Category: Ethics

I love eating animals of any kind — there’s no such thing as an “unclean” animal that Christians can’t consume (c.f. the book of Acts). And whether it’s jellyfish in China or lamb brains in Kuwait, when I’m in an ethnic restaurant or foreign country, I love to try new animals, or parts of animals I’ve never eaten.
That being said, I have some sympathy for Whole Foods’ decision to end the sale of live lobsters and crabs. Maybe you will tell me they did this because their management is a bunch of secular left-wing pinko commies, and they are trying to appeal to the pale, squeamish upper-middle-class yuppies who patronize their stores. I’ll take your word for it.
Have you ever stuck a metal skewer through the length of a lobster’s body? In one of the restaurants where I was employed, that was part of my job. I did it a few times, and the things reacted…pretty much as you would expect: they tried to curl up and defend themselves, but their claws were banded and there was little they could do. So I had to pry their tails down, ram the skewer as straight as I could up their bodies, and out through their heads, with bits of their innards oozing out through their faces. Then I threw them into a steamer where they cooked for a while and died at some point. We served their tails cold and with three kinds of sauce on the side.
Unhappy with this cooking method, I thought I would euthanize the lobsters before skewering them. I did some research, and found out that if you stick a knife between two of the plates near the head, it would sever something important (I forget what) and the things would die instantly. I tried this a couple of times, but botched it and ended up with pissed-off crustaceans.
After that, I refused to use the skewer. Patiently, the sous chef explained that a straighter tail made for a better presentation. I politely told him that I didn’t care if people ate lobsters, but I saw no reason to make another living creature suffer just to make its lower half look better on a bed of ice. He shrugged and said he’d get somebody else to do it, and that was the end of it.
I am not the least bit squeamish about the use of lethal force against human beings. If someone broke into my house tonight, I wouldn’t think twice about shooting him (it would fill me with disgust, but not remorse.) But there is something uniquely repulsive about causing unnecessary suffering to an animal when the end is the carnal pleasure of consuming its flesh. Lobsters and crabs are luxury foods; practically nobody relies on them for sustenance. Even if these creatures were a significant part of the food supply, they could be killed and their flesh preserved through refrigeration or freezing, just like other animals.
Crab meat doesn’t take that well to freezing, and lobsters even less so — true gourmands would shudder at the thought of eating a frozen lobster tail (though the Safeway near my house sells them). The only reason to sell them in tanks is to keep them completely fresh. If catching, processing, transporting, and displaying live animals causes pain, then it isn’t necessary to preserve human lives, and the practice should be abandoned.
That’s where the case against Whole Foods’ prior practice breaks down. Kids tapping on the lobster tank glass is not torture (except perhaps in Mark Shea’s world.) The CEO’s comment about “the importance of humane treatment and quality of life for all animals” is risible. What does “quality of life” mean to a lobster or crab? Maybe they prefer being in a big glass tank with no predators.
But even though the management of Whole Foods is probably made up of morally silly people, avoiding pain in animals isn’t morally silly per se.

On Thursday, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it was responsible for the flooding of New Orleans, because of bad design decisions in the city’s levees and floodwalls. As you will recall, the mainstream media had blamed the Bush Administration, but CNN and the BBC could not be reached, and so it is not known if they will issue formal apologies to the president.
I haven’t read the 6,000-page report issued by the Corps, but it sounds like they’re being a little hard on themselves. New Orleans has been slowly sinking into the earth for a long time, and it will continue to do so. Hurricanes will keep forming in the Gulf of Mexico, barring some drastic change in the Earth’s climate. Those two facts militate against any “solution” to the city’s long-term survival.
But it isn’t “nice” to ask whether it’s prudent to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on rebuilding a doomed city. In the past, the Corps has occasionally asked whether a proposed project made economic sense. It shall repent from this violation of the Gospel of Nice:

Thursday’s report urged the Corps to shift its formulaic cost-benefit approach on how it decides what projects are worthwhile. The agency was urged to look at potential environmental, societal and cultural losses, “without reducing everything to one measure such as dollars.”

There are certainly cultural landmarks that are worth spending an “irrational” amount of money to save. If the Washington Monument were about to topple over, it would be worth spending millions to fix it, but surely that shouldn’t be the normative way to decide if a public-works project is worthwhile.
According to the Gospel of Nice, we are supposed to ignore such scruples. Once you start measuring flood losses by “societal and cultural losses,” get out the Federal checkbook and don’t put it away. Nevermind that by the time New Orleans is rebuilt and the flood defenses are strengthened, the Feds could have bought a new house on high ground for each of the displaced families. No, President Bush has already pledged “whatever it takes” to rebuild, and Congress is always happy to spend obscene amounts of money.
This Gospel abets so many evils in the world — and this is a comparatively minor evil of misusing public money. Members of the Church are certainly not immune to it. Niceness dictated that bishops should not punish priests for heterodoxy or homosexual molestations. It continues to damage the Body of Christ by encouraging Christians not to live lives of heroic virtue, but rather embrace a fuzzy, non-judgmental credo of never giving offense to anyone.

The word “tragedy” gets abused a lot these days, but here’s something truly tragic:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – U.S. forces killed two Iraqi women — one of them about to give birth — when the troops shot at a car that failed to stop at an observation post in a city north of Baghdad, Iraqi officials and relatives said Wednesday. Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, 35, was being raced to the maternity hospital in Samarra by her brother when the shooting occurred Tuesday.

The U.S. military said coalition troops fired at a car after it entered a clearly marked prohibited area near an observation post but failed to stop despite repeated visual and auditory warnings.

Given the frequency of suicide car bombings in Iraq, the rules of engagement are justified. That is no comfort to the family involved. And imagine if you were the gunner who killed the two women — knowing that you acted properly, and in ignorance of what the vehicle was really doing, is no comfort either.
But there’s a reason Kim Gamel of the AP filed an 800 word story on a simple incident: to blur the moral distinction between accidental killing and murder.

[The victim’s brother] said the killings, like those in Haditha, were examples of random killings faced by Iraqis every day.

The killings at Haditha, a city that has been plagued by insurgents, came after a bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., a decorated war veteran who has been briefed by military officials, has said Marines shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot others.

Kim didn’t mention that the congressman, a living disgrace to the Marine Corps, declared that the Marines were guilty though none have been charged with anything yet, and he implicated the Marines’ chain of command, too. Very discreet. Then she reveals her main theme:

Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi told the BBC that the allegations have “created a feeling of great shock and sadness and I believe that if what is alleged is true — and I have no reason to believe it’s not — then I think something very drastic has to be done.”

“There must be a level of discipline imposed on the American troops and change of mentality which seems to think that Iraqi lives are expendable,” said Pachachi, a member of parliament.

Pachachi was being droll — for if anyone considers Iraqi lives expendable, it’s other Iraqis. And then comes…you can see this coming…Abu Ghraib!

If confirmed as unjustified killings, the episode could be the most serious case of criminal misconduct by U.S. troops during three years of combat in Iraq. Until now the most infamous occurrence was the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse involving Army soldiers, which came to light in April 2004 and which Bush said he considered to be the worst U.S. mistake of the entire war.

I wouldn’t put barking dogs and naked Iraqi pyramids on the same level as mass murder, but the AP is as mainstream as journalism gets, and mainstream journalism decided two years ago that Abu Ghraib is equivalent to Dachau.
It’s 5:00 a.m. in Baghdad as I type this. Thousands of Marines and soldiers have already woken for the day, and they are getting their gear ready to go out on patrol, man checkpoints, give fire support, render medical aid, and countless other tasks. Over the last three years, hundreds of thousands of men have risked their lives to save Iraqi civilians, and many more will in the future.
If Marines really committed murder in Haditha, people like Kim Gamel of the Associated Press will use their guilt to eradicate any good that servicemen did in Iraq. They’ve done a good job so far: most of the American public thinks that the war hasn’t been worth the cost. Who can blame them? The feckless Big Media never ceases to highlight bad events in Iraq, and no one can answer them effectively.

This BBC story tells of an amazing story: in a small trial, three patients diagnosed with PVS woke up temporarily when given an anti-insomnia drug.

Each of the three patients studied was given the drug every morning.
An improvement was seen within 20 minutes of taking the drug and wore off after four hours, when the patients restored to their permanent [sic] vegetative state.

Notice how the BBC’s culture-of-death mentality appears here, when the writer uses the wrong name for the condition: “permanent vegetative state” vs. the usual “persistent”. Even when the patient has awakened to an obviously conscious condition with the help of a medication, the writer still calls the patient’s uncommunicative state “permanent”.
It appears that the tendency to deny the patient’s humanity and worth is persistent.

Today’s Old Testament reading speaks of the sabbath:

Those who escaped the sword were carried captive to Babylon,
where they became servants of the king of the Chaldeans and his sons
until the kingdom of the Persians came to power.
All this was to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah:
“Until the land has retrieved its lost sabbaths,
during all the time it lies waste it shall have rest
while seventy years are fulfilled.”

The day of rest is worth remembering: it gives thanks for what God has given to us in the created world. It sets a limit to our sometimes constant labor: a limit to our using the world. It expresses a faith in God’s providence, by desisting from work for a day.
The passage from 2 Chronicles presents the sabbath as something we owe the land. If I may return to Rod’s book again: he’s been thinking about what we owe the land too, in an excerpt about environmental conservation.