The ethics of killing things with your bare hands

Spring is here in Toronto.  I can go outside in a tshirt and bare feet, the days are getting longer, and it is time to clean all the pigeon poop off of my balcony.  Naturally this brings us to deep philosophical questions.

While we were discussing the pigeon problem I suggested that I could solve it by grabbing a pigeon, killing it with my bare hands, and putting it on a spike as a warning to the others.  This wouldn't work with wild birds of course, but city pigeons give no fucks about people and I am sure I could get close enough to grab one.

Wendy asked if I would actually be willing to kill a pigeon with my bare hands.

This is easy.  Sure I would!

Presuming I was already okay with killing a pigeon to keep them off my balcony, that is.  To me this is the real question - I don't see anything different ethically between wringing a pigeon's neck and killing it some other way like poison / traps / shooting.  If anything I think killing it up close and personal is ethically preferable because you aren't fooling yourself about what you are doing.  It is easy to imagine that you aren't violently ending a life when you kill something from a distance, but when you actually get blood on your hands you have to come to terms with what you are doing.

If I am going to kill something I would prefer to face that head on, when possible.  Do, or do not, but I am not interested in do while pretending to do not.

Most people agree that it is okay to kill animals for convenience.  We just draw the line of how *much* convenience has to be involved differently from one another.  Some would kill animals for any reason at all, while others would go to great lengths to avoid it.  Still, we all have homes that animals used to live in, and they sure don't anymore.  We consume goods that are trucked around the world, and those trucks and factories and roads kill endless critters of all types.

No matter the outcome of my musing though, I am unlikely to actually go out and murder any pigeons.  The poop isn't actually that hard to get rid of, and eventually they will find somewhere else to go, or some falcons will move in nearby and eat them all.

Now falcons, they don't fool themselves or anyone else when it comes to murder.  They kill stuff with their faces, and they apologize to nobody for it.  Gotta give them credit for that.

The Prime Directive

Star Trek's Prime Directive is a law that forces the Federation to not interfere in societies that are starting up and have not achieved some specific level of technology yet.  I have a similar sort of thing with Pinkie Pie where I won't directly interfere with her friendships and social groups.  I want to give her general advice and then let her figure stuff out on her own.

This came up recently when she was involved in a Minecraft group.  There are tons of Minecraft servers out there, and they seem to come paired with voice chat groups where people chat constantly while playing the game.  Minecraft seems like a fine thing for Pinkie Pie to be doing as entertainment as it involves a lot of creativity and thinking, but sometimes the social scene is not ideal.

Pinkie Pie was in voice chat and I was near her doing some chores, overhearing only her side of the conversation.  Initially it was innocuous, but she began to get more and more upset and agitated, eventually starting to plead for the people in her chat to stop fighting.  She began to have an extreme emotional reaction, crying over and over that they were upsetting her, that they needed to stop, begging them to cease their fighting.

Listening to her be so upset that she was wailing and grovelling in an attempt to get other people to stop their conflict was so upsetting for me. 

My emotions were swirling and I struggled to stay out of the mess.  I wanted to just grab the mic away from her and yell at them to shut the hell up, and I wanted to yell at her to leave the damn server if it is making her so upset.

You don't have to put up with friends screaming at each other all day.  You can move on!  MOVE ON!

I didn't yell at anybody, but I knew this had to stop.  Even if she could cope with it, I can't, and for her sake I hope she never feels like this is the sort of 'friendship' she needs to accept.

I totally understand why this is a struggle for her.  She is making friends online, and when you find people you like it is tough to just drop them when the situation turns toxic.  This is a good lesson though - begging people to stop being awful to each other isn't productive.  If that is the environment, you need to find the people you like, tell them you would like to continue playing with them but this environment has got to go, and then leave without a backward glance.  There are places in the world that aren't full of this sort of aggravation and you need to find them.

Thankfully Pinkie Pie eventually figured it out on her own, as I had hoped.  She told her friends on the server she was leaving, and they left together to find someplace else to play.  They ditched the people they hated, and while the new place has its own struggles, they have never resulted in the mess I saw in the first one.

I suppose I should be glad that my technique (assuming you think 'do nothing' is a technique) worked.  She moved on, and she learned.

But DAMN sitting there listening to my kid beg for other people to stop hurting her was hard to do without leaping in to stop it.  Having your emotions be so easily wound up by someone else's issues is the cost of being a parent, I guess.

A joyful end

I finished watching The Good Place this week.  (Substantial spoilers ahead, though I don't think it will ruin the show for you at all.)  The show is a bizarre hybrid of silly jokes and philosophical musing, a mishmash of pop culture riffs and deep examination of the meaning of life.

I love that combination.

I cried most of the way through the final episode.  It wasn't because the end of the show was sad, as it was most certainly a happy ending.  The characters completed their bizarre journeys across the boundaries of life and afterlife and concluded their adventures through The Good Place, The Bad Place, and The Medium Place.  The story ended, the plot resolved, and they went on to find their eventual end.  Wendy asked me what it was about the episode that made me weep throughout and after some consideration I have a couple of answers.

First off I love the idea of a properly finished story.  A character ending their arc and being done, finished, complete, has a huge emotional power over me.  I can be happy with a 'happily ever after' sort of ending, but if you really want to yank on my heartstrings you need to finish the character completely.

The characters in the show absolutely got their proper end.  Their adventures stopped, and they had the time needed to rest, grow, improve, and become their best selves.  Then, when they had done all the things, become beautiful butterflies, they ended.

Ended.  Not dead, not 'no more to say', actually ended.

I love that so much.  Something about an actual end, a proper one, one that comes when the character is truly ready for it, has immense power.

This leads into my second point, which is that I am so interested in how relationships end.  I love the idea of people accepting their partners for who they are, and not clinging on to a relationship that is no longer truly serving them, or being true to who they are.  I love watching people who love one another but who are capable of accepting that their partner may need to leave, and that this is the best thing.  Often a partner leaving is portrayed as a thing you must fight, or hate, but The Good Place absolutely took a stand that I love:  Sometimes someone leaving is simply the best thing that can happen.  That doesn't mean the relationship isn't important, that you now hate each other, or that the relationship failed.  It simply means it needs to be over.

You can love someone deeply and watch them leave you without anger or bitterness.  Set them free, and let them fly, and wish them only the best.  When we talk about children people mostly get this, and I wish we all saw our relationship partners the same way.

This is all most potent because of choice.  The characters *chose* their fate.  This wasn't the universe sweeping in and killing them randomly - they decided to be done.  I don't know why exactly, but watching someone come to that place of contentment, of satisfaction, of completeness, and looking into the void without fear or worry... so powerful.

Something about having done enough, having learned enough, *being* enough, that you can comfortably say that you need no more hits me square in the feelings.  I have often said that mortality is defined not by the fear of death, but the experience of fear, doubt, and worry.  Seeing people who have gotten beyond that, who no longer face those demons, because they have done all they need to do; it gets me.

I love that The Good Place managed to tackle the philosophical trolley problem with a trolley that runs over screaming people, covering the person riding the trolley in blood, with a cackling eternal being taking notes the entire time.  I love that it never stopped having Tahani drop names, or Jason be a doofus.  But while having all this silly humour they also taught us things and told a wonderful story.

You should watch The Good Place.  Whether you are there for the silly fun or the deep stuff, it delivers.