Morality from the ground up

[bennyboy]

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.

Reasons™

1) Yes, for sure.
2) When it comes to cultural values, are there any other kind?

Other mammals feature heavily in our moral considerations.  Funny thing about that, most of them are dumb as a bag of rocks.  Mammals benefit greatly from familiarity and comfort.  Meanwhile, a great many non mammalian species that we have good reason to believe have a rich interior life are given little to no regard.  

This is actually part of my question. Clubbing baby seals is going to get a strong negative reaction from a lot of people. Clubbing a very clever (or at least interestingly adapted) species of lizard, less so. Killing members of maybe the most successful species in Earth's timeline, the cockroach, will get VERY little pushback, even from the most determined hippie.

Then there are mosquitoes. They have no intrinsic value at all, and must be actively hunted and eliminated wherever possible. If humanity lives only long enough to wipe those fuckers off the face of the Earth, our time here will not have been in vain.

(. . . or something that more greatly values live in general, rather than the little retarded humans we call baby mammals.)

Property isn't uniquely human, we just have the most amusingly elaborate rituals regarding property - a somewhat new wrinkle for our species, so far as we can tell.  I suppose that whether or not a person thinks that there's a moral compulsion to remove someones property (or any unhealthy attachment) touches on a persons idea of sovereignty.  We confiscate cats from cat ladies (and lion ladies..if you're from florida, lol).  We intervene in the case of addicts and baker act unstable people.  So..it certainly seems that at least in some cases the scales tip towards necessity.......though, my aunt collects ceramic clowns.  Lots of them.  A disturbingly large amount of them.  She's doing great now - but there was a rough patch in her life where she probably should have spent whatever meager cash she had on food, rather than clowns.  If somebody came and confiscated her clowns, most of us would probably consider that to be morally reprehensible.  So, case by case basis?  There seems to be a threshold of self harm that we're comfortable with, possibly because intervening in every case would be even more harmful - a totalitarian moralizing society has been tried time and time again...it ends poorly.  

This is a unique case we haven't really talked about much-- that there may be a possibility that CAUSING harm is moral, on the grounds that function is sometimes more important than comfort.

It certainly harms a Christian in some ways for his world view to be challenged such that he has a moment of philosophical crisis. Instead of thinking that his little girl who died of leukemia is with loved ones and God, he may realize that she's gone, and that her body is only plant food, and not even very much of it. I doubt there will be much benefit to him in arriving at this conclusion. And yet, few non-Christians would consider questioning his religious views an immoral act-- or would they?

Personally, I see death as an inevitability.  Not, in and of itself, harmful.  The only time I would attach some moral component to a natural death is when some other person could prevent it, and the person didn't want to die.  Or if, by harming another, you caused an untimely death.  Both are subject to many, many qualifications.  In general, I avoid killing shit where I can.  

I'm not sure that even murder can be called harm. Surely, there's often a brief suffering involved. But the actual not-being-alive-anymore part, that's philosophically tricky. Does loss of memory, the missing of the chance to walk under the sun and hear the birds sing again, constitute harm?

I'm not sure about that, but I'd call murder immoral in almost any context unless there were a very clear greater good.

Wasn't always this way, though.  I don't know if I ever had occasion to tell you this story whenever we were chatting..but-  When I was maybe six or seven, I got a daisy bb gun.  One of those little pump handle deals that you could shoot somebody with and leave, maybe, a welt.  My grandfather though, big time hunter.  I wanted to be just like him.  So, I was always looking for stuff to shoot that the bb gun might be able to kill.  Lizards, cicadas, cockroaches, snakes, small birds.  On top of that, bb's from those little guns (if you never had one) have a tendency to curve at random.  They're slow enough to watch from the barrel out - which i guess is a mesmerizing part of the fixation.  So - whatever you were going to reliably hit..it had to be close..and preferably stationary.   The juiciest target, all things considered, were songbirds in the nest.  So, me being me, I pop this little songbird...and it falls right out and down.  Immediately, I have a sinking sort of feeling - but, also, it was fascinating - until mama bird flew down.  She buzzed me a few times and then landed there, by the dead bird, and started chirping.  It seemed, at the time, that her chirps were a frantic accusation.  It was so loud in my ears and the shame I felt became so pronounced that there was only one thing to do.  I shot her too.  I immediately realized that I would never be the great white hunter.  I only ended up going hunting with my grandfather once.  We went out to a palmetto hammock in NW Florida, by the Suwannee, where Ichetucknee Spring flows down through the Sante Fe and the headwaters meat.  It was a long ride at four in the morning.  We ate funnel cake we had from the state fair and drank cold coffee.  I was anxious, the whole way, I knew he had expectations and that it would be difficult for me to play it off if I couldn't shoot a deer.  I was fourteen by this time so I'd been shooting for a decade.  It wasn't like he'd have believed me if I told him I missed.  Deep down, I knew I couldn't.  We spent the morning in a tree stand over some apple dusted corn he;d laid out the week before.  We're ambush hunters and poachers...not wandering through the brush tracking types, lol.  I got lucky, ultimately, when we finally saw a deer in the wild I was so excited that I almost jumped out of the stand and I shout "Poppy Look!" - so, ofc, that thing bolts at top speed into the fronds.  "There's another one!" - again, off into the woods.   spent the rest of the time using my rifle like a heavy set of binos - which is mostly how I use it today when I go hunting.  There wasn't a single deer I couldn't scare off on accident before he could shoot it.  He never even discussed taking me again.  Still doesn;t..though I did get over that anxiety later in life.  Now I play follow up shot to necks with deer fever, who miss and maim.  Mostly, though, I just like hanging out in the woods.  I like setting the stands in the right spots.  I like staring at the deer through my scope...sometimes I make little "pop" noises with my lips and whisper, under my breath "gotya bitch".  I still ruin other peoples hunts, but I've learned to do it casually as a running joke.  "Hey Bill....there's an 8 pointer, right over there."  Oops, there he went.  Maybe next time.  My buddies joke that I'm batting for the other side, lol.

1) Similar story for me, but with fishing. I went with my uncle. We walked up the train tracks (live ones, and through a tunnel even!) to get to our family's secret fishing hole. We had our favorite brand of root beer, a basket of sandwiches made by grandma-- it was a regular Norman Rockwell painting. But when we caught a fish, I couldn't bring myself to bash its head. My uncle told me it was cruel not too-- either kill it or put it back. We didn't have fish for dinner, and that was the end of that.

2) I think most people can relate to your story. I really feel we have to learn to overcome an aversion to killing. I personally have a much greater respect for people who have ever killed an animal themselves than I do for people who buy meat as Food™ and never once consider that they are eating something that once had a life of its own.

3) You should seriously consider putting about 100 of these stories into a book.

So, I guess for you it was a car and a caribou - which, frankly, would make my stomach turn.  For me, it was a pair of robins and a bb gun.  Still, I've been known to hack snakes to pieces with a machete while shouting at them, and when I go fishing, I carry a hammer handle to beat gar and any other inedible before I throw it back into the water.   I'm not much for kjilling chickens, my grandmother made me spin their necks with my hands and pluck em as a child..and I kindof like watching them peck around and play dinosaur, lol.  I'll club a stray with a shovel if it screws with with the henhouses - which is easy to do, since they seem to think that human beings are their friends and benefactors.....and -anything- that fucks with my pig, Pig Pig.  Obviously, I've been known to pull the trigger back at people.  

So, spotty, right?  Still, no matter what my reasons for killing something may be, there's a certain uneasiness that I;ve just learned to live with.  It's not like I don't understand that I'm inflicting the greatest and most final sort of harm.  I even think about it when I spray pesticides, which isn;t very often.  Spiders are welcome in my home (despite Missy's -strenuous- protestations ).  I suppose there's a ritual to it, for me, and a pronounced sense that all of this death links us together.  Birds and spiders and snakes and dogs and deer and cattle and caribou...and human beings.  It wouldn;t really surprise me if I ended up getting kicked by a horse or gored by a bull, bitten by a copperhead..someday, when I;m old and feeble or just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I suppose I;d rather go out that way than after a long infirmity through illness.   In that sense, something finally killing me, for a change, could be seen as a mercy.  Not just for myself but for all of the things I would invariably kill with every passing day.

+1 for having a pig named Pig Pig.

Your stories, and mine, really do seem to have a common element: it seems to me that humans (at least some of them) have a national inclination toward empathy with other species (at least some of them) and other humans, especially babies. I've many times heard even the hardest racist say things like, "Black babies are so damned cute, why do they have to end up like that?" I've even seen adopted black kids who grew up, and all their friends are hardcore racist, but they don't include him as black: "He ain't really a n@#%-er, he likes Hank Williams!"