That's just groundless ideology.

"Doing the right thing" is just a frame for conceptualizing a biological adaption. Formal reasoning is relatively recent, morality is a biological imperative. It's not surprising that we experience morality differently than we rationally understand it.

Isn't it more likely that our reason allows us to see that our moral intuitions are often incorrect? In evolutionary terms, altruism is instinctual, not willful moral action; merely Darwinian adaptations that lead to greater gene replication. Humans on the other hand are able to act altruistically even when it has absolutely no adaptive advantage, which cannot be explained merely through kin selection, reciprocity, etc.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Oct 14 2014 01:45pm

You all have piqued my curiosity, I'm going to have to look into this issue deeper.

The government will pay the US. farmers to not farm over 34 million acres of farmland that they have put into the CRP. program.
This started out as another good conservation idea but snowballed into a big payout to the industrial mega-farms.

Sadly I agree with Gastly most of todays farms are set-up for grain production, they've taken down what fences they had and have created mega fields
for bigger implements they've found it more profitable to house the livestock in confinement systems and grow the feed, then it is to pasture them out in the fresh air and sunshine

Altruism serves a distinct social purpose, altruism towards prey does not.

I see this as the overdevelopment of an adaption to the point that it becomes maladaptive. Suffering is not intrinsically bad, and there is little functional difference between an animal and non-sentient life.

If an ant hive had sapient agency, would it find annihilation acceptable just because they lack a developed nervous system? Why is a rabbit different?

And to what end are we constructing this utopia where predators and prey cease to exist? Is existing itself the prize, even if they aren't able to understand it? Why does a tree have any less right to life when its biological makeup explicitly proves its desire to live?

Human morality only makes sense in a human context. Animals have their own social mores, and you'll notice they begin and end insofar as they are reciprocated.

We react more strongly to the deaths of dogs and horses because we have a defined mutualistic relationship, the same isn't true for a lion or a deer.

keep in mind that while cutting meat consumption definitely is in order, the a full abstaining is not required either.
though such a stratification might _once again_ make meat something that only the rich eat (which it traditionally is).

Interesting thoughts.

Whether or not consciousness has functional causality is yet an unanswered question because we don't understand consciousness much at all, but I think there is some sway to the idea that sentience itself offers physical functionality that non-sentience cannot have, or at least cannot easily have. It may be true, though, that sentience is just an emergent byproduct of physical processes and has no effect on the physical world. Either way I don't think the functional ability of a being is relevant to its moral worth.

If an ant hive or an ant in a hive isn't sentient, then annihilation is neither acceptable nor unacceptable because those are cognitive states that require sentience. In this case rabbits would be fundamentally different. There are good reasons to think that insects are conscious to some extent, though this is obviously speculative and it's unclear where to draw the line, or if there even is a line to draw; maybe everything is proto-conscious.

The far-fetched utopia I advocate, which I don't expect to convince you is a good idea, wouldn't require extermination but rather contraception and genetic reprogramming. Lions wouldn't be killed, they'd just be lions 2.0.

Again with trees, it's unclear that a tree is a subject of experience. Intuitively, it seems it isn't. We can't know for sure though, until we develop some coherent, testable theory of consciousness.

(I use "sentience"/"consciousness"/"subject of experience" interchangeably to mean the same thing)

By the way, for my own reference, are you a Christian? I seem to remember you are but your thoughts seem very naturalistic to me.

For the record, I react roughly equally strongly to the death of a dog or a lion, but maybe I'm a freak.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Oct 14 2014 03:11pm

you could possibly be my prey, does this mean that altruism's development as development occurs does not occur?


is suffering something that we should wish to happen? of course it might be seen as a "propelller" of human function, but the truth is (both psychologically and historically and...) that humans are at their best at forging the world to be when they're not forced to deal with suffering and forces beyond themselves.


is there a price apart from what existence is? this blatant disregard of existence and what it is is exactly what's wrong with existing!


human morality makes sense in the context of somewhat human and close to human, while absolutely maing sense within human.
b ) no, there's things such as "gene centric evolution" or "reciprocity" - which both humans are beyond of btw, "humanity is a bridge" said a wise man once.


why can't we live along-them rather than against-them? is this a need for us?

This post was edited by Gastly on Oct 14 2014 03:22pm

Your vision of this utopia interests me, you mention contraceptive and genetic reprogramming and you would reprogram predator and prey to coexist in harmony?

How do you plan to control populations I know you say with contraceptive measures but with some species this could require some rather intensive time and material investment wouldn't it

also how far down the food chain are you planning, does your plan cover fish as well ie; the big fish eats the small fish..etc

I'm not being a smart ass I'm really just curious

Yes that's correct, genome editing would eliminate instinctual predation and contraception would maintain ecological balance.



It would indeed require a very significant time and resource investment so global governmental cooperation would be necessary (which is why I say it's far-fetched; I think it's unlikely that we'll pass the ideological hurdles in creating a consensus to make it happen )



At least at first, this would likely be technologically out of reach. Micromanagement of the oceans would require pretty advanced nanotechnology, which of course is still in its infancy and what we can do with it is barely known.

This is not my original idea by the way. You can read more from what I think is the earliest outline of it, from David Pearce, here, if you're interested: http://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html

Lots of good content on that group of sites in general, regardless if you agree with his ideas.