Morality from the ground up

[The Grand Nudger]

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

Cultural reasons, sometimes, maybe, but obviously not all the time.  We're working at a rational morality..though, not a cultural flavor of morality.  

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.

Well..success and sentience aren't the same thing.  Theres good reaon to think that an octopus, a squid, some species of spider, and ants as a colony (the only way to consider them with any integrity) have alot more going on "in their heads" than seals though...and we routinely disregard them.  That would only go to show that regardless of how well justified or objective our standards are, our ability or proclivity to consistently apply them is lacking.  That much isn't in doubt no matter what moral system we're referring to...really.  Hell, christians call it "sin" - and their moral system is batshit crazy and completely without rational justification.  

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.)

I'd add deer to that list....lol...but for whatever reason I can't bring myself to kill rats with horns with any regularity.  

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?

Plenty of non-christians think that questioning atheists are assholes.  

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.

You're still being myopic in your view of harm.  You could conceivably murder someone painlessly, but a society in which this was considered moral, a-okay...would absolutely be a harmful society.  You couldn't sleep at night for fear of some Decent Person™ creeping up on you and clubbing you in your sleep.  So, you know that, depsite whatever my moral values tell me I should think..I have very little regard for Some People™.  Imagine you were one of them..and I was creeping around your window at 0-Dark Thirty....armed with Reasons™ and a suppressed M4.

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.

Yup.  Can I suggest a very sharp fillet knife, five inches long - up through the gill at a 45 degree angle to a point just back behind and between the eyes.  Easier than beating them(viscereally easier).  I only beat the onees I throw back, in the hope that this dissuades them from biting again, wasting my bait and time and murderous currency.  

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.

We certainly do have an aversion.  I have written these stories down, I'm still putting them together, along with other stories my family tells (mine aren't the best...the rest have had decades of retelling to make them awesome, the best is my grandfather and his brother setting fire to heir house and what happened to his uncles navy whites when he rolled in to "save" them...not knowing they;d ran for the hills in fear of the belt they knew was coming).  Maybe one day I'll publish it.  Or maybe I'll throw it away and you fine denizens of AF will be the only ones to have heard it told.  I appreciate that you enjoyed it btw.  

+1 for having a pig named Pig Pig.

She's the cutest damned thing. Vietnamese/american cross..snow white, long fur, fat as shit.  Pretty sure she's pregnant as fuck right now.  Free range baby.  My buddies are always asking me when I'm gonna have a roast...I tell them whenever they get around to saying goodbyes to their wives and children.  

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!"

Yeah, my super racist family is like that.  I grew up with cuban kids in the house and treated as family, and my grandfathers only surviving friend is an old black man who calls him boss.  He maintains that "Willy aint like the rest of em".  Willy, on one level, fucking hates my grandfathers guts...but, everyone else they knew is dead, so...lol?