Re: OT: Spiked Article/Atheists and EcoChristians

On Jan 7, 4:38 pm, Jane <JaneH...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 7, 11:21�am, Andrew Barss <ba...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jane <JaneH...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
\> :>
:> Logically, your moral imperative does not follow from your declaration that man
:> is different in kind.

: � � � Yes, logically, it does follow.

No, it really does not. �You're either being disingenuous or you don't understand what
"logically" actually means.

I know what "logically" means, Andy.

And what's more, I know the history--in every era in which some
men have held other men to be "just like animals," they've endeavored
to treat them "just like animals."

And we all--quite rationally--acknowledge different levels of
moral obligation to different animals by the fact of their very
differences with each other. We do not treat dogs as we treat
spiders, or the bacteria that cause deadly diseases, and we do not do
so because dogs are different IN KIND, not just in degree, from
spiders and bacteria.

The basis of that difference--the ability to feel as
individuals, to experience certain basic emotions and communicate
them, etc--is the basis of our difference in our treatment of and
obligations towards them.

That is, in fact, the ONLY logical position. Anything else
would require us to ignore the reality of dogs (or people), and
instead treat them as if the differences did not exist or were not
important.



I think a much more interesting question is why you are so desperate
to ignore all the examples of creative and optimized behavior in nonhumans, be rude
to the people who have raised them in this thread, and repeatedly try to "prove"
your point by assertion of your belief in the rigid separation of human culture
and animal behavior.

First, Andy, I have NEVER asserted that there is a "rigid
separation of human culture and animal behavior."

I've never said anything like that, and I've never implied it.

Second, I don't think I'm being 'rude.' I have, in fact,
consistently engaged the people arguing your point on the basis of
their ideas--not by attacking them personally, or implying that there
must be some psychological problem that would cause them to disagree
with me,.or making fun of them in the third person as if they weren't
here.

Third, I'm not the one who has been persistently and
incorrigibly misstating my opponents' positions, and persisting in
those misstatements even after corrected.

And yet the bunch of you continues to claim that I think
animals are 'automatons," or that I think they don't have empathy or
that they can't reason, or that I think they don't have personalities,
and a load of other garbage that has not a thing to do with anything
I've said.

So I'll ask it again--what is it exactly about the possibility
that you may owe a higher moral obligation to human beings than you
owe to dogs and cats that panics you all so much that you engage in
this kind of crap?



you've
: yet to provide a single instance that could even vaguely be considered
: evidence of it.

Numerous examples have been given. �You've just either ignored them, or
asserted they don't count.

Untrue.

First, numerous examples have NOT been given me. What I've been
given is examples of behavior.

Second, I've then asked--because it's the POINT--if there is any
proof that this behavior is conscious and deliberate and driven by
abstract reasoning.

When I get there, I get told that I can't prove it isn't.

But the difference in kind between human beings and other animals
comes not in the fact that we have politics, but that we have
political science.

And I've provided you with at least one criteria that would
easily prove that the behavior in question is deliberate and
conscious, and significantly falsify my position--that is, that
individuals in the species choose different behaviors, and one
individual sometimes chooses to change course, and other individuals
choose to follow them--and then I get told I'm changing the subject.

OK, so monkeys that wash their fruit before eating it would qualify.
I vaguely recall reading about that - one monkey somehow figured out
that washing a fruit in the river would make it taste better when
eaten. It then taught all the other monkeys in that social group -
and just that social group. They kept up that behavior and taught
their kids to do it. Monkeys in other social groups would still eat
their fruit unwashed.

There's plenty of deliberate, learned behavior in primates. You have
not read about any of it, and you have never encountered a monkey
colony except in a zoo, so you can ignore that blithely - in fact, you
seem to ignore any infusion of facts on animal behavior. I suggest
you read Sapolsky - he writes quite interestingly about the social
behaviors in baboon colonies. I think it was baboons. Could have
been some other primate.

Is this not enough? Do the monkeys also need to write books on
epistemology in perfectly spelled English?

LM
.

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