Subject:
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Re: Are humans animals? Are humans MORE than animals?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Tue, 1 Aug 2000 13:52:59 GMT
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Viewed:
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207 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> Yes, Yes...
>
> That hunting/eating/cockfighting thread is huge and hard to navigate.
I'll agree-- I've been quietly lurking around the past few weeks ANYWAY, but
this debate has certainly intreuged me... Just got a bit much to wade
through...
From the outset, I'll give my general feeling... I don't mind eating animals.
However, the more akin to human beings those animals are, the more
uncomfortable I get with their consumption. Uncomfortable enough not to eat
them? Sometimes. But mostly, I don't think it's so much of a 'line' to cross
drawn by intelligence. It's a line drawn by instinct, directed at my
similarity to these creatures. That similarity can be emotional range,
physical similarity, and, yes, also intelligence.
> However Dave Schuler said this:
>
> " If you can produce an animal that generally demonstrates free will, I won't
> eat it. "
Maybe I missed it, but what's free will? That's never made sense to me. I
don't really believe in what I think it is. Is it (in this case) taken to mean
a transgression above instinct? I'll comment on why I disagree with that later
anyway...
> Humans are animals. But many (not all, and not all the time) members of the
> human species are more than just animals, they transcend animalness. That's
> why it's not OK to eat them unless they're consenting to the matter.
Well, I'll jump in on the 'transcending animalness' later, but for now, I'll
say I wouldn't eat a human, even if they were consenting to the matter, on the
one stipulation that my life didn't depend on it. In my mind, I would have a
moral issue with that, regardless of what the other person wanted. My instinct
tells me that it's wrong. More logically, I'd say that the person's own
instincts were flawed in some way. It's rather like people who want to commit
suicide-- many of them could be "fixed" back to "normal" (wow, I've set a trap
for myself there) with psychiatric help, or simply with the passage of time
fading and healing old wounds. To eat the person would be rather like kicking
them while they're down. Kinda like (a lot less extreme) telling someone
they'd have to PAY you for taking an MISB Galaxy Explorer from them-- you're
taking advantage of them for their probable lack of knowledge. But anyway,
that's logically. Even if they had a valid reason for wanting me to eat them,
I probably wouldn't. I'd still just *feel* it was wrong.
> What that transcendence is, is debatable. Christians will say it's the soul. I
> say its the ability to reason and to exhibit free will (with the implications
> of being able to manipulate the environment instead of reacting to it.) since
> I don't hold with the existence of a soul.
> [snip]
> To me animalness means reacting to stimuli based on programming. That's what
> deer do. I think you can very well explain why they eat apples instead of
> poison ivy, they are programmed to eat good things and programmed with a
> threat/benefit evaluation mechanism to decide that when it's guarded by wolves
> it's a bad bet.
>
> Transcending animalness means breaking out of the programming and becoming
> self actualized. We got lucky somehow and we did.
Ok, I'll have to disagree. (who gets the square?)
1. The soul - Nah. You couldn't convince me no matter how hard you tried that
humans have a soul AND that animals don't. To me, that's laughable. If there
is such a thing as a soul (of which I could be convinced, I suppose-- I'd
probably define it a bit differently than the traditional sense, though),
animals have just as much of a soul as we do.
2. Ability to reason - Nah. Animals have this too. Not as good as humans have
it, but they've got it. And the further down you go (something like from
humans to monkeys to dogs to octopuses to birds to worms to trees to
bacteria), the less 'reasoning' power there is. I don't think it's safe,
reasonable, or logical to assume that reasoning power flicks on like a light
switch at some point down the path, at which point it increases in
intensity... More like a dimmer switch that has no "off", nor for that matter
a full "on".
3. Free will - Nah. Humans react due to instinct just as much as animals. We
just don't think we do. I think it was Dewey that said that thinking itself is
instinctual to humans. When we are brought up in a society of thinking
individuals, the act of thinking BECOMES instinctive. And to boot, the
patterns in which we think are instinctive. Just like we can predict how mice
will react to stimuli, we can do the same thing with humans. The only
difference being that it's a LOT harder. Humans have the benefit of having a
society that's been thinking for thousands of years-- The cycle of society
only increases the individual's ability to think, which is what I think pushed
us so far out in front of other animals. Once humans started to be brought up
as thinking creatures, our level of thinking increased by leaps and bounds.
Anyway, back to the point. Humans are just a conglomeration of reactions to
stimuli based on programming too, our programming is just a lot more complex.
I personally think we HAVE to act the way we do. There isn't free will, it
just *feels* that way. You think about your action before you act. That's why
we tend to differentiate it from "knee-jerk" reactions, which are what we like
to call "instinct" reactions, and think of them as being "lower". But that
thinking itself is PART of your action-- and you start to think without even
thinking about it. That in and of itself is an instinct reaction. It's all
programmed in.
Anyway, my key point is that we haven't *separated* ourselves from animals by
crossing a 'line', we've merely gone way ahead in the race.
As for the eating other creatures thing-- here's my logic. It is 'immoral' to
kill anything for any purpose. How immoral it *feels* to *me*, however, varies
with the level of closeness the being is to me in terms of emotion,
complexity, reasoning power, physical appearance, and probably more. Suffice
to say, it's hard to say exactly what defines that level of closeness. It is
far easier to say that I feel it's less immoral to kill a mosquito than to
kill a cat.
However, I think Lar asked early on 'Do the ends justify the means?'. My
answer is yes and no. Does killing an animal for survival make the act of
killing moral, or at least not immoral? No. However, it makes it less immoral.
My problem with morality is that in order to TRULY be perfectly moral, you'd
have to kill yourself, since by merely living, you are detrimental to other
living things. The fact that you may be aiding OTHER living things is ignored
for the moment, because we're looking for TRUE goodness, which implies or
requires by my definition that NO immoral acts are committed. Hence, the
MOMENT one is aware of being in the slightest bit harmful to other living
things, one is obligated to stop, at the cost of one's own life.
But that's just silly. I don't think anyone expects anyone else to be
perfectly moral in that sense, if not merely because doing harm to one's self
is probably more harmful than the harm inflicted on other beings by living. So
in essence, the act of eating another being to stay alive is OVERALL a moral
act. But the LESS immoral the killing of the other being, the MORE moral the
overall act becomes.
Hence, by my "feel" of morality, it is more moral to kill plants to live than
to kill humans to live. Killing humans for food (by my "feel" of morality)
goes to the point of the immorality of killing outweighing the morality of
staying alive-- hence, the overall action becomes immoral. And that's the
tough part, I think. Drawing the line at where it *feels* immoral to kill
something for eating it becomes the line at which it *does* become immoral;
and that 'line' is difficult to find. But now that gets into a definition of
morality, and I hope I've given enough to chew on without delving into that...
Anyway, that's my main thought line... discuss as necessary...
DaveE
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