The ‘Occupy’ Philosophy

Ken La Salle — Less than a year, in September of 2011 – 9/11 for those equipped with irony – the Occupy Movement sprang from the homes of the downtrodden. Those without homes sprang even easier. In New York City, they gathered in Zuccotti Park and marched on Wall Street. Across the nation and across the globe, the poor and the powerless stood against the rich and the powerful with the only things they had left: their bodies and their voices. What were they doing, anyway?

Whether you agree with their message or not, it is clear that the Occupiers were trying something that had not been done in quite some time, a non-violent refusal of traditional values. (The last time this had been tried on such a scale in the United States, Martin Luther King was assassinated as a result.) The Occupiers rejected the “value of greed”, if such a term even makes sense, and decided to redefine values for themselves.

This is important for anyone studying philosophy and ethics, because it shows us that our studies do not end where the book we are studying ends. Many of us work our way through Aristotle, Kant, and even Nietzsche. We learn the ethics of the Greeks. We are taught about the Categorical Imperative. We learn about Utilitarianism and Pragmatism. But it is when we walk away from those studies and live out our lives than the real value of what we learn comes into play.

Who amongst us is a Deontologist, a Utilitarian, and so on? Do we live according to labels? No, we don’t. People rarely live according to a single label. In the end, those labels end up being static, wooden… useless.

But that isn’t what philosophy is about. If philosophy was about simple categorization, there’d be no point in studying it. You could just learn the labels and apply them, like some kind of computer programmer or everyday plumber. Philosophy is about learning how to think and how to apply the lessons of thinkers from the past and then, and this is the important part, move beyond them.

That is what the Occupiers have done and are doing. They are taking the values of the past and moving beyond them. That’s what philosophy is all about and the facts surrounding Occupy – the volatility, the emotion, the conflict, the thirst for answers – display for us just how powerful philosophy really is.

Many of us learn about philosophy as a dead, boring list of theories from a bunch of equally dead and boring thinkers. But remember, those people were alive once. Their ideas were earth-shattering in their time. Now, this is your time to shatter the earth. Think beyond the great thinkers of philosophy. Find your own answers or, better still, find the answers for a whole new generation of thinkers.

Bring philosophy to life.

About the Author

You can find out more about Ken La Salle at www.kenlasalle.com. Climbing Maya, An Exploration Into Success by Ken La Salle is now available from all major e-tailers by Solstice Publishing You can also find The Worth of Dreams/The Value of Dreamers, a compilation of Ken La Salle’s first year with Recovering the Self with plenty of bonus content, available as an e-book from all major e-tailers and coming soon as an audio book.

Canada’s ‘Enviropigs’ killed for failing to bring profit

Ernest Dempsey — We today find ourselves in a world where the authority of science is used as an excuse to do away with any ethics sheltering life against destruction. If the torturous experiments that lead to agonizing deaths of primates and other animals in science labs were not enough, researchers in a Canadian university played a new game on life – creating a small herd of genetically modified pigs, and were soon planning to kill them because these animals wouldn’t get them a commercial contract.

As media reports tell, a group of researchers the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, created 16 genetically engineered pigs, calling them Enviropigs due to their being more “environment-friendly” than other pigs usually raised on farms. The project cost at least a million dollars and more than a decade of research work till the arrival of this small herd of Enviropigs which were created with the intention of commercializing them. But when the target food company didn’t show any interest in the plan, the university decided to euthanize the pigs. In other words, life not sold for large-scale slaughter to earn millions was decreed not worthy of living at all.

But animal rights advocates started demanding that these Enviropigs be allowed a second chance and adopted out to some animal sanctuary where they may live their life as other animals do and die a natural death, not killed by slaughter or euthanasia. The problem arose, or aggravated, to say, when the university refused to adopt these animals out. One of the researchers was quoted saying that donating or transferring these animals would breach their protocol or violate regulations.

The question of ethics takes a painful twist here. If life is created for slaughtering en mass for fulfilling commercial interests, does it not violate the protocol of this environment of which the researchers pretend to be advocates. It simply falls outside the grounds of sanity to produce environment-friendly life-forms for commercial use; but if that interest isn’t met, then destroy this life, despite its environment-friendliness. Perhaps the university could get a legal bond of not reproducing these pigs in exchange for adopting them out, and/or just neutering them, prior to release. Even they could keep them as living proof of a successful genetic engineering project. But killing them is only equal to getting rid of them because they are worthless.

To someone who talks environment, life will hardly be worthless. And when we claim to be behaving ethically, we don’t destroy something, particularly something living, which doesn’t have any significant risks for other life. Animal rights supporters followed this approach and started a petition online to demand the University of Guelph for letting these pigs live a normal life as they deserve.

However, The Journal of Humanitarian Affairs learnt from the university that  all the Enviropigs were killed on May 24, saying that protocols within the university prohibited the transfer of transgenic animals; and also that the Canadian government and the various environmental  and food agencies have regulations that prohibited it as well.

Whether it's an excuse that can deceive people into believing that ethics fail when regulations are recited to protect commercial interests but not when life is at stake. This is a point readers will decide better themselves. One thing is clear to this scribe — by killing the environment-friendly pigs, the university authorities have unofficially listed themselves as a threat to the environment.