= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DonGeddis comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1329)
Once you've left out the pain I no longer think killing the baby is ethically permissible. And I don't see how knowing that people don't have souls alters my position.
Most people's moral gut reactions say that humans are very important, and everything else much less so. This argument is easier to make "objective" if humans are the only things with everlasting souls.
Once you get rid of souls, making the argument that humans have some special moral place in the world becomes much more difficult. It's probably an argument that is beyond the reach of the average person. After all, in the space of "things that one can construct out of atoms", humans and goldfish are very, very close.
I like what Hook wrote. If I believed that babies were valuable because they have souls and then was told, "no they don't have souls", I might for a while value them less. But it has been a very long time since I believed in souls and the value I assign to babies is no longer related at all to my belief about souls (if it ever was).
Sure, they just don't resemble each other in many morally significant ways (the exception, perhaps, being some kind of experience of pain). There is no reason to think the facts that determine our ethical obligations make use of the same kinds of concepts and classifications we use to distinguish different configurations of atoms. Humans and wet ash are both mostly carbon and water, and so have a lot more in common than, say, the Sun. But wet ash and the sun and share more of the traits we're worried about when we're thinking about morality. The same goes for aesthetic value, if we need a non-ethics analogy.
I think "making the argument that humans have some special moral place in the world" in the absence of an eternal soul is very easy for someone intelligent enough to think about how close humans and goldfish are "in the space of 'things that one can construct out of atoms.'"
Would you please share? I would really, really like to know how the argument that "humans have some special moral place in the world" would work.
Humans are the only animals that seem to be capable of understanding the concept of morality or making moral judgements.
Morality is complicated and abstract. Maybe cetaceans, chimps, and/or parrots have some concept of morality which is simply beyond the scope of the simple-grammar, concrete-vocabulary interspecies languages so far developed.
Show me someone who actually needs to be convinced. Just about everyone acts as if that is true. One could argue that they are just consequentialists trying to avoid the bad consequences of treating people as if they are not morally special. I'm not even sure that is the psychological reality for psychopaths though.
Also, a corollary of what Matt said, if humans aren't morally special, is anything?
The question might be less "do humans have some special moral place in the world" than "do human beings have some special moral place in the world". For example: are we privileging humans over cows to an excessive extent?
Leaving aside the physical complications of moving cows, I think most vegetarians would find the decision to push a cow onto the train tracks to save the lives of four people much easier to make than pushing a large man onto the tracks, implying that humans are more special than cows.
EDIT: The above scenario may not work out so well for Hindus and certain extreme animal rights activists. It may be better to think about pushing one cow to save four cows vs. one human to save four humans. It seems like the cow scenario should be much less of a moral quandary for everyone.
I agree that they would probably have that reaction, but that's not the question; the question is whether that's a rational reaction to have given relatively simple starting assumptions.
Since when were terminal moral values determined by rationality?
'Starting assumptions' as I used it is basically the same concept as 'terminal moral values', and a terminal moral value that refers to humans specifically is arguably more complex than one that talks about life in general or minds in general.
More-complex terminal moral values are generally viewed with some suspicion here, because it's more likely that they'll turn out to have internal inconsistencies. It's also easier to use them to rationalize about irrational behavior.
So then what did you mean by this?