this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Perry Bible Fellowship
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This is a community dedicated to the webcomic known as the Perry Bible Fellowship, created by Nicholas Gurewitch.
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I have so many arguments against this I don’t even know were to start, so I’ll keep it simple: you need to abandon anthropocentrism.
Humans are animals and not particularly special or even intelligent ones. (Intelligence being defined as the ability to solve problems and learn from them) Our “intelligence” is actually just cumulative generationally passed knowledge. It is not clear that humans are indeed more rational than a tiger or that tigers or non human animals in general lack rationality, except only in the way in which a human would define rationality which cannot be a universal claim.
Nobody invoked intelligence or rationality. You have misread and now you are just confusing things.
To keep it simple: A tiger's life depends on killing other animals. A human being can live to a record-setting age and never kill another animal. The tiger has no choice but to be violent to vulnerable individuals, but when a human does it, the lack of necessity makes it cruelty and abuse. When a human does have such a necessity, the math works out differently, but in the context of the comic strip, the subject had no necessity to kill those vulnerable individuals.
It doesn’t need to be invoked, the higher moral agency placed on humans hinges on the notion of superior human rationality. You could choose to be a vegetarian and choose not to kill animals, but that doesn’t mean that it is a more ethical or moral choice because human biology evolved to require meat other wise it requires planning and supplementation that is not necessarily possible outside of industrial societies. I do agree that choosing not to eat animals due to the industrial nature of meat production is a more ethical choice, but not that killing animals is necessarily wrong.
I may not be explaining it well but basically: the idea that humans killing animals is wrong can only exist if you think humans are superior to animals. I reject that notion and that’s where my argument comes from.
That's a really bad argument, sorry. Of course we place a higher moral agency on humans than on animals - otherwise you'd have yo argue that other atrocities like rape and murder shouldn't be morally judged either.
A tiger cannot make moral decisions. You can. So you will be judged if you don't.
Not to hold yourself to a higher standard morally than a literal predator would be downright psychopathic.