killing = taking away life
April 17, 2014 at 12:45 pm
(This post was last modified: April 17, 2014 at 2:41 pm by Coffee Jesus.)
From a utilitarian perspective, taking away a life is bad if the life taken was or would be a good life. By this same reasoning, giving life is good if that life will be a good life, and it is better to give and take a life than to not give life at all. Other concerns—the emotional hurt of friends, the removal of a parent/guardian, the silencing of a voice, or the loss of an important individual—don't apply as universally as this.
By bringing forth a life, you are garunteeing that it will die, but this does not negate the value of bringing forth the life. Our punishments however do not have to be based on the overall impact of a person's actions. If you steal back from the poor that which you gave them, we can still punish you. Similarly, we can punish a woman who kills her own infant painlessly. Considering that infant production is long, arduous, and painful, perhaps infants have value by virtue of how difficult it is to make them. Therefore we could consider it extremely wasteful to kill them, even painlessly.
This also has implications for vegetarianism as it relates to livestock welfare. While it would be better if the animals weren't killed, they were born specifically because people wanted to eat them. This shifts the welfare argument for vegetarianism toward quality of life. If a life will be of terrible quality, then it may be better that the life never starts or is ended prematurely.
By bringing forth a life, you are garunteeing that it will die, but this does not negate the value of bringing forth the life. Our punishments however do not have to be based on the overall impact of a person's actions. If you steal back from the poor that which you gave them, we can still punish you. Similarly, we can punish a woman who kills her own infant painlessly. Considering that infant production is long, arduous, and painful, perhaps infants have value by virtue of how difficult it is to make them. Therefore we could consider it extremely wasteful to kill them, even painlessly.
This also has implications for vegetarianism as it relates to livestock welfare. While it would be better if the animals weren't killed, they were born specifically because people wanted to eat them. This shifts the welfare argument for vegetarianism toward quality of life. If a life will be of terrible quality, then it may be better that the life never starts or is ended prematurely.
