That’s what I hate about philosophy: it’s so detached from reality. If I run over a deer on a dirt path far from civilization, should I end its suffering with my gun or should I drive off leaving it to enjoy the incredible good of being alive? Nothing can be accomplished by sustaining the damned forever, their wills are irrevocably set against God. Both they and God know annihilation would be a good, but the satisfaction of God’s justice is what trumps that good.
An interesting analogy, though I reject your conclusions, and one that I’ll have to think about in more detail. I have a couple tentative responses, but am unfortunately not familiar enough with the philosophy of animals, if such is a thing, to pick out which (if any) is correct. They all hinge on the difference between persons and non persons though.
Animals do not exist for their own sake as do humans (CCC 356), which led me to a handful of variations on why this scenario might not apply to the annihilation of persons (ranging from positing that animal death, while the end of their existence, is not analogous to annihilation because animals, being wholly material and not existing for their own sake, can be identified with their earlier and later forms [as in the animals that ate and will eat it] in some sense; to considering that it might actually be bad for the animal to die in this case but it is good in other ways, and animals, not existing for their own sake, lose out on that equation [not one that I favor, but not one that I’ve ruled out either], to …), but I don’t think this is the place for me to veer off into uninformed conjecture on animal existence.
Or at least not any further - I already typed and deleted about four different responses, but since I am unsure of all of them, I think I’ll settle for pointing out that there is a quality that could point to way to understand how annihilation can be evil while euthanasia of animals could be at least neutral and possibly good. (Note though that euthanasia of humans, even though that doesn’t end human existence, is not good, which also suggests a direction an argument could be found.)
I did find the analogy interesting though, even if I’m not convinced, and so will be reading around and thinking about it more. (Which means, at least if past experience is indicative, that I will be scratching my head and thinking up possible answers until such time as someone on some CAF thread somewhere points out that St. Thomas answered the question a few hundred years ago in a way that is both obviously correct and shows that about 90% of what I managed to come up with was just wrong.)
A more mundane consideration: how do you quote someone’s post and someone’s reply to that post as you so brilliantly did? I’m as dull as knives can be, this isn’t my first incarnation here and I haven’t been able to figure out how it’s done.
There may be a better way to do it, but I copy and paste the interior quote into the exterior quote and put quote=NAME] and /quote] around the interior quote (minus leading spaces inside the ]).
Being dumb is such a far-reaching curse, you have to be to appreciate it. Thank you.
Don’t worry, I understand - I teach. (Joke. Mostly.) In seriousness though, given that it takes me on average 10 minutes to find my list of subscribed threads
every single time, despite (unless the admins are messing with me - that would be a fun joke) the fact that the method has never changed, I’m not sure I can claim to be better.
