rachel.blog

Category: Ethics

  • This Beautiful Creature Must die

    We’re all addicted to the new 80s-themed Peta computer game to which The Smiths have lent their 1980s song, Meat is Murder. It’s quite retro with 8-bit audio and pixelated graphics and it’s also very addictive. The song grates on your nerves after a while though. Daniel is the reigning champion with a score of…

  • Is Pokémon Go immoral?

    Ben brought back an English newspaper from Russia. He thought I might be interested because there’s an article about Pokémon Go in it. Here’s an excerpt: Nintendo refuses to reveal when the game will be released in Russia. But Russia’s traditional values crusaders are already worried nonetheless. “It feels like the devil arrived through [Pokémon] and…

  • Petri dish meat balls

    Food technology company Memphis Meats has produced a meat ball with lab-grown meat rather than farm-raised animals. I don’t eat meat but I am cautiously optimistic of this development because there are so many negatives associated with raising animals for slaughter for human consumption – climate change, health, and ethics. Two of these problems can potentially be addressed through lab-grown…

  • On eating roadkill

    George Monbiot has written an article about how he recently ate roadkill: a grey squirrel. I think that if we must eat animals then roadkill is probably the most ethical of all the options since the animal is dead anyway. But in his article he describes how he was admonished for doing this by people…

  • Absurd hypocrisy on the dinner table

    Earlier this week hosts of a Danish radio station killed a bunny rabbit on air and then later cooked and ate it. It generated a huge backlash for the station including calls for a boycott. I wonder how many of those who complained eat other animals? Why is it acceptable to kill, cook, and eat a young…

  • Vegan for more than 10 years and still alive

    The best thing about having all our belongings back is that I’ve got all my cookbooks again. I’m not that good at just making recipes up and I also like flipping through cookbooks for inspiration. We had visitors over last Sunday and so I really needed some inspiration. I ended up making four vegan dishes:…

  • Women and the Islamic State

    As a woman living in the 21st Century, I have enjoyed the freedom to study, to work, and to express my thoughts without fear of punishment, and so I am completely dumbfounded as to why three teenage girls would voluntarily fly to Syria to join the Islamic State. What could they possibly be thinking? According to the…

  • What is freedom of speech?

    I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the idea of freedom of speech and freedom of expression this week and what it means exactly. It’s not something I’ve thought a great deal about in the past because I’ve always felt I had the freedom to express my thoughts, which I quite frequently do, and I’m…

  • The Life You Can Save

    Whenever I find myself debating right and wrong, I wonder what Peter Singer would say. He’s the most rational thinker on the planet, in my opinion, and so I will sometimes say to myself, “What would Peter Singer do in this situation?”. For those who’ve never heard of him, he’s an Australian philosopher, the Ira W.…

  • A new word: Reducetarian

    I just watched an interesting TedX talk about the negative connotations behind the words vegan and vegetarian. Tell a stranger you’re a vegan and they make all sorts of negative assumptions about you. This is why I prefer to call myself a plant-eater. A friend of mine once told me that when they first found…

  • A gaudy shirt and feminism

    Ok, I promise not to write about this topic again after this post but I have to get this off my chest one more time. I got some thought-provoking comments on my last post about the gaudy shirt worn by scientist Matt Taylor on international television. Thank you. I appreciate all the comments. I even changed…

  • All or nothing?

    Some people have expressed concern to me that I’m punishing my kids by banning sweets. But the thing is, when I say I’m banning something, it does not mean I’ve literally banned something. I never take anything to extremes. I’m flexible with practically everything I do in my life. So what does banning sweets mean?…

  • Masturbation is sinful!

    But only for men and only if you’re Catholic. We women can masturbate as often as we want 🙂 Ok, this is complete nonsense. Masturbation is not a moral issue and nor is sex for that matter. The reason I’m bringing it up is because Richard Dawkins found himself in the middle of a Twitter storm…

  • The world needs all kinds of minds

    Temple Grandin is an American autistic woman who, through her work as a consultant for the meat industry, has made significant improvements to conditions for animals at abattoirs. According to PETA,”Dr. Grandin’s improvements to animal-handling systems found in slaughterhouses have decreased the amount of fear and pain that animals experience in their final hours, and…

  • Cyclone Lusi damage, warnings and false alarms

    Here’s the damage in our backyard after Cyclone Lusi: After almost a week of warnings from media and the Metservice as well as two separate notifications sent to my iPhone from Civil Defence, Cyclone Lusi was a bit of an anti-climax. Auckland produces more damaging storms on a semi-regular basis that don’t generate any warnings…

  • Weekday vegetarianism

    I saw this TED talk today about being a weekday vegetarian and thought it was quite good. I know that many people are put off by vegan/vegetarianism because it seems like an impossible task. But it needn’t be done militantly and as Graham Hill makes clear in this video, eating less meat is still beneficial…

  • Taking life

    A little while ago I promised to write about taking life as a follow on from my post about eating plants. It’s Christmas Day today, the kids are playing happily with gifts, and so now is a good time to tackle it. When is it wrong to take the life of a living being? In…

  • Do climate change policies hurt the world’s poor?

    There’s something about what Bjorn Lomborg writes that makes me cross. He’s got an article on Project Syndicate in which he argues that environmental policy is hurting the world’s poor. He’s specifically referring to climate change policy and he thinks that what the developing world really needs is access to cheap fossil fuels. The article…

  • On eating plants

    I thought I’d explain in this post a bit about what my tagline “eats plants” actually means. I have been reluctant to write about this here before because I don’t want to come across as judgemental of what other people eat. We each make the best decisions we can and so here I want to…

  • Business ethics and the value of nature

    Most people are familiar with the Hippocratic Oath as a do-no-harm pledge for doctors and physicians, but not many will have heard of the MBA Oath. It is the do-no-harm oath for graduating MBA students and the world’s most famous school of business, Harvard business school, adopted it in 2009. Some of the promises made by students…