What if I hadn’t eaten chicken? – Pagosa Daily Post News Events and Video for Pagosa Springs Colorado

I really had no intention of questioning my own morality.

But I’ve always had a thing for philosophy, ever since I took Introduction to Philosophy during my second year at university. It struck me that a philosopher can think very deeply about topics that have almost no relation to everyday life and feel satisfied.

So sometimes, when daily life becomes too much for me, I seek refuge in online discussions about philosophy. This happened a few days ago, when I innocently clicked on a YouTube link titled:

Peter Singer: Ordinary people are bad

This is something I’ve suspected for a long time, and in the video, ethics professor Jeffrey Kaplan made a good case for my belief, drawing on a fairly famous philosophical essay written in 1972 by a young man named Peter Singer. The essay was “Famine, Wealth and Morality.”

Of course, I include myself in the definition of “ordinary people”.

You can watch Professor Kaplan’s half-hour video here.

It turns out that Peter Singer later made a name for himself by publishing a book called animal liberation, in which he proposes that humans have a moral obligation to treat animals with the same respect that we treat other humans, or at least, with something approaching the same respect…based on knowledge as animals, like humans, are capable of enjoying a somewhat satisfying life. life, if they are allowed to make decisions for themselves. Instead of letting humans make all the decisions.

But the most important thing, for Mr. Singer, is to know that animals are capable of suffering.

Which humans are also capable of doing. Ask me how I know.

Either before or after writing animal liberation, Mr. Singer became a vegetarian. Once you’ve decided to release the animals, you really don’t have much choice.

Anyway, I finished watching the video, about suffering and morality, then went into the kitchen and made myself a chicken salad sandwich. Which was delicious.

But not as delicious as before.

That night, I lay in bed thinking about the hundreds, if not thousands, of chickens that were killed in my name, so that I could consume them as food.

I imagined myself as a chicken, living in a cage, barely able to move, surrounded by two dozen of my close relatives, who were also barely able to move. In my imagination, we were all women. Not a rooster in sight. That is to say, opportunities for romance were non-existent.

You can laugh at the idea of ​​a chicken romance if you want. But stuck in my little cage, that’s all I could think about. Of course, I didn’t want to think about my ultimate fate, or that of all my hen sisters.

Yesterday I met a friend for lunch and ordered taco salad. The waiter asked me what type of meat, and without thinking, I answered, “Chicken.”

I guess I could have said, “Oh, no meat, thanks.” I don’t want to be responsible for the suffering of a sentient being.

But I just said, “Chicken.” Being an ordinary person myself.

What if I hadn’t eaten the chicken?

Would she have a chance of having a romantic relationship?

Probably not. Probably, another ordinary person would eat it.

But not Peter Singer.