Morality from the ground up

[bennyboy]

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.

It doesn't equate, but they are obviously related. I gotta make an aside here, though, and say that the potty mouth isn't working for me. There's no major battle here, and nothing so exciting happening that this kind of rhetoric is needed. I have enough stress in RL; I don't really want my forum experience to feel like a flame war.

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

Implied in this is that necessity is one of the variables worth considering in forming moral ideas. That's worth talking about.

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.

There IS this instinctive separation for sure. That's probably why we demonize or animalize our enemies-- because if they aren't as fully human as we are, then they don't fall under the umbrella of moral consideration.

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I'm not asking you if it's okay to kill animals, I'm asking you whether or not the example you offered, being rational..in your estimation, made it okay to kill Bessie, and wondering whether..since it doesn't lead to nazis as it does in the case of people, you're willing to stick with it and declare the killing of animals a-okay.

I don't think killing either Bessie or the immigrant is okay. However, if there is a moral issue with killing animals, it's probably more sourced in their being caused to exist at all than in what you do to them after they have been brought into existence.

I know you aren't, and so the question is more to do with what you thought was rational and whether or not, if it were, you'd be consistent with it.  Or at least consistently rational, and maybe decide that your example wasn't really that compelling of a counterargument to why being able to drug and kill a person isn't moral.  Similarly, can we entertain the absurd claim that by drugging someone you've somehow bypassed all suffering that must be taken into account?  We don;t even make such an absurd claim with regards to our livestock.  Yes, we kill them as humanely as possible, but an ethical model also seeks to provide them with a healthy environment in life.  Failure to do so would render any claim as regards a humane model moot.  It doesn't matter whether or not you kill your victims humanely, if you provide for a torturous and terrifying existence on account of it.  Further, in the case of livestock, we have a compelling reason to even engage in any of this, but forgive me for suggesting that a persons racist and nationalist tendencies don't exactly rise to the level of agricultural necessity....?

Let me clarify the point of using the racist example. I think the main reason that animals aren't much considered in the moral metric is that they are other, and lower, and that we reserve our full moral consideration for those capable of entering into a social contract with us.

But slavery, jew-killing, etc. follow this same principle, and our social mentality is turned against us: black people are animalistic savages, and so by right of our superiority, we don't treat them as we'd treat each other. Jews are tricky little buggers who will wave a contract in front of your face while stabbing you in the back, so we don't need to treat them as we'd treat each other. We view them as humanoid animals, and surprisingly easy adapt to doing them harm without the sense of moral conflict that we probably SHOULD have.

In the example you offered, it wasn't that there was anything particularly special about people, simply that killing them causes immense suffering in ways that killing cattle does not - in both the best and worst of cases.  

It seems, in this, like you're digging in your heels on a plainly silly point rather than having a rational discussion.  I understand that you want to find some obvious issue with such a moral system, but this isn't one of them.  It's consistent and straightforward in the area in which you've attempted to manufacture ambiguity and special pleading.

Further, if the capacity for suffering doesn;t matter...why, again, did killing the caribou bother you?  Why does eating meat bother you?  Why does kicking a dog bother you?  Why would hurting someone -wthout- drugging them bother you?

Killing the caribou bothered me because it was avoidable and served no benefit. Eating meat doesn't bother me because I don't do it. I stopped because I had developed a sense of intrinsic beauty and value in animals, and my desire to eat a Big Mac was less important to me than appreciating that value, even indirectly. I don't want to participate in the killing of an animal that has feelings much like my own.

Hurting someone with or without drugging them bothers me because I've been hurt, didn't like it, and see no rational reason why I'm more important or more worthy of protection than anyone else. (or, in my case, anything else) Except mosquitoes-- fuck mosquitoes, they must die.