Egyptian Scribbles: Cats, cats and more cats

Wednesday 24 October 2007

Cats, cats and more cats

If you are a cat lover, then Cairo can be tough on the heart. My roommate left the house yesterday and passed two dead kittens on the doorstep of the opposite apartment. She said they had been torn apart, probably by another cat. One small kitten was left alive and lay huddled next to its siblings.
When I got home this evening, this small kitten was crouched at the foot of my door. I tried to feed it, but it wouldn’t eat the food I left out. Instead, its mother arrived and ate the food and I later saw the kitten feeding from her. I wish I could adopt the little fluff of orange and white. But we already have a cat… and you just can’t adopt all the strays on the street.

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."