RE: Morality in dogs? Morality Learned?
May 14, 2013 at 1:57 pm
(This post was last modified: May 14, 2013 at 2:01 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Careful not to anthropomorphize our pets (one of the major targets...and their status of being so easy to anthropomorphize may be at least some part of why those species are such popular pets..mind you).
If we consider some behaviour exhibited by a dog, for example, from the light of human experience, motivation, and comprehension - it won't be surprising when we reach a conclusion that suggests that these behaviours have familiar human analogues. We're forcing things - at a very basic level, onto the dog - projecting ourselves. Now, this isn't to say that no specific instance of this could be justified or demonstrated - and between dogs and people we have a hell of alot of anatomy in common...and certain similarities in social structure (perhaps due again to our shared origins)...
-however-
whether or not similar behaviours (or our ability to rationalize them in a particularly human way) can actually be chalked up to a similar impetus in the two creatures involved is notoriously difficult to pin down, and for good reason. For example, we could exhibit identical behaviors for entirely different reasons - either connected or unconnected to some demonstrable function of our biology. To provide a wonderfully interesting little factoid that highlights how different two seemingly similar things can be from form to function (and in the reverse)...dogs are actually capable of smelling differing molecular weights of fatty acids.
You could say that something "smells heavy" if you were a dog (and a particularly accurate scale would back you up) So any reaction the two of you share when smelling a given object could be spurred on by wildly different processes. You might think that it "smells bad" and all of the unspoken things that this entails..and the dog, again, thinks it smells heavy - and whatever that might entail...but even here we're anthropomorphizing - in leveraging concepts like "bad" and "heavy" and even "smelling"- particularly in that it is difficult for us to conceptualize any of this in a way that would remove the shadow of doubt that this behaviour casts over a conclusion about the impetus behind an animals behaviour.
If we wanted to compare the "moralities" of dogs and humans I think that working down (or up) with humans as a reference (and not dogs) would be a much more solid way of doing this - because we at least have some insight as to how t comprehend our experience and quantify it between each other, and if we can reach a point - by reference or modification to ourselves or our own behaviors- that lines up with the dog's...... it's no longer accurate to say that dogs "exhibit morality" but that both humans and dogs exhibit behaviors which we sometimes decide to call morality in human beings. If we want to make a run at this sort of stuff we have to avoid affording ourselves or our notions of things primacy when considering what might be shared.
My two cents on any observation of animals (including ourselves) and whatever morality we may have.
After all of that, as to the OP - we have to acknowledge that just because one creature might "learn morality" that doesn't demonstrate that another creature does as well. Same for a situation where one creature is "born with morality" - doesn't demonstrate that the creature standing next to it is.
If we consider some behaviour exhibited by a dog, for example, from the light of human experience, motivation, and comprehension - it won't be surprising when we reach a conclusion that suggests that these behaviours have familiar human analogues. We're forcing things - at a very basic level, onto the dog - projecting ourselves. Now, this isn't to say that no specific instance of this could be justified or demonstrated - and between dogs and people we have a hell of alot of anatomy in common...and certain similarities in social structure (perhaps due again to our shared origins)...
-however-
whether or not similar behaviours (or our ability to rationalize them in a particularly human way) can actually be chalked up to a similar impetus in the two creatures involved is notoriously difficult to pin down, and for good reason. For example, we could exhibit identical behaviors for entirely different reasons - either connected or unconnected to some demonstrable function of our biology. To provide a wonderfully interesting little factoid that highlights how different two seemingly similar things can be from form to function (and in the reverse)...dogs are actually capable of smelling differing molecular weights of fatty acids.
You could say that something "smells heavy" if you were a dog (and a particularly accurate scale would back you up) So any reaction the two of you share when smelling a given object could be spurred on by wildly different processes. You might think that it "smells bad" and all of the unspoken things that this entails..and the dog, again, thinks it smells heavy - and whatever that might entail...but even here we're anthropomorphizing - in leveraging concepts like "bad" and "heavy" and even "smelling"- particularly in that it is difficult for us to conceptualize any of this in a way that would remove the shadow of doubt that this behaviour casts over a conclusion about the impetus behind an animals behaviour.
If we wanted to compare the "moralities" of dogs and humans I think that working down (or up) with humans as a reference (and not dogs) would be a much more solid way of doing this - because we at least have some insight as to how t comprehend our experience and quantify it between each other, and if we can reach a point - by reference or modification to ourselves or our own behaviors- that lines up with the dog's...... it's no longer accurate to say that dogs "exhibit morality" but that both humans and dogs exhibit behaviors which we sometimes decide to call morality in human beings. If we want to make a run at this sort of stuff we have to avoid affording ourselves or our notions of things primacy when considering what might be shared.
My two cents on any observation of animals (including ourselves) and whatever morality we may have.
After all of that, as to the OP - we have to acknowledge that just because one creature might "learn morality" that doesn't demonstrate that another creature does as well. Same for a situation where one creature is "born with morality" - doesn't demonstrate that the creature standing next to it is.
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