Morality from the ground up

[bennyboy]

For fuck's sake, dude, you're making gargantuan leaps here without taking a second to realize there is a tremendous fundamental difference between us and lower animals. Let's say an animal kills a human-is the animal aware of the nature of their action? Is it capable of participating in a moral discussion in which it can evaluate these things to the level which we can? Is it logical to hold a criminal trial, assess the animal's culpability, maybe find it not guilty by reason of insanity or mental incapability? You are fucking insane if you are putting them on the same level as us. Or should every veterinarian who's ever put someone's pet to sleep be charged with murder, what with all the Dr. Kevorkian controversy?

I get you're trying to make a point but you're using completely incompatible factors to draw a line somewhere, it's really not working.

I don't think I'm making any assumptions at all. I'm trying to address axioms as they are presented. One is the capacity for suffering-- people have greater capacity to suffer, so their suffering matters more. I'm saying this can be discounted by controlling the environment in which moral/immoral acts take place.

You are now looking from the perspective of the moral agent-- someone with the capacity to understand and engage in right action. However, it seems to me that very much of our justice system involves those who consider themselves higher condemning those who are "lower" for their behaviors. For example, if a particularly stupid and easily angered man hurts someone, we will talk about mens rea, and if he can verbalize ANY understanding of right and wrong, we'll hang him for it. But it's obvious that some people are no more capable of controlling their impulses than chimps. It seems to me it's this condescending view of ourselves as better than others that leads to a very real dysfunction in applying moral ideas in real life. We have to identify WITH animals, as we are animals, if we are to arrive at a fair understanding of the moral impulse and the behaviors it leads to, I think. I think Jorg is saying something along those lines in the above post, but I'll answer that one a little later.