We should take the Moral Highground

[mediamogul]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nature itself is amoral, as in the pure biological and natural functions of the world. Humans posses language and rationality and thus comprehend suffer in an externalised sense. Animals only comprehend their own suffering when it occurs and seek to avoid it. I doubt one of your dogs comprehends that it caused another sentient being to suffer. Therein lies the reason why humans are capable of moral consideration.

I'm glad you picked up on the Kant reference. I always thought the "treating humans as an end in themselves" provision of the categorical imperative was more interesting than the categorical imperative itself.

Reason is a function of language. Without language we would not be capable of making logical inferences about the world. I for one am not constructivist and believe that language reflects some real properties of the world and thus, carefully applied, can furnish us with real conclusions in regards to normative ethics.