Man cooked alive with 12,000 pounds of tuna

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I'm not a representative of The Green Party, I'm just some guy, telling you my personal beliefs. If you want the views of the Green Party on their plans to reduce overfishing and improve sustainability, the answers are on their website here: http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/ar.html

Any political party makes their policies sound amazing, just too bad business and independent studies show greens to have very large black holes in a lot of their policies.

Reply 21

miser

Original post by The two eds

Any political party makes their policies sound amazing, just too bad business and independent studies show greens to have very large black holes in a lot of their policies.

Take it up with your parliamentarian.

Reply 22

whorace

Wow, the title wasn't even bait.

Reply 23

caravaggio2

Just another male death in the work place.
Nothing to see....move Along. :frown:

Reply 24

Scott.

I bet his family got awarded compensation to the tuna of £300,000....

Gets coat :colondollar:

Reply 25

caravaggio2

Original post by Scott.

I bet his family got awarded compensation to the tuna £300,000....

Gets coat :colondollar:

Fixed that for you.

Reply 26

Back Stabbers

Now we know how those Germans felt being cooked alive in the Dresden bombings. Liberation or genocide?

Reply 27

kxylah

Original post by Greg Jackson

RIP in peace

rest in peace, in peace??

Reply 28

Wade-

Original post by Immunology

That is crazy. What a horrible way to go. All my prayers are with him and his family.

Bit late for that, it was in 2012

Posted from TSR Mobile

Reply 29

Observatory

Original post by miser

This man's death was terrible. You really can't imagine many worse ways to go than that... But the literal industrial scale of killing of tuna is still worse in my opinion, and is on-going.

How many pounds of tuna is a human life worth, in your opinion?

Reply 30

Asolare

Omg I bought some tuna the other day... I don't wanna eat it now :frown:

RIP to him that sounds awful.

Reply 31

Danny the Geezer

Something like that happened over in the UK-tragic....

Reply 32

miser

Original post by Observatory

How many pounds of tuna is a human life worth, in your opinion?

Why is it that it's the human's life that matters, but the tuna are valued in pounds?

Reply 33

Observatory

Original post by miser

Why is it that it's the human's life that matters, but the tuna are valued in pounds?

You may answer in terms of a number of tuna, if you prefer.

Reply 34

miser

Original post by Observatory

You may answer in terms of a number of tuna, if you prefer.

I think still we're trivialising the subject somewhat. The price this man paid was not just his life - he must have suffered horribly. Likewise do the tuna suffer, when they are brought onto the boats in great piles and left to asphyxiate, or killed using ice baths, or whatever means happens to be the cheapest for the operator. Yes, the person suffered horribly, and it's tempting to say that no amount of killing of fish could be worth that death, but that is because we are very good at empathising with humans and not very good at empathising with fish.

I can't give you a number because I don't know where the tipping point would be, distinguishing each as the greater evil. It could be that the suffering endured by the tuna means that 3 tuna deaths are as bad, or it could be over a thousand - that's a question for researchers to answer - but I cannot say that one human life is worth carte blanche of the killing of tuna as we currently have.

Reply 35

Prince_fancybum

Original post by miser

I don't think that you do agree. I am saying that we shouldn't fish at all. If more and more tuna are being fished, that is not a fault of overpopulation, but a fault this people's unacceptable approach to animal rights.

Why shouldn't we fish at all? Killing and eating prey animals is completely natural and has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, stopping doing so would greatly damage the Eco system.
I don't agree with factory farming and believe their should be more controls put in place but having a world made up of vegans and veggies just wouldn't work

Reply 36

Observatory

Original post by miser

Generally people perceive killing another person as intrinsically wrong, i.e. killing one person would not be only equally as bad as killing two people while inflicting half as much suffering on each. Perhaps you disagree, but assuming you do not, the question is whether tuna have intrinsic moral value. I hope we agree that not all life does, e.g. insects, amoebae, bacteria, or wherever you choose to draw the line. Do tuna perceive a value to their own lives, or are they just biological machines that are programmed to some extent for self-preservation? I accept there's some room for doubt here, but many would argue, I think persuasively, that self-value requires self-awareness, which tuna, and almost all non-human creatures, don't possess.

Reply 37

miser

Original post by Observatory

I don't believe that any life has intrinsic moral value in the above sense. I think moral considerations are a product of vulnerability to different states of experience (e.g., amoebas cannot experience, therefore we do not have to worry how we treat them). Humans on the other hand can experience tremendous highs of happiness and lows of suffering, so we should be very conscientious in our treatment towards them. This unlocks a gradient of moral consideration with amoebas at one end, and humans on the other, with non-human animals occupying the middlespace, where vulnerability to different states of experience increases as we traverse the gradient.

Death is the moment where a creature ceases to exist as a subject of experience. A person doesn't notice that they've been killed - they're not personally pained by it. In my opinion, the circumstances of the death is everything - were they panicked or did they feel pain, and how much? Will they leave behind grief-stricken relatives, or causes that would have benefitted others? I know that this is not the conventional view however, that life is intrinsically better than non-life.

I don't think it matters at all whether a tuna fish can look at itself in the mirror and recognise its reflection - what matters is that it can experience pain and suffering and that we are forcing these things upon them, in vast quantities, for our own personal satisfaction, with hardly a thought about what we are doing. And when we do think about it, we bring up such self-serving rationalisations such as "tuna don't value their own existence." Nonsense! If my brain was injured with no hope of recovery, such that I could not show that I knew I was alive, but could by appearances still experience pain, would you let a corporation cut me up and kill me because I couldn't demonstrate "self-value"?

Reply 38

Observatory

Original post by miser

Then to be clear, you believe that:

1. if I were to silently and painlessly kill you in your sleep, it would be wrong, but not due to any harm caused to you, only to your friends and relatives

and that

2. if I were able to similarly and contemporaneously kill all of your friends and relatives (ignoring for a moment their friends and relatives) it would be less immoral than if I had only killed you, and left your friends and relatives alive to experience their grief?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the most moral act anyone could perform would be to instantly and painlessly kill all living humans.

I don't think it matters at all whether a tuna fish can look at itself in the mirror and recognise its reflection - what matters is that it can experience pain and suffering and that we are forcing these things upon them, in vast quantities, for our own personal satisfaction, with hardly a thought about what we are doing. And when we do think about it, we bring up such self-serving rationalisations such as "tuna don't value their own existence." Nonsense! If my brain was injured with no hope of recovery, such that I could not show that I knew I was alive, but could by appearances still experience pain, would you let a corporation cut me up and kill me because I couldn't demonstrate "self-value"?

I am not sure I agree that a creature that can't recognise itself in a mirror (or at least in its own head) can even experience pain and suffering. The fact that a creature reacts in what looks like a defensive way to certain actions does not mean it feels pain or fear. I can programme a machine to do that, perhaps in a way that is less empathic to humans, but as you've pointed out yourself, that isn't the point. An amoeba may have the ability to move away from a poison. The HIV virus has the ability to kill parts of the immune system that attack it. I think that pain and suffering as feelings, rather than just programmed responses to certain stimuli, are epiphenomena of consciousness.

I am willing to concede that I do not know for sure that tuna are not conscious. But that is the only extent to which I think you can have a good argument.

Reply 39

41b

I think at some stage we've to realise that striving for good versus evil are perhaps self-harming ways of living and that what matters is our own (whatever you may define "own" as) survival and success, even if it does result in the suffering of animals or even other groups of people.