The Crabbing Excursion

The text of this brief essay, or autobiographical snippet, or “ars poetica” maybe, was composed mostly in late 2022, but it is in connection with a series of essays that I am currently in the process of writing and publishing elsewhere, first and foremost on the Catholic website Where Peter Is.

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When I first conceived of a series of moral, philsophical, and theological arguments that I have recently been developing, I decided that I could not credibly make these arguments if I were not making them from personal experience of having killed. Many of these arguments were to be phenomenological in nature and oriented towards compassion and attempts at empathy; this would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, had I not made that decision early on. Since I had no interest in committing murder, was not in a social or legal position to be sent to war, and would have be unable to write if I had successfully committed suicide, I decided to investigate taking nonhuman life via hunting or fishing.