Group prayer on Skype on behalf of our Christian members

[Huggy Bear]

De Waal was the source YOU provided as corroborating the idea that animals have a sense of morality. De Waal claims no such thing, so instead of admiting you were wrong, you start backpedaling, that is typical atheist behavior.

Againg De Waal was YOUR source not mine.

You seem to either not have read my response, ignored my point or misunderstood it.

De Waal provided evidence and an interpretation of that evidence.

I disagree with that interpretation.

I think he provided evidence of animals with rudimentary morality.

I must point out yet again that De Waal is the source that YOU provided. If you're disagreeing with your own source then that puts you back at square one... Provide a source to back up your claims.

As far as I know, no expert is claiming that animals are moral beings, especially your own source.

Further, de Waal doesn't go so far as to equate animal goodness with morality. "I am reluctant to call a chimpanzee a 'moral being'," he writes.

Chimps are the closest you're going to get to being human like, and if he wont call a chimp a moral being, then no animal is a moral being.

There aren't degrees to morality, morality is simply the ability to know right and wrong, it's basic human understanding.

If that was so then the trolley problem would not be of such interest. There are many situations where it is not clear what is the right or wrong thing to do. This is what philosophy concerns itself with. Philosophers often try to figure out such answers.

The trolley problem? A totally hypothetical situation? I'd argue that the person who tied  people to the tracks in the first place bears the responsibility for any deaths that occurred.

Knowing right from wrong means you understand WHY something is right or wrong. If you don't know why murder is wrong, I'd argue you don't have any sense of morality.

Easy with clear cut examples such as murder. What about state sanctioned murder such as the death penalty? Abortion? The answer is not so obvious for these. If it was, they would not contentious issues.

I don't think anyone would have a problem with the death penalty if the justice system was perfect...

As far as abortion goes, it seems some would play fast and loose with the definition of life...

That being said, the answer to both of those issue would be obvious if the justices system was perfect, and if an unborn child was considered a 'person'.

Animals have absolutely zero ability to reason, therefore they cannot be moral.

Wrong.

Here are examples of a squirrel reasoning about how to get to a bird feeder

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Crow understanding water displacement to retrieve food (loads of other videos of them using tools)

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Also dolphins are known to save people from sharks. That sounds fairly moral to me.

I think you need to learn the difference between the ability to solve problems vs the ability to reason.

Young children have the ability to problem solve, yet we don't hold them responsible for their actions, why?


Self-taught, ‘superhuman’ AI now even smarter, says creators

THE computer that stunned humanity by beating the best mortal players at a strategy board game requiring “intuition” has become even smarter, its creators claim.

Dubbed AlphaGo Zero, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) system learnt by itself, within days, to master the ancient Chinese board game known as “Go” — said to be the most complex two-person challenge ever invented.

It came up with its own, novel moves to eclipse all the Go acumen humans have acquired over thousands of years.

After just three days of self-training it was put to the ultimate test against AlphaGo, its forerunner which previously dethroned the top human champs.

AlphaGo Zero won by 100 games to zero.

“AlphaGo Zero not only rediscovered the common patterns and openings that humans tend to play ... it ultimately discarded them in preference for its own variants which humans don’t even know about or play at the moment,” said AlphaGo lead researcher David Silver.

The 3000-year-old Chinese game played with black and white stones on a board has more move configurations possible than there are atoms in the Universe.

My question to you is, do you belive a computer posses the ability to reason?

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I just posted from a scientific source that stated animals aren't moral.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal

So a single Wikipedia article about one single researcher is a scientific source now, is it?   No summary or survey of all published Peer reviewer professional papers?   No survey of their citations?

*emphasis mine*
What's your response to that?

Response to what?  To the fact that not only did you cherry pick a non-scientific source and pretend it reflects the scientific consensus, but had to misrepresent the content of what you cherry picked in order to achieve the effect?

The very paragraph before the quote you cherry picked from the source you cherry picked says “the possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rates....”

*emphasis mine*
First of all, as far as I know, one source beats ZERO sources; Which is the amount YOU provided after repeated requests...

Second of all were not discussing "empathy" (I don't know how one would measure 'empathy' in the first place) were discussing morality. De Waal clearly stated he would not call a Chimp a moral being, are rats more evolved than a Chimp?