Morality from the ground up

[bennyboy]

Maybe, hard to say not knowing why that would be, but obviously not from the system of harm or suffering, as no harm or suffering need be caused there.  Though, again, if there were some shitty moral component to food production..and in practice there usually is something, we'd still be choosing the least egregious among a field of sub-optimals.  That's -generally- not seen as grounds for moral condemnation even when the act in a vacuum might be considered immoral.  

The reality is that the animals involved in food production are treated really horribly, even the ones used to make the milk that I drink. We do not, in fact, choose the "least egregious." For the most part, out of sight, out of mind, and pass me the steak sauce.

-that's lazy.  Yes, they're dehumanized, but it goes deeper than that..the nazis weren't gassing german shepherds.  They treated them as -less- than animals.  They extended their notions of morality and noty being cruel, for example...to dogs, but not to those jews.  

They weren't gassing german shepherds only because they had no reason to. But this is a two-way street: we anthopomorphize pet animals, and dehumanize people we intend to abuse.

I want to point out here, that in all of the above, you refused to continue the discussion of the rationalization you argued to -be- rational.  You refused to consistently apply it, you refused to entertain the logical consequences of it when it determined that killing bessie was -not- immoral even though killing the immigrant was..and not because one was human and one was a cow - and now, you're just trying to start that again, up above.  

Too much meta-commentary. You have in your comment about German shepherds demonstrated that animals CAN selectively be included under the umbrella of moral consideration. The next question should be obvious: is there a rational basis for this consideration, or is it emotional?

My position with regard to both German shepherds and Jews is that we decide who we will include under our umbrella, and who we will exclude, and the latter group is basically fucked. But we don't have to be nazis to do this-- we just have to be human.

-here's something fun to point out, rather than go full balls to wall crazy with "harm doesn't matter", you could have asked whether or not a society in which livestock production is okay is a society that creates suffering - for the animals.  After all, just because the law says we have to do x, doesn't mean we will, or that everyone does x.

I would prefer you only quote things I've actually said. I said that "suffering" as a single metric for moral ideas is incomplete, because you can do things we'd consider immoral (e.g. murder) without causing suffering, or at least causing very little. So we have to extend the list of axioms from "Minimize suffering" to something more than that.

As for harm-- well, are we going to define death as harm, or not? And if so, on what basis does the cessation of conscious agency constitute "harm"?

[Astonished]

B-boy, if my singular use of 'fuck' was a bother to you, rest assured it was to impress upon you how inane bringing up law in the discussion was and my wish not to discuss that any further, nor was it directed at you personally so just chill, li'l bro, a'ight? Trust me, if I'm really laying into someone, you'll know it. Just look at what happens when theists talk themselves into a corner and refuse to acknowledge when they're called out on it, and I'm there to see it.

Other than that I can't really find anything substantial in your posts other than, yes, these things do merit further discussion. But you've got to draw the line somewhere and it's not arbitrary where we've drawn it.

[The Grand Nudger]

The reality is that the animals involved in food production are treated really horribly, even the ones used to make the milk that I drink.  We do not, in fact, choose the "least egregious."  For the most part, out of sight, out of mind, and pass me the steak sauce.

Some of them, for sure - and similarly there's no shortage of people willing to point out that this is unethical, even immoral, regardless of whether or not they're vegetarians.  

They weren't gassing german shepherds only because they had no reason to.  But this is a two-way street: we anthopomorphize pet animals, and dehumanize people we intend to abuse.

They had no reason to gas the jews either.  Yes, it is a two way street.  We sometimes afford our pets more consideration than human beings.  No matter what our moral system, our moral agency is spotty.  

Too much meta-commentary.  You have in your comment about German shepherds demonstrated that animals CAN selectively be included under the umbrella of moral consideration.  The next question should be obvious: is there a rational basis for this consideration, or is it emotional?

A question already asked and answered - we generally set the lines along sentience in a rational moral system...but sentiment is also a strong selector, though theres a meta-issue here as well..in that even when we don;t think an animal is all that sentient, we sometimes think that the people who abuse them are still cruel, or immoral. We might even recognize that a person who mindlessly destroys inanimate objects is somehow broken. Not because the act, in a vacuum, causes any real harm..but because it strongly correlates with others that do.

My position with regard to both German shepherds and Jews is that we decide who we will include under our umbrella, and who we will exclude, and the latter group is basically fucked.  But we don't have to be nazis to do this-- we just have to be human.

Well, ofc we decide that.  We can do it any number of ways..some of them rational, most of them not.  

I would prefer you only quote things I've actually said.  I said that "suffering" as a single metric for moral ideas is incomplete, because you can do things we'd consider immoral (e.g. murder) without causing suffering, or at least causing very little.  So we have to extend the list of axioms from "Minimize suffering" to something more than that.

I've already shared my opinion there..that many of the additions will reduce to minimizing suffering.  Sure, though, we can make other considerations.  Do you have any in mind?  

As for harm-- well, are we going to define death as harm, or not?  And if so, on what basis does the cessation of conscious agency constitute "harm"?

Some do, some don't.  What do you think, is death harm?

[bennyboy]

They had no reason to gas the jews either.  Yes, it is a two way street.  We sometimes afford our pets more consideration than human beings.  No matter what our moral system, our moral agency is spotty.  

They definitely had reasons to gas the Jews. They wrote books and books about their reasons, and shouted them at political rallies. We just wouldn't consider them sufficient reasons for the murder of human beings on that Dantean scale.

A question already asked and answered - we generally set the lines along sentience in a rational moral system...but sentiment is also a strong selector, though theres a meta-issue here as well..in that even when we don;t think an animal is all that sentient, we sometimes think that the people who abuse them are still cruel, or immoral.  We might even recognize that a person who mindlessly destroys inanimate objects is somehow broken.  Not because the act, in a vacuum, causes any real harm..but because it strongly correlates with others that do.  

I don't see how any mammal can be seen as insufficiently sentient not to deserve moral consideration. I mean, mother cows cry when you take away their baby cows. Crying mothers are sad, no?

And you've touched on another thing-- the idea of property, and that for sure is a human thing. I sometimes wonder if it is morally reprehensible or morally necessary to separate people from unhealthy attachments: like if someone can't live because she's grown her fingernails to be 15 feet long, I wonder if the best thing wouldn't be to jump her with a pair of scissors.

Some do, some don't.  What do you think, is death harm?

I dunno. I fear death more than most kinds of suffering and loss of property. I'm pretty sure that there are some "Angel of Death" murderers who think they are freeing highly-suffering people by releasing them into the peace of death.

It takes effort and resources to draw earth's materials into an animated form. Death releases those materials, and is in that sense on undoing of all the effort that went into it. Assuming that we see life as a struggle against entropy, and that we take this struggle as good, then I think you could define death as harm.

[The Grand Nudger]

They definitely had reasons to gas the Jews.  They wrote books and books about their reasons, and shouted them at political rallies.  We just wouldn't consider them sufficient reasons for the murder of human beings on that Dantean scale.

Reasons™

I don't see how any mammal can be seen as insufficiently sentient not to deserve moral consideration.  I mean, mother cows cry when you take away their baby cows.  Crying mothers are sad, no?

Other mammals feature heavily in our moral considerations.  Funny thing about that, most of them are dumb as a bag of rocks.  Mammals benefit greatly from familiarity and comfort.  Meanwhile, a great many non mammalian species that we have good reason to believe have a rich interior life are given little to no regard.  

And you've touched on another thing-- the idea of property, and that for sure is a human thing.  I sometimes wonder if it is morally reprehensible or morally necessary to separate people from unhealthy attachments: like if someone can't live because she's grown her fingernails to be 15 feet long, I wonder if the best thing wouldn't be to jump her with a pair of scissors.

Property isn't uniquely human, we just have the most amusingly elaborate rituals regarding property - a somewhat new wrinkle for our species, so far as we can tell.  I suppose that whether or not a person thinks that there's a moral compulsion to remove someones property (or any unhealthy attachment) touches on a persons idea of sovereignty.  We confiscate cats from cat ladies (and lion ladies..if you're from florida, lol).  We intervene in the case of addicts and baker act unstable people.  So..it certainly seems that at least in some cases the scales tip towards necessity.......though, my aunt collects ceramic clowns.  Lots of them.  A disturbingly large amount of them.  She's doing great now - but there was a rough patch in her life where she probably should have spent whatever meager cash she had on food, rather than clowns.  If somebody came and confiscated her clowns, most of us would probably consider that to be morally reprehensible.  So, case by case basis?  There seems to be a threshold of self harm that we're comfortable with, possibly because intervening in every case would be even more harmful - a totalitarian moralizing society has been tried time and time again...it ends poorly.  

I dunno.  I fear death more than most kinds of suffering and loss of property.  I'm pretty sure that there are some "Angel of Death" murderers who think they are freeing highly-suffering people by releasing them into the peace of death.

The latter can be safely ignored in any rational morality.  Their opinions are not only suspect, but irrelevant to the subject of what is right.  In any case, I'm not sure that a fear of death is really operable in this context.  Sure, we fear our deaths - but we don't condemn each other morally for being mortal.  We don;t condemn each other for all killing either.  It;s only a subset of death that's widely considered immoral in an absolute sense.  Murder.  Senseless killing.  Killing for Reasons™.

It takes effort and resources to draw earth's materials into an animated form.  Death releases those materials, and is in that sense on undoing of all the effort that went into it.  Assuming that we see life as a struggle against entropy, and that we take this struggle as good, then I think you could define death as harm.

Personally, I see death as an inevitability.  Not, in and of itself, harmful.  The only time I would attach some moral component to a natural death is when some other person could prevent it, and the person didn't want to die.  Or if, by harming another, you caused an untimely death.  Both are subject to many, many qualifications.  In general, I avoid killing shit where I can.  

Wasn't always this way, though.  I don't know if I ever had occasion to tell you this story whenever we were chatting..but-  When I was maybe six or seven, I got a daisy bb gun.  One of those little pump handle deals that you could shoot somebody with and leave, maybe, a welt.  My grandfather though, big time hunter.  I wanted to be just like him.  So, I was always looking for stuff to shoot that the bb gun might be able to kill.  Lizards, cicadas, cockroaches, snakes, small birds.  On top of that, bb's from those little guns (if you never had one) have a tendency to curve at random.  They're slow enough to watch from the barrel out - which i guess is a mesmerizing part of the fixation.  So - whatever you were going to reliably hit..it had to be close..and preferably stationary.   The juiciest target, all things considered, were songbirds in the nest.  So, me being me, I pop this little songbird...and it falls right out and down.  Immediately, I have a sinking sort of feeling - but, also, it was fascinating - until mama bird flew down.  She buzzed me a few times and then landed there, by the dead bird, and started chirping.  It seemed, at the time, that her chirps were a frantic accusation.  It was so loud in my ears and the shame I felt became so pronounced that there was only one thing to do.  I shot her too.  I immediately realized that I would never be the great white hunter.  I only ended up going hunting with my grandfather once.  We went out to a palmetto hammock in NW Florida, by the Suwannee, where Ichetucknee Spring flows down through the Sante Fe and the headwaters meat.  It was a long ride at four in the morning.  We ate funnel cake we had from the state fair and drank cold coffee.  I was anxious, the whole way, I knew he had expectations and that it would be difficult for me to play it off if I couldn't shoot a deer.  I was fourteen by this time so I'd been shooting for a decade.  It wasn't like he'd have believed me if I told him I missed.  Deep down, I knew I couldn't.  We spent the morning in a tree stand over some apple dusted corn he;d laid out the week before.  We're ambush hunters and poachers...not wandering through the brush tracking types, lol.  I got lucky, ultimately, when we finally saw a deer in the wild I was so excited that I almost jumped out of the stand and I shout "Poppy Look!" - so, ofc, that thing bolts at top speed into the fronds.  "There's another one!" - again, off into the woods.   spent the rest of the time using my rifle like a heavy set of binos - which is mostly how I use it today when I go hunting.  There wasn't a single deer I couldn't scare off on accident before he could shoot it.  He never even discussed taking me again.  Still doesn;t..though I did get over that anxiety later in life.  Now I play follow up shot to necks with deer fever, who miss and maim.  Mostly, though, I just like hanging out in the woods.  I like setting the stands in the right spots.  I like staring at the deer through my scope...sometimes I make little "pop" noises with my lips and whisper, under my breath "gotya bitch".  I still ruin other peoples hunts, but I've learned to do it casually as a running joke.  "Hey Bill....there's an 8 pointer, right over there."  Oops, there he went.  Maybe next time.  My buddies joke that I'm batting for the other side, lol.

So, I guess for you it was a car and a caribou - which, frankly, would make my stomach turn.  For me, it was a pair of robins and a bb gun. Still, I've been known to hack snakes to pieces with a machete while shouting at them, and when I go fishing, I carry a hammer handle to beat gar and any other inedible before I throw it back into the water. I'm not much for kjilling chickens, my grandmother made me spin their necks with my hands and pluck em as a child..and I kindof like watching them peck around and play dinosaur, lol. I'll club a stray with a shovel if it screws with with the henhouses - which is easy to do, since they seem to think that human beings are their friends and benefactors.....and -anything- that fucks with my pig, Pig Pig. Obviously, I've been known to pull the trigger back at people.

So, spotty, right? Still, no matter what my reasons for killing something may be, there's a certain uneasiness that I;ve just learned to live with. It's not like I don't understand that I'm inflicting the greatest and most final sort of harm. I even think about it when I spray pesticides, which isn;t very often. Spiders are welcome in my home (despite Missy's -strenuous- protestations ). I suppose there's a ritual to it, for me, and a pronounced sense that all of this death links us together. Birds and spiders and snakes and dogs and deer and cattle and caribou...and human beings. It wouldn;t really surprise me if I ended up getting kicked by a horse or gored by a bull, bitten by a copperhead..someday, when I;m old and feeble or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I suppose I;d rather go out that way than after a long infirmity through illness. In that sense, something finally killing me, for a change, could be seen as a mercy. Not just for myself but for all of the things I would invariably kill with every passing day.

[bennyboy]

They definitely had reasons to gas the Jews.  They wrote books and books about their reasons, and shouted them at political rallies.  We just wouldn't consider them sufficient reasons for the murder of human beings on that Dantean scale.

Reasons™

1) Yes, for sure.
2) When it comes to cultural values, are there any other kind?

Other mammals feature heavily in our moral considerations.  Funny thing about that, most of them are dumb as a bag of rocks.  Mammals benefit greatly from familiarity and comfort.  Meanwhile, a great many non mammalian species that we have good reason to believe have a rich interior life are given little to no regard.  

This is actually part of my question. Clubbing baby seals is going to get a strong negative reaction from a lot of people. Clubbing a very clever (or at least interestingly adapted) species of lizard, less so. Killing members of maybe the most successful species in Earth's timeline, the cockroach, will get VERY little pushback, even from the most determined hippie.

Then there are mosquitoes. They have no intrinsic value at all, and must be actively hunted and eliminated wherever possible. If humanity lives only long enough to wipe those fuckers off the face of the Earth, our time here will not have been in vain.

(. . . or something that more greatly values live in general, rather than the little retarded humans we call baby mammals.)

Property isn't uniquely human, we just have the most amusingly elaborate rituals regarding property - a somewhat new wrinkle for our species, so far as we can tell.  I suppose that whether or not a person thinks that there's a moral compulsion to remove someones property (or any unhealthy attachment) touches on a persons idea of sovereignty.  We confiscate cats from cat ladies (and lion ladies..if you're from florida, lol).  We intervene in the case of addicts and baker act unstable people.  So..it certainly seems that at least in some cases the scales tip towards necessity.......though, my aunt collects ceramic clowns.  Lots of them.  A disturbingly large amount of them.  She's doing great now - but there was a rough patch in her life where she probably should have spent whatever meager cash she had on food, rather than clowns.  If somebody came and confiscated her clowns, most of us would probably consider that to be morally reprehensible.  So, case by case basis?  There seems to be a threshold of self harm that we're comfortable with, possibly because intervening in every case would be even more harmful - a totalitarian moralizing society has been tried time and time again...it ends poorly.  

This is a unique case we haven't really talked about much-- that there may be a possibility that CAUSING harm is moral, on the grounds that function is sometimes more important than comfort.

It certainly harms a Christian in some ways for his world view to be challenged such that he has a moment of philosophical crisis. Instead of thinking that his little girl who died of leukemia is with loved ones and God, he may realize that she's gone, and that her body is only plant food, and not even very much of it. I doubt there will be much benefit to him in arriving at this conclusion. And yet, few non-Christians would consider questioning his religious views an immoral act-- or would they?

Personally, I see death as an inevitability.  Not, in and of itself, harmful.  The only time I would attach some moral component to a natural death is when some other person could prevent it, and the person didn't want to die.  Or if, by harming another, you caused an untimely death.  Both are subject to many, many qualifications.  In general, I avoid killing shit where I can.  

I'm not sure that even murder can be called harm. Surely, there's often a brief suffering involved. But the actual not-being-alive-anymore part, that's philosophically tricky. Does loss of memory, the missing of the chance to walk under the sun and hear the birds sing again, constitute harm?

I'm not sure about that, but I'd call murder immoral in almost any context unless there were a very clear greater good.

Wasn't always this way, though.  I don't know if I ever had occasion to tell you this story whenever we were chatting..but-  When I was maybe six or seven, I got a daisy bb gun.  One of those little pump handle deals that you could shoot somebody with and leave, maybe, a welt.  My grandfather though, big time hunter.  I wanted to be just like him.  So, I was always looking for stuff to shoot that the bb gun might be able to kill.  Lizards, cicadas, cockroaches, snakes, small birds.  On top of that, bb's from those little guns (if you never had one) have a tendency to curve at random.  They're slow enough to watch from the barrel out - which i guess is a mesmerizing part of the fixation.  So - whatever you were going to reliably hit..it had to be close..and preferably stationary.   The juiciest target, all things considered, were songbirds in the nest.  So, me being me, I pop this little songbird...and it falls right out and down.  Immediately, I have a sinking sort of feeling - but, also, it was fascinating - until mama bird flew down.  She buzzed me a few times and then landed there, by the dead bird, and started chirping.  It seemed, at the time, that her chirps were a frantic accusation.  It was so loud in my ears and the shame I felt became so pronounced that there was only one thing to do.  I shot her too.  I immediately realized that I would never be the great white hunter.  I only ended up going hunting with my grandfather once.  We went out to a palmetto hammock in NW Florida, by the Suwannee, where Ichetucknee Spring flows down through the Sante Fe and the headwaters meat.  It was a long ride at four in the morning.  We ate funnel cake we had from the state fair and drank cold coffee.  I was anxious, the whole way, I knew he had expectations and that it would be difficult for me to play it off if I couldn't shoot a deer.  I was fourteen by this time so I'd been shooting for a decade.  It wasn't like he'd have believed me if I told him I missed.  Deep down, I knew I couldn't.  We spent the morning in a tree stand over some apple dusted corn he;d laid out the week before.  We're ambush hunters and poachers...not wandering through the brush tracking types, lol.  I got lucky, ultimately, when we finally saw a deer in the wild I was so excited that I almost jumped out of the stand and I shout "Poppy Look!" - so, ofc, that thing bolts at top speed into the fronds.  "There's another one!" - again, off into the woods.   spent the rest of the time using my rifle like a heavy set of binos - which is mostly how I use it today when I go hunting.  There wasn't a single deer I couldn't scare off on accident before he could shoot it.  He never even discussed taking me again.  Still doesn;t..though I did get over that anxiety later in life.  Now I play follow up shot to necks with deer fever, who miss and maim.  Mostly, though, I just like hanging out in the woods.  I like setting the stands in the right spots.  I like staring at the deer through my scope...sometimes I make little "pop" noises with my lips and whisper, under my breath "gotya bitch".  I still ruin other peoples hunts, but I've learned to do it casually as a running joke.  "Hey Bill....there's an 8 pointer, right over there."  Oops, there he went.  Maybe next time.  My buddies joke that I'm batting for the other side, lol.

1) Similar story for me, but with fishing. I went with my uncle. We walked up the train tracks (live ones, and through a tunnel even!) to get to our family's secret fishing hole. We had our favorite brand of root beer, a basket of sandwiches made by grandma-- it was a regular Norman Rockwell painting. But when we caught a fish, I couldn't bring myself to bash its head. My uncle told me it was cruel not too-- either kill it or put it back. We didn't have fish for dinner, and that was the end of that.

2) I think most people can relate to your story. I really feel we have to learn to overcome an aversion to killing. I personally have a much greater respect for people who have ever killed an animal themselves than I do for people who buy meat as Food™ and never once consider that they are eating something that once had a life of its own.

3) You should seriously consider putting about 100 of these stories into a book.

So, I guess for you it was a car and a caribou - which, frankly, would make my stomach turn.  For me, it was a pair of robins and a bb gun.  Still, I've been known to hack snakes to pieces with a machete while shouting at them, and when I go fishing, I carry a hammer handle to beat gar and any other inedible before I throw it back into the water.   I'm not much for kjilling chickens, my grandmother made me spin their necks with my hands and pluck em as a child..and I kindof like watching them peck around and play dinosaur, lol.  I'll club a stray with a shovel if it screws with with the henhouses - which is easy to do, since they seem to think that human beings are their friends and benefactors.....and -anything- that fucks with my pig, Pig Pig.  Obviously, I've been known to pull the trigger back at people.  

So, spotty, right?  Still, no matter what my reasons for killing something may be, there's a certain uneasiness that I;ve just learned to live with.  It's not like I don't understand that I'm inflicting the greatest and most final sort of harm.  I even think about it when I spray pesticides, which isn;t very often.  Spiders are welcome in my home (despite Missy's -strenuous- protestations ).  I suppose there's a ritual to it, for me, and a pronounced sense that all of this death links us together.  Birds and spiders and snakes and dogs and deer and cattle and caribou...and human beings.  It wouldn;t really surprise me if I ended up getting kicked by a horse or gored by a bull, bitten by a copperhead..someday, when I;m old and feeble or just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I suppose I;d rather go out that way than after a long infirmity through illness.   In that sense, something finally killing me, for a change, could be seen as a mercy.  Not just for myself but for all of the things I would invariably kill with every passing day.

+1 for having a pig named Pig Pig.

Your stories, and mine, really do seem to have a common element: it seems to me that humans (at least some of them) have a national inclination toward empathy with other species (at least some of them) and other humans, especially babies. I've many times heard even the hardest racist say things like, "Black babies are so damned cute, why do they have to end up like that?" I've even seen adopted black kids who grew up, and all their friends are hardcore racist, but they don't include him as black: "He ain't really a n@#%-er, he likes Hank Williams!"

[The Grand Nudger]

1) Yes, for sure.
2) When it comes to cultural values, are there any other kind?

Cultural reasons, sometimes, maybe, but obviously not all the time.  We're working at a rational morality..though, not a cultural flavor of morality.  

This is actually part of my question.  Clubbing baby seals is going to get a strong negative reaction from a lot of people.  Clubbing a very clever (or at least interestingly adapted) species of lizard, less so.  Killing members of maybe the most successful species in Earth's timeline, the cockroach, will get VERY little pushback, even from the most determined hippie.

Well..success and sentience aren't the same thing.  Theres good reaon to think that an octopus, a squid, some species of spider, and ants as a colony (the only way to consider them with any integrity) have alot more going on "in their heads" than seals though...and we routinely disregard them.  That would only go to show that regardless of how well justified or objective our standards are, our ability or proclivity to consistently apply them is lacking.  That much isn't in doubt no matter what moral system we're referring to...really.  Hell, christians call it "sin" - and their moral system is batshit crazy and completely without rational justification.  

Then there are mosquitoes.  They have no intrinsic value at all, and must be actively hunted and eliminated wherever possible.  If humanity lives only long enough to wipe those fuckers off the face of the Earth, our time here will not have been in vain.

(. . . or something that more greatly values live in general, rather than the little retarded humans we call baby mammals.)

I'd add deer to that list....lol...but for whatever reason I can't bring myself to kill rats with horns with any regularity.  

This is a unique case we haven't really talked about much-- that there may be a possibility that CAUSING harm is moral, on the grounds that function is sometimes more important than comfort.

It certainly harms a Christian in some ways for his world view to be challenged such that he has a moment of philosophical crisis.  Instead of thinking that his little girl who died of leukemia is with loved ones and God, he may realize that she's gone, and that her body is only plant food, and not even very much of it.  I doubt there will be much benefit to him in arriving at this conclusion.  And yet, few non-Christians would consider questioning his religious views an immoral act-- or would they?

Plenty of non-christians think that questioning atheists are assholes.  

I'm not sure that even murder can be called harm.  Surely, there's often a brief suffering involved.  But the actual not-being-alive-anymore part, that's philosophically tricky.  Does loss of memory, the missing of the chance to walk under the sun and hear the birds sing again, constitute harm?

I'm not sure about that, but I'd call murder immoral in almost any context unless there were a very clear greater good.

You're still being myopic in your view of harm.  You could conceivably murder someone painlessly, but a society in which this was considered moral, a-okay...would absolutely be a harmful society.  You couldn't sleep at night for fear of some Decent Person™ creeping up on you and clubbing you in your sleep.  So, you know that, depsite whatever my moral values tell me I should think..I have very little regard for Some People™.  Imagine you were one of them..and I was creeping around your window at 0-Dark Thirty....armed with Reasons™ and a suppressed M4.

1) Similar story for me, but with fishing.  I went with my uncle.  We walked up the train tracks (live ones, and through a tunnel even!) to get to our family's secret fishing hole.  We had our favorite brand of root beer, a basket of sandwiches made by grandma-- it was a regular Norman Rockwell painting.  But when we caught a fish, I couldn't bring myself to bash its head.  My uncle told me it was cruel not too-- either kill it or put it back.  We didn't have fish for dinner, and that was the end of that.

Yup.  Can I suggest a very sharp fillet knife, five inches long - up through the gill at a 45 degree angle to a point just back behind and between the eyes.  Easier than beating them(viscereally easier).  I only beat the onees I throw back, in the hope that this dissuades them from biting again, wasting my bait and time and murderous currency.  

2) I think most people can relate to your story.  I really feel we have to learn to overcome an aversion to killing.  I personally have a much greater respect for people who have ever killed an animal themselves than I do for people who buy meat as Food™ and never once consider that they are eating something that once had a life of its own.

3) You should seriously consider putting about 100 of these stories into a book.

We certainly do have an aversion.  I have written these stories down, I'm still putting them together, along with other stories my family tells (mine aren't the best...the rest have had decades of retelling to make them awesome, the best is my grandfather and his brother setting fire to heir house and what happened to his uncles navy whites when he rolled in to "save" them...not knowing they;d ran for the hills in fear of the belt they knew was coming).  Maybe one day I'll publish it.  Or maybe I'll throw it away and you fine denizens of AF will be the only ones to have heard it told.  I appreciate that you enjoyed it btw.  

+1 for having a pig named Pig Pig.

She's the cutest damned thing. Vietnamese/american cross..snow white, long fur, fat as shit.  Pretty sure she's pregnant as fuck right now.  Free range baby.  My buddies are always asking me when I'm gonna have a roast...I tell them whenever they get around to saying goodbyes to their wives and children.  

Your stories, and mine, really do seem to have a common element: it seems to me that humans (at least some of them) have a national inclination toward empathy with other species (at least some of them) and other humans, especially babies.  I've many times heard even the hardest racist say things like, "Black babies are so damned cute, why do they have to end up like that?"  I've even seen adopted black kids who grew up, and all their friends are hardcore racist, but they don't include him as black: "He ain't really a n@#%-er, he likes Hank Williams!"

Yeah, my super racist family is like that.  I grew up with cuban kids in the house and treated as family, and my grandfathers only surviving friend is an old black man who calls him boss.  He maintains that "Willy aint like the rest of em".  Willy, on one level, fucking hates my grandfathers guts...but, everyone else they knew is dead, so...lol?