I was under the impression (though this is from an Intro Biology class, so it’s very possibly oversimplified for the purpose of ease of education) that somewhere close to 99% of all genetic information is shared by all organisms (as I don’t have my notes with me, I may be misremembering animals/some other classification in favor of organisms). This seems to simultaneously accept and explain this idea.
Humanity doesn’t deserve to live. We certainly shouldn’t be the arbiters of what should live or die.
The larger elephant will try to keep its genes active within its own species. Apply this to humans…
Actually, you are mistaken - two species have to be pretty closely related to have 99% sequence similarity (man and chimps or gorillas). This is not to say that there aren’t some genes which exist (in relatively constant form) in all living things - there are. But these are the exception, not the norm.
Humans are trying to cause the extinction of mosquitos? Since when? I doubt if anybody thinks that they could be wiped out totally. Controlled in a particular area, maybe. Too many other species rely on mosquitos and the result of their loss would be devestating.
All humans are about 99.x% genetically the same. Humans and chimps are 95 - 98% genetically the same, depending on whose data you believe. Humans and mice are about 90% genetically the same.
Well, well, well…somebody thinks rather highly of himself eh? So sure you’re my intellectual superior? Oooooh, your username claims you have a PhD, so obviously you’re a mental giant. That sort of smug claim about intellectual superiority isn’t bandied about lightly on these boards, and surely not on GD. I wager to say that’s rather jerkish behaviour on your part and advise you to refrain from it in the future.
Nonetheless, I’ll deal with your point.
To me, the matter of whether an entity is morally considerable is not a matter of degree, but rather there is a threshold, and all entities above it are morally considerable, those below are not. It’s not a matter of “intelligence” as the word is commonly used, but rather a matter of self-awareness and future-oriented mental states. After all, if an entity has no preference about how it’s future life might go, no hopes or dreams or ambitions, how can killing it be immoral? You don’t deprive it of anything by killing it. It didn’t value it’s own life, because only reason can judge value, and the lower animals (and certainly the sorts of insects and plants we’re talking about with extinction rates) cannot reason, have no concept of self, and no aspirations that it’s death might frustrate.
Humans meet the threshold of having self-awareness and future-oriented mental states, and therefore all humans are morally considerable. Even the most slothful and lazy human has, at the very least, some things that it values and seeks with the power of its reason. And because it is not a matter of degree, it doesn’t matter how much more any individual or group may be able to meet those requirements. One can surely conceive of an alien race coming to meet us someday far in the future, or the other way around, and no matter who was more intelligent, all would be equally morally considerable if they met the threshold requirement. That is the ethical principle I hold, so you can see why it cannot possibly be applied to situations of oppression and genocide between groups of morally considerable beings, which all humans are.
And don’t go around suggesting I don’t have any “compassion” for other lives. When was the last time you stood outside the governor’s mansion protesting the state-sanctioned murder of a human being? I simply exclude from my ethical theory those entities that do not warrant ethical consideration.
Oh, and to clarify, looking at where the rest of this discussion has gone…
I am certainly open to the notion that some animals might meet the threshold I set for being a morally considerable entity. There is anecdotal evidence that chimps, dogs, even dolphins have from time to time exhibited behaviour that might indicate a self-concept (ape recognizes self in mirror) or a non-instinctual value judgment indicative of reason (dog saves boy from fire, dolphin saves diver from shark.) The latter cases are likely to be entirely apocryphal, but the case with apes is worth a second look. In any case, I think that’s worth treading lightly in our actions towards those species.
Insects, plants, cows, chickens, pigs, elephants, viruses, camel spiders, and so on exhibit none of these characteristics, and therefore I see no reason to treat them as morally considerable entities. Rather, their value is contingent upon their being judged valuable by humans through our power of reason.
RexDart:
My apologies for the delay in my reply - had to go out of town for a wedding…
Let me assure you that my claim of intellectual superiority is not something I “bandy about lightly”; if you’re questioning my credentials, I can assure you that my Ph.D. (Molecular Biology, U. of Wisconsin-Madison) is 100% genuine. As for claiming to be a “mental giant” - I don’t know if I’d go that far, but at least I’m not a law student who claims to have conclusively pinned down the answer to a question which has occupied countless scientists (including some of the best biologists of all time) for centuries. As you may (or may not) be aware, there’s an entire branch of biology (cognitive ethology) that’s devoted to particularly these kinds of questions - trying to understand the extent to which animal behavior is influenced by thought and conscious decisions/preferences/desires. I’m sure it will be of interest to the hundreds of people worldwide who work in this field that they can all pack up their research and go home, 'cause RexDart has it all worked out. And, by the way, all of their data was “apocryphal”.
By the way, if any of this qualifies as “jerkish” to you, I had the same reaction to your “f*ck all animals” line…
Anyway, on to your argument. You say that, to be “morally considerable”, an animal/being has to reach some magical “threshold” based on self-awareness, “future-oriented thought”, and a preference or desire as to what happens to it. Anything that fails to meet these criteria (as well as my personal favorite, from your first post, that it somehow be “necessary to our existence”) is subject to extermination without a second thought. One additional point of clarification: You’re attempting to marginalize my argument by implying that I’m talking about “insects and plants”, which isn’t the case. I still don’t think it’s at all wise from an ecological perspective to wipe out species of this sort willy-nilly. This is also, by the way, a point which most ecological scientists would agree with - we simply aren’t advanced enough to know what species might be the straw that broke the camel’s back with regard to holding the whole ecosystems together. The analogy that’s been used for years is popping rivets out of an airplane. Nonetheless, that’s not the point behind this particular argument (if you read my original post, it referred to lemurs in Madagascar, and no major shift had occurred in the thread prior to your orignal entry).
Your whole “threshold” argument has the convenient corollary that since humans as a whole have reached your cutoff value, it doesn’t matter that numerous cases can be found that don’t. This is why, as an aside, this kind of black-and-white thinking isn’t very useful in science. The severely retarded, those with Alzheimer’s disease, and others will fail on at least one of your counts. They’ll display no (or VERY limited) concepts of self, time (past or future - without this, it’s pretty difficult to have “future-oriented” thought), consequences to actions, death, etc. They probably don’t “want” to die in the strictest biological sense that they’d fight you if you tried to kill them (more on that below), but that doesn’t mean they have any real concept of what it means. Deaf-mutes and people in long-term comas are undoubtedly capable of all of your criteria; however, unless you were capable of communicating with them in a very precise way (which is, of course, the only way you could measure most future-oriented thoughts and desires), you might well never be able to prove it. The same goes for your hypothetical example of aliens. Would you assume that any highly-intelligent alien race with which you could not communicate with must lack all of the above qualities simply because you can’t figure out how to quatify them? This concept will also come up again below. Finally, I defy you to produce any argument as to how the lives of any of these groups of people are in any way “necessary” for the rest of our survival. So, absent your corollary, they’re all “morally inconsiderable” (I guess this would be the appropriate antonym form), and completely expendable. My point is this: the fact that you need such a contrived corollary to whitewash over so many cases that don’t fit your initial set of “rules”, in my mind at least, calls the whole set of rules into question. Would you as a legal scholar consider a law to be a good one if it had to be immediately followed up with dozens of exceptions and loopholes?
OK, on to self-awareness in animals. Self-awareness was first conclusively demonstrated (in mirror experiments) with chimps. Once chimps became accustomed to mirrors, and to their own reflections in them, they were anesthetized and their faces were marked with dye. When they were again shown their reflections, the responses of these animals not only clearly demonstrated that they recognized something was different, but that that something was on themselves (i.e. their investigations of the dyespots were directed at their faces, rather than the mirrors. So far, this has been duplicated with orangutans and gorillas. Experiments with dolphins have been inconclusive, and dogs have so far failed. Here’s the kicker - mirror experiments may fail with other animals not because they’re not self-aware, but because our concept of what they key on in their self-recognition process is out-of-whack. Hauser et al (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 92:10811-10814) showed in cotton-top tamarins (a non-hominid, considerably “lower” species of monkey) “failed” mirror tests when the dye was applied to their faces, but passed with flying colors when it was applied to the very distinctive tuft of hair on their heads. In other words, if we can’t even pin down what features a species considers important in recognizing itself, proving its self-awareness is likely to be damn difficult. It is precisely these frame-of-reference issues that caused me to caution another poster that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. Most researchers feel that self-awareness of some level or another is necessary for all animals who live in social groups with well-defined hierarchies (some concept of the self being necessary to understand that one has a place in the social order); if so, this will encompass not only essentially all primates, but also most wild canids (wolves, hyenas), elephants, lions, etc. I suspect it goes farther down the evolutionary ladder than that - I’d argue that any animal which can feel (if you prefer, “demonstrate”) fear has to have some sense of self, as it has to recognize that the thing it is fearing is going to happen to or effect it.
Future-oriented thought and a preference in their own fate: I quote Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth (taken from Richard Leakey’s The Origin of Mankind:
**A monkey confronted with this all this non-random turnoil (the complex interactions of monkey societies) cannot be content with learning simply who’s dominant or subordinate to herself; she must also know who’s allied to whom and who’s likely to aid and opponent ** (emphasis mine).
Sounds like at least some element of forward thinking and future-oriented thought, doesn’t it? Again, one would have to assume that this holds true to some extent or another in any highly-social animal, as above.
As for the latter (preference in their own fate), this is clearly much more difficult to measure. Virtually all animals will resist attempts to kill them, and appropriately-conditioned animals will avoid behaviors that they know will lead to pain or other negative consequences. Beyond that, it’s tough to say. Again, I’ll submit to you that this is just as likely to be because we don’t yet know how to measure any of the less-obvious desires. I hate to repeat myself, but if you were plunked down on a desert island with a person from a completely different culture, with whom you couldn’t effectively communicate, you’d have a pretty tough time figuring out how he wanted his life to unfold. I hope that wouldn’t mean you’d automatiucally assume he didn’t give a shit…