Animal Slavery

[Angrboda]

This can be made even stronger. The advocates often bring up marginal cases — brain damaged persons and not yet mature children — as examples of beings similar to animals in mental ability, and asks us to explain why we don't treat them, morally, the same as we do animals who are possessed of similar mental abilities. Under my evolutionary foundation, the reason we treat them different is because they are human; no additional rationalization is necessary and the problem of marginal cases disappears. This seems to indicate that we naturally, via intuition, make a distinction between the moral significance of the experiences of animals, and that of humans. This seems to show that "humanness" is the default moral boundary, even if it's not fully clear why and how this is.

Firstly regarding evolution, what drives evolution is not the fitness of a species as a whole, but the fitness of individuals and their offspring. For example if one individual in a species develops a mutation it can than outcompete other members of its species and selectively breed with those individuals who have other competitive advantages until they become a new species or the species splits like Darwin's finches. Therefore there is no intrinsic reason for evolution to select for a whole species to be empathise with each other, and indeed considerable reason for us to not empathise as we are all competing for the same environmental niche.

The point is not that we satisfy some arbitrary criterion for species, but that, because of our compatibility, we have shared interests which are furthered by us possessing and fostering certain traits, and we have those traits in common because of the way evolution works. So, yes, evolution works at the gene level, but what's at issue is not strictly the shared genetic material, but the instrumental utility of "playing along" with those traits which we have in common and which serve that sort of shared utility.

Now we will need the ability to empathise some what as we are a tribal species, and the survival of our offspring is intrinsically linked to the success of the tribe. However, warfare and inter-tribal violence has always been a feature of humans, and so we also have the ability to not empathise and be violent towards others for our own gain. There is no intrinsic reason however for us to value one of these tendencies over the other merely from an evolutionary standpoint.

This is a strong objection. However, the point that these shared traits can conspire to produce instrumentally useful results doesn't make them "objectively" valuable, and we don't indulge them solely because they are more natural than other behaviors, we indulge them because our evolved values make it rational for us to indulge them, because their benefits are consistent with the things we have evolved to consider beneficial.

Secondly, using species as a guide to ethics leads to contradictions. Consider our earliest evolutionary ancestor with which we could still breed and create fertile offspring. They are human and so would therefore deserve rights. But then consider this individuals evolutionary ancestors with whom it could breed, but that we (modern humans) could not. Does this very early hominid deserve ethical consideration? It is a different species from us, but not from the intermediate human. Either way one is left with a contradiction because species has fuzzy boundaries.

This is a problem, admittedly. But I think it's more a problem that my explanation is using 'evolution' and 'genetic compatibility' as a short-hand for a bunch of processes that need to be unfurled to show an actual rational basis for shared self-interest. If we have to decide whether to let a denisovans or a Yahweh into the framework, that would be decided on whether those processes line up in that case. And this is only the beginning of the problems for my framework.

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From our point of view, he is neither moral nor immoral. He's just a thing. A thing to be opposed. God is not good. His commands are not moral.

When you say he's not good, are you saying he's neutral? I ask because if you mean he's evil, that seems to contradict your statement that he's neither moral nor immoral.

I mean he's amoral from our perspective. In addition, it's not even clear morality would apply, as he didn't evolve his "needs." Regardless, to us, he's just a blunt force of nature, like hurricanes or gravity.