/lit/ - Literature

From a book on Moral Relativism, this passage explains how Native American children torture animals as part of normal play, while still understanding that animals feel pain:

>[Native American] children often catch birds and play with them by tying their legs, breaking them, and then pulling their wings off. [The children] do not regard animals as unconscious or insensitive; they rather regard them as closer to the human species than does the average white man

To avoid implications of racism, many authors have tried to justify this either by justifying the behaviour ("yeah it's bad but they lack the education to understand why it's bad") or resorting to relativism ("who are we to judge, there are no objective values").

But it seems to me that the obvious answer is that it is immoral to torture animals regardless of culture, and there is no excuse. Children are naturally immoral and their behaviour is not the product of some perverse environment. There need be no apologies for stating this.