I suspect it has a lot to do with how close you feel to the death whether it's justified or not. Pretty obvious, but I'll explain anyway.
Silly example. I went to a 4-H auction on Friday. Here are kids who have raised lambs for six months, who clearly cared about them. I saw them in the barn before the auction hugging them, tenderly putting ribbons around their necks and brushing them - before they brought them to the auction block to be sold by the pound to supermarkets. I got all emotional thinking about those kids and those lambs and how hard that must be.
The next day, I was in Costco, looking at a package of lambchops in shrink wrap thinking, "Those look good..."
Clearly, my consumerism, if I had bought those lambchops, would be a direct contributor to the death of lambs. But see, I didn't see those lambs or the people who raised them. It was meat in shrink wrap.
So - my hypothesis? The further removed you are from the specifics of the death, the easier it is to accept the death.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-07-31 09:21 pm (UTC)Silly example. I went to a 4-H auction on Friday. Here are kids who have raised lambs for six months, who clearly cared about them. I saw them in the barn before the auction hugging them, tenderly putting ribbons around their necks and brushing them - before they brought them to the auction block to be sold by the pound to supermarkets. I got all emotional thinking about those kids and those lambs and how hard that must be.
The next day, I was in Costco, looking at a package of lambchops in shrink wrap thinking, "Those look good..."
Clearly, my consumerism, if I had bought those lambchops, would be a direct contributor to the death of lambs. But see, I didn't see those lambs or the people who raised them. It was meat in shrink wrap.
So - my hypothesis? The further removed you are from the specifics of the death, the easier it is to accept the death.