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All mammals, birds, fish, and probably all invertebrates are sentient, meaning they feel. Plants almost certainly do not feel. Most people would agree that it is wrong to hurt or kill sentient beings if it is not vitally necessary. “Not vitally necessary” means not necessary for survival or health, the way it is necessary for obligate carnivores like lions to hunt and eat their prey. (Human beings are facultative omnivores, meaning we can live and be healthy either as carnivores or as herbivores: we have a choice.) As long as we continue to hurt and kill sentient beings, needlessly, for food, clothing, fashion, sport, combat or entertainment it will continue to be the greatest crime of our species against all species (including our own), alongside the crimes we have renounced and outlawed: violence, rape, torture, homicide, genocide, enslavement and subjugation. Let us hope that admitting animals are sentient is the first step along the road to ending at last the horrors we inflict on them, needlessly.

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Of course multibillionnaire Mark Zuckerberg is orders of magnitude more ethical to contribute 99% of his $45B wealth to the planet’s needs and needy rather than to keep it all for himself. But reserving $440M for one multimillionaire child is not exactly altruism either. 1% of that ($4.4M) would stll have left little Max extremely well off for life, and far better off than 99.99% of the planet.

(That said, if he does as he has promised, MZ will nevertheless become the most magnanimous of multibillionaires today — and perhaps ever…)

Is evil a “pathology“?

No “professional” opinion, as I’m not a professional in this (or any) area.

My belief happens to be that (apart from the inevitable, but small, quota of genetic psychopaths) what we call “evil” is a consequence of learning and culture rather than genes or “pathogens.”

Is learned cruelty a “disease”? Perhaps the way gambling and alcoholism are, in the sense that they can sometimes be unlearned (“cured,” or at least pushed into remission) by “therapy” (and some are born with more of a propensity towards it than others).

But calling such learned behaviors a “disease” is just playing with words. If the effects of air pollution are a disease, what is it when the pollutant is cultural (“cognitive”)?

Or maybe the question should be whether nationalism, religious zealotry, xenophobia, machismo and other malign “memes” are “pathogens”? That’s probably literally true in some sense, yet still remains more metaphorical than medical (just as a lot else that passes for psychology does). “Prevention” and “cure” depend on education and culture, not medicine. The right analogy there is not the effects of air pollution (or poverty, or injustice), but its causes: “pathogenogens”?

Unless someone finds a drug or surgery…

Not very deep, but certainly right. The trick will be to genuinely sensitize people to the hurts they inflict, knowingly or unknowingly, otherwise there will only be the pretence of empathy, practised as empty PC method-acting.

I have lately (far too late in life) become meta-sensitized on behalf of victims who are blind to the micro-insults yet suffer infinitely worse macro-injuries (“more than one way to skin a cat,” “squealing like a stuck pig”…).

If that triggered a reflexive smile then you are face to face with the real heart of the problem — and it is indeed about whether one really has a heart, nothing more, nothing less. It’s not called compassion when we care about ourselves or our loved ones. It begins outside that circle. And it encompasses every innocent being that feels.

In a variant on “we always hurt the ones we love”: We always revile the ones we hurt. Helps us live with ourselves…

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Matthieu Ricard asked a Montreal audience at ToHu. 29 August 2015:

Are you in favour of causing needless suffering to feeling beings?

Not a single hand raised. Most people are fundamentally decent. The rest is about sensitizing them to the fact that most of them are nevertheless unknowingly and needlessly causing unimaginable agony to countless innocent victims — as consumers of meat, fish, dairy, eggs, fur, leather, the commercial pet trade, and the animal entertainment industry (including zoos) — which grades continuously into the sadistic blood-sports (rodeos, bull-fighting, dog-fighting) that only the inhumane minority crave.

Êtes-vous en faveur d’infliger la souffrance aux êtres sensibles sans nécessité?

https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/hungarian-refugees-in-a-refugee-camp-austria-photograph-news-photo/82092139

Hungarian refugees, 1956

The excuses of Ambassador Odor are rank and all-too-familiar attempts to put a deceptive sanctimonious spin on the calculating and anti-social malfeasances of the Hungarian government.

Blaming the EU and the media for bearing witness to the Hungarian government’s heartless and reckless mistreatment of the refugees — instead of owning up to it and remedying it — is a signature tactic of Viktor Orban’s scruple-free regime.

Overwhelmed by an unexpected crisis not of their making?

The months of advance preparation in the form of a concerted nation-wide hate-campaign against migrants and the fortune spent on hastily building a makeshift razor fence whose only bloody victims are migrant wildlife — was that all done sleep-walking?

So that now, being “caught unawares” by a humanitarian catastrophe — with no government provisions whatsoever for feeding, sheltering, reassuring and registering growing numbers of exhausted men, women and children, not even a public address system that can tell the bewildered and frightened victims in their own language what is happening and what lies in store for them — what the Hungarian did (and didn’t do) was the only possible option under the circumstances?

The victims — repeatedly called “economic migrants” and not refugees in the Hungarian government’s lengthy advance propaganda campaign against them, well before they even arrived — are right now detained for days outdoors by police cordons in the rapidly dropping temperatures, with the only food, water, tents, medical aid and information being provided for them by individual Hungarian citizens and volunteer organizations, not the Hungarian government, which is busy building hate and fences, along with hastily dispatching its ambassadors with stretched, sanctimonious and legalistic excuses to the rest of the world.

Unable to stop the worldwide media from bearing witness, the only thing the Hungarian government wants to do now is to get the victims herded into refugee camps, out of the public view, where even Amnesty International has been refused admittance.

The Hungarian government reckoned well that (with the help of its own domestic media control) its hate campaign would further desensitize and brutalize much of the Hungarian populace. (The wonderful volunteer helpers are alas just a small and exceptional minority.)

But perhaps the leadership didn’t reckon with the effect this very graphic glimpse of the Hungarian government M.O. would have on the rest of the world, which, till now, had not been quite ready to believe that the alarm signals about what is going on in Hungary were not exaggerations.

For this entire refugee catastrophe was premeditatedly fomented by the Hungarian government — muscularly resisting the alien hordes, as the defender not only of the sovereign Hungarian nation, but the rest of Europe — fomented for three reasons that have nothing to do with either the crisis in the Middle East, or the vast numbers of resulting refugees invading “Christian Europe,” or the threat of terrorism (as they are being cynically spun):

The plight of the refugees was simply stoked in every way by the Hungarian government in order to divert domestic press attention from mounting government corruption scandals (so far just minor mysteries to the world press) that could threaten the government’s electoral base. Scare tactics plus a muscular guardian stance, stoutly resisting the alien hordes, in contrast, wins Hungarian votes.

But, just as an insurance policy, in reality the primary reason for fomenting the refugee crisis was so as to provide a pretext for introducing new police-state laws that will be adopted September 15, but will last long past the refugee crisis — laws that plan to (1) criminalize asylum-seekers, (2) call up the army and the police forces to “defend” Hungary against them, with deadly force if deemed necessary, (3) allow warrantless entry into Hungarian homes on suspicion of harbouring refugees and (4) prescribe lengthy prison sentences for those found guilty.

(Under the new laws, for example, the current PM’s arch-rival, the former PM, could immediately be imprisoned as he has been sheltering an average of a dozen refugees every night since the crisis began, as well as feeding them and providing medical care. The current PM has long been seeking — so far in vain, because the Hungarian judicial system is not yet 100% under his control — a pretext for imprisoning the former PM, dictatorship quashing democracy.)

Viktor Orban likes to cite the letter of the law to justify his every misdeed. So he re-writes Hungarian law as needed and cherry-picks EU and member state laws to fit the occasion, creating a Frankenstein patchwork out of the worst from everywhere, to which he can claim to be faithfully adhering to the letter, while stifling the spirit of all that’s intended to be good, honest and decent. His refugee atrocities are a paradigmatic example of this unscrupulous legalistic strategy.

Princeton University’s renowned constitutional-law expert, Professor Kim Lane Scheppele — who has been studying and warning about the Hungarian government’s abuse of its 2/3 majority to adopt an undemocratic constitution undermining human rights as well as checks and balances on government powers — has written an extremely sobering analysis of what the latest piece of legislation portends.

In a police state, there would no longer be any need to fear being voted out of power…

http://www.euractiv.com/sections/justice-home-affairs/hungarian-official-admits-campaign-generate-hate-against-migrants

“IF YOU COME TO HUNGARY, YOU CANNOT TAKE AWAY HUNGARIANS’ JOBS”
National Consultation on Immigration and Terrorism
Hungarian Government Posters, June 2015

It is by now patently obvious that the refugee “crisis” that Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban has artifically and systematically created had 3 goals:

(1) to divert attention from Orban’s many mounting corruption scandals,

(2) to re-assert and reinforce Orban’s populistic self-image as the nation’s protector against the invasion of the Turks and the exploitation by the EU and

(3) to provide a pretext for introducing police-state legislation for enhancing Orban’s dictatorial powers.

(The bonus of the new emergency right to break into the homes of people suspected of giving refuge to refugees (sic!) is that Orban will now at last gain the legal right to break into the home of his arch-enemy, the former prime-minister, Viktor Gyurcsany, whom he had ousted through dirty tricks and character assassination and who is now giving refuge to the refugees: perhaps Orban will even be able to do what he has so long tried, so far unsuccessfully, to do, which is to find a legal pretext for imprisoning Gyurcsany.)

This is the standard M.O. of psychopathic dictators, if they are not stopped by concerted resistance from normal, decent people.

What a huge difference between the psychopath whom the Hungarians twice elected — Viktor Orban — and the decent human being whom that psychopath ousted through demagoguery and character assassination: Former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany

Perhaps at long last the brainwashed Hungarian populace will now wake up to who is the decent one and who is the deceiver.

(The Orban propaganda machine will of course howl “It’s all a publicity stunt!” — Well even as a publicity stunt it would send a far more humane message than Orban’s shameful, shameless hate-mongering.)

HUMAN RATIONALISM
Wesley L Smith’s article, Animal Rights Zealotry Hates Animal Welfare (“Human Exceptionalism” in National Review) is full of unreflective stereotypes and over-simplification. Here’s a much more circumspect account:

Most people will agree (if they are not sadists or psychopaths) that it is wrong to hurt or kill a feeling organism unnecessarily.

(To disagree would be to hold that “it is fine to hurt or kill a feeling organism unnecessarily — e.g., for pleasure or profit.”)

Animal welfare advocates are working to reduce the suffering of animals who are being hurt or killed, regardless of whether it is being done out of necessity or for pleasure or profit.

Animal rights advocates are working to prevent animals from being hurt or killed unnecessarily at all. They feel that all animals (including humans) have the right not to be hurt or killed unnecessarily (i.e., that that’s what it means to say it’s wrong to do it).

The rest is down to what is “necessary.” Most people will agree that necessity has to do with conflicts in vital (survival or health) needs, as between predator and prey, or aggressor and victim.

There are extremists who hold that no animal (whether nonhuman or human, presumably) should ever be hurt or killed, under any circumstances. This is either like saying that there should not be any disease or hunger — or conflicts of vital interest — in the world (a commendable but utopian pipe-dream); or it is based on imagining that if they were attacked by a nonhuman or human aggressor they could or would or should not fight for their lives.

That’s all there really is to it, if you think about it.

Craig, W. J., & Mangels, A. R. (2009). Position of the American Dietetic Association: vegetarian diets. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 109(7), 1266-1282.

Harnad, S. (2013). Taste and Torment: Why I Am Not a Carnivore. Québec Humaniste 8(1): 10-13