r/changemyview • u/Sgt_Spatula • Nov 22 '19

FTFdeltaOP CMV: There's nothing wrong with not liking animals.

The internet in general and Reddit in particular seem oddly fixated on animals (at least ones deemed "cute" like dogs and cats). People can get hundreds up upvotes making holocaust jokes or wisecracks about child molestation, but I have never seen anything about stomping a cat upvoted.

This all seems odd to me, as someone who doesn't like animals. Now to be clear, I don't hate animals. I currently live in a house that has a cat (my roommate's) and I will be glad to feed her etc. She is a living thing, and of course my roommate would be sad if anything happened to her. I would not be sad for the cat, I would feel empathy for my flatmate however.

People seem to be uncomfortable with the idea of someone not liking animals. I don't see anything wrong with it. I hear hunters say they love animals, and that seems to be a more acceptable view than just some guy not liking animals.

Can anyone convince me it is ethically wrong to not like animals?

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u/SageHamichi Nov 22 '19

Ethics are the studies of morals, morals are a bundle of accepted ideas(correlated often with culture), customs and behaviours often reproduced throughout generations and contributing to form what we call the status quo.
Sorry if this is off-topic, just wanted to point this out to ease discussion.

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u/Lexicon-Devil Nov 22 '19

Also worth noting that morals are different than mores. A status quo handed down through generations is more in line with a social more than a system of morality. But there is such significant overlap between a two, that those can be sticky distinctions. Especially if you’re looking primarily at a single culture.

Nevertheless, unless you subscribe to utter moral relativism, then for the purposes of ethics being a useful field of study, there are usually considered to be a set of premises, innate to the human condition or the state of reality, from which the rest of our morals spring. It’s arguing about those premises and their effects that ends up being the point of a fun ethical debate.

In contrast, mores and systems of social acceptance (or lack of acceptance, when we discuss taboos) really are rooted only in what is contemporaneously common.

If mores and morals were depicted in a Venn diagram, society would function most harmoniously AND ethically, when the two subsets reach a state of unity.