The rabbit and fox are processing and resolving their moral arguments the same way humans often do with each other. They don’t verbally argue, because they don’t speak. To determine their behaviors as meaningless because they don’t hold a human conversation is anthropomorphism.
As fish are an example of prototype vertebrates, we can reasonably infer that all animals that shared a common ancestor with fish retained similar biological hardware and share the similar social adaptations. This hardware does not exist in rocks or hot air “creatures”.
When humans observe fish behavior (or rabbits or foxes), it is incorrect to claim, “see how they behave like us,” because our biological machinery is additional complexity overlaid on their base systems.
Don’t assume human social sophistication is all that special just because we have it. Since humans are “merely animals” biologically it is a survival adaptation like any other and over the long term may prove to be an experimentally blip in the historical timeline. There is certainly a case to be made that our lofted intelligence and fictitious free will is superfluous to survival as evidenced by older and abundant animal species around us.
In chronological and evolutionary terms it is more logical to claim that core human social behavior is that of fish (or rabbits or foxes).
A couple of articles to consider:
"Now, fish are regarded as steeped in social intelligence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of manipulation, punishment and reconciliation, exhibiting stable cultural traditions, and cooperating to inspect predators and catch food."
Recent research had shown that fish not only recognised individual "shoal mates" but monitored the social prestige of others, and tracked relationships.
They had also been observed using tools, building complex nests and bowers, and exhibiting impressive long-term memories.
Our inner fish extends beyond physicality. New research reveals that many fish display a wide range of surprisingly sophisticated social behaviors, pursuing interpersonal, interfishal relationships that seem almost embarrassingly familiar.
“Fish have some of the most complex social systems known,” Michael Taborsky, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, said. “You see fish helping each other. You see cooperation and forms of reciprocity.”
Regarding the broader theme (if I'm not too far off the mark). Unlike the rock and air and arguably the Pebblesorters (since I get the impression that they aren’t biological as we know it), the rabbit and fox are biological machines and as such even our rudimentary understanding of their organic systems lends to understanding their moral positions. They are determined to survive. They will seek food and shelter. They will seek fit mates to reproduce. They will nurse their young. They will do some of that complex fish behavior and add a few tricks of their own.
Belief in Artificial Intelligence in a box suffers from the human superstition of disembodied consciousness that we tend to attribute to our Gods and even ourselves in the form of souls (since we classicaly consider ourselves Gods on Earth). However, the meat in our heads and bodies, and the selective recorded experience of this meat in the environment, is us -- along with our fishy programming and all sorts of other “leftover” genetic data.
An AI (or moral agent) needs a body to work in the way that people typically conceive of an artificial person attempting to experience emotions and creativity and all the other sentient and sapient behaviors. The AI needs senses and a means to respond to the environment and all the other trappings and limitations of a corporal form, probably best done with biological materials or approximate synthetics. Even so, without genetic heritage there is small chance that it would behave human or even animal-like unless great pains were taken to program in our survival tendencies starting with our “surprisingly sophisticated social” fish brains.
In other words, it’s not that easy to separate morality from biology. It’s software inherent to the hardware and the historical pressures that shaped them both.
Followup to: The Bedrock of Morality, Abstracted Idealized Dynamics
Tim Tyler comments:
Boy, you know, when you think about it, Nature turns out to be just full of disagreement.
Rocks, for example, fall down - so they agree with us, who also fall when pushed off a cliff - whereas hot air rises into the air, unlike humans.
I wonder why hot air disagrees with us so dramatically. I wonder what sort of moral justifications it might have for behaving as it does; and how long it will take to argue this out. So far, hot air has not been forthcoming in terms of moral justifications.
Physical systems that behave differently from you usually do not have factual or moral disagreements with you. Only a highly specialized subset of systems, when they do something different from you, should lead you to infer their explicit internal representation of moral arguments that could potentially lead you to change your mind about what you should do.
Attributing moral disagreements to rabbits or foxes is sheer anthropomorphism, in the full technical sense of the term - like supposing that lightning bolts are thrown by thunder gods, or that trees have spirits that can be insulted by human sexual practices and lead them to withhold their fruit.
The rabbit does not think it should be eating grass. If questioned the rabbit will not say, "I enjoy eating grass, and it is good in general for agents to do what they enjoy, therefore I should eat grass." Now you might invent an argument like that; but the rabbit's actual behavior has absolutely no causal connection to any cognitive system that processes such arguments. The fact that the rabbit eats grass, should not lead you to infer the explicit cognitive representation of, nor even infer the probable theoretical existence of, the sort of arguments that humans have over what they should do. The rabbit is just eating grass, like a rock rolls downhill and like hot air rises.
To think that the rabbit contains a little circuit that ponders morality and then finally does what it thinks it should do, and that the rabbit has arrived at the belief that it should eat grass, and that this is the explanation of why the rabbit is eating grass - from which we might infer that, if the rabbit is correct, perhaps humans should do the same thing - this is all as ridiculous as thinking that the rock wants to be at the bottom of the hill, concludes that it can reach the bottom of the hill by rolling, and therefore decides to exert a mysterious motive force on itself. Aristotle thought that, but there is a reason why Aristotelians don't teach modern physics courses.
The fox does not argue that it is smarter than the rabbit and so deserves to live at the rabbit's expense. To think that the fox is moralizing about why it should eat the rabbit, and this is why the fox eats the rabbit - from which we might infer that we as humans, hearing the fox out, would see its arguments as being in direct conflict with those of the rabbit, and we would have to judge between them - this is as ridiculous as thinking (as a modern human being) that lightning bolts are thrown by thunder gods in a state of inferrable anger.
Yes, foxes and rabbits are more complex creatures than rocks and hot air, but they do not process moral arguments. They are not that complex in that particular way.
Foxes try to eat rabbits and rabbits try to escape foxes, and from this there is nothing more to be inferred than from rocks falling and hot air rising, or water quenching fire and fire evaporating water. They are not arguing.
This anthropomorphism of presuming that every system does what it does because of a belief about what it should do, is directly responsible for the belief that Pebblesorters create prime-numbered heaps of pebbles because they think that is what everyone should do. They don't. Systems whose behavior indicates something about what agents should do, are rare, and the Pebblesorters are not such systems. They don't care about sentient life at all. They just sort pebbles into prime-numbered heaps.