What is the point of separation between Homo sapiens sapiens and other animals?

[warty goblin]

Now you've misplaced the point. No one said man was special "just for existing," man is special for his potential, and that potential is worth something, and it is a crime against human nature not to tell children about it, but instead raising them to wallow in their own hopelessness and cynicism about their species' incidents of succumbing to unreason.

I believe you missed the second portion of that statement; that being praised for things I might have done, but did do also struck me as phony and annoying. Regardless, what do children have to do with this? I was under the impression this was a conversation among adults, or is the thread overrun with crouching toddlers and hidden nine year olds?

What difference does any morality make, if there be any one or group whose morality differs? Some moralities love their neighbours, others eat them. What's the difference other than might making right?--or the admission that there is no morality after all and we might as well be like whatever animal we choose in our dealings with, or exploitations of, others?

Different moralities impact people's lives differently, and therefore make real differences in people's lives. It is fallacious to suppose that simply because something fails to be universally or transcendentally true it cannot be locally and conditionally true.

Hoooo boy, this is where we're going now? Okay... I'm going to try to only say these three things on this subject:

1. There is nothing cynical about acknowledging the way things are, especially not when, as mentioned, honesty about reality is the necessary first step towards realising potential. Also, I don't think I've ever heard "but what will we tell the children?" used as a credible argument against anything ever.

2. Experiments have already found that certain monkeys have a very strong sense of fairness, so we know the foundations of morality are not an exclusively human thing.

3. Just because morality is subjective and evolved doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Subjective is not the same as arbitrary, and indeed the fact it's evolved (in both the biological and social sense) means it's almost certainly not arbitrary and rather serves some very important purposes. Beauty and love are subjective products of evolution too, but few but the most hard-line abstract-thinking nihilists and pragmatists would claim those are arbitrary and meaningless.

Thank you for this, it's a very well written post.

Is roach-squishing murder or not? If humans are animals, then we can behave like animals, as we please, unless you wish to appeal to a human self-interest that transcends animalism by saying that what we can achieve is, in essence, sacred. That human life is sacred. If we're just primates, then morality is just a trick of social organisation, which we can dispense with at our pleasure.

Not at all. We're one variety of animal among many; with the advantage of large brains capable of considering long-term consequences, which allows us to do things other animals cannot. We also have an unusually high capacity for empathy, which when used and developed very often has the effect of improving our lives and the lives of others. These are entirely biological functions, but they are biological functions that are in scale and combination uniquely human, which gives us as a species unique capabilities and potential. The fact that our potential and capability is unique to us is itself not unique to us however; chickens also have unique potential and capability, as do centipedes, wolf spiders, antelope and so on.

However being human, we need to be concerned with human actions. Which we judge by the plethora of human moralities, all of which are almost certainly rooted in human biology and then interpreted though circumstance and history. All of which are real things (or many real things, since we aren't all clones living out identical lives). Now I'd argue that it is in keeping with the traditions of human morality that have benefited the species greatly in the past to not run willy-nilly over the rest of the natural world, and that respecting its autonomy is a human virtue, and also to a large extent congruent with a long-term understanding of our self-interest. None of this requires some version of human morality to be universal, sacred or anything else, but instead is entirely consistent with an understanding of morality as conditional on human biology et cetera. Which in my view does nothing to reduce the importance of humanity, our morals or anything else.

Arguing that if humans are animals our morality is 'just' a trick of our social order or otherwise dispensable is like arguing that humans are 'just' mammals, and therefore free to our breath for two hours and go diving for giant squid, because the sperm whale is 'just' a mammal too. It ignores what we are and our particular place in nature for a Denethor-like insistence on either having the one extreme of utter and unapproachable uniqueness or the other of complete exchangability and uniformity on the other.