You're struggling with a few category errors here.
@Sunflowers Already covered this one somewhat:
tinyphilosopher wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 10:16 pm
Okay, so on to the issues....
People often pose this question "Would you kill an animal to survive, if that was your only source of food and you were starving?" My answer has always been "Yes".
Now, if we flip it and say "Would you kill a
human to survive, if that was your only source of food and you were starving?" The answer to this has always been "No"
It's a "would you" vs. "would it be morally permissible if you were to"
First, I think you actually *would* do that if you were starving, but more importantly nobody would blame you for it (as is the case in real survival situations) and I don't think you'd condemn somebody else for doing this: thus you're not a hypocrite.
Second, we can also speculate we would not eat a corpse, or even feces, to survive. The rejection of those hypotheticals may merely be based on personal preference or disgust; it doesn't indicate that those actions are actually immoral, just that we imagine death to be preferable to us.
Where I strongly disagree with Sunflowers is rejection of moral systems. You're right to try to find consistent rules to derive an objective system here, otherwise we're only talking about random cultural norms and whims, and that's a very poor metric for morality.
tinyphilosopher wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 10:16 pmMorally, is it okay to kill in order to survive? In some circumstances maybe...
What if someone was born who lived off the death of other humans (humor me). Morally, is it still okay to kill to survive? Or, does that person have a moral duty to starve and thus die?
The thing I'm trying to highlight here is that there starts to seem like we
might a moral duty to die if we can't sustain ourselves off things that lack the right to life or aren't sentient or whatever. This really starts to feel too demanding of a moral system to ask of us.
IOW "What about vampires?"
Here you're mixing up what is good or bad for what we have a "duty" to do, as well as judgement of character vs. effect.
First, a good person merely needs to be good, not great or a saint. Not always doing the absolute best thing possible doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you human. You should strive to do better if you're a good person, but that doesn't always mean you'll get there.
I dislike the word "duty" because it suggests a relationship or contract, and that's not what morality is. I think Sunflowers has argued for god elsewhere on that basis.
The only "duty" you have is to your own self-image -- an existential compulsion to conform to your identity.
If you identify as an evil person, you have certain duties you've given yourself on that basis to act evilly.
If you identify as a good person, then in the same sense you have certain duties to act goodly.
It's a question of what you're trying to do. Norms are not typically categorical, but hypothetical.
To bring it back to being a vampire:
Vampires are a typically harmful state of being, yes, and maybe inevitably. But even within that there's a spectrum. There could be vampires that revel in it, gluttons who seek out the most innocent of victims. Then there could be vampires who eat as little as possible and then only prey on predators themselves when at all possible.
We can imagine a *good* vampire, despite it still being a harmful thing overall. It's a vampire who is putting in a conscious effort to be better.
A saintly vampire might impale his or herself on a stake immediately, but that doesn't mean there's nothing short of that.
When we talk about moral judgement of individuals, we really need to take into account their situations and how they are taking their lots in life and doing more or less harm.
And finally, you can't look at your harm footprint in a vacuum. Just by being less bad and less harmful you influence others to do the same. Your influence on the world overall due to your effect as a social creature could be positive despite all of the ant stomping to go see movies (and perhaps even because of it, since nobody is going to want to copy insane-seeming self-sacrificing perfectly saintly behavior).