Posted on 05/03/2008 4:50:51 AM PDT by rhema
You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the "dignity" of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called "plant rights" is being seriously debated.
A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring "account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms." No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, "The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants," is enough to short circuit the brain.
A "clear majority" of the panel adopted what it called a "biocentric" moral view, meaning that "living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive." Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim "absolute ownership" over plants and, moreover, that "individual plants have an inherent worth." This means that "we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily."
The committee offered this illustration: A farmer mows his field (apparently an acceptable action, perhaps because the hay is intended to feed the farmer's herd--the report doesn't say). But then, while walking home, he casually "decapitates" some wildflowers with his scythe. The panel decries this act as immoral, though its members can't agree why. The report states, opaquely:
At this point it remains unclear whether this action is condemned because it expresses a particular moral stance of the farmer toward other organisms or because something bad is being done to the flowers themselves.
What is clear, however, is that Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.
Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.
The intellectual elites were the first to accept the notion of "species-ism," which condemns as invidious discrimination treating people differently from animals simply because they are human beings. Then ethical criteria were needed for assigning moral worth to individuals, be they human, animal, or now vegetable.
Rising to the task, leading bioethicists argue that for a human, value comes from possessing sufficient cognitive abilities to be deemed a "person." This excludes the unborn, the newborn, and those with significant cognitive impairments, who, personhood theorists believe, do not possess the right to life or bodily integrity. This thinking has led to the advocacy in prestigious medical and bioethical journals of using profoundly brain impaired patients in medical experimentation or as sources of organs.
The animal rights movement grew out of the same poisonous soil. Animal rights ideology holds that moral worth comes with sentience or the ability to suffer. Thus, since both animals and humans feel pain, animal rights advocates believe that what is done to an animal should be judged morally as if it were done to a human being. Some ideologues even compare the Nazi death camps to normal practices of animal husbandry. For example, Charles Patterson wrote in Eternal Treblinka--a book specifically endorsed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--that "the road to Auschwitz begins at the slaughterhouse."
Eschewing humans as the pinnacle of "creation" (to borrow the term used in the Swiss constitution) has caused environmentalism to mutate from conservationism--a concern to properly steward resources and protect pristine environs and endangered species--into a willingness to thwart human flourishing to "save the planet." Indeed, the most radical "deep ecologists" have grown so virulently misanthropic that Paul Watson, the head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, called humans "the AIDS of the earth," requiring "radical invasive therapy" in order to reduce the population of the earth to under a billion.
As for "plant rights," if the Swiss model spreads, it may hobble biotechnology and experimentation to improve crop yields. As an editorial in Nature News put it:
The [Swiss] committee has come up with few concrete examples of what type of experiment might be considered an unacceptable insult to plant dignity. The committee does not consider that genetic engineering of plants automatically falls into this category, but its majority view holds that it would if the genetic modification caused plants to "lose their independence"--for example by interfering with their capacity to reproduce.
One Swiss scientist quoted in the editorial worried that "plant dignity" provides "another tool for opponents to argue against any form of plant biotechnology" despite the hope it offers to improve crop yields and plant nutrition.
What folly. We live in a time of cornucopian abundance and plenty, yet countless human beings are malnourished, even starving. In the face of this cruel paradox, worry about the purported rights of plants is the true immorality.
No
So, the greenies on one side want us to live in caves and these loons want us to eat dirt?
People who think like this need to be put away in nice facilities with bars on the windows and rubber rooms
Looks like the panel has emotional need to coddle Eden.
For the mopst part, they are wealthy and over-educated and have no connection with God.
I’m going to honor all of those sugar cane plants that gave their life for my rum, I’ll toast them while I pound shots of Appleton Estates XV while I watch the race this evening.
Me thinks the Swiss have been watching too much Veggie Tales...
Eventually, you would call them "corpses".
;-)
Darn ... I have to go out and viciously decapitate nearly 8 acres of grass blades today. Call me a monster ...
Arbitrary killing of babies is still “ok” because it would inconvenience the mother by making her quit liquor, drugs, smoking, and whoring it about. She’d also put on weight. And what? For some parasitic lifeform that practically rapes her uterus by tresspassing on HER personal space. < /s >
Don’t you dare eat that tomato ... it has rights ping!
I’m glad to see something like this. I hope it garners serious attention. This is the type of absurdity that will send the pendulum swinging back in our direction rapidly as people note how absolutely bizarre the leftist path can become.
Coined by an honorary member.
If you do a bit of googling, you’ll find that many deep green radicals advocate wars, disease, genocide, abortion and homosexuality as solutions to erradicating humanity. There is no doubt about their clear alliance with leftism and the RAT party - all for one and one for all.
Let them eat mud pies. But wait, there are organisms in that mud.
And besides, that air you breath becomes CO2. We are supposed to off ourselves, become worm food, and renew the Earth.
Human sacrifice for Gaia. < /s >
Artist: The Arrogant Worms
Song: Carrot Juice Is Murder
Listen up brothers and sisters
come hear my desperate tale
I speak of our friends of nature
trapped in the dirt like a jail
Vegetables live in oppression,
served on our tables each night
This killing of veggies is madness,
I say we take up the fight
Salads are only for murderers,
coleslaw’s a fascist regime
Don’t think that they don’t have feelings,
just cause a radish can’t scream
Chorus:
I’ve heard the screams of the vegetables (scream, scream, scream)
Watching their skins being peeled (having their insides revealed)
Grated and steamed with no mercy (burning off calories)
How do you think that feels (bet it hurts really bad)
Carrot juice constitutes murder (and that’s a real crime)
Greenhouses prisons for slaves (let my vegetables go)
It’s time to stop all this gardening (it’s dirty as hell)
Let’s call a spade a spade (is a spade is a spade is a spade)
I saw a man eating celery,
so I beat him black and blue
If he ever touches a sprout again,
I’ll bite him clean in two
I’m a political prisoner,
trapped in a windowless cage
Cause I stopped the slaughter of turnips
by killing five men in a rage
I told the judge when he sentenced me,
“This is my finest hour,
I’d kill those farmers again
just to save one more cauliflower”
Chorus
How low as people do we dare to stoop,
Making young broccolis bleed in the soup?
Untie your beans, uncage your tomatoes
Let potted plants free, don’t mash that potato!
Oh spare the spud! Eat a cow instead!
I’ve heard the screams of the vegetables (scream, scream, scream)
Watching their skins being peeled (fates in the stir-fry are sealed)
Grated and steamed with no mercy (you fat gourmet slob)
How do you think that feels? (leave them out in the field)
Carrot juice constitutes murder (V8’s genocide)
Greenhouses prisons for slaves (yes, your composts are graves)
It’s time to stop all this gardening (take up macrame)
Let’s call a spade a spade
(is a spade, is a spade, is a spade, is a spade......)
Power to the peas! Give peas a chance!
all we are saying, is give peas a chance
A YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP ping to the gardening list.
SHEESH..............
Look, these are the acts of loons. All anyone sane can do is laugh politely, pat them on their heads and go on living.
Yesterday, I went online to look at the art work of someone I used to know rather well. This person is talented, educated, married wealth, has three children and at least four grandchildren. They live expensively in a major urban area and travel the world at will. They have been grounded in Reformed Judaism and active for decades in Illinois Democrat politics (main reason for the past tense relationship). I found childish posters decrying the “use of the EPA for political purposes” (!) and hand made books detailing extensive BDS. This privileged person is literally making themselves ill over imaginary anxieties and hatred. And, from past experience, I know that any injection of reality will call forth a haughty condescension followed by a mini nervous breakdown that will blame reality for being *politically manipulated* and will call in support from the entire family because they have a *right* to be happy and to *feel safe*.
For my part, I have simply tried to forget these people. I cannot see how they can continue to attempt their ill-informed, overt, controlling temper tantrums to any successful end. They are in the minority. They keep escalating their demands to the point where no one could possibly comply and they do not have the real power to make a majority do so. And they do not understand that even they are not living to their own standards and are thereby hypocrites. And if they did, it would be someone else's fault, probably George W. Bush.
Let's see how the majority of the Swiss people deal with these vague pronouncements. IMO, they are a fairly stolid lot.
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