Is Bestiality Wrong?

For what it's worth, Rat, I don't think your argument against bestiality based on interspecies disease transmission is being treated seriously enough--it's one of the best. There's a big difference between introducing your girlfriend to herpes and introducing your species to a plague.Consider that we already know that the butchering and handling of animal carcasses likely played a significant role in the movement of pathogens from other species to ours: SARS (open air meat markets in Asia), and HIV (the popularity of game meat, including monkey and chimp in Africa). For millennia, close proximity between people and domesticated animals facilitated the movement of pathogens: pigs and flu, cow and pox. Removing the cows and pigs from the house was a major public health advance: moving them into the boudoir would be a retreat.A great deal of cultural knowledge has been embedded in moral strictures concerning animals. For example, dietary prohibitions (pork, shellfish) almost certainly reflect ancient discoveries of associated health risks. A western Native American culture (?Navajo) abandoned a residence if a particular species of mouse was seen; that seemed like superstition until a few years ago, when it was identified as a primary vector for a deadly disease.It's fun watching a bunch of moral relativists (I'm one, too) argue about whether something should be immoral. Think about it.Maybe a better discussion would be about whether bestiality can be reasonably and coherently held to be immoral. In a society that abhors any killing (Buddhist) or any other deliberate cause of suffering, the answer seems to be, yes, of course. At any rate, many of the questions being asked in this thread are more in the arena of law and public policy than that of morality.Is there a risk of introducing a dangerous pathogen to our species through bestiality? Clearly, the answer is yes.Is the public policy interest in preventing this stronger than the liberty interest in letting a few men screw their dogs? I'd say so.Personally, I find bestiality abhorrent because I do not believe animals are unthinking, unfeeling automatons to abuse for our sport and pleasure. But there are good, rational arguments against bestiality, quite aside from such feelings.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

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Chiroptera, that was really funny but even more silly.Why should we ban driving at 100 mph just because it might, perhaps, maybe, cause a few deaths? I mean, we allow mass deaths through wars and starvation, so why can't Legend rip up the shire to his heart's content?Life isn't risk-free, therefore we cannot legitimately manage risk as a society: is that about it?Well, okay--I'll make an exception for bats. Bats you can fuck to death. Knock yourself out.

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I agree that public health and social risk management are mediated by many nonrational factors. That's undeniable.However, the topic under discussion was bestiality, and whether there is any reason to think it morally wrong. Of course, we have not carefully defined just what morality might be, but any discussion of law, morality, public health policy, etc., can be sidetracked by asking, "Oh yeah, what about X?" In moral debate, perhaps isolation of cases is as important as the isolation of variable factors in experimentation.Consistency may or may not be the hobgoblin of little minds, but demanding perfect consistency is definitely the derailment devil of moral/public policy debate.Personally, I find Chicken McNuggets a crime against humanity, but that's a question for another thread.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

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If we are just jousting for some sort of arena primacy, then, sure, it makes sense to take an opponent's argument in its most trivial sense.But if we are using debate to sort out some version of truth, then it makes more sense to take those arguments in their strongest form.Your dismissal of Rat's comments as prejudice displays your own. No, and it doesn't require a drunken driver to kill innocent bystanders--a drunken pilot can do as well or better. So we shouldn't mandate drivers' sobriety? Further, we have extensive laws concerning travel and innoculations, as well as quarantines, when necessary. The basis in law for proscriptions of liberty based on public health concerns is well established. Not fair? What an odd notion: we are discussing the most intimate of contacts with animal species, so my focus seems appropriate to me. On the other hand, persons are, after all, animals.The role of disease in the decimation of New World native populations is a subject of research that I have followed closely for decades. The lethal threats that exist at contact points between two different groups of creatures--whether the same species or not--support my argument, not yours. Nice rhetoric, but irrelevant and wrong: nothing has been plaguing us since the beginning of time, since we weren't there and neither were pathogens.Pathogens do not arise in the human species, whole and complete like Satan's daughter from his forehead. They invariably require the vectors and reservoirs of other species. By the way, I believe I mentioned the pox pathogens--which came to us via domesticated animals. I beg you to do better at it. I have asserted a rational, public health reason for any society to proscribe bestiality and supported it with factual material. You have merely dismissed it.I value human sexual freedom a great deal, but it is not an absolute value--we can and do prohibit and criminalize HIV-infected people from intercourse with unknowing partners because there is an overriding public health interest. The same principles can be reasonably applied to bestiality.

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You seem quite exercised--what reasons did you assert that I dismissed? Please quote from your own post to demonstrate this. Barely rational? You are frothing.Quote me in context, then demonstrate the "barely rational" nature of my remarks. I demonstrated by analogy that one poorly regulated threat to public health and safety does not vitiate concerns about another. The disease transmissions about which I spoke concerned either past practices where domesticated animals literally lived with humans or open air meat markets that mixed live, dead, domestic and game animals. Indeed--you have yet to engage rationally anything I have said.

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I noticed.Okay, from here on I'll ignore the irrelevant crap about Rat.Moving on: Your reading is poor: squint at the screen, and you will note that my analogy did not compare sober drivers to drunk drivers. Once more, slowly: a relative difference between threats does not mean a less likely threat should be ignored. Having said that, please substantiate your assertion that a novel pathogen against which human populations have no defense is more likely to occur via human-to-human contact than interspecies transmission. You both misunderstand my argument and are wrong about your own. Yet again: Reason does not identify a primary threat and dismiss all others. Nice creationist tactic, Taz, inserting the inflammatory "just" into my statement via paraphrase. As to your wife, I suppose that depends on your wife. Actually, you said:

quote:

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The most notable pandemics in history have always been the works of pathogens that had been plaguing man kind since the beginning of time. Compared to smallpox or the guinea worm disease, SARS was just a walk in the park.

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As I pointed out, smallpox moved to our species from domesticated animals--indeed, the first clue toward a smallpox vaccine was the fact that folks who had experienced the much milder cow pox tended to survive later infections with smallpox.You are again making the same two errors: one, that human populations are more at threat from extant pathogens, to which they have some resistance, than they are from novel ones; two, even if there is a greater and lesser threat, we must choose between policies that remedy only one and not both. See above.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

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I'm glad to hear you say so. In Msg 68 of this thread you declared:

quote:

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It doesn't make any sense to ban beastiality when having physical and sexual contact with people from more-often-than-not infested regions of the world like Africa is still A-OK.

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That seems pretty clear. "Severe epidemics and pandemics" generally occur when a pathogen is introduced to a population previously unexposed. The Eurasian plague epidemics, the devestation of Native American populations, and the great flu pandemics of the early 20th century are good examples, and all of these involved our careless interaction with other species: the plague came via stowaway rats and fleas, smallpox via too close living with domesticated animals, and the mutated flu virus from close contact between domesticated fowl and wild fowl as well as too-close living with the domesticated fowl. I think you are still missing the point. First, you do not know what role past bestiality has played in the interspecies transmission of pathogens. The jokes are all about sheep (Why do Scots wear kilts? The sound of zippers startles the sheep.), but do you suppose no herder ever took a fancy to a comely young heifer? Camel and cow pox are candidate ancestor species to our smallpox, and the transmissiom came about via close contact--just how close is unknown. But the larger point is that I cited such cases previously to establish how common and dangerous interspecies transmission can be. Actually, over time the more virulent strains of pathogens in human populations tend to be replaced by less virulent strains, since the rapid killing of the host is not in the evolutionary interest of the pathogen. Accounts of early European syphillis, for example, suggest that a far more rapidly lethal form was first transmitted and later supplanted by a more indolent one.Records suggest Spanish sailors who transmitted smallpox to the Americas survived the disease because of its long history in Europe, and the human adaptation to it: that is why the explorers survived the long voyage despite their infection. The lack of adaptation to the pathogen in American populations made its introduction to the Americas particularly tragic. The disease carrier who does not himself succumb to the disease is a tremendous threat.Similarly, the frightening and rapidly lethal Ebola has so far had only local outbreaks because infected persons bleed out dramatically and have little time to carry the pathogen to other locales. In this case, a more indolent pathogen would be much more dangerous. Yes, I noted in passing that we are a species of animal. You in reply suggested by paraphrase that I had said "just" an animal, then went on to wonder whether I would characterize your relations with your wife as bestiality.Creationists generally react in a similar fashion to the idea that people are animals--evolved, instinctual, etc., and emotionally load the discussion by insisting that we are not "just" animals and then raising the stakes further by suggesting personal offense. So, Taz--that is the creo tactic I cited; perhaps you reinvented the wheel; if so, my apologies for suggesting you borrowed the tactic from creos. Eerily familar? I'm not sure what that means, exactly. For the record, I am defintely in the pro-sodomy camp. I don't think people will stop killing each other because murder is banned, but I see no reason to lift the laws against it. I do thank you for the amusing suggestion that I am a homophobe, however. It actually isn't like that at all. I have pointed out several times that there is a general category of public health risk to which the public health risks of bestiality can be assigned. The history of interspecies transmission shows that the threat is real; bestiality is an avenue of interspecies tranmission. That obvious conclusion is a far cry from blaming all human pathogens on bestiality.The most likely avenue of interspecies transfer of HIV (though not the only one possible) was the butchering of game meat, monkeys and chimps, probably--which, by the way, is banned in most areas of Africa. It continues, in part, due to the dietary needs and threat-ignorance of those who do it. Education and dietary assistance are the best ways to counter this, but that is no reason to lift a prohibition which exists for good reasons.And, yes, indeed, most researchers think the primary means of HIV transmission among human populations in Africa was and is heterosexual, with some speculation that the vaginal injuries done to young girls by early marriage/rape/prostitution and by the wounds of vaginal mutilation promoted that heterosexual spread.Also, as noted above, you have no idea of the exact avenue by which the smallpox virus, or any other pathogen, made it into our species.If it came by the most likely route of keeping the cow in the house at night (once common in Europe), the general need for caution about our interactions with other species is clear, an area of caution which subsumes bestiality. Can there be any doubt that direct exposure to bodily fluids is even more likely to facilitate such transmissions?Finally, there are a number of ways to measure risk. I agree that the transmission of an existing human pathogen to one human group by another is more likely than the transmission of a novel pathogen from another species to ours.However, most of our major pathogens now already have global reach; thousands of years of human evolution and intermingling have granted some degree of resistance to most pathogens in most populations, and the same period of evolution among pathogens has tended to replace virulent strains with less virulent ones. But the global-village, rapid-transit nature of our present world makes novel pathogens more dangerous than ever.Human-to-human contagion is certainly more probable; the consequences of a new, highly virulent pathogen are certainly more dangerous. To continue our driver theme, a fender-bender is far more likely, but a T-bone by a drunk driver is far more dangerous, so we both educate drivers about the risks of driving under the influence and prohibit the behavior by law.

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Mustang Ranch?

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I am truly and deeply puzzled by your continuing insistence on this point.The relativist position--as I understand and embrace it--is that an act must be examined in context before it can be declared morally wrong or right. Sometimes an act that appears clearly immoral may be judged otherwise when context and motive are considered; sometimes an act of apparent kindness may turn out to be cruelly immoral.So in the specific case you discuss here, it is not that an event of rape must be examined carefully to determine its rightness or wrongness, but that an event of sexual intercourse is so examined.You are merely reciting tautologies:Wrongful sex is wrong.
Wrongful killing is wrong.You can continue in this vein forever without error, but you will have said nothing useful. So let me totally agree with your tautologies:Rape is wrong.
Murder is wrong.Now assume there are cases of sexual activity and killing to consider--right here, right now. Tell me your verdict: Is it rape and murder?What? You don't know yet? You have to ask for facts and circumstances?Exactly.It is more accurate to say that the relativist disagrees with the absolutist on why rape and murder are wrong. You find the ground of your morality in the moral dictates of a divine absolute; I find mine in the values and relations of the human community and the commonality of life.When you say "based on their philosophy, rape is not actually wrong" you are merely acting out your rejection of relativist foundations in an offensive manner. It's fine to reject those foundations, but saying it in this particular manner is a canard.Surely you understand the difference between saying 'relativists condemn wrongful acts but I find the foundations of their moral philosophy untenable' and "based on their philosophy, rape is not actually wrong."I--and other moral relativists in this forum and elsewhere--find rape and murder as wrong and morally obscene as you do.Please stop suggesting otherwise.

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Very like a reverend... These accusations, of course, are not universally true. Even where they are true, inconsistency does not refute a moral argument; it may damage a political argument or a debate score, but those are other arenas. Taz, mirror; mirror, Taz. So a carnivore must grant moral carte blanche to any treatment of animals? All life feeds on life: it is the great necessary contract of our being, vegan, carnivore, and omnivore alike. That necessity does not blot out all other moral concerns.Competition for good employment means I hope the young lady fails in her attempt to gain the job I want for myself--it's a jungle out here, baby, and I'm an implacable competitor. That I mean to see that she can't pay her rent doesn't mean I can also have sex with her without her consent.And moral inconsistency is, alas, also a hallmark of our existence; it does not of itself refute any particular argument.Do you mean to argue that only moral paragons may present valid moral arguments? Many of your posts seem to suggest that you believe the mere detection of inconsistency vitiates a person's moral arguments--do you explicity believe that?Hypocrisy gets up my nose, too, a nose that is hypersensitive to it. But when we narrow the focus to a particular moral issue, charges of hypocrisy are irrelevant to the meat of the matter. Your focus on what you see as hypocrisy or inconsistency is essentially an ad hominem fallacy.

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n_j, I would appreciate a response. EvC Forum: Is Bestiality Wrong?

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You seem to have said, "That's right, it doesn't," then, "Yes, it does."Could you tell me more about the mechanism by which the fact that life feeds on life blots out concerns about consent in other matters? If I eat meat, I must consent to the most atrocious treatment of animals? If I eat wings, I must accept Johnny's torture of bluebirds without demurral?If the banker doesn't ask consent to foreclose on the widow's farm, why can't he just rape her at will? If the soldier doesn't need consent to shoot enemy soldiers, why can't he bugger them once they are prisoners?No act of predation is consensual. That is what I suggested by "the great necessary contract of our being": to live in this world is to be fair game to other life for the necessity of their being.It is their life-need--and ours--that raises this commonalilty beyond moral questions of consent.The apparent "blot out" you refer to is a psychological twitch, a blind spot of human cognition, not a moral tenet. "If you don't ask consent to kill something, how can you ask consent to fuck it?" is an emotional question, not a moral one.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

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If you reject the force of hypocrisy and/or inconsistency here, you have no argument at all. Jack said jack. See my reply. To question the motivation of the argument is an ad hominem argument--usually resorted to when there is no good refutation. Further, your audience includes vegans and animal rights activists--in fact, you have no idea how those grounds of inconsistency or hypocrisy apply to anyone in this thread: you make them out of the blue. Your notion of "cherry picking" moral arguments is a prime example of why I titled my reply, "Inconsistency does not cancel out." There is a great deal of wrong in the world, and none of us is pure: nonetheless, we may make moral assertions.Edited by Omnivorous, : spleling

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