Proving What We Already "Know"

[bennyboy]

Here's one to ponder, though-- feelings of distrust exist due to their evolutionary value.  Being an open-hearted unconditional lover of all mankind is fine and well, but it doesn't help your genetic fitness when your offspring is rotting face-down in a secluded swamp with a load of jizz up its ass.

/end disconnected random rant

One of the many...many reasons neither I nor objectivism consider a thing moral or immoral based on it's utility to me or whether I feel a certain way as a product of my biological origin.  

"I don't just hunt animals for food, I hunt them for fun."

I suspect you may, in fact, have as feelings-based a moral system as the "squee" that makes people fall in love with baby animals.  But your instincts don't say "squee" they say "rawr" in that context.  I'm trying to give you a moral escape, in that your "rawr" instinct is external to your conscious awareness-- it is part of your mental environment, let's say, and those feelings are a product of billions of years of animal interactions that you have nothign to do with.  But if you don't think its emotions that serve as the differential basis for your moral calculation, then what, objectively, IS?

But maybe, as you say, I don't understand anything about anything.  Certainly, I have little regard for the terms "subjectivist, objectivist, realist" etc. that you keep applying to me and then telling me I don't understand. Tell me, then, on what objecitve basis is your willingness to harm some organisms but not others not considered "moral or immoral based on it's [sic] utility to me or whether I feel a certain way as a product of my biological origin."

And before you start mocking me for being a bleeding-heart, I'm not particularly emotional about animals.  But I was quite young when I realized that I could not find any rational basis for preferring humans to animals in my moral calculus-- what objective difference exists between humans and other mammals that would make the suffering of one sacrosanct, and the other unworthy of regard?