Lobster logic

Seriously, W.T.F?:

Amy Schaefer, a Whole Foods spokesperson, summed up the corporate thinking: "Lobsters are going to be caught and going to be eaten. . . [what we're] trying to do is create a supply chain that treats the animals with respect and minimizes unnecessary pain."

This is essentially the same reasoning the Supreme Court has used in interpreting the Eighth Amendment: Capital punishment is not by itself cruel and unusual (and, presuming the synonym, inhumane), but you can do it in certain ways that make it so, and those ways are verboten.

Whole Foods, by reasoning that implicitly says lobsters have a right (just like U.S. citizens!) to be treated humanely in this particular way, is extending a parallel, abstract protection against the cruel and unusual to maritime invertebrates. ...

Most shoppers will probably shrug at the chain's decision, and few will leave it because it is treating its shellfish too humanely. But for those who buy into Whole Foods' reasoning, other things follow. If it's inhumane to cause undue pain to a being that can feel it, but acceptable to terminate that being's life in a painless way, then it follows that partial-birth abortions are inhumane but abortions in early pregnancy are acceptable. And if it's accepted that it's better to kill a lobster quickly than to keep it alive for six months in conditions that are degrading and painful to it, then it's certainly true that it's acceptable for people to terminate their own lives rather than live for years in painful and degrading conditions.

Conservatives who don't buy into Whole Foods' reasoning, on the other hand, don't have much of a problem inflicting pain and undue suffering as long as no one finds out about it.