Take a look at one of the earlier sentences in that paragraph, “… though we don’t compete with each other directly…” We’re not trying to wipe them out. Even when they become pests, many of us actively try not to kill them. Really, our moral interaction is almost entirely one-sided.
When you think of moral competition, sometimes it is like World War II. But just as often it’s like the modern US, Europe and Japan. We trade ideas about political systems, argue about economic systems, influence each other through art and literature. Over time, cultures in all three change. Some ideas are dropped, and some become more acccepted.
Well, then maybe animals are inherently “better” than us in this regard. Take for example rescue dogs, or just a run of the mill, loyal dog and owner. I can’t count the number of times that I have seen instances of people who have been saved in life or death situations by their dogs/animals with disregard to all speciation. Ten times in ten, when presented a scenario, I guarantee a dog would save its human over another animal… or it might just save both. Why, it’s almost like they are sentient and compassionate…
Maybe. I don’t think that it’s arrogance to support freedom of speech and democracy, as opposed to a rigid social structure dictated by heridity. IMHO we’re better off with the moral accomplishments of modernity. Hell, even the dogs are better off with those moral accomplishments. But I suppose pointing out that they, for the most part, no longer have to fend off rival predators, search for food every waking hour, succomb to who knows how many diseases and suffer through a slow, painful death only adds to my arrogance.
Maybe so. On the flip side, one could even argue that Mosquitoes are inherently better because of how many humans they’ve killed, since humans seem to be messing up the planet quite a lot. That’s if the Earth could have a perspective on things.
Of course you could also argue that dogs do that because they have been domesticated by humans, but it wouldn’t get you anywhere.
That’s all pretty much irrelevant to how people generally put value of life on things. As a matter of fact, I know a good many dog lovers who would put the life of their dog over the life of someone they don’t know about as an extreme example, or the life of someone who is a murderer, rapist etc as a more level headed example. A baby screams, it cries, it doesn’t do anything useful, it doesn’t save lives, it keeps you up all night, it drains your money. It’s not inherently ‘better’ (I’m still looking for how that is defined in this discussion) than anything else. So why do we value it’s life so highly?
The answer is always going to be arbitrary somewhat. “Because we evolved to care”, “Because they have big eyes and evoke an emotional response”, “Because they’re human”, “Because it’s my son”, or “Just because.” It has nothing to do with it being ‘better’. There’s always going to be a ‘why’ at the end of every answer to why we care more about our own species, and I maintain that that reason is rarely ‘because we’re better than them’.
This sounds like a dodge to me - the fact that we don’t aggressively try to kill all mice is part of our culture/moral code/whichever. By making “compete[s] with each other directly” a criteria for comparing two cultures you are True Scotsmanning out essentially all societal comparsons so far - there are relatively few cases where both groups are each trying to completely wipe the other out or subsume the other, and even fewer when one actually succeeds (allowing a winner to be determined).
Additionally, I don’t think you can determine an objectively superior moral code this way, because you could have several local maxima (so to speak). Killing the enemy tribe might be an effective survival trait in one set of circumstances, but not in another, and among other things that it might depend on what other rules are part of your moral code. Mice might find it ineffective to try and save dying comrades as oppoed to having the survivors just flee as fast as they can, where humans might disagree with that, because their circumstances differ.
So when the dust settles on this, while I agree that you have proposed a viable model for describing/codifying morality (that is, whatever a society’s doing is its moral code), I reject that you have demonsrated that there is an objectively superior moral code or that it’s possible to even compare two moral codes. (Particularly if being extinct doesn’t count against them - that undermines the notion that survivability is a viable measure of morality, which seems to me to be core to your position.)
Well, it is inherently arrogant and human to think that any of those quite admirable accomplishments (in human context) were possible without dogs. What you describe is rather one sided and lording, when in fact our thousands of years of concomitant history and coevolution with dogs has perhaps benefitted us more than them. How many dogs have died to save humans from death whether by medical testing or just protecting us from physical harm from other predators? How many of our ancestors have been saved from starving due to the hunt or shepard dog? How many from drowning by the water dog? I would be willing to bet that far more dogs have died for humans or been killed by humans than humans have died to benefit dogs, or have been killed by dogs.
No, we have a synergystic relationship with dogs, and I posit that none of our “Great Moral Achievments” would even be possible without the dog freeing up time and resources for those achievements, it is only through our codependence, enslavement, and eugenic manipulation of the dog that we were freed from the bonds of the hunter gatherer mentality. Many of those “benefits” that you mention we have provided the dog are only self-serving, we have only come this far, because we have ridden on the backs of dogs and countless other animals- their sacrifice, while we pat each other on the back… what a good monkey.
Take another look at my second paragraph. You don’t need either to be trying to destroy the other for a moral competition as I see it. I do require that moral systems are changing in responce to each other. For example, think of the dynamics of the US, Europe and Japan that I brought up. Specifically, consider how much of the current health care debate basically reduces to “Look at how great Europe is!”, “But capitalism is the American Way!” The thing with mice is that they aren’t changing their moral code in responce to us, while we’re changing ours in responce to them. For example, animal rights in general, medical testing procedure, and no-kill mouse traps.
Of course, this makes comparisons between humans and other animals somewhat tricky. But it’s also made a bit easier by the fact that the human morality deals with all the situations that the mouse morality deals with.
Luckily, moralities are subtle enough to be be able to handle the different situations where killing the enemy tribe and not killing them are optimal. Certainly no modern state is aggressive all the time.
With regards to local optimality: I don’t think moralities as a whole can be optimal, but I do think that moral rules can be, as I said in post 47. A good rule will be able to handle a wide variety of input, so I don’t think your local maxima argument works.
There are sort of two places you can be here: “only direct competitions that result in the elimination of one moral code count, and victors are determined by who’s the last man standing”, and “various indirect competitions also count, and there’s no way to determine the victor in most cases”. Since I’m disputing that you can assess an objective universal morality, I don’t see anyplace on the continuum here working against me; the closer to one end you get the more you’re True Scotsmanning and losing the “objective universal” aspect of the comparison, and the closer you get to the other end the less this yeilds an actual result. I do not believe there is a happy medium in there where you can avoid both problems.
Sounds to me like you’re just saying to take all the local maxima and make a single rule composed of all the separate rules based on a case-by-case system incorporating every other relevent aspect of the environment as part of choosing which specific moral rule to use at the moment. Which I will concede would work - in practice, it’s called a “legal code”. So I concede this - while doubting that the average joe has this level of complicated and systematic morality in his head for day-to-day use.
because our planet would be reduced to just a rock that happened to have life on it instead of a rock with life capable of domesticating animals, speak languages, contain nuclear fission, and rocket people into space. in the grand scheme of things it may not matter that much because we live and die like any other creature, but i think it’s something of note. it’d be like a family with a son that became a successful doctor/lawyer, and a son that just sits in the basement fondling himself.
as for the planet being indifferent… it’s a planet. a rock. it has no opinions. however to sentient beings capable of thought, it matters. just like we view dogs and rats differently, others judge us and bonobo monkeys differently.
Interestingly enough, the question was answered with the first response. Both morals and values are ideas that were created by humans for the benefit of the majority of humans and therefore cannot be compared to anything but humans. When the first human appeared there was no instruction booklet to life. All the rules we have created were for us by us. It’s like the ideology of good and bad. It’s always in context that the idea holds. I can pretty much guarantee that I can bring up a situation where something that we hold as bad can be done for the good, and something that is done for good can end up being bad. It all relates to context and since we don’t have an animalistic context to compare with, there’s no way the question can really be answered. I think somebody else already pointed it out, but in the end we shouldn’t even question whether anything is better and just live to our best abilities.
By the standards of the laws of the universe, we are not more valuable.
If the Big Comet hits tomorrow, it won’t deliberately spare humans.
By the standards of other living things, we are not more valuable.
We are superior by their standards–winners in confrontation with any other living thing (until some sneaky virus wipes us out, anyway) and winners in the competition for resources. Since animals have no concept of “valuable,” we can’t be more valuable by their standards.
By our standards we are more valuable in every way. You can be as philosophical as you like in debating the theory of this, but in practice the last living pregnant tigress on earth would get shot on the spot if it had your baby in its mouth. It’s the golden rule: the one with the gold, rules. For right now we are the King of the Jungle. We are busy procreating as we please and consuming our way through the planet.
Want to put the rest of living creatures first because they are more valuable? Go kill yourself. Try to take out the rest of humanity right before you polish yourself off. Anything short of that is hypocrisy.
We do share a great percentage of genetic similarities with other mammals. Our biology and behaviors are not extremely dissimilar. There is probably a gene matrix for our shared brain, and possibly, moral, characteristics with fairly few sequential differences, bet you could find them mathematically.
I do know that humans can communicate quite effectively with other mammals as they communicate with us.
Well, technically speaking, the best that I can do is show that an objective evaluation of some moral rules is logically possible. Rigorously proving that the objective evaluation actually exists is probably impossible*. The corollary is that the “morality is arbitrary and inherently meaningless” viewpoint is not necessarily correct. On a more practical level, I’d like to show that the we are justified in believing that our societal notions (because our moral codes are the product of evolution), but at the same time, challenging and sometimes overthrowing old moral rules is also good (because the evolution is never complete). The “average joe” doesn’t need to have this kind of theory of morality, all it really says is that Joe is justified in defending his beliefs. He believes that anyway.
Regarding the Direct-Indirect competition spectrum, I think it’s enough if the two moralities evolve towards each other. Which raises an interesting question: is it possible for two societies to evolve very different, yet complementary moralities and be able to function together efficiently? I certainly have no answer to this question, but an affirmative might throw a wrench into the quest for objectivity.
*We may be able to get some insight into good social strategies through fields like game theory or economics, but I know far too little about either subject to write an actual proposal.
Of course, that would be a great number of generations of mice, and eugenic manipulation. And more subjectivity… We can cut things down to major quantifiable objective classifications. Aggression, Prosperity, Problem Solving, Compassion, Empathy.
You assume that whatever other sentient species that would eventually evolve would be like a son that just sits the the basement? Hmmm. Also, you assume that domesticating animals, speaking languages, nuclear fission, and rocket science are of paramount importance. Those are things you value, but I’m not sure they’re inherently valuable to the planet as a whole.
To whom does it matter? Other humans. The rest of the planet is either indifferent, or very likely harmed by all of our activities. Sentience is not an end unto itself; it’s what you do with it. Humans have done both great and terrible things, and obviously the fate of our species has yet to be determined, but I’m not ready to say there’s evidence that anything we’ve done has been great “for the planet.”
Are you certain you aren’t confusing sentience with another concept such as sapience? Too assert that only humans are sentient can only be argued by solipsism, and even then it only says for certain that YOU are specifically. If you expand it, the only basis you have left is language, which while being able to communicate could denote intelligence (after all the given being could just be a computer) it doesn’t mean that a being that does not speak does not indicate mindlessness.
I somehow doubt that you be able to determine the sentience of an alien race if you don’t even realize that at the very least, mammals are sentient. After all, it is not likely that we would be able to speak to an alien species - not at first at least assuming they even communicate by speech and not something like touch or chemical signals - and without such communication, I see no reason why you would find an alien species to be sentient.
Anything short of that is hypocrisy.