Pragmatism.

I am alone, so very very alone.

But who cares? Enough of that self indulgent pity begging hilariousness, lets talk about PHILOSOPHY.

Begin Flan's Philosophy Extravaganza the First: Pragmatism! Or something.

Recently, my sister had a baby. It is small. It is wrinkly. Also lately, my friends Grandmother died. Also small, also wrinkly. If one were to be horribly cynical, as I intend to be, one could therefore deduce that the only things anyone manages in life is to learn how to speak and produce more wrinkly things. All other skills learnt go by the wayside, rendering them nill.

Add to this mix of misanthropy and existentialism the fact that I have been thinking. Thinking about things. I am to go and talk to some parlimentarilists early next month to give them reasons as to why a society for the promotion of the sciences should not absorb into its functions the promotion of the humanities. There are many reasons why this is a bad idea, the chief of which is that it won't work none good. But I'm having trouble thinking why it is a bad idea financially, which is, of course, the main way we measure health, happiness, and our place in the world. So I might be a little buggered.

Anyway. That was not what I was thinking about, well, not what I was thinking about to write here. Here I am going to complain about vegetarians.

Or at least about the arguments that vegetarians make for vegetarianism, and then I'll have a little bitch about ethics in general, ultimately showing that our societal constructs, where they aren't simply crap, are harmful crap. YES.

So. The most annoying argument for vegetarianism: Meat Is Murder.

Yes, it's snappy, yes, you can chant it though a loudspeaker, yes, it is the name of an album by the cold war kids. But when you are having new years steak in a restaurant and some smug bastard is explaining to the young lady he wishes to bed about the immorality of being carnivorous, using you in conjunction with dead kittens to illustrate his point, you apparently aren't allowed to go over and meat-slap the irritating goatee off his face.

I'm not against anyone not eating meat. There are damn good reasons not to: one of my friends will throw up if he so much as licks the stuff. I am not against individual choice, and for the purposes of this discussion let it stand that individualism is completely open within the scope of society and the law. But these arguments are used to try and convince others that this isn't an individual choice, that it is fundamentally wrong with the capital double-you. And perhaps it is. I haven't worked that out yet. And I think other people haven't either?

How is meat murder? Murder is a legal point of view, which requires, as much as my watching of Boston Legal has imparted to me, several things, two of which are intent and actually killing something. From our place at a restaurant table we can say that no, I didn't kill this piece of meat, nor did I form mental intent to do so. I was just like "Sweet! Meat!" Perhaps this is a deficiency on our part as we have severed the connection between dead flesh and once living creature, but still, murder as a legal charge is out. The goateed, bespectacled man who also, incidentally, votes for the more consevative parties and knows a lot about something boring, lets say the rate of fingernail growth at different stages of your life, would then retort that you are supporting murder. We are accessories to the crime.

Well, apart from having to change the original, oh-so-snappy saying, that's a rather large definition of accessory to a crime. Yes, paying for meat creates a market etc. but your paying taxes trains soldiers that are then put in kill or be killed situations sometimes? Your having a car creates need for crude oil which sometimes spills into a gulf as it is collected, causing untold harm to creatures you will save the indignity of eating? I suppose I wouldn't eat them either now that they are all oily and crap.

I can go on. Don't get me started on "natural law" arguments or questions of consciousness. We will be here all day. Suffice to say I find none of them airtight.

There are lots of reasons to abstain from certain foods, health risks and the lack of fish around the place for example, but the prescriptive you should not eat all meat has little if anything to do with these arguments. The problem with arguments for vegetarianism, and most other ethical and moral arguments for that matter, is that the person or people have already decided on what is either right or wrong and then created an argument to prove it. This is not as much of a problem if you are debating emotional matters where the only possible outcome can be for someone to respect your view (not to trivialise such debates, they are often more important than other types) but when someone promotes their emotional view as a logically reasoned one when it is really just the quickest rationalisation between two points then it makes me want to tear of someone's face and put it in a blender while shouting "WHERE IS YOUR REASON NOW CHEESE BURGER?" The face might well end up being mine.

Like I say, I don't know the 'right' or 'wrong' to the position on eating meat, ethically or morally. Perhaps at a latter date I will be convinced emotionally, or someone may come up with an airtight logical argument, and then either meat will be taken off the menu or I'll still have to be emotionally persuaded, for history shows us just what people are able to do or think in the face of 'hard' evidence. This course of creating an argument is called "pragmatisim" when the argument is to be judged against the practical consequences of that argument/ belief. Its a helpful tool, and is one way of moving from theory into action. However, it is often taken the opposite way, as in above, where the desired consequence is decided and the argument built around it. Not only does this often cause really bad arguments, but it can be used to give apparently reasonable consideration to really bad ideas. We can think of many ways and conflicts between races that bear this out.

The worst thing, I think, about this type of constructing an argument is that it already makes to many assumptions, which, as we all know, turn us all into a donkey. The biggest assumption in religion is that religion has all the answers. The assumption of science is that science can find the answers, and even that there are answers to be found. The assumption of pragmatism and the murder of meat arguments is that reason is that which gives truth, that logic is the way to dictate action, that empirical ways of knowing are the only ways of knowing.

Starting by asking questions about someone's reasoning is a good start, but sometimes I wonder whether we need to ask question of reason as a practice itself.