Steelers sign Ron Mexico (a/k/a Dogkiller)

[primetime]

The nature of owning people was deliberate and calculated, and repulsive too. I never said the act itself wasn't evil, but that someone can perform an "evil" act out of ignorance, and not actually be "evil". That doesn't mean that they aren't responsible for for their actions. The power to learn and regret past actions is part of the cost of being sentient.

Good and evil are relative and historically contingent categories, after all.

 

[Tunescribe]

So your argument is effectively that the same sadistic, inhumane treatment of animals is however different because one violates a legal statute and the other does not, or rather to the final analysis that one is routine and accepted while the other is considered deviant and "unique" by society and its juridical processes. I also suspect that this argument also hinges on perceived difference in moral status between, say, cows and chickens on one hand and dogs on the other, though you can correct me if I'm wrong.

That said, I'm not going to debate you further, because your mind seems very much set and these sorts of arguments can have no winners, but I want to lay bare the moral argument you're making.

You have laid nothing bare save for your own inability to differentiate between two entirely unrelated matters -- factory farming and Michael Vick's federal crime.

 

[Galeb]

Good and evil are relative and historically contingent categories, after all.

Perhaps, but when people are able to sufficiently minimize self and think deeply, broadly and critically, they come to many of the same fundamental conclusions. Whether or not there is universal morality, great human thinkers tend to agree on the foundations of man's morality.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Ethics_for_the_New_Millennium.html?id=ZoDzX1-In7UC

 

[primetime]

Perhaps, but when people are able to sufficiently minimize self and think deeply, broadly and critically, they come to many of the same fundamental conclusions. Whether or not there is universal morality, great human thinkers tend to agree on the foundations of man's morality.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Ethics_for_the_New_Millennium.html?id=ZoDzX1-In7UC

I agree completely, though I'm not a huge fan of the Dalai Lama. Give me Spinoza instead.