Jeremy Bentham

For those of you who don't know who the guy is, his most infamous quote is utilized in this piece of poor journalism. I encourage you to think for yourself and question why animals and the environment won the poll for worst moral actions; this left prisoners and the neglect of the elderly as the least concerning to American readers. America, it's a good thing you don't pay for your parents'/grandparents' paper subscriptions... When this poll gets published they might see how much you don't care about them. And there was nowhere available for comment under the article.

And by the way. Jeremy Bentham is more accurately quoted in this wikipedia article. Kwame does Bentham a severe injustice by quoting him in such a way (or I just inferred it the wrong way), actually implying that Bentham really thought animals could reason. No, Bentham was just a guy who wanted as much happiness in the world as possible, and didn't want the animals to suffer in the way in which he saw them being treated. Hey, by the way, we don't treat them that way anymore anyhow and that was the 1700s, back when Henry the umpteenth could marry and kill whoever he wanted. Just like then, Kwame has drawn attention to the wrong set of "oppressed" life forms.

In my final point for today, interestingly enough, the debate about conscientious beings among animals in some cases is based on whether they feel suffering in an emotional way or just the sensory feedback of pain. While the ability to feel emotions is a highly doubtful ability among livestock, livestock raised under standard and proper conditions today feel neither and I argue would feel more of it were they raised under the suggested conditions in this article. Thanks to John for another interesting post.