copernicus

I have posted this query on the Challenging Atheism board, but I thought that I'd open it up here as a discussion topic, too.

Free will comes up a lot in our discussions, because it is central to the atheist's argument that one would expect an omnimax God not to permit evil and not to remain "silent" in the face of human moral transgressions. Divine Silence therefore counts as evidence against God's existence. From the theist's perspective, anything other than divine silence would remove our free will.

Our pets do not even have primate intelligence, but they live by a kind of moral code that depends on human rules. So consider this scenario. Fido has to pee, but he can't get out. He pees on the floor. Then you walk in and see the puddle. You glare at him, and he slinks away with lowered tail. Is this a case where Fido has a bad conscience because he has transgressed a rule that he knows about (i.e. don't pee in the house)? Does animal obediance to humans approximate human obediance to gods?

Tell us how you voted and your reasons. Feel free to expound on how this scenario is or is not relevant to religious morality.

Dean Anderson

I voted 'yes' and I will use an example from personal experience to illustrate this.

I have a cat. He used to love sitting on people's knees to be stroked.

One day, he was sat on my sister-in-law's knee and my wife accidentally made a loud noise which startled him.

He panicked and scrambled away. Unfortunately, as he ran over my sister-in-law's shoulder, he caught her lip with one of his back claws.

She screamed and started bleeding - and we had to take her to A&E to have stitches.

Now we were not angry with the cat. The accident wasn't his fault. In fact we went out of our way to reassure him that we weren't annoyed with him.

Despite this, he still was very contrite and quiet for a couple of days, and even today (two years later) he won't usually sit on people's laps anymore. He sits on the chair next to you.

Now his feeling bad about having hurt someone he knew was not any morality imposed on him by humans. It was a result of the natural empathy that he has with his 'friends' as a social creature.

Godless Wonder

I've read about an experiment in which they kept two chimps in cages, next to each other. They feed one chimp, but not enough. The other chimp not at all. The hungry chimp begs the fed chimp for food. The chimp with food, though hungry himself, as he doesn't really have enough food, appears to be uncomfortable and shifty, guilty, one might guess, and eventually shares his food with the other chimp.

Why would the hungry chimp beg for food? Why would chimps beg if begging were never a successful tactic? And why should begging ever be a successful tactic, if chimps aren't capable of empathy? And isn't it possible that empathy is the root of morality? And if chimps are capabile of empathy, then, what is that, if not a crude sense of morality?

As for free will, nobody has that. (I'm a materialist.)

Dean Anderson

That's what I meant in my post. I was implying that my cat's empathy for others was a crude sense of morality - not saying that his behaviour was 'not morality but only empathy'

Agreed.

Ab_Normal

Well, my cat has the same amount of free will as anybody else in the house (neatly dodges the question of free will's existence). But if she has a conscience, it's well hidden. She's the stereotypical amoral self-centered "What's in it for me, hairless pink slave?" cat.

Never owned a dog, but have interacted with friend's pooches, and I'm not sure if their willingness to please and follow the rules stems from any innate morality or the genetically coded impulse to please the pack leader -- which, if I understand correctly, should be their human.

contracycle

Actually, whle agreeing with the pervy hobbit* and godless wonder, I would suggest that this nbexus is instead a good opportunity to ditch the term morality, which I consider useless, on the basis that it is just a behavioural projection of empathy.

* have you read Grunts, by Mary Gentle? If not, should.

Yahzi

Yes, various animals obviously have a sense of morality. Refer to Biff the Unclean for more details.

However, I have some bad news. Scientifically speaking, cats have been shown to be the only large mammal without a shred of morality.



Seriously, cats are not very social animals. Morality is a function of social existance. Cats don't got it.

copernicus

I cannot agree with this generalization. When I recently visited a friend, who had a couple of cats in the family, one of them kept leaving dead field mice and birds outside my bedroom door. I felt quite welcomed into the family, but, being on a strict diet that doesn't allow the ingestion of vermin, I refrained from indulging in the proffered treats. Clearly, cats have a strong sense of social responsibility toward their families and can be quite generous.

Karalora

Try explaining that to our three cats. Seriously. (Well, you may be right about the little one. Fuzzy hellion, she is.)

Even in the wild, most species of cats are social at one point in their lives: when they are kittens. They need social instincts in order to deal with their siblings and their mothers. Since we artificially extend the kittenish period of being cared for into their adult lives, domestic cats also retain many kittenish psychological traits as adults, including the ability to be sociable and affectionate. In general, the more time a cat spends indoors with its people, the more kittenish and sociable it will be.

Ab_Normal

Too true! I'd forgotten that our cat, a neutered female, used to leave dead critters under the spawn's high chair. And she used to bring them inside alive to teach the kiddo how to hunt. (We had to work hard to dissuade that behaviour.)