Don't Tell Furries to Kill Themselves
In favor of being a decent person
I’m not a furry. I’ve never really understood the appeal. In fact, I think it’s a very strange thing to be into. But despite finding the whole concept decidedly unappealing, I also think that many people have an incredible degree of hate towards furries, and I think it’s immoral to express this hate.
The people who actively go around and tell furries to kill themselves are of course pretty rare, probably have an average age of around 8, and would vote for Andrew Tate as president, if they could muster the power to leave their basement. This blog’s demographics (hopefully) differ quite a lot from this, and such people are likely too far from pedagogical reach to find the arguments I give persuasive anyhow. But even excluding the people who put “anti-furry” on their curriculum vitae, there still seems to be a very strong prejudice against furries, and many would express some sort of disdain for furries if pressed. In any case, I think it’s a healthy exercise to stop up and reconsider your attitudes towards certain groups, and expand your moral circle.
To refresh your memory on the form furry hate can take, I found this arbitrarily picked anti-furry meme compilation, which is basically just 16 minutes of 2015-style memes expressing a wish to kill furries in random brutal ways (of course mixed in with some Nazi-edits for good measure).
I also found this video of some guy explaining why he hates furries. The reasons are ironclad: they have strange fetishes and many of them are gay (roughly). But his opinions are of course also nuanced! For instance it’s only zoophiles he wishes to chop up into tiny pieces; furries are not as bad. This might make you wonder “hmm, does he purely use all his energy to try and get furries to kill themselves?” Luckily he has got you covered! And wouldn’t you know it, he’s no radical—if anything, he’s a moderate—as he explains: “I don’t purely use all my energy to try and get them to kill themselves.” After all, doing so would put him at risk of becoming a furry himself (I’m not kidding). What a saint! So I can’t help but agree with @bmshere2427 on this one:
I support this fact as well!
So why do I think it’s immoral to hate on furries? Basically because it hurts their feelings. I don’t think this should be a particularly strange idea: you shouldn’t go around telling people how much you hate them, expressing how you think they’re crazy and weird, and wish that you could shoot them or gas them to death. Let me illustrate:
Jack: Hello
Jill: Hello
Jack: I like Star Wars
Jill: FUCK YOU, YOU MENTALLY ILL EXCUSE FOR A HUMAN BEING! I HOPE YOU GET CANCER AND DIE YOU PIECE OF SHIT! GOD, IF IT WERE LEGAL TO SHOOT YOUR KIND, I WOULD HAVE FUCKING BLASTED YOUR BRAINS OUT RIGHT HERE AND NOW!!!
Or let’s take another example:
Jack: *Posts Star Wars fan art online*
Jill: YOU’RE SO FUCKING DISGUSTING, GET BACK TO THE MENTAL HOSPITAL WHERE YOU BELONG!
I think it’s pretty clear that Jill is doing something wrong here. Now obviously it isn’t very wrong. It would be very wrong to sucker-punch Jack in the face, or buy 100 kg of factory farmed chickens. But still, it’s a little wrong. These reactions are of course more extreme than anything the highly esteemed readers of Wonder and Aporia would ever do. Nevertheless, even if you don’t explicitly encourage suicide, I think it’s also wrong to tell them that they’re weird in a negative way, or to ostracize them. You naturally don’t have a moral obligation to try to be friends with all furries you meet, or give them compliments all day, just like you don’t have an obligation to do that to other people—but you do have an obligation to not make people feel terrible, because someone feeling terrible is a bad thing.
It might be hard to not be at least a little negatively discriminatory if the thought of furries induces a negative gut reaction in you. But you can at the very least try to not let it influence your behavior too much. Many people (at least historically) also have negative gut reactions to homosexual people, and you should probably try and suppress that reaction, rather than channel it into an insult or death threat, if you feel it (I know, hot take). Before you start typing your angry comment, let me just emphasize that there are obvious disanalogies; being gay is not the same as being a furry. Firstly you have much less of a say in whether you’re gay than in whether you’re a furry, and secondly you’ll probably be a lot more sad if you don’t express your homosexuality than if you don’t express your furriness. Also furries have not historically been systematically oppressed in the same way, if you think such considerations are relevant.
Still, it seems like people who are furries have it as a quite big part of their identity, and while being a furry presumably isn’t wholly involuntary, it’s not very easy to decide what you like and care about. If being interested in philosophy were something that would get you ostracized upon people finding out, rather than being super cool (this is obviously a counterpossible), I would certainly be a lot more miserable. Consequently it would be wrong for people around me to ostracize me for simply having the interest, especially if I refrained from teaching them valuable (though involuntary) lessons about mereology and the nature of arguments. Yet I have observed people excluding others from social situations simply due to knowing that they were furries—not even having brought it up, strolled around in a fursuit, or whatever. It’s of course to be expected that people act this way, as most are quick to limit moral concern to arbitrary ingroups, and make moral judgements on the basis of aesthetic intuitions. That, however, does not change the fact that it’s wrong to do so.
Besides, I think you can very much train your gut reactions and instinctual dispositions. Many in the past didn’t like homosexuals and black people (and I suspect primarily due to gut reactions and them being different), yet I don’t think many have negative reactions to those groups now. And in the past I didn’t care much for chickens, shrimp, or insects. Nevertheless I have trained my moral sense to have the proper intuitions—and in fact I find that this can be done very quickly. So even if you feel uneasy when you see a furry, it doesn’t take very much work to change this disposition.
Three quick objections before we end it off:
“Furries are zoophiles and pedophiles, so it’s okay to treat them badly.” I don’t have the stats, but I expect that pedophile-rates would not be too different from rates in the general population, though I would be very surprised if zoophile-rates aren’t noticeably higher. But that’s all besides the point, as it’s obviously irrelevant to how you should treat furries in general. Whether or not there are higher rates of violence among coffee-lovers should not affect how you treat any given person who enjoys coffee—likewise for furries. On top of that, I just think it’s extremely obvious that there’s nothing wrong with being a zoophile or pedophile if you don’t act on it—people do not obtain desert from their unrealized dispositions.1 In any case, most people do things that are way worse than bestiality three times a day; wooden beams in eyes, etc., etc.2
“I should have the freedom of speech to insult furries.” Sure, I lean towards a pretty wide freedom of speech (though encouraging suicide may be beyond the limit). Still, just because you have a legal right to do something doesn’t mean it’s not immoral to do it. It’s also not illegal to leak your friend’s dirty secrets, take someone’s shopping cart in Lidl, or walk past a drowning child, and yet those are clearly immoral.
“Furries should know that they’ll be ridiculed and excluded for showing that they’re furries.” Obviously you’re exposing yourself to risk of being harassed or whatever, if you take the train or go to a restaurant in a fursuit. Similarly, you expose yourself to a risk of being kicked, if you walk down a high school hallway with a “kick me” sign; and you expose yourself to being raped by walking down a dark alley dressed like Bianca Censori at the Grammy’s; but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t doing something wrong by kicking or raping you. If you genuinely hate furries, it’s really not very hard to avoid bumping into them. Apart from writing this post, I very rarely think about furries, and am also rarely presented with furry-related things online; and if I am, I can simply scroll past it, which usually takes about 2 seconds.
It is perhaps quite fitting that my conclusions about furries are pretty similar to Kant’s views on animals—I think the furries might like that. Obviously not in the sense that I don’t think furries are persons, or that they have less moral worth than other humans; but in the sense that while not being prejudiced against furries might not be the biggest concern you can have, it is a good way to positively develop your character, and learn to not view people (and other species) as less morally significant due to arbitrary group memberships. The badness of furries being mistreated is likely not particularly high—probably a fair bit less than bullying in general—though the main lesson here also isn’t about preventing some big harm regarding furries specifically, but about noticing your moral biases.
Obviously, then, the point doesn’t just apply to furries. Rather it is just an argument for being a fundamentally decent person. Taking furries as the example is just especially helpful, as they’re so widely considered weird, and it’s very acceptable to express how much you feel this way. But you should in general make sure that you are not mistreating others and disregarding their moral worth due to irrelevant characteristics of them.
† I’m so sorry! May the Lord have mercy on my soul…
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Great article
I always thought that the way people treat/talk about furries is a moral test (though a very easy one to pass) to tell if people are actually morally principled or if they are just following social pressure. The analogy with how people treat gay people is actually pretty apt (people get offended by it mainly because they falsely think you're saying something disfavorable about gay people by comparing them to furries, but the whole point of the analogy is the opposite - that you shouldn't mistreat either group). Until not too long ago, the vast majority of people treated gay people very badly, often with open contempt and sometimes with endorsements of violence if only it was legal. Nowadays, at least in the western world, the vast majority of people have realized that this was immoral, and if you still try to treat gay people like that today, most people will side against you. But is this because people actually have a better moral sense or moral dispositions, or is it just people going along with what society tells them, and treating whatever social norms are currently prevalent as "obvious"? You can tell based on how they treat people who objectively aren't doing anything wrong but who it's still socially acceptable or even socially encouraged to mistreat. Those who understand why it's immoral to mistreat gay people realize that the exact same reasons apply here, but those who are just going along with society will try to come up with some ad-hoc reason to justify their social prejudices.