#Is this hypothetical only made possible when you insist on the critical distance of factory farming and supply chains

[swamp-world]

!!!! Exactly this! Many people in the notes seem to be treating this scenario like it is self-contained on the one hand (the chicken magically appears as in a thought experiment, already plucked and wrapped and ready in a store, and its having-been-aliveness is only relevant insofar as it isn't alive anymore) and on the other hand getting caught up in letting it spill over in its speculated repercussions ("What if chickenfucker catches a disease and then has sex with another person and they get sick and die, then there's harm caused!") And so even where you could try to expand this into a more useful framework (please be content with it as a litmus test), it seems like folks are way more willing to come up with extended scenarios that introduce forms of harm that the original bracketed off, all while turning a blind eye to the harm which is explicitly present: i don't care so much about the man who fucks a dead chicken as I do about the fact that it's possible to get a carcass or twenty. It's the idea that a chicken lived a factory farm life so that someone can buy that carcass and do what they want to it at any time. But that seems not to be occurring to people, instead preferring to wonder about the sanitation of the chicken carcass rather than the conditions of the chicken's life which is permitted only to the point of becoming a carcass, the eating or sodomizing of which are placed on equivalent levels.

All of which is to say—hard agree, this is a good question and strategy in these limited situations, but unless people are willing to interrogate whether the nonhuman harm that led to the hypothetical, it's also as much an unintentional exposure of people's often limited consideration for animal life and dignity.

Oh my god. I need to share another story of my new friend making today. So my friends husband says, very casually, as we’re about to leave for the ren faire, “Yeah, it’s like my story about fucking a chicken.”

And of the four people present I was the only one who was shocked. The others all nodded as if to say, yes yes, we know, the chicken fucking.

So he explained, when a progressive person is analyzing a behavior they will typically use the metric, Harm/No Harm. They may not like things in the No Harm category but they wouldn’t object.

Conversely, a more conservative mindset used something like eight metrics. Authority/No Authority Moral/Not Moral, things like that.

So, he posited if you want to sound out someone’s mindset (and you’re willing to live with the repercussions) you can ask: if a man buys a dead chicken from the store, cleans it thoroughly, then fucks it, and then eats it himself…?

I listened in dawning horror, both rapt and disgusted. But into the growing pause I whispered, “No harm…” because it really has no effect on me or anyone else if a man fucks a dead chicken. I don’t like it, I think he’s a weird dude, but like. That’s his dick. But a more conservative person will hear that and object on moral grounds despite not being harmed.

It’s been haunting me all day, so please enjoy.