Followup:
As I recall, Singer thinks - and I think I agree - that there isn’t something uncontroversial that we can ground ethics on, using reason alone. (If there were, we wouldn’t have a Great Debates forum at this point, would we?)
That would be the source for a moral imperative. Absent that, we have to each find our own ethical imperatives.
As others have said above, ethical systems require assumptions/axioms - if you doubt this, try describing what ethics a sociopath, or for that matter an ant, should follow.
Saying that cruelty to animals “has little to no effect on humans or human society” is just astoundingly wrong. The cite above that people who are cruel to animals are likely to be cruel to others is just the tip of the iceberg – it’s much more fundamental than that.
Mahatma Gandhi is supposed to have said that “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members” and therein lies the real truth. Most of the higher animals are sentient beings, and are precisely our most vulnerable members, along with our poor and our disadvantaged. It’s not about the equivalence of animal and human, it’s about the universality of empathy with sentient beings without making selfish or anthropocentric value judgments. How we treat animals is a perfect examplar of how we are likely to treat humans who we perceive to be beneath us and to offer us no possible advantage, or those whom we oppose for reasons of prejudice or ideology.
There are many variants of the same parallel; Pearl Buck said “Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is that way that it cares for its helpless members.” The values expressed in all those sentiments are all exactly the same.
I forgot to add, an oft-cited variant of Gandhi’s quote is that “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its animals”. That’s about as succinct a summary as any of what I was trying to say. The evil that we do is usually symptomatic, and when we do it as a society it usually comes back to us, in a sort of divine justice.
Okay, one more stab at this and I’ll shut up (at least temporarily):
I may have been unclear in my description of Singer’s discussion of the choice to be ethical, so let me say it again in big letters: IT IS A LEAP OF FAITH. This is fundamentally different from doing something because someone (God, your parents, the state) told you to.
This is you choosing to do something that no one can make you choose to do.
If you read Singer’s book, he tries to convince readers to embrace ethics (by using his own preferred preference-utilitarian ethical system). But he does acknowledge that at some point we need to choose to be ethical.
And we don’t have to! If we reject the choice to be ethical, no one will be able to use logic to tell us that we were wrong to rape and strangle that 6-year-old, or cheat on our taxes.
So - does morality precede ethics? Yes, if “morality” is the logically unjustifiable choice we make about how to deal with other humans. But the moral authority that dictates the fundamentals that will shape our ethical choices is within each of us.
I think there’s a tension in your earlier post between the statements that “morality is at root arbitrary” (versus ethics, which are supported by an attempted justification) and “under moral rules, you should be good because someone says you should”. Is the arbitrariness which characterises morality, or the command?
If it’s the arbitrariness then, yes, your “leap of faith” choice to be good is a moral choice, not an ethical one, and all your later ethical decisions are applications of that moral decision. So morality does precede ethics, it seems to me
If it’s the command, do we have a situation where an ethical rule becomes a moral one whenever obedience is commanded?
Or is it the case that we only have “morality” where there is both abitrariness and command? In which case we are lacking a term for rules of behaviour which are arbitrary, but not commanded. Which would include Singer’s initial choice to be ethical.
If you break anything like morality, ethics, whatever down to its core reasoning there is no such thing as right or wrong because all these things are subjective values applied by humans, you can’t objectively prove something is right or wrong. Even arguments about doing what is “right” in order for society to function rests on the subjective belief that society is a good thing or attempts to justify that you should follow these rules because it benefits you in return and that could be true for why people as a whole or group should arguably make moral choices but it doesn’t really hold up at the individual level if that individual can game the system by being immoral but avoid getting caught doing so. I’m not really advocating such behavior and it isn’t how I live my life but I think it is the reality when you really stop and think about the subject long enough.
But I think cruelty to animals is a symptom, not a cause. If someone is cruel to animals, then he or she was probably a sadistic person to begin with. If they subsequently move on to hurting people, that simply is another manifestation of their sadistic nature. The cruelty to animals didn’t cause subsequent cruelty to humans; furthermore, banning animal cruelty doesn’t change who sadistic people are on the inside.
The point here is that being an animal the one that is being hurt or killed now is not the point; the point is that ignoring it, as it is being proposed, only leads to blissfully ignore the warning signs that are useful to humans so as to help prevent the death of humans, it could be useful even to prevent your own demise or the one of your loved ones.
I tried to address this upthread, but perhaps I wasn’t clear. In my view this is completely wrong-headed thinking because what may be a “symptom” in an individual becomes a “cause” in society, because a society that tolerates savagery is normalizing it and thus encouraging it and creating a climate where it becomes acceptable, and it can potentially spiral into more and more such behaviors becoming tolerated. This is the meaning of the expression that “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members”. Part of how you judge a society is by the norms of empathy and compassion that it holds. Those can become degraded by groupthink self-reinforcement even in otherwise good people.
Why accept Jesus now? If you accept Jesus at twenty or at eighty after leading a life of total debauchery, the reward is the same: You go to heaven. Hell, if the 9/11 hijackers accepted Jesus before the planes hit the buildings, they are now supposedly in heaven.
I’m amazed by the number of people who think animal cruelty isn’t wrong based on the suffering it causes animals. If you take the radical and scientifically unsupported view that animals cannot suffer, then it hardly makes sense to speak of animal cruelty, any more than we speak of car cruelty when I bang my hand on the steering wheel in frustration.
It seems tautological that suffering is bad and that cruelty is morally wrong (Thank you for pointing that out, Waldo Pepper) unless you mean something radically different by one of those terms.
If you want to reduce only some instances of suffering and cruelty, it may be possible to make that position rationally consistent, but it is up to you to justify whatever lines you draw. It seems to me that the easiest place to draw the line (other than drawing it to include all suffering and cruelty as things to minimize) is to draw it such that one cares only about one’s own suffering–I don’t think there is anything logically inconsistent in being a psychopath. Draw the line anywhere else, and I think you are going to have a real problem making your criteria non-arbitrary and self-consistent. (Which may not bother you, but it means that you are willing to tolerate suffering and cruelty without any justification, which puts you firmly in the morally wrong camp by my definition.)
That’s not to say that animals suffer from the same things or in the same ways that we do, or that we can practically act to reduce suffering in animals the way we can with humans (especially given the suffering inherent in the natural life of most animals.)
With all due respect to Gandhi and you, I would disagree with this reasoning. I do not believe that animals are sentient or members of our society. Animals are not entitled to the same rights that human beings are.
One obvious example is consumption. Humans eat animals on a regular basis. We do not eat our fellow humans, even the ones at the bottom of the social ladder. The fact that we can routinely treat animals as food without considering the possibility of cannibalism shows that we see a clear line between animals and humans.
I’ll acknowledge that people who are intentionally cruel to animals are often dysfunctional in other ways. But that’s because we have a social taboo against animal cruelty. A person who violates one social taboo is likely to violate others. Torturing kittens doesn’t turn you into a serial killer. It’s some other factor in your background that leads you to aberrant behavior like torturing kittens and serial killing.
I think the animal-ethics question is an interesting one. Animals themselves (at least up to the higher primates and cetaceans) don’t have ethics. Ethics is something that comes along with speech, stable social groupings (‘civilization’) and awareness of the past and the future. Animals are not (to me) entitled to the same rights as humans, but that doesn’t follow that they are not entitled to any rights or consideration.
I think the only thing close to what the OP is actually asking for is snoe’s suggestion in post #15. Even non-reproductive, consensual, non-power-imbalanced incest produces in most people a sense of instinctive, utter revulsion. Even in cases where, eg the incest is between siblings who were raised apart. What degree of relation is ‘acceptable’ and which is ‘icky’ varies between and within cultures, but there is really no ‘logical’ reason for these particular feelings of ‘ickiness’.
An extreme example: I am an only child, and thus have no real idea of what it is like to have a sibling. But when I hear about people who are in relationships who only portray brother and sister on TV, I still get a residual feeling of ick: Michael C Hall and the actress who played Deb, his sister, on Dexter, got married, and it grossed me out, for example. I feel this way when I hear about fanfiction written that ‘slashes’ fictional siblings Dean and Sam Winchester on Supernatural. There is 100% no ‘logical’ justification for why this ‘feels’ wrong. But it does.
I venture that if, indeed, there is any answer to this question, it will be like this – a penumbra of a ‘logical’ or rational practice or belief that still applies, even though the central reason for the case is removed.
That’s not the only reason…but it is a reason, and a valid one.
(It’s sort of like saying you shouldn’t get into alley fights with razors with gang members…because you’ll mess up your clothing. It’s true, and valid, but not the principal reason.)
What Little Nemo was saying seemed to indicate that he thought it was THE reason. I was asking for clarification to be sure, but he did say that he doesn’t think non-human animals are sentient (which means capable of having feelings). If that’s how he sees it, I certainly hope his is an outlier opinion.
I was under the impression—correct me if I’m wrong—that there have been cultures, in certain parts of the world and at certain times in history, that haven’t been at all concerned with the welfare of animals and haven’t seemed to find their suffering at all problematic.
I also get the impression that there have been plenty of people throughout history who apparently haven’t seen anything morally wrong in causing other human beings to suffer, if those humans are one’s enemies.
I, personally, agree that it’s morally wrong to cause unnecessary suffering. This belief may even be objectively true. But it doesn’t seem to be universally held or obvious to all.
I’ll go on record as saying I am firmly opposed to kitten torture.
I will admit to some semantic confusion. I was thinking of sentience in the sense of self-awareness and intelligence; in that sense I don’t believe that most animals other than humans are sentient. But sentience also means capable of sensing things and having feelings; I agree that most animals have that capacity.
Ironically, I hold humans to a higher standard because we are sentient (in the former meaning of the term). Cats torture mice to death but I don’t think they’re immoral for doing so; they lack the awareness to have a moral code. But humans are aware of what they’re doing, so it’s immoral for a human to torture an animal. And that’s because it’s wrong (in the sense this thread is discussing) not because it has negative consequences.
I would say it’s all but inescapable that the “higher mammals” have feelings, self-awareness, even a pretty advanced intelligence. Dogs really do suffer when you harm them – or even when you scold them harshly!
That said, yeah, it really is only a “cultural value” that we shouldn’t cause harm and pain…to anyone or anything. The “fierce people” of the Yanamamo were thought to be harsh, unfeeling, cruel, and vicious (later study shows this was perhaps a misreading of their values.) It’s not at all impossible for a society to exist bereft of the kind and gentle moral values we favor.