Trophy Hunting Good?!

[bennyboy]

That's right.  The question is whether it comes down to the greater good as virtue, or abstinence from evil as virtue.

Just not for me, at least not in this.  

I think that's ALWAYS the moral question. If by doing some harm, you can prevent even more harm, or even cause a good of greater magnitude, how do you stand? Do you avoid doing any harm personally, or do you commit the evil in order to serve the greater good? Here's a question-- what if instead of deer, we come to the conclusion that HUMAN population density is likely to lead to wipeout-proportion disease spread, strangulation due to lack of resources and so on. Do we commit the necessary evil of thinning out the herd?

Is even the horrific evil of war ultimately likely to lead to a net negative?

Man vs. beast, killing that beast is nasty business-- it will suffer, and its life will end, and I see both those as negatives.

Some ways moreso than others..yeah.  It will suffer and it's life will end regardless.  Moreso if it's mangled by a deep moldboard plow, eaten alive by any number of things, or hit with a bow and bled out running.  Not so much from a well placed shot.   

Joe Rogan makes a pretty good point. The status quo for nature is that either you die of illness, you bleed out from injury, or something bigger than you rips you apart, starting from your asshole, and you die in horrible agony. In some sense, a shot to the head or heart is the animal world equivalent of dying in your sleep, right?

But maybe harm isn't so much in the suffering in that sense, as in the inability of the individuals to live (and die) according to their nature. You are taking an animal that would have experienced the morning sunlight thousands more times, enjoyed eating fresh sprigs in springtime, had a chance to mate again. . .

But given a knowledge of the bigger picture. . . you can count all the animals who don't yet exist but will, and will definitely suffer (like livestock), you can count the lives of one species against those of another, and so on.

Livestock needn't suffer.  We're in a better position to reduce that suffering than we are in the case of wild animals.   I sometimes wonder, btw, at people who treat the hunting of a deer with more thorough ethical consideration than the production of their own livestock.  People with 40 acres managed for deer....and some tiny portion of the rest a feedlot.

Again, it's very hard to arrive at a good picture of what harm is. I'd say for animals to be enclosed in tight spaces is suffering. Separating a cow from her calves certainly must produce a great deal of suffering in both, but we do that with puppies, so. . .

It's a lot more ambiguous than people of either side generally admit to. Maybe Aroura is on to something by looking at it through an environmental lens: at least there's some degree of objectivity to be found there.