Morality from the ground up

[Astonished]

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.

I don't give a flying fuck about what our justice system does, that does not by rote make what they do automatically moral. Law does not equate with morality by default. Yet another bad comparison.

Of course as beings with empathy we can identify with animals, it's why we recognize that being needlessly cruel is a sign of sociopathic behavior. But if we benefit from a natural biological process (consumption being the most basic example), and it's proven that based on blood type, some people's bodies simply do not thrive on vegetarian/vegan diets, or we benefit from our discovery of new forms of medical procedures, medicines or donor blood and organ availability via animal experimentation, it's hardly for no good reason. Since animals can't give positive or negative consent, or comprehend what's happening or what's at stake, it doesn't seem like they have the capacity to really CARE in the long run what ultimately happens to them. Odds are their genes are still being passed on via their siblings who escape that fate long enough to be bred or cloned or whatever.

Bill Maher got chewed out on his show for comparing someone with severe mental disabilities to a pet, so it's not remotely a stretch for people to see something intrinsically wrong with using a lack of or diminished capacity for joy and suffering as the sole criteria for one's being subject to what we routinely do to animals. No animal's family (if they even have one, or even possess the capacity for it; sharks, for instance) is going to have the same capacity to suffer as a human family's losing one of their members. That lack of capacity is not a biological fact in humans, it's a rare anomaly, while in lower animals, it's a pretty set biological limit until some shift in evolution seems to counteract it. There's no expectation that it could improve, and let's face it, with the right medical research, we could probably someday end that rare condition in humans altogether. Then that little analogy between them and animals would fall flat on its face.

There's a reason running over an animal is not considered a vehicular-manslaughter-esque crime in the way it would were it a person. There's a reason, accident or not, our fault or not, if we do happen to hit a fellow human, we feel far more sick and guilty. There's an internal understanding that we are that different from even our closest evolutionary kin even if we don't actively comprehend just how much or why. Unless we're willing to completely overwrite everything, give them all the exact same rights we enjoy, I don't see exactly how one could justify not treating them differently. And if we decided to discriminate against some animals more than others, that would be hypocrisy.