Freedom over Morals?

In the class discussion today, interesting topics were brought up.

Liberty versus Morality, for instance.

The example brought up was lobsters, and how, to eat a lobster, one must boil said lobster. It really does put things into perspective, and leads a person to consider the freedom of being able to do something, to the righteousness of doing that same thing.

Is it right to boil another creature to death, just because it tastes good? Because a person has the ability do something, can it really be said that it is perfectly ok to do that thing? You certainly can't say that that is true for every case, and if you can't, does that make everything true, but only on a selective basis?

If a cow tasted better when boiled, would someone boil a cow alive? What about a dog?
And if the freedom to do any single thing is more important to people than the rightness of that action, where is the line drawn?

That's always seemed to be the case with my view of the NRA. Just because they can, should people own so many guns? Is it really safe for anyone else to have 80-year-olds to 18-year-olds (barring some legal inability that I don't know about) carry firearms around, simply because they can?

Shouldn't there be a better reason than "because"? Has there ever seemed to be the need for one? It seems that it is human nature ( sometimes, at least) to come up with a glib answer for everything, even when there isn't an answer.
"Why?" "Just Because."
I'd imagine that there are many people who never consider changing their eating habits, for instance, simply because that is how their habits are. Just because.

Dialogs

Being a writer of fiction, dialog has always seemed like an intelligent way to get points across. One of the text books for Animals & Ethics is written by someone who obviously thinks along those same lines, although to a certain extent, philosophical dialog is a bit different than fiction. The focus is not on the plotline, or characterization so much as it's on the dialog itself. The concepts, if you will.

I've read a philosophical dialog before. Plato, I think, from his Republic. I took a class on Critical Reading, once, and I believe that was where I came across it. I don't agree with everything Plato did, but his was truly a brilliant mind. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms has quite a bit to say about him, but most of it revolves around how he believed that all things stem from ideas, and a higher plane of existence.

I wonder what he would have thought about the topic of this class, though? It's very unlikely, I'd think, that many, if any ancient Greek philosophers would have thought to ponder anything beyond human morality and idealism. This seems to be a modern topic of debate. I'd love to know who the first philosopher was, that came to the conclusion that thinking about it at all was a wise choice..

To Start with

I've never imagined myself as any sort of philosopher; I suppose you could say I'll admit to being a thinker, but nothing so very labeled as "philosopher". Not more than any other person, in any case.

Be that as it may, my decision to take a philosophy course stemmed directly from a simple desire to learn just what is what. The moral dilemma is an ageless thing; it seems that howsoever long there has been man (humans, that is), there has always been a question of what is right, what is wrong, and just what values do we all share in common that go beyond what is relative to our own experience..and what's simply inherent to us as a species?

Philosophy does nothing if not raise more questions, even as it might help to answer some. Maybe. Maybe not. The point is, it makes one think. A good thing, really, when the world seems to spend so very much time doing nothing of the sort. Hopefully, as I read the class texts, and converse with the other students in my class, I'll get a greater understanding of just how huge the entire debate really is.