3 Comments

David Nickol
March 5th, 2013 | 11:31 am

Can’t someone start a “Send Rocco Palmo to Rome” Fund?

Matt
March 5th, 2013 | 10:55 pm

The Palmo stuff doesn’t sit well. First how it rates a mention here is weird. A blogger can’t go to Rome? So? Guy hasn’t had a scoop in years.

Secondly…his accounting is way off. I just checked and I could fly from Philly to Rome TOMORROW for a bit more than a thousand bucks and I found hotels for under 200 night available. Not exactly 8000 budget.

Bret Lythgoe
March 7th, 2013 | 2:32 am

Concerning “Beastly Justice: Medieval Animal Trials, Mr. McWilliams makes an excellent point that factory farming, which treat animals as objects, isn’t better than medieval trials. Certainly there were many factors that contributed to the belief that animals are just “objects” for humans to exploit. One principal factor, is the intellectual influence, which has been profound, of the brilliant frenchman Rene Descartes, who argued that only humans are conscious. This pernicious belief, was never advocated by the great thinkers of the middle ages, such as Aquinas. The latter argued that non-human animals were not just conscious, but had feelings, and could suffer. The angelic Doctor never endorsed animal rights (although logically, I think his views of animals should lead to this endorsement), and he also didn’t believe that animals had intellect or will, therefore he would logically be against animal trials. A middle way, one that accepts animals as conscious, feeling beings, but not possessing will and intellect, therefore not possessing moral culpablity, is the proper approach, which is the Thomistic apporach, would result in animals not being treated as objects for our use.