"Animal Rights Terrorism"

I leave you this fine evening with a column by Debra Saunders. For the record, I am opposed to violence in behalf of animals. I can't think of anything that does more harm to the cause of animal liberation. In the long run, the best thing we can do for animals is engage in rational persuasion. That means patiently showing people—one at a time, if necessary—that their own values commit them to changing the way they treat animals. You might wonder how this could work. If their own values commit them to changing the way they treat animals, why haven't they changed the way they treat animals? The answer is that not everyone has thought through the implications of his or her values. Philosophers are trained to do this. Their only tool is the law of noncontradiction, which says that no proposition can be both true and false. If I can show you that one of your moral principles entails that it's wrong to eat meat, then, to avoid contradiction, you must either abandon the principle or abstain from meat. If you're unwilling to abandon the principle, then you must abstain from meat. Here is a brilliant example of this approach.