Comment by amanaplanacanal 2 days ago
Try this then: every animal eats other living things to survive. We have been doing it for a billion years. Is a basic drive built into it DNA. After that, is just a question of which living things you are going to eat.
> Some birds will abandon weaker chicks to focus on the ones most likely to survive. Others will allow siblicide. That these behaviors exist and have existed for billions of years is a fact orthogonal to morality because birds don’t have the capacity to reason about systems and the mortality of actions.
There's something missing from this analysis. Namely that animals that have many offspring generally expect most of them to die and this is part of selective pressures that keeps the population healthy. If, for example, a mouse could reason morally it might still let many of its weaker babies die because keeping them alive would not be good for mouse-kind. It's inappropriate to assume that the child rearing morals of a low-fecundity, high-parental-investment species like ourselves applies to other species with different reproductive strategies.
> If, for example, a mouse could reason morally it might still let many of its weaker babies die because keeping them alive would not be good for mouse-kind.
I agree. If a mouse could reason morally and inside the system it currently inhabits, it might reason that way because it was unconscious of or had no access to alternatives for survival.
It’s is absolutely inappropriate to assume any morals on a species that has no capacity for reason.
Morality is arrived at through value judgement. We have a social contract with each other, not animals.
People generally dislike gratuitous pain and cruelty, hence we're seeing a push for cage-free hens and the like. They don't oppose slaughter in and of itself.
What people generally oppose today is a function of their consciousness and ability to access alternatives. They don’t oppose slaughter because they don’t think there’s an alternative, the same way that a person who is on the verge of starvation will steal food. They also don’t oppose slaughter because it’s hidden away from them, and done by others.
Slavery is an excellent cognate to this.
It’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? If you’re not careful with your compassion, you’ll end up having it for all sorts of beings you’ve come to see as like yourself.
> Slavery is an excellent cognate to this.
No it's not. I always find the idea that humans are not in some way special (at least to other humans) off-putting. Even animals treat members of their own species generally better than they treat other species.
I love animals, I think we should treat them with dignity and respect as much as possible. At the same time I would not hesitate to kill an animal for food or if it endangered another human.
Some birds. And some people.
The key difference between humans and every other animal that has ever existed is our ability to reason about systems and the morality of actions.
Some birds will abandon weaker chicks to focus on the ones most likely to survive. Others will allow siblicide. That these behaviors exist and have existed for billions of years is a fact orthogonal to morality because birds don’t have the capacity to reason about systems and the mortality of actions.
“Living things” is a sleight of hand, logically. When it comes down to it, everything is just atoms in the end. So why not murder? Why not steal? Why not exploit the poor? Reductionism leads us down some very dark paths indeed.