However, we now see Johnson making public speeches where he overstates and distorts his role in land use negotiations, and furthermore, brags
passionately about fantasy residential developments that were never built, as though people are actually living in them!
I bring the conversation up because it came to mind last week when I was reading
about a Christian ethicist so
passionately committed to defending the (unmistakably) exceptional nature of human beings that he thinks it necessary to forbid his children any sentimental solicitude for the suffering of beasts, and to disabuse them of the least trace of the dangerous
fantasy or pathetic fallacy that animals experience anything analogous to human emotions, motives, or needs; they can not really, he insists, know anxiety, grief, regret, or disappointment, and so we should never allow them to divert our sympathies or ethical longings from their proper object.