Are we evil?

[Mr Tumnus]

So some background, I was watching this new fall anime Parasyte -the maxim- where these parasites come to earth, bond with existing lifeforms (usually humans), take over their bodies and then proceed to eat people. When the main character asks one of these parasites "You guys are monsters, why are you doing this?" the parasite responds with "We're not monsters, we're eating humans for food." At this point there have been about 80 of these strange murders caused by these things. The parasite then asks "Aren't humans really the monsters? How many millions of things do you kill each year and eat?" Its this statement that prompted this post.

Picture a world where these ravenous creatures existed that enslaved and consumed the other, less intelligent creatures of that world. So great was their hunger that entire species went extinct in an attempt to satiate them. They forced the ones that didn't die out to mate in order to produce more food. They ate creatures of every gender and age, young, old, the strong, the weak and even the unborn.

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

[Eldan]

Can I answer with a shrug? Evil is just a very nebulous term and I never had that much of a mind for ethics.

I do my best to limit my impact, by recycling, living a relatively simple lifestyle and not eating too much meat. I still like meat. We have laws that keep meat production as humane as we can make it while still keeping it economical.

And, well. Of course it's a problem. Want to hear the brutal part? IF we didn't eat those animals, they'd probably be extinct, or near extinction, like just about anything else. We feed them, we give them medicine and shelter, we protect them from predators. The domestic chicken is the world's most abundant bird. They wouldn't be if we weren't looking after them. They probably have a better live than their ancestors in the wild. (Unless they are factory farmed in tiny cages. That's just cruel).

In the end? Us or them. It's that simple. I like animals a lot often more than a given human, but on general terms, I Like humanity more than... animality? Strange term. Anyway. I like science and technology and art and we produce that.

[Gnomvid]

There is something else above us, bears, sharks and wolves for example and we demonize them at least we do for sharks, they do nothing wrong we just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and they are curious/defending a cub or desperately hungry and bad things happen.
How ever whether something or someone is evil is a purely moral question and only because of the way we compare ourselves and the other entity.

[Killer Angel]

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis?

Well, the shocking part in Matrix, where Morpheus explains to Neo that humans are harvested for energy, that's almost the standard procedure of many modern farms.

[Eldan]

There is something else above us, bears, sharks and wolves for example and we demonize them at least we do for sharks, they do nothing wrong we just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and they are curious/defending a cub or desperately hungry and bad things happen.
How ever whether something or someone is evil is a purely moral question and only because of the way we compare ourselves and the other entity.

I'm not sure you can say they are above us. Sure, they eat people, if they get them. But people also eat bears occasionally and we almost certainly eat more sharks than sharks eat humans. We probably just don't eat wolves because we don't like eating them. Some people might have done so anyway.

[The_Ditto]

:smallfrown:My favourite movie of all times is "Aliens" ... I've never considered them "evil", however.

Evil would be more "kill for sake of killing". That (almost) reminds me of the Predators. If you "kill for the sake of survival/food". No, that's not evil, that's just survival.

Leave humans out of it. Are you saying a Lion that catches, kills and eats a gazelle is evil?

So we can immediately rule out the simple act of "eating for survival" is not evil.

What remains is the issue of "Is it evil to HARVEST another life form to provide MORE food?" :)

Again, I don't think so. It sucks to be "the Food" .. but evil? No, I can't see it. Sure, as some have pointed out, I suppose some of it depends on how the "food" is treated, but .. *shrug*

I'm "simple" .. I for one can't seem to feel bad for a chicken .. regardless of conditions :) Does that make me evil? (Hope not :) )
Maybe a little callous .. but certainly not evil.
:smallamused:

[Anarion]

We draw a distinction between sentient and non-sentient. Not everyone agrees with it (e.g. vegetarians), but the point with the alien parasites is that they can communicate with us and know that we're self-aware, but they eat us anyway. We don't do that knowingly to any other species.

[BannedInSchool]

Those soybeans aren't even born yet, you monsters! :smalltongue:

[The_Ditto]

We draw a distinction between sentient and non-sentient. Not everyone agrees with it (e.g. vegetarians), but the point with the alien parasites is that they can communicate with us and know that we're self-aware, but they eat us anyway. We don't do that knowingly to any other species.

Well, I know a lot of people who talk to their plants ..

:smallbiggrin:

[Bulldog Psion]

I'll just note in passing that these threads seldom end well. Caveat postor.

(And yes, I did just turn "poster" in to "postor" to make it look more Latin. :smallbiggrin: )

[Asta Kask]

Cave posterior

I.e., watch yo' ass.

And yes, that is all kinds of grammatically wrong.

[Kajhera]

Sounds like the parasite's value system does not distinguish all that much regarding how sapient an animal is. Most people who eat meat do make that distinction. By a human value system they only have a point if they are as sapient relative to us as we are relative to, say, pigs.

Also, absolutely we can complain even if mindflayers or whatnot think it is morally justified to harvest humans. There's such a thing as self-preservation, after all. :smalltongue: Bears hunt salmon, doesn't mean they are happy about being hunted in turn (leaving farms out of it entirely for the moment).

If an alien does not consider us sapient, despite our best efforts to convince them otherwise: yeah that's a pretty significant difference in values. They are 'evil' by our value system, but we are not evil by theirs, since they and we agree on eating nonsapient creatures being valid. If an alien considers us, chickens, and pigs, equally 'sapient' to themselves, we might be somewhat evil by their value system ... but if they are eating us, so are they, just to a lesser extent. And practically every living thing on earth is. And eating them would be no morally different from them eating us, and do they really want to propose that?

[warty goblin]

Sounds like the parasite's value system does not distinguish all that much regarding how sapient an animal is. Most people who eat meat do make that distinction. By a human value system they only have a point if they are as sapient relative to us as we are relative to, say, pigs.

A typical pig is more sentient than a person who has lost brain function. We don't go around eating people in permanent vegetative states, but I've got most of a pig in my freezer right now. On the other hand we harvest organs from braindead or recently dead people. To us the difference between serving up a car accident victim with celery and BBQ sauce, and sticking their kidney in somebody is pretty profound. Speaking for myself for instance the first makes my stomach turn just thinking about it, the second makes me at most slightly uncomfortable. But why would an alien parasite consider there to be any difference between eating us, and what we do to our own selves already?

Still on the subject of alien parasites, consider this for weird. We'd certainly try like the devil to kill the things by any means possible. We wouldn't eat them. Even if we killed them simply to avoid getting turned into a walking container of alien baby food, we would not eat them as a rule. But we'd happily shoot, stab, burn, and nuke them. Probably give folks medals for doing it, but if they reach for the ketchup they've crossed one of those weird human lines in the sand.

What I'm getting at here is not that we should start eating people, or stop eating non-human animals, or that it would be wrong to kill an alien trying to use us as a nursery for it's flesh-grubs, or right to eat that alien after we riddled it with holes. What I'm saying is that human morality (insofar as one can even talk about there being a singular human morality) is very weird, and centered almost entirely on humans. I don't think it's meaningful to say what human standards tell us about how non-human things should act towards each other, or towards us. It is meaningful to talk about how human standards inform how we relate to each other, and how we treat non-human creatures. There is nothing universally morally wrong with a bear that devours a person, just as there is nothing universally morally right about a dog that dies protecting the person from the bear. We judge the bear to be bad, because our values are rooted in preserving humans, and the dog to be right for the same reasons. But if we shifted our values in one direction, the dog was wrong for endangering itself for a 'mere' human, or for attacking something as important as a bear for the sake of just another hairless ape.

[Anarion]

Also, absolutely we can complain even if mindflayers or whatnot think it is morally justified to harvest humans. There's such a thing as self-preservation, after all. :smalltongue: Bears hunt salmon, doesn't mean they are happy about being hunted in turn (leaving farms out of it entirely for the moment).


Well, now I'm picturing a squad of heavily armed Salmon rising and leaping out of the river and firing off several rounds at their bear oppressors.

[Tengu_temp]

This isn't a dilemma. This is the Standard Vampire Excuse, used by evil creatures to justify their choice to prey on humans instead of some other, non-sapient species.


We draw a distinction between sentient and non-sentient. Not everyone agrees with it (e.g. vegetarians), but the point with the alien parasites is that they can communicate with us and know that we're self-aware, but they eat us anyway. We don't do that knowingly to any other species.

Nitpick: sapient, not sentient. Most animals are sentient, all that's required is the ability to feel pleasure or pain. Sapience is much harder to achieve, and only a few species qualify - humans, some apes, arguably dolphins.

[warty goblin]

This isn't a dilemma. This is the Standard Vampire Excuse, used by evil creatures to justify their choice to prey on humans instead of some other, non-sapient species.



Nitpick: sapient, not sentient. Most animals are sentient, all that's required is the ability to feel pleasure or pain. Sapience is much harder to achieve, and only a few species qualify - humans, some apes, arguably dolphins.

It's only an excuse if you assume human morality is portable to non-human species, which is to say it's rooted in anything more universal than human history, culture and biology. Otherwise it's simply a statement of moral reality for the species and creature in question. Given that human morality itself is extremely heterogeneous, I don't find the idea that a different species with different modes of reproduction, eating, communicating and interacting with their environment would by necessity have a human-style moral code at all convincing.

[Killer Angel]

We draw a distinction between sentient and non-sentient. Not everyone agrees with it (e.g. vegetarians), but the point with the alien parasites is that they can communicate with us and know that we're self-aware, but they eat us anyway. We don't do that knowingly to any other species.

well, we kill / imprison animals that we know they're intelligent. Chimpanzees, dolphins, and so on. All this kind of reasonings, are on a slippery slope.

There was an interesting SF story, where humans (castaway in spaaace on this wild planet) were captured by aliens and put in a sort of zoo; in the end, those humans (being very bored), put in a cage a little mouse, to pass some time.
At that point, the aliens recognize the humans as an intelligent race...

[Ionbound]

Humans have a human-centric (for the most part; One of the benefits of sapience is the ability to chose, for better or worse) morality system. Those that kill humans, for what ever reason, are evil, but killing and farming animals? Why not! Meat is yummy, after all.

That said, I don't think there's a major problem with this. It is a survival trait of the utmost importance. For one, it removes members of the anthropological tribe that harm other members, as well as causing us to hunt things that might view us as a potential food source, thus solidifying our position at the top of the food chain.

[Coidzor]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good.

I'm pretty sure you are just by accepting the premise. That's a gateway premise.


Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

No, it really doesn't, it's just sophistry. If they're intelligent enough to talk to us, they're definitely in the wrong morally, since they don't have to eat humans, they're just choosing to do so. And also creating quite a bit more trouble for themselves than they really would want anyway.

[Razade]

No, it really doesn't, it's just sophistry. If they're intelligent enough to talk to us, they're definitely in the wrong morally, since they don't have to eat humans, they're just choosing to do so. And also creating quite a bit more trouble for themselves than they really would want anyway.

Actually, according to the source material (Parasyte) they do in fact have to eat humans, nothing else gives them sustenance. They address it in the series. The only reason the Parasyte that is with the main character can live is because the dude's blood is in his system. Rest of your points still stand however.

[Jaycemonde]

Most animals don't have genders, they only have sexes. Only sentient things like humans have a recognizable concept of that stuff. Just gonna put that correction out there.

Anyway, this whole thing is a loaded question, and it's going to veer into a bunch of topics we're supposed to stay away from before the day is out, so I'll pass on responding to the topic itself.

[warty goblin]

I'm pretty sure you are just by accepting the premise. That's a gateway premise.

Or you conclude that there's nothing morally objectionable about slime-beings from Zyrgon 12 harvesting humans for delicious, delicious human pot pie. One can still practically object to being baked in a flaky crust with potatoes and Great-Grandhivequeen's shridnark gravy, without necessarily thinking there's anything immoral about the thing trying to cook you. I don't think there's any sophistry to be had here, merely an acknowledgement that human morality only applies to human actors. Slime-beings for Zyrgon 12 are not human, the fact that for purposes of this scenario we can talk with them may be beside the point from their perspective. They may regularly talk with, and subsequently eat, each other after all. We tend to think eating things that talk is bad, because as a rule humans seem to have a very strong anti-cannibalistic impulse, but this is hardly ubiquitous. Chimpanzees fairly regularly kill and eat each other's young for instance, and they are as close to human as currently exists.

[Forum Explorer]

So some background, I was watching this new fall anime Parasyte -the maxim- where these parasites come to earth, bond with existing lifeforms (usually humans), take over their bodies and then proceed to eat people. When the main character asks one of these parasites "You guys are monsters, why are you doing this?" the parasite responds with "We're not monsters, we're eating humans for food." At this point there have been about 80 of these strange murders caused by these things. The parasite then asks "Aren't humans really the monsters? How many millions of things do you kill each year and eat?" Its this statement that prompted this post.

Picture a world where these ravenous creatures existed that enslaved and consumed the other, less intelligent creatures of that world. So great was their hunger that entire species went extinct in an attempt to satiate them. They forced the ones that didn't die out to mate in order to produce more food. They ate creatures of every gender and age, young, old, the strong, the weak and even the unborn.

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

No not really. I could go on and on about morality but this example is really a bad one unless the parasites had to feed off of humans (for whatever reason). If they could eat any other creature then their argument doesn't have a leg to stand on.

As for eating creatures, no it's not evil unless you want to argue that all of nature is evil, because yes animals eat as much food as they can get.

Basically it's the level of intelligence that makes it taboo to go around eating people. Or dolphins, or chimps. (and most ape species for that matter)


A typical pig is more sentient than a person who has lost brain function. We don't go around eating people in permanent vegetative states, but I've got most of a pig in my freezer right now. On the other hand we harvest organs from braindead or recently dead people. To us the difference between serving up a car accident victim with celery and BBQ sauce, and sticking their kidney in somebody is pretty profound. Speaking for myself for instance the first makes my stomach turn just thinking about it, the second makes me at most slightly uncomfortable. But why would an alien parasite consider there to be any difference between eating us, and what we do to our own selves already?

Still on the subject of alien parasites, consider this for weird. We'd certainly try like the devil to kill the things by any means possible. We wouldn't eat them. Even if we killed them simply to avoid getting turned into a walking container of alien baby food, we would not eat them as a rule. But we'd happily shoot, stab, burn, and nuke them. Probably give folks medals for doing it, but if they reach for the ketchup they've crossed one of those weird human lines in the sand.

What I'm getting at here is not that we should start eating people, or stop eating non-human animals, or that it would be wrong to kill an alien trying to use us as a nursery for it's flesh-grubs, or right to eat that alien after we riddled it with holes. What I'm saying is that human morality (insofar as one can even talk about there being a singular human morality) is very weird, and centered almost entirely on humans. I don't think it's meaningful to say what human standards tell us about how non-human things should act towards each other, or towards us. It is meaningful to talk about how human standards inform how we relate to each other, and how we treat non-human creatures. There is nothing universally morally wrong with a bear that devours a person, just as there is nothing universally morally right about a dog that dies protecting the person from the bear. We judge the bear to be bad, because our values are rooted in preserving humans, and the dog to be right for the same reasons. But if we shifted our values in one direction, the dog was wrong for endangering itself for a 'mere' human, or for attacking something as important as a bear for the sake of just another hairless ape.

It's because humans are built to identify with and value other humans. Cannibalism is considered taboo, because it devalues humans by reducing them to 'food item'. After all, other food items exist and should be eaten before resorting to eating other people. Which is why there are times where cannibalism is considered acceptable, such as being stranded on a boat with no other resources. Most people would not consider the survivors who resorted to such methods in order to survive as evil.

Similarly 'useful' animals like dogs, cats, and horses tend to have taboos against eating them as well, though obviously not everywhere, and other high intelligence animals are seen as more 'human' and are considered taboo to eat.


well, we kill / imprison animals that we know they're intelligent. Chimpanzees, dolphins, and so on. All this kind of reasonings, are on a slippery slope.

There was an interesting SF story, where humans (castaway in spaaace on this wild planet) were captured by aliens and put in a sort of zoo; in the end, those humans (being very bored), put in a cage a little mouse, to pass some time.
At that point, the aliens recognize the humans as an intelligent race...

We kill and imprison humans too. :smalltongue:

Generally killing an ape or a dolphin for no reason is considered bad by society. But we still value them less then humans so if they are a threat to humans it's considered acceptable to kill them. It's also considered 'worth it' if killing them is for a scientific endeavor as the hope is that in doing so we would be better able to preserve them and others.

Imprisoning them falls under the same 'worth it' category. It provides more knowledge, keeps public interest, even preserves genetic stock is necessary. We also try and keep their captivity as humane as possible, to the point where someone could seriously argue that the life an animals experiences in a high quality zoo is superior to a life in the wild.

[Coidzor]

Actually, according to the source material (Parasyte) they do in fact have to eat humans, nothing else gives them sustenance. They address it in the series. The only reason the Parasyte that is with the main character can live is because the dude's blood is in his system. Rest of your points still stand however.

...Yeah, then it's even worse because they're aliens whose biology is somehow set up so they can only survive off of humans. That's fine for soft sci-fi silliness, but not so good for actually taking anything said seriously vis-a-vis philosophy.

[Razade]

...Yeah, then it's even worse because they're aliens whose biology is somehow set up so they can only survive off of humans. That's fine for soft sci-fi silliness, but not so good for actually taking anything said seriously vis-a-vis philosophy.

Oh totally. The actual story doesn't even try to address the "Maybe we're the monsters" angle. It's the reverse in a lot of situations, where the Parasytes are trying to live like Humans. Humans are never portrayed as the enemy in the series unless they're trying to kill peaceful Parasytes. Parasyte is a story about prejudice and acceptance rather than a story about the assumed moral implications of living in a anthropocentric world view. There's also a pretty interesting Coming of Age aspect to it since the main character is a teen thinking about getting into a romantic relationship with someone. So it's got angles of "Growing into an Adult" parallells too. That's even how the story concludes, the "bestial, aggressive instincts" all but disappearing once the character has actually consummated said relationship with the female lead.

[The_Ditto]

...Yeah, then it's even worse because they're aliens whose biology is somehow set up so they can only survive off of humans. That's fine for soft sci-fi silliness, but not so good for actually taking anything said seriously vis-a-vis philosophy.

Not even that, it's just bad genetics :) Earth has had a few samples of such animals who were solely dependant on another specific species for food. The one species dies out, and bam, the other one dies out as well since their only food source is gone. :)

So although possible in nature, it's generally not seen as an "optimal evolutionary option" ;)

[Coidzor]

Or you conclude that there's nothing morally objectionable about slime-beings from Zyrgon 12 harvesting humans for delicious, delicious human pot pie. One can still practically object to being baked in a flaky crust with potatoes and Great-Grandhivequeen's shridnark gravy, without necessarily thinking there's anything immoral about the thing trying to cook you. I don't think there's any sophistry to be had here, merely an acknowledgement that human morality only applies to human actors. Slime-beings for Zyrgon 12 are not human, the fact that for purposes of this scenario we can talk with them may be beside the point from their perspective. They may regularly talk with, and subsequently eat, each other after all. We tend to think eating things that talk is bad, because as a rule humans seem to have a very strong anti-cannibalistic impulse, but this is hardly ubiquitous. Chimpanzees fairly regularly kill and eat each other's young for instance, and they are as close to human as currently exists.

Understanding is the line between an entity being an amoral actor when it chooses to kill and eat a human, as in the case of a shark or tiger, and immoral as in the case of a human or other sophont.

If the slime beings are capable of communicating with us and understanding us to any extent then it is immoral for them to decide to try to kill and eat us because they think we'd taste delicious rather than merely amoral, even given their alien mindset. If they aren't, then, well, we're back to Ender's Game, and Orson Scott Card's homophobia, played straight without the subversion at the end.

I'm not sure what your're trying to argue for with chimps, though. It's not immoral when chimps rape and kill one another because they're not quite sophonts? It's morally OK for chimps to rape and kill one another merely because they're not human if we accept that they are sophonts?

[Razade]

Understanding is the line between an entity being an amoral actor when it chooses to kill and eat a human, as in the case of a shark or tiger, and immoral as in the case of a human or other sophont.

If the slime beings are capable of communicating with us and understanding us to any extent then it is immoral for them to decide to try to kill and eat us because they think we'd taste delicious rather than merely amoral, even given their alien mindset. If they aren't, then, well, we're back to Ender's Game, and Orson Scott Card's homophobia, played straight without the subversion at the end.

I'm not sure what your're trying to argue for with chimps, though. It's not immoral when chimps rape and kill one another because they're not quite sophonts? It's morally OK for chimps to rape and kill one another merely because they're not human if we accept that they are sophonts?

Cannabilism in nature doesn't even matter in this discussion as it's not generally done for actual food but for territorial reasons even when it comes to chimps. The incidence levels of said cannibalism is also not nearly as high as "fairly regularly" unless Warty Goblin has statiscs to back that up.

[Mx.Silver]

I'm not sure you can say they are above us. Sure, they eat people, if they get them. But people also eat bears occasionally and we almost certainly eat more sharks than sharks eat humans.

The number of sharks killed by humans each year (primarily for their fins, which are eaten) runs well into the millions. The number of humans killed by unprovoked shark attacks in a year hardly ever reaches ten.

It's also worth noting that while we don't eat them, humans kill a lot more wolves than wolves do humans. Orders of magnitude more. Bears are also hunted and killed for reasons other than food (or folk medicine), again to a substantially greater degree than they kill humans.

[Erloas]

Actually, according to the source material (Parasyte) they do in fact have to eat humans, nothing else gives them sustenance. They address it in the series. The only reason the Parasyte that is with the main character can live is because the dude's blood is in his system. Rest of your points still stand however.
Yeah, as at least one other person has said, that makes no sense at all. That is poorly thought out science even for something like sci-fi. How did the parasyte ever live long enough to become capable of traveling space if they can only live off of one creature that doesn't even live in the same solar system.
There is also nothing at all unique about humans in terms of chemical/biological makeup that would make only humans work. Even while we're smarter than most creatures around it isn't even like our brain is really different, just more of it.


As for cannibalism, while I don't remember for sure, I think one of the main reasons it is taboo in so many different cultures and times around the world is because of medical reasons. I don't remember what happens, and it probably isn't the sort of thing that happens quickly, but it causes some problems. I could probably look it up fairly easily but I'm not in the mood to.
Maybe similar to mad cow disease?

[TheThan]

Yeah that’s a loaded question.
I’ll try to answer without straying into religion here:
Yes we’re all evil; it’s an innate trait we’re stuck with. Fortunately we have the power to see and understand the difference between good and evil. Therefore we can fight our nature and strive to not be evil.

On food:
Food of any kind is required for basic survival. Everything eats.
So in order for us to survive we need to kill things and eat them. Humans are amazing because we can eat a very large variety of plants and animals; that means we not only have tons of options but we can afford to be picky.

[Tyndmyr]

Probably. Maybe not all of us. There are probably humans more concerned about doing right than ruling the world with an iron fist. A lack of ambition, really.

But don't worry, you can be evil if you really want to be.

[Razade]

Yeah, as at least one other person has said, that makes no sense at all. That is poorly thought out science even for something like sci-fi. How did the parasyte ever live long enough to become capable of traveling space if they can only live off of one creature that doesn't even live in the same solar system.
There is also nothing at all unique about humans in terms of chemical/biological makeup that would make only humans work. Even while we're smarter than most creatures around it isn't even like our brain is really different, just more of it.

They don't address how the Parasytes get here, just that they're here. We don't explore their culture or why they come to Earth or anything like that. They're emotionless monsters until they start trying to adapt to human life. And that's really the crux of the story. The "Eating Humans" thing is just a vehicle for drama and conflict and not really the major story arc. The line in the OP is seriously the one time it's brought up and it's never talked about again. It's a throw away line, nothing more.



As for cannibalism, while I don't remember for sure, I think one of the main reasons it is taboo in so many different cultures and times around the world is because of medical reasons. I don't remember what happens, and it probably isn't the sort of thing that happens quickly, but it causes some problems. I could probably look it up fairly easily but I'm not in the mood to.
Maybe similar to mad cow disease?

There are quite a few, called Spongiform Encephalopathies or Prion Disease. Nature doesn't really look kindly on Cannibalism for sustenance. Prion Diseases are pretty nasty. You're thinking of Kuru however.

[warty goblin]

Understanding is the line between an entity being an amoral actor when it chooses to kill and eat a human, as in the case of a shark or tiger, and immoral as in the case of a human or other sophont.

If the slime beings are capable of communicating with us and understanding us to any extent then it is immoral for them to decide to try to kill and eat us because they think we'd taste delicious rather than merely amoral, even given their alien mindset. If they aren't, then, well, we're back to Ender's Game, and Orson Scott Card's homophobia, played straight without the subversion at the end.

Only under the assumption that there is a single morality for all creatures capable of understanding. Since I consider it extremely unlikely that human morality (again, insofar as there is *a* human morality) is independent of human evolution, I do not think this is a realistic premise.

That is, the slime-beings could well eat each other as a routine matter, and view doing so as entirely moral behavior. I posit for the sake of argument that the slime-beings would have no moral qualms about eating humans. Would I object strongly to being turned into slime-being chow, and fight against being eaten? Absolutely. Do I think that the slime-being trying to eat me is necessarily in the moral wrong? From my perspective perhaps. From the slime-being's point of view, under this hypothesis, it's acting entirely correctly. My judgement of it as wrong is as meaningless to it as it's possible judgement of me as contemptible for not killing and eating those weaker than me is to me. I'm certainly not going to go out and start eating people because it's a moral action for a slime-being, any more than the slime-being is going to stop eating people because it's a wrong choice for a person. I'm human, it's a slime-being, and ne'er the twain shall meet, although we may meat.


I'm not sure what your're trying to argue for with chimps, though. It's not immoral when chimps rape and kill one another because they're not quite sophonts? It's morally OK for chimps to rape and kill one another merely because they're not human if we accept that they are sophonts?
Chimps aren't humans. Moral codes devised for humans in human society don't apply to them. My point was that if something that close to us departs from a norm we find as central as not eating babies, there's precious little reason to think that our ideas would meaningfully apply to extra-terrestrial slime-beings.

[Themrys]

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?


No, we can't.

However, at the moment humans do so horrible things to other humans on a daily basis that the treatment of animals is hardly the only reason why many humans are monsters.

[SiuiS]

Only under the assumption that there is a single morality for all creatures capable of understanding. Since I consider it extremely unlikely that human morality (again, insofar as there is *a* human morality) is independent of human evolution, I do not think this is a realistic premise.

That's not really a thing though. Either the broad moral strokes are objective, and life has value commensurate with it's sapience, in which case we can judge them; or it's subjective, life has value to us commensurate with it's sapience, and we can still judge them because it's our judgement criteria and they're still falling flat of it.

This is like people who insist on both freedom of expression and also no consequence for expression. Sorry, either A) you have to accept you can't say anything no matter how outlandish, or B) you have to accept that I can express my dislike with a fist just like you can.

Morality being non-objective doesn't mean that all moralities are equal and that anything anyone makes a good case for is okay.

[Findpathfencer]

So some background, I was watching this new fall anime Parasyte -the maxim- where these parasites come to earth, bond with existing lifeforms (usually humans), take over their bodies and then proceed to eat people. When the main character asks one of these parasites "You guys are monsters, why are you doing this?" the parasite responds with "We're not monsters, we're eating humans for food." At this point there have been about 80 of these strange murders caused by these things. The parasite then asks "Aren't humans really the monsters? How many millions of things do you kill each year and eat?" Its this statement that prompted this post.

Picture a world where these ravenous creatures existed that enslaved and consumed the other, less intelligent creatures of that world. So great was their hunger that entire species went extinct in an attempt to satiate them. They forced the ones that didn't die out to mate in order to produce more food. They ate creatures of every gender and age, young, old, the strong, the weak and even the unborn.

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

First lets answer the question in the name of this thread.
Evil, in a general context, is taken as the absence or complete opposite of that which is ascribed as being good. Evil is a word that is used to denote profound immorality. This means that question is about one's morals. Also meaning that we can't answer this question for other people. But for most people's morals the answer is no, we are not evil.

Now is enslaving and eating animals evil? Well a good way of answering this question, like a lot of questions, is looking to the past. Around the time early humans learned how to make weapons and how to create fire, we learn that cows produce milk and their skin can be really tuff, and that sheep are soft and their fur can keep is warm, early humans decided to start protecting them to gain supplies from them. Meaning not just because they have meat on them, that's just a bonus, a vary yummy bonus. Then after a while early humans learned that they where too successful because there where too many humans running around and that they where killing of whole species of animals and started running out of food. This is one of the reasons we started farming in the first place, so that we will not run out of food. What does this mean? It means that humans where all about conquering nature so that we could thrive with out wiping out all the specials of animals and to not starve to death because of lack of food.
We farm to not die.

If aliens think we are tasty and to try and eat us then it becomes a matter of self preservation. It don't matter if we farm, it don't give the right for aliens to eat our brains. I don't want my brain eaten.



This is like people who insist on both freedom of expression and also no consequence for expression. Sorry, either A) you have to accept you can't say anything no matter how outlandish, or B) you have to accept that I can express my dislike with a fist just like you can.


This i believe is madness.
I am some one who insists on both freedom of expression and also no consequence for expression. Why? Because that is how a society is run.

A) that's how North Korea is run. North Korea, the hermit state that hasn't changed in decades.
You need to be able to speak up to be able to change things for the better

B) expressing your dislike with a fist!?! That is barbarism, uncivil, and against order and hurts society.
If the world was like that then everything would be discussed by war. And that is bad. That is oppression.
Punching someone is assault and not just a simple gesture. It becomes a matter of a attacking someone, and that is bad.
Assaulting someone because you disagree with them is evil.

You should never express your self with attacks because if your discussing opinions, and your opinions don't match, then your trying to convince them that you are right, not insult them or hurt them or even think less of them. Deferent opinions is a good thing. Because everyone is not always right. Part of gaining wisdom and being wise is being able to change your opinions and having a open mind and a clear head.

Your a) and b) are both extremes. You need to have balance, because everything is about balance.

[Forum Explorer]

This is madness.
I am some one who insists on both freedom of expression and also no consequence for expression. Why? Because that is how a society is run.

A) that's how North Korea is run. North Korea, the hermit state that hasn't changed in decades.
You need to be able to speak up to be able to change things for the better

B) expressing your dislike with a fist!?! That is barbarism, uncivil, and against order and hurts society.
If the world was like that then everything would be discussed by war. And that is bad. That is oppression.
Punching someone is assault and not just a simple gesture. It becomes a matter of a attacking someone, and that is bad.
Assaulting someone because you disagree with them is evil.

You should never express your self with attacks because if your discussing opinions, and your opinions don't match, then your trying to convince them that you are right, not insult them or hurt them or even think less of them. Deferent opinions is a good thing. Because everyone is not always right. Part of being a adult is being able to change your opinions and having a open mind and a clear head.

Your a) and b) are both extremes. You need to have balance, because everything is about balance.

He used a bad example for B, here's three better ones:

You get banned from a forum, kicked out of a public location, or even simply just losing a friend.

There are consequences for your words and you can't have both unlimited expression and unlimited protection from how you express yourself. Because giving someone B prevents another person from having A.

[Findpathfencer]

He used a bad example for B, here's three better ones:

You get banned from a forum, kicked out of a public location, or even simply just losing a friend.

There are consequences for your words and you can't have both unlimited expression and unlimited protection from how you express yourself. Because giving someone B prevents another person from having A.

I should hire you as my editor.

[Grinner]

We farm to not die.

Except at this point we really don't even need to farm animals. We just like the way they taste.


This i believe is madness.
I am some one who insists on both freedom of expression and also no consequence for expression. Why? Because that is how a society is run.

A) that's how North Korea is run. North Korea, the hermit state that hasn't changed in decades.
You need to be able to speak up to be able to change things for the better

B) expressing your dislike with a fist!?! That is barbarism, uncivil, and against order and hurts society.
If the world was like that then everything would be discussed by war. And that is bad. That is oppression.
Punching someone is assault and not just a simple gesture. It becomes a matter of a attacking someone, and that is bad.
Assaulting someone because you disagree with them is evil.

You should never express your self with attacks because if your discussing opinions, and your opinions don't match, then your trying to convince them that you are right, not insult them or hurt them or even think less of them. Deferent opinions is a good thing. Because everyone is not always right. Part of gaining wisdom and being wise is being able to change your opinions and having a open mind and a clear head.

Your a) and b) are both extremes. You need to have balance, because everything is about balance.

Words can cut as deep as any knife.

[Findpathfencer]

Except at this point we really don't even need to farm animals. We just like the way they taste.

Words can cut as deep as any knife.

That's why I keep my knife collection next to my pen collection.

We do need to farm animals because we make things out of them like fur, and they make milk and eggs and honey and many other things. Though you are right that we eat too much meat and should eat more veggies.

[SiuiS]

Woah there, sport. Hie away from anything resembling real political entities, would you kindly?

[warty goblin]

Except at this point we really don't even need to farm animals. We just like the way they taste.

Personally I eat meat because I like animals. A pig is a fine creature if you give it space to be a proper pig, and makes for both good eating and a pleasant addition to a homestead. I figure my pigs have a good life, and if I get to die half so well as getting unexpectedly annihilated by a bullet mushrooming its way through my brain in the middle of a good breakfast on a fine November morning, I'll count myself lucky.

Chickens are marvelous to have about, providing eggs, meat, and do a good job of keeping the bugs down. Plus a hen who eats mostly bugs and grass lays the best eggs you'll ever eat. Again, given space and a bit of freedom, chickens are very pleasant animals with an interesting and complex social structure that only occasionally results in fatal violence. They're smarter than they're given credit for too. My life would certainly be the poorer for not having ever had chickens in it. Which also means that it includes the slaughter of chickens.


So I eat meat because it tastes good, yes. But that's not the only reason.

[noparlpf]

Eating other life-forms for energy isn't evil, it's nature.

On the other hand, modern agricultural practices are inefficient, unsustainable, highly inhumane, and pretty evil.

[Erloas]

On the other hand, modern agricultural practices are inefficient, unsustainable, highly inhumane, and pretty evil.
While you could say they are inhumane, and with that evil, it is very hard to put any credible backing to it being inefficient.

We're creating a whole lot more food now with less land and fewer people then ever before, so I don't see how that could be inefficient.
Unsustainable is a bit harder to quantify, but I don't see any indication of what we're doing now failing in the foreseeable future. Given in developing nations they are still expanding the land used for agriculture, but in most cases that is because they have less efficient agriculture compared to developed countries.

[noparlpf]

While you could say they are inhumane, and with that evil, it is very hard to put any credible backing to it being inefficient.

We're creating a whole lot more food now with less land and fewer people then ever before, so I don't see how that could be inefficient.
Unsustainable is a bit harder to quantify, but I don't see any indication of what we're doing now failing in the foreseeable future. Given in developing nations they are still expanding the land used for agriculture, but in most cases that is because they have less efficient agriculture compared to developed countries.

Check out a documentary called "King Corn"; I think it's on YouTube, or was when I took that food anthropology class a couple of years ago.

At least in the US, we put a huge amount of money and resources into growing corn. Not even edible corn; corn that has to be processed to even be semi-edible to livestock, or that can be processed into ethanol or sugar. It would be hugely unprofitable if the US government didn't subsidise it, it's not a crop that humans can eat, and it's not even a crop that our livestock can eat, yet we force them to eat it until they develop bleeding ulcers and have to be kept alive with drugs. If we used that land for actual edible crops, we'd have way more food, and if we used the land we use for livestock for other edible crops, we'd have even more food. And anyway, meat, especially cows, is energetically inefficient to produce.

[SiuiS]

Eating other life-forms for energy isn't evil, it's nature.

On the other hand, modern agricultural practices are inefficient, unsustainable, highly inhumane, and pretty evil.

I was going to ask if you meant husbandry and animal food processing, because agriculture is plants and I couldn't envision evil wheat and wheat by-productsI'msosorryCecil

[Aedilred]

I was going to ask if you meant husbandry and animal food processing, because agriculture is plants and I couldn't envision evil wheat and wheat by-productsI'msosorryCecil
Not so sure about that.


agriculture
[ag-ri-kuhl-cher]

noun
1.
the science, art, or occupation concerned with cultivating land, raising crops, and feeding, breeding, and raising livestock; farming.
2.
the production of crops, livestock, or poultry.

What is evil anyway? Is there reason to the rhyme? Without evil there can be no good so it must be good to be evil sometimes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLITAQi0aj0).

[pendell]

Yeah that’s a loaded question.
I’ll try to answer without straying into religion here:
Yes we’re all evil; it’s an innate trait we’re stuck with. Fortunately we have the power to see and understand the difference between good and evil. Therefore we can fight our nature and strive to not be evil.

On food:
Food of any kind is required for basic survival. Everything eats.
So in order for us to survive we need to kill things and eat them. Humans are amazing because we can eat a very large variety of plants and animals; that means we not only have tons of options but we can afford to be picky.

Pretty much this. The question of whether humans are capable of overcoming evil without supernatural assistance is religious and not board-appropriate. But the fact that the battle against the evil in ourselves is worth fighting, even if it's a losing battle, is not in doubt. Odin will have his Ragnarok, even knowing in advance that Fenris Wulf will win.



As towards humans eating animals -- for your consideration (http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/71/3/682.full). Hunter-Gatherer societies as a rule consume much of their energy in the form of animal protein. Consider the binocular vision of humans, the pointed teeth -- we are not herbivores.

There's nothing inherently evil about that. Herbivore populations need to be controlled by carnivores, and as the apex predator we have driven off most natural competitors. So if you don't want herbivore overpopulation (http://blog.nature.org/science/2013/08/22/too-many-deer/), humans are going to have to do the job of the predators we have displaced -- we must kill the surplus.

And because IMO it's rude to kill an animal and leave it to rot, we should strive if at all possible to eat every bit of it. That's the circle of life.

I define evil as 'out of balance' with the world and nature, causing harm to oneself and others and nature. So I dispute the idea that good and evil must both exist ; if everything was as it should be , there would be no place for evil at all.

To me, evil is not the opposite of good. Evil is what happens when good is taken too far, or too little. To me, good is the golden mean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy)), and of course there is no need for any unnecessary deviation therefrom. So good can exist quite comfortably without evil.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Heliomance]

Personally, I see nothing inherently morally wrong with cannibalism, in itself. With killing a sapient being for food, yes, but if they're dead already, I don't see cannibalism as evil any more than any other method of dealing with the corpse. Squicky, yeah. Not for me. But not evil.

[pendell]

Arguing from nature, I'm not so sure that's a good idea. Predator animals eat prey animals -- lions eat gazelle, for example -- but predators rarely eat other predators. In fact, predators rarely actually KILL other predators of the same species. Instead, they either drive each other out of their territories [solitary hunters] or they establish a dominance hierarchy [wolves, dogs]. There is a surrender reflex (http://kjshayla.blogspot.com/2005/02/surrender-reflex_22.html).

This is why a seemingly peaceful dog can 'savage' a young child. Pet dogs seem to believe that humans are part of their 'pack'. Thus they submit to the pack elders but feel it is right to discipline pack 'juniors' with their teeth. A baby is not exactly alpha material. And a baby doesn't know how to signal submission to a dog -- by going limp -- so the dog keeps hitting harder.

At any rate, so far as I know it's only humans who wage wars of extermination or genocide against others of their own species. As I understand it, most other creatures do not even kill other members of their species, normally, and they definitely do not hunt them.

One of the few exceptions I can think of is in the area of mating -- a male lion will kill the cubs of another lion when taking over a pride. animal infanticide (http://bigcatrescue.org/why-big-cats-kill-their-cubs/) also occurs when there is great privation, and there may be other stressors as well. But I think the principle in the natural world is that, as a rule of thumb, predators do not eat their own. I invite comment from any biology major why this is so, 'cause I'm not exactly sure.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Aedilred]

At any rate, so far as I know it's only humans who wage wars of extermination or genocide against others of their own species. As I understand it, most other creatures do not even kill other members of their species, normally, and they definitely do not hunt them.
Although I cannot cite any evidence, I believe other primates, specifically chimps, have been documented fairly unambiguously waging war against rival groups within the same species.


One of the few exceptions I can think of is in the area of mating -- a male lion will kill the cubs of another lion when taking over a pride. animal infanticide (http://bigcatrescue.org/why-big-cats-kill-their-cubs/) also occurs when there is great privation, and there may be other stressors as well. But I think the principle in the natural world is that, as a rule of thumb, predators do not eat their own. I invite comment from any biology major why this is so, 'cause I'm not exactly sure.
Again - not a zoologist, so going mainly off memory and loose generalisations here - predators will often kill rival predators in the same environment when they can, without discrimination by species. Lions will make an apparent point of killing cheetahs and leopards they encounter, although they don't usually eat them. The main reason it doesn't happen too often is probably risk of injury: two predators of similar stature fighting often stand a good chance of crippling each other, which is bad for everyone.

From what I understand, cannibalism is just not generally very good for you. Various forms of spongiform encephalopathy seem to be caused by it in a number of species: most famously BSE in cattle and kuru in humans. And there are very few conditions you really want less than spongiform encephalopathy.

[warty goblin]

Although I cannot cite any evidence, I believe other primates, specifically chimps, have been documented fairly unambiguously waging war against rival groups within the same species.
There's also ants, various species of which fight wars of extermination, and also enslave each other. Apparently people have recently observed formerly hostile colonies of different species cooperating to fight off slaver ants as well.


Again - not a zoologist, so going mainly off memory and loose generalisations here - predators will often kill rival predators in the same environment when they can, without discrimination by species. Lions will make an apparent point of killing cheetahs and leopards they encounter, although they don't usually eat them. The main reason it doesn't happen too often is probably risk of injury: two predators of similar stature fighting often stand a good chance of crippling each other, which is bad for everyone.
It's fairly well documented that wolves kill a lot of wolves.

[Erloas]

A lot of fish will eat any other fish if they can, same species or not. They don't try to kill them off though. Though since most fish work independently it isn't like one species would be able to target another to thoroughly.

And yes, one of the main reasons predators don't go after each other is because the chance of being hurt is too great. It doesn't take too bad of a wound to kill you in nature, so the benefit of having another species killed off isn't great enough to justify the very high risk in doing so.

[The Vagabond]

My personal opinion is "No."
Oh, you're asking if we're monsters? No more than a bear. Or an ape.
What? You're saying we default to good? F*** no.
My personal ethos is this:
People are animals. They aren't good, or evil, they just ARE. They do. Most of the time, what they do is make themselves content through various different means.
We are not evil, but neither are they, really. We eat. We kill to eat, and sometimes do things to animals that most people wouldn't accept happening to people. But we do it because we want to make our own lives better. Sometimes we make roads, buildings, and help. We do that to make our own lives better.

[SiuiS]

Arguing from nature, I'm not so sure that's a good idea. Predator animals eat prey animals -- lions eat gazelle, for example -- but predators rarely eat other predators. In fact, predators rarely actually KILL other predators of the same species. Instead, they either drive each other out of their territories [solitary hunters] or they establish a dominance hierarchy [wolves, dogs]. There is a surrender reflex (http://kjshayla.blogspot.com/2005/02/surrender-reflex_22.html).

Wolves actually do not take the alpha pair beta pair etc., pack format we are accustomed to in the wild. It's a stress reflex noted in wolves who were in captivity and perpetuated by scientific bias, as there were "enough" markers of this behavior in wild wolf packs to make broad claims. Similar stress reactions include nice, who all go homosexual, cannibalistic and refuse to procreate or socialize. So that isn't a good indicator of much.

That article is also... Eh. It's a man using outdated sexual psychology to justify dominating his women, specifically in the context of owning a slave girl. So whatever reflexes and instincts there are there have been cherry picked.



This is why a seemingly peaceful dog can 'savage' a young child.

I don't think bad parenting should be used for discussions of innate nature :smalltongue:

You're right about babies though. Human kids are infamously stupid around animals. A human grub's default expression upon seeing a dog or cat is (in the language of that dog or cat) "I am going to ****ing kill you and eat your young". Eyes flared, mouth open, teeth bared, making hideous screams. We call that "smiling" and "laughing wih joy", but the animals, they don't know that.



It's fairly well documented that wolves kill a lot of wolves.

Ooh. Source?


A lot of fish will eat any other fish if they can, same species or not. They don't try to kill them off though. Though since most fish work independently it isn't like one species would be able to target another to thoroughly.

And yes, one of the main reasons predators don't go after each other is because the chance of being hurt is too great. It doesn't take too bad of a wound to kill you in nature, so the benefit of having another species killed off isn't great enough to justify the very high risk in doing so.

We as humans actually have a skewed understanding if harm. Remember the first time you heard that if a horse breaks it's leg, they just kill it? That's not a horse thing. That's an animal thing. Small cuts in humans scar over quickly, in animals they scab and fester. Breaks in bones are lethal. We eat toxins to add variety to our food, or sometimes to hide that we are eating spoiled food.

Humans are bad ass, and you all should stop to acknowledge how amazing you are as a species sometimes. :3

[ghost_warlock]

Assume, for the sake of argument, that humans are evil. Then what? What does that even mean? What conclusions can we draw from this information? What would be the consequences?

To me, this isn't really useful information in any way. "Evil" is too general a term and "evilness" is likely more a gradient than binary, anyway. At most, I know I can expect an evil person to act in self-interest, but how's that any different than what every living creature does on a daily basis?


Personally, I see nothing inherently morally wrong with cannibalism, in itself. With killing a sapient being for food, yes, but if they're dead already, I don't see cannibalism as evil any more than any other method of dealing with the corpse. Squicky, yeah. Not for me. But not evil.

Squick nothing, I'm far more concerned about prions.

[SiuiS]

Evil creates it's own purpose by existing. If evil exists, then it is indeed, evil, and we have an obligation to strive away from evil and toward good in all ways in all things.

Evil, by nature, days 'the naturalistic fallacy is not a fallacy'. Any discussion of evil must buy into that or it's a failure of the basic tennets of dialogue.

[Frozen_Feet]

While you could say they are inhumane, and with that evil, it is very hard to put any credible backing to it being inefficient.

We're creating a whole lot more food now with less land and fewer people then ever before, so I don't see how that could be inefficient.

Efficient and sustainable agriculture is a local thing, NOT a global thing. A significant portion of arable land is farmed with basically medieval tools and techniques. Minority of all land is arable, and minority of arable land produces majority of food.

The discourse on ethicality of meat-eating and agriculture is as old as those two practices are. A consensus was also reached a long time ago as to how to do them: you do them efficiently, while treating things you eat with utmost respect, and if you have to kill something, you kill it with minimum pain and suffering caused. The "sapient versus non-sapient" argument only served as a sidetrack from these premises, as it made people disregard suffering of other beings and leads to lower overall productivity, efficiency and sustainability more often than not. This is true of all hierarchical world-views, where some class of things is considered arbitrarily higher or holier than some other class.

For a really basic example, giving pigs pieces of rope to toy with and chew, one significantly reduces the stress they suffer, making them less violent, less likely to catch disease, more likely to eat well and even demonstrably tastier when eaten! But when a pig farmer goes "oh they're just animals, they don't really feel stuff", they will disregard things like this and hurt their own business without even realizing it.

In the end, life cannot exists without suffering. Even plants, which on the face of it only need sunlight, water and minerals, compete of living space and smother each other. The benefit of one is detriment of another; all ethics systems are based on the notion that at least sometimes, the benefit can be greater than the detriment, but due to laws of thermodynamics, even this can only be achieved locally and temporarily, never eternally and universally. So if you feel like it, you can deem meat-eating unethical, but the logical conclusion is that life, itself, is unethical.

[SiuiS]

Efficient and sustainable agriculture is a local thing, NOT a global thing. A significant portion of arable land is farmed with basically medieval tools and techniques. Minority of all land is arable, and minority of arable land produces majority of food.

Is that relevant? If this minority of a minority produces enough to, quantitatively, feed the world three times over, then it doesn't matter if it's a local thing. Everywhere has that sort of locality. Those locations are global.

Give those medieval farmers better tools, better practices, a bit of subsidy. Help them help themselves. Focus on the concept of agriculture across the world. Help them maintain their land. If our tiny sliver of land can produce such abundance, help them improve their slivers of land.



For a really basic example, giving pigs pieces of rope to toy with and chew, one significantly reduces the stress they suffer, making them less violent, less likely to catch disease, more likely to eat well and even demonstrably tastier when eaten! But when a pig farmer goes "oh they're just animals, they don't really feel stuff", they will disregard things like this and hurt their own business without even realizing it.

Interesting.

[Melzentir]

All consumption is death for the consumed. Yet all must eat, so we all bring damnation to one creature or another.

Yeah, Gravemind.

[Frozen_Feet]

Is that relevant? If this minority of a minority produces enough to, quantitatively, feed the world three times over, then it doesn't matter if it's a local thing. Everywhere has that sort of locality. Those locations are global.

It is relevant if you want to evaluate global efficiency of food production and distribution. Even now, we technically produce enough to feed the global population twice over, but still one billion people starve, and another one-and-half billion are obese. It continues to matter as long as the inefficiency remains, as that inefficiency is to blame for the suffering and unethicality.


Give those medieval farmers better tools, better practices, a bit of subsidy. Help them help themselves. Focus on the concept of agriculture across the world. Help them maintain their land. If our tiny sliver of land can produce such abundance, help them improve their slivers of land.

We've tried. It hasn't stuck. It may one day, but in the interim, billions of people, animals and what not suffer.

[SiuiS]

It is relevant if you want to evaluate global efficiency of food production and distribution. Even now, we technically produce enough to feed the global population twice over, but still one billion people starve, and another one-and-half billion are obese. It continues to matter as long as the inefficiency remains, as that inefficiency is to blame for the suffering and unethicality.

That's my point. It sounded like you believed that since it was a local matter, people shouldn't network. That those people who were usig medieval tools in the other half of the world should be left to do that while we continue to do our farming stuff here.


And it's been done, but it's never been done for people with good motives by people who have the funds of greedy motives. If it was a world goal, we could get it done.

[Frozen_Feet]

The difference between what we are doing and what we could be doing usually answers the title question, aye.

[Colemanus]

Yes we can complain. Bad people complained about the Nazis hurting them. People in prison bitch about being used by others.

[veti]

When the main character asks one of these parasites "You guys are monsters, why are you doing this?" the parasite responds with "We're not monsters, we're eating humans for food." At this point there have been about 80 of these strange murders caused by these things. The parasite then asks "Aren't humans really the monsters? How many millions of things do you kill each year and eat?"

The real problem here is that the character is using undefined terms ("monster"), introducing an emotionally loaded argument, and generally engaging in sloppy thinking. The reason to fight these things is nothing to do with their alignment, or the definition of the word "monster". The reason to fight them is that they're eating people. It's not complicated, and it's a mistake to make it so by introducing vague terms.

Imagine a Siberian tiger is about to kill your son. If you have the means, would you kill it?

I would, unhesitatingly, and I wouldn't waste a moment thinking about the fact that the tiger is an endangered species, or that it just wants to feed its cubs. When it's trying to kill my son, those things are not the point. It could be sprouting feathery wings and a halo, and its every word echoed by an invisible choir of joyous voices, and I'd still be doing my very best to kill it. I don't care who's the monster in that scenario, it's eating my son, and at that point "moral" just doesn't matter any more. I quite literally don't give a damn.

[Zrak]

Firstly. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVid_fLzN5g)


No, it really doesn't, it's just sophistry. If they're intelligent enough to talk to us, they're definitely in the wrong morally, since they don't have to eat humans, they're just choosing to do so. And also creating quite a bit more trouble for themselves than they really would want anyway.

We don't have to eat creatures that [can feel pain/have faces/can recognize individual humans/have spines/&c.], we're just choosing to do so.


This is like people who insist on both freedom of expression and also no consequence for expression. Sorry, either A) you have to accept you can't say anything no matter how outlandish, or B) you have to accept that I can express my dislike with a fist just like you can.

I don't think most definitions of freedom of speech include expressions of the fist any more than they do propaganda of the deed. Someone can believe in their right to say something, however outlandish, and your right to say something back (however outlandish) without believe either of you has the right to use physical violence as a response to outlandish speech.


All consumption is death for the consumed. Yet all must eat, so we all bring damnation to one creature or another.

Eating apples hardly kills the tree.


Imagine a Siberian tiger is about to kill your son. If you have the means, would you kill it?

How old is he? I mean, are we talking "cute years" or is this kid about to hit middle school? That tiger might be doing me a huge favor.

[Razade]

We don't have to eat creatures that [can feel pain/have faces/can recognize individual humans/have spines/&c.], we're just choosing to do so.

Doesn't make them not tasty.


Eating apples hardly kills the tree.

But does kill the apple.


How old is he? I mean, are we talking "cute years" or is this kid about to hit middle school? That tiger might be doing me a huge favor.

Does it matter? If something is trying to kill someone do you not feel obligated to help them regardless of their age or their ability? I know I do.

[Eldan]

Depending on your definition of "feeling pain", very few living things don't. Plants react to being hurt, after all, and communicate the fact to other plants nearby.

[Zrak]

Doesn't make them not tasty.
Nor would our ability to speak make us not tasty to the hypothetical aliens.


But does kill the apple.
Apples aren't discrete organisms, so, no, it doesn't.


Does it matter? If something is trying to kill someone do you not feel obligated to help them regardless of their age or their ability? I know I do.

Well, yeah, if the middle-schooler is trying to kill the tiger that's trying to eat him, I would feel obligated to help defend the poor innocent kitty. I was saying I'd just stand by under the assumption the tiger has taken the middle-schooler by surprise.

[Asta Kask]

What standard of 'evil' do we use?

[warty goblin]

But does kill the apple.

In point of fact, the entire purpose of an apple is to be attractive enough that something eats it. It's why they were relatively sweet even before we spent a couple thousand years breeding them. It's how apple trees (and most other fruiting plants) solve the problem of moving their seeds. Unless you're regularly grinding up and eating apple seeds, you are doing exactly what the parent tree wanted, carrying and then discarding its seeds somewhere else. Just eating the seeds whole is fine, they'll go right through unharmed.

If we're attaching ethics to eating plants, you only run into trouble when you start eating either the entire plant, or its actual seeds. Eating corn kills the kernels, eating a walnut destroys that seed, eating lettuce involves the rampant shredding of lettuce plants, as well as usually lopping off any seed heads that the plant grows, or else pulling the entire plant up when it starts to bolt. Gardening requires the wholesale destruction of a lot of desirable plants, not to mention the constant slaughter of hordes of weeds and legions of insects and other arthropods.

[Aedilred]

Unless you're regularly grinding up and eating apple seeds,
Incidentally: Don't do this, they're full of cyanide. One or two won't hurt you too much (and swallowing them whole is fine), but it's not good for you all the same.

[SiuiS]

The real problem here is that the character is using undefined terms ("monster"), introducing an emotionally loaded argument, and generally engaging in sloppy thinking. The reason to fight these things is nothing to do with their alignment, or the definition of the word "monster". The reason to fight them is that they're eating people. It's not complicated, and it's a mistake to make it so by introducing vague terms.

Imagine a Siberian tiger is about to kill your son. If you have the means, would you kill it?

I would, unhesitatingly, and I wouldn't waste a moment thinking about the fact that the tiger is an endangered species, or that it just wants to feed its cubs. When it's trying to kill my son, those things are not the point. It could be sprouting feathery wings and a halo, and its every word echoed by an invisible choir of joyous voices, and I'd still be doing my very best to kill it. I don't care who's the monster in that scenario, it's eating my son, and at that point "moral" just doesn't matter any more. I quite literally don't give a damn.

I can respect that.

I would actually try to scare the tiger off, if I had any reason to believe I could use something less than lethal force and survive.

Tangent question: you know 100% by engaging the tiger, you will die. Your son will still be out in tiger infested wilderness (though safe from this tiger). Do you still do it?


Firstly. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVid_fLzN5g)

Neat, haven't heard the original before.



I don't think most definitions of freedom of speech include expressions of the fist any more than they do propaganda of the deed. Someone can believe in their right to say something, however outlandish, and your right to say something back (however outlandish) without believe either of you has the right to use physical violence as a response to outlandish speech.


Then I did a poor job of explaining.

The common use of freedom of speech is "I can say whatever I want, but you cannot challenge me because then you're challenging my freedom of speech", that is, if I were to call you a dirty name, and you reported me to the moderators, you're at fault for not letting me speak freely.

That's asinine. Freedom of speech applies to everyone. You have the freedom to say something inflammatory, sure, but then I have the freedom to verbally tear you a new one for being an (hypothetical) idiot.

I just default to animal morality sometimes. It's always in the back of my mind that push comes to shove, the guy with the knife is right because there comes a point where he says "I'm right" and the other guy can no longer disagree. It keeps me civil.



Eating apples hardly kills the tree.


Precisely. This argument is like saying sloughing skin slowly kills you because the cells die.



But does kill the apple.


Apples aren't relevant to the idea of creatures. This is like holding your breath because metabolism causes molecular separation of air. Giving equal weight to apples and humans is ludicrous.



Does it matter? If something is trying to kill someone do you not feel obligated to help them regardless of their age or their ability? I know I do.

I do not value human life above animal life. I respect your position though, in the sense of respecting you and not just a patronizing 'I get that, sure'. We need more folks like that sometimes.

[veti]

I can respect that.

I would actually try to scare the tiger off, if I had any reason to believe I could use something less than lethal force and survive.

Tangent question: you know 100% by engaging the tiger, you will die. Your son will still be out in tiger infested wilderness (though safe from this tiger). Do you still do it?

To the last question: yep. Obviously that's a sub-optimal outcome in many ways, but if only one of the three of us is going to survive this encounter, there's no doubt in my mind who that should be.

Yes, if there were an option that involved sparing the tiger while still saving the kid, I'd do that. But for purposes of this thought experiment, I assumed there wasn't.

[Aedilred]

To the last question: yep. Obviously that's a sub-optimal outcome in many ways, but if only one of the three of us is going to survive this encounter, there's no doubt in my mind who that should be.

Yes, if there were an option that involved sparing the tiger while still saving the kid, I'd do that. But for purposes of this thought experiment, I assumed there wasn't.

I would rather not kill the tiger if it could be avoided, but that's mostly because I'm generally in favour of tigers and they're in short supply. If however one was directly attacking me/my loved ones I'd probably do what needed to be done and if it died then mourn it later.

I would have much less compunction about killing a member of any species attacking me/a loved one that wasn't endangered, still less if it were an invasive species in that habitat. I don't have a problem with killing mice, rats, cockroaches, clothes moths, fruit flies or bluebottles that invade my home even if they're not directly hurting anyone, and would fairly happily shoot game birds or rabbits in order to eat them.

[warty goblin]

Apples aren't relevant to the idea of creatures. This is like holding your breath because metabolism causes molecular separation of air. Giving equal weight to apples and humans is ludicrous.

Quite right, it isn't an apples to apples comparison. The apples to apples comparison involving apples and humans is probably something like comparing apples to sperm. Which leads quite naturally to that most fundamental of horticultural problems; trying to get the apple tree to wear a condom.


I do not value human life above animal life. I respect your position though, in the sense of respecting you and not just a patronizing 'I get that, sure'. We need more folks like that sometimes.
I value human life more than animal life, but I'm human. I am under no illusion that a disinterested third party would necessarily judge me to be worth more than the pig whose leg I slow-cooked to delicious perfection last night. To such a creature the pig may well be worth more, because I really suck at digging holes with my face. I would protest quite stringently if the third party decided I should die for my swine-murderin' ways, but I cannot say I can meaningfully prove the third party wrong.

[Razade]

Apples aren't relevant to the idea of creatures. This is like holding your breath because metabolism causes molecular separation of air. Giving equal weight to apples and humans is ludicrous.

And I wasn't making that argument. Your comment that eating causes death to the consumed. Zrak responded that eating an apple doesn't kill the tree. My point was you don't eat the tree. You eat the apple. Which doesn't live after you eat it. I was backing up your point.


I do not value human life above animal life. I respect your position though, in the sense of respecting you and not just a patronizing 'I get that, sure'. We need more folks like that sometimes.

I don't not value animal life over human life. Saving someone from being killed doesn't place them above another being over all, just in the moment. Secondly I wouldn't go to the "kill" option if it wasn't the only option. Thirdly, if I saw a human trying to kill a dog I'd try to stop that person from doing it with all my power.

[Kornaki]

And I wasn't making that argument. Your comment that eating causes death to the consumed. Zrak responded that eating an apple doesn't kill the tree. My point was you don't eat the tree. You eat the apple. Which doesn't live after you eat it. I was backing up your point.


Did the apple live before you ate it? Is an apple a living organism?

[Bhu]

OP: No we aren't evil, we're amoral. Good and evil are polite fictions created by humans, for humans, to justify what they do to one another, and to manipulate others into changing their behaviors. They are lies that allow society to function, but that doesn't make them any less of a lie.

[Razade]

Did the apple live before you ate it? Is an apple a living organism?

Depends on how you define Life I guess. The apple isn't dead, the cells are still active after all.

[Heliomance]

Incidentally: Don't do this, they're full of cyanide. One or two won't hurt you too much (and swallowing them whole is fine), but it's not good for you all the same.

But they're tasty!

[SiuiS]

And I wasn't making that argument. Your comment that eating causes death to the consumed. Zrak responded that eating an apple doesn't kill the tree. My point was you don't eat the tree. You eat the apple. Which doesn't live after you eat it. I was backing up your point.


But the apple is not alive in the same sense. Alive does not mean possesses cellular metabolism. It's a distinction that has to be made. It may be arbitrary, but there must be a line where you say "okay, this spot here, this is where distinction matters". Otherwise we end up with the doctor manhattan issue; at a particle level there is no difference between a livif body and a dead one.



I don't not value animal life over human life. Saving someone from being killed doesn't place them above another being over all, just in the moment. Secondly I wouldn't go to the "kill" option if it wasn't the only option. Thirdly, if I saw a human trying to kill a dog I'd try to stop that person from doing it with all my power.

I did not mean to imply anything and was speaking solely for myself.

It's an old martial arts parable (old as in older than me), that a practitioner was arrested and spent his time meditating on fighting a tiger. If done well enough, one can come out of solitary prison confinement just as sharp mentally as one went in, because all opponents are in the mind.

I told you that so I could tell you that tigers, actively attacking, are probably the best illustration I can think of for the continuum of force. There is not escalation, there are no steps, there is only lethal force. It's a topic of interest for me, much navel gazing involved.

Children, animals and the disabled (through age or infirmity), aye. It's an irrational bias, but I attribute a moral weight to assault of someone that cannot fathom an attack as such and cannot defend themselves. Like, a dog is a wolf in body, right? For given values of dog. But dogs are conditioned to like people, or respond to people as people do. Someone hurting a dog will get a rise out of me that someone hurting an adult human male will not*.




* caveat: tears or clear dismay.

[Zrak]

The point I was arguing was not that we ate apple trees, but that considering an apple on is own rather than a part of the tree frames the question disingenuously. If you consider the apple alone, rather than the organism of which it is a part, the statement I argued against is technically true, but pointless; "killing" things which are not discrete organisms and, in fact, are a creature's means of reproduction that rely on consumption doesn't really entail the conclusion implied in the post to which I responded, that "we all bring damnation to one creature or another." Eating an apple does not bring damnation to the apple tree. In fact, it pretty much does the opposite.

[Razade]

But the apple is not alive in the same sense. Alive does not mean possesses cellular metabolism. It's a distinction that has to be made. It may be arbitrary, but there must be a line where you say "okay, this spot here, this is where distinction matters". Otherwise we end up with the doctor manhattan issue; at a particle level there is no difference between a livif body and a dead one.

Sure, and it's up to you to draw the line I suppose. Not you specifically of course but more so you as the individual. And that's cool.



The point I was arguing was not that we ate apple trees, but that considering an apple on is own rather than a part of the tree frames the question disingenuously. If you consider the apple alone, rather than the organism of which it is a part, the statement I argued against is technically true, but pointless; "killing" things which are not discrete organisms and, in fact, are a creature's means of reproduction that rely on consumption doesn't really entail the conclusion implied in the post to which I responded, that "we all bring damnation to one creature or another." Eating an apple does not bring damnation to the apple tree. In fact, it pretty much does the opposite.

Sure, I wasn't really supporting the argument to show where you were wrong but more as pointing out that SiuS's point wasn't exactly false as you framed it either. Though I wouldn't argue that eating the Apple Tree's ability to proliferate somehow is the opposite of dooming it unless you want to say that since we want the apples we keep the trees safe. Though in that sense then we're not really dooming the cow as a species either since we're going to keep breeding them because we want their steaks. Sucks for the individual cow sure but it's not exactly roses for the individual tree either. We just give more weight to the cow because we value it's life as more important, a distinction I find arbitrary.

[warty goblin]

Sure, I wasn't really supporting the argument to show where you were wrong but more as pointing out that SiuS's point wasn't exactly false as you framed it either. Though I wouldn't argue that eating the Apple Tree's ability to proliferate somehow is the opposite of dooming it unless you want to say that since we want the apples we keep the trees safe. Though in that sense then we're not really dooming the cow as a species either since we're going to keep breeding them because we want their steaks. Sucks for the individual cow sure but it's not exactly roses for the individual tree either. We just give more weight to the cow because we value it's life as more important, a distinction I find arbitrary.

Depending on the specific tree, it can in fact be very good, so long as it produces apples that we like. Apples don't breed true for their fruit (by which I mean the fruit of a cross of two apples is very different from either of the parent tree's fruit), so if we want more apples, we clone the tree. We also do this for apples that have otherwise favorable characteristics, such as rootstock.

[Razade]

Depending on the specific tree, it can in fact be very good, so long as it produces apples that we like. Apples don't breed true for their fruit (by which I mean the fruit of a cross of two apples is very different from either of the parent tree's fruit), so if we want more apples, we clone the tree. We also do this for apples that have otherwise favorable characteristics, such as rootstock.

Right, I said exactly that. It's good for the tree if you want to frame it in that we keep the trees that produce the apples we want. But the same can be said for the cow if you want to frame it in that sense. It's great for the cow that we want their steak and milk and leather because we're going to keep breeding the stock that produce the best qualities of all of those.

[warty goblin]

Right, I said exactly that. It's good for the tree if you want to frame it in that we keep the trees that produce the apples we want. But the same can be said for the cow if you want to frame it in that sense. It's great for the cow that we want their steak and milk and leather because we're going to keep breeding the stock that produce the best qualities of all of those.

Eating a tree's apples does not doom it as an individual. In fact it may make that particular genetic strain vastly more long-lived than it could manage left to its own devices. Since we don't tend to eat animals that keel over of old age however, eating a cow does doom that individual. The difference does seem relevant.

[Razade]

Eating a tree's apples does not doom it as an individual. In fact it may make that particular genetic strain vastly more long-lived than it could manage left to its own devices. Since we don't tend to eat animals that keel over of old age however, eating a cow does doom that individual. The difference does seem relevant.

I don't particularly see it. The cow regardless of what it's use it has (in general) a higher standard of living and especially in the case of dairy farms a much longer life expectancy than a wild cow. This is of course ignoring Factory Farming and the like. My family cows have most certainly had a better standard of living and much longer lives than they'd have at the mercy of things much faster and hungrier than themselves. Even the ones we used for meat. I freely accept that a Tree and a Cow aren't really equal to most people but I put more worth on the tree in my personal view.

[Murska]

Answering the title question: Morality is not objective. Therefore, no, we are not evil. (And yes, we are, from some other point of view, but that is unimportant as the only morality I can follow is my own.)

[SiuiS]

Sure, I wasn't really supporting the argument to show where you were wrong but more as pointing out that SiuS's point wasn't exactly false as you framed it either. Though I wouldn't argue that eating the Apple Tree's ability to proliferate somehow is the opposite of dooming it unless you want to say that since we want the apples we keep the trees safe. Though in that sense then we're not really dooming the cow as a species either since we're going to keep breeding them because we want their steaks. Sucks for the individual cow sure but it's not exactly roses for the individual tree either. We just give more weight to the cow because we value it's life as more important, a distinction I find arbitrary.

No man, apple trees design apples to be eaten. You eat the apple, ingest the seeds, poop them out somewhere else and give birth to baby apple trees. Literally their life cycle.

Eating apples is not consuming life. Eating apples is tree sex and procreation.

[Murska]

Eating apples is not consuming life. Eating apples is tree sex and procreation.

These are not necessarily contradictory.

[Razade]

No man, apple trees design apples to be eaten. You eat the apple, ingest the seeds, poop them out somewhere else and give birth to baby apple trees. Literally their life cycle.

Eating apples is not consuming life. Eating apples is tree sex and procreation.

Yes? I understand that? I've conceded that under your, and others, definition that an apple and a cow aren't equal. I find your line in the sand merely arbitrary. Keeping and propagating an apple tree to me is no more or less a problem than keeping and breeding a cow for domestic use so long as the cow isn't suffering unduly. I'm saying I don't feel that the cow has any special or additional privileges than the apple tree.

[SiuiS]

I'm not talking about orchards dude. No human interaction at all.

A horse eats and poops apple seeds. Cows do. In the wild. No humans. No domestication. There is no way in which eating an apple is in any way 'arbitrarily' not killing something. That's not a line in the sand drawn arbitrarily. That's the basic functions of English and understanding.

Apples are as fleeting as sperm. Apples are sophisticated pollen devices. There is no comparison of apple and tree; there is comparison of apple and bark, of apple and pollen, of apple and hair or nails; part of a whole, useful, but in no way it's own living thing and in no way bearing any weight if destroyed.


Ah well. Enough horse beating.

[warty goblin]

I don't particularly see it. The cow regardless of what it's use it has (in general) a higher standard of living and especially in the case of dairy farms a much longer life expectancy than a wild cow. This is of course ignoring Factory Farming and the like. My family cows have most certainly had a better standard of living and much longer lives than they'd have at the mercy of things much faster and hungrier than themselves. Even the ones we used for meat. I freely accept that a Tree and a Cow aren't really equal to most people but I put more worth on the tree in my personal view.

I never said anything about quality of life, or the relative valuations of cow and apple lives. The point that what is done to them to be consumed by humans impose fundamentally distinct changes in the individual organisms. Which is to say that grafting an apple tree causes only a very slight harm to the parent tree, whereas butchering a cow is an entirely terminal outcome for the bovine. At least I find this distinct, in the sense that I also find getting my fingernails trimmed and getting shot in the head fairly different portions of my day.

[Murska]

Third, our moral sense of human worth means no matter how much you love your dog, if you had to choose between the dog and yourself, you won't ever choose the dog. If you sacrifice your life for another, then it will likely be a human, not a dog that you are giving up your life for.

It isn't always that simple though. For instance, it's perfectly plausible you'd sacrifice other humans for your dog's sake.


As for the question, Are we evil?, there is only one possible answer. Yes, we are. We possess the capacity to do evil in greater amount than good, otherwise, why would we have civilizations and laws? Strip away civilization and law, you get anarchy and Might makes Right. At our most basic nature, we are animals, but unlike animals we possess a higher understanding which we can always use to commit evil. Animals don't launch campaigns of genocide based on the color of skin or religious background or cultural/racial background. They won't even understand those concepts. There will never be an real kind of animal Nazi, because they simply can't reach those levels of evil like we humans can.

We do have goodness in us as well, but evil is always stronger seeming and more seductive. That's what yoda said, and its true for humans.

If we were evil, how come we have civilizations and laws? All these things are human attempts to make humans act in certain ways that, generally and in the long term, are beneficial to humanity even while they might in some situation be bad for specific people. Evil and good are also concepts created for that same purpose.

Animals are not thought of as evil not because they don't commit 'evil' actions - they do - but because we view them as incapable of choosing to do otherwise, and thus not responsible for their actions. It's debatable how true that might be, but if we take it as given shouldn't that also make animals incapable of good? Does not the fact that humans can perceive the moral wrongs we commit and attempt to do better already raise us above those who can't? (of course morality being a wholly human-specific construct meant to direct human behaviour does raise into question the meaningfulness of the debate anyway)

[SiuiS]

Third, our moral sense of human worth means no matter how much you love your dog, if you had to choose between the dog and yourself, you won't ever choose the dog. If you sacrifice your life for another, then it will likely be a human, not a dog that you are giving up your life for.

Bullhockey. You've never tried to come between a southerner and their dog before have you?

If I'm attacked by a bear, and my dog valiantly intervenes, I will honor his sacrifice by living. If my dog gets in a fight with a bear? I'll dial 9-1-1 so someone will come and pick up my dog, and I'm either eating well for the next month or that hear is gonna have one hell of a story for it's friends.


It isn't always that simple though. For instance, it's perfectly plausible you'd sacrifice other humans for your dog's sake.

Damn straight.



If we were evil, how come we have civilizations and laws? All these things are human attempts to make humans act in certain ways that, generally and in the long term, are beneficial to humanity even while they might in some situation be bad for specific people. Evil and good are also concepts created for that same purpose.

Laws are not necessarily moral.

[Zrak]

Sure, I wasn't really supporting the argument to show where you were wrong but more as pointing out that SiuS's point wasn't exactly false as you framed it either.
I'm not sure what point you're referring to, since I wasn't responding to anything SiuS said. I was responding to the post I quoted, by Melzentir.


Though I wouldn't argue that eating the Apple Tree's ability to proliferate somehow is the opposite of dooming it unless you want to say that since we want the apples we keep the trees safe.
You really don't get how apples work, huh? Eating an apple does not eat an apple tree's "ability to proliferate," it greatly facilitates that tree's ability to proliferate. Pretty much the whole idea is you eat an apple and then when you poop out apple seeds you make a baby tree. Moreover, eating apples does not doom the apple tree any more than not eating apples. Aside from the fact that picking apples doesn't alter the tree's lifespan, there's also the fact that you can wait for the apples to fall off so as to not even have to pick them.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the central conceit of my rebuttal was that a cow (or, more generally, an animal) is of more value than an apple tree (or, more generally, a plant). This is not the case. The essence of my rebuttal was that one can eat part of an apple tree without killing, or even harming, the tree. The distinction here would not be in the "value" of the organisms, but in the fact that it's generally impossible to eat the meat of an animal without killing it, while it is often possible to eat the fruit of a plant without killing or even harming the plant.

[Murska]

Laws are not necessarily moral.

This is true. However, I am curious as to whether you honestly thought I disagreed or was unaware of the fact, so that it was necessary to bring up.

[Zrak]

Your argument gave the impression that you were either unaware of the fact or choosing to ignore it to further your argument; in either case, I would say it seemed a relevant counter-argument. If you don't believe laws are necessarily moral, asking why we have laws does not refute the premise that we are evil, as you seem to be arguing it does.

[SiuiS]

This is true. However, I am curious as to whether you honestly thought I disagreed or was unaware of the fact, so that it was necessary to bring up.

I believe this would be a lovely conversation to have somewhere that wouldn't evict us for being so political. I believe that you are aware of the idea of law as nonmoral but have your own understanding of what level of moral the law should be.

[Murska]

The sentence was meant to contrast the sentiment in the post I quoted that 'The fact that we have laws is evidence that we are evil, as if we were good we wouldn't need them'. My point was that it is equally valid to argue that if we were evil, there would be no impetus to have laws. From the context it is clear that 'laws and civilization' is being used to signify the social contract to live in a specific way or face punishment by society.

In general, most laws tend towards upholding a stable society.

[aspi]

I wonder... to those here who are convinced that we're "helping" apples by eating them, have you considered the following?

Pretty much all apples that you can buy are of a selected variety that has been specifically cultivated, in some cases for hundreds of years. This is done by grafting, a process where the top of a small tree (or the tops of all it's branches) are cut off and replaced by branches from another tree that carries the exact variety of fruit the owner wants to produce. Pretty much any apple you can buy, wether it's organic or not, will be produced this way. If you're buying an apple tree for your garden, it will come pre-grafted. So in essence, we're mutilating apple trees and robbing them of any chance to ever produce offspring. Even worse, we're forcing them into a life where they have to produce some other tree's offspring instead of their own for dozens of years before we cut them down because they're losing prductivity, years ahead of the end of their possible lifespan. All just so we can have nice, similar and essentially cloned apples. And it doesn't stop at apples... we do that for most cultivated kinds of fruit.

Thoughts on that? For me personally, it's the reason why I can't take a fruitarian seriously :smallwink:

[Frozen_Feet]

Evil behaviour results from laws and strictures just as well - natural laws. Humans are cellular automatons running within the constraints of a finite set of rules. Goodness and evil both necessarily arise from said rules. The opposite of Law is not evil - it's Chaos, or Nihility.

[SiuiS]

I wonder... to those here who are convinced that we're "helping" apples by eating them, have you considered the following?

Irrelevant, because we aren't discussing any particular case or even the particular case of apples as currently grown. It is enough to say that the existence of fruit which is eaten to propagate puts lie to the idea that everything destroys everything.

[aspi]

Irrelevant, because we aren't discussing any particular case or even the particular case of apples as currently grown. It is enough to say that the existence of fruit which is eaten to propagate puts lie to the idea that everything destroys everything.
No, but we only got to that topic because of the statement that it would be evil for another species to "farm" humans, which led to the discussion about humans farming animals, which some then called into question - in contrast to the eating fruit which was portrayed as doing plants a favor in general.

I find that strain of logic questionable and thus gave an example why the farming of plants as mankind currently does is just as cruel if it were phrased in humanized terms. Since I just demonstrated that we are as cruel if not more cruel to plants than we are to animals, I'd like to hear the position of those wo make a distinction in justification. After all, the question wasn't phrased as "are we evil because we could eat something", it was "are we evil because we do eat something".

Me personally, I find this entire argument somewhat weird, since it is clear that when it comes to sustenance, we as humans just do what it takes to survive at the cost of other organisms. It just seems more difficult to justify in cases where the food is easier to attribute human characteristics to, then it is in others that are further removed from us in the tree of life.

On a side note: calling someone's question in an open discussion that was in no way even intended as a counter to your previous statement irrelevant strikes me as overly defensive and not particularly nice.

[Razade]

No, but we only got to that topic because of the statement that it would be evil for another species to "farm" humans, which led to the discussion about humans farming animals, which some then called into question - in contrast to the eating fruit which was portrayed as doing plants a favor in general.

I find that strain of logic questionable and thus gave an example why the farming of plants as mankind currently does is just as cruel if it were phrased in humanized terms. Since I just demonstrated that we are as cruel if not more cruel to plants than we are to animals, I'd like to hear the position of those wo make a distinction in justification. After all, the question wasn't phrased as "are we evil because we could eat something", it was "are we evil because we do eat something".

Me personally, I find this entire argument somewhat weird, since it is clear that when it comes to sustenance, we as humans just do what it takes to survive at the cost of other organisms. It just seems more difficult to justify in cases where the food is easier to attribute human characteristics to, then it is in others that are further removed from us in the tree of life.

On a side note: calling someone's question in an open discussion that was in no way even intended as a counter to your previous statement irrelevant strikes me as overly defensive and not particularly nice.

Their argument is that a eating the fruit of a planet isn't the same as killing a cow because the plant lives on but the cow doesn't. Which is a fair point.

[SiuiS]

I find that strain of logic questionable and thus gave an example why the farming of plants as mankind currently does is just as cruel if it were phrased in humanized terms. Since I just demonstrated that we are as cruel if not more cruel to plants than we are to animals, I'd like to hear the position of those wo make a distinction in justification.

Plants do not suffer in any comparable way by having their fruit taken or by being farmed. Their quality of life is not diminished, they do not suffer for growth, and there is still no valid comparison between picking from or even rearing fruit and doing the same with an animal.

Eating fruit not being a bad thing is not an exception, but the rule. Just because you can make them technically similar does not mean they have equal weight or frequency.

[warty goblin]

{scrubbed}

[Navian]

Humans made up the concept of evil, entirely for our own selfish purposes. Other intelligent creatures capable of using our language could, hypothetically, use it against us, the same way we could, hypothetically, reverse-engineer one of their spaceships and use it against them.

While reverse-engineering the spaceship could be construed as theft, we probably would consider it 'a heroic feat of engineering', and while using our own concept of 'evil' against us could be construed as superlative oratory, we would probably consider it manipulative and disingenuous, or in other words 'evil'.

What's evil or not shifts over time. Slavery is 'evil' today. It used to be, thousands of years ago, that refusing to practice slavery was immoral. It was unassertive, unconventional, and limp-wristed, and to take such an attitude would bring only death and destruction. Thousands of years before that it wasn't even in question, because using slavery was logistically infeasible. Back then, it wasn't good or bad, it was only nonsensical.

It's going to keep changing. The first entirely lab-grown hamburger patty was eaten last year. It tasted like cardboard, but I'm sure that a hundred years from now, butchering steers to grind them up to make hamburger patties would seem like some bizarre arcane ritual, when you could just vat-grow them with feedstock and get better meat for much cheaper, especially since cows don't grow in space. Morality is complex, but it comes down to 'what's the right thing to do?' and that does depend to some extent on how easy the best options are to implement, not just on what would be the ideal.

If some alien creature can travel between planets, what is keeping them from growing their own biological hosts that have no self-awareness? That's what I'm wondering. It might be related to how some people today still hunt wild animals when they could just eat chicken, or nuts for that matter.

Hunting for food still isn't generally considered evil, though. The human subspecies who didn't do it are extinct for good reason, and they never would have been capable of developing the life-saving technology modern humans have using our larger, high-cost, high-performance brains. Even hunting for sport is only slowly getting there, as more viable alternative forms of entertainment appear, and the virtues it exercises become less important (and therefore less virtuous) in day-to-day life.

If you can look at something that humans practiced to survive, like hunting by driving game to exhaustion instead of just shooting it, and call it 'evil' just because we now know better and have better tools and infrastructure, all that says about you or them is that you're much, much more privileged... and in large part, you owe that privilege to your ancestors' wicked ways! We can always work to create a better future, but it's not fair to judge the past, or even the present, based on ideals that haven't matured yet.

[Devils_Advocate]

Okay, I've seen several references to "our" or "human" values in this thread, and most of them seem misplaced. Especially if we're talking about human cultures throughout history and not just in the present, I think that some of the principles being referred to as if they were nigh-universal are, in fact, uh... not that.

Heck, forget "intelligent beings" or "sapient beings" in general, whatever that even means. My understanding is that the idea that all human beings are worthy of one's consideration -- or at least the idea that all human beings are equally worthy of consideration -- has only really gained any widespread popularity in relatively recent times. And I'm not convinced that it's even all that popular now. People tend to be partial to members of their own groups at best. At worst, you get comments to the effect of "They killed our innocent civilians, now we're going to kill theirs".

And it's hard for me to see favoring those similar to oneself as a separate thing from selfishness. Because, hey, we're changing all the time. You're different now than you were five seconds ago. Actions you take to benefit yourself in the future benefit a different person than you, albeit only slightly different. So acting in favor of people similar to yourself just seems like more of the same, pretty much. The concept at work is distinguishable from that of the self, but I'd bet that there are more underlying similarities than differences.

And, really, even if you expand your in-group to include nearly all humans, that's still gotta be really tightly clustered in the space of all possible minds, relatively speaking. I personally think that it's fairly unimpressive to manage to care about entities that are well over 99 percent genetically identical to you and whose underlying psychological architecture is almost entirely the same as yours. And doesn't being ethical mean being considerate of those who you don't empathize with? Like, not doing something bad to someone just because it gets you something you want and doesn't make you feel bad?

Some people take the position that we have to draw some sort of line between things that have moral rights and things that don't. Counterpoint: NO, WE DON'T. It would be evil to force a rock to suffer against its will. If anything, I think it would be especially evil, because you'd have to go out of your way to give a rock a will and the capacity to suffer. If something "having moral rights" means that it's evil to do evil things to it, then everything "has moral rights". Of course, one can deny that non-humans are capable of suffering, but one can deny the existence of human suffering as well.

Almost no one actually believes that non-humans aren't sentient, because that belief has been heavily selected against. E.g. if a hungry tiger is charging at you and you aren't worried about it because you think that the tiger can't see you, then things aren't going to go too well for you as a result of that. Nor are you likely to say to yourself, under those circumstances, "Okay, the tiger doesn't really possess awareness of its environment, but it has sophisticated mechanisms in place that cause it to act as though it's able to AAAAAHHH OH NO I AM BEING EATEN". Mind you, there is a danger of thinking too anthropomorphically, of assuming that that an animal experiences its environment more closely to how you do than it actually does, and not taking into account its stronger sense of smell but poorer vision, for example. But straight-up denying that a tiger has a mind -- that it has its own internal model of its environment based on the information provided by its sense organs -- probably isn't going to yield much success.

Now, if you have don't have to run from a wild animal right now and have the luxury of analyzing the situation from your armchair, sure you can say all sorts of stuff about how "animals are just automatons". But you can say that about human beings, too. Heck, humans are animals (which is why I used "non-humans" instead of "animals" in the above) -- we ain't vegetables nor minerals -- so it's remarkably straightforward. There's plenty of philosophical positions to appeal to if you want to deny sentience. Mereological nihilism, solipsism... I remember reading a paper once arguing to the effect that minds exist in the abstract space of all possible minds, and all matter does is represent them, providing a window into a particular place in mindspace, as it were.

And I'm totally up for exploring questions like what it even means for something to exist, but you shouldn't be willing to do anything bad to anyone on the grounds that they're not real. The relevant ethical principle obviously is to not do that. Heck, I may not really exist, but I'm still totally not okay with someone torturing me even if I don't. I assume that you don't want to be mistreated even if you don't exist either. So via the ethical rule that we should (at a minimum) be willing to grant others the same consideration that we want for ourselves, we derive the principle that we shouldn't mistreat other minds, even if they don't exist.

Now, some people seem to have gotten the idea that you can redefine the word "sentient" and that allows you to talk about e.g. respecting the rights of sentient beings without having to, you know, mean it. But the thing is that anyone can pull that nonsense. I can go and declare "sentient" to mean "me, personally". But within the context of that declaration, talking about the rights of sentient beings no longer has the same meaning. Talking about placing higher priority on the welfare of the sentient becomes me saying that I'm a selfish prick, in that context. Changing the meaning of a word changes the meaning of a sentence that contains it.

Alternately, you can say that only a particular subset of sentient beings have rights, which is at least being honest about what you're claiming. Although I rather doubt that many people actually believe that intelligence or self-awareness or moral agency or whatever makes you deserve the consideration of others. Like, a cow may lack the sophisticated mental faculties of a human adult, but so does a human infant. And would you be okay with being mistreated by someone much smarter than you, someone with a mind qualitatively more intricate on like a whole different level and all that? How cognitively disabled are you saying someone can be and in what way before disregarding their welfare becomes ethically acceptable? You could probably exploit severely retarded people for organ transplants and medical testing in a way significantly less evil than how some animals are treated... and yet still be pretty evil. :/

How much worse, then, when such a thing isn't even done for a good reason. I gotta say, the whole "Evil food tastes better" (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0511.html) thing strikes me as being... kinda contrived, almost? Because, I mean... there are lots of things that taste good. Why pick something evil? I'm not a fan of assigning motives beyond the obvious, but I can almost imagine that there's some sort of subconscious desire to assert dominance over other creatures at work. But if I'm gonna be like that then that assessment seems like a contrived effort to assert my own moral superiority and oh no I've gone cross-eyed.

But saying that humans deserve special consideration doesn't have to be unfair favoritism necessarily. You can say, for example, that everyone deserves the chance to make well-informed decisions about their own lives, but not everyone is capable of that, so human beings are given opportunities that e.g. pigs do not. That is pretty much the stated justification for how humans tend to treat their offspring, although the applications of that principle may be pretty dubious. It's like how smashing a rock on the ground isn't evil because rocks don't have feelings. The point is, if the mental difference between two objects somehow makes doing something to one of them less evil than doing the same thing to the other one... well, then it makes it less evil.

On the other hand, if doing something to one of them isn't in any way less evil than doing the same thing to the other one... well, then it isn't any less evil. There's a pretty big difference between, on the one hand, acknowledging that different minds have different needs and respond differently to the same treatment, and on the other hand, carefully delineating who the acceptable victims are. If you want to be ethical, the goal shouldn't be to specify what mental traits make someone okay to abuse, it should be to prevent abuse.

In closing, let me say that seeming difficulties in valuing everyone's welfare equally may be due to valuing human welfare too much. For example, does the average person really deserve to live? How much has the average person done to deserve it, and how much has the average person done to deserve to die instead? Heck, out of all of the people who could exist, do you think that you deserve to exist just because you already do? How does that make any sense? If anything, it seems like it would be fairer to give someone new a turn, if you haven't made yourself worthy to be alive; and if being alive is highly desirable, then wouldn't you have to be pretty virtuous to be worthy of it? But you're probably not, because, as has been discussed, most people are pretty evil, and not even just because they kill because they crave innocent flesh. Although that would be enough, probably... I mean, when a monster is described as killing not to survive but because it craves the taste of innocent flesh, you know that it's pretty damn evil, amirite? Like, that's the whole point of that description.

So, mull that one over.

[SiuiS]

You base your point on a false equivalence. The idea that we change every moment intellectually, emotionally and molecularly is technically accurate but misses the point. "The same as me" has never been a technical point. Ever. No one has ever said "oh yeah, we're technically similar enough and it's cool".

When I work for those the same as me, I abstract that to a, let's call it, 'tribal' level. Those of my tribe. Not even my tribe; it's disingenuous to say they are like me. That's a dangerous rubric. We all tend to mean "they and I are similar enough to the tribal ideal"; we all match up to an external value. Or, externally expressed.

It's also missing a mark to say that these values are recent. They aren't. These values show up at least three thousand years ago, and they keep achieving spontaneous genesis among different groups. We presume they are more widespread, and that is 100% true. I guarantee more of the world knows of and can try to understand these values than before. They don't always agree or believe, they don't always even understand the actual point. But the background radiation is there now and if snuffed out, will be again.

Hmm. I lost track of myself didn't I? Here I am saying it's not recent and the supporting evidence is that it is recent. It feels complete to me. Accurate, legitimate. But then, "feelings" aren't easy to convey data with or through. Ah well. My general idea is that we need a holistic understanding of these things before we can truly pass judgement.

[Thanqol]

So some background, I was watching this new fall anime Parasyte -the maxim- where these parasites come to earth, bond with existing lifeforms (usually humans), take over their bodies and then proceed to eat people. When the main character asks one of these parasites "You guys are monsters, why are you doing this?" the parasite responds with "We're not monsters, we're eating humans for food." At this point there have been about 80 of these strange murders caused by these things. The parasite then asks "Aren't humans really the monsters? How many millions of things do you kill each year and eat?" Its this statement that prompted this post.

Picture a world where these ravenous creatures existed that enslaved and consumed the other, less intelligent creatures of that world. So great was their hunger that entire species went extinct in an attempt to satiate them. They forced the ones that didn't die out to mate in order to produce more food. They ate creatures of every gender and age, young, old, the strong, the weak and even the unborn.

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

We spent 11 billion years fighting a desperate biological struggle for survival, the most ruthless arms race ever seen. Tooth and claw, hook and eye, a genocidal war of extinction. And then our team developed the greatest superweapon of all - tool use.

Bam. Instantly - biologically speaking - we won. We achieved total domination in the biological war of extermination, not only becoming the top of the food chain, but totally upending the concept of the food chain. And in that luxurious peace we discovered for the first time in the world's history we suddenly found the time to ask questions that weren't related to survival. One of these questions is, 'is it okay to kill things?' Asking that question pits us against all those billions of years of survival instinct, but we can do that now. Bigger concepts are growing.

So the principles are:
- The food chain has no moral value.
- Survival of the species is a fundamental impulse.
- A far more useful question once the question of survival is answered: 'what do we want?'

[veti]

And, really, even if you expand your in-group to include nearly all humans, that's still gotta be really tightly clustered in the space of all possible minds, relatively speaking. I personally think that it's fairly unimpressive to manage to care about entities that are well over 99 percent genetically identical to you and whose underlying psychological architecture is almost entirely the same as yours. And doesn't being ethical mean being considerate of those who you don't empathize with? Like, not doing something bad to someone just because it gets you something you want and doesn't make you feel bad?

The problem with this - no, scratch that - one of many problems with this line of reasoning is that unless you can empathise with something, how can you "be considerate of it"? Perhaps the rock actually looks forward to being smashed. Lacking any insight into its mind, or any way to gain such, how would you know? Empathy is not the thing that makes us want to be considerate of others, it's the thing that makes it possible.


Some people take the position that we have to draw some sort of line between things that have moral rights and things that don't. Counterpoint: NO, WE DON'T. It would be evil to force a rock to suffer against its will. If anything, I think it would be especially evil, because you'd have to go out of your way to give a rock a will and the capacity to suffer. If something "having moral rights" means that it's evil to do evil things to it, then everything "has moral rights". Of course, one can deny that non-humans are capable of suffering, but one can deny the existence of human suffering as well.

Counterpoint: YES, WE DO. "If something 'having moral rights' means that it's evil to do evil things to it" - then you're just talking in circles. If it doesn't have moral rights, then there is no such thing as an "evil thing" to do to it, so the whole sentence is meaningless.

So how do we decide - and yes, it's we, humans, who have got to decide this - what qualifies for "moral rights"? Rocks don't, because as you yourself pointed out they have no will and no 'capacity to suffer'. Smashing a rock isn't evil, unless someone/thing that does have moral rights has an interest in that rock.


And I'm totally up for exploring questions like what it even means for something to exist, but you shouldn't be willing to do anything bad to anyone on the grounds that they're not real. The relevant ethical principle obviously is to not do that. Heck, I may not really exist, but I'm still totally not okay with someone torturing me even if I don't. I assume that you don't want to be mistreated even if you don't exist either. So via the ethical rule that we should (at a minimum) be willing to grant others the same consideration that we want for ourselves, we derive the principle that we shouldn't mistreat other minds, even if they don't exist.

I'm not sure what the correct name is for this philosophical fallacy... The sentiment "I'm not okay with" only has meaning if you assume that you exist (so I guess that's 'begging the question'). If you don't, then the statement has no meaning and therefore no moral weight. If tormenting a fictional construct is evil, then Shakespeare was a monster.


And would you be okay with being mistreated by someone much smarter than you, someone with a mind qualitatively more intricate on like a whole different level and all that? How cognitively disabled are you saying someone can be and in what way before disregarding their welfare becomes ethically acceptable? You could probably exploit severely retarded people for organ transplants and medical testing in a way significantly less evil than how some animals are treated... and yet still be pretty evil. :/

Now you're venturing into the minefield of Heavily Loaded But Totally Undefined Words. "Ethically acceptable" - acceptable to whom, specifically? "Evil" according to what standard? Surely you're not, at this point, going to say "there is an absolute and unarguable objective standard of ethics and morality and this is it"?


But saying that humans deserve special consideration doesn't have to be unfair favoritism necessarily. You can say, for example, that everyone deserves the chance to make well-informed decisions about their own lives, but not everyone is capable of that, so human beings are given opportunities that e.g. pigs do not. That is pretty much the stated justification for how humans tend to treat their offspring, although the applications of that principle may be pretty dubious. It's like how smashing a rock on the ground isn't evil because rocks don't have feelings. The point is, if the mental difference between two objects somehow makes doing something to one of them less evil than doing the same thing to the other one... well, then it makes it less evil.

"Deserve... unfair... well-informed..." - can you define any of those terms?


On the other hand, if doing something to one of them isn't in any way less evil than doing the same thing to the other one... well, then it isn't any less evil. There's a pretty big difference between, on the one hand, acknowledging that different minds have different needs and respond differently to the same treatment, and on the other hand, carefully delineating who the acceptable victims are. If you want to be ethical, the goal shouldn't be to specify what mental traits make someone okay to abuse, it should be to prevent abuse.

You're just arguing in circles here. "If something isn't less evil then it isn't less evil" - well yes, but that doesn't get us anywhere. Then you wander into words like "victims" and "abuse", which, again, are prejudging the outcome: "abuse" is, by definition, "not acceptable", but that doesn't bring us any closer to being able to recognise exactly what does and doesn't constitute "abuse".


In closing, let me say that seeming difficulties in valuing everyone's welfare equally may be due to valuing human welfare too much. For example, does the average person really deserve to live? How much has the average person done to deserve it, and how much has the average person done to deserve to die instead?

And there's that bizarre word "deserve" again. What does "deserve" have to do with anything, even if we could define it? In the end, "desert" is just a question of social consensus - animals "deserve" consideration precisely in so far as the bulk of people decide that they do. I can decide, unilaterally, that they "deserve" more, but that's my decision, it doesn't automatically become true and binding on everyone else; the best I can do is try to persuade others to adopt and share my opinion.

[SaintRidley]

I don't really have anything of my own to add to the conversation, but the question and nature of the conversation brings a song to mind. I'll leave the lyrics here for anyone who wants to chew them over.


And the angel of the lord came unto me, snatching me up from my place of slumber.
And took me on high, and higher still until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself.
And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own midwest.
And as we descended, cries of impending doom rose from the soil.
One thousand, nay a million voices full of fear.
And terror possesed me then.
And I begged,
"Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?"
And the angel said unto me,
"These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots!
You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust."
And I sprang from my slumber drenched in sweat like the tears of one million terrified brothers and roared,
"Hear me now, I have seen the light!
They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul!
Damn you!
Let the rabbits wear glasses!
Save our brothers!"
Can I get an amen?
Can I get a hallelujah?
Thank you Jesus.
Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on........

This is necessary this is necessary THIS IS NECESSARY

LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE FEEDS ON........

It was daylight when you woke up in your ditch.
You looked up at your sky then.
That made blue be your color.
You had your knife there with you too.
When you stood up there was goo all over your clothes.
Your hands were sticky.
You wiped them on your grass, so now your color was green.
Oh Lord, why did everything always have to keep changing like this.
You were already getting nervous again.
Your head hurt and it rang when you stood up.
Your head was almost empty.
It always hurt you when you woke up like this.
You crawled up out of your ditch onto your gravel road and began to walk,
waiting for the rest of your mind to come back to you.
You can see the car parked far down the road and you walked toward it.
"If God is our Father," you thought, "then Satan must be our cousin."
Why didn't anyone else understand these important things?
You got to your car and tried all the doors.
They were locked.
It was a red car and it was new.
There was an expensive leather camera case laying on the seat.
Out across your field, you could see two tiny people walking by your woods.
You began to walk towards them.
Now red was your color and, of course, those little people out there were yours too.

[Flickerdart]

http://makeameme.org/media/created/HansAre-we-the.jpg

Have you looked at our caps lately? They've got skulls on them! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU)

[Eldan]

- Survival of the species is a fundamental impulse.

No it's not. Evolution acts on the gene and the individual first. If one animal kills three other of its own species to survive, the species as a whole has lost total members. A male lion killing another male's cubs all the way to Humans going to war. It's from the small unit up, not from the large unit down.

[Tyndmyr]

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

Sure we can. Everyone acts as if people should, somehow, be entirely fair and equal all the time, without the slightest trace of hypocrisy.

Nah. I'll happily eat a steak before going off to fight against the killer aliens. If that's evil, I'm going to enjoy the crap out of being evil.

[The_Ditto]

Animals don't launch campaigns of genocide based on the color of skin or religious background or cultural/racial background.
[quote]

*cough* army ants *cough*
I recall it once being said, the only creature on this planet, other than humans, who wage war against their own kind, is Ants. ;)
Of course, there's a solid argument for them not really comprehending the action - unlike humans - our higher reasoning and understanding set us aside from them, not just our ability to wage war/genocide on each other. Animals do that as well, they just don't have the full comprehension of the action.

[QUOTE]
We do have goodness in us as well, but evil is always stronger seeming and more seductive. That's what yoda said, and its true for humans.

"Evil will always win, because Good is dumb." Dark Helmet

:smalltongue:

[Flickerdart]

I recall it once being said, the only creature on this planet, other than humans, who wage war against their own kind, is Ants. ;)
That's incorrect. Chimpanzees wage organized and consistent war on a massive scale [PDF] (http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mitani/wp-content/uploads/sites/152/2014/08/watts_and_mitani_2001.pdf), in order to capture territory and kill members of other chimp groups. Other monkeys also display various levels of intergroup aggression but chimpanzee warfare is "constant and ferocious."

[Coidzor]

You might even say that they're nasty, brutish, and short.

[Devils_Advocate]

A point often made in discussions like this is that someone could conceivably have any sort of value system at all. And, well, yeah. But seeking only to spread misery and suffering, to give an extreme example, is evil, no matter how internally consistent one's priorities are. Saying that a course of action is moral, ethical, right, etc. doesn't just mean that it's endorsed by a value system that could conceivably exist, or even just that it's endorsed by a value system that does exist.

Some people will say stuff like "'Doing what's right' is still just doing what you want to do" as though that constitutes a criticism, but the idea that your motives are impure if you want to do what you're trying to do makes no sense. Of course you want to do what you try to do, otherwise you wouldn't try to do it! If morality truly had nothing to do with our goals, then we'd have no reason to pay it any heed. But that doesn't mean that we can't distinguish moral concerns as different from -- and more important than -- other concerns.


The idea that we change every moment intellectually, emotionally and molecularly is technically accurate but misses the point. "The same as me" has never been a technical point.
That's kind of what I was saying. Technically speaking, if A is B, then A has all of the properties of B and B has all of the properties of A. When we say that A was B, we seem to mean something like that, but a lot vaguer as far as I can tell. Anyway, let me try to explain the perceived relevance.

The idea that two selfish rational agents can act towards their mutual detriment has been well explored; see the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, etc. And one can argue on that basis that selfishness is bad and altruism is good. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to quite go far enough, as it's possible for two groups to act to each others' mutual detriment as well. The problem with hurting others for your own benefit isn't that you benefit, it's that others get hurt. Hurting those who you care about less for the benefit of those who you care about more has the same problem. Maximizing everyone's total welfare would seem to require valuing everyone's welfare equally, as presumably favoring some beings over others tends to yield worse results on the whole, regardless of whether the favored beings are "you" or not.

I doubt that the concept of the self holds up under much scrutiny, but that's not actually my main concern here, as I feel that it's a lousy basis for ethical decision-making even if it does hold up. And that group favoritism has a lot of the same ethical problems as selfishness, if not all of the same ethical problems. I do suspect that relating to others works rather similarly to thinking about one's own potential future, though. It's often described as being able to "see yourself in" someone else's circumstances.


It's also missing a mark to say that these values are recent. They aren't. These values show up at least three thousand years ago, and they keep achieving spontaneous genesis among different groups.
And human history is, like, how long? And beliefs existing at all is rather a different thing from them being commonly held. I'm not sure you appreciate how mild the phrase "has only really gained any widespread popularity in relatively recent times" is. I was just trying to counteract what seemed like a sort of implicit absolute claim.

[Murska]

A point often made in discussions like this is that someone could conceivably have any sort of value system at all. And, well, yeah. But seeking only to spread misery and suffering, to give an extreme example, is evil, no matter how internally consistent one's priorities are. Saying that a course of action is moral, ethical, right, etc. doesn't just mean that it's endorsed by a value system that could conceivably exist, or even just that it's endorsed by a value system that does exist.

Some people will say stuff like "'Doing what's right' is still just doing what you want to do" as though that constitutes a criticism, but the idea that your motives are impure if you want to do what you're trying to do makes no sense. Of course you want to do what you try to do, otherwise you wouldn't try to do it! If morality truly had nothing to do with our goals, then we'd have no reason to pay it any heed. But that doesn't mean that we can't distinguish moral concerns as different from -- and more important than -- other concerns.

A mind could conceivably have pretty much any values. And acting according to those values would be 'right' or 'good' in their morality. Just as it might be 'wrong' or 'evil' in ours. Saying that an action is moral, ethical or right means that it is endorsed by our value system, which in most humans is close enough to most other humans that we can make judgments like that even over several minds that technically have slightly differing valus. That's all. This doesn't mean that the concepts right and wrong are meaningless. They are very important to us, directing our actions and judging the actions of others based on our values. But there's nothing beyond ourselves that gives them meaning.


The idea that two selfish rational agents can act towards their mutual detriment has been well explored; see the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, etc. And one can argue on that basis that selfishness is bad and altruism is good. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to quite go far enough, as it's possible for two groups to act to each others' mutual detriment as well. The problem with hurting others for your own benefit isn't that you benefit, it's that others get hurt. Hurting those who you care about less for the benefit of those who you care about more has the same problem. Maximizing everyone's total welfare would seem to require valuing everyone's welfare equally, as presumably favoring some beings over others tends to yield worse results on the whole, regardless of whether the favored beings are "you" or not.

I would dispute this. If you act in a way that is to your own detriment, you are not acting rationally. Rationality means winning. In the example of an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, a rational actor will cooperate by default, but punish defectors. Two rational agents will cooperate the entire time. In the case of a singular Prisoner's Dilemma, two rational agents will still cooperate, because if they simulate the other side in their situation, a defection would result in two defects and cooperation would result in two cooperations. This is part of timeless decision theory.

It's rather simple if you think of it like this. If you are selfish, you want what's good for you. Therefore, you want to take actions that benefit you. If you operate under the assumption that whoever you're playing against acts like you do, you will avoid causing harm on them, so as to avoid them mirroring your decision.

[SiuiS]

And human history is, like, how long?

I agree with everything else you said, but my point was very much that as long as humans have been capable of metathought and had time for metathought, these concepts arise spontaneously throughout history. Just because I have a number that's comfortable doesn't mean the concept is wrong. It means I don't want to quibble with someone who insists history is only really four thousand years, or history before Rome was unreliable, or other such bunk.



I would dispute this. If you act in a way that is to your own detriment, you are not acting rationally. Rationality means winning. In the example of an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, a rational actor will cooperate by default, but punish defectors. Two rational agents will cooperate the entire time. In the case of a singular Prisoner's Dilemma, two rational agents will still cooperate, because if they simulate the other side in their situation, a defection would result in two defects and cooperation would result in two cooperations. This is part of timeless decision theory.


Rational means able to think clearly, sensibly and logically. If you value a group then personal loss is rational; everyone who decided not to murder someone who upset them because that's bad for society does this. Selfish means for the self. Something that is done not for the self but still gratifies you through degrees is not selfish. The idea that anything you enjoy is basically selfish is a technicality that has outlived it's purpose. It's not relevant. It's obfuscation.

[Murska]

Rational means able to think clearly, sensibly and logically. If you value a group then personal loss is rational; everyone who decided not to murder someone who upset them because that's bad for society does this. Selfish means for the self. Something that is done not for the self but still gratifies you through degrees is not selfish. The idea that anything you enjoy is basically selfish is a technicality that has outlived it's purpose. It's not relevant. It's obfuscation.

What does thinking clearly, sensibly and logically mean then? Especially 'sensibly'. But other than that, I agree - I don't really understand why you quoted me though. Selfishness has nothing to do with rationality, as rationality is orthogonal to values. You have some set of values to which you have arrived through one method or another, and rational actions are ones that contribute towards those values in the most effective way.

[Donnadogsoth]

{scrubbed}

[Murska]

{scrubbed}

Well, a lot of animals are capable of discovering physical principles such as 'if I knock this shell with this rock, it cracks open and I get food'. And all life is capable of using them, otherwise it wouldn't exist in the first place. Yet, the vast majority of humans are incapable of discovering more universal principles such as quantum mechanics, which are still not in any way fundamentally different from more simple approximations - they're not true and finished, simply more accurate models.

[SiuiS]

What does thinking clearly, sensibly and logically mean then? Especially 'sensibly'. But other than that, I agree - I don't really understand why you quoted me though. Selfishness has nothing to do with rationality, as rationality is orthogonal to values. You have some set of values to which you have arrived through one method or another, and rational actions are ones that contribute towards those values in the most effective way.

You don't understand why I would quote you saying "someone acting selflessly is not acting rationally" and follow up with an explanation of how acts not in your own best interest can indeed be rational? I feel it's self evident. Am I wrong? :smallconfused:

[Murska]

You don't understand why I would quote you saying "someone acting selflessly is not acting rationally" and follow up with an explanation of how acts not in your own best interest can indeed be rational? I feel it's self evident. Am I wrong? :smallconfused:

I feel there is unresolved confusion there. I said acting in your own detriment is not acting rationally. If you are acting against your values, you are acting irrationally. However, depending on what your values are, sacrificing your own life to save a friend might be perfectly rational.

[Donnadogsoth]

Well, a lot of animals are capable of discovering physical principles such as 'if I knock this shell with this rock, it cracks open and I get food'. And all life is capable of using them, otherwise it wouldn't exist in the first place. Yet, the vast majority of humans are incapable of discovering more universal principles such as quantum mechanics, which are still not in any way fundamentally different from more simple approximations - they're not true and finished, simply more accurate models.

No, that's just trial and error, no hypothesis, no principle involved. When the animal discovers (or rediscovers, as will usually be the case) the, eg, principle of universal gravitation, then we have...an animal of a species-level higher value than all other animals. And if the aliens can do that, they're on that level too, and if they can't, they're not. But there's no telling us we're not on that level, and so there's no telling us that preying on us or anyone on that level is not evil.

[Murska]

No, that's just trial and error, no hypothesis, no principle involved. When the animal discovers (or rediscovers, as will usually be the case) the, eg, principle of universal gravitation, then we have...an animal of a species-level higher value than all other animals. And if the aliens can do that, they're on that level too, and if they can't, they're not. But there's no telling us we're not on that level, and so there's no telling us that preying on us or anyone on that level is not evil.

So what principles exactly are counted? Fire? Wheel? Newtonian mechanics? If a species figures out those but then notices that they are in error, yet is unable to figure out special relativity, what then? Or if they follow a different path entirely?

What if humanity had not discovered the scientific method? Were all humans pre-1600s not human?

[Cuthalion]

Well, Murska's evil. :smalltongue:

[Donnadogsoth]

So what principles exactly are counted? Fire? Wheel? Newtonian mechanics? If a species figures out those but then notices that they are in error, yet is unable to figure out special relativity, what then? Or if they follow a different path entirely?

What if humanity had not discovered the scientific method? Were all humans pre-1600s not human?

Fire would be the great touchstone here. Man is the animal who cooks his food. We cannot be sure that hominids predating the use of fire were human, but we can be sure that all after were, even if pockets of descendents here and there remained ignorant of the use of fire.

The aliens in question came here somehow, presumably they had access to a higher form of "fire" that powered their flight from star to star. If they didn't, it would be a point of high dialogue between the two species to see how they had progressed from evolutionary inchoate to starfaring outside of the use of fire.

[Coidzor]

So what principles exactly are counted? Fire? Wheel? Newtonian mechanics? If a species figures out those but then notices that they are in error, yet is unable to figure out special relativity, what then? Or if they follow a different path entirely?

What if humanity had not discovered the scientific method? Were all humans pre-1600s not human?

Defining true sapience is a job for philosophers, xenologists, and neuro-science rather than armchair fans of a comic based on a table top roleplaying game.

We don't need any special considerations like that when we've already got "ability to hold a cogent dialogue" on the table anyway.

If Turing Tests weren't apparently useless things put on by a bunch of silly people who, as far as I've been able to determine, have a significant overlap with the AI researchers who it has been found would routinely let a malicious AI out of its box, that'd be the next step for determining how to categorize something if it can communicate with us.

[Murska]

Fire would be the great touchstone here. Man is the animal who cooks his food. We cannot be sure that hominids predating the use of fire were human, but we can be sure that all after were, even if pockets of descendents here and there remained ignorant of the use of fire.

The aliens in question came here somehow, presumably they had access to a higher form of "fire" that powered their flight from star to star. If they didn't, it would be a point of high dialogue between the two species to see how they had progressed from evolutionary inchoate to starfaring outside of the use of fire.

So, basically, the defining point of moral worth is the ability to invent the use of fire? How about a hypothetical species that is vastly more intelligent than us but lives underwater?

It seems very artificial to me. It's not carving reality at the joints. And it still doesn't answer the question - what objective force has the right to define 'right' in this manner? I would bet that said hypothetical species of underwater geniuses would disagree with this criterion. What makes us right and them wrong? Or, for that matter, a species that has forsaken scientific progress entirely in favour of maximizing the happiness of their individual people, or a remnant of a starfaring species that has lost all of their educated people in a catastrophe and is left subsiding on the scraps of their ancestors.

[Donnadogsoth]

So, basically, the defining point of moral worth is the ability to invent the use of fire? How about a hypothetical species that is vastly more intelligent than us but lives underwater?

It seems very artificial to me. It's not carving reality at the joints. And it still doesn't answer the question - what objective force has the right to define 'right' in this manner? I would bet that said hypothetical species of underwater geniuses would disagree with this criterion. What makes us right and them wrong? Or, for that matter, a species that has forsaken scientific progress entirely in favour of maximizing the happiness of their individual people, or a remnant of a starfaring species that has lost all of their educated people in a catastrophe and is left subsiding on the scraps of their ancestors.

An hypothetical submarine species would still, in principle, be able to recognise the genius of a terranean fire-using species, and vice versa. They are both committing acts of hypothesis and discovery of ideas. The particular ideas are not the question, the possibility of discovering ideas at all is the question. Fire is the most convenient touchstone, as I said. If the capacity for discovering ideas--whether that capacity is employed not--isn't the basis for defining rights, nothing is.

[Eldan]

Still, though. It doesn't sound like a very practical definition. A species living in a vastly different physical environment, like under water or in an atmosphere that isn't conductive to fire, would have no concept of fire. Would that mean they would only count if some outsider explained fire to them?

[Murska]

An hypothetical submarine species would still, in principle, be able to recognise the genius of a terranean fire-using species, and vice versa. They are both committing acts of hypothesis and discovery of ideas. The particular ideas are not the question, the possibility of discovering ideas at all is the question. Fire is the most convenient touchstone, as I said. If the capacity for discovering ideas--whether that capacity is employed not--isn't the basis for defining rights, nothing is.

If your moral worth is defined by your capacity to discover specific, universal scientific principles, then would that not mean that only a few genius scientists have any moral worth at all in our own species?

[Donnadogsoth]

Still, though. It doesn't sound like a very practical definition. A species living in a vastly different physical environment, like under water or in an atmosphere that isn't conductive to fire, would have no concept of fire. Would that mean they would only count if some outsider explained fire to them?

They would only count if a mutual principle could be discovered. Otherwise, we would have no conclusive evidence they exist in the realm of ideas.


If your moral worth is defined by your capacity to discover specific, universal scientific principles, then would that not mean that only a few genius scientists have any moral worth at all in our own species?

Not at all. The uniqueness of a discovery is not what matters morally, but the capacity for apprehension itself. In most people that will mean rediscovering principles originally discovered by others. The principle remains: man is worthy of being treated as a higher species because he can discover said principles, one way or another.

[SiuiS]

I feel there is unresolved confusion there. I said acting in your own detriment is not acting rationally. If you are acting against your values, you are acting irrationally. However, depending on what your values are, sacrificing your own life to save a friend might be perfectly rational.

That's a technicality with enough wiggle room to be a useless statement. Things that exist do indeed exist; hit things are hit; things you do are things you do; following your heart is not not following your heart. Useless.

What do you mean by that? What purpose does it serve to point out that when a thing happens, it happened?

[Murska]

That's a technicality with enough wiggle room to be a useless statement. Things that exist do indeed exist; hit things are hit; things you do are things you do; following your heart is not not following your heart. Useless.

What do you mean by that? What purpose does it serve to point out that when a thing happens, it happened?

Well, a poster mentioned that rational agents can act to the detriment of themselves in things like Prisoner's Dilemma. I answered that it is not so, as rational agents do not act in a way that is to their own detriment. The distinction matters. I'm not sure what you are trying to say, however.

[HalfTangible]

So some background, I was watching this new fall anime Parasyte -the maxim- where these parasites come to earth, bond with existing lifeforms (usually humans), take over their bodies and then proceed to eat people. When the main character asks one of these parasites "You guys are monsters, why are you doing this?" the parasite responds with "We're not monsters, we're eating humans for food." At this point there have been about 80 of these strange murders caused by these things. The parasite then asks "Aren't humans really the monsters? How many millions of things do you kill each year and eat?" Its this statement that prompted this post.

Picture a world where these ravenous creatures existed that enslaved and consumed the other, less intelligent creatures of that world. So great was their hunger that entire species went extinct in an attempt to satiate them. They forced the ones that didn't die out to mate in order to produce more food. They ate creatures of every gender and age, young, old, the strong, the weak and even the unborn.

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

Hmmmm...

No.

The central flaw the parasite exposes here is the assumption that eating something that your species is designed to eat makes you evil. The parasites are the antagonists because we're human, and we can empathize with a human's struggle far more than the parasite trying to kill us. I haven't read the series, so I can't make accurate comments on it, but from your description I get the impression that the parasites are considered 'evil' because they terrorize humans, not because they eat them.

Also, boiling down all extinction events to 'humans were hungry' is extremely inaccurate. Off the top of my head, the buffalo went near-extinct in America because of the transportation industry. Cows, chickens and other domesticated animals aren't going extinct and we constantly eat them.

[veti]

Also, boiling down all extinction events to 'humans were hungry' is extremely inaccurate. Off the top of my head, the buffalo went near-extinct in America because of the transportation industry. Cows, chickens and other domesticated animals aren't going extinct and we constantly eat them.

The OP didn't say that was the only reason for extinctions, just that it has happened, and I think that's undeniable. The dodo is the most famous example, but others would include the moa, stellar sea cow, Pyrenean ibex, and very probably the woolly mammoth. See also 'overfishing'.

Another way of driving animals to extinction is to clear the land on which they live, in order to cultivate something that we do eat. That's accounted for several more species.

Personally I think there's a lot of agonising about nothing in this thread. They're eating people, therefore they're the enemy. Good or bad... seriously, who cares? Just kill them already.

[SiuiS]

The OP didn't say that was the only reason for extinctions, just that it has happened, and I think that's undeniable. The dodo is the most famous example, but others would include the moa, stellar sea cow, Pyrenean ibex, and very probably the woolly mammoth. See also 'overfishing'.

Another way of driving animals to extinction is to clear the land on which they live, in order to cultivate something that we do eat. That's accounted for several more species.

Personally I think there's a lot of agonising about nothing in this thread. They're eating people, therefore they're the enemy. Good or bad... seriously, who cares? Just kill them already.

Yeah. That's pretty straightforward. It's never been about whether or not to kill them, though. It's about how bad you should feel about it afterwards, and if that feel bad is enough to maybe stop you.

[TuggyNE]

Well, a poster mentioned that rational agents can act to the detriment of themselves in things like Prisoner's Dilemma. I answered that it is not so, as rational agents do not act in a way that is to their own detriment. The distinction matters. I'm not sure what you are trying to say, however.

You're assuming that "acting against one's values" and "acting to one's detriment" are formally equivalent. Why?

Note that a number of value systems make a point of mentioning situations in which the right thing to do (according to them) is one that will harm the actor, which to most people would be considered "detrimental". You could, I suppose, claim that these are fundamentally irrational systems, but such a claim requires very strong proof indeed, and tossing that sort of thing off as an implication of an unstated assumption simply isn't cricket.

I suppose you could be trying to say that rational agents never act according to their ultimate, end-of-the road detriment, but that seems to miss the mark of the discussion, since e.g. Prisoner's Dilemma is predicated, not on some sort of lifetime reward or net effect, but the isolated consideration of what falls out at the end of the Dilemma. And honestly, even this much weaker claim seems like it's entirely too strong to leave assumed, and still worse, unstated.

[Murska]

You're assuming that "acting against one's values" and "acting to one's detriment" are formally equivalent. Why?

Note that a number of value systems make a point of mentioning situations in which the right thing to do (according to them) is one that will harm the actor, which to most people would be considered "detrimental". You could, I suppose, claim that these are fundamentally irrational systems, but such a claim requires very strong proof indeed, and tossing that sort of thing off as an implication of an unstated assumption simply isn't cricket.

I suppose you could be trying to say that rational agents never act according to their ultimate, end-of-the road detriment, but that seems to miss the mark of the discussion, since e.g. Prisoner's Dilemma is predicated, not on some sort of lifetime reward or net effect, but the isolated consideration of what falls out at the end of the Dilemma. And honestly, even this much weaker claim seems like it's entirely too strong to leave assumed, and still worse, unstated.

I just used 'detriment' as defined to mean something that goes against one's values. Thus, 'rational agents don't act to their own detriment' simply means 'rational agents do not act against their own values' where rationality is defined as acting towards your own values. I hope the confusion is now dissolved as I don't think there's any point in debating a tautology any further.

In Prisoner's Dilemma, the rational decision is to cooperate. If we assume that two cooperations give out 3 utilons to both participants, two defects pay out 1 utilon to each and one defect and one cooperate gives 0 to the cooperative and 6 to the defector, for instance, then what happens if two identical agents meet, they act in the same way every time as their reasoning processes are mirrored, so they can either precommit to cooperate and get 3 utilons or precommit to defect and get 1. The rational choice is the former.

[Donnadogsoth]

The OP didn't say that was the only reason for extinctions, just that it has happened, and I think that's undeniable. The dodo is the most famous example, but others would include the moa, stellar sea cow, Pyrenean ibex, and very probably the woolly mammoth. See also 'overfishing'.

Another way of driving animals to extinction is to clear the land on which they live, in order to cultivate something that we do eat. That's accounted for several more species.

Personally I think there's a lot of agonising about nothing in this thread. They're eating people, therefore they're the enemy. Good or bad... seriously, who cares? Just kill them already.

The philosophy comes in when we win the war against them. Should we exterminate them, enslave them, give them a bloody nose and back off, or attempt to come to terms? If they're people, we attempt to come to terms, if possible. If they're not people, we don't and may end up eating them.

Though I should add that I've met enough people online who exhibit no ability or desire to distinguish human from beast, so without a philosophy that grants us humans a special status among animals, I think there would be plenty of people who wouldn't even bother to fight the aliens, out of misguided compassion, inferiority complex, or quietism.

[TuggyNE]

I just used 'detriment' as defined to mean something that goes against one's values.

*insert Princess Bride quote here* "Detriment" is not conventionally defined in terms of "going against values", but in terms of harm (per OED, M-W, etc etc etc). So no, it's not a tautology. It's a novel and unusual definition, upon which your entire argument hangs. Therefore, as previously noted, you can't just brush it under the rug; you must rigorously defend exactly why this definition is correct, or why it is semantically equivalent to the usual, or whatever. Otherwise the argument falls on its face at the starting blocks.

[SiuiS]

Thank you for articulating my vague thoughts, Tuggy.

[Murska]

*insert Princess Bride quote here* "Detriment" is not conventionally defined in terms of "going against values", but in terms of harm (per OED, M-W, etc etc etc). So no, it's not a tautology. It's a novel and unusual definition, upon which your entire argument hangs. Therefore, as previously noted, you can't just brush it under the rug; you must rigorously defend exactly why this definition is correct, or why it is semantically equivalent to the usual, or whatever. Otherwise the argument falls on its face at the starting blocks.

Because I am claiming that is what I intended to say? If my definition was poor, I apologize - I am not a native speaker, and have thus made a mistake in communicating my thoughts. However, I hope I have now made my meaning perfectly clear, and would much rather defend that if anyone finds anything in it to question, rather than discussing words.

EDIT: Ah, yes. In the context of Prisoner's Dilemma specifically, detriment is functionally equivalent to not getting the best possible outcome, as the game is abstracted to only contain the four possible outcomes which are clearly ranked in preference.

[TuggyNE]

EDIT: Ah, yes. In the context of Prisoner's Dilemma specifically, detriment is functionally equivalent to not getting the best possible outcome, as the game is abstracted to only contain the four possible outcomes which are clearly ranked in preference.

Sure, but a rational actor might in principle consider that acting in a locally-suboptimal fashion in Prisoner's Dilemma would in some fashion benefit them in a broader context, e.g. if they believe themselves to be observed by someone who values behavior of one kind or another. And in English, one's "values" are conventionally used to mean personal ideals in the context of a belief system; these are generally used as the basis for determining (presumably) rational courses of action to further those values, but they need not be such simple things as the amassing of utilons, but can include meta-values like (not) cooperating.

It should probably also be noted that results from game theory suggest that naive cooperation is not, in fact, the optimal strategy, at least in iteration. Just to muddy the waters a bit more.

TL/DR: This is actually fairly complicated stuff, and there are very few easy answers that are worth the electrons they inconvenience.

[SiuiS]

It should probably also be noted that results from game theory suggest that naive cooperation is not, in fact, the optimal strategy, at least in iteration. Just to muddy the waters a bit more.

Interesting. Could you elaborate on this?

[Murska]

Sure, but a rational actor might in principle consider that acting in a locally-suboptimal fashion in Prisoner's Dilemma would in some fashion benefit them in a broader context, e.g. if they believe themselves to be observed by someone who values behavior of one kind or another. And in English, one's "values" are conventionally used to mean personal ideals in the context of a belief system; these are generally used as the basis for determining (presumably) rational courses of action to further those values, but they need not be such simple things as the amassing of utilons, but can include meta-values like (not) cooperating.

It should probably also be noted that results from game theory suggest that naive cooperation is not, in fact, the optimal strategy, at least in iteration. Just to muddy the waters a bit more.

TL/DR: This is actually fairly complicated stuff, and there are very few easy answers that are worth the electrons they inconvenience.

Meta-concerns are generally ignored in theoretical discussion. But one would assume that generally speaking most value systems promote cooperation even more.

Naive cooperation is not a good idea, I believe I mentioned that in iterative Prisoner's Dilemma the optimal strategy tends to, in experiments, be to begin with cooperation yet punish defection harshly. Simulative iterative Prisoner's Dilemma favours the same thing.

It's not very complicated at all, really. Most things aren't. The vast majority of correct answers are blindingly obvious, in hindsight.

EDIT: Also, 'utilon' is a general term for 'benefit according to one's values' in imaginary units that can be compared in theoretical discussions. If you get utilons from having observers view you as trustworthy even while cooperating against a probable defect, then that might become rational, which is the reason why such concerns are abstracted away - you are assumed to only and solely care about the result of the game.

[007_ctrl_room]

Are humans naturally evil? No, I don't think so, but I'm an eternal optimist. However, I will say that things like fear, and the desire for power is what drives some humans into that dark direction.

[Devils_Advocate]

*insert Princess Bride quote here* "Detriment" is not conventionally defined in terms of "going against values", but in terms of harm (per OED, M-W, etc etc etc). So no, it's not a tautology. It's a novel and unusual definition, upon which your entire argument hangs. Therefore, as previously noted, you can't just brush it under the rug; you must rigorously defend exactly why this definition is correct, or why it is semantically equivalent to the usual, or whatever. Otherwise the argument falls on its face at the starting blocks.
I would hope that you'd agree that calling a life-saving surgery "injurious" because it involves slicing someone up is misleading, because you're no longer using that word to indicate what it normally indicates. Usually! But, in turn, if saving someone's life is contrary to that individual's goals, then calling it harmful is appropriate again.

That's the ethically relevant sense of these words. That which is beneficial to or good for me is that of which I approve, and that which is detrimental to or bad for me is that of which I disapprove. Acting contrary to my preferences is not "helping" me. Don't speak of yourself as if you are my ally if you are instead my enemy. Etc.

It's generally dubious to suppose that you know how to achieve others' values better than they do, and there's a case to be made that we have an ethical obligation not to do that most of the time. But at the point at which you're knowingly acting against others' values, it's outright dishonest to claim that you're doing something to them "for their own good", as you're not even trying to act in their service.


A mind could conceivably have pretty much any values. And acting according to those values would be 'right' or 'good' in their morality. Just as it might be 'wrong' or 'evil' in ours. Saying that an action is moral, ethical or right means that it is endorsed by our value system, which in most humans is close enough to most other humans that we can make judgments like that even over several minds that technically have slightly differing valus. That's all.
No. A value system need not be moral in nature. And saying that something is moral doesn't just mean that it's in accordance with our values, because we are capable of distinguishing our moral values from other values of ours which aren't moral. People sometimes do things that they think are immoral, because sometimes people care about other things more than morality.

In much the same way in which chocolate isn't whatever flavor of ice cream you like the best, morality isn't whatever you want the most. And an alien being with a good grasp of human language wouldn't call some sort of gross (to us) puke-flavored ice cream or whatever "chocolate" just because that's its favorite. Similarly, an alien being with values fundamentally opposed to morality would have no reason to call its values "moral" unless it was trying to deceive.

Try putting yourself in the alien's place here. Suppose that you come across a planet filled with beings who place great value on a bunch of interrelated things that are, as a rule, loathsome to you. Do you then adopt their word for those things as a term for a bunch of stuff that you value? Does that seem like a reasonable thing to do?


This doesn't mean that the concepts right and wrong are meaningless. They are very important to us, directing our actions and judging the actions of others based on our values. But there's nothing beyond ourselves that gives them meaning.
... Do you think that this somehow constitutes an argument against something that I said? If so, what, and how?


I would dispute this. If you act in a way that is to your own detriment, you are not acting rationally. Rationality means winning.
You win the most in the Prisoner's Dilemma if you defect and your opponent cooperates. Are defectors whose opponents cooperate the most rational? Is playing the lottery highly rational if you manage to pick the winning numbers? Rationality is related to winning, but the two are not equivalent.


In the example of an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, a rational actor will cooperate by default, but punish defectors. Two rational agents will cooperate the entire time. In the case of a singular Prisoner's Dilemma, two rational agents will still cooperate, because if they simulate the other side in their situation, a defection would result in two defects and cooperation would result in two cooperations. This is part of timeless decision theory.
That's true if they have mutual knowledge of their mutual rationality, but that isn't necessarily the case now is it? Technically, it's a matter of the probability that the other agent's decision will mirror your own, for any of numerous possible reasons. (In practice, it's not rational to assign a proposition a probability of 0 or 1.)


However, I hope I have now made my meaning perfectly clear, and would much rather defend that if anyone finds anything in it to question, rather than discussing words.
But defining "rationality" as acting in accordance with your own values doesn't seem to have been the basis for something else that you were getting at but rather to have been your central point (in the latter half of your response to me). What point other than the meaning of the word "rational" were you addressing? Furthermore, what do you think that the preceding exchange is about if not the meanings of the words "right", "good", "moral", "ethical", "wrong", "evil", etc.?

Purely philosophical statements are basically those statements whose truth values are purely functions of the meanings of the words they contain. "Jill's house is green", for example, is not a philosophical statement, but "Something is knowledge if it is a true justified belief" is. Philosophical questions by their very nature are semantic questions. "What is knowledge?", "What is goodness?", "What is rationality?", "What is beauty?", etc. directly equate to "What does 'knowledge' mean?", "What does 'goodness' mean?", "What does 'rationality' mean?", "What does 'beauty' mean?", etc. Each of the big questions of philosophy is really just the question of what the heck we're even talking about when we use a particular set of interrelated words.

Didn't Wittgenstein say something to the effect that the only function of philosophy is the clarification of language?

When engaged in a discussion like this, it's pretty ridiculous to accuse someone else of engaging in mere semantic nitpicking as if you are not also disputing the meanings of words. What various words mean is basically ultimately all that's at issue. But something being pretty ridiculous has never been a barrier to plenty of people doing it. :P


Well, a poster mentioned that rational agents can act to the detriment of themselves in things like Prisoner's Dilemma. I answered that it is not so, as rational agents do not act in a way that is to their own detriment.
I mentioned the idea that a group of rational agents can act towards their mutual detriment in some situations. I didn't claim that it's so, did I? But if you really do want to argue that that's impossible then my understanding is that you've got your work cut out for you. What the Prisoner's Dilemma purports to show, to my understanding, is that individual rationality doesn't add up to collective rationality. Basically, the idea that a choice is a bad one or a good one is based on contrast to "what would have happened in the case that another choice had been made", so the whole concept hinges on the evaluation of counterfactuals, which is actually a fairly complicated philosophical question I think.

But the sort of reasoning that you mention is actually fairly applicable here, because the fates of human beings may one day be governed by minds qualitatively more sophisticated than ours. And for all of their differences from us, they may subject to many of the same considerations as we are regarding the question of how to treat one's inferiors, notably including the consideration that their superiors may be subject to many of the same considerations as they are.

It's possible to pick out some trait that you have and to devalue everyone who lacks it. And post-humans or alien superbeings or the extradimensional entities simulating our universe or whatever could totally devalue human beings for lacking mental capabilities of theirs that we can't even conceive of, just as various human beings devalue those who lack intelligence, self-awareness, metacognition, moral agency, abstractions, hypotheses, or even just whatever skin color or religion or nationality or whatever the hell they favor. Any damn thing, really! (They probably wouldn't claim that whatever they chose was the only possible basis on which to value minds, though. One imagines that such hyper-advanced superbeings would be far more intellectually honest, self-aware, etc. than that.)

And obviously by raising the possibility of being in the same situation, I'm trying to get human readers to empathize with other creatures, and to raise considerations of the Golden Rule, along with ethical principles like it being wrong for someone to have bad things happen to them because of things that they have no control over, it still being evil to do evil things to those in your outgroup, etc. But also, even if you don't give a rat's ass about any of that, there seems like a non-trivial possibility that minds who have to decide how well to treat you just may be similar enough to your mind in the relevant ways that their decisions mirror your decision of how well to treat those that you have power over. It certainly seems more likely that other minds in general will tend to be like yours than opposite yours. In addition to specific possibilities like post-humans inheriting human values, interest in simulating minds like one's own, etc., some anthropic reasoning also seems applicable.

In many cases your decision of how to treat your inferiors will have no obvious direct causal impact on your superiors' decision of how to treat you, but as in Newcomb's problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox), that doesn't mean that it's rational to disregard the relationship between the two. And all of the above is before we even get into the question of what form punishing defectors might conceivably take...

Of course, if you decide that the probability of a superior's decision mirroring yours is very small, then the logic sounds rather similar to Pascal's Wager. Including the idea that the tiny chance of a huge payoff isn't necessarily the only reason to take the wager.


Does anyone seriously think that any principle that could be reasonably described as "moral" somehow recommends disregarding the welfare of other sentient beings? Because it seems to me like basically all of them recommend treating other sentient beings well. Kindness? Obviously. Justice? Of course. The ethic of reciprocity? Well, yeah! Maximizing happiness? You bet. Enlightened self-interest? Um... It actually kinda seems like it.

This should not come as a surprise. One of the reasons that ethical principles are formulated in so many different ways is that there are a lot of surprisingly different formulas that produce surprisingly similar advice. Or not so surprising, really, since prohibiting murder, theft, assault, etc. is basically what they're designed to do. And sometimes, nearly all of the various generalizations of such standard ethical rules will recommend against doing something that the standard rules themselves do not prohibit. That indicates that you shouldn't do that thing! For, like, almost every value of "should"!

Only when different ethical guidelines make conflicting endorsements does it make a difference which principles are fundamental. In a case where e.g. happiness and preference satisfaction are both maximized by the same course of action, then the question of which whether one of them should only be regarded as a means to the other isn't practically relevant.

[SiuiS]

Thanks. That was a good read. :)

[veti]

Devils Advocate: for the most part I wholeheartedly agree with you. And yet there are a couple of places where your logic troubles me. So just for your reference, in the hope that it may help you to tighten up your explanation in future...


Try putting yourself in the alien's place here. Suppose that you come across a planet filled with beings who place great value on a bunch of interrelated things that are, as a rule, loathsome to you. Do you then adopt their word for those things as a term for a bunch of stuff that you value? Does that seem like a reasonable thing to do?

I'm thinking of the 17th-through-19th-century European explorers, who went forth and discovered new peoples and cultures, and attached words like "religion" and "gods" and "laws" to what they found, even though their own religion and laws said that these were inappropriate. (It was a considerable intellectual jump for some of them, but in the end the doubters were firmly overruled by the cultural relativists among them.) If the aliens have a concept of "rightness", a "should" imperative that causes them to regard these repulsive things as valuable and important even when they don't, at a personal level, find them remotely desirable, then it's not so far-fetched to associate them with a concept that we regard in the same light.

Morality isn't a set of values, it's a way of regarding those values. We bundle a set of concepts together and attach the label "good" to them. What, precisely, gets included in that bundle is secondary: it's the label that makes it "moral". If we see other people attaching an equivalent label to a very different bundle, then there's nothing dishonest about using our word "morality" to describe their attitude.


That's true if they have mutual knowledge of their mutual rationality, but that isn't necessarily the case now is it? Technically, it's a matter of the [B]probability that the other agent's decision will mirror your own, for any of numerous possible reasons. (In practice, it's not rational to assign a proposition a probability of 0 or 1.)

It's perfectly rational, if you know that the other player is identical to yourself. Imagine that a computer, sufficiently advanced to reason the answer out for itself, knows that it is playing against another computer that is a perfect clone of itself, and that it's given precisely the same starting information. Then it can know, with certainty, that the clone will make the same choice as it does.

[Murska]

No. A value system need not be moral in nature. And saying that something is moral doesn't just mean that it's in accordance with our values, because we are capable of distinguishing our moral values from other values of ours which aren't moral. People sometimes do things that they think are immoral, because sometimes people care about other things more than morality.

In much the same way in which chocolate isn't whatever flavor of ice cream you like the best, morality isn't whatever you want the most. And an alien being with a good grasp of human language wouldn't call some sort of gross (to us) puke-flavored ice cream or whatever "chocolate" just because that's its favorite. Similarly, an alien being with values fundamentally opposed to morality would have no reason to call its values "moral" unless it was trying to deceive.

Try putting yourself in the alien's place here. Suppose that you come across a planet filled with beings who place great value on a bunch of interrelated things that are, as a rule, loathsome to you. Do you then adopt their word for those things as a term for a bunch of stuff that you value? Does that seem like a reasonable thing to do?

Semantics wasn't my point here. We can talk about moral values and other values if you want, and aliens can use a completely different term, but it makes no difference to the argument.


... Do you think that this somehow constitutes an argument against something that I said? If so, what, and how?

I don't know, does it? What does that matter?


You win the most in the Prisoner's Dilemma if you defect and your opponent cooperates. Are defectors whose opponents cooperate the most rational? Is playing the lottery highly rational if you manage to pick the winning numbers? Rationality is related to winning, but the two are not equivalent.

Rationality is systemized winning. Playing the lottery is rational if you can pick numbers in a way that statistically you win money. Defecting in Prisoner's Dilemma is rational if you know your opponent will cooperate. In reality, assuming a rational opponent, you cannot make your opponent cooperate except by precommitting to cooperate, in which case cooperation is the highest expected reward and is therefore rational.


That's true if they have mutual knowledge of their mutual rationality, but that isn't necessarily the case now is it? Technically, it's a matter of the probability that the other agent's decision will mirror your own, for any of numerous possible reasons. (In practice, it's not rational to assign a proposition a probability of 0 or 1.)

Yes. 1 and 0 are not probabilities - they don't exist. (With ~0.9999 certainty, at any rate) But you make your decision through modeling your opponent the best you can, so the technicality doesn't matter for the purposes of the argument.


But defining "rationality" as acting in accordance with your own values doesn't seem to have been the basis for something else that you were getting at but rather to have been your central point (in the latter half of your response to me). What point other than the meaning of the word "rational" were you addressing? Furthermore, what do you think that the preceding exchange is about if not the meanings of the words "right", "good", "moral", "ethical", "wrong", "evil", etc.?

What are you asking here? I attempted to define rationality in order to mention that rational agents don't systematically lose in Prisoner's Dilemma and give some basis why, but that was not related in any way I can discern to other arguments regarding morality or whatnot.


Purely philosophical statements are basically those statements whose truth values are purely functions of the meanings of the words they contain. "Jill's house is green", for example, is not a philosophical statement, but "Something is knowledge if it is a true justified belief" is. Philosophical questions by their very nature are semantic questions. "What is knowledge?", "What is goodness?", "What is rationality?", "What is beauty?", etc. directly equate to "What does 'knowledge' mean?", "What does 'goodness' mean?", "What does 'rationality' mean?", "What does 'beauty' mean?", etc. Each of the big questions of philosophy is really just the question of what the heck we're even talking about when we use a particular set of interrelated words.

Didn't Wittgenstein say something to the effect that the only function of philosophy is the clarification of language?

If all philosophical questions are only about meanings of words, then there is nothing to philosophy as all words only mean what we want them to mean, and nothing more. In general, philosophical questions tend to be questions about things we find mysterious due to our own lack of knowledge, and then over time as our knowledge increases, more and more philosophical questions are dissolved or answered. That doesn't mean they're talking about nothing, but it does mean that philosophy in general is pretty useless. Wittgenstein has said plenty of things, which might or might not be true.


When engaged in a discussion like this, it's pretty ridiculous to accuse someone else of engaging in mere semantic nitpicking as if you are not also disputing the meanings of words. What various words mean is basically ultimately all that's at issue. But something being pretty ridiculous has never been a barrier to plenty of people doing it. :P

When engaging in a debate or argument regarding some matter, the correct way to proceed is to take the opponent's argument and do your very best to interpret it in the most damaging possible way to your own position, to do your very best to break yourself upon it, and then see if you can still stand. If someone counters some argument of mine by claiming they use a different definition of some word, it equates to them saying they do not understand what I mean, and therefore I must clarify my position. This is not yet debating the position either way, it is simply trying to clearly communicate it to the other person so they can begin to attack it as best they can, or accept it as correct. That's all semantics is good for - enabling mutual understanding.


I mentioned the idea that a group of rational agents can act towards their mutual detriment in some situations. I didn't claim that it's so, did I? But if you really do want to argue that that's impossible then my understanding is that you've got your work cut out for you. What the Prisoner's Dilemma purports to show, to my understanding, is that individual rationality doesn't add up to collective rationality. Basically, the idea that a choice is a bad one or a good one is based on contrast to "what would have happened in the case that another choice had been made", so the whole concept hinges on the evaluation of counterfactuals, which is actually a fairly complicated philosophical question I think.

But the sort of reasoning that you mention is actually fairly applicable here, because the fates of human beings may one day be governed by minds qualitatively more sophisticated than ours. And for all of their differences from us, they may subject to many of the same considerations as we are regarding the question of how to treat one's inferiors, notably including the consideration that their superiors may be subject to many of the same considerations as they are.

It's possible to pick out some trait that you have and to devalue everyone who lacks it. And post-humans or alien superbeings or the extradimensional entities simulating our universe or whatever could totally devalue human beings for lacking mental capabilities of theirs that we can't even conceive of, just as various human beings devalue those who lack intelligence, self-awareness, metacognition, moral agency, abstractions, hypotheses, or even just whatever skin color or religion or nationality or whatever the hell they favor. Any damn thing, really! (They probably wouldn't claim that whatever they chose was the only possible basis on which to value minds, though. One imagines that such hyper-advanced superbeings would be far more intellectually honest, self-aware, etc. than that.)

And obviously by raising the possibility of being in the same situation, I'm trying to get human readers to empathize with other creatures, and to raise considerations of the Golden Rule, along with ethical principles like it being wrong for someone to have bad things happen to them because of things that they have no control over, it still being evil to do evil things to those in your outgroup, etc. But also, even if you don't give a rat's ass about any of that, there seems like a non-trivial possibility that minds who have to decide how well to treat you just may be similar enough to your mind in the relevant ways that their decisions mirror your decision of how well to treat those that you have power over. It certainly seems more likely that other minds in general will tend to be like yours than opposite yours. In addition to specific possibilities like post-humans inheriting human values, interest in simulating minds like one's own, etc., some anthropic reasoning also seems applicable.

In many cases your decision of how to treat your inferiors will have no obvious direct causal impact on your superiors' decision of how to treat you, but as in Newcomb's problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox), that doesn't mean that it's rational to disregard the relationship between the two. And all of the above is before we even get into the question of what form punishing defectors might conceivably take...

Of course, if you decide that the probability of a superior's decision mirroring yours is very small, then the logic sounds rather similar to Pascal's Wager. Including the idea that the tiny chance of a huge payoff isn't necessarily the only reason to take the wager.


Does anyone seriously think that any principle that could be reasonably described as "moral" somehow recommends disregarding the welfare of other sentient beings? Because it seems to me like basically all of them recommend treating other sentient beings well. Kindness? Obviously. Justice? Of course. The ethic of reciprocity? Well, yeah! Maximizing happiness? You bet. Enlightened self-interest? Um... It actually kinda seems like it.

This should not come as a surprise. One of the reasons that ethical principles are formulated in so many different ways is that there are a lot of surprisingly different formulas that produce surprisingly similar advice. Or not so surprising, really, since prohibiting murder, theft, assault, etc. is basically what they're designed to do. And sometimes, nearly all of the various generalizations of such standard ethical rules will recommend against doing something that the standard rules themselves do not prohibit. That indicates that you shouldn't do that thing! For, like, almost every value of "should"!

Only when different ethical guidelines make conflicting endorsements does it make a difference which principles are fundamental. In a case where e.g. happiness and preference satisfaction are both maximized by the same course of action, then the question of which whether one of them should only be regarded as a means to the other isn't practically relevant.

Agree on everything, aside from the very first part. In Prisoner's Dilemma, a group of rational actors will cooperate with each other, and achieve the highest total payoff for all of them combined. Therefore, it would appear to me to show that individual rationality adds up to collective rationality, in this case. It is easy to try and craft a situation where individual rationality might not lead to maximized collective payoff - for example having a situation where one person in a group of five is given a choice to take action that gives him one utilon and costs everyone else one utilon, or to not take it, stipulating no additional costs or benefits whatsoever socially or otherwise, and also stipulating that this is the only time this chance will ever happen to anyone. However, this is where timeless decision theory begins to get complicated. If we assume that each actor in the group has a very good ability to model each other's decisions, it would be rational for everyone to truly precommit to not taking that action if offered, as there's a four in five chance otherwise of losing an utilon. If one were capable of fooling everyone else of being so precommitted yet still being able to change their decision once given the choice, that'd be the better thing to do, however.

[Devils_Advocate]

Semantics wasn't my point here.
I'm honestly not sure how it is that you think that. I made statements about what some words mean and you responded with your own contradictory claims about what those words mean. We were totes arguing semantics, and now you seem to be indicating that you were doing so without realizing it, even though it was really quite obvious.


Saying that an action is moral, ethical or right means that it is endorsed by our value system
I bolded the relevant keywords to help clarify what I'm talking about.


We can talk about moral values and other values if you want, and aliens can use a completely different term, but it makes no difference to the argument.
What argument are you talking about here?


I don't know, does it?
It doesn't seem to, no. I don't seem to have claimed or implied that any position entails that the concepts right and wrong are meaningless or given meaning by something beyond ourselves.


What does that matter?
I wanted to know if you mistakenly read something into something that I said, or if I mistakenly said something that I didn't mean to, or if I said something that I lost track of somehow. I thought that perhaps you hadn't intentionally segued away from contradicting me, so I wanted to check whether I had missed something. Ha ha, maybe that was sort of paranoid of me?


What are you asking here?
I'm asking the questions that you quoted. Was that supposed to be a trick question or something?

Okay, look, let me break down one of your arguments:

[1] Rationality is, by definition, acting towards your own values.
[2] Detriment is, by definition, something that goes against your values.
[3] Rational agents do not act to their own detriment.

No one is disputing that [3] follows from [1] and [2]. It's obvious that [3] follow from [1] and [2] (given a few other definitional assumptions that we're perfectly willing to grant). The dispute is over [1] and [2], which are claims about what words mean.

So, if you were only giving definitions to clarify your argument, then what position were you arguing for, if not for definitions you favor? See what I mean?

Are you claiming that you thought that people contradicting [3] already agreed with [1] and [2], but not that [3] follows from [1] and [2]? (And if you actually did think that, then, good grief, why?)


I attempted to define rationality in order to mention that rational agents don't systematically lose in Prisoner's Dilemma and give some basis why, but that was not related in any way I can discern to other arguments regarding morality or whatnot.
The issue of what the words "rational", "rationality", "irrational", "irrationality", etc. mean is similar to the issue of what the words "right", "good", "moral", "ethical", "wrong", "evil", etc. mean in that each is an issue of what a set of interrelated words mean.


If all philosophical questions are only about meanings of words, then there is nothing to philosophy as all words only mean what we want them to mean, and nothing more.
To operate under that assumtpion is to use words incorrectly.

The above statement is clearly a valid one, yes? It's not as though I could be using the word "incorrectly" incorrectly if there's no such thing as using a word incorrectly. If a word's meaning is chosen by the person using it, then I can make "incorrectly" mean whatever I want it to. And, quite frankly, I don't think that it's hard to pick a meaning for "meaning" that's a lot more conducive to productive conversation than what you're suggesting.

It may be the case that, in a technical philisophical sense, words don't actually mean things. But verbal communication is pretty clearly based on at least pretending that they do, and even on different people pretending that the same words mean the same things, or at least close to the same things. But in many cases, it is not a trivial matter for different people to manage to pretend that a word means close to the same thing. Coordinating meaning-pretendings relies heavily on communication, and so can be significantly impeded by the fact that we do not speak the same language (http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=640), which is exactly the problem we're trying to correct!


If someone counters some argument of mine by claiming they use a different definition of some word, it equates to them saying they do not understand what I mean, and therefore I must clarify my position. This is not yet debating the position either way
That assumes that something other than the definitions of words is at issue, which is a poor assumption to make, because people appear to be really bad at recognizing when disputes are fundamentally semantic in nature.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? The popular assumption seems to be that that question is about whether events happen without being observed. WRONG, BUCKO! The hypothetical -- "a tree falls in the forest and no one is around" -- assumes that unobserved events occur. At issue, rather, is what the word "sound" means. Does it cover certain sensory perceptions, the external phenomena that can cause those perceptions, phenomena that do cause such perceptions, or what? And, call me crazy if you want, but I think that it's easier for two people to resolve that question if they realize that that's what they're arguing about. Heck, if they both agree that "words don't really mean things, people just think they do", then they may consider the matter settled right there, on the grounds that there is no substantive disagreement between them. But that requires them to first realize that they're arguing definitions!

I once saw the situation described as "Something like 90% of philosophical arguments boil down to semantics, with the debaters acknowledging this in maybe 10% of cases". Or something along those lines. That may be an overestimate, but my experience is that this is something that crops up fairly often. I have seen e.g. two people argue back and forth about what extremism is, both seemingly unaware that they were debating the definition of the word "extremism", despite the fact that plainly neither was using the other's definition and despite the fact that their "arguments" plainly consisted entirely of stating their respective definitions. Once again, I say: This appears to be something that people are really bad at recognizing that they're doing.

As such, acknowledging this is a powerful tool for understanding why you and someone else are expressing disagreement with each other: Just try to work out how your disagreement boils down to semantics. A handy rule of thumb is that if it's not clear how any observation would constitute evidence for or against either of your positions, then you are very probably engaged in a purely philosophical/semantic dispute.


That's all semantics is good for - enabling mutual understanding.
Isn't combining their individual understandings of things into a superior shared understanding ideally the goal of the participants in a debate? Or at least improving their individual understanding in ways that probably involve bringing those understandings closer to each other. I'm not sure why you'd consider that to be preliminary.

Indeed, needing to clarify your position to someone else may force you to first clarify it to yourself, and maybe to acknowledge that it wasn't as clear as you thought it was.


But you make your decision through modeling your opponent the best you can, so the technicality doesn't matter for the purposes of the argument.
No, there are cases where modeling your opponent the best you can does not mean assuming that your opponent is rational.


Agree on everything, aside from the very first part.
Whoops, I should have said "What the argument that originally introduced the Prisoner's Dilemma purports to show", or something like that. The phrase "the Prisoner's Dilemma" really just refers to the scenario under consideration, or game-theoretical equivalents or near-equivalents, I think.


In Prisoner's Dilemma, a group of rational actors will cooperate with each other, and achieve the highest total payoff for all of them combined. Therefore, it would appear to me to show that individual rationality adds up to collective rationality, in this case.
Consider the following hypothetical:

A group of selfish people are gathered up by researchers and paired off in sequence to participate in a PD-style scenario -- one with the same sort of payoff matrix, based on the binary choice of each participant to "cooperate" or "defect". These people are not allowed to communicate with each other, and each one plays the game only once. All of the participant who have yet to play the game watch each pair of participants who play before them, and observe that both players defect each time.

After many of these "matches", eventually two participants are paired together, who, as it happens, are both rational agents. Do they choose to cooperate or to defect?

This is a contrived situation, but any "pure" Prisoner's Dilemma style scenario is hella contrived. That doesn't mean that considering them can't inform our understanding of a broader class of interactions. And the hypothetical described above has implications for cases where the person you're dealing with probably has no technical knowledge of game theory nor decision theory, much less an understanding superrationality, timeless decision theory, and the like. Aren't most of our interactions in real life with people who aren't ideally rational? It's rare to be faced with a case where someone else is likely to make the same choice as you for the same reasons... even in cases where you and another person have to make the same decision! Sure, a rational actor effectively chooses for all rational actors faced with the same decision (with corresponding priorities, information, etc.), but that's usually still a minority in practice.


It's perfectly rational, if you know that the other player is identical to yourself. Imagine that a computer, sufficiently advanced to reason the answer out for itself, knows that it is playing against another computer that is a perfect clone of itself, and that it's given precisely the same starting information. Then it can know, with certainty, that the clone will make the same choice as it does.
What is knowledge, bro? (http://www.philosophybro.com/post/66120891281/mailbag-monday-what-do-we-know) If you guess that the other player is identical to you and happen to be right, do you know that the two of you are identical? Specifying that justified beliefs are knowledge just moves the ambiguity from "knowledge" to "justification"; what justifies a belief? Your perceptions could be an elaborate illusion specifically designed to deceive you; whether or not that's likely, it certainly seems logically possible. If sensory experiences can justify a belief despite being compatible with that belief being false, and all justified beliefs are knowledge, then you can know things that aren't even true; does that sound right? On the other hand, saying that knowledge equals true justified belief makes "knowing" things partly a matter of luck, and avoiding that was frankly why we didn't just go with the simpler and much clearer definition of knowledge as true belief in the first place! Like, whoa.

At this point the concept of subjective probability cuts in and says "Hey, bro, belief isn't all or nothing; it's a matter of degree, you dig? Like, you can be pretty confident that a store will be open on Tuesday, but way super confident that the sun will rise tomorrow, and even more confident that one plus one equals two. You can specify how confident you are about something by estimating what fraction of the time things that you're that confident about will be true. 99% of the stuff that you're '99% confident' about should be true. If less than 99% of that stuff is true then you're overconfident, bro."

Due to the problem of induction, you can't rationally believe things about your surroundings -- like that someone is identical to you -- with 100% confidence. Now, you might say to that "Aw, man, that's too bad, but at least I can be rationally certain about tautologies, right?" Actually... not so much. See, in practice, human beings are not perfect reasoners, and make mistakes. And if you think that there's only a one in a million chance that 23 isn't a prime number, then you're probably overconfident. Probably more than one of every million things you're that confident in are false. (But I'm only claiming a confidence of over 50% on that, mind you. "Probably" just means "more probably than not".)

"Well, okay, but what about some sort of superintelligent machine that reasons completely flawlessly?", you may ask. But such a machine could be made to malfunction by modifying it in some way. So how could such a machine be justified in 100% certainty in its own perfect functioning? How could it "know" that it's functioning perfectly in a sense of "knowledge" that doesn't involve being at least a little lucky? Basically, we can look at a subprocess that renders final judgement on something and ask how it performs in the event that supporting subprocesses are compromised. Because that is a thing that could conceivably happen!

(And that sort of consideration is important to bear in mind if you're actually trying to design a superintelligent machine. Assuming that anything will function perfectly is irresponsible. You want to have failsafes to cope with things like less than perfectly reliable hardware and the fact that the individual modules have been coded by fallible human beings.)

So, for a rational being, as Murska put it, 1 and 0 are not probabilities (with ~0.9999 certainty).

The parenthetical part is because our understanding of rationality is also the product of fallible human beings and thus subject to uncertainty; get it? It's funny because it's true, as they say.


I'm thinking of the 17th-through-19th-century European explorers, who went forth and discovered new peoples and cultures, and attached words like "religion" and "gods" and "laws" to what they found, even though their own religion and laws said that these were inappropriate. (It was a considerable intellectual jump for some of them, but in the end the doubters were firmly overruled by the cultural relativists among them.) If the aliens have a concept of "rightness", a "should" imperative that causes them to regard these repulsive things as valuable and important even when they don't, at a personal level, find them remotely desirable, then it's not so far-fetched to associate them with a concept that we regard in the same light.
I have no problem with acknowledging alien ideals and social mores as ideals and social mores. But if they aren't our ideals and social mores, then they're not the same thing. The same type of thing, sure, but not the same thing.

Even if you think that calling something "right" or "good" is just endorsing it and has no other meaning, it makes no sense use those words to describe things that you disapprove of but others approve of, because you don't want to endorse them yourself!

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."
-- Abraham Lincoln

See, if the word "legs" included tails, then the statement "A dog has five legs" would be true, because it would have a different meaning due to the word "legs" having a different meaning. But a dog would still only have four legs. We are not having this exchange within the hypothetical world under consideration, you see, so when I use the word "legs" in a statement to you -- e.g. "But a dog would still only have four legs" -- it means what we use it to mean. Because meaning is a matter of convention and/or intention (depending on what one means by "meaning", as dangerously recursive as that is), not in spite of it!

Now, if some people had a word for legs and/or tails, but not a word for just legs, then it would be fairly reasonable to use "legs" as an approximate translation of that word most of the time, depending on context, even though the meaning wouldn't be exactly the same. It wouldn't be reasonable to translate a word for tails as "legs", though. Not even if the people using it felt the same way about tails as we do about legs. (Wow, what a weird hypothetical.) IMO.


Morality isn't a set of values, it's a way of regarding those values. We bundle a set of concepts together and attach the label "good" to them. What, precisely, gets included in that bundle is secondary: it's the label that makes it "moral". If we see other people attaching an equivalent label to a very different bundle, then there's nothing dishonest about using our word "morality" to describe their attitude.
That pretty much summarizes what I have been disagreeing with, yes.

Partly this is a matter of how the word "morality" is used. It seems to me that there's enough difference in usage that the most honest thing to do is to avoid using "morality" in many cases, including the one under consideration. It's a question of what to group together under what label. Doesn't mean that the groupings aren't all useful regardless. Consider that color television sets were still called "television sets" despite being different from those produced earlier, but television sets were not called "radios". It can be useful to consider the group of all television sets and all radios; it can be useful to distinguish between television sets and radios; and it can be useful to distinguish between black and white and color television sets. One can agree that all of those groupings can be useful regardless of whether one thinks that television sets should have been called "radios", or that color television sets should have gotten their own name, or whatever.

But I also get the impression that maybe people having ideals is more important to you than what those ideals are. Maybe not, I'm not sure. But if so: WOW ****, that is some scary as hell Lawful Neutral ****, there. Like, wow.

[Murska]

Sorry, that's too much text for me to have time to get involved. I'll cherry pick some specific things to respond to.

I don't find arguments about semantics very interesting in most cases, which is why I try to define and redefine things to get around the words to the interesting part of the issue, which is why it's so difficult to progress if someone else finds arguing semantics to be fine. So the following should elaborate this point rather well:


Okay, look, let me break down one of your arguments:

[1] Rationality is, by definition, acting towards your own values.
[2] Detriment is, by definition, something that goes against your values.
[3] Rational agents do not act to their own detriment.

No one is disputing that [3] follows from [1] and [2]. It's obvious that [3] follow from [1] and [2] (given a few other definitional assumptions that we're perfectly willing to grant). The dispute is over [1] and [2], which are claims about what words mean.

It's obvious to me too that 3 follows from 1 and 2. And I have no interest in debating what the words mean, I am simply attempting to use them as defined in 1 and 2. All I'm trying to say here is that 3 follows from 1 and 2, which should be obvious and thus all the people who seem to dispute it confuse me. If they're actually trying to dispute 1 and 2, which are definitions of words in order to be able to state 3 in the first place, then that's not what I'm here for and it seems pointless given that we can define words to mean anything. In this case, it seems to me that we agree on 3, which resolves everything neatly. All the time and effort spent on discussing 1 and 2 was entirely worthless.

What I want to find is situations where, even if me and whomever I'm debating with understand each other's words, we disagree on some fact. That's when we can discuss our points of view and attempt to find out which one of us is right, if either. All the work getting to the point where we understand each other is just an unfortunate necessity, made harder if people wilfully misinterpret things in order to have something to disagree with each other about.


After many of these "matches", eventually two participants are paired together, who, as it happens, are both rational agents. Do they choose to cooperate or to defect?

They are likely to defect in this scenario due to having an incorrect model of each other as being irrational actors, based on having observed a lot of games where all participants have been irrational. If they were paired in the first game, they would definitely cooperate, and the probability of mutual cooperation drops as a function of watched games, I would expect.

[TuggyNE]

It's obvious to me too that 3 follows from 1 and 2. And I have no interest in debating what the words mean, I am simply attempting to use them as defined in 1 and 2. All I'm trying to say here is that 3 follows from 1 and 2, which should be obvious and thus all the people who seem to dispute it confuse me. If they're actually trying to dispute 1 and 2, which are definitions of words in order to be able to state 3 in the first place, then that's not what I'm here for and it seems pointless given that we can define words to mean anything. In this case, it seems to me that we agree on 3, which resolves everything neatly. All the time and effort spent on discussing 1 and 2 was entirely worthless.

Your argument appears to be based inherently on picking words that sound good (after all, who doesn't want to be considered rational?) and making sure their definitions are adjusted such that the logical conclusions you desire fall out as a syllogism, then refusing to discuss whether those definitions you hand-picked are suitable and match the full set of connotations and associations nearly everyone will have with those words, on the basis that words can be redefined to whatever people want! In the face of all the scholarly effort in the world that goes into determining actual meanings from actual conventional usage, this looks disingenuous in the extreme.

The best part, of course, is that logically this doesn't go anywhere. You've defined "rationality" such that (apparently) all agents are rational, which raises the question of what "detriment" means. A hypothetical class of actions that no one would ever take, varying per person/agent? That's not especially useful in a practical sense. And since your definition doesn't match what any of your opponents in debate would actually consider "detriment", you can't logically apply it to their arguments to rebut their points. You've cut yourself off from meaningful debate.

[Murska]

Your argument appears to be based inherently on picking words that sound good (after all, who doesn't want to be considered rational?) and making sure their definitions are adjusted such that the logical conclusions you desire fall out as a syllogism, then refusing to discuss whether those definitions you hand-picked are suitable and match the full set of connotations and associations nearly everyone will have with those words, on the basis that words can be redefined to whatever people want! In the face of all the scholarly effort in the world that goes into determining actual meanings from actual conventional usage, this looks disingenuous in the extreme.

The best part, of course, is that logically this doesn't go anywhere. You've defined "rationality" such that (apparently) all agents are rational, which raises the question of what "detriment" means. A hypothetical class of actions that no one would ever take, varying per person/agent? That's not especially useful in a practical sense. And since your definition doesn't match what any of your opponents in debate would actually consider "detriment", you can't logically apply it to their arguments to rebut their points. You've cut yourself off from meaningful debate.

I apologize. Let me reword my argument once again.

[1] Asreworg is, by definition, acting towards your own values.
[2] Sirah is, by definition, something that goes against your values.
[3] Asreworg agents do not act to their own sirah.

No actual agent that I've ever observed is perfectly asreworg. People tend to take sirah actions all the time, due to various reasons such as biased thinking, incomplete information or simple accident.

[Devils_Advocate]

Murska, if that had instead been your reply to my post (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?380400-Are-we-evil&p=18864598&viewfull=1#post18864598), I would have been perfectly in line responding "What the hell are you even talking about?" You'd have had to also say something like "I think that asreworg agents are rational", or a reader would have to infer that you were implying that, or something along those lines, in order to make sense of that stuff as doing anything but starting an entirely different discussion. At which point you'd still be arguing semantics, just indirectly.

I think that Tuggy was on the right track with the idea that a suitable definition captures a word's connotations and associations. More specifically, I'd say the art of coming up with an appropriate formal definition is the art of making a vague concept less vague by formalizing what you're talking about. And that's a process that it's possible to screw up, inadvertently specifying something different from what you meant to specify.


They are likely to defect in this scenario due to having an incorrect model of each other as being irrational actors, based on having observed a lot of games where all participants have been irrational.
So... you agree that that two selfish rational agents can in fact act towards their mutual detriment in some scenarios, which is to say, your definition-based argument was wrong, because your definition was wrong? Your stated definition of "rational" is more like the definition of "fortunate", or rather "fortunately-acting". You neglected the possibility that the option with the best expected outcome doesn't have the best actual outcome. Like someone overlooking the possibility of untrue justified beliefs in defining "knowledge". You made a mistake and specified the wrong thing.

Rational thinking and rational behavior are thinking and behavior that are appropriate in a particular sort of way. In what way, exactly? That's the question that a definition of "rational" attempts to answer. And, since we are talking about a particular sort of appropriateness, not just any old sort, it's a question that can totally be answered incorrectly. Brushing off the art of correctly specifying what we're trying to talk about is like saying that Bayes' theorem isn't particularly useful. It may turn out, upon examination, that we're actually talking about several subtly different things that are very similar. But let's be clear, here: There are things that we aren't talking about. There may not be only one right answer, but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of wrong ones (http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3761).

Similarly -- to bring this back around to the main topic -- ethical values and ethical behavior are values and behavior that are appropriate in another particular sort of way. Or, again, maybe not exactly one specific sort of way. But certainly not in any sense whatsoever, and in very nearly one sense for many practical purposes. Pointing to the ambiguity of "evil" as though that even constitutes a rebuttal to ethical criticism is like treating the ambiguity of "sound" as a counterpoint to complaints that something is too loud. You need to show that different senses of a word are unequally applicable in order to show that the distinction is relevant to the discussion at hand. Otherwise you're just trying to shut down the discussion (http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2009#comic). It's remarkably disingenuous to suddenly act as though meaningful discourse requires infinite clarity when finite clarity plainly is normally so not a problem that it goes unnoticed.

So that's my problem with arguments of that nature.


If they were paired in the first game, they would definitely cooperate, and the probability of mutual cooperation drops as a function of watched games, I would expect.
How on Earth is that definite? What reason does either one have to suppose that it's anything more than highly unlikely that the other person will be making the same decision for the same reasons? What reason do you have for your apparent assumption that that's probable?

[VincentTakeda]

Mr Tumnus... You may not be evil. But you are most certainly a naughty faun.

[Cyber Punk]

Answering straight from reading the OP: Yes.

Let me explain.

Most of us try our very best to be good, and most of us claim to be 'good people', but that does little to change the fact that we have an inherently evil nature. It's mostly nurture and personal decisions that drive us to try and be 'good', well-mannered people, but when you examine your actions and motivations, you'll realize that you have a selfish streak in you, no matter how generous you are. For instance, of course.

I read a statement somewhere that rang very true for me: Even the pope is capable of murder. Of course he is, he is only human. It's by choice, willpower and by nurture that he doesn't go around killing people. That we know of. :smalltongue:

Jokes aside, yes, we are inherently evil, but we choose to be good to try and overcome that evil nature.

Please understand that evil doesn't necessarily mean 'trying to take over the world' or some such thing. As I've seen it, most evil is based in selfishness.

[Razade]

I read a statement somewhere that rang very true for me: Even the pope is capable of murder. Of course he is, he is only human. It's by choice, willpower and by nurture that he doesn't go around killing people. That we know of. :smalltongue:

Going to level with you here man. I don't make a choice not to kill people, I don't have to suppress my desire for murder-lust by sheer willpower and while sure...my surrounding culture taught me that killing was wrong I dare say I'd know that without having it to be taught to me. And I can tell you that with fairly good certainty because I am -not- inherently Evil. I am an inherently empathetic being and I can take a step back from myself and think "Would I like to be killed". The answer of course is no, I don't want to be killed. If I don't want to be killed I can therefore assume plenty of other people don't want to be killed. Thus, without nurture or willpower or choice, I can understand that killing another person is wrong. I won't kill another person because it's the wrong thing to do. Don't steal for the same reasons. Don't do a lot of things for the same reasons. And I dare say that we as a species have been able to do that since we stepped off the plains. Or else we wouldn't have a global civilization or an internet to discuss the matter over.

[Zrak]

While I generally fall along the lines of an "inherent" good impulse, primarily along Mencian lines, I have to say I think a corollary to the rule about real physics in D&D and kittens is that every time somebody tries to argue something is "inherent" to human nature, a crazy king locks a baby in a closet. Less facetiously, I think we tend to significantly underestimate how difficult it is to divorce ourselves from our socialization.

[Diamondeye]

So some background, I was watching this new fall anime Parasyte -the maxim- where these parasites come to earth, bond with existing lifeforms (usually humans), take over their bodies and then proceed to eat people. When the main character asks one of these parasites "You guys are monsters, why are you doing this?" the parasite responds with "We're not monsters, we're eating humans for food." At this point there have been about 80 of these strange murders caused by these things. The parasite then asks "Aren't humans really the monsters? How many millions of things do you kill each year and eat?" Its this statement that prompted this post.

Picture a world where these ravenous creatures existed that enslaved and consumed the other, less intelligent creatures of that world. So great was their hunger that entire species went extinct in an attempt to satiate them. They forced the ones that didn't die out to mate in order to produce more food. They ate creatures of every gender and age, young, old, the strong, the weak and even the unborn.

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

Yes. We're a sapient species. There's good arguments we shouldn't eat chimpanzees or dolphins. Other than that, trying to treat animal species as humans for ethical purposes is Stolen Concept Fallacy, and mainly the province of people that want to aggrandize themselves by pretending they have some great moral truth in objecting to eating meat. The animals eaten would not know any different and the universe would not care if we stopped.

[Zrak]

Yes. We're a sapient species. There's good arguments we shouldn't eat chimpanzees or dolphins. Other than that, trying to treat animal species as humans for ethical purposes is Stolen Concept Fallacy,
Huh? No it's not. The Stolen Concept fallacy refers to an argument that requires the validity of the point it is trying to disprove. Treating humans and other animal species equivalently for ethical purposes does nothing of the kind. With a little sleight of hand and control over the language of the debate, it's pretty easy to make it seem like it does, but this is the sort of parlor trick that might work in some intro philosophy course at the world's dingiest diploma mill, but even that's a "might."


The animals eaten would not know any different
I don't know what you mean by this. In what sense would they not? Virtually all animals can demonstrably feel pain, most can be observed to feel fear and many are generally thought to mourn. While they may not understand the concept of death in a philosophical sense, they would certainly "notice" the cessation of their being to the same extent as anything else. Even if they wouldn't consciously recognize they weren't going to be killed and eaten, they'd know they whether or not they were presently being killed and eaten, or kept in horrific conditions, &c.
If you mean an animal won't know the difference between someone who will and will not eat it, this is also at least partly false. When you have a new pet bird, for example, you show it your profile while earning it's trust; a bird will recognize a potential predator when it sees that you have two eyes in the front of your head. After the bird has socialized to you and learned you're not a threat, however, it will not recognize you as a predator despite your eye configuration. While its guess may turn out to be inaccurate, it will distinguish between individual members of a species when determining threats. Obviously, this is based on experience and not some intrinsic knowledge, but the argument that animals can't just magically sense vegetarians is a pretty silly counter-argument.


the universe would not care if we stopped.
This is an even sillier counter argument. The universe is an abstract concept, not a conscious being; it doesn't care about anything.

[ef87]

Think of the planet Earth as a living object and humans as a virus feeding off its host and whichever way it can.

[Shamash]

Think of the planet Earth as a living object and humans as a virus feeding off its host and whichever way it can.

I don't get why people act as if humans are aliens and not part of the planet.

Nature created us! We are part of it and we have all the right to be here.

[Zrak]

I think you're misreading the analogy; "nature" also created viruses, and they are part of nature and have a right to be there. They are nonetheless detrimental, generally speaking, to the health of their host.

[Razade]

I think you're misreading the analogy; "nature" also created viruses, and they are part of nature and have a right to be there. They are nonetheless detrimental, generally speaking, to the health of their host.

It's a bad analogy because the Earth isn't a single organism.

[Zrak]

Nor are human beings an actual virus. I don't think you know what analogies are.

[Razade]

I know what an analogy is, it doesn't change the fact that it's a bad one.

[Zrak]

Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I'm sure you know, in a general sense, what an analogy is. I meant that you don't understand how analogies work. If it is a bad analogy, it's not for the reason you mentioned; whether the earth is a single organism or not is totally irrelevant. Analogies compares two things or sets of things on the basis of a significant similarity, most often in their structure or relationship, in order to better illustrate or clarify a contention about one of the things. The nature of each party in a set is not relevant if the point of comparison is the relationship between the parties in the set, because the goal is to illustrate the relationship of the source in the more commonly understood structure of the target. But hey, why take my word for it when we can use an example.

So, for our example, imagine a DM has come up with some new monsters for their urban fantasy campaign setting. One of these monsters is an intelligent undead whose great powers are balanced out by its crippling and relatively quotidian weaknesses; it catches fire and/or disintegrates upon even relatively indirect contact with ginger, while it is repelled by the flickering of fluorescent lighting, which revolts its heightened senses. Your argument is that it would be a bad analogy to say that ginger is to it as sunlight is to vampires because ginger is not a kind of lighting; similarly, saying fluorescent lighting to it is like garlic to a vampire would be a bad analogy because fluorescent lighting is not a root vegetable with a strong scent and diverse culinary uses. While both of those clearly convey the relationship in question, and would thus be perfectly serviceable explanations for the DM to give their players of the monster's weaknesses, your position says they're bad analogies merely because the taxonomies fail to match up.

So, then, let's do the reverse, and assume the DM gives their players taxonomy-matching analogies: "for this monster, ginger is like garlic to a vampire" and "fluorescent light is like sunlight to a vampire." How are the players supposed to understand, from these analogies, that ginger disintegrates the undead and fluorescent light repels it? Not only can they not discern the meaning, they're fairly likely to discern the wrong meaning and assume fluorescent lighting disintegrates the creature and ginger repels it because that is exactly what the analogy is saying.

Now, add to all of this that the analogies would be just as intelligible and misleading respectively were we also to change the DM's creature so that it was an ooze or demon or swarm. An analogy's ability to convey its intended meaning does not relate, directly or indirectly, to the comparability of taxonomy of the parties involved in the structures or relationships it compares, merely in the comparability of those structures or relationships in and of themselves. As such, the fact that the Earth is not a single organism has no impact whatsoever on the ability of any analogy about the relationship of a species to the earth to convey that relationship, or at least the speaker's view of it, clearly and effectively.

[BannedInSchool]

No, see, viruses aren't that talky so we're totally not viruses.

[Razade]

Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I'm sure you know, in a general sense, what an analogy is. I meant that you don't understand how analogies work. If it is a bad analogy, it's not for the reason you mentioned; whether the earth is a single organism or not is totally irrelevant. Analogies compares two things or sets of things on the basis of a significant similarity, most often in their structure or relationship, in order to better illustrate or clarify a contention about one of the things. The nature of each party in a set is not relevant if the point of comparison is the relationship between the parties in the set, because the goal is to illustrate the relationship of the source in the more commonly understood structure of the target. But hey, why take my word for it when we can use an example.

So, for our example, imagine a DM has come up with some new monsters for their urban fantasy campaign setting. One of these monsters is an intelligent undead whose great powers are balanced out by its crippling and relatively quotidian weaknesses; it catches fire and/or disintegrates upon even relatively indirect contact with ginger, while it is repelled by the flickering of fluorescent lighting, which revolts its heightened senses. Your argument is that it would be a bad analogy to say that ginger is to it as sunlight is to vampires because ginger is not a kind of lighting; similarly, saying fluorescent lighting to it is like garlic to a vampire would be a bad analogy because fluorescent lighting is not a root vegetable with a strong scent and diverse culinary uses. While both of those clearly convey the relationship in question, and would thus be perfectly serviceable explanations for the DM to give their players of the monster's weaknesses, your position says they're bad analogies merely because the taxonomies fail to match up.

So, then, let's do the reverse, and assume the DM gives their players taxonomy-matching analogies: "for this monster, ginger is like garlic to a vampire" and "fluorescent light is like sunlight to a vampire." How are the players supposed to understand, from these analogies, that ginger disintegrates the undead and fluorescent light repels it? Not only can they not discern the meaning, they're fairly likely to discern the wrong meaning and assume fluorescent lighting disintegrates the creature and ginger repels it because that is exactly what the analogy is saying.

Now, add to all of this that the analogies would be just as intelligible and misleading respectively were we also to change the DM's creature so that it was an ooze or demon or swarm. An analogy's ability to convey its intended meaning does not relate, directly or indirectly, to the comparability of taxonomy of the parties involved in the structures or relationships it compares, merely in the comparability of those structures or relationships in and of themselves. As such, the fact that the Earth is not a single organism has no impact whatsoever on the ability of any analogy about the relationship of a species to the earth to convey that relationship, or at least the speaker's view of it, clearly and effectively.

I understand how analogies work, you don't particularly have to condescend down to me you know? It doesn't exactly help express your point in any effective manner.

[erikun]

Morality tends to be human-centric, thanks to it being created by humans and being defined by humans. (or being understood and interpreted by humans, depending on viewpoint) As such, morality is going to favor humans over other things, or at least equal to other things, and favor human viewpoints over non-human ones.

Please note that the idea that humans are evil, simply by eating and surviving, is not a new one - although such thinking generally assumes that humans must therefore actively work to counterbalance the necessary evil of existence. However, that isn't a very popular at times. Most people don't like the idea that they are evil, and so the more popular moralities tend to set some sort of arbitrary divide. Either it's "non-sapient don't count" or it's "non-sentient don't count" or it's "non-living don't count" or something similar, where there is a distinct difference between doing evil to something and not doing evil to it, or the impact being lessened. Note that, even in those cases, a person could still end up doing evil - most people would not consider the death of a dog to automatically be evil, especially a dangerous or rabid dog, but most people would still consider tortore or inhumane treatment of the dog to be evil. Even if it was a dangerous or rabid animal, it is still considered inhumane (evil, basically) to needlessly cause it suffering.

Some sort of creature which doesn't need to kill a bunch of stuff just to survive day-to-day could easily look at humanity and call it evil. After all, if they just need some water and sunlight to survive and grow, then what do they think about a species which needs to kill stuff daily just to survive? To them, who have no concept of necessary killing of others, the idea of regularly killing something just to eat could be completely foreign. Their morality would not see much difference between sapience and non-sapience, because while non-sapient creatures may not be capable of decisions, that doesn't follow that they are worthy of being slaughtered by the dozens just for another creature to survive.

And on the flip side, something which does eat to survive and which everything living has some degree of sapience isn't going to make a sapient/non-sapient distinction. To them, there is no real point; they need to kill and eat sapient creatures just to survive. They are unlikely to see much difference between eating a human and eating a bovine.

[Zrak]

I understand how analogies work, you don't particularly have to condescend down to me you know? It doesn't exactly help express your point in any effective manner.

Says you. I tried to condescend up to someone, once, and I wound up in traction.

More seriously, I'm not even trying to come across as particularly condescending, but it is hard to find a neutral phrasing to explain the fact that your criticism of the analogy not only missed the point of the analogy in question, but of analogy categorically. I mean, you said the analogy was bad because of the thing that made it an analogy. I don't think there's a way to express that kind of mistake that wouldn't come across as condescending. Since I assumed you weren't being wrong on purpose, and I am honestly sorry if I was mistaken and have misapprehended a deadpan joke or the purpose of an intentional self-contradiction has gone over my head, the only reasonable explanation I can see for your argument is a basically total misunderstanding of the concept of analogy. I explained the function of analogies in great detail because earnestly believed that you didn't really understand the purpose of analogy, because if you did you wouldn't have made the criticism you did, because that criticism is blatantly nonsensical on its surface.

[Devils_Advocate]

Morality tends to be human-centric, thanks to it being created by humans and being defined by humans. (or being understood and interpreted by humans, depending on viewpoint) As such, morality is going to favor humans over other things, or at least equal to other things, and favor human viewpoints over non-human ones.
You could replace humanity with a particular culture, ideology, or, heck, tribe in that analysis, and I'm pretty sure that people have and do. Except that I'm pretty sure that the overall trend has been one of substituting the specific with the general, not vice versa. In no small part because, to the extent that fairness is moral and unfairness is immoral, it's easy to see how some "moral standards" are actually immoral standards.

And to the extent that "morality" can include unfairness in your favor, it seems like there's a distinction to be made between good morality and evil morality. Or however you want to put it. Maybe "good" and "evil" aren't the best words for this, but there is a rather obvious difference, right?


Please note that the idea that humans are evil, simply by eating and surviving, is not a new one
Has anyone argued that in this thread? If not, what's your purpose in bringing it up? Seems like kind of a strawman in that case.

[BananaPhone]

@OP:

No. Animals eat other animals, that's the way of the world. I'm against eating animals that are self-aware like elephants and dolphins, but other than that, nope, eat away.

I'd still see such parasites as monsters no matter how much they tried to philosophically befuddle me/weasel their way out of a shotgun to the face. At the least I'd see them as a predator and a threat to the security of myself and fellow humans, so again, shotgun meet face.

[SalmaHayek]

Those soybeans aren't even born yet, you monsters! :smalltongue:
:smallbiggrin:

[Killer Angel]

@OP:
I'm against eating animals that are self-aware like elephants and dolphins, but other than that, nope, eat away.

What's the limit of "self-awareness"? a cow is self-aware of its existance or is like an amoeba?

[Zrak]

Generally speaking, "self-aware," "sentient," and "sapient" are all qualifiers based around the very precise standard of a delineation which allows you to take a principled stand in a way which does not in the least inconvenience you.

[Killer Angel]

Yeah, I thought it was something like that... :smalltongue:

[Tvtyrant]

Generally speaking, "self-aware," "sentient," and "sapient" are all qualifiers based around the very precise standard of a delineation which allows you to take a principled stand in a way which does not in the least inconvenience you.

Like pretty much any principled stand in my experience.

[Tyndmyr]

@OP:

No. Animals eat other animals, that's the way of the world. I'm against eating animals that are self-aware like elephants and dolphins, but other than that, nope, eat away.

I'd still see such parasites as monsters no matter how much they tried to philosophically befuddle me/weasel their way out of a shotgun to the face. At the least I'd see them as a predator and a threat to the security of myself and fellow humans, so again, shotgun meet face.

I'm also against eating friendly animals. Pets and the like. They're basically family. Part of the tribe, regardless of talk of self awareness or whatever.

On the flip side, the idea of say...hyper-intelligent spiders does not fill me with curiosity and a desire to converse. Such a thing must be purged from the earth with fire. Something that lives off eating humans? Danger to me. Kill it with fire.

Justify that however you prefer.

[Coidzor]

Generally speaking, "self-aware," "sentient," and "sapient" are all qualifiers based around the very precise standard of a delineation which allows you to take a principled stand in a way which does not in the least inconvenience you.

From a utilitarian point of view, having principles that don't inconvenience you is a good, no? :smallamused:

[BannedInSchool]

From a utilitarian point of view, having principles that don't inconvenience you is a good, no? :smallamused:
With a sufficient array of principles one can do whatever one wants and choose the appropriate principle to justify it. Bonus points for also claiming it is right and necessary to do whatever it is that you want to do based on that principle. :smalltongue:

[BananaPhone]

What's the limit of "self-awareness"? a cow is self-aware of its existance or is like an amoeba?


Being aware that you're a separate entity, an individual. Dolphins, elephants and most apes have been observed demonstrating the most rudimentary characteristics of this (such as recognising themselves in mirrors). Humans can too. The overwhelming majority of animals, however, cannot. Even dogs. And I love dogs.

If you want a deeper response than this though, I fear I cannot give it to you. Even the most eminent of psychologists haven't formed an agreement.

[Zrak]

Like pretty much any principled stand in my experience.

I would disagree. Even on a very rudimentary level, a great many principled stands involve a great deal of at least petty, quotidian inconvenience, and a not inconsiderable number of them involve a lot more.


Being aware that you're a separate entity, an individual. Dolphins, elephants and most apes have been observed demonstrating the most rudimentary characteristics of this (such as recognising themselves in mirrors). Humans can too. The overwhelming majority of animals, however, cannot. Even dogs. And I love dogs.
The idea that this is testable borders on the ludicrous; the idea that the mirror test is representative crosses that border and builds a clown shoe factory on the other side.

For example, do you contend that blind people, who lack one of "the most rudimentary characteristics" of self-awareness, are not aware that they're individuals? If not, then that is a pretty bad rudimentary characteristic of self-awareness. I don't mean this just to be pedantic, either. Although that's an extreme example, it shows the exact reason that the mirror test is a bad test; it doesn't test whether or not you're aware that you're a separate, individual entity, it tests your reaction to mirrors. I say "your reaction to mirrors" because it doesn't even really test whether you can recognize the figure in the mirror as yourself, but rather whether or not you touch a mark made on a part of your skin you cannot normally see that the mirror would allow you to see. The connection between this act and self-awareness relies on an astounding number of not only totally unsupported, but often contraindicated or demonstrably false assumptions, like an animal relying on vision to distinguish between individuals or the notion that touching all marks you see on your body is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of self-awareness. For example, dogs rely on other senses much more heavily than vision, and a visually-focused mirror test may be as likely to create a false-negative for a dog as a scent-based "mirror" test would be for most people.

[BananaPhone]

I would disagree. Even on a very rudimentary level, a great many principled stands involve a great deal of at least petty, quotidian inconvenience, and a not inconsiderable number of them involve a lot more.


The idea that this is testable borders on the ludicrous; the idea that the mirror test is representative crosses that border and builds a clown shoe factory on the other side.

For example, do you contend that blind people, who lack one of "the most rudimentary characteristics" of self-awareness, are not aware that they're individuals? If not, then that is a pretty bad rudimentary characteristic of self-awareness. I don't mean this just to be pedantic, either. Although that's an extreme example, it shows the exact reason that the mirror test is a bad test; it doesn't test whether or not you're aware that you're a separate, individual entity, it tests your reaction to mirrors.


I'm not a psychologist, and I use the mirror test as one example of methods those far more educated than I in the manner have gone about trying to test other animals self-awareness. But the underlying principle, I believe, is to see if the animal recognises itself or if it reacts as if seeing another of its own species. This is further explored by animals receiving additions to their bodies (such as noticeable dots being placed on them). Dolphins, apes, elephants etc have all then used the mirror to inspect this new addition to themselves, tilting their vision in ways that allows them to observe it. Where-as other animals notice no difference and act as if they're interacting with another of their kind.

The two camps of reactions tend to be split up into one group of animals reacting with "hey, what's that thing on me?" and another reacting with "another dog! Bark at it!"

It isn't fool-proof. It isn't watertight. But the underlying mechanics that are generating those two very different types of reactions are the rudimentary foundations of self-awareness.

I think so anyway. Again, I'm not a psychologist so I'll leave the research and conclusion up to them. In the mean-time I'll stick with my distinction between not wanting to harm/eat the animals I think are self-aware and being fine with eating the ones that aren't (except dogs and cats, because dogs are awesome and cats are snakes with fur).

[Killer Angel]

I it doesn't test whether or not you're aware that you're a separate, individual entity, it tests your reaction to mirrors. I say "your reaction to mirrors" because it doesn't even really test whether you can recognize the figure in the mirror as yourself,

Speaking about reaction to mirrors, Narcissus saw his own reflection in a pool, and fell in love with it, not realizing it was merely an image.

[Murska]

With a sufficient array of principles one can do whatever one wants and choose the appropriate principle to justify it. Bonus points for also claiming it is right and necessary to do whatever it is that you want to do based on that principle. :smalltongue:

These are my principles, and if you don't like them... Well, I have others.

[Zrak]

I'm not a psychologist, and I use the mirror test as one example of methods those far more educated than I in the manner have gone about trying to test other animals self-awareness. But the underlying principle, I believe, is to see if the animal recognises itself or if it reacts as if seeing another of its own species. This is further explored by animals receiving additions to their bodies (such as noticeable dots being placed on them). Dolphins, apes, elephants etc have all then used the mirror to inspect this new addition to themselves, tilting their vision in ways that allows them to observe it. Where-as other animals notice no difference and act as if they're interacting with another of their kind.
That's not the underlying principle. The underlying principle really is just whether or not it touches (or, rarely, inspects more generally) the mark on itself. It really is just that. Pigs, for example, have never passed the "mirror test," (insofar as I'm aware) but have passed a number of other tests involving using mirrors to get food, which require at least a vague awareness that they are the figure in the mirror, since they could not otherwise gauge their position relative to the food they can only see in the mirror. Taken together, the two indicate that the mirror test says more about pigs' grooming habits than their comprehension of mirrors or their self-awareness.


The two camps of reactions tend to be split up into one group of animals reacting with "hey, what's that thing on me?" and another reacting with "another dog! Bark at it!"
It's more complex than this, since most animals, including people, initially react by thinking the figure in the mirror is a different member of their species, and very few continue to react that way over prolonged interaction with a mirror. For example, dogs typically lose interest in mirrors, rather than continuing to act as though there's another dog in the mirror; what this indicates is totally ambiguous. They could still think it's another dog, and just not have any interest in that dog, or they may recognize that it isn't another dog without recognizing it's them, or they may recognize it's them and have no real interest in looking at themselves.


It isn't fool-proof. It isn't watertight. But the underlying mechanics that are generating those two very different types of reactions are the rudimentary foundations of self-awareness.

It would be one thing if it weren't perfect, but it's another entirely to be so fundamentally flawed. A test of "the rudimentary foundations" should require only self-awareness to pass; the mirror test requires self-awareness, visual acuity, a certain fairly specific set of grooming standards and behaviors, and a measure of reasoning ability. Lacking in any one of those can lead a self-aware creature, even one which is otherwise demonstrably self-aware (i.e. a blind human) to fail the test. I've yet to see a mirror test attempt to control for any of these by, say, gauging reactions to a similar mark placed somewhere the animal can see without a mirror; if they don't react to the mark then, nothing can really be established by their lack of reaction to a mirror. It's a pretty goofy, arbitrary test that measures a lot of other things much more reliably than it measures the one thing it's supposed to.

[Ravens_cry]

I do agree that the mirror 'test' is pretty flawed. With modern computer capabilities, it would be possible to design a special purpose robot that could pass the test while otherwise being unintelligent, and it's deucedly easy to conceive of a being that, while otherwise intelligent, would fail the test.
However, if humans and animals are moral equals, then animals are moral equals to each other. Should we lock up a crocodile for murder because it eats a gazelle? If you say 'That's nature', well, it's human nature to eat other animals as well. We have the digestive system and teeth of omnivores. Now, that does not excuse human cruelty to other animals. If we take another animal into our lives, we have a duty to make its life comfortable and safe while they are with us, and make sure their end is without pain or suffering, because causing suffering when it can be avoided is wrong. How do we know if they 'feel' pain? How do we know if another human feels anything? We don't; we can't, but we assume so since, allegedly, we do.

[Grinner]

Consider this. There's a book by the eminent Douglas Hofstadter, titled I Am A Strange Loop. Early in the book, he introduces the idea of consciousness being a spectrum rather than a binary state.

Food for thought. :smallsmile:

[Lissou]

I don't really understand the point of the mirror in the first place. I don't understand how being self-aware (aware that you're an individual, separate from other individuals) should automatically lead to recognizing yourself in a mirror, knowing that a reflection is your reflection, and so on. Even taking blindness aside, there are conditions that make people unable to recognize themselves in a mirror and they're still self-aware.

I also don't really understand basing what you eat on how smart they are. Not all individual from a same species have the same degree of intelligence so there will be overlaps (including with humans, for that matter) and since I doubt you'll ever bother to check if the specific individual you're eating (or eating part of) was on the smarter or dumber side of its species, using it as your justification doesn't really make sense to me. I mean looking at just humans, there is a huge range, and several humans would fail many of the criteria I've heard people use to justify eating this or that animal. And treating whole species as though they were all on the exact same page isn't consistent with what we know of individual beings from the same species, most notably humans (since we spend most time around humans) but also other animals, for anyone who has spend time around many individuals from the same species, they'll be able to tell you there is a large variation in personality, intelligence, and so on.

And in the end, because we can't communicate effectively with most animals, it's difficult to know what they think. For instance, it was believed for a long time that cats, unlike dogs, didn't understand things such as their names, a variety of commands, and so on. Only more recently was it proven that they completely understand, they just don't care. You ask them to do something? Well they don't want to do it, so they won't. Similarly, they know when you're playing with them, it's you who's moving the feather, but they pretend they're hunting it anyways. So I don't find it difficult to believe that they know it's them in the mirror, but don't care at all, and will either play with their reflection because hey, something that reflects them is kinda cool, or do nothing because they've lost interest. And they definitely know how mirrors work. I've seen my cat look at me through a mirror and then go directly to where I had put something. It shows a complete understanding of how mirrors works. Again, not that I think it is relevant as far as being self-aware goes.

And... I don't really see why something being self-aware would be the criteria for whether you'll eat it or not. There are criteria I understand. Do I need to eat it to survive? Is it tasty? Does it feel pain? But self-awareness, or intelligence? I don't really get those. "You're stupid, therefore it's fine if you die" is just too disturbing a thought to me because again, there are many humans who happen to rate lower than some individual animals on a number of scales meant to measure intelligence (and so many different ways we have to measure it that it's easy to pick the one you already agreed with in the first place and then use it to back-up your pre-existing position).

[Zrak]

However, if humans and animals are moral equals, then animals are moral equals to each other. Should we lock up a crocodile for murder because it eats a gazelle? If you say 'That's nature', well, it's human nature to eat other animals as well. We have the digestive system and teeth of omnivores. Now, that does not excuse human cruelty to other animals. If we take another animal into our lives, we have a duty to make its life comfortable and safe while they are with us, and make sure their end is without pain or suffering, because causing suffering when it can be avoided is wrong. How do we know if they 'feel' pain? How do we know if another human feels anything? We don't; we can't, but we assume so since, allegedly, we do.

Well, yes and no. I don't think having equal moral rights confers, necessarily, equal moral responsibilities, either in my own personal estimation or, for that matter, in most moral systems. The easiest example of this is children, who we generally consider at least morally equal to adults as objects, but who we rarely hold to adult standards as moral subjects. More abstractly, moral responsibility and moral weight are typically conferred by different qualities; the latter typically hinges on a nebulous "consciousness" or a more concrete (though still arguably unknowable) ability to suffer, while the former typically hinges on being a semi-rational actor with a certain degree of agency. A creature could conceivably be conscious and feel suffering without really having the reasoning abilities (or even simply not having the knowledge) required for moral agency or responsibility. The idea that the crocodile could choose not to eat the gazelle, either in the practical sense of being able to ensure its own survival without doing so or more theoretical terms concerning the degree of free will possessed by a crocodile, is hard to confidently assert; asserting that it can understand the gazelle's suffering as a basis to make that choice, is harder still. On the other hand, we can be much more confident in asserting that (most adult) humans can comprehend others' suffering, and are both logistically and cognitively able to choose to avoid eating meat.

In other words, even if the crocodile and human are considered equivalent moral actors, rather than merely equivalent moral objects, the actions also have to be considered in their contexts; a crocodile who is eating a gazelle likely has no other way to survive and, moreover, may not understand that the gazelle suffers; a modern human who is eating a pig is likely to have a ton of options that allow it to survive without eating the pig and, moreover, probably has at least some awareness of the pig's capacity for suffering. Even putting aside the issue of understanding others' capability to suffer, since it's harder to firmly assert either party's understanding on the subject with certainty, killing something because it's necessary for one's survival and killing something because it's convenient or has a pleasant result are generally considered ethically distinct, to say the least; killing someone in self-defense is not the same as killing someone to shorten the line at the coffee shop.

[Coidzor]

Speaking about reaction to mirrors, Narcissus saw his own reflection in a pool, and fell in love with it, not realizing it was merely an image.

Just goes to show, the idea of the pretty airhead goes way back. :smallamused: And the original Dumb Blonde was actually a Dumb Blond.

[danzibr]

I'm not a psychologist, and I use the mirror test as one example of methods those far more educated than I in the manner have gone about trying to test other animals self-awareness. But the underlying principle, I believe, is to see if the animal recognises itself or if it reacts as if seeing another of its own species. This is further explored by animals receiving additions to their bodies (such as noticeable dots being placed on them). Dolphins, apes, elephants etc have all then used the mirror to inspect this new addition to themselves, tilting their vision in ways that allows them to observe it. Where-as other animals notice no difference and act as if they're interacting with another of their kind.

The two camps of reactions tend to be split up into one group of animals reacting with "hey, what's that thing on me?" and another reacting with "another dog! Bark at it!"

It isn't fool-proof. It isn't watertight. But the underlying mechanics that are generating those two very different types of reactions are the rudimentary foundations of self-awareness.

I think so anyway. Again, I'm not a psychologist so I'll leave the research and conclusion up to them. In the mean-time I'll stick with my distinction between not wanting to harm/eat the animals I think are self-aware and being fine with eating the ones that aren't (except dogs and cats, because dogs are awesome and cats are snakes with fur).
I saw a cool video on this, in which a baboon attacked its reflection, and an ape used its reflection to actually examine itself.

[Amazon]

I saw a cool video on this, in which a baboon attacked its reflection, and an ape used its reflection to actually examine itself.

It is funny how in many scenes where the characters are supposed to be losing their mind they smash their own reflections.

[Zrak]

I saw a cool video on this, in which a baboon attacked its reflection, and an ape used its reflection to actually examine itself.

Are you calling Henry Rollins a baboon?

[BananaPhone]

That's not the underlying principle. The underlying principle really is just whether or not it touches (or, rarely, inspects more generally) the mark on itself. It really is just that. Pigs, for example, have never passed the "mirror test," (insofar as I'm aware) but have passed a number of other tests involving using mirrors to get food, which require at least a vague awareness that they are the figure in the mirror, since they could not otherwise gauge their position relative to the food they can only see in the mirror. Taken together, the two indicate that the mirror test says more about pigs' grooming habits than their comprehension of mirrors or their self-awareness.


It's more complex than this, since most animals, including people, initially react by thinking the figure in the mirror is a different member of their species, and very few continue to react that way over prolonged interaction with a mirror. For example, dogs typically lose interest in mirrors, rather than continuing to act as though there's another dog in the mirror; what this indicates is totally ambiguous. They could still think it's another dog, and just not have any interest in that dog, or they may recognize that it isn't another dog without recognizing it's them, or they may recognize it's them and have no real interest in looking at themselves.



It would be one thing if it weren't perfect, but it's another entirely to be so fundamentally flawed. A test of "the rudimentary foundations" should require only self-awareness to pass; the mirror test requires self-awareness, visual acuity, a certain fairly specific set of grooming standards and behaviors, and a measure of reasoning ability. Lacking in any one of those can lead a self-aware creature, even one which is otherwise demonstrably self-aware (i.e. a blind human) to fail the test. I've yet to see a mirror test attempt to control for any of these by, say, gauging reactions to a similar mark placed somewhere the animal can see without a mirror; if they don't react to the mark then, nothing can really be established by their lack of reaction to a mirror. It's a pretty goofy, arbitrary test that measures a lot of other things much more reliably than it measures the one thing it's supposed to.



I don't get what your beef or point is.

I'm not a psychologist, nor am I here to defend mirror tests in every facet of their existence. I merely mentioned them as one measure that we have. I've freely admitted that they aren't perfect but that the idea of testing an animals self-awareness is in itself a highly difficult proposition that'll be riddled with flaws (at least until the day we can mind-read them). Yet you're not coming across as someone that wants a conversation about it as much as you seem to want to brow-beat me into agreeing with you.

So okay, Zrak, you win. All psychologists that experimented with the idea of mirror testing are wrong and should have their work thrown in the garbage for being so terrible..

...what now? Where do we go from here?

[Grinner]

I don't get what your beef or point is.

If history proves true, I don't think Zrak is intentionally trying to offend anyone. He merely has a very...noxious approach to conversation.

[BananaPhone]

Is that so?

Hmmm, thank you Grinner, my good man.

*prepares Cool Story Bro images*

Thank you very much indeed! ^_^

[Zrak]

I don't get what your beef or point is.
You said that the overwhelming majority of animals cannot recognize themselves as individuals, based on the fact that they cannot recognize themselves in mirrors. I disagreed, and supported my contention by explaining why I didn't find the evidence you cited in support of your position (mirror tests) remotely convincing or conclusive. So my point is that failing the mirror test does not prove that an animal doesn't recognize itself as an individual. I have no "beef," I merely disagree with you.


I'm not a psychologist, nor am I here to defend mirror tests in every facet of their existence. I merely mentioned them as one measure that we have.
And I merely said they're a totally inconclusive and possibly misleading measure on which we should not rely. If you aren't willing or able to defend mirror tests, but still wish to make the same argument, why not suggest an alternate measure? Or merely say that you believe what you believe without saying there's any evidence in support of it; when you bring up evidence, you make a factual claim, and I feel that such claims are and should be subject to scrutiny and criticism.


I've freely admitted that they aren't perfect but that the idea of testing an animals self-awareness is in itself a highly difficult proposition that'll be riddled with flaws (at least until the day we can mind-read them).
I don't understand why you would support your position by citing the results of a method you agree to be "riddled with flaws" that tests something you at least vaguely seem to agree isn't really testable.


Yet you're not coming across as someone that wants a conversation about it as much as you seem to want to brow-beat me into agreeing with you.
I'm sorry that you feel I am brow-beating you by criticizing the methods of the studies you cited as evidence in support of your position. I think rigorous criticism is a part of productive philosophical conversation. It's how we learn and grow.


If history proves true, I don't think Zrak is intentionally trying to offend anyone. He merely has a very...noxious approach to conversation.

I think you mean Fort Knoxious, because everything I say is solid gold. It's okay, lots of people make typos when they try to say nice things about how great I am.

[Grinner]

I'm sorry that you feel I am brow-beating you by criticizing the methods of the studies you cited as evidence in support of your position. I think rigorous criticism is a part of productive philosophical conversation. It's how we learn and grow.

I don't think you actually believe that. I think you just like to win fights. :smallsigh:

[Killer Angel]

I don't think you actually believe that. I think you just like to win fights. :smallsigh:

Isn't that, basically, the spirit of debates? to support your pov? If i concede a point, due to your reasoning, it means you "won".

[Grinner]

Isn't that, basically, the spirit of debates? to support your pov? If i concede a point, due to your reasoning, it means you "won".

Context is important.

The most important element of formal debate is the presence of a moderator to actively guide the discussion through its stages. Otherwise, a discussion will loop through a cycle of increasing anger and contention until someone gives up in disgust. Nothing productive results.

When someone attempts to argue as though these things are present in an informal setting, the setting does not normally become more formal. Instead, tempers flare, pride is wounded, and a forum moderator or administrator has to clean up the mess.

[Zrak]

I don't think a formal debate as the same thing as asking for a measure of critical rigor in even an informal discussion. A formal debate has moderators because it proceeds according to very exacting rules in terms of things like argument structure and time allotment, while there are plenty of discourses which demand critical rigor that are not subject to the same strictures as "debate club" debates.

I also happen to believe, and in the vast majority of my experience it has been the case, that most of my interlocutors, both here and elsewhere, have been capable of having such a debate without it sinking into the cyclical mire of personal attacks and hurt feelings you describe. I don't subscribe to the idea that it's impossible to have a productive, critical debate in an informal internet setting without it deteriorating to the point of requiring moderator intervention, which isn't to say that such a discussion is always possible, or always what happens, but I don't think that makes it any less something to strive for, especially when the alternative does not strike me as markedly less likely to descend into such a pejorative, diminished state. In either kind of discussion, tempers and pride can make a mess of things, while only one type is suitable for learning and growing by critically engaging with your own views and the views of others on a rigorous level.

[Grinner]

I don't think a formal debate as the same thing as asking for a measure of critical rigor in even an informal discussion. A formal debate has moderators because it proceeds according to very exacting rules in terms of things like argument structure and time allotment, while there are plenty of discourses which demand critical rigor that are not subject to the same strictures as "debate club" debates.

I also happen to believe, and in the vast majority of my experience it has been the case, that most of my interlocutors, both here and elsewhere, have been capable of having such a debate without it sinking into the cyclical mire of personal attacks and hurt feelings you describe. I don't subscribe to the idea that it's impossible to have a productive, critical debate in an informal internet setting without it deteriorating to the point of requiring moderator intervention, which isn't to say that such a discussion is always possible, or always what happens, but I don't think that makes it any less something to strive for, especially when the alternative does not strike me as markedly less likely to descend into such a pejorative, diminished state. In either kind of discussion, tempers and pride can make a mess of things, while only one type is suitable for learning and growing by critically engaging with your own views and the views of others on a rigorous level.

I disagree. When we call another's argument unrigorous, they are implicitly ignoring that argument. Consequently, we are implicitly ignoring what the other person is saying. To some, this is quite offensive. Compounding that, when we get into the game of trying to corner others logically, others can quite easily feel as though they're being personally attacked. These two things in turn shunt off meaningful discourse, entrenches each side in their position (regardless of its viability), and draws the battle lines.

I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I remain unconvinced that demanding such rigor of others in an informal setting is really all that productive.

Edit: At the very least, if a person is going to sue for rigor, they should do so respectfully. For some people, there is nothing more valuable than their pride.

[Meepo_]

If you're talking about evil in D&D terms then... yes, actually. Evil equates to selfishness, and humans are selfish. It's in our nature. Of course, everything has to be a little selfish in order to survive. If you want to compare any species to any other species, unless the two are symbiotic then neither really cares for the other, and one species would cause harm to the other for the former's benefits. But you don't see the wolf cry about eating the rabbit, or the rabbit crying about eating the grass, or the grass crying about sucking up nutrients and causing the deaths of millions of microorganisms. It's just nature. Which is why druids are considered neutral: They assume that survival of the fittest is purely natural and shouldn't be morally evaluated. So don't feel bad that we aren't nice to other species: they'd do the same to us if the roles were reversed. Just be glad you're human.

[Murska]

If you're talking about evil in D&D terms then... yes, actually. Evil equates to selfishness, and humans are selfish. It's in our nature. Of course, everything has to be a little selfish in order to survive. If you want to compare any species to any other species, unless the two are symbiotic then neither really cares for the other, and one species would cause harm to the other for the former's benefits. But you don't see the wolf cry about eating the rabbit, or the rabbit crying about eating the grass, or the grass crying about sucking up nutrients and causing the deaths of millions of microorganisms. It's just nature. Which is why druids are considered neutral: They assume that survival of the fittest is purely natural and shouldn't be morally evaluated. So don't feel bad that we aren't nice to other species: they'd do the same to us if the roles were reversed. Just be glad you're human.

Instead, feel awed that at least we're trying to also be nice to other species, at least some of the time and to some extent.

But species aren't any fundamental unit either. There's no specific dividing line that makes individuals care about their species yet not other species. By evolution, one might think that individuals care about their own genetic inclusiveness, but evolution doesn't actually work that way - the drives that have formed over generations into individuals haven't been designed by anyone, and while they generally work to maximize genetic inclusiveness that does not mean the individual itself cares about its genes. The individual cares about various things like fatty foods, potential mates, survival of its community and so on not because caring about those things have, in the past, helped its ancestors pass on their genes to it, but because that individual assigns value to such things, be it due to pleasure taken from them, some system of ethics that it has formulated or whatever.

[GolemsVoice]

If you're talking about evil in D&D terms then... yes, actually. Evil equates to selfishness, and humans are selfish. It's in our nature. Of course, everything has to be a little selfish in order to survive. If you want to compare any species to any other species, unless the two are symbiotic then neither really cares for the other, and one species would cause harm to the other for the former's benefits. But you don't see the wolf cry about eating the rabbit, or the rabbit crying about eating the grass, or the grass crying about sucking up nutrients and causing the deaths of millions of microorganisms. It's just nature. Which is why druids are considered neutral: They assume that survival of the fittest is purely natural and shouldn't be morally evaluated. So don't feel bad that we aren't nice to other species: they'd do the same to us if the roles were reversed. Just be glad you're human.

Wouldn't we be "neutral" then? If being selfish is just being part of the natural cycle, and humans are selfish, we'd be neutral. Or rather, Neutral.

[Coidzor]

We do mostly do neutral things. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqZXPX0CiQI)

[Zrak]

I disagree. When we call another's argument unrigorous, they are implicitly ignoring that argument. Consequently, we are implicitly ignoring what the other person is saying. To some, this is quite offensive. Compounding that, when we get into the game of trying to corner others logically, others can quite easily feel as though they're being personally attacked. These two things in turn shunt off meaningful discourse, entrenches each side in their position (regardless of its viability), and draws the battle lines.

I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I remain unconvinced that demanding such rigor of others in an informal setting is really all that productive.

Edit: At the very least, if a person is going to sue for rigor, they should do so respectfully. For some people, there is nothing more valuable than their pride.

I can't see how impugning the rigor of an argument or its supporting evidence even remotely implies the argument is being ignored. If anything, it implies precisely the opposite; had one not paid attention to the argument, how would one know it lacks rigor. Moreover, offering a specific critique of how the argument lacks rigor not only implies having paid attention to the argument, but actively demonstrates this attention and careful consideration.

While I regret it when I inadvertently cause offense, I cannot be held responsible if others cannot separate considered, supported criticism of points they make and the way they make them from petsonal attacks. In any case, the world would be a much worse place if we let the potential of unintentionally causing offense frighten us into letting misinformation proliferate, ignorance triumph, or "conventional wisdom" bully its Othered for daring to be different.

[Grinner]

While I regret it when I inadvertently cause offense, I cannot be held responsible if others cannot separate considered, supported criticism of points they make and the way they make them from petsonal attacks. In any case, the world would be a much worse place if we let the potential of unintentionally causing offense frighten us into letting misinformation proliferate, ignorance triumph, or "conventional wisdom" bully its Othered for daring to be different.

If you really regret offending others, then perhaps you would consider giving BananaPhone an apology?

[Cespenar]

From a nobody's point of view, Zrak was arguing pretty civilly here, heads above the forum's average level. I just felt the need to say this because he seems like being picked on pretty unfairly.

The fact that he's refuting a rather large fallacy without resorting to any passive-aggressive patronizing is a bonus too, but never mind.

Nobody out.

[Grinner]

Fundamentally, my contention is that angry people don't listen to anyone's logic but their own. Ergo, logos is worthless without some measure of pathos.

[GreatWyrmGold]

So some background, I was watching this new fall anime Parasyte -the maxim- where these parasites come to earth, bond with existing lifeforms (usually humans), take over their bodies and then proceed to eat people. When the main character asks one of these parasites "You guys are monsters, why are you doing this?" the parasite responds with "We're not monsters, we're eating humans for food." At this point there have been about 80 of these strange murders caused by these things. The parasite then asks "Aren't humans really the monsters? How many millions of things do you kill each year and eat?" Its this statement that prompted this post.
Picture a world where these ravenous creatures existed that enslaved and consumed the other, less intelligent creatures of that world. So great was their hunger that entire species went extinct in an attempt to satiate them. They forced the ones that didn't die out to mate in order to produce more food. They ate creatures of every gender and age, young, old, the strong, the weak and even the unborn.
Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?
A few notes.

1. I can't fault beings for consuming nonsapient organisms to survive. If they add unneeded suffering to the mix, or if they feed on sapient beings, I'll probably have issues, but cattle are fine.
2. I can't call a group evil for the unexpected consequences of actions no one truly controlled. It is good to avoid doing that, and bad to intentionally avoid doing that, but it's not a sign of evil.
3. Very few species have gone extinct for food. Most have gone extinct because humans didn't realize that cutting down trees, bringing dogs to strange new lands, not keeping rats off their ships, etc, would have the effects they did.
4. I find it hard to believe that those parasites don't consume a number of humans comparable to (or, more likely, greater than) the number of animals a similar population of normal humans would in the same time. Also, mind control isn't nothing either, even if it's things they consider evil. At best, they're being hypocritical in a clumsy attempt to add moral depth to the show.

[BananaPhone]

You said that the overwhelming majority of animals cannot recognize themselves as individuals, based on the fact that they cannot recognize themselves in mirrors. I disagreed, and supported my contention by explaining why I didn't find the evidence you cited in support of your position (mirror tests) remotely convincing or conclusive. So my point is that failing the mirror test does not prove that an animal doesn't recognize itself as an individual. I have no "beef," I merely disagree with you.

And I merely said they're a totally inconclusive and possibly misleading measure on which we should not rely. If you aren't willing or able to defend mirror tests, but still wish to make the same argument, why not suggest an alternate measure? Or merely say that you believe what you believe without saying there's any evidence in support of it; when you bring up evidence, you make a factual claim, and I feel that such claims are and should be subject to scrutiny and criticism.


I partially agreed with you but that wasn't good enough, you wanted total submission.

...which I promptly gave to you (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=19975013&postcount=205). But that still wasn't enough for you.


I'm sorry that you feel I am brow-beating you by criticizing the methods of the studies you cited as evidence in support of your position. I think rigorous criticism is a part of productive philosophical conversation. It's how we learn and grow.

Evidence in support of my position? Rigorous criticism? Full-on citing studies?

I'm sorry...did I take a wrong turn and end up at ResearchGate or something? I thought this forum was called "friendly banter" not "have every one of your opinions backed up by hard scientific evidence that you can quote and debate at full for when Zrak jumps you demanding you explain yourself" forum.

Do you know what "friendly banter" means? You see this reply of mine (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=19956235&postcount=193) to you? It has a very casual, talking-with-someone-at-the-train-station vibe - that informal, friendly way in which two people can disagree on something, but understand that their own positions aren't perfect before departing amicably? I'm not here to have a formal scientific debate (on an area in which I possess almost no expertise, for that matter).

Maybe try not coming at someone next time like a bull in a china shop and you'll get more of an amicable discussion.



I think you mean Fort Knoxious, because everything I say is solid gold. It's okay, lots of people make typos when they try to say nice things about how great I am.

That's nice. Have fun.

[Zrak]

I think it's a little unfair to accost me for restating my point after you said you weren't sure what my point was. I was merely trying to clarify a position you had just said you didn't understand.

As I said, I apologize if you felt my criticism of the evidence you presented as part of a fact-based claim in support of your opinion was brow-beating. What I meant when I said that I felt such criticism was an integral part of any philosophical conversation is that I feel such criticism is entirely normal in casual conversation; when it became apparent that your casual conversations are very different than mine, I endeavored to explain the perspective from which I am approaching the discussion (i.e. criticism is normal, healthy, and not unfriendly) and why I raised the objections as I did (i.e. I feel that fact-based claims, even in support of wholly subjective opinions, are subject to fact-based scrutiny), so that you could better understand my position. I am sorry for any slight you have inferred from this; I assure you it was not intended.


From a nobody's point of view, Zrak was arguing pretty civilly here, heads above the forum's average level. I just felt the need to say this because he seems like being picked on pretty unfairly.

The fact that he's refuting a rather large fallacy without resorting to any passive-aggressive patronizing is a bonus too, but never mind.

Nobody out.

Thanks, man.

P.S. I'm still mad about the Flail of Ages +5, though. No haste? C'mon. :smallwink:

[Talya]

"Evil" is what we make it. We invented the concept.

Nature is neither good nor evil. Life is a mere complex set of chemical reactions that has evolved to maintain its own existence and spread itself throughout every possible ecosystem. In its evolution, it has stopped to consume itself at every opportunity, and will continue to do so.

One of those evolutions is us. Somewhere along the way, we invented this social concept of "right and wrong," although we've never clearly and definitively explained the concept in an all-encompassing way. While you may find individual acts that are so repugnant to human nature that we all agree they are evil, you will never find a definition of good and evil that a majority of humans will agree upon. Morality is not only relevative, it is subjective, and exists only in a complete way inside each one of us, and even then it is different for every person who has ever lived. If your definition of evil is one that marks humanity as evil, then to you, yes, we are evil.

We may be a product of our evolution, but compare us to nature around us! Any other species will, given an opportunity, consume until there is nothing left, and when prey is exhausted, predator dies out as well. Contrary to the words of Agent Smith in the Matrix -- other species do NOT "instinctively find equilibrium" - it is imposed upon them by the harsh realities of the struggle for survival. Humans, however, have overcome that struggle in a way that means nature rarely threatens our survival as a species anymore. And while we continue to spread and consume, we are the only species in the history of the planet that has willfully limited its consumption. As a species, we are the only ones that understand the concepts of value in biodiversity, conservation, and living in harmony with the land that has sustained us.

Now, one can make a valid argument that we're not very good at these things, and I'd agree. It's a work in progress. We're treading on new ground for life - no other life has ever had to consider these things. At least not on this world. Maybe we'll figure it out. I hope so.

[Zrak]

We may be a product of our evolution, but compare us to nature around us! Any other species will, given an opportunity, consume until there is nothing left
I'm pretty sure you can't come close to backing this up. I mean, c'mon, any other species?


And while we continue to spread and consume, we are the only species in the history of the planet that has willfully limited its consumption.
My cat didn't finish the food in his bowl this morning, nor did he devour the entirety of the cat grass in the window. He doesn't eat every squirrel or snake he sees in the yard; in fact, he hasn't ever eaten any of them. I did not force, or even tell, him to do anything of these things. Am I therefore correct in asserting that my cat is a human?


As a species, we are the only ones that understand the concepts of value in biodiversity, conservation, and living in harmony with the land that has sustained us.
This is kind of a silly point. Of course no other species understands those concepts, they're human-invented, language-dependent abstracts.

[Talya]

I'm pretty sure you can't come close to backing this up. I mean, c'mon, any other species?


My cat didn't finish the food in his bowl this morning, nor did he devour the entirety of the cat grass in the window. He doesn't eat every squirrel or snake he sees in the yard; in fact, he hasn't ever eaten any of them. I did not force, or even tell, him to do anything of these things. Am I therefore correct in asserting that my cat is a human?

You're making a bit of a strawman argument. I didn't say individual members of a species will eat until either all food is exhausted or they explode. Their species, itself, however, has governor that curtails overconsumption. If cats overpopulate, for example, they will consume until all available resources are gone.

Here in Canada, the Ministry of Natural resources keeps an eye on the populations of certain types of wildlife, because if they over-proliferate in spring and summer, they will suffer a mass die-off during the winter when their food is scarce. When there's, for example, too many deer in the wild, they will issue more hunting permits to try to lower the wild population for that species own good.



This is kind of a silly point. Of course no other species understands those concepts, they're human-invented, language-dependent abstracts.

Biodiversity and conservation are not human-invented, language dependant abstracts. They are real things. Likewise, value judgements are things most fauna have to make on a regular basis. You'd be correct if you said no other species understands these things, but that makes my point for me. Humans have come to understand these things, and what they mean for ourselves and the world around us, so we can act on them.

"Living in harmony with the land" is a bit abstract, but it also describes an action - intentionally living in a way so as to disturb your environment as little as possible... and only we have ever tried such a thing. Other creatures just live the only ways they know how.

[Zrak]

You're making a bit of a strawman argument. I didn't say individual members of a species will eat until either all food is exhausted or they explode. Their species, itself, however, has governor that curtails overconsumption. If cats overpopulate, for example, they will consume until all available resources are gone.
Well, you said no other species willfully limited its consumption. I would argue choosing to stop eating constitutes willfully limiting consumption. So we know that at least one species willingly limits its consumption in at least some circumstances. Now, the question is how many other species limit their consumption and in what other circumstances that consumption is limited.
Let's shift our gaze a little and look out the window, into my back yard. What are those squirrels doing? Why, they're not eating all the food that's presently available to them, but instead burying some to save for later. Squirrels aren't cats, and they're not just curtailing consumption to prevent themselves from exploding. I imagine you see where this is going: a number of species willingly curtail their consumption for a number of reasons.

This is to say nothing of the idea that humans won't consume until all available resources are gone in conditions of overpopulation (a claim contradicted by numerous occasions in which, in a given environment, humans have done exactly that) or the basic untenability of making basically any claim (barring those which define the species) about a given species as though it were a single, holistic unit.


Here in Canada, the Ministry of Natural resources keeps an eye on the populations of certain types of wildlife, because if they over-proliferate in spring and summer, they will suffer a mass die-off during the winter when their food is scarce. When there's, for example, too many deer in the wild, they will issue more hunting permits to try to lower the wild population for that species own good.
Only certain types of wildlife? That seems horrendously irresponsible, given the premise that literally all other species are relentless, heedless consumption machines. One wonders why they don't need to curtail the population of every single nonhuman species, animal or otherwise, to prevent such catastrophes from befalling them. One might begin to suspect this impulse towards overconsumption is, perhaps, somewhat less universal than you have made it out to be.


Biodiversity and conservation are not human-invented, language dependant abstracts. They are real things.
Yes and no. The traits and actions to which they refer are real, concrete things; the terms you describe are broad, language-dependent abstract constructs. Biodiversity and conservation are "real" to the same extent "good" and "evil" are; the phenomena to which they refer (i.e. murder, in the case of "evil") certainly exist, but idea which groups those phenomena into an abstract, conceptual association is entirely constructed. Biodiversity, being comparatively concrete, is somewhat less language-dependent, but "conservation" and especially "living in harmony" are absolutely constructed, culturally mutable ideas; even within a single language, the notions of what each of those concepts entails isn't remotely consistent or exact.


Likewise, value judgements are things most fauna have to make on a regular basis. You'd be correct if you said no other species understands these things, but that makes my point for me. Humans have come to understand these things, and what they mean for ourselves and the world around us, so we can act on them.
I don't know if I would be correct in saying that. I think the idea of "understanding" is a hazy idea we tend use as though it were much more concrete than it really is. Basically nobody really understands anything, if we want to be as strict as possible about it, but there are a great many things I think it would be incorrect to assert animals don't understand, if we're going to use a more open-ended definition. While one can draw a line anywhere along the continuum to delineate what does and does not "count" as understanding, I don't think it's very productive to define a term so that one's view is correct and call it a day. Rather, I think we ought to talk about the degree to and way in which a given person or animal understands the concept, action, or value judgment at hand.


"Living in harmony with the land" is a bit abstract, but it also describes an action - intentionally living in a way so as to disturb your environment as little as possible... and only we have ever tried such a thing. Other creatures just live the only ways they know how.
It describes an abstract and totally mutable set of actions and decisions which vary wildly from one individual to the next even within the bounds of a single language. What constitutes a disturbance? What establishes one disturbance as greater or lesser than another? What constitutes an "environment," and how is "my environment" bounded and delineated?

Also, do you contend all humans have tried this, or merely some individuals within our species? Earlier, you appeared to discount the behavior of "individual members of a species" as fundamentally unrepresentative of the behavior of the "species itself" as a whole. Accepting for the sake of argument that the latter is a thing, at all, how would you address this apparent contradiction?

[gooddragon1]

Now realize that thats humans. Is there any horror story that can compare to what humans do on a daily basis? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a vegan lifestyle, meat tastes too good. Its just that this parasite thing kind of had a point, we justify doing what we do to animals because we're at the top of the food chain. If we found out there was something else above us, can we really complain if they do the same to us?

Animals don't have the ability to complain about it in the first place. People realize when it's happening and animals don't. I think we'd have a lot harder of a time with it if the animals started asking us what happened to that other one of them on a particular day. We're also humane about it. We don't generally kill one animal in front of the rest to traumatize them.

[warty goblin]

Animals don't have the ability to complain about it in the first place. People realize when it's happening and animals don't. I think we'd have a lot harder of a time with it if the animals started asking us what happened to that other one of them on a particular day. We're also humane about it. We don't generally kill one animal in front of the rest to traumatize them.

Ever tried to handle an animal that thinks it is about to die? I guarantee you they can complain about it. Also struggle, bellow, and try to escape or fight back, with extreme vigor. Animals may be less adept at figuring out when something is trying to kill them then people, but they aren't cute little protein sacks wandering around, all innocent and unsuspecting.

[Murska]

Zrak: The point seems to be that if we give any animal species a large amount of food, space and all other necessities, and remove dangers, predators and such, they will reproduce exponentially until the resources are no longer sufficient, at which point their population will undergo a massive collapse. Whereas if we give humans a large amount of food, space and other necessities, which is essentially what modern society has (to a limited extent, and only in some places) achieved, humanity has empirically actually began to plan ahead, figure out that the eventual collapse would not be something we want to have happen, and so we've began to limit ourselves gradually now to avoid the environment imposing a harsher fallout on us later. This would be because humans are smarter than other animals, and more capable of extrapolating into the future and understanding the eventual results of our current actions.

[Zrak]

Ever tried to handle an animal that thinks it is about to die? I guarantee you they can complain about it. Also struggle, bellow, and try to escape or fight back, with extreme vigor. Animals may be less adept at figuring out when something is trying to kill them then people, but they aren't cute little protein sacks wandering around, all innocent and unsuspecting.

Yeah, this.


Zrak: The point seems to be that if we give any animal species a large amount of food, space and all other necessities, and remove dangers, predators and such, they will reproduce exponentially until the resources are no longer sufficient, at which point their population will undergo a massive collapse. Whereas if we give humans a large amount of food, space and other necessities, which is essentially what modern society has (to a limited extent, and only in some places) achieved, humanity has empirically actually began to plan ahead, figure out that the eventual collapse would not be something we want to have happen, and so we've began to limit ourselves gradually now to avoid the environment imposing a harsher fallout on us later. This would be because humans are smarter than other animals, and more capable of extrapolating into the future and understanding the eventual results of our current actions.

This really only holds up to even cursory scrutiny if your points of comparison are absolutely all over the place; not just an entire species but the collection of all nonhuman species are compared to the examples of specific human individual behavior patterns. In other words, not all humans, probably not even most and maybe not even really all that many humans, plan ahead and limit their consumption. If you instead compare those other animals to the collection of all humans, the argument doesn't hold up. If you instead compare a collection specific, individual humans to certain collections of specific, individual animals, the argument also won't really hold up, at least without recourse to that fallaciously nebulous argument of "understanding" I disputed earlier. Either a single animal demonstrably choosing not to over-predate (or whatever) invalidates the argument, or the argument cannot be propped up by some individual humans choosing to limit consumption.

[Talya]

Yeah, this.



This really only holds up to even cursory scrutiny if your points of comparison are absolutely all over the place; not just an entire species but the collection of all nonhuman species are compared to the examples of specific human individual behavior patterns. In other words, not all humans, probably not even most and maybe not even really all that many humans, plan ahead and limit their consumption. If you instead compare those other animals to the collection of all humans, the argument doesn't hold up. If you instead compare a collection specific, individual humans to certain collections of specific, individual animals, the argument also won't really hold up, at least without recourse to that fallaciously nebulous argument of "understanding" I disputed earlier. Either a single animal demonstrably choosing not to over-predate (or whatever) invalidates the argument, or the argument cannot be propped up by some individual humans choosing to limit consumption.


Exactly zero percent of other creatures have any concept of or ability to engage in sustainable life practices. Given an opportunity, all other species WILL overpopulate and exhaust their environmental supplies in short order. The only thing that holds them in check is the rest of nature herself killing them off.

Nearly 100% of adult humans have the capability to understand and engage in sustainable life practices, and the majority of members of our species are at least somewhat concerned with doing so. We don't always agree on what those practices are -- it's a work in progress.

[Zrak]

Exactly zero percent of other creatures have any concept of or ability to engage in sustainable life practices. Given an opportunity, all other species WILL overpopulate and exhaust their environmental supplies in short order. The only thing that holds them in check is the rest of nature herself killing them off.

Nearly 100% of adult humans have the capability to understand and engage in sustainable life practices, and the majority of members of our species are at least somewhat concerned with doing so. We don't always agree on what those practices are -- it's a work in progress.

What are "sustainable life practices," exactly? I've given a few examples now of animals willingly limiting their consumption or intentionally managing limited resources to prepare for the future, but apparently they don't count, so I'd appreciate a more concrete definition of the terms you're using. Can you say specifically what concrete, observable behaviors you're claiming aren't demonstrated by any members of any other species, but are demonstrated by essentially all adult humans?

[Talya]

What are "sustainable life practices," exactly? I've given a few examples now of animals willingly limiting their consumption or intentionally managing limited resources to prepare for the future, but apparently they don't count, so I'd appreciate a more concrete definition of the terms you're using. Can you say specifically what concrete, observable behaviors you're claiming aren't demonstrated by any members of any other species, but are demonstrated by essentially all adult humans?
Uh, i can't find any of your so-called examples. Please enlghten us. All I see mentioned is (wild) cats and squirrels, who definitely do NOT willingly limit their consumption to prevent the depletion of their food sources in the environment. If you got rid of the natural forces that prevent overpopulation of them, they'd cause a mass die off of their species.

[Zrak]

First you said no other creatures willingly limited their consumption. I used the example of a cat to point out that pretty much all creatures willingly limit their consumption. Then you clarified that you didn't mean merely deciding to stop eating before one explodes, so I gave an example of a creature which willingly limits its present consumption not just to avoid explosion, but to prepare for the future. As I said, I understand that this also doesn't meet your definition of "sustainable life practices"; what I do not understand is what that definition is. Hence why I asked you to explain your use of the term, preferably with specific, observable behaviors that you feel constitute "sustainable life practices."

I mean, do red squirrels' (Sciurus vulgaris) alterations in diet and home range size based upon seed availability count, especially in light of the fact that they keep track of seed availability and make temporarily heavier use of non-adjacent food rich areas? If not, why not? Can you explain what, exactly, about that behavior is inadequately sustainable, or if that behavior isn't the problem, which other observed behaviors aren't "sustainable life practices"?

[Talya]

First you said no other creatures willingly limited their consumption. I used the example of a cat to point out that pretty much all creatures willingly limit their consumption. Then you clarified that you didn't mean merely deciding to stop eating before one explodes, so I gave an example of a creature which willingly limits its present consumption not just to avoid explosion, but to prepare for the future. As I said, I understand that this also doesn't meet your definition of "sustainable life practices"; what I do not understand is what that definition is. Hence why I asked you to explain your use of the term, preferably with specific, observable behaviors that you feel constitute "sustainable life practices."

I mean, do red squirrels' (Sciurus vulgaris) alterations in diet and home range size based upon seed availability count, especially in light of the fact that they keep track of seed availability and make temporarily heavier use of non-adjacent food rich areas? If not, why not? Can you explain what, exactly, about that behavior is inadequately sustainable, or if that behavior isn't the problem, which other observed behaviors aren't "sustainable life practices"?

I said nearly all humans have the capability of understanding the concept of sustainability. Surely you are among them.

All other animal life will, without outside factors limiting their growth, reproduce and spread until there is not enough of whatever their source of energy is to sustain their population, at which point they will experience a catastrophic collapse. Most animals (read: all fauna that isn't human) have no understanding of this concept - they cannot plan for it. As intelligent as dolphins or elephants or bonobos are, without some limitations preventing it, they will not intentionally leave some of their food source alive to ensure more grows for next year. That's sustainability - not increasing your resource requirements to the point where nature can no longer keep up to your demand.

Humans got around this limitation initially through farming (which requires a basic understanding of sustainability from the start). As our technologies increased, and our ability to overcome the challenges nature through at our survival improved, it resulted in exponential growth of our species, from a few tens of thousands, to a few million,, up to seven billion today. However, humans have reacted in a way unique among other animal species. As our mortality dropped, our lifespans expanded, and our prosperity grows ... our birthrate dropped. In the developed world, birthrates are dropping below the replacement rate. It's only in cultures where survival was still challenging that birthrates remained high. In addition, we see issues with some of our resource use. Fossil Fuels are a dense, rich energy source that has allowed us to feed far more people in comfort and luxury than we would have without them - but they have their own drawbacks, the most serious of which is not climate change, but supply. Even our greediest oil companies have predicted and are planning for the "peak oil" production issues. Humans understand, in ways that even the most intelligent non-human life on earth does not, that our survival is intrinsically tied in to our ability to live in a way that is sustainable. Sustainability is not a philosophical idea. It's logic, math, and ... perhaps most importantly... economics. It's about consumption not outstripping our means of replacement. As stated earlier, this is a work in progress. We're still figuring it out. But we ARE figuring it out. We're spending an inordinate amount of resources figuring it out. And while "past performance are no guarantee of future results" - i believe we will get it right.

Eventually.

[Zrak]

I said nearly all humans have the capability of understanding the concept of sustainability. Surely you are among them.
I am. In fact, I understand several concepts of sustainability. What I do not understand is to which of those conceptions, if any, you are referring. Hence my request for you to provide a concrete definition for your use of the term, preferably one that's based in observable behaviors rather than further abstractions or conjectures about fundamentally unknowable aspects of animal cognition. Also, what exactly is your argument from that definition, in terms of scale, scope, and universality; are you saying that other species engage in no "sustainable life practices" or merely that not all of their life practices are sustainable?


All other animal life will, without outside factors limiting their growth, reproduce and spread until there is not enough of whatever their source of energy is to sustain their population, at which point they will experience a catastrophic collapse. Most animals (read: all fauna that isn't human) have no understanding of this concept - they cannot plan for it. As intelligent as dolphins or elephants or bonobos are, without some limitations preventing it, they will not intentionally leave some of their food source alive to ensure more grows for next year. That's sustainability - not increasing your resource requirements to the point where nature can no longer keep up to your demand.
So, to be sure I'm understanding you correctly, is "intentionally leav some of their food source alive to ensure more grows next year" [I]an example of a sustainable life practice, or is that your definition of sustainable life practices as a behavioral category? In either case, would you accept that a species which leaves some of its food supply intact for the following year, absent evidence of an external cause forcing them to do so, is engaging in a sustainable life practice? If not, why not?


However, humans have reacted in a way unique among other animal species. As our mortality dropped, our lifespans expanded, and our prosperity grows ... our birthrate dropped.
This is not unique. Like, at all.


Sustainability is not a philosophical idea. It's logic, math, and ... perhaps most importantly... economics. It's about consumption not outstripping our means of replacement.
So it's the confluence of several philosophical ideas? None of which, apparently, comes from ecology?
Also, if sustainability is about consumption not outstripping the means of replacement, aren't all life practices in which consumption does not outstrip the means of replacement sustainable? If not, why not?

[Talya]

I am. In fact, I understand several concepts of sustainability. What I do not understand is to which of those conceptions, if any, you are referring. Hence my request for you to provide a concrete definition for your use of the term, preferably one that's based in observable behaviors rather than further abstractions or conjectures about fundamentally unknowable aspects of animal cognition.

We're not talking about something incredibly difficult, here. The very first dictionary definition will suffice:

Sustainable: 1. able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.

A sustainable practice does not deplete its own resources below the level required to continue the practice.


Also, what exactly is your argument from that definition, in terms of scale, scope, and universality; are you saying that other species engage in no "sustainable life practices" or merely that not all of their life practices are sustainable?

Every species engages primarily in sustainable life practices, or they'd have gone extinct long ago. The difference is, for no species other than humans has this ever been a conscious choice. Other species have their sustainable practices imposed upon them by the harsh reality of nature. Life does not exist in some idyllic scenario of peaceful equillibrium. Life is a frantic competitive struggle for survival, desperate to reproduce and pass on one's genes before the struggle is inevitably lost. It's a violent, short experience that involves grabbing every possible advantage one can at the expense of every other bit of life around you whenever possible. That's the reality of nature. There's never been any garden of eden in a natural ecosystem. And any life that exists today has adapted to behave accordingly.



So, to be sure I'm understanding you correctly, is "intentionally leav some of their food source alive to ensure more grows next year" [I]an example of a sustainable life practice, or is that your definition of sustainable life practices as a behavioral category? In either case, would you accept that a species which leaves some of its food supply intact for the following year, absent evidence of an external cause forcing them to do so, is engaging in a sustainable life practice? If not, why not?

No. Because there is always evidence of an external cause -- the species has not been able to proliferate to the point that they begin seriously depleting their food supply, due to survival challenges. Other times their food source of choice presents a serious challenge to them with regard to catching it.

Take something as simple as the wolf... if you placed a pack of wolves in a very large cage with slow moving and easy to kill prey herds, the pack would grow and grow and the herd would dwindle until there was none left. The wolf would not choose to limit its reproduction to ensure that its food needs did not outstrip the replacement rate of the herd.

Humans are the only exception to this among animal species in nature - whether herbivore, carnivore or omnivore, in an ideal situation with low mortality, and plentiful resources, and no external factors limiting their consumption of those resources, all other animal species will proliferate to the point that their resources are no longer plentiful and suffer a population collapse.

Why doesn't it happen more often? That scenario very rarely exists in nature. Humans are currently the only species for whom it's true.


So it's the confluence of several philosophical ideas? None of which, apparently, comes from ecology?
Also, if sustainability is about consumption not outstripping the means of replacement, aren't all life practices in which consumption does not outstrip the means of replacement sustainable? If not, why not?

None of those concepts are philosphical. Logic and math are not some fancy human inventions. The are universal truth that is still true even if not a single life form exists to utilize it. Likewise, economics are very important even to non-biological processes that use resources, like the life cycle of stars. Economics is the generation, flow, and consumption of resources. This is not abstract or philosophical.

[Frozen_Feet]

Colonial insects such as ants and bees engage in agriculture, terraforming and supply storage. Mammals like beavers actively engineer their living environment to suit them. None of the following are unique to humans: tool use, empathy, learning, planning, self-regulation, language, architechture, emotions.

You can make an argument, a strong argument backed by a lot of evidence, that humans as a species exceed other animals in all of these respects. But you cannot argue humans have monopoly on them, because modern biology and etiology have proven such claims false.

Also, if you make a claim that 100% of humans have ability to understand sustainable living, you are making a fool of yourself. By definition, half of humans are of below average intelligence, and a person's ability to succesfully lead any sort of lifestyle drops dramatically the further to the left they are on the bell curve. Likely at least a fifth of the population basically piggy-backs on others, their net worth to society being negative. It is unlikely that sustainability of human populations stems directly from invidual ability; rather, it's likely it"s a by-product of colonial/social intelligence as it is with insects.

Also also, animals are not bacteria. They do not reproduce exponentially untill all possible space and resources are exhausted. Rather, population die-offs happen at a much earlier point due to social problems caused by lack of social space. This was proven for mice and rats in a famous experiment, look up "Universe 25" and "behavioral sink". Urbanization has analogous effects on humans, and similar phenomena have been observed in other mammals.

Finally, anyone who thinks either modern meat-production or modern agriculture are humane is rather clueless. I believe I've said this before even in this thread, but it bears repeating: if you want to be sure the food on your plate was produced ethically, eat nothing you didn't grow or kill by yourself.

[thorgrim29]

Are you actually arguing that boom-bust cycles aren't a thing in nature Zrak? Because they really are. The deer example Talya gave is a good example of that, but even without human intervention it happens. You often read about the field-mice/owl relationship, where if there is a few good years for the mice they will reproduce like crazy, leading the owls to reproduce like crazy also, hunt the mice to near-extinction and start dying off/leaving the area.

[warty goblin]

None of those concepts are philosphical. Logic and math are not some fancy human inventions. The are universal truth that is still true even if not a single life form exists to utilize it. Likewise, economics are very important even to non-biological processes that use resources, like the life cycle of stars. Economics is the generation, flow, and consumption of resources. This is not abstract or philosophical.
Whether or not logic and math are human inventions is a matter of some philosophic debate among mathematicians, often phrased as whether math is invented or discovered. Given a particular logic (and the logic generally taught is not unique) and a particular set of axioms and definitions, I find it hard to argue that math isn't discovered, which is to say statements expressed using the axioms and definitions are true before anybody shows them to be so; since their truth depends only on logic, axioms and definitions. However the axioms themselves are made up and beyond the scope of logic, and are at best abstractions of concepts in reality.

It also seems a rather difficult sell to me that stars are meaningfully explicable by economics, when they are perfectly explicable via atomic physics. I can't for instance really think of an economic analog to, say, neutron degeneracy or pulsars for that matter, since pulsars don't 'consume resources' and yet are an entirely predictable result of the consumptive process of certain stars.

[Frozen_Feet]

Thorgrim29: boom-and-bust cycles happen, but they are not just a factor of exponential growth. Plenty of organisms have self-regulatory mechanisms, leading to their growth rates stabilizing or declining way before theoretical limits of food and space are reached. Even something as simple as yeast culture on a petri dish can reach a state of self-regulating equilibrium.

Ergo, boom-and-bust cycles occasionally happening is not strong evidence for them being inevitable, nor is it strong evidence for only humans being capable of self-regulation. Talya may be right that said self-regulation isn't a conscious decision for animals (it certainly isn't for yeast), but the idea that it is one for humans doesn't follow from that and is questionable on itself.

[Florian]

Are we evil?

I think the answer to that question depends on what we accept, either subjective or objective morality.

[TechnOkami]

We are evil... if we choose to be.

[Zrak]

We're not talking about something incredibly difficult, here. The very first dictionary definition will suffice:

Sustainable: 1. able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.

A sustainable practice does not deplete its own resources below the level required to continue the practice.
This isn't really what you were talking about earlier, though. Both my cat's eating habits and the nut-burrying of the squirrels in my backyard are "able to be maintained at a certain rate or level." Yet, those don't meet your standards of "sustainable life practices." Hence my confusion.


Every species engages primarily in sustainable life practices, or they'd have gone extinct long ago. The difference is, for no species other than humans has this ever been a conscious choice. Other species have their sustainable practices imposed upon them by the harsh reality of nature.
So your argument is not that other animals don't engage in sustainable life practices, but that they do not engage in these life practices as a conscious choice? Barring the portions on this which hinge upon fundamentally unknowable aspects of animal cognition, I don't think this is really true. In other words, without getting into a debate about the nature of consciousness or the existence of free will, I can contend at the very least that animals alter their behavior to account for changes in relative resource availability that serve no benefit beyond preventing resource depletion. In fact, I mentioned several examples of red squirrels taking actions that serve to prevent future resource exhaustion, like tracking seed availability and making temporarily heavy use of non-adjacent food-rich areas.


No. Because there is always evidence of an external cause -- the species has not been able to proliferate to the point that they begin seriously depleting their food supply, due to survival challenges. Other times their food source of choice presents a serious challenge to them with regard to catching it.
I'm not sure I'm understanding you. Are you saying that, even if there were no evidence of an external cause, you would believe that there was an external cause, regardless? I don't think that's what you mean, but there's not really another way this makes sense as a response to the question I asked, since I specifically asked about a hypothetical situation in which there was no evidence of an external cause, not whether or not you believed such an example existed.


Take something as simple as the wolf... if you placed a pack of wolves in a very large cage with slow moving and easy to kill prey herds, the pack would grow and grow and the herd would dwindle until there was none left. The wolf would not choose to limit its reproduction to ensure that its food needs did not outstrip the replacement rate of the herd.
I presume you know of an instance in which this was tested that backs up your assertion? Or are you just assuming, absent any evidence at all, that this is what would happen in that scenario?


None of those concepts are philosphical. Logic and math are not some fancy human inventions. The are universal truth that is still true even if not a single life form exists to utilize it. Likewise, economics are very important even to non-biological processes that use resources, like the life cycle of stars. Economics is the generation, flow, and consumption of resources. This is not abstract or philosophical.
Logic most certainly is some fancy human invention. It is a set of abstractions we use to describe independent, concrete events, but that set of abstractions is very much an artificial construct. Mathematics could go either way; I'd personally hedge my bets and argue it contains elements of both discovery and invention.


Are you actually arguing that boom-bust cycles aren't a thing in nature Zrak? Because they really are.

No, I'm not saying boom-bust cycles don't exist. I don't really know what gave you that impression, but my apologies for the confusion. My contention is, like Frozen_Feet said, there is nothing about the existence of boom-bust cycles to imply that they are inevitable and, moreover, a substantial body of evidence to suggest that they are not.

[Talya]

This isn't really what you were talking about earlier, though. Both my cat's eating habits and the nut-burrying of the squirrels in my backyard are "able to be maintained at a certain rate or level." Yet, those don't meet your standards of "sustainable life practices." Hence my confusion.

Your cat is not a species. It is an individual. Cats as a species, however, DO overpopulate and eat all their resources given an opportunity.
Likewise, storing up food does not really help here - it isn't an example of a sustainable practice. If squirrels overpopulated, they'd still die off because they wouldn't be able to store up food for themselves.



So your argument is not that other animals don't engage in sustainable life practices, but that they do not engage in these life practices as a conscious choice?

No. They don't engage in it as an unconscious choice, either. It is not because of anything they have any control over at all. It's because nature KILLS THEM. Squirrels don't run rampant overpopulating their ecosystem, but it's not because squirrels limit their breeding. It's because they have lots of predators, and a low survival rate. We do know other animals don't have this type of cognition, the higher thoughts to understand it simply don't exist, but it doesn't matter. Prehistoric humans were in the same situation - life is harsh. Most things die before they ever reach maturity. Even apex predators have this problem. Modern humans are the first species in the history of this planet to potentially take control of their own fate.





I'm not sure I'm understanding you. Are you saying that, even if there were no evidence of an external cause, you would believe that there was an external cause, regardless? I don't think that's what you mean, but there's not really another way this makes sense as a response to the question I asked, since I specifically asked about a hypothetical situation in which there was no evidence of an external cause, not whether or not you believed such an example existed.


I'm definitely not understanding what you are asking here, at all.



I presume you know of an instance in which this was tested that backs up your assertion? Or are you just assuming, absent any evidence at all, that this is what would happen in that scenario?


Of course this was never tested. However it's incontrovertably what happens with every single type of fauna that has ever lived, except, possibly, humans - who through higher cognition have the ability to avoid it. That's how life operates. It ALL operates like bacteria in a petrie dish. Now, as was mentioned by someone else earlier, some species will start killing off their own kind in response to feeding competition (humans do this, too), but that rather proves my point even more.



Logic most certainly is some fancy human invention. It is a set of abstractions we use to describe independent, concrete events, but that set of abstractions is very much an artificial construct. Mathematics could go either way; I'd personally hedge my bets and argue it contains elements of both discovery and invention.

Logic is true regardless of whether there are any beings there to think it through. Logic is not cognitive, it is truth. (And ultimately, logic is just a type of math. They aren't separate things.)



In any event, the idea of nature being this harmonious wonderful thing that we humans are somehow harming is complete garbage. Nature is a horrific, brutal gauntlet of millions of related species in merciless, cutthroat competition with each other trying to come out on top. And most of them fail, miserably. Through this deathmatch competition, natural selection gleefully (yes I'm anthropomorphizing a process) takes note of what manages to survive long enough to pass on its genes. Over 99% of all species that have ever lived on this rock went extinct before humans even existed. So this concept that humans are somehow evil for having, to a great degree, mastered nature and turned our own existence into something more comfortable than the deathmatch every other species has to deal with* is absurd. We're the only species that is actively trying to preserve nature, rather than simply dominate it. (The rest are too busy struggling to improve their lot.) What the OP is doing is villifying success.

* - The exceptions as far as animals that no longer have a daily struggle just to exist are those that have made themselves useful or desirable in some way to humans. Sure, there's our pets, but even cattle. Nothing resembling the domestic bovine even exists in the wild - Cows avoided extinction by being yummy. Same with chickens. It's a rather effective survival adaptation.

[Zrak]

Your cat is not a species. It is an individual. Cats as a species, however, DO overpopulate and eat all their resources given an opportunity. Likewise, storing up food does not really help here - it isn't an example of a sustainable practice. If squirrels overpopulated, they'd still die off because they wouldn't be able to store up food for themselves.
This is what I meant when I said the definition you just provided doesn't really match what you're saying. You keep defaulting to examples of overpopulation, which isn't what that definition is talking about; the fact that there are rates and levels at which something cannot be maintained (i.e. overpopulation) does not mean there is no rate or level at which it can be maintained. Squirrels can maintain food storage at a certain rate or level, so according to the definition you provided, it is sustainable. Yet, it does not meet your definition of sustainability. Hence my confusion.


No. They don't engage in it as an unconscious choice, either. It is not because of anything they have any control over at all. It's because nature KILLS THEM. Squirrels don't run rampant overpopulating their ecosystem, but it's not because squirrels limit their breeding. It's because they have lots of predators, and a low survival rate.
This only applies specifically to curtailing population levels, though; there are plenty of other behaviors designed to prevent resource exhaustion, even behaviors specifically designed to prevent resource exhaustion in overpopulation conditions. These are, to the extent any behavior is, demonstrably conscious choices; predation and disease do not force red squirrels to change their seed selection preferences or home range size based on resource levels, or to keep track of seed availability in various areas.
If, however, what you meant this entire time was that no other species limits its breeding or makes conscious choices to curtail population, this is also false. Even rabbits, colloquial example of breeding a lot, take behavioral measures to prevent overpopulation conditions.


We do know other animals don't have this type of cognition, the higher thoughts to understand it simply don't exist, but it doesn't matter.
We don't. We assume that they don't, but this really is just fundamentally unknowable with our present resources. We can't look at a creature's behavior or even a brain scan and really say with any meaningful degree of certainty what's going on its head.


I'm definitely not understanding what you are asking here, at all.
I asked if you would accept a species whose behavior ensures its food supply remains intact the following year, absent evidence of an external force causing them to do so, as an example of conscious sustainable life practices. You replied that there is always evidence of an external cause. That does not make sense as a response to the question I asked, since I didn't ask if there was always evidence of an external cause, but rather about a hypothetical behavior for which there were no evidence of an external cause. Specifically would such a behavior meet your standards for a conscious, sustainable life practice. If it would not, why would it not?


Of course this was never tested.
So you're just assuming that would happen. You have no evidence whatsoever to support this contention. About one species that you specifically chose to bring up. Like, even putting aside the fact that your claim here hinges on the idea that all non-human species, despite their vast physiological and behavioral differences, are totally analogous to the behavior you describe in wolves, the behavior you describe is, essentially, a thing you just made up.


However it's incontrovertably what happens with every single type of fauna that has ever lived, except, possibly, humans - who through higher cognition have the ability to avoid it. That's how life operates. It ALL operates like bacteria in a petrie dish. Now, as was mentioned by someone else earlier, some species will start killing off their own kind in response to feeding competition (humans do this, too), but that rather proves my point even more.
That's not really a good summation of what happens in a behavioral sink. Also, that person (Frozen_Feet) was arguing against your point.


Logic is true regardless of whether there are any beings there to think it through. Logic is not cognitive, it is truth. (And ultimately, logic is just a type of math. They aren't separate things.)
Whether something is true has no bearing on whether it exists. Plenty of things in fiction are true without being real.

[Frozen_Feet]

The fungi termites eat require a constant humidity and temperature to thrive. Such conditions do not normally happen where termites live - hence, termites create and maintain mounds of hardened mud which must be of specific size and shape to maintain tose conditions.

An queen bee does not pump out eggs at constant rate. Rather, the class of working females rations how much food it is given to influence the number. Neither do the eggs hatch to be soldiers, workers or drones by chance - the quality of eggs depends on size, shape and temperature of the nest, and these traits are actively engineered by the workers to suit prevailing conditions. All males born outside breeding season are killed.

Ants of one hive actively seek to destroy other ants from other hives - even when there's abundance of space and resources. This doesn't happen when the other hive's ants are of notably different size, nor when queens of the nests are related. Resources are traded between related nests and ants engage in cultivation of plants, fungi and some types of other insects to produce food, rather than just collecting them from their surroundings.

I've not done the math to see how closely the growth rates of these species resembles an exponential curve, but based on specifics of their reproductive cycles, I'd bet "not at all".

Colonial insects are some of the most widespread and succesfull things on Earth. Measured in amount of biomass, just ants added together make up a bigger part of animals on Earth than humans do. They are a vital presence to ecosystems they inhabit - the recent drop-off in number of bees has caused problems to human agriculture world wide.

Invidually, these creatures are not very intelligent. (Well okay, to give ants credit, they can apparently count the distance to their nest from the angle of sunlight.) But as a species, to borrow Talya's rhetoric, they act quite a bit smarter than simple bacteria.

[Murska]

After examining my assumptions, I have to admit that I was wrong. I was attributing the decisions of individual humans, falsely, to some other sort of decision-making process than those of animals. I believe the fundamental error was forgetting that I, myself, am part of nature and therefore my decisions do not and cannot come from anywhere except my own biology and the physical effects of my environment on me.

I post this to encourage people who are struggling to keep up the motivation to argue against strangers who are wrong on the internet. Occasionally, you do succeed.