Volenta wrote:
If you can plan ahead and think about things you like to do in the future, you have a stronger interest in not to be killed.
Correct
Volenta wrote:
Yes, some plants do have a defense mechanism, to stay alive and to reproduce. They don't 'want' you to end their live, even though they aren't conscious. So it's not necessarily because an organism is conscious that they want to avoid death.
Wrong.
1. You really need to stop talking about consciousness as if it applies in this context- please- that's a wiggly wobbly undefined notion that has more supernatural baggage than anything else, and it just confuses the whole conversation. Using words without definitions (or with circular definitions that beg the question) in discussion isn't useful. The only place this word is useful is in the medical context of awake vs. asleep for a sentient being.
2. The issue is sentience- and that's what matters.
3. Plants do not and can not want anything; they are not sentient.
There's a fairly famous quote:
"The primitive sign of wanting is trying to get"
Understand, that merely moving towards or away from something is NOT in itself trying to get. If it were, we could say that things WANT to fall. That's nonsense and defeats all meaning in the notion.
In order to show one wants something, one has to modify behavior to get it (or avoid something one doesn't want- like noxious stimuli). This means responsiveness to some form of Operant conditioning - and this requires some form of rudimentary intelligence, which plants don't have.
Plants don't want anything.
Now, if you were a creationist, you might say that god wants it, because he designed the plants in that way- much as a watch maker wants a watch to tick.
If you're not a creationist, the most you could say is that evolution "wants" it, in a sense, because in the broadest scope it is vaguely intelligent (in the sense that over generations it reforms its behavior- in the broad sense, it fucntions in the same way intelligence does).
This kind of "wanting" however, has nothing to do with the plant. If we wanted to respect the "will" as such of an entire species, we could only consider what was good for the species as a whole.
Volenta wrote:
I'm not really sure myself whether I agree with the premise that killing a conscious creature with no sense of the future is justifiable. I like to think it is not (like you do), but I feel that I have no basis for holding that position.
False premise.
All sentient beings have a sense of the future. Primitive understanding of cause and effect is foundational to intelligence.
Even if that sense of the future is mere milliseconds in the immediate future, it's there.
The questions is how far into the future, and in what breadth of understanding.
A conscious creature (an awake creature) always has a sense of the future.
When we are unconscious- either knocked out by general anesthetic or asleep (which is the only proper way of using the term 'conscious' that has clear meaning)- we may have no sense of the future. But while we were awake we did. We were just paused- and that suspension is morally irrelevant provided that we would or should normally wake up.
It makes no sense talking about a plant in terms of conscious or unconscious, because they are not sentient and they possess no such medical states.
It's like asking whether the manual abacus is powered on or turned off. It doesn't use electricity, it neither turns on nor off.
Volenta wrote:
If your moral framework is broad consequentialism, you potentially can also objectively answer that second question. Although you can't really calculate it beforehand, one of the two options causes more suffering, sadness, ... than the other.
Correct
Volenta wrote:
I also don't think you should base morals on the mechanisms of evolution.
Correct
Volenta wrote:
I think some of these have moral weight and some don't. That's why I prefer to talk about consciousness.
Then talk about Sentience please. Consciousness is the wrong word to use.
thebestofenergy wrote:
But like I said, having a stronger interest in not to be killed doesn't matter in this case. In this scenario you're killed without realising it. If you kill a mosquito mashing it with your hand, the fear/pain that it feels before dying is zero, in the same way you fear/feel zero when you're killed istantly without knowing it.
False.
Pain and suffering are in themselves irrelevant to morality.
What matters is interest. We usually have an interest in not suffering - that, and only that, is why suffering is usually bad.
When you have an interest not to die, it doesn't matter how quickly you are killed, or if you realize it's happening or not- that interest is still being violated.
thebestofenergy wrote:No, it's scientifically wrong to say that they don't 'want' you to end their lives. They don't have the desire to keep living. It's a mechanism to keep the specie alive. They don't 'want' to avoid death, while instects do want to avoid death.
Correct.
thebestofenergy wrote:The instects struggle to survive. They want to keep living, at a conscious level (unlike plants and stones), and they're sentient. That's why, atleast for me, they are worth moral value. They have a neurological activity and a nervous system that make them feel, even if just in the slightest.
Can we try to avoid the word "conscious"?
Yes, they're sentient, and that's what matters.
It's not just for you that they have moral value- it's impossible to respect the interests of something that does not have interests.
If we "respect the interests of a rock" we're participating in some kind of delusion to think the rock has interests in the first place.
Sentient beings, and only sentient beings, have interests.
Now whether a species as a whole, represented by its evolutionary path, can be interpreted to be some kind of vaguely collective being is an interesting question- but probably beyond the scope of the subject here.
thebestofenergy wrote:The first example I gave is objective because of our genes. It's built in our evolution process that killing your own children would endanger the specie. Anyone that doesn't have a mental disorder that modifies that, thinks that killing your own children is wrong. Most of the morals we have are based on evolution. That's because of mirror neurons and the ability to 'put ourselves in the shoes of others' that we can define morals.
No no no.
1. Evolutionary 'sense' of morality is not morality, and it's not objective in the least (genes vary from individual to individual, not just in damaged people). It is relative to genetics- down to the individual.
2. This is at its core an appeal to nature fallacy.
3. Most of the morals we have (descriptive ethics) are NOT based on genetic evolution, but on social systems.
4. You're dealing in descriptive ethics here, and that's a field rife in contradiction by definition. It's not any form of practical ethics. Descriptive ethics does not describe anything approaching a rational or objective morality.
5. We can define moral with reason- psychopaths do just fine at understanding moral theory without mirror neurons (and can even do it more reliably than people who have their views tainted by assumptions and biases).
thebestofenergy wrote:But in the second scenario, where we can't have numbers and stable facts to base our morals on, the answer is subjective.
No, it's still objective- we just don't know what the answer is due to lack of empirical data.
Volenta wrote:But what do you think about killing an animal that has no conscious interest in living (not just less interest)?
It's not OK to kill people in their sleep.
If they are conscious at the time, and they have no interest in continued living, and it's really informed consent (and not a temporary bout of depression) then euthanasia is not inherently wrong.
However, one must also examine the consequences of those actions- such as on family, and society as a whole.
Volenta wrote:How do you make them choose? They can't make the decision. That was my point. Yes, they try to avoid danger, but so do some plants. Avoiding danger doesn't mean they made a choose.
Yes, they can make that decision. Susceptibility to operant conditioning proves that sentient beings have wants- that they have preferences in this regard. Plants do not. Plants are not sentient, and they do not want to avoid danger- they don't want anything, any more than rocks want to fall.
Volenta wrote:There is a reason I put want between quotes. The goals of a plant and insect are the same, but the insect is conscious. But I think the insect has as much choice in avoiding danger/death as a plant has (although it depends on the insect, not really sure how smart mosquito's are).
An insect has actual wants, a plant does not.
If you think you're respecting the interests of something that by its very nature can not have interests, you are being delusional, not moral.
It's like worrying about the well being of a stuffed toy.
No, we should not wantonly destroy things and waste, but non-sentient beings do not have interests.
You aren't doing harm to a rock by carrying it up a hill and setting it down at the top, despite the fact that it has a tendency to move downwards due to gravity. The rock doesn't actually want to move downwards- it just does. The same with a plant.
Insects want to avoid harm, and they want to not die.
If you're getting at the fact that no sentient beings really get to choose what they want (but want merely as a result of deterministic and random factors), then that applies no less so to humans.
Lack of purely free will, in that supernatural sense, doesn't negate moral responsibility.
Volenta wrote:Their sentience matter for me to don't inflict pain and suffering, but I'm still not sure about living. I give them the benefit of doubt by not killing them without a good reason.
Pain and suffering are morally irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is interests. The animal has an interest in not dying- it is sentient and it has wants. A plant does not.
Animals also usually have an interest in not suffering- and that is why we should avoid causing suffering. But that's a secondary matter, which only matters because the animal wants to not suffer.
Volenta wrote:It's objective that we feel emotion and you can explain by evolution where this feelings come from, but that doesn't say anything about morality. Evolution can also produce rapists. Raping is a very good strategy to reproduce, but I don't think you want to have that as a moral baseline. Sadists or psychopaths can get great emotional feelings when seeing a child being tortured, that doesn't mean it's alright (even if everyone was a sadist).
Correct
Volenta wrote:
Like I said, even if you don't know the answer, that doesn't mean there is no objective answer to it. It's a practical problem which maybe can't be solved, but that's not the definition of moral relativism as far as I know. I would call it moral ignorance.
Correct
thebestofenergy wrote:Plants don't try to avoid danger. Insects do
Correct
thebestofenergy wrote:The quantity of the tought and of the choice that insects have are between plants and humans. Not as much as humans, but more then plants.
Plants are zero- they are fundamentally different. Putting them on a scale isn't meaningful, and might imply to some people that plants have sentience that is just very low (you imply that they have a quantity at all by saying that)- but that's not the case. Why not say "rocks" instead of plants?
I don't think we should even be comparing them on the same scale, because that implies things we do not mean to imply.
I don't think I disagree with what you're saying, but please be careful not to accidentally imply that (carnists will take us out of context if we do).
thebestofenergy wrote:But we have the ability to use the 'golden rule' thanks to evolution (that gave us mirror neurons; not every animal has them).
Psychopaths can too. It's easily an exercise in pure reason. Actually, psychopaths are better at it, because they're not distracted by all of the other nonsense people think is morality but isn't (theistic 'morals', social taboos, etc.).
thebestofenergy wrote:What I said is that we have that moral absolute because of our genes in the first place, not only because of our critical thinking (altough I should have specified that it's not only absolute because of evolution).
Obviously we only exist at all because of our genes, but that's not a useful claim, our genetic predispositions have distracted us by inclining us to superstition and absurd taboos as much as anything. Society contributed more to honing those notions, along with critical thinking which discovered them as objective principles.
People can accidentally assume something is absolute, but you don't get partial credit for guessing, and evolution didn't give us anything beyond the tools (reason) to do it the right way.
thebestofenergy wrote:There are actually different types of moral relativism (descriptive, meta-ethical, normative). This example falls into the meta-ethical category.
I think you're misunderstanding the common application of relativism here.
I guess you read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
And misunderstood this:
Moral relativism may be any of several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures. Descriptive moral relativism holds only that some people do in fact disagree about what is moral; meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong; and normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when we disagree about the morality of it.
(sorry if I'm mistaken in that assumption)
Moral relativism can be analyzed and applied in different ways, but there aren't different 'types' of it in that sense.
1. Descriptive ethics is more anthropology, not philosophy- it deals with what people think in a given culture, etc. It has nothing to do with what we're discussing. The only time it's anything more than anthropology is when one takes the bizarre meta-ethical position that defines ethics as descriptive (which is just bad philosophy).
2. Normative ethics are subservient, or dependent upon a meta-ethical position: not a fundamentally different type of thing. It's just a differnt use- meta Ethics deals with the premises of normative ethics, normative ethics applies those premises to prescriptive ethics.
The vast majority of Meta-ethics and Normative ethics are thus two sides of the same coin, because in order to apply some principle to matters of normative ethics, one depends on the meta-ethical position that the principle is true at all to begin with.
3. Normative relativism doesn't really even exist, because it's not possible to create a consistent prescriptive system within a relativisitic framework. (That is, philosophers do not take this seriously)
Wikipedia summarizes the issue pretty well:
Normative moral relativists believe not only the meta-ethical thesis, but that it has normative implications on what we ought to do. They argue that meta-ethical relativism implies that we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when it runs counter to our personal or cultural moral standards. Most philosophers do not agree, partially because of the challenges of arriving at an "ought" from relativistic premises.[2] Meta-ethical relativism seems to eliminate the normative relativist's ability to make prescriptive claims. In other words, normative relativism may find it difficult to make a statement like "we think it is moral to tolerate behaviour" without always adding "other people think intolerance of certain behaviours is moral". Philosophers like Russell Blackford even argue that intolerance is, to some degree, important. As he puts it, "we need not adopt a quietism about moral traditions that cause hardship and suffering. Nor need we passively accept the moral norms of our own respective societies, to the extent that they are ineffective or counterproductive or simply unnecessary."[4] That is, it is perfectly reasonable (and practical) for a person or group to defend their subjective values against others, even if there is no universal prescription or morality. We can also criticize other cultures for failing to pursue even their own goals effectively.
The only real type of moral relativism there is, is Moral relativism, which refers to the meta-ethical position that:
terms such as "good", "bad", "right" and "wrong" do not stand subject to universal truth conditions at all; rather, they are relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of an individual or a group of people.[3] The American anthropologist William Sumner was an influential advocate of this view. In his 1906 work Folkways he argues that what people consider right and wrong is entirely shaped by the traditions, customs and practices of their culture. Moreover, since there is no higher moral standard than the local mores of a culture, no trans-cultural judgement about the rightness or wrongness of a culture's mores can be justified.
That's what moral relativism is.
But none of that really matters here, because what we are discussing is a matter of objective morality- it is the only premise under which any of this conversation makes any sense at all.
If you are taking the meta-ethical stand that morality is relative, we're not only not on the same page, but you're reading an entirely different book.
We can have that discussion if you want.
As Volenta said, this is an objective/absolute that just happens to be unknown.
This is a matter of normative ethics, where we just don't have enough information to arrive at the answer- which does not default to relativism in those cases.
thebestofenergy wrote:If you cannot predict the future and you don't know the exact probability, then I don't think there's practical solution to this case.
You don't need to know the exact probability. Any empirical matter has error bars- all you need to do it gather more information to narrow it down; your answer is, like any answer in science, then contingent on that range and degree of certainty.
thebestofenergy wrote:Yes, that's a dilemma for me aswell. I consider this another moral relative example: you don't know if and how much he/she is going to harm other sentient beings in the future.
Again, that's not what moral relativism is.
As Volenta said, that's just ignorance, not relativism.
Take the case that you have a closed box, and you don't know what's inside.
Somebody says it's air
Another says it's a cat
Another says it's an orange
If that was a relativist situation, we would say that everybody's statement of what's in the box is equally correct- that they're all right, because belief defines reality.
A realist would say that what's in the box is what's in the box, and not knowing what's in the box doesn't make everybody equally right. You can guess, and you might be right, and you might be wrong. Either it's just air, or a cat, or an orange, or something else entirely. Maybe nobody is right. But when they disagree, somebody is definitely wrong- we just don't know who is wrong yet until we have more information about what's in the box.
Moral relativism defeats normative ethics, just as factual relativism defeats any sense of coherent reality.
I haven't kept up with current trends in philosophy, however, so I'll take your word that modern ethicists don't take deontological theories seriously.
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