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Debate Proposal For Starlight: Infantcide

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  • #31
    Originally posted by mossrose View Post
    I had an elderly cat that went blind. My Mom was upset about this, saying, "the poor thing, how awful it must be for her!".

    I replied, "She doesn't recognize that she is 'blind'. She doesn't know it isn't a normal condition. She doesn't know she is a cat. For all she knows, this thing happens to everything."

    We give animals far too much credit when it comes to self-awareness.
    Actually we give animals way to little credit, a fact that science is slowly coming to grips with.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by JimL View Post
      Actually we give animals way to little credit, a fact that science is slowly coming to grips with.
      Sure. I guess when you put all your faith in science you will give animals lots of credit and newborn children none.


      Securely anchored to the Rock amid every storm of trial, testing or tribulation.

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      • #33
        Originally posted by mossrose View Post
        Sure. I guess when you put all your faith in science you will give animals lots of credit and newborn children none.
        Apples and oranges. In either case, sentience is a matter of developement.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by JimL View Post
          Apples and oranges. In either case, sentience is a matter of developement.
          We don't live in the 19th century any more.
          Last edited by JonathanL; 06-19-2016, 12:07 PM.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by JimL View Post
            Apples and oranges. In either case, sentience is a matter of developement.
            You are the one who mentioned animals as compared to humans, not I.


            Securely anchored to the Rock amid every storm of trial, testing or tribulation.

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            • #36
              Originally posted by Starlight View Post
              I think a crucial moral premise here on which people are holding differing opinions is how they justify treating animals morally differently to humans.

              Christianity supplies 3 main options for that premise:
              1) Because God says so - in Genesis, God puts mankind in charge of the animals on the earth.
              2) The Image of God - Humans are made in the "image of God" (whatever that is perceived to be) and so are different to the animals who aren't.
              3) An immortal soul - Humans live on after death, while animals don't. Hence the morality of actions toward them are different.

              Christians can endorse any or all of those as a moral justification for treating animals by a completely different standard to how they treat humans. Thus a conscious human fetus can be vastly more important to them than a dolphin, because the fetus is human and the dolphin isn't.

              Atheists don't have those options. The two main options seemingly available to atheists (and Christians too if they want them) are:
              A) In Group vs Out Group - Our moral obligations to beings who are similar to us are significantly greater than our moral obligations to beings that are different than us.
              B) Higher mental functions - Morality relates not merely to the very basic mental function of consciousness, but instead there is a continuum where additional higher brain functions being present imply greater moral personhood.

              Studies have shown that conservatives in general tend to quite like (A) and liberals in general tend to dislike it. It gives us an obvious reason to treat animals differently - they're not like us, and treat humans well because they're like us. But it equally means that people of other races and cultures who "aren't like us" can be treated badly, and people who live in other countries, who have other religious beliefs, or anyone in general who ain't like us, can be legitimately be treated worse than someone who is like us. Premise A, in other words, is the Donald Trump Premise. It lets us be racist and xenophobic, and even goes almost as far as mandating that we have to be those things in order to be moral.

              Liberals, as everyone may have observed, are not fans of the Donald Trump Premise. As a result, secular liberals basically have to opt for premise (B) (or come up with something I've never seen or thought of). And they generally do. Premise B is widely accepted, in some form or another. To given an example, The Thinker, who sometimes posts here, has an essay explaining his views of secular objective morality, and he explains his version of (B) as "since human beings have the greatest cognitive faculties concerning consciousness, emotion, reason, empathy and compassion that we are aware of, the greatest ethical considerations should be with the treatment of human beings. And from this, through scientific inquiry we can learn to the best of our ability [the level of mental function] in all other living things and categorize the ethical treatment of animals, fish and insects accordingly." Or, as he phrases it in another post "there is a very striking difference between someone who's lived and has been conscious and was able to contemplate life, have dreams, have thoughts of love and happiness, and someone who's never consciously experienced any of those things, at all, ever. It is a qualitative difference and it seems to me a very natural distinction." That's premise (B) again, phrased differently, with the importance of mental functions beyond mere consciousness being asserted to have moral relevance. (I'm not citing him as any particular authority, merely as an example of another secular liberal endorsing (B))

              A consequence of B is that as a human fetus matures, killing it becomes gradually more wrong over time.

              It is, I guess, possible to come up with some creatively constructed versions of B that gives a different result:
              (S) Additional brain functions in a species imply greater moral obligations to that species / greater moral personhood for that species.

              Premise (S) is a version of (B) where we've decided that it's not the individual being's mental capabilities that matter but instead arbitrarily applied those protections and obligations out to the entire species, just because. This would allow a person endorsing (S) to say "but you can't kill a fetus because it's a member of the human species!" Membership of a genetic species thus becomes really important, because they said it was.

              Another alternative that I've seen Joel using in this forum is:
              (T) A being is to be evaluated not only on the cognitive functions it currently has, but upon its capacity to naturally develop those in the future.

              Premise (T) is a version of (B) where time is ignored, and things that could and might happen in the future are essentially counted as morally relevant in the present. A fetus's potential to grow into a cognitively fully-functioning adult human is counted as a present reality for moral purposes.

              So secular liberals can make up versions of (B) that get them more towards a pro-life view, but those other versions of (B) I think are arbitrary and unjustifiable.
              I think your constructions of the atheist options aren't correct. "In Group vs Out Group" is applied in practice by most. It's an extremely minority view that all animals should be treated on par with treatment of humans. "Higher mental functions" as the second option isn't generally accurate, either, since the most common baseline is one of capacity for suffering. We do know that mammals (possibly all vertebrates) possess the same brain regions that are responsible for feeling in humans. We know that mice can feel scared, for example.

              There's a huge problem trying to use either "higher mental functions" or "capacity for suffering" as a basis for determining moral obligation. Namely, we can't evaluate these things in other species. Even recognizing emotions in other mammals tells us nothing about invertebrates. Their physiology is just too different. We can't use 'higher mental functions' in part because each species uses their brains to solve different problems in different ways. A dog doesn't need to gauge height at the level any bird does, for example. There's never a place we can make an apples to apples comparison. Even the mirror test is insufficient in this way, since we have no way of knowing why certain animals fail while others do not.

              Morality does need to be species-specific, though, lest we be mired in a morass of subjective interpretations of qualifying factors.
              I'm not here anymore.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by mossrose View Post
                You are the one who mentioned animals as compared to humans, not I.
                Nope, you brought up your cat as a comparison to newborns, asserting that your cat, unlike infant children, was barely cognizant.

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by JimL View Post
                  Nope, you brought up your cat as a comparison to newborns, asserting that your cat, unlike infant children, was barely cognizant.
                  Actually, Adrift said

                  Treating animals as more sacred than children, Singer is morally bankrupt, an example of the insanity of the naturalistic worldview taken to it's extremes.
                  To which you replied

                  Not from the animals perspective.
                  Which seems to imply that you give animals a great deal of credit for self-awareness, agreeing with Singer, et.al. who believe animals are more sacred than children.

                  I was merely giving an example about my blind cat. And how my own Mother gave the cat more credit than she deserved.


                  Securely anchored to the Rock amid every storm of trial, testing or tribulation.

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by mossrose View Post
                    I had an elderly cat that went blind. My Mom was upset about this, saying, "the poor thing, how awful it must be for her!".

                    I replied, "She doesn't recognize that she is 'blind'. She doesn't know it isn't a normal condition. She doesn't know she is a cat. For all she knows, this thing happens to everything."

                    We give animals far too much credit when it comes to self-awareness.
                    This is not true.

                    When my dog went blind from her diabetes it was very upsetting for her, and I could see how she was very depressed for awhile because of it. The vet told me how it was common for them to be distraught for awhile due to their new condition. Animals know when they are in pain, and frankly this idea that they don't, is about as half-baked as Starlights philosophy.

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                    • #40
                      Originally posted by mossrose View Post
                      Actually, Adrift said



                      To which you replied



                      Which seems to imply that you give animals a great deal of credit for self-awareness, agreeing with Singer, et.al. who believe animals are more sacred than children.

                      I was merely giving an example about my blind cat. And how my own Mother gave the cat more credit than she deserved.
                      Right, my bad. But no one is arguing that animals are more sacred than children, the argument is the degree to which infants and animals are cognizant of their selves. At one time it was thought that animals had very little if any self awareness, or intellectual abilites, but not any more. So to use that belief as justification for treating animals in a way that you would never treat human beings is not a valid argument. The reason we would justify such treatment to the one and not the other, to animals but not to humans, is because we are humans.

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                      • #41
                        Originally posted by Adrift View Post
                        Yep, I realize that, and Starlight has name dropped him a few times as his role model. Outside of a few utilitarians on the fringe-left though, it's still not a "normal" view in the modern West. Treating animals as more sacred than children, Singer is morally bankrupt, an example of the insanity of the naturalistic worldview taken to it's extremes.
                        Do you have anything other than these grandstanding posts you know will get you a million high-fives from the peanut gallery? It's kind of getting old. I mean, if you're going to continue this crusade against him, at least give the guy a point by point take down.

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                        • #42
                          Originally posted by Amazing Rando View Post
                          Peter Singer (prominent ethicist at Princeton University) is one significant scholarly voice who would agree with Starlight's views. So while certainly not mainstream, they are not exactly an outlier either.
                          Congrats on your book btw. It's refreshing to see someone be consistent on these sorts of issues, as so many US Christians seem to love being "pro-life" but are nonetheless pro death-penalty, pro-war, and pro self-defence-using-guns.
                          "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                          "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                          "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

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                          • #43
                            Originally posted by Sea of red View Post
                            Do you have anything other than these grandstanding posts you know will get you a million high-fives from the peanut gallery?
                            I'm convinced that one-liners that get high-fives from the peanut gallery is the primary purpose of this site.
                            "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                            "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                            "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

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                            • #44
                              Originally posted by Sea of red View Post
                              Do you have anything other than these grandstanding posts you know will get you a million high-fives from the peanut gallery? It's kind of getting old. I mean, if you're going to continue this crusade against him, at least give the guy a point by point take down.
                              Genuine (rhetorical) question here....

                              In another thread you were arguing how you hated how LPOT had derailed a thread onto this very topic, basically calling Starlight insane and evil for his views, and you and Adrift never seem to get along either. So why come to this thread in the first place? Why put yourself in this type of situation, with the very people and topics that set you off before? Just don't do it and you will be much happier.

                              Moderated By: Sparko

                              Again, people:
                              this thread was supposed to be for setting up a debate between two people. It has turned into another civics thread. And it isn't going anywhere. I am closing it for now. It may be reopened and moved but that isn't up to me. the Arena is for formal debates only

                              ***If you wish to take issue with this notice DO NOT do so in this thread.***
                              Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publicly complain or whine, please take it to the Padded Room unless told otherwise.

                              Last edited by Sparko; 06-20-2016, 07:14 AM.

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