Read Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace and consider the following questions before our next session:
- What are the ethical dimensions of Wallace’s piece?
- What connections, if any, are there between ethics and morality?
- Would the “knife in the head” or the slow boil method strike you as more ethical?
- “Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in?”
- Interpret and apply this rich line from the text, “[s]ince pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.”
If you are interested, here is an interview with Wallace recorded two years before his suicide.
