Why does it have to do that? Is it too much for you to handle that different cultures have different ideas of right and wrong and are comfortable living within those confines?

You seem to have a definition of morality other than that which is in the dictionary. Perhaps you are talking about achieving an objective moral code? But that is impossible... Humans are incapable of being objective and should an attempt be made to create a universal moral code that would simply be totalitarianism.

Cut off your hand. Did it feel bad? Oh, I guess it was bad.



In the very post you fucking quoted I said that I thought perhaps higher non-human primates had the ability, why are you being so fucking hostile? Their ability is still radically inferior to humans.



I think we have a very good idea how complex non-human animals' thoughts are as if they were as complex as humans (I still can't believe some people are arguing this, I know you aren't but damn) they would almost invariably develop sophisticated technology (unless you wanna argue that dolphins would have developed Turing machines if only they had thumbs )

I'm perfectly calm and collected, you're basically screaming across the internet.

So then, feeling bad implies an action was bad? Seems pretty arbitrary. I also felt bad when I didn't get candy, guess I should have gotten myself as much candy as I wanted to avoid being immoral.....

So when pressured you concede that a previously necessary skill is actually possessed by the apes, but then move the goal posts to something vague by saying "their ability is radically inferior to humans" without ever quantifying the minimum necessary level of "ability".

Top it off with a straw-man by implying there are people arguing that animal intelligence is on par with humans, when in fact all that's being argued is that some animals may have the necessary minimum intelligence to establish an ethical system.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Sep 23 2014 04:13pm

stealing feels good

I didn't say you were mad, I said you were hostile. I'm really sick of people on the internet being so fucking condescending when they don't agree with someone, I don't expect you to agree but quit it with the passive-aggressiveness.

And before you quote my posts where I was being condescending, I will say I admit it and I am sorry, though I really do think it's beyond obvious that non-human animals cannot develop ethical systems as ethical systems require linguistic understanding beyond "finger-bracelet" being a ring. You are in the extreme fringe minority with your belief that they can among all biologists, ethicists, linguists, philosophers, neuroscientists, etc.

I think you're just massively underestimating how important language is in human thought.

And yes, someone earlier did argue that non-human animals may have linguistic abilities at or above human level.



If something produces a net bad experience then yes that is bad (a tautology really).



It can get tricky in particular judgments indeed with conflicting parties. I think practically, a ban on theft across the board will produce the best or close to the best result (because of course, you must take into account the suffering that theft results in).

I'd also argue that reduction if negative experiences is more urgent than increase in positive experience, but again this is very debatable which is why I said a "crude utilitarianism", there are a lot of details that have yet to be worked out and I'm not sure we have the intellectual capacity to do so (yet).

I actually don't think that it's beyond possible that some species of highly intelligent animals (other than humans of course) like dolphins and apes could have a concept of right and wrong. You don't have be able to speak to feel bad when something bad happens... They feel fear and happiness so why not guilt? I would say the only things required for morality are empathy, and some animals (elephants, apes, dolphins and others) have demonstrated that, and an ability to recognise patterns of events and behaviour such as - throw a rock at another ape, ape gets hurt, feel sad that other ape feels sad, don't throw rocks at other apes because it makes them sad.

If it's true then it's an abstract and less complex morality which I highly doubt they are analising but it's a learned morality that keeps social groups functioning. I would also say that our codes of ethics and morals are only really an extension of that combined with our ability to analyse and reason at a higher level.

This post was edited by Scaly on Sep 23 2014 05:56pm

Yes I wholeheartedly agree, but is a non-human animal able to conceptualize that #1 "other animals like me also have unitary selves like me" and #2 that "because it's wrong for me it's also wrong for them"? I think almost certainly not as these are very complex ideas even to humans.

Yes I also am sure that animals feel guilt, but again I think this is a product of a low level of empathic ability as well as kin-selection and reciprocal altruism evolutionary adaptations and not of actual understanding of cruelty etc.

I disagree that the only thing required for moral understanding is empathy (though empathy is indeed an essential part!) It also requires some level of reasoning ability because moral reasoning involves, at heart, the making of truth statements (i.e. "x is wrong", "y is good", "z is immoral" which is beyond the conceptual abilities of non-human animals... hell it's beyond the conceptual abilities of some humans)

I definitely see where you're coming from, but I think there's a differentiation between evolutionary altruistic behavior (which many non-human animals exhibit), and rational conceptual ethics (which only humans exhibit) as-in the ability to think, conjecture, and communicate ethical ideas. Then again I'm a strict moral realist so we probably disagree fundamentally there, and maybe that's where Thor and I are in disagreement with as well... though I think my postulation is still compatible with moral subjectivism/relativism.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Sep 23 2014 06:13pm

I did actually say that there were two things needed for morality; empathy and



But I agree that they are different, but I also think they are both kinds of morality. What I think you're talking about is as you say 'rational conceptual ethics' and where morality is included in ethics ethics doesn't have to be included in morality.

It's a taugology, but you're using your terms wrong. What you are actually implying is that if the action is a net unpleasurable experience then the action was bad. Cutting your hand off is only a "bad" experience if you define "bad" as unpleasurable or painful, but there's no reason a painful experience or an unpleasurable experience is necessarily bad.

I'm not being passive aggressive, I'm raising criticisms and you're utterly failing to answer and hiding behind ambiguous terms. I'm trying to get you to define your position and perhaps give some methods we can use to test them, but instead you're stating it matter-of-fact that you're right and you know every observation that's ever been performed.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Sep 23 2014 07:26pm

This is where the disagreement arises, and in which the most sufficient answer I can give is that unpleasurable experience is intrinsically bad by its very nature, it has inherent negative value; the pain-pleasure axis is the very basis for our conception of value.. it's not reducible to good/bad because it is the basisof good/bad. A person under duress of extreme physical pain cannot arbitrarily believe the experience as being good (outside of it being some sort of concordance of mental phenomena in masochists in which the pleasure outweighs the pain), any more than a person who is perceiving a house can arbitrarily believe they are looking at a dog.

To say otherwise is akin to saying that the perception of the color "red" doesn't have the property of "redness" which is of course nonsensical. The phenomenal experience of "redness" is an objective feature of the world, with a specific phenomenal property (what we call "redness"). No other quale has the property "redness". In exactly the same way, the phenomenal experience of "pleasure" or "positive hedonic value" or whatever you want to call this range of experiences, is an objective feature of the world with the unique phenomenal quality of "feeling good" (and the converse is true with regard to suffering).

To say anything else is to ignore a fundamental property of the world. The experience of positive and negative value is an inherent aspect of nature as it stands.



Sorry, skipped over that part of the post, and yes I suppose I would agree.