When do we cross the line from 'animal' to 'person?'

[jstrodel]

No, it is reducible to rationality and self-consciousness.

How do you know that it is those two criteria that confer ethical worth? If you have one but not the other (as in, animals have self-consciousness but not rationality) does that make them 1/2 as valuable as people? How do you deal with people that do not have either e.g. fetus's, unconscious old people? Do they become ethically erroneous as soon as they lose those criteria? What makes you so sure?

What is being reduced in value statements? Do they ultimately refer to properties of value in that exist in the world or are they created by societies? You sound very confident about what you are saying, but I think you are talking about a standard that is essentially a made up standard. There are many words which describe psychological/physiological properties that are related to ethics. You narrow it down to two, but I could think of others, such as the degree to which an agent is functioning in his proper teleological role and fulfilling his duties to society and not causing harm as defined by his design and the processes of establishing the ends of human behavior as law.

You list rationality and self consciousness as your criteria, do all people have an equal right to live? Is it ever moral to fight a war? How do you derive a set of ethics with those two scienc-ey principles? How do you define moral responsibility? You probably don't believe that people have free will. You probably come to the end of all of this and have some sort of "enlightened" view of ethics that makes people essentially cogs in a social machine that must constantly redefine ethical norms for people who are effective incapacitated by their lack of free will and lack of any guiding criteria for behavior other than an arbitrary stopping point of the two criteria of "rationality" and "self consciousness" that are constantly re-evaluated and revised according to the whims of the societies that enforce their norms on others. What stops people from choosing other criteria to define ethical norms? Some people are primitivists, they consider nature to be sacred. Others believe in animal rights and consider a different measure of worth to signify ethical value.

In the end I think you realize that you have what is basically an ad hoc view of morality, that fails to capture the human spirit and brilliance of the uninhibited soul as it acts on its divinely given impulses. Of course, none of what you have written is even remotely adequate, from a theistic perspective. Maybe that is why you are so angry.

I think the categories of "rationality" and "self consciousness" show the point I made earlier, about relying on practical reason to understand reality. You know in your heart that it is ad hoc, that it does not capture life in itself, only your values and perception of life. That is why I say it is like the mind of a shopkeeper, who has practical reason to guide him and tell him what is acceptable in his world, but which fails to penetrate the nature of things. If practical reason is enough to understand the purpose of life and that meets your (very low) standard, well, ok, but why be so aggressive about it? It is not like you are sharing anything other than your opinions.