Animal Slavery

[bennyboy]

On no... It's springtime for Hitler! Thread abandoned.

I didn't know Sven was a French name!

---

At best, you can say that common evalutions are rooted in instinct. However, so are the desire to rape, the instinct to murder and maim, tendencies toward selfishness, shortsighted misuse of resources, and every other thing we consider bad or wrong about humanity. This is still not a good basis on which to form a moral code.

I would suggest that species-centrism and evolutionary psychology are the proper backbone for a generic, scientific concept of ethics. Obviously, more goes into it than this, and at present, we can't reductively explain all our moral judgements and in what way they differ from our other instincts, for that we'll have to rely on intuition and philosophy for some time to come. You can't simply derive ethics from biology at this time. However, to my mind, it seems to form a reasonable "guard rail" explanation for why we have moral intuitions, and thus can provide a way of excluding certain explanations of morals as rational and correct. Saying, I feel empathy towards animals, therefore I'm going to base my ethics on that feeling, while admirable, does not provide a rational foundation for those desires. (I'd argue that "empathy" is a crude guide to moral behavior among humans and that extending it to animals is a misapplication of it, and my evolutionary rationale justifies this interpretation, but that's another discussion.) Placing ethics on the back of evolutionary biology, a) provides a rational basis for our species-centrism, b) explains the origin of "moral behaviors," and c) is extensible to behaviors of other species (it's biologically a sound framework). As noted, we can't reason from "it evolved" directly to "it's moral," but we can backstop in the other direction, that, if it is counter-productive to our species survival, nature will select against it. (And so should we.)

That 'Rampant.A.I.' person is saying some very clever stuff here. +1 to him/her.

I do like the idea of finding new ideas around which to build moral ideas, and evolutionary biology is certainly a viable candidate. With regard to evolutionary biology, I'd wonder this: what can you give to the species that already has it all? It seems to me that we are too well-adapted in a sense, and that we are eating up the Earth's resources like bacteria in a petri dish.

What moral choices should we make in the face of our ongoing expansion? Is it immoral to create more humans, adding an unnecessary burden on shared resources? Is it immoral to eat meat, given that sun--plant--human energy conversion is more efficient and results in less pollution than sun--plant--animal--human conversion? Or is it, on the other hand, immoral to prevent humans from acting on their already-evolved impulses, and letting our evolution play out "naturally"? Should we just let things play out to their (possibly unpleasant) ends, or should we impose ideas about a perfect world and GUIDE our evolution as a species deliberately through gene modification, selective breeding programs, etc? Perhaps we should arrange for most members of the species to be half the height (i.e. 1/8th as big), with a natural fondness for seaweed wafers and Soylent Green.

All of these positions can be rooted in ideas about our evolution, but there is still that arbitrary evaluation at work. How can we arrive at a scientific decision about how to use science as a basis for morality, so to speak?