Outcome risk and status risk - Uncertainty for vegansHere are two cases:
1. A trolley is hurtling towards a person on a track. You can divert the trolley so that it plummets over a cliff. You know that there is a small (but not vanishingly small) chance that there is a person in the trolley. 2. Eating plant food involves, indirectly, being complicit in the suffering of animals that are killed during harvest. You could reduce the amount of plant food you eat by eating insects like crickets. You know that there is a small (but not vanishingly small) chance that crickets have whatever feature(s), F, make things into persons. (For instance, crickets might feel pain and pleasure). Bob Fischer (in his 2016 paper 'Bugging the strict vegan', ) wants us to accept that these two situations are equivalent. In both cases, we might say, you 'might kill someone who matters'. Since you clearly ought to divert the trolley, you ought to eat the insect.
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Suffragettes and suffragists There's been a lot of celebration in the UK news recently of the Suffragette movement, since it's 100 years since the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which granted the vote to (some) women.
Someone I know recently complained about the lack of focus in the associated discussion about the Suffragists. While I don't have the sufficient historical knowledge to offer a comprehensive distinction between the two groups, a rough division seems to be that while the 'ettes were prepared to engage in both violent and non-violent criminality to forward the cause, the 'ists wanted to do things within the letter of the law as it was. |
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December 2021
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