Kill the Killers
Apparently, morality demands we kill all predators.
--
One delightful characteristic of our species homo sapiens is that as soon as we achieve some measure of safety from inclement weather and the unwanted attention of predators, we begin to drift slowly but ineluctably away from reality. Whether one toils through the constipated musings of Kant or the lefty-trendy posturing of Derrida, a common thread of self-indulgent solipsism runs through all the supposedly worthy tomes and renders them little more than self-aggrandizing toilet paper.
Fortunately, with the development of empirically-based science over the last couple of hundred years, philosophy has shriveled and invaginated up its own fundament. Today, most philosophers pleasantly waste their time courtesy of comfortable academic tenure and for the most part they remain harmless nobodies, content with their self-reflexive obscurantism. Every once in a while, however, thanks to some strange combination of the mass media looking for a new sensation and a subtle shift in the zeitgeist, a few of these dusty drudges are hauled into the limelight and their ideas are promulgated to the hapless masses.
At the present time we are experiencing, on the fringes, such an event. A subset of vegans are no longer content merely to bore everyone else senseless with their assertions of moral superiority (combined with rather charming anemia and chronic vitamin B12 deficiency). Now a small number of vegan philosophers (yes, you have been adequately warned now) have decided that not only is it bad, very bad, for humans to eat meat but logically (in the Monty Python And The Holy Grail sense of the word) it is therefore also very bad for any animal to eat meat.
Philosophers Jeff McMahan and David Pearce, and bloggers like Tobias Leenaert, are just a few of the new breed of veganosophers who take the position that it is morally unacceptable to permit any creature to suffer. As it is incontrovertible that a prey animal does indeed suffer when being chased and ultimately torn apart by a predator, it follows therefore that we humans have a moral obligation to end this suffering. On a global scale.
The aforementioned writers and those who follow in their footsteps focus on the large telegenic predators. Thus they talk about…
