Are we evil?

[SiuiS]

Sure, I wasn't really supporting the argument to show where you were wrong but more as pointing out that SiuS's point wasn't exactly false as you framed it either. Though I wouldn't argue that eating the Apple Tree's ability to proliferate somehow is the opposite of dooming it unless you want to say that since we want the apples we keep the trees safe. Though in that sense then we're not really dooming the cow as a species either since we're going to keep breeding them because we want their steaks. Sucks for the individual cow sure but it's not exactly roses for the individual tree either. We just give more weight to the cow because we value it's life as more important, a distinction I find arbitrary.

No man, apple trees design apples to be eaten. You eat the apple, ingest the seeds, poop them out somewhere else and give birth to baby apple trees. Literally their life cycle.

Eating apples is not consuming life. Eating apples is tree sex and procreation.

[Murska]

Eating apples is not consuming life. Eating apples is tree sex and procreation.

These are not necessarily contradictory.

[Razade]

No man, apple trees design apples to be eaten. You eat the apple, ingest the seeds, poop them out somewhere else and give birth to baby apple trees. Literally their life cycle.

Eating apples is not consuming life. Eating apples is tree sex and procreation.

Yes? I understand that? I've conceded that under your, and others, definition that an apple and a cow aren't equal. I find your line in the sand merely arbitrary. Keeping and propagating an apple tree to me is no more or less a problem than keeping and breeding a cow for domestic use so long as the cow isn't suffering unduly. I'm saying I don't feel that the cow has any special or additional privileges than the apple tree.

[SiuiS]

I'm not talking about orchards dude. No human interaction at all.

A horse eats and poops apple seeds. Cows do. In the wild. No humans. No domestication. There is no way in which eating an apple is in any way 'arbitrarily' not killing something. That's not a line in the sand drawn arbitrarily. That's the basic functions of English and understanding.

Apples are as fleeting as sperm. Apples are sophisticated pollen devices. There is no comparison of apple and tree; there is comparison of apple and bark, of apple and pollen, of apple and hair or nails; part of a whole, useful, but in no way it's own living thing and in no way bearing any weight if destroyed.


Ah well. Enough horse beating.

[warty goblin]

I don't particularly see it. The cow regardless of what it's use it has (in general) a higher standard of living and especially in the case of dairy farms a much longer life expectancy than a wild cow. This is of course ignoring Factory Farming and the like. My family cows have most certainly had a better standard of living and much longer lives than they'd have at the mercy of things much faster and hungrier than themselves. Even the ones we used for meat. I freely accept that a Tree and a Cow aren't really equal to most people but I put more worth on the tree in my personal view.

I never said anything about quality of life, or the relative valuations of cow and apple lives. The point that what is done to them to be consumed by humans impose fundamentally distinct changes in the individual organisms. Which is to say that grafting an apple tree causes only a very slight harm to the parent tree, whereas butchering a cow is an entirely terminal outcome for the bovine. At least I find this distinct, in the sense that I also find getting my fingernails trimmed and getting shot in the head fairly different portions of my day.

[Murska]

Third, our moral sense of human worth means no matter how much you love your dog, if you had to choose between the dog and yourself, you won't ever choose the dog. If you sacrifice your life for another, then it will likely be a human, not a dog that you are giving up your life for.

It isn't always that simple though. For instance, it's perfectly plausible you'd sacrifice other humans for your dog's sake.

As for the question, Are we evil?, there is only one possible answer. Yes, we are. We possess the capacity to do evil in greater amount than good, otherwise, why would we have civilizations and laws? Strip away civilization and law, you get anarchy and Might makes Right. At our most basic nature, we are animals, but unlike animals we possess a higher understanding which we can always use to commit evil. Animals don't launch campaigns of genocide based on the color of skin or religious background or cultural/racial background. They won't even understand those concepts. There will never be an real kind of animal Nazi, because they simply can't reach those levels of evil like we humans can.

We do have goodness in us as well, but evil is always stronger seeming and more seductive. That's what yoda said, and its true for humans.

If we were evil, how come we have civilizations and laws? All these things are human attempts to make humans act in certain ways that, generally and in the long term, are beneficial to humanity even while they might in some situation be bad for specific people. Evil and good are also concepts created for that same purpose.

Animals are not thought of as evil not because they don't commit 'evil' actions - they do - but because we view them as incapable of choosing to do otherwise, and thus not responsible for their actions. It's debatable how true that might be, but if we take it as given shouldn't that also make animals incapable of good? Does not the fact that humans can perceive the moral wrongs we commit and attempt to do better already raise us above those who can't? (of course morality being a wholly human-specific construct meant to direct human behaviour does raise into question the meaningfulness of the debate anyway)

[SiuiS]

Third, our moral sense of human worth means no matter how much you love your dog, if you had to choose between the dog and yourself, you won't ever choose the dog. If you sacrifice your life for another, then it will likely be a human, not a dog that you are giving up your life for.

Bullhockey. You've never tried to come between a southerner and their dog before have you?

If I'm attacked by a bear, and my dog valiantly intervenes, I will honor his sacrifice by living. If my dog gets in a fight with a bear? I'll dial 9-1-1 so someone will come and pick up my dog, and I'm either eating well for the next month or that hear is gonna have one hell of a story for it's friends.

It isn't always that simple though. For instance, it's perfectly plausible you'd sacrifice other humans for your dog's sake.

Damn straight.

If we were evil, how come we have civilizations and laws? All these things are human attempts to make humans act in certain ways that, generally and in the long term, are beneficial to humanity even while they might in some situation be bad for specific people. Evil and good are also concepts created for that same purpose.

Laws are not necessarily moral.

[Zrak]

Sure, I wasn't really supporting the argument to show where you were wrong but more as pointing out that SiuS's point wasn't exactly false as you framed it either.

I'm not sure what point you're referring to, since I wasn't responding to anything SiuS said. I was responding to the post I quoted, by Melzentir.

Though I wouldn't argue that eating the Apple Tree's ability to proliferate somehow is the opposite of dooming it unless you want to say that since we want the apples we keep the trees safe.

You really don't get how apples work, huh? Eating an apple does not eat an apple tree's "ability to proliferate," it greatly facilitates that tree's ability to proliferate. Pretty much the whole idea is you eat an apple and then when you poop out apple seeds you make a baby tree. Moreover, eating apples does not doom the apple tree any more than not eating apples. Aside from the fact that picking apples doesn't alter the tree's lifespan, there's also the fact that you can wait for the apples to fall off so as to not even have to pick them.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the central conceit of my rebuttal was that a cow (or, more generally, an animal) is of more value than an apple tree (or, more generally, a plant). This is not the case. The essence of my rebuttal was that one can eat part of an apple tree without killing, or even harming, the tree. The distinction here would not be in the "value" of the organisms, but in the fact that it's generally impossible to eat the meat of an animal without killing it, while it is often possible to eat the fruit of a plant without killing or even harming the plant.

[Murska]

Laws are not necessarily moral.

This is true. However, I am curious as to whether you honestly thought I disagreed or was unaware of the fact, so that it was necessary to bring up.

[Zrak]

Your argument gave the impression that you were either unaware of the fact or choosing to ignore it to further your argument; in either case, I would say it seemed a relevant counter-argument. If you don't believe laws are necessarily moral, asking why we have laws does not refute the premise that we are evil, as you seem to be arguing it does.

[SiuiS]

This is true. However, I am curious as to whether you honestly thought I disagreed or was unaware of the fact, so that it was necessary to bring up.

I believe this would be a lovely conversation to have somewhere that wouldn't evict us for being so political. I believe that you are aware of the idea of law as nonmoral but have your own understanding of what level of moral the law should be.

[Murska]

The sentence was meant to contrast the sentiment in the post I quoted that 'The fact that we have laws is evidence that we are evil, as if we were good we wouldn't need them'. My point was that it is equally valid to argue that if we were evil, there would be no impetus to have laws. From the context it is clear that 'laws and civilization' is being used to signify the social contract to live in a specific way or face punishment by society.

In general, most laws tend towards upholding a stable society.

[aspi]

I wonder... to those here who are convinced that we're "helping" apples by eating them, have you considered the following?

Pretty much all apples that you can buy are of a selected variety that has been specifically cultivated, in some cases for hundreds of years. This is done by grafting, a process where the top of a small tree (or the tops of all it's branches) are cut off and replaced by branches from another tree that carries the exact variety of fruit the owner wants to produce. Pretty much any apple you can buy, wether it's organic or not, will be produced this way. If you're buying an apple tree for your garden, it will come pre-grafted. So in essence, we're mutilating apple trees and robbing them of any chance to ever produce offspring. Even worse, we're forcing them into a life where they have to produce some other tree's offspring instead of their own for dozens of years before we cut them down because they're losing prductivity, years ahead of the end of their possible lifespan. All just so we can have nice, similar and essentially cloned apples. And it doesn't stop at apples... we do that for most cultivated kinds of fruit.

Thoughts on that? For me personally, it's the reason why I can't take a fruitarian seriously

[Frozen_Feet]

Evil behaviour results from laws and strictures just as well - natural laws. Humans are cellular automatons running within the constraints of a finite set of rules. Goodness and evil both necessarily arise from said rules. The opposite of Law is not evil - it's Chaos, or Nihility.

[SiuiS]

I wonder... to those here who are convinced that we're "helping" apples by eating them, have you considered the following?

Irrelevant, because we aren't discussing any particular case or even the particular case of apples as currently grown. It is enough to say that the existence of fruit which is eaten to propagate puts lie to the idea that everything destroys everything.

[aspi]

Irrelevant, because we aren't discussing any particular case or even the particular case of apples as currently grown. It is enough to say that the existence of fruit which is eaten to propagate puts lie to the idea that everything destroys everything.

No, but we only got to that topic because of the statement that it would be evil for another species to "farm" humans, which led to the discussion about humans farming animals, which some then called into question - in contrast to the eating fruit which was portrayed as doing plants a favor in general.

I find that strain of logic questionable and thus gave an example why the farming of plants as mankind currently does is just as cruel if it were phrased in humanized terms. Since I just demonstrated that we are as cruel if not more cruel to plants than we are to animals, I'd like to hear the position of those wo make a distinction in justification. After all, the question wasn't phrased as "are we evil because we could eat something", it was "are we evil because we do eat something".

Me personally, I find this entire argument somewhat weird, since it is clear that when it comes to sustenance, we as humans just do what it takes to survive at the cost of other organisms. It just seems more difficult to justify in cases where the food is easier to attribute human characteristics to, then it is in others that are further removed from us in the tree of life.

On a side note: calling someone's question in an open discussion that was in no way even intended as a counter to your previous statement irrelevant strikes me as overly defensive and not particularly nice.

[Razade]

No, but we only got to that topic because of the statement that it would be evil for another species to "farm" humans, which led to the discussion about humans farming animals, which some then called into question - in contrast to the eating fruit which was portrayed as doing plants a favor in general.

I find that strain of logic questionable and thus gave an example why the farming of plants as mankind currently does is just as cruel if it were phrased in humanized terms. Since I just demonstrated that we are as cruel if not more cruel to plants than we are to animals, I'd like to hear the position of those wo make a distinction in justification. After all, the question wasn't phrased as "are we evil because we could eat something", it was "are we evil because we do eat something".

Me personally, I find this entire argument somewhat weird, since it is clear that when it comes to sustenance, we as humans just do what it takes to survive at the cost of other organisms. It just seems more difficult to justify in cases where the food is easier to attribute human characteristics to, then it is in others that are further removed from us in the tree of life.

On a side note: calling someone's question in an open discussion that was in no way even intended as a counter to your previous statement irrelevant strikes me as overly defensive and not particularly nice.

Their argument is that a eating the fruit of a planet isn't the same as killing a cow because the plant lives on but the cow doesn't. Which is a fair point.

[SiuiS]

I find that strain of logic questionable and thus gave an example why the farming of plants as mankind currently does is just as cruel if it were phrased in humanized terms. Since I just demonstrated that we are as cruel if not more cruel to plants than we are to animals, I'd like to hear the position of those wo make a distinction in justification.

Plants do not suffer in any comparable way by having their fruit taken or by being farmed. Their quality of life is not diminished, they do not suffer for growth, and there is still no valid comparison between picking from or even rearing fruit and doing the same with an animal.

Eating fruit not being a bad thing is not an exception, but the rule. Just because you can make them technically similar does not mean they have equal weight or frequency.

[warty goblin]

{scrubbed}

[Navian]

Humans made up the concept of evil, entirely for our own selfish purposes. Other intelligent creatures capable of using our language could, hypothetically, use it against us, the same way we could, hypothetically, reverse-engineer one of their spaceships and use it against them.

While reverse-engineering the spaceship could be construed as theft, we probably would consider it 'a heroic feat of engineering', and while using our own concept of 'evil' against us could be construed as superlative oratory, we would probably consider it manipulative and disingenuous, or in other words 'evil'.

What's evil or not shifts over time. Slavery is 'evil' today. It used to be, thousands of years ago, that refusing to practice slavery was immoral. It was unassertive, unconventional, and limp-wristed, and to take such an attitude would bring only death and destruction. Thousands of years before that it wasn't even in question, because using slavery was logistically infeasible. Back then, it wasn't good or bad, it was only nonsensical.

It's going to keep changing. The first entirely lab-grown hamburger patty was eaten last year. It tasted like cardboard, but I'm sure that a hundred years from now, butchering steers to grind them up to make hamburger patties would seem like some bizarre arcane ritual, when you could just vat-grow them with feedstock and get better meat for much cheaper, especially since cows don't grow in space. Morality is complex, but it comes down to 'what's the right thing to do?' and that does depend to some extent on how easy the best options are to implement, not just on what would be the ideal.

If some alien creature can travel between planets, what is keeping them from growing their own biological hosts that have no self-awareness? That's what I'm wondering. It might be related to how some people today still hunt wild animals when they could just eat chicken, or nuts for that matter.

Hunting for food still isn't generally considered evil, though. The human subspecies who didn't do it are extinct for good reason, and they never would have been capable of developing the life-saving technology modern humans have using our larger, high-cost, high-performance brains. Even hunting for sport is only slowly getting there, as more viable alternative forms of entertainment appear, and the virtues it exercises become less important (and therefore less virtuous) in day-to-day life.

If you can look at something that humans practiced to survive, like hunting by driving game to exhaustion instead of just shooting it, and call it 'evil' just because we now know better and have better tools and infrastructure, all that says about you or them is that you're much, much more privileged... and in large part, you owe that privilege to your ancestors' wicked ways! We can always work to create a better future, but it's not fair to judge the past, or even the present, based on ideals that haven't matured yet.

[Devils_Advocate]

Okay, I've seen several references to "our" or "human" values in this thread, and most of them seem misplaced. Especially if we're talking about human cultures throughout history and not just in the present, I think that some of the principles being referred to as if they were nigh-universal are, in fact, uh... not that.

Heck, forget "intelligent beings" or "sapient beings" in general, whatever that even means. My understanding is that the idea that all human beings are worthy of one's consideration -- or at least the idea that all human beings are equally worthy of consideration -- has only really gained any widespread popularity in relatively recent times. And I'm not convinced that it's even all that popular now. People tend to be partial to members of their own groups at best. At worst, you get comments to the effect of "They killed our innocent civilians, now we're going to kill theirs".

And it's hard for me to see favoring those similar to oneself as a separate thing from selfishness. Because, hey, we're changing all the time. You're different now than you were five seconds ago. Actions you take to benefit yourself in the future benefit a different person than you, albeit only slightly different. So acting in favor of people similar to yourself just seems like more of the same, pretty much. The concept at work is distinguishable from that of the self, but I'd bet that there are more underlying similarities than differences.

And, really, even if you expand your in-group to include nearly all humans, that's still gotta be really tightly clustered in the space of all possible minds, relatively speaking. I personally think that it's fairly unimpressive to manage to care about entities that are well over 99 percent genetically identical to you and whose underlying psychological architecture is almost entirely the same as yours. And doesn't being ethical mean being considerate of those who you don't empathize with? Like, not doing something bad to someone just because it gets you something you want and doesn't make you feel bad?

Some people take the position that we have to draw some sort of line between things that have moral rights and things that don't. Counterpoint: NO, WE DON'T. It would be evil to force a rock to suffer against its will. If anything, I think it would be especially evil, because you'd have to go out of your way to give a rock a will and the capacity to suffer. If something "having moral rights" means that it's evil to do evil things to it, then everything "has moral rights". Of course, one can deny that non-humans are capable of suffering, but one can deny the existence of human suffering as well.

Almost no one actually believes that non-humans aren't sentient, because that belief has been heavily selected against. E.g. if a hungry tiger is charging at you and you aren't worried about it because you think that the tiger can't see you, then things aren't going to go too well for you as a result of that. Nor are you likely to say to yourself, under those circumstances, "Okay, the tiger doesn't really possess awareness of its environment, but it has sophisticated mechanisms in place that cause it to act as though it's able to AAAAAHHH OH NO I AM BEING EATEN". Mind you, there is a danger of thinking too anthropomorphically, of assuming that that an animal experiences its environment more closely to how you do than it actually does, and not taking into account its stronger sense of smell but poorer vision, for example. But straight-up denying that a tiger has a mind -- that it has its own internal model of its environment based on the information provided by its sense organs -- probably isn't going to yield much success.

Now, if you have don't have to run from a wild animal right now and have the luxury of analyzing the situation from your armchair, sure you can say all sorts of stuff about how "animals are just automatons". But you can say that about human beings, too. Heck, humans are animals (which is why I used "non-humans" instead of "animals" in the above) -- we ain't vegetables nor minerals -- so it's remarkably straightforward. There's plenty of philosophical positions to appeal to if you want to deny sentience. Mereological nihilism, solipsism... I remember reading a paper once arguing to the effect that minds exist in the abstract space of all possible minds, and all matter does is represent them, providing a window into a particular place in mindspace, as it were.

And I'm totally up for exploring questions like what it even means for something to exist, but you shouldn't be willing to do anything bad to anyone on the grounds that they're not real. The relevant ethical principle obviously is to not do that. Heck, I may not really exist, but I'm still totally not okay with someone torturing me even if I don't. I assume that you don't want to be mistreated even if you don't exist either. So via the ethical rule that we should (at a minimum) be willing to grant others the same consideration that we want for ourselves, we derive the principle that we shouldn't mistreat other minds, even if they don't exist.

Now, some people seem to have gotten the idea that you can redefine the word "sentient" and that allows you to talk about e.g. respecting the rights of sentient beings without having to, you know, mean it. But the thing is that anyone can pull that nonsense. I can go and declare "sentient" to mean "me, personally". But within the context of that declaration, talking about the rights of sentient beings no longer has the same meaning. Talking about placing higher priority on the welfare of the sentient becomes me saying that I'm a selfish prick, in that context. Changing the meaning of a word changes the meaning of a sentence that contains it.

Alternately, you can say that only a particular subset of sentient beings have rights, which is at least being honest about what you're claiming. Although I rather doubt that many people actually believe that intelligence or self-awareness or moral agency or whatever makes you deserve the consideration of others. Like, a cow may lack the sophisticated mental faculties of a human adult, but so does a human infant. And would you be okay with being mistreated by someone much smarter than you, someone with a mind qualitatively more intricate on like a whole different level and all that? How cognitively disabled are you saying someone can be and in what way before disregarding their welfare becomes ethically acceptable? You could probably exploit severely retarded people for organ transplants and medical testing in a way significantly less evil than how some animals are treated... and yet still be pretty evil. :/

How much worse, then, when such a thing isn't even done for a good reason. I gotta say, the whole "Evil food tastes better" thing strikes me as being... kinda contrived, almost? Because, I mean... there are lots of things that taste good. Why pick something evil? I'm not a fan of assigning motives beyond the obvious, but I can almost imagine that there's some sort of subconscious desire to assert dominance over other creatures at work. But if I'm gonna be like that then that assessment seems like a contrived effort to assert my own moral superiority and oh no I've gone cross-eyed.

But saying that humans deserve special consideration doesn't have to be unfair favoritism necessarily. You can say, for example, that everyone deserves the chance to make well-informed decisions about their own lives, but not everyone is capable of that, so human beings are given opportunities that e.g. pigs do not. That is pretty much the stated justification for how humans tend to treat their offspring, although the applications of that principle may be pretty dubious. It's like how smashing a rock on the ground isn't evil because rocks don't have feelings. The point is, if the mental difference between two objects somehow makes doing something to one of them less evil than doing the same thing to the other one... well, then it makes it less evil.

On the other hand, if doing something to one of them isn't in any way less evil than doing the same thing to the other one... well, then it isn't any less evil. There's a pretty big difference between, on the one hand, acknowledging that different minds have different needs and respond differently to the same treatment, and on the other hand, carefully delineating who the acceptable victims are. If you want to be ethical, the goal shouldn't be to specify what mental traits make someone okay to abuse, it should be to prevent abuse.

In closing, let me say that seeming difficulties in valuing everyone's welfare equally may be due to valuing human welfare too much. For example, does the average person really deserve to live? How much has the average person done to deserve it, and how much has the average person done to deserve to die instead? Heck, out of all of the people who could exist, do you think that you deserve to exist just because you already do? How does that make any sense? If anything, it seems like it would be fairer to give someone new a turn, if you haven't made yourself worthy to be alive; and if being alive is highly desirable, then wouldn't you have to be pretty virtuous to be worthy of it? But you're probably not, because, as has been discussed, most people are pretty evil, and not even just because they kill because they crave innocent flesh. Although that would be enough, probably... I mean, when a monster is described as killing not to survive but because it craves the taste of innocent flesh, you know that it's pretty damn evil, amirite? Like, that's the whole point of that description.

So, mull that one over.

[SiuiS]

You base your point on a false equivalence. The idea that we change every moment intellectually, emotionally and molecularly is technically accurate but misses the point. "The same as me" has never been a technical point. Ever. No one has ever said "oh yeah, we're technically similar enough and it's cool".

When I work for those the same as me, I abstract that to a, let's call it, 'tribal' level. Those of my tribe. Not even my tribe; it's disingenuous to say they are like me. That's a dangerous rubric. We all tend to mean "they and I are similar enough to the tribal ideal"; we all match up to an external value. Or, externally expressed.

It's also missing a mark to say that these values are recent. They aren't. These values show up at least three thousand years ago, and they keep achieving spontaneous genesis among different groups. We presume they are more widespread, and that is 100% true. I guarantee more of the world knows of and can try to understand these values than before. They don't always agree or believe, they don't always even understand the actual point. But the background radiation is there now and if snuffed out, will be again.

Hmm. I lost track of myself didn't I? Here I am saying it's not recent and the supporting evidence is that it is recent. It feels complete to me. Accurate, legitimate. But then, "feelings" aren't easy to convey data with or through. Ah well. My general idea is that we need a holistic understanding of these things before we can truly pass judgement.

[Thanqol]

So some background, I was watching this new fall anime Parasyte -the maxim- where these parasites come to earth, bond with existing lifeforms (usually humans), take over their bodies and then proceed to eat people. When the main character asks one of these parasites "You guys are monsters, why are you doing this?" the parasite responds with "We're not monsters, we're eating humans for food." At this point there have been about 80 of these strange murders caused by these things. The parasite then asks "Aren't humans really the monsters? How many millions of things do you kill each year and eat?" Its this statement that prompted this post.

Picture a world where these ravenous creatures existed that enslaved and consumed the other, less intelligent creatures of that world. So great was their hunger that entire species went extinct in an attempt to satiate them. They forced the ones that didn't die out to mate in order to produce more food. They ate creatures of every gender and age, young, old, the strong, the weak and even the unborn.

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

We spent 11 billion years fighting a desperate biological struggle for survival, the most ruthless arms race ever seen. Tooth and claw, hook and eye, a genocidal war of extinction. And then our team developed the greatest superweapon of all - tool use.

Bam. Instantly - biologically speaking - we won. We achieved total domination in the biological war of extermination, not only becoming the top of the food chain, but totally upending the concept of the food chain. And in that luxurious peace we discovered for the first time in the world's history we suddenly found the time to ask questions that weren't related to survival. One of these questions is, 'is it okay to kill things?' Asking that question pits us against all those billions of years of survival instinct, but we can do that now. Bigger concepts are growing.

So the principles are:
- The food chain has no moral value.
- Survival of the species is a fundamental impulse.
- A far more useful question once the question of survival is answered: 'what do we want?'

[veti]

And, really, even if you expand your in-group to include nearly all humans, that's still gotta be really tightly clustered in the space of all possible minds, relatively speaking. I personally think that it's fairly unimpressive to manage to care about entities that are well over 99 percent genetically identical to you and whose underlying psychological architecture is almost entirely the same as yours. And doesn't being ethical mean being considerate of those who you don't empathize with? Like, not doing something bad to someone just because it gets you something you want and doesn't make you feel bad?

The problem with this - no, scratch that - one of many problems with this line of reasoning is that unless you can empathise with something, how can you "be considerate of it"? Perhaps the rock actually looks forward to being smashed. Lacking any insight into its mind, or any way to gain such, how would you know? Empathy is not the thing that makes us want to be considerate of others, it's the thing that makes it possible.

Some people take the position that we have to draw some sort of line between things that have moral rights and things that don't. Counterpoint: NO, WE DON'T. It would be evil to force a rock to suffer against its will. If anything, I think it would be especially evil, because you'd have to go out of your way to give a rock a will and the capacity to suffer. If something "having moral rights" means that it's evil to do evil things to it, then everything "has moral rights". Of course, one can deny that non-humans are capable of suffering, but one can deny the existence of human suffering as well.

Counterpoint: YES, WE DO. "If something 'having moral rights' means that it's evil to do evil things to it" - then you're just talking in circles. If it doesn't have moral rights, then there is no such thing as an "evil thing" to do to it, so the whole sentence is meaningless.

So how do we decide - and yes, it's we, humans, who have got to decide this - what qualifies for "moral rights"? Rocks don't, because as you yourself pointed out they have no will and no 'capacity to suffer'. Smashing a rock isn't evil, unless someone/thing that does have moral rights has an interest in that rock.

And I'm totally up for exploring questions like what it even means for something to exist, but you shouldn't be willing to do anything bad to anyone on the grounds that they're not real. The relevant ethical principle obviously is to not do that. Heck, I may not really exist, but I'm still totally not okay with someone torturing me even if I don't. I assume that you don't want to be mistreated even if you don't exist either. So via the ethical rule that we should (at a minimum) be willing to grant others the same consideration that we want for ourselves, we derive the principle that we shouldn't mistreat other minds, even if they don't exist.

I'm not sure what the correct name is for this philosophical fallacy... The sentiment "I'm not okay with" only has meaning if you assume that you exist (so I guess that's 'begging the question'). If you don't, then the statement has no meaning and therefore no moral weight. If tormenting a fictional construct is evil, then Shakespeare was a monster.

And would you be okay with being mistreated by someone much smarter than you, someone with a mind qualitatively more intricate on like a whole different level and all that? How cognitively disabled are you saying someone can be and in what way before disregarding their welfare becomes ethically acceptable? You could probably exploit severely retarded people for organ transplants and medical testing in a way significantly less evil than how some animals are treated... and yet still be pretty evil. :/

Now you're venturing into the minefield of Heavily Loaded But Totally Undefined Words. "Ethically acceptable" - acceptable to whom, specifically? "Evil" according to what standard? Surely you're not, at this point, going to say "there is an absolute and unarguable objective standard of ethics and morality and this is it"?

But saying that humans deserve special consideration doesn't have to be unfair favoritism necessarily. You can say, for example, that everyone deserves the chance to make well-informed decisions about their own lives, but not everyone is capable of that, so human beings are given opportunities that e.g. pigs do not. That is pretty much the stated justification for how humans tend to treat their offspring, although the applications of that principle may be pretty dubious. It's like how smashing a rock on the ground isn't evil because rocks don't have feelings. The point is, if the mental difference between two objects somehow makes doing something to one of them less evil than doing the same thing to the other one... well, then it makes it less evil.

"Deserve... unfair... well-informed..." - can you define any of those terms?

On the other hand, if doing something to one of them isn't in any way less evil than doing the same thing to the other one... well, then it isn't any less evil. There's a pretty big difference between, on the one hand, acknowledging that different minds have different needs and respond differently to the same treatment, and on the other hand, carefully delineating who the acceptable victims are. If you want to be ethical, the goal shouldn't be to specify what mental traits make someone okay to abuse, it should be to prevent abuse.

You're just arguing in circles here. "If something isn't less evil then it isn't less evil" - well yes, but that doesn't get us anywhere. Then you wander into words like "victims" and "abuse", which, again, are prejudging the outcome: "abuse" is, by definition, "not acceptable", but that doesn't bring us any closer to being able to recognise exactly what does and doesn't constitute "abuse".

In closing, let me say that seeming difficulties in valuing everyone's welfare equally may be due to valuing human welfare too much. For example, does the average person really deserve to live? How much has the average person done to deserve it, and how much has the average person done to deserve to die instead?

And there's that bizarre word "deserve" again. What does "deserve" have to do with anything, even if we could define it? In the end, "desert" is just a question of social consensus - animals "deserve" consideration precisely in so far as the bulk of people decide that they do. I can decide, unilaterally, that they "deserve" more, but that's my decision, it doesn't automatically become true and binding on everyone else; the best I can do is try to persuade others to adopt and share my opinion.

[SaintRidley]

I don't really have anything of my own to add to the conversation, but the question and nature of the conversation brings a song to mind. I'll leave the lyrics here for anyone who wants to chew them over.

Spoiler: Disgustipated

Show

And the angel of the lord came unto me, snatching me up from my place of slumber.
And took me on high, and higher still until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself.
And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own midwest.
And as we descended, cries of impending doom rose from the soil.
One thousand, nay a million voices full of fear.
And terror possesed me then.
And I begged,
"Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?"
And the angel said unto me,
"These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots!
You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust."
And I sprang from my slumber drenched in sweat like the tears of one million terrified brothers and roared,
"Hear me now, I have seen the light!
They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul!
Damn you!
Let the rabbits wear glasses!
Save our brothers!"
Can I get an amen?
Can I get a hallelujah?
Thank you Jesus.
Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on........

This is necessary this is necessary THIS IS NECESSARY

LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE FEEDS ON........

It was daylight when you woke up in your ditch.
You looked up at your sky then.
That made blue be your color.
You had your knife there with you too.
When you stood up there was goo all over your clothes.
Your hands were sticky.
You wiped them on your grass, so now your color was green.
Oh Lord, why did everything always have to keep changing like this.
You were already getting nervous again.
Your head hurt and it rang when you stood up.
Your head was almost empty.
It always hurt you when you woke up like this.
You crawled up out of your ditch onto your gravel road and began to walk,
waiting for the rest of your mind to come back to you.
You can see the car parked far down the road and you walked toward it.
"If God is our Father," you thought, "then Satan must be our cousin."
Why didn't anyone else understand these important things?
You got to your car and tried all the doors.
They were locked.
It was a red car and it was new.
There was an expensive leather camera case laying on the seat.
Out across your field, you could see two tiny people walking by your woods.
You began to walk towards them.
Now red was your color and, of course, those little people out there were yours too.

[Flickerdart]

Have you looked at our caps lately? They've got skulls on them!

[Eldan]

- Survival of the species is a fundamental impulse.

No it's not. Evolution acts on the gene and the individual first. If one animal kills three other of its own species to survive, the species as a whole has lost total members. A male lion killing another male's cubs all the way to Humans going to war. It's from the small unit up, not from the large unit down.

[Tyndmyr]

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

Sure we can. Everyone acts as if people should, somehow, be entirely fair and equal all the time, without the slightest trace of hypocrisy.

Nah. I'll happily eat a steak before going off to fight against the killer aliens. If that's evil, I'm going to enjoy the crap out of being evil.

[The_Ditto]

[QUOTE=russdm;18437132] Animals don't launch campaigns of genocide based on the color of skin or religious background or cultural/racial background.
[quote]

*cough* army ants *cough*
I recall it once being said, the only creature on this planet, other than humans, who wage war against their own kind, is Ants. ;)
Of course, there's a solid argument for them not really comprehending the action - unlike humans - our higher reasoning and understanding set us aside from them, not just our ability to wage war/genocide on each other. Animals do that as well, they just don't have the full comprehension of the action.

We do have goodness in us as well, but evil is always stronger seeming and more seductive. That's what yoda said, and its true for humans.

"Evil will always win, because Good is dumb." Dark Helmet

[Flickerdart]

I recall it once being said, the only creature on this planet, other than humans, who wage war against their own kind, is Ants. ;)

That's incorrect. Chimpanzees wage organized and consistent war on a massive scale [PDF], in order to capture territory and kill members of other chimp groups. Other monkeys also display various levels of intergroup aggression but chimpanzee warfare is "constant and ferocious."