Because humans are moral agents and humans are animals.




Humans being a non-deterministic system does not imply that they have free will. All quantum systems, for example, are non-deterministic but you wouldn't say they have free will because the indeterminacy is randomness, not will.

Free will means that a human will has causal power, i.e. can affect reality causally.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Oct 13 2014 11:14pm

In a biologically sense humans are animals, but not in a philosophical sense.

Humans may be moral agents and they may be animals, but humans are not moral agents because we are humans, nor are we moral agents because we are animals. We are moral agents because of our mental capacity to understand morality.

How do we know that animals do not contain the same moral capacity? Just because we cannot communicate with them, or they look different than us? Those have been the arguments for some terrible atrocities. To avoid such acts in the future, would it not be best to err on the side of caution? Or do you know that animals do not have the mental capacity to be moral agents?

Indeed, I never claimed any of the bold. And yes I agree that we are moral agents because of our cognitive abilities. But we are animals in every sense.



I think it is absolutely crucial to recognize that a conscious being doesn't need to be a moral agent to be treated as a moral end.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Oct 13 2014 11:23pm

Is communication not a qualifier of moral agency? The ability to specifically communicate complex ideas is a root of the ability to differentiate right from wrong. Can an animal think critically about their position in existence and determine the moral nature of their actions based on consequences? To be a moral agent is to be able to philsophize. Evidence doesn't suggest animals can do this. At least not in primates. Perhaps dolphins do, but we don't understand if dolphin vocalization is complex language or simply advanced non verbal communication.

Yes I had a very long discussion in another thread where I took the same position as you.

At most I think non-human animals have very primitive moral intuitions, but they are not reasoned moral beliefs. It's probably primarily adaptive evolutionary altruistic behavior. I think it's unlikely that anyone could have coherent thoughts about morality without language.

Quantum systems are deterministic, however we are incapable of determining the outcomes of quantum experiments. The function which describes the system is complex and deterministic, however due to the nature of the particles observing it as a macrosacle entity it is impossible to predict the outcome. I don't fully understand it, but that's the explanation given in Feynman's book "Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals" which I'm working through. Need to learn multivariate and differential equations before I can give a full answer though.

I just had a thought though, all conscious animals with valence are able to recognize that certain states of mind in themselves are intrinsically good or bad so this is one moral truth that's universal in a sense and doesn't require language. Whether or not they can recognize that other animals have the same sorts of good or bad experiences, and that those experiences are just as good/bad for them as they are for you and that their experiences are equally important, I think is unlikely, though.



Certain interpretations of quantum mechanics allow for determinism and others don't, so this is an area of contention.

My point isn't affected if quantum mechanics is deterministic, though, since Bard said "human free will, in which a choice is made in a manner that cannot be deterministicly predicted", so it could be the case that humans are a deterministic system but we just don't have the capacity to determine future states. This would be the case if the brain involves quantum processes in some way (though this is very speculative).

We will of course find with more research that the classical operations of the brain are deterministic, and deterministic in such a way that we can simulate them with a computer.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Oct 13 2014 11:47pm

Communication is not a qualifier of moral agency. Being able to comprehend morality is the qualifier of moral agency. I do not have to be able to communicate to be able to think about right and wrong. If I were to lose the ability to communicate entirely, I would still be a moral agent.

The bolded part is correct. But the part after that...where is your evidence suggesting animals are not capable of doing so? Up until now, the most we've been able to say is that we cannot confirm that they DO have moral agency, but neither can we deny that many species are moral agents. Dolphins, apes, chimps...and we learn new things about these species and their habits with relative frequency. Who's to say that in 10 years we won't learn that they're moral agents?

What's next, we start giving personhood to just anybody? Atheists next?

When does it end.