Jamie_L

Should we attribute more moral value to humans than animals simply on the basis of being human?

In cases were the human in question is, and always will be less cognitively functional than some animals - such as the serverely retarded compared to an ape - is it still appropriate for the life of the human to have more moral value than that of the ape?

This extends to law as well. Should the punishment for taking the life of the less-developed human be more severe than taking the life of a more mentally capable animal?

In practice, the answer seems to be yes. The human has more value, morally and legally, simply because he or she is human. Is there anything wrong with this?

Jamie

SmashingIdols

We are human. It would be ironic if a lifeform as sucessful as homo-sapiens did not place a value upon its own species as higher than others. That being said...

We have never based our moral code on intelligence. I think before you can make a case for whether it is right or wrong to place human life above animal life based upon intelligence you must produce evidence (or at least an argument) that this is indeed how or why such (or any) morality was codified.

[ May 04, 2002: Message edited by: SmashingIdols ]</p>

DRFseven

Yes, plenty. What value are we to the universe? Why SHOULD we even exist? What if we didn't exist; would that be wrong? Why should intelligence (a survival tool) matter any more than fangs or claws (other survival tools)? Nothing is inherently "better" than anything else; there is only personal opinion to go by.

bd-from-kg

DRFseven:

But if morality is (as I gather you believe) just a name for the set of attitudes that one happens to have been socialized with, and one of these attitudes is that humans are superior to other animals and that it's OK to treat them as we please for our own benefit, how can there be anything "wrong" with that? It would seem to be incoherent to say that the attitudes that we have been socialized with are contrary to the attitudes that we have been socialized with. So what are you saying that they're contrary to?

Or inherently "worse" either. Thus taking the interests only of humans into account and ignoring the interests of animals is neither inherently better nor inherently worse than considering the interests of both.

Jamie_L

I started thinking about this during the long and brutal Personhood thread. There were all sorts of hypotheticals about intelligent lions, mutant, genius orangutans, space aliens, and the like. The trend in that thread was to suggest that it was the cognitive ability that was of moral value, not the speciation.

I was just exploring that further.

Jamie

DRFseven

I'm not saying Jamie's attitudes are wrong, as in immoral or amoral; I'm saying the premise doesn't make sense. S/he asks if there's anything wrong with the idea that an animal that is more intelligent than another one is "better" than the less intelligent animal. To answer that, one must ask, "Better at what?" S/he doesn't specify, and only specification would make an objective answer possible. As I'm sure you know, moral subjectivists make objective evaluations once an objective is reached.

Right; Jamie can't say anything is inherently better or worse than anything else without specifying what it is better for. So that's what's wrong with that statement; humans are not objectively "better." If Jamie had said "Humans are better at solving math problems.", I would have agreed; we are much better (most of us) at solving math problems.

dk

dk: - If morality regulates conduct with reason then the antecedent of moral value is reason. Absent the capacity to reason animals lack moral value, but not moral agency. Animals and plants are a great source of knowledge, inspiration and comforts that enable people to understand and participate in their destiny. Morality dictates people recognize a moral obligation to treat animals humanely, but should not confuse the moral agency of animals with principles that integrate moral value with human behavior. The proposition fundamentally confuses experience with knowledge.
dk: - By definition an imbecile and moron rank age 3-7 and 8-12 years in terms of human development, respectively. In human terms this puts the mentally retarded well above an orangutan or chimpanzee. While their impediments makes autonomy nonessential it doesn’t strip them of essential human dignity. I don’t see how equating morons and imbeciles to orangutan and chimpanzee can possibly do justice to people or great apes. Morality constructs terms of right (good) and wrong (evil) from human nature to regulate conduct with reason. While its true many people behave immorally the root cause is deprivation caused by ignorance, nurture, environment and self delusion. Imbeciles and morons never reach the age of reason, but they often display heroic virtue lacking in some of the best educated and brightest people. Its unreasonable to strip imbeciles or morons of their essential human dignity, just as its unreasonable to animate apes with human reason.
To answer the question: How people treat animals reflects upon human morality not the law of the jungle.
dk: - This is the first time punishment has been brought up, to my knowledge. Justice serves punishment in order to secure contrition, retribution, deterrence, forgiveness, closure and restoration. Justice has its limitations because people’s capacity to destroy far outpaces their powers to restore. In the post modernist world reason requires a premium on human life because people have the capacity to destroy all life on the entire world. Morality dictates that civilizations grow and prosper until they encounter an unsolvable problem. Today the advances in technology, logistics, communications and human creativity strongly suggests the greatest problem civilization faces is immorality.
dk: - Not in my estimation. There are many people so confused they understand humankind as a parasite upon the planet. This pathology deprives humanity of dignity whether the epistemological source stems from monism, dualism, pluralism, idealism, materialism, or rationalism. If people are essentially parasites then the planet is doomed. Hope requires us to struggle for a higher purpose, so to the extent people debase themselves by rationalizing the wanton destruction of life, especially human life, people become degenerates. As degenerates people do act like parasites. Personally I favor the propositions 1) we are our neighbors keeper; 2) the golden rule; 3) and custodian’s of the planet. To ground human dignity in some utopian notion of a Cognizant Class Theory gives rise to intellectual trash like the “The Bell Curve”, fascism and social darwinism.

[ May 07, 2002: Message edited by: dk ]</p>

Jamie_L

Thanks for consideration WRT s/he. For clarity: it's "he".

However, you misunderstand my question. I'm not asking if one animal is "better" than another. I'm asking if human morality should place more value on human life than other life simply on the basis that human life is human. The issue of which type of life is better at something isn't really what I'm getting at. I bring up cognitive thought as an example of something else that one might consider when placing moral value. (A hypothetical example being: suppose a lion was found that had the cognitive and emotional capabilities of a person. Should that lion be given the same moral consideration as a person, or should it be given less because it's a lion and not a human being. What makes a human a person? Physiology? Cognitive reasoning? Something else?)

By severely retarded, I mean severely. I have a 24-year old cousin who will forever operate at about the mental level of a 20-month-old child. Some apes can communicate with sign-language and perform complex tasks that are beyond my cousin. Yet, generally (and I agree) my cousin is valued more by common morality and law. Is it just because she's human? Is that the way it should be?

Jamie

DRFseven

To me it seems the same; which is better/which is valued more? There is still the implicit assumption that we value things FOR something. Is an umbrella more valuable than a boot? For keeping one's head dry, yes; for keeping the feet dry, no. I think we have to ask, should we value humans as a part of "our" group more than we value other animals as a part of it? In my opinion, the answer is clearly yes. Humans make better humans than other animals do and this is why we value them more. We have to have a culture and the culture has to be human, so we really have no choice in who we value more. No matter how much we care about animals, except in rare and isolated instances, we always care more about other humans. Our moral codes reflect this attitude and priviledges humans over other animals.

Cognitive abilities are certainly involved in our preference for humans as our meta-cultural group because they are of supreme importance in the formation of human cultural behavior, but, really, it is the similarity to ourselves we are looking at, not intelligence, per se. Individuals seem human to different individuals to varying degrees; some perceive anything genetically human to be human, while others require more of the "like me" aspect for identification as human.