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Atheistic morality: Is harm to animals on a continuum with harm to humans?

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  • #76
    Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
    We've been warned of dire consequences before, and they failed to materialize. But keep crying wolf, little boy, keep crying wolf.
    The evidence is there. “Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

    https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

    OTOH it could be a sign of the end times, this would be a good thing right?
    “He felt that his whole life was a kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.” - Douglas Adams.

    Comment


    • #77
      Originally posted by Tassman View Post
      The evidence is there. “Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

      https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

      OTOH it could be a sign of the end times, this would be a good thing right?
      18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year

      1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

      2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

      3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

      4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

      5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

      6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

      7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

      8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

      9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

      10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

      11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

      12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

      13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

      14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

      15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

      16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

      17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

      18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”


      The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

      Comment


      • #78
        Originally posted by Starlight View Post
        Elsewhere on this forum I wrote:
        [Harming another being is] wrong in proportion to its level of 'mind' - i.e. its sentience / cognition / conscious / comprehension / memory / self-awareness faculties. So rocks aren't on the scale because they don't have minds in any way shape or form, while plants / bacteria are at the absolute minimum of life on up through insects, fetuses, fish, mammals, and finally humans with fully functioning minds which have the maximum mind we have yet to encounter

        And in doing so I felt somewhat surprised this was something I really needed to explain. But on this forum I've noticed most Christians here treat humans as qualitatively different to animals when it comes to morality. They believe that because humans are made in the image of God / have immortal souls / will be resurrected in the afterlife / have been given different commands by God about action toward other humans as compared to action toward animals, that therefore human-human moral interactions aren't on a continuum with human-animal moral interactions but are rather completely different to them. As such, they believe things like killing a developing human fetus is utterly and completely different to killing a developing animal fetus even if the two have the same levels of brain function (or lack thereof).

        So, I'm wondering whether I'm right in simply assuming that all atheists here would share the same basic moral premises as myself that:
        1. Humans exist on a continuum with animals, having evolved from them,
        Yes - humans live on a continuum with the rest of the animal kingdom. There is not characteristic humans possess that is not present, to some degree, in other members of the animal kingdom.

        Originally posted by Starlight View Post
        2. That what makes beings morally relevant is the extent to which they posses minds (let's avoid details here of whether by that we mean 'consciousness' or 'self-awareness' or 'possessing intention' or something else)
        I do not know how you can tackle this one without a discussion of what "mind" is. In order to moralize, a certain degree of cognition, self-awareness, and consciousness is required. A being without a sense of "I" and an ability to reason consequences and intent cannot be a moral agent.

        Originally posted by Starlight View Post
        3. That minds exist on a scale of not there at all through to human-level
        Agreed

        Originally posted by Starlight View Post
        ...and thus share the belief that the moral differences between humans and animals are quantitative not qualitative.

        I am wondering, in particular, if Carpedm will come down on the side of affirming all those premises, or will argue that because in practice morality is a social construct created through a social contract that therefore animals cannot participate in it because they can't negotiate their part in any contract.

        Vote in the poll!
        I'm not sure why my view is of any particular relevance. In general, I would argue that we cannot expect animals to moralize unless they have the requisite capabilities (e.g., consciousness, reasoning). However, I do believe that we have a moral obligation to be "humane" (if I may use that words) to animals. We should eschew needless harm to other beings capable of feeling pain. But I am not Buddhist in my leanings. I do not suffer a moral quandary if I destroy a bee's nest that is under my eaves and threatens harm to my children or visitors. I am not a vegetarian and see no reason to be one. But I will only buy meat that has been humanely raised, and slaughtered with minimal pain. In that, the rabbis can teach us a lot.

        Not sure if that answers your question - but there it is.
        The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

        I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

        Comment


        • #79
          Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
          Tassman, can you PLEASE stop with these goofy false accusations of dishonesty?
          Ummm....
          The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

          I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

          Comment


          • #80
            Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
            Ummm....
            You got something to say?
            The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

            Comment


            • #81
              Originally posted by KingsGambit View Post
              Isn't the general consensus of climate scientists that we're screwed no matter what we do anyway?
              There are some who feel we may have passed the "point-of-no-return."

              I'm not sure that view is warranted. Frankly, I don't think there IS a point-of-no-return. I think the longer we take to shift away from fossil fuels to renewables, the greater the consequences we will have to face downstream. Unfortunately, humans don't have a good track record of long-term planning. For example, if the right long-term choice is X, but it has short-term consequences Y, humans will tend to avoid the short term consequences because the long term ones will be someone else's problems.

              I suspect, someday, our children's children will be facing the consequences of our current choices, and wondering "what on earth were they thinking?" What we were thinking is simple: today's issues are more important than the consequences 100 years down the road.
              The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

              I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

              Comment


              • #82
                Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
                There are some who feel we may have passed the "point-of-no-return."

                I'm not sure that view is warranted. Frankly, I don't think there IS a point-of-no-return. I think the longer we take to shift away from fossil fuels to renewables, the greater the consequences we will have to face downstream. Unfortunately, humans don't have a good track record of long-term planning. For example, if the right long-term choice is X, but it has short-term consequences Y, humans will tend to avoid the short term consequences because the long term ones will be someone else's problems.

                I suspect, someday, our children's children will be facing the consequences of our current choices, and wondering "what on earth were they thinking?" What we were thinking is simple: today's issues are more important than the consequences 100 years down the road.
                Pretty much, yeah, but if somebody could actually say "if we do X, we can reasonably expect Y to happen, and here's the data...."

                All I ever get is "more money, bigger government, no idea how much money or how big government needs to be to get whatever ROI...."
                The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                Comment


                • #83
                  Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                  I think the solution is already doing itself. As we naturally switch over to electric cars, improve battery and solar power technology, most of the causes of pollution will diminish which should stop any further global warming due to fossil fuels right? And such technological advances will happen whether global warming is true or not.
                  Possibly not. There are some effects that have a cascade function. So, for example, the absence of sea ice in the Arctic in the summer presents a darker surface to the sun, which then absorbs more heat, which shortens the time the arctic is covered with ice, etc. If this gets into a feedback loop, we could well see a time when there is no ice covering the north pole year around. The same thing happens as ice shrinks on Greenland. We see this effect on our roof in Vermont. As long as the snow covers the entire roof, there is little melting. As soon as the snow melts enough to expose the edge of the roof, the darker shingles absorb more heat, which melts more snow, and the process accelerates as it goes. Greenland is already into this cycle, and there are concerns that Antarctica could as well.

                  And those are just a couple examples. I do not think that we are in danger of the kind of runaway greenhouse effect at work on Venus, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility, depending on how long it takes humanity to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
                  The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

                  I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

                  Comment


                  • #84
                    Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                    But... Cow Farts!!!
                    Amazingly enough - yes - cow farts are a fairly major source of greenhouse gases. And as our hunger for meat increases, we make the problem worse.

                    One would think, however, that our decimation of the buffalo herds would have countered that, at least to some degree. I wonder how modern cow herds compare with the buffalo herds pre 20th century?
                    The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

                    I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

                    Comment


                    • #85
                      Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
                      You got something to say?
                      I think I just did
                      The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

                      I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

                      Comment


                      • #86
                        Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
                        Pretty much, yeah, but if somebody could actually say "if we do X, we can reasonably expect Y to happen, and here's the data...."

                        All I ever get is "more money, bigger government, no idea how much money or how big government needs to be to get whatever ROI...."
                        I am dubious. We actually have a fair amount of what you describe above, but the fossil fuels industry is busily throwing as much sand in the air as possible, and (as usual) some percentage of the population is buying it. I don't know when we will learn. The lead industry did this about lead - touting (believe it or not) it's health benefits for years. The cigarette industry did the same thing. Now the sugar and fossil fuels industries are doing the same thing. And because they are backed by the enormous profits these industries realize, they can flood the marketplace with their claims and perpetuate their business models well past the time they should have ended.

                        It's sad, actually.
                        The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

                        I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

                        Comment


                        • #87
                          Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
                          I think I just did
                          Ya know, for somebody who moaned and groaned about emojis, you sure do use them a lot.
                          The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                          Comment


                          • #88
                            Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
                            I am dubious. We actually have a fair amount of what you describe above, but the fossil fuels industry is busily throwing as much sand in the air as possible, and (as usual) some percentage of the population is buying it. I don't know when we will learn. The lead industry did this about lead - touting (believe it or not) it's health benefits for years. The cigarette industry did the same thing. Now the sugar and fossil fuels industries are doing the same thing. And because they are backed by the enormous profits these industries realize, they can flood the marketplace with their claims and perpetuate their business models well past the time they should have ended.

                            It's sad, actually.
                            OK, so clue me in.

                            How much money is enough?
                            What do we spend it on?
                            How much government expansion is needed?
                            What, exactly, will all that accomplish?
                            The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                            Comment


                            • #89
                              Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
                              Amazingly enough - yes - cow farts are a fairly major source of greenhouse gases. And as our hunger for meat increases, we make the problem worse.

                              One would think, however, that our decimation of the buffalo herds would have countered that, at least to some degree. I wonder how modern cow herds compare with the buffalo herds pre 20th century?
                              And then there were the dinosaurs!
                              The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                              Comment


                              • #90
                                Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
                                18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year

                                1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

                                2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

                                3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

                                4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

                                5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

                                6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

                                7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

                                8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

                                9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

                                10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

                                11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

                                12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

                                13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

                                14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

                                15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

                                16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

                                17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

                                18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
                                So you would agree with well-known intellectual Sarah Palin that “these global warming studies that now we're seeing are a bunch of snake oil science." And yet, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), released in mid-2010, brings together many different series of data “from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the ocean” with the conclusion that many independent lines of evidence tell us unequivocally that the Earth is warming.

                                http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories...heclimate.html

                                So if, as seems to be the case, they're right we and more to the point our children are at great risk on a planet that can no longer sustain us.
                                “He felt that his whole life was a kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.” - Douglas Adams.

                                Comment

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