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I find your reasoning with respect to society similarly troubling. I understand your reasoning - that the social endorsement of the permissibility of slaughtering seems to imply the permissibility of bestiality. Now, while a grown adult would have to be thoroughly ignorant to not know that we...

P.S. for the sake of revealing stance and bias, I am a vegetarian.

This logic of consistency which you are using to interpret and extrapolate the law is quite rediculous. Unless you equate the law with right it doesn't make sense to insist on extending the law as far as consistency permits. To me it seems to be a relatively simple matter to acknowledge that the...

People regularly have sex with themselves and with inanimate objects for recreation.

Sure, if there is a reliable way to determine whether the animal is 'up for it'. As I am not an animal whisperer I can only but speculate that this would be fraught with difficulty.

This is my inclination - both bestiality and slaughtering are wrong.

Consider Kant's solution: it is a condition of the possibility of experience that perceived objects be structured in accordance with a priori laws. In other words, the universe is perceived by us as lawlike because it could not appear any other way to a rational being capable of cognition and...

Complete speculation on my part: financial crisis induced suicide?

My avatar pic is taking from Ruben's painting 'Saturn Devouring his Son' (which was later appropriated by Goya in a horrifying form). It depicts one of the predecessors of the Greco-Roman pantheon Cronos/Saturn devouring one of his sons (Poseidon I think?), though eventually his children...

Re: Questions about euthanasia... It doesn't matter so much whether such interpretation is best undertaken by government or private organisations. The simple suggestion that an external body could better understand the 'best interests' of a person than that person themself is already anathema...

Re: Questions about euthanasia... Sure, but the point I was getting at was that things seem more complicated to me when we are looking at a permanent change in an individual. This may be due to a stroke, traumatic brain injury, a traumatic experience, poisoning, and so on - essentially...

Re: Questions about euthanasia... A general way to reason about this would be to first note that arguments in favour of euthanasia are typically premised on the instrumental value of life. In other words, life is not intrinsically valuable (i.e. the classical Christian view of life as...

Re: Questions about euthanasia... I am inclined to agree on the case of the arm. In fact, there have been multiple cases of this sort in which individuals have thoroughly rejected some limb or other part of their body. However, I'm not sure whether there are many surgeons out there who would...

Re: Questions about euthanasia... I actually find Alzheimer's and certain forms of dementia to be more difficult because it is almost as though a different person emerges. A more drastic example is a severe, personality-changing stroke (e.g. primarily affecting the frontal lobe of the brain)...

1. Unitarian Universalism (100%) 2. Theravada Buddhism (92%) 3. Liberal Quakers (80%) 4. Secular Humanism (80%) 5. Taoism (76%) 6. Mahayana Buddhism (75%) 7. Neo-Pagan (68%) 8. New Age (60%) 9. Nontheist (60%) 10. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (57%) ...

Re: Questions about euthanasia... For the same reason I would stop a friend from cutting off a limb, trying to fly from their balcony, branding themself with an esoteric symbol, or similar, in the midst of an exteme manic, depressive or psychotic episode. I assume that there exists some...

Re: Questions about euthanasia... A core problem with this is that it tends to dissallow paternalism towards individuals with mental illness or some form of cognitive impairment. I find that it leads towards (1) skepticism about mental illness and (2) an inability to ever presume that you...

Re: Questions about euthanasia... Not if you accept a definition of murder as killing which is unlawful or intentional with malicious intent, or similar. Pro-life campaigners typically perform a rhetorical twist in which they ensure that the negative moral force of the word 'murder' is...

I received this bit of news today via the International Federation of Medical Student Associations network and felt that it was a very sad bit of news. It is terrible that an already unstable country has to witness the further deaths of figures in professions like politics and medicine. BBC...

Clearly we are too busy being altruistic.