Are humans more important than fish?

[Steve Walker]

(Excuse me deleting most of what you said apart from the bits I want to refer to)

 

So you are saying that you get your morals from the social organisation of this country, and the people who believe in killing babies (or animals etc) get their moral authority from their country, tribe etc. So am I right in thinking neither has any basis for saying they are objectively right, so presumably neither is truer than the other.

 

I'm missing something. What is your basis for intervening?

 

My basis for intervening is that I have the power to do so and I believe that where my morals differ from theirs, mine are right and theirs are wrong - I must believe this to be the case, otherwise I would adopt theirs. The only thing that might stay my hand is that my own morals include the belief that others should be allowed to live in their own way - and so where this comes into conflict with my own belief that it is wrong to (for example) kill babies, I choose the lesser evil.

 

I think the key issue in your example is that a third party is involved.

 

I suppose it is a matter of "do as you would be done to" - well, I would like to be allowed to live my life in my own way, but I would also like to be assisted if I am being persecuted. When living my life my own way involves persecuting someone else...

 

Where it gets really sticky is where the third party is an animal - or a foetus - or those who value a 1700 year old Bhuddist monument - but those arguments are about the detail of the particular case rather than the principle.

[The Flying Tench]

My basis for intervening is that I have the power to do so and I believe that where my morals differ from theirs, mine are right and theirs are wrong - I must believe this to be the case, otherwise I would adopt theirs.

 

But if you believe you are right and they are wrong, aren't you saying you DO believe there is some objective standard of what is right and what is wrong? I thought you were saying it was all purely subjective, in which case isn't your statement that you are right and them wrong meaningless? I'm not saying you need to believe in the ten commandments, but aren't you using some criterion - fairness, love, greatest good for the greatest number, not limiting someone else's freedom unless it interfere's with your own, etc - you must have some basis for saying your beliefs are right mustn't you?

[mr motorola]

Ain't going to stop me eating fish.

 

Who actually cares ? And to what end will an outcome ever be found? Never.

 

Get fishing.

[Rusty]

Ain't going to stop me eating fish.

 

Who actually cares ? And to what end will an outcome ever be found? Never.

 

Get fishing.

 

I'm reading this thread in the office with a minimised screen so it's not too obvious...and was getting quite absorbed in the discussion until then

[The Flying Tench]

That must be the is the craziest belief of all, the belief that humans have souls. Where does this soul come from? Does the soul come into existance at the moment of conception or implantation? Do monozygotic twins have a soul each or do they share one? Another example of Judeo-Christian-Islamic wishful thinking methinks, although I freely admit that many other religions beleive in some kind of afterlife or other.

As a monozygotic clone myself I venture the view that my twin and I both have souls. But I don't see 'soul' myself as a kind of 'ghost in the machine', more like software in the computer of the human brain.

[billy50000]

is this about fish or that toss religeon? i thought the heading was about fish:

 

cod and chips anyone!

[corydoras]

As a monozygotic clone myself I venture the view that my twin and I both have souls. But I don't see 'soul' myself as a kind of 'ghost in the machine', more like software in the computer of the human brain.

Whichs is uploaded to some mainframe in the sky upon death? What happens to the software in the brains of other species?

[Steve Walker]

But if you believe you are right and they are wrong, aren't you saying you DO believe there is some objective standard of what is right and what is wrong? I thought you were saying it was all purely subjective, in which case isn't your statement that you are right and them wrong meaningless? I'm not saying you need to believe in the ten commandments, but aren't you using some criterion - fairness, love, greatest good for the greatest number, not limiting someone else's freedom unless it interfere's with your own, etc - you must have some basis for saying your beliefs are right mustn't you?

 

It goes back to what I was saying about there being no absolute authority, only power. If I believe (for whatever reason) that a particular way of treating others is the best way of doing it, and I see someone else treating others badly (by my reckoning), and it is in my power to intervene, I must consider doing so. That only needs to be internally consistent with my own beliefs, I don't actually need to be right in any kind of absolute way.

 

As to where my beliefs come from, that's a different question to whether they are in some larger way "correct". It does seem to me that most societies end up with a fairly similar set of ground rules, and I suspect that societies which didn't do so failed to prosper. It's quite possible that much of my routine behaviour that I consider "decent" is habit - when I meet someone in the street I don't actively consider being horrible to them - but I would like to think that if faced by a real moral dilemma I would reach a decision based on reason rather than just social conditioning. Maybe I wouldn't, maybe the axioms I would base my reasoning upon are socially conditioned - certainly the key question of "would I like to be treated like that" is a question thought important in Christianity, but the "Golden Rule" is common to other religions and philosophies.

[Steve Walker]

One of the interesting things about "evolution" is that it seems to be a universal law, not just confined to Darwin's findings.

 

Find anything that replicates a process - even a human skill handed down from master to apprentice, such as boatbuilding, ploughing, design of steam locomotives, etc etc, and you will find that different environmental pressures will over a period of time produce different designs. Boats for rocky coasts as opposed to those for lagoonal ones, ploughs for clay soils as opposed to those for sandy areas, and so on. That may sound simplistic, but detailed study of design of any artefact will show branches, trends and even extinctions in exactly the same way as a phylogenetic "tree" (or bush as Cory points out)

 

There was a section in The Blind Watchmaker talking about crystalline structures in clays in that sense. Seems to me that anything which leads to imperfect replication of information and differential survival determined by the information will tend to lead to evolutionary change.

 

Here you are applying the same principle to human societies, and their behaviour. It would explain (amongst other things) the rise of the career politician as a creature best adapted to the environment it finds itself in.

 

I suspect that rather like sharks, those creatures have some very well conserved traits arrived at long ago and which will always serve them well.

[gozzer]

Nature..Nurture...or is it Nietzsche?

 

John.