Sentienced to Death

Thou shalt not kill? Well, as the great John Lydon once said, "Meat isn't murder, it's fucking delicious!"

But alas, dark ethical issues lurk over the horizon of such trite epigrams. Is all life, sentient or otherwise, created equal? Or can we, should we, intelligently discriminate? Those are our two options.

The first is "relatively" less complicated. Maybe you add the condition of sentience to your definition of "life", enabling you to eat the odd lentil or lettuce leaf, but otherwise you see all life as equal. Sparrows, elephants, Osama Bin Laden, all are worthy of our loving care and the right not to have their lives taken from them by another.

However, this has side effects. What do you do about the food chain? Can you train a lion to love lentils? Do you protect mice from hungry predatory cats? Should we really ascribe ourselves a moral stance over something which even intelligent animals such as dolphins have no scruples? In addition, if you are pro-euthanasia, it makes it very difficult to argue that a suffering human's life has less value than a non-suffering one. Life is cheap on God's earth, and a blanket commitment to it is akin to Cnut's commitment to changing tidal movements.

So I find myself in the awkward position of saying that some lives are simply more valuable. My empty stomach, designed to sustain an intelligent creative being (well, I like to think so anyway), is more important than the life of a creature whose most creative action is laying a double-yolked egg. But this is not a sustainable argument either. We get into Gattaca-type problems where intelligence determines destiny, and the Timmys of this world, who are probably less sentient than your average chicken, could find themselves up for the chop.

Chromosomes? We don't kill anything with 48 of them, but anything else is fair game? Well at least the rhinos are safe... and anyway, genetics is also a rather useless signifier of value, especially when expounded by such great thinkers as Dr Joseph Mengele.

I believe that lines can be drawn, however. You are going to hate me for being so fucking wishy-washy and hippie about this, but I believe that a life is only valuable if it is loved.

(awwwwww!)

What I mean is this: You shouldn't kill Mr Smithers the next door neighbour, not because he wouldn't like it, but because someone would care, and be upset, and grieve - whether it was his wife, a close relative, a drinking buddy, or merely the Lord God Almighty Himself. This works pretty well as an ethic, really. You can even eat meat - provided you don't kill somebody's pet lamb to do it. The onus would be on vegetarians to prove that they really do have an attachment to sheep #30675 from the Mackenzie country. Ditto abortion. You care about this foetus? well, you pay the mother a surrogacy fee and raise it yourself. And if someone wants to kill themselves, why should it be illegal not to love their life more than they do?

In many ways it's an ethic that only works well if you believe in a benevolent God who loves all humankind, but it's the best I can come up with so far. Come in cow number 20679 from Buckinghamshire, your time is up...

- Cartman