“I believe I have omitted mentioning that in my first voyage from Boston, being becalmed off Block Island, our people set about catching cod and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion, I considered with my master Tryon the taking of every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and when this came hot out of the frying pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanced some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that when the fish were opened I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs. Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I dined upon cod very heartily and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”
- Benjamin Franklin, excerpt from Autobiography
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Do you actually have Benjamin Franklin's autobiography?
ReplyDeleteNo, it was an excerpt from a reading assignment I had for some class a few semesters back. It always stuck with me.
ReplyDeleteFish are not as evolved as we are or have the potential to evlove to the state of enlightenment as we have. So to compare our eating habits to a fish is pointless. They don't think as we do. So the fish had other fish inside its belly but a fish cannot plant vegetables or buy vegetables at a store and prepare a vegetarian meal. They are very limited to hat they can eat and mostly go on instinct as opposed to feeling they're way through a situation. They truly live in a world where it is kill or be killed. They do not have the luxuries that we have as people do of having the ability to make a conscious choice of what to eat and what not to eat. For Benjamin Franklin to compare his eating habits to a fish just becuase they are both living creatures is to me very strange. We are not fish, just as we are not lions and tigers or turtles. The choice of what to eat and what not to eat comes from within us. He must have somewhere inside him had a strong earge to want to eat fish again and in observing the eating habits of the fish he found a reason to justify him no longer being a vegetarian. We have the power and imgaination within all of us to justify anything, some have justified carrying out genocide on entire populations. Just wanted to share.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI think that was the whole point of his argument. We have an uncanny ability to create and mold reason and logic in our minds, that, at the moment, is truly acceptable and right. Of course, there are loopholes and cracks in these certain situations, but our desire to have what we want automatically deletes such possibilities from our reality. Therefore, what we truly want is the only reality that we'll subconsciously allow.