: don't need it because a cat is no more sentient than a stalk of celery.

Not that they are no more sentient -- they are no more self-aware.

Level 1: Feeling pain. Pain is an input to an animal's psyche. It's not an
    input to a stalk of celery's psyche, because there isn't even a psyche
    to talk about.

Level 2: Feeling the fact that it's feeling pain. This requires
    self-awareness, which in turn is a property of free will. With free
    will, people have their thoughts as inputs to our psyches, so that
    we can adjust our thoughts and decisions. But animals don't have
    fee will, they don't have self awareness, so it doesn't go to level 2.

There is no level 3. Level 2, self-awareness, is the ability to look at
oneself. The loop is closed and can be chased infinitely without positing
any more structure to the mind or soul. Feeling the fact that one feels
the fact that one is feeling pain is just another self-awareness.

"Pain" was what I used to describe the level 1 phenomenon; "suffering"
is what I used to describe the level 2.

An animal's pain doesn't rise to a level of suffering. Our needs are
therefore qualitatively different than theirs.

What obligates us in sheluach haqein isn't the avoidance of the mother
bird's pain, because without suffering the pain is insufficient to
create such an obligation. If it were so, we couldn't shecht calves in
the presence of their mothers either. (And oso ve'es beno has nothing
to do with the animals knowing they are both dying on the same day --
it's totally not parallel.) What makes the obligation is our need not
to learn cruelty.

Like the stereotype of the mass murderer who as a boy would hurt small
animals for fun. The damage to the boy is far more significant than the
damage to the small animals.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy,
micha at aishdas.org        if only because it offers us the opportunity of
http://www.aishdas.org   self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                              - Arthur C. Clarke