I’ve already emphasized my point – repeatedly, in fact. If the only reason you do a “moral” act is because you don’t want to risk punishment – well, that’s not morality. It’s quite the opposite.
All we have to do is point out that there are situations wherein self-interest is NOT the basis. Consider the anti-Nazi symphathizers who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust. They would have been severely punished for their deeds, yet they did it anyway, and the world applaud’s their selflessness. In contrast, if a mother lets her newborn baby drown because she doesn’t want to risk harm to herself – however small that risk may be – then any moral person would agree that her actions were immoral and reprehensible.
Now you’re changing the topic. The question at hand isn’t whether morality is absolute. The question – which you yourself raised – is whether morality is merely motivated by self-interest.
It isn’t. If you only avoid wrongdoing because you’re looking out for yourself, then that’s selfishness, not morality.
In other words, if you lived someplace where there were no police, then sexual assault would be miraculously justified. As I said, your “morality” say that if you can get away with rape, without punishment or threat thereof, then it’s all hunky dory. Heck, if someone were to rape your mother, then this act would be justified as well, if we were to apply your standards of (ahem) “morality.”
I wonder if your mother is proud that you feel that way.
I think the point is that although Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, God did not ask that of him but asked for the sacrifice of an animal as a symbol. Jesus was true God and true man and as such had a soul and was the perfect sacrifice (God sacrificing His Son).
Matt 6:34-38: “Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.”
I see these as saying that animals and plants do not have moral responsibility or souls. Putting animals and plants on the same level like this implies that they have similar levels of morality, i.e., none.
Huh? Are you defining morality as doing actions taken without regard for your self-interest, or directly contrary to it? Is running into a wall therefore moral?
Alright, I’m kidding about that last one. But, I’m still lacking a definition of moral.
Gotcha. (Ya.) If you think that you will be rewarded in Heaven for such acts on Earth, than you are being self-serving. If you fear guilt, what will happen to you when the regime falls, or simply don’t want to be a person who gives innocents over to die, then there is a definite stick. For some, this stick was bigger then the percieved stick of being caught.
In the vast, vast majority of cases, respecting other people’s property (counting their bodies and minds here) is a safe thing to do. Trespass/vandalism on a personal level is therefore a majorly bad idea. Even discounting the idea of police, vigilante family members, or the fact that my mother has taken several self-defence classes, the simple logic of “Does this help or hurt me?” makes such an act both reprehensible and really dumb.
And no, she’s actually quite pissed about by moral scale as I explained it to her. On the other hand, it got me to college with no arrests, traffic violations, or tobacco, alcohal, or drug use. So don’t knock it.
Actually, go ahead and keep knocking it. If you strike it down, it will be replaced with a better, stronger one.
I don’t see where that quote puts animals and plants “on the same level”. And just because the Bible says that people are superior to (“worth more”) than birds, it doesn’t follow from that that birds lack souls. Show me a passage that actually says that animals are just automatons, and I’ll be impressed, if only at your ability to dig up obscure Bible quotes.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote that we implicitly hold the belief that animals have souls (or consciousness, or sentience, or whatever you want to call it), but that ours are “bigger” than theirs are. I think that most people who think about these things just tend to deny one of the parts of this implicit belief (either that animals have “souls”, or that humans’ are “bigger”).
As I understand it, the answer lies in the whole “created in God’s image” business. (no need to be impressed, the exact quote isn’t that obscure) This is understood not to refer to a physiological image, but rather a spiritual one. IOW, man is created as a spiritual being, like unto God.
Arrrgh…wait, no, Tygr…don’t open those floodgates… Can’t stop…
Human beings are animals. If you believe that “animals have no souls”, they you are saying human beings have no souls. (Which actually I have no problem with.) If you say “animals can’t sin”, that is, animals can’t do things which are ethically wrong, then you are in effect saying that there is no such thing as an ethically wrong action, which I would have to disagree with.
Did Homo erectus have souls? Did Neandertals have souls? Did archaic Homo sapiens–before Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens sapiens–have souls? At some point in history did a soulless automaton give birth to a little baby with a soul?
Does a dog have the same capacity for abstract reasoning as a human being? I certainly don’t think so. Can a dog feel emotions, including some sort of emotional response to being scolded? And can a dog get to the point where he feels that emotional response even before he’s scolded? Probably so. I think that a chimpanzee could develop more complex moral ideas than a dog can. At some point our pre-human ancestors developed a more complex capacity for abstract thought, including such concepts as empathy–recognizing that others are thinking and feeling beings the same as you are–than even chimpanzees have. Conversely, if you look at history, many biologically fully human beings didn’t seem to have ideas about morality and empathy that we now hold, such as that people who are not members of your immediate clan or tribe nonetheless deserve to be treated as thinking and feeling beings the same as you are. Hell, there are still people out there who don’t believe that. Nonetheless, over the last several thousand years, that basic idea has been expressed in a variety of religions and philosophies, and has gradually taken hold in more and more of the planet, at least nominally. But this development of ethics is not particularly susceptible to the black and white thinking of the “We have souls, but ‘animals’ don’t” sort.