Why? Why would the planet be worse off without humans? I would think the planet is indifferent, though humans have harmed the planet far more than any species in the history of life, so I can’t figure why you think the planet would be worse off. Another sentient species would likely evolve eventually in any case.
I don’t personally understand people who don’t think that humans are different than any other creature out there. We have the ability to share thoughts and emotions and develop society and culture and values and morals. If any other creature had that ability, don’t you think they would have developed the ability to show it??
Clearly, society already values humans much more than other animals. Say one hundred puppies are murdered. Will people be outraged? Yes, absolutely. And rightfully so, in my opinion. But say one hundred human infants are murdered. I don’t think I know a single person who wouldn’t be utterly shocked and disturbed by that.
MAYBE you can still argue that we just think we are more valuable or “better,” as you say, because we are approaching the question from a self-centered point of view. But I think the fact that we are even able to discuss this while the ants and the deer and the lightning bugs aren’t definitely means something.
Properly define ‘better’ then we’ll talk.
I am better than all animals, because I can drive a car and play the piano.
At the same time?
Better to whom?
To humans? Yes, we value our own species more than other species. That is glaringly obvious.
To the insentient Universe as a whole? No. To think that the universe does somehow value this one species, on this one tiny planet, more or at all, is extremely laughable arrogance.
Oh, you were saying that it’s not good enough to think about morals, but that you also have to argue about them without others? In that case, I disagree that this is a sensible measure of value. Yakking about your thoughts is not better than having them silently.
This bit is the reason I am responding to this post. What is moral value? And can it be defined objectively? (Or even subjectively without restricting yourself to a particular society’s or philosopher’s definition?)
As noted, subjectively speaking humans are generally more valuable to humans simply because we identify with them more, and because we value properties that we see in ourself. And I’m not really saying that this is a bad thing - but it’s pretty simplistic, and seems unlikely to have anything to do with “moral value”, whatever that is.
Personally, I’m not buying that there is any one single “correct” objective standard of valuation, moral or otherwise. And without first having one of those, we can’t argue that humans are more valuable than anything else. Sure, once you define “can drive a car while playing the piano” or whichever as the standard of measure it’s a baby step from there to proving that humans are more valuable. But why should I accept that any such objectively best objective valuation standard exists?
It’s not binary, but a sliding scale. The ability to discuss, argue with, influence and be influenced by others allows for extremely rapid development of moral systems. It also allows you to handle significantly more complex and subtle social situations. Because of this, our social systems get put through more stringent tests than those of other animals, and so ours are more likely to be correct.
Not that I’ve worked this out in detail, but it would probably go something like this: A “morality” is a set of rules (or algorithms or heuristics) governing behavior in social situations, a “moral value” is one of these rules, the “moral value of some object” is the result of applying these rules (the “moral values”) to that object. When you apply these rules to some large number of scenarios, you can find the moral value of various things (usually some kind of living thing) by comparing how often their interests come out above others.
In the framework above, it seem obvious to me that the overwhelming majority of moralities would, if widely adopted, cause society to instantly collapse. For others, the society would continue, but just barely and requiring tremendous amounts of work. Then there are societies like ours, where the overwhelming majority would be much worse off if society went down. These societies work extremely well–they produce much more than the sum of their parts.
I’ll agree that there is probably no single “correct” morality. If the little quirks of human thought were different then I suspect that the best morality would change as well. If there are highly social aliens out there, I bet that their best morality is different from ours. So, yes, there probably is no one single correct objective standard. But there doesn’t have to be! The above argument applies just as well to them. In all likelihood, the majority of possible moralities are completely unworkable for any intelligent species. So, already, we can say that certain moral values are wrong, objectively, even if we can’t say that any are right.
Suppose we had a list of all of the best moralities, for every highly social species that could ever evolve, wouldn’t you be shocked if they turned out to be completely different from each other? That there wasn’t even one moral value that they all had in common? What about just most of them? It seems to me that, if we have some moral value that is common to all of these, that this moral value counts as being truly objective.
But even then, those things aren’t necessarily tied to “humanity”. Another type of creature could be made that resembles God but is not human; God could value things about humans that aren’t human-specific; and humans are not the only possible beings capable of that relationship, just (accepting the frame of the argument) the only ones that are.
I think that, just as with everything else, when it comes to religion we need to break down the generalities of “human” into what is specifically meant, if it’s possible. A question to ask should be not just what qualities humans have that make them superior in some way, but whether another, non-human creature could have those same qualities yet be distinctly non-human.
This is pretty much it. It’s just an assumption so we don’t all rape and kill each other in the streets over pizza.
I’m not buying the argument - humans have been chatting amongst themselves for thousands of years and it doesn’t seem to have pushed us towards “correctness” at any appreciably impressive rate. Which is to say, if it’s helping, it doesn’t help much - not enough for me to dismiss the idea that it’s a more valuable situation than if, say, dogs have got all their morals figured out and coded into instincts so they don’t have to talk about them. So yeah. I reject this as a meaningful distinction upon which to hang a valuation on.
I’m having a great deal of trouble following this. Suppose that your society includes the rule “non-tribe members can and should be enslaved, abused, or killed”, like many societies historically have had. Then from what you say, ruthlessly slaughtering the neighboring tribe would be moral by definition?
And I don’t understand “When you apply these rules to some large number of scenarios, you can find the moral value of various things (usually some kind of living thing) by comparing how often their interests come out above others” at all. Meaning, I literally don’t know what you’re saying. Is the person who is the best slaughterer the one with the highest moral value? Is it the person whe best complies with society by being the subservient slave? I simply don’t understand.
Even supposing I grant that moral codes can be objectively rated (which seems dubious to me, though I do concede that by pegging it to societal survival you do make “don’t kill everyone in the society at once” a pretty clear winner), I don’t follow how this translates to making individuals moral. Particularly once you then take those individuals and speak of them as a species as a whole!
I mean, let’s ask the question, ‘are humans of higher moral value than mice’? Step one: Are their rules governing their interaction with things? Well, yes. The mice’s seem to be a lot simpler, and involve things like avoiding predators and eating their babies sometimes, but they do seem to have rules. Which means thay have a moral code, by your definition. Is the moral code good? Well, we check this by looking for survival. So, are there still mice around? Yes, there are. So, their moral code is “good” by the only (crude) measure we have for it.
Um, now what? Both humans and mice are still around, so they’re both good, we get that. (Them dimetredons, on the other hand, were clearly amoral scum since they’re dead now. Ignore the fact that the were around for a really long time.) But how can we tell that humans are more good than mice, morally? We have no clear criteria to rate “good” moral codes in comparison to one another. Is it by head counts? Does the human moral code get more valuable with every birth, and lesser with every death? Is it by longevity? The mice have had their lifestyle longer than the current human moral codes have been around. Does that make the mice better?
This doesn’t seem to work to me, either as a argument for an objective morality or as a method for making objective comparisons between humans and other animals as species. Presumably I’m completely misunderstanding you…?
People ARE animals. Whenever people try to make distinctions they are proven wrong but keep trying to find a “missing link” where there is none.
And they will say incredible things, like animals don’t mourn their dead or grieve for their sick, despite that being obvious.
I just want to note that extending some of the arguments being posed here would mean that we should value the life of a highly intelligent person over that of an average person. And the life of a dog or ant over a person in a coma or with severe brain damage.
Right. And subjective is all we have.
Doesn’t mean anything of the sort. Conciousness is only tangentally related to intelligence; what matters is capacity for reciprocity, which isn’t necessarily higher depending on how smart you are. Some smart people are downright nasty and some stupid people are capable of great sympathy: human value is not decided by an IQ test.
Persons who are damaged to the extent that they are incapable of having the conciousness of an “ant” we value for two reasons: because they have the potential to be cured; and also because we feel sympathy for those who care for them. If someone is truly and permanently “brain dead” they aren’t a “person” any more, so they have no particular rights (their relations of course do).
Woah, wait a minute, which arguments indicate that?
An individual being better than another individual doesn’t mean their life is worthless, that’s a whole other kettle of fish. I for example can beat most of my friends at badminton and thus consider myself better than them, not in an abstract philosophical sense, just in a skill sense. An adult is better than a baby, if we’re talking about skills.
But that doesn’t mean you value their life differently. Value of life can be a completely unrelated thing.
But, come on, in what situation do you find yourself deciding over the life of a dog and that of a person in a coma? If you ever did, your decision would not be defined by how better you think they are, it would defined by how much you care about the individual, how much you couldn’t bare to see them gone.
Value of life is determined by lots of things, but being ‘better’ isn’t one of those things, unless you’re a Nazi. I think we generally have a natural compassion towards our own family, tribe and ultimately species. We don’t generally (there are always exceptions) exploit other species because we’re better than them. It helps us exploit them, but our reasons are myriad. Whether it’s food, clothing or medicine.
You may argue that there are people who kill animals because they consider themselves better than them. Well I would counter that by pointing out that people kill people because they’re better than them, the whole species thing can be irrelevant. If superiority was what we based value of life on we’d be screwed.
Yes. Humans are intelligent and are the only sentinent species on this planet. I will treat sentinent aliens equally however animals are mindless. If they evolve a million years from now they will gain my respect until then…
I think all the below could be construed to mean just that.
Why? I see no reason to make demarcations between one being and another here, just because one is human and another is a dog. Why do we have to evaluate one individual based on the capabilities of the whole species? Don’t you think it’s arrogant and arbitrary to say that the ‘worst’ human is automatically and unquestionably better than the ‘best’ dolphin or gorilla-- without some kind of rationale for it?
Your first point: really? The abolition of slavery, reductions in racism and sexim, codifying freedom of speech, electing our leaders rather than using inheritance, no more wars for the glorification of the leader–these aren’t important moral advances? What qualifies as an “appreciably impressive rate”? Cultural evolution may be slow compared to a human lifetime, but it is orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution.
Your second point: maybe. Honestly I doubt that such a creature could evolve, whose moral instincts were so finely tuned that it needs no ability to learn at all.
Your first paragraph is more-or-less right. I propose that, in order to evaluate a moral system (or a “morality”), we take the proclimations of that moral system as gospel, and then we look at the consequences. I think of this as somewhat analogous to biological evolution, so let me try to make the analogy.
We often think of genes as being good or bad, but in evolution, genes are never selected for my themselves. Natural selection works on the level of animals–systems of genes. If we want to know whether a certain gene is “good,” we would start out with a variety of animals, some with the gene and some without. Then we would back off a bit and let natural selection work its magic. At the end, we take a look at the new population. If most of the animals now have that gene, it was probably “good,” if they don’t, it was probably “bad.”
Roughly speaking, natural selection evaluates the fitness of individual animals based on two criteria: robustness and efficienty. By the former, I mean that the animal must be able to deal with what the world throws at it; by the latter, I mean that an animal must make effective use of its resources.
Moral values (rules) are like genes, moralities (moral systems) are like animals. In order to get anywhere, we have to compare entire moralities, and only after we’ve done that extensively can we try to say which moral values are objectively good or bad. We evaluate moralities by the same two criteria as above. Robustness here is twofold: first, individuals in that society should be able effectively handle a wide variety of social situations, and the society as a whole must be able to deal with problems without falling apart. Efficiency means about the same thing: the society can get useful work out of its individuals.
Maybe a little more concretely: suppose we wanted to find an objective morality experimentally, what would we do. Let’s just limit ourselves to intelligent beings for the moment. I propose that our experiment might look something like this:
[ol]
[li]Create a large number of societies, each with a different morality.[/li][li]Allow these societies to interact with each other and with themselves as they see fit. Their moralities will change over time as they come up with new ideas, and transfer ideas to each other.[/li][li]Let this go on for a really long time. Then catalog the moral beliefs of the societies that remain.[/li][li]Repeat steps 1-3 for all possible species.[/li][li]Compare all the moralities that you found in step 3. If they’re similar, then you have good reason to think that they are objectively correct.[/li][/ol]
Did I miss something? I don’t know what you mean about “translates to making individuals moral.”
Your second paragraph looks pretty good to me, but the third one misses it by a bit I think. Regarding dimetredons: biological evolution depends on a lot more than moral codes. Maybe their moralities were very good, but they just couldn’t compete physically with newer species. We need something a little more than the fact that they’re extinct.
Then how might we compare mice and men? I would argue that, though we don’t compete with each other directly, our moral code is both more efficient and more robust. Mice have rules for dealing with family members and mating rituals, but maybe not much else. We have rules for both these situations, but also extensive rules for dealing with people only distantly related to us, in many different circumstances (business relations, friendships, government, etc.). Our system is also much more efficient. Look around your home or office, how many individuals worked to create all the things that you have? We have a system where every one of us can harvest the labor of millions of other individuals and direct them towards our own purposes. Mice have nothing that even comes close to this. If we were put into a situation where western society competed with mouse society, it seems obvious which of us would win.
You sure about that? We have built better mousetraps, but they are still around, and I predict when we humans are all gone there will still be mice around… we simply can’t compete biologically and reproductively, they are faster and more efficient. And if we did somehow manage to wipe them out, it would perhaps have wideranging and unintended affects for us as a species and the earth as an environment… possibly leading to our own extinction. Homo sapiens isn’t an island.
Arbitrary perhaps, but not arrogant at all. If a Gorilla could drive a car better than a human I wouldn’t say “But the human is still better at driving”. When Cheetah’s run faster than humans I am not in denial about that fact. They’re better than humans in that regard.
But I have a natural compassion for humans that I simply do not have in the same way for animals. When I think of saving a human’s life I think “There are people who care about this person, I understand what empathy is, I know what it feels like to lose someone.”
A similar thing goes on with animals, I don’t want them to die either. But that’s not where my preferences lie.
I don’t say the ‘worst’ human is automatically and unquestionably ‘better’ than the ‘best’ dolphin or gorilla. I say that I care about the least skilled humans more than animals simply because they’re human. It is completely arbitrary, but then, so is all my likes and dislikes. My love for the band Elbow is not based on any objective criteria, they’re not ‘inherently’ better than any other band. I just like them. Just as I like humans more than animals. Certain humans I like a lot.
I don’t see how it’s arrogant to have arbitrary preferences. Is it wrong to want to have sex with humans rather than animals? Is that arrogant?