Morality from the ground up

[bennyboy]

They had no reason to gas the jews either.  Yes, it is a two way street.  We sometimes afford our pets more consideration than human beings.  No matter what our moral system, our moral agency is spotty.  

They definitely had reasons to gas the Jews. They wrote books and books about their reasons, and shouted them at political rallies. We just wouldn't consider them sufficient reasons for the murder of human beings on that Dantean scale.

A question already asked and answered - we generally set the lines along sentience in a rational moral system...but sentiment is also a strong selector, though theres a meta-issue here as well..in that even when we don;t think an animal is all that sentient, we sometimes think that the people who abuse them are still cruel, or immoral.  We might even recognize that a person who mindlessly destroys inanimate objects is somehow broken.  Not because the act, in a vacuum, causes any real harm..but because it strongly correlates with others that do.  

I don't see how any mammal can be seen as insufficiently sentient not to deserve moral consideration. I mean, mother cows cry when you take away their baby cows. Crying mothers are sad, no?

And you've touched on another thing-- the idea of property, and that for sure is a human thing. I sometimes wonder if it is morally reprehensible or morally necessary to separate people from unhealthy attachments: like if someone can't live because she's grown her fingernails to be 15 feet long, I wonder if the best thing wouldn't be to jump her with a pair of scissors.

Some do, some don't.  What do you think, is death harm?

I dunno. I fear death more than most kinds of suffering and loss of property. I'm pretty sure that there are some "Angel of Death" murderers who think they are freeing highly-suffering people by releasing them into the peace of death.

It takes effort and resources to draw earth's materials into an animated form. Death releases those materials, and is in that sense on undoing of all the effort that went into it. Assuming that we see life as a struggle against entropy, and that we take this struggle as good, then I think you could define death as harm.