RE: We should take the Moral Highground
April 5, 2012 at 5:21 pm
(April 5, 2012 at 4:41 pm)mediamogul Wrote: I responded to one of your earlier posts with essentially this same argument.
Sorry, if other posts distracted me. Your posts are thoughtful and worthy of comment.
(April 5, 2012 at 4:41 pm)mediamogul Wrote: To me all sentient beings are afforded rights because of their ability to suffer. These things are not arbitrary and are related to human nature and biology.
Nature seems indifferent to suffering. The strong prey on the weak. One of my dogs caught a rabbit. While it was still alive, he held it down and bit it from head to toe, breaking every bone in its body. Then he ate the rabbit. I do not see nature as a good place to find moral instruction.
(April 5, 2012 at 4:41 pm)mediamogul Wrote: Couple this with others treating others as "ends in themselves" instead of means to an end and you have the rational basis for ethics. Ethics being normative in the sense that they demonstrate how people ought to act as defined by good and bad.
Gee thanks! (sarcasm) Now I have to go back and read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
(April 5, 2012 at 4:41 pm)mediamogul Wrote: It [morality] is… based on reason and human nature…it will be based upon those two things.
I do not disagree with this. The question to me is this. Where do we get our reason and our humanity? For the reasons I stated above I do not think we can draw on evolution for help. Even though I haven’t found an alternative that fully satisfies, I’m still reasonably confident that morality does indeed have some absolute basis.
