So where do you stand on videos of animal torture?

At least my view on it is that it should not be banned, but it should be used as evidence.

There’s a lot of evidence (videos, pictures of autopsies, etc) that I thoroughly do not enjoy seeing, but which should definitely not be banned.

What I want to say is that no sense can be made of the claim that one “ought to feel such and such.”

As I’ve written in several comments above, I agree, always did. For example, I wrote about it in the following links and I’d love to hear what you think:
http://spacecollective.org/XiXiDu/5744/Why-choose-the-future-over-the-present
http://xixidu.tumblr.com/post/266184363/some-thoughts-on-peace-democracy-freedom-and

I fight for those things that I care about and try to make them happen. That involves both verbal and other forms of coercion. What I don’t do is try to pretend that I am advancing some sort of objective, perspective-neutral, true morality. (Although I might, if I thought it might advance the causes about which I have strong feelings.)

Same. So I suppose we all agree. That also means that none of us believes into true tolerance.

Just one additional point:

…and you wonder why those who are don’t necessarily feel equally inspired by the treatment of animals raised for food…

Many do, including me. I just can’t stop it right now.

You have characterized my position perfectly. Indeed, you have characterized it more elegantly and clearly than I have been doing through all my long-winded philosophizing.

I fight for those things that I care about and try to make them happen. That involves both verbal and other forms of coercion. What I don’t do is try to pretend that I am advancing some sort of objective, perspective-neutral, true morality. (Although I might, if I thought it might advance the causes about which I have strong feelings.)

–Corum

What I remain curious about is what motivates you as a political being. Does the above aptly describe your mode of action as you experience it? Concerning, that is, such matters as inspire you to action?

I’ll call that progress.

I have no such prescription. Behavior is only ever regulated by innumerable methods of coercion: soft and hard; physical and verbal. The idea that there is something inherently non-coercive about a certain kind of civil discourse–i.e. the liberal democratic ideal of policy making via rational interlocution–is, in my view, entirely mythical. Reason, in itself, only expresses abstract relations between propositions: it has no efficacy in the causal sense. To the extent, then, that language is efficacious (i.e. is able to get people to do things) it is so because of its non-rational characteristics (which include things like the social prestige that attaches to *appearing* to be rational).

–Corum

I have no doubt that you are an especially compassionate person, with an exceptionally broad range of sympathy. The Humean point–and mine–is simply the empirical one that in human beings, sympathy tends to radiate outwards, on the basis of the capacity of the individual to identify with the object of sympathy. So:

1. I care about my own children more than about other peoples’ children.

2. Same point as 1. re: my parents, other relatives, and friends.

3. I care more about people I know that I do about total strangers.

4. I care more about people, regardless of whether I know them or not, than I care about animals.

5. I care more about animals that bear some similarity to me–i.e. mammals–then I do about those that bear less–say, insects.

I would submit that these things are true of most people (admitting exceptions like yourself).

Now, those who are invested in a moral philosophy of one kind or another will want to say, “Yes, that may be how people actually feel, but it’s not how they *ought* to feel.” Indeed, this is how Peter Singer, Peter Unger, and other prominent Utilitarians speak.

What I want to say is that no sense can be made of the claim that one “ought to feel such and such.” Certainly, there are some who would *rather* that most people not feel the way I have described–you, for example, wish that we wouldn’t–but notice, this is just another feeling: albeit a contrary one.

Moral philosophers will then want to say that one can produce a rational argument or account on behalf of some “ought”, but I have yet to see one that succeeds (the Utilitarians are still arguing with the Kantians, etc), and until I do, all I see are competing sets of wants. Unfortunately, yours–and the animal rights peoples’–comprise only a tiny minority of said wants.

Moral discourse is an attempt to cheat one’s way out of this inconvenient fact. Rather than saying “I don’t want what you people want” (say, eating animals) and then accepting the fact that there aren’t enough people who don’t want it to make the people that do want it stop, one pretends, instead, that there is some objective fact of wrongness, and then uses this pretense to try and trick those on the other side into acquiescing. This used to be bolstered by warnings of divine punishment for failure to acquiesce, but now, more often than not, involves the more temporal sanction of a kind of shunning from the “moral community,” which is no less a fiction than the alleged moral fact on which it’s based.

The impression is then given that the forces of morality have won over the forces of wickedness, on the grounds of dispassionate, universal reason, but of course, all that has really happened is that one group of people have managed to make other people acquiesce to their wants, in a particularly clever, because dishonest way. I have no problem with this, but I do think it is nice to be clear about what is really going on.

–Corum