Did who disagree? The person that did that?
No. This is the part you just don’t get. it’s not the act of suggesting itself that is wrong - it would be what we suggest that would be wrong - but not morally wrong. It would be counterproductive to the object of the endeavour. It would be like dialing a wrong number. that’s not the same as a prank call.
You said I didn’t agree with someone about the dog case. That someone suggested otherwise than I did. You tell me…?
I know, I know. I’m trying. My GF is trying to educate me. She’s made some progress.
What’s the object of the endeavour?
To devise a usable moral system.
A moral system guides people in tough life choices. By what criteria would it guide? And why is that the criteria?
No, I didn’t. I said that you don’t think that a human should treat a dog like that. I didn’t say that any specific person disagreed with you in that regard, even the person that treated the dog like that may not disagree that a dog should not be treated like that.
Are you saying not a soul would disagree with me? Of billions of people, what an unlikely coincidence. What’s’ so good about my “suggestion”?
I think I should just let you pretend that you are me and have this discussion with yourself in my place. I did not say that nobody would disagree, I said that even the person that did that might not disagree. In other words, it is possible for an agent to act in a way that the agent believes to be immoral.
Mo - The answer to that is complex, Mo. The simplest way to answer is with a chosen model. The model can be adjusted. But let’s imagine that there is a group of people wherein everyone has the same amount of power. In that case, the moral system is designed to achieve a certain balance between individual claims and behaviors in several ways. One way is to balance the short term and long term interests of the members of the group - between each other and also between individuals and the group at large.
I’ll give you an example. For the ancient jews. “Thou shalt not kill”. Of course, this means that individuals may not kill each other. But the “state” could. There were several offenses for which the punishment was death. So personal vendettas were forbidden, and killing was formalised through a series of rules. Now, jewish tribes were not democratic, so in this case, the leaders were the ones who benefited the most. But so did individuals, because it took more than a pissed off neighbor to do them in. The pissed off neighbor had to go to the bosses, and the offense he described had to apply to the rules.
It would be tempting to say that good was maximised, but it did depend upon whose good we are talking about. Overall, a tolerable balance was struck, since we know of no open rebellions. In the end, morality is abut coercing behavior of the members of the group towards a tolerable balance between competing claims and behaviors.
There are many other ways to analyse this - in terms of mutual trust, for instance. People benefit when others trust them and they can trust others - individuals benefit and the group at large does. But there are no ultimate goods - there are workable systems that produce enough benefit to enough centers of power - the benefit is “weighted”, because the group’s power is. And then there are those systems that don’t work that well.
You said that before that I’m not right to think the dog ought not to have been beaten—that it was just “my suggestion”. Why do you think my suggestion is neither right nor wrong? Does someone with the opposite “suggestion” miss nothing?
Do I have a claim to my neighbour’s dog?
A claim to the dog? Depends on the claim. Most moral systems respect property rights to a degree. People might take exception to someone lighting their house on fire when it threatens the lives of neighbors. What claim do you want to make?
That is your suggestion, Faust and myself share in that suggestion, as I would suggest most people do.
If all of my friends jumped off a bridge, I would not join them, but since you gave an extreme example last night, I feel that I am justified in doing the same.
Let’s say that you had an individual whose only experience with dogs was that they were somehow locked in a cage with violent dogs and those dogs growled at the person, bit the person, ripped him and ate his flesh until he was within an inch of his life, but then someone finally rescued him from the cage. Jut for the Hell of it, we’re going to say that the person never saw another dog in his life after that. Years have gone by, and the person is faced with a dog that he has somehow captured. This individual (who does not believe revenge is immoral) decides he is going to take revenge on canine-kind by torturing this dog, or it could be one of the same (or all of the dogs) that originally did that to him.
He doesn’t know that dogs can actually be extremely loving companions and great friends. His only experience with dogs, ever, is that dogs are evil and tried to bite him to death. For this person, beating a dog is probably not an immoral act…and I might even go as far as to say that the person is not clinically insane, he’s just acting on his only experience with dogs. He thinks that he is morally justified in torturing this dog(s), and so he decides to do so. Why would torturing the animal be immoral to him?
I can prove there’s a tree in the yard by showing it to you.
I can prove the dog ought not to have suffered by showing it to you.
That’s my claim. My claim is that the dog be taken away from the owner. It’s my “suggestion”. Someone else might have a different “suggestion”. Tell me why you think one is better than the other.
Lots of different people with lots of different takes on lots of different moral issues could have posted this. And lots of different minds would not likely be changed.
You take Mo’s words out into the world and they dissolve into the unbearable lightness of becoming.
So he is compelled to weight them down with…more words.
But, in the end, you still have the same tree some folks insist must be cut down in order to pave the way for their moral agenda while other folks insist it must remain standing in order to preserve theirs instead.
So, leave it standing or cut it down? What should we really do?
Animal torture is immoral. Objectively immoral. (
I am not the one reducing morality to a “suggestion”—you are.
The kid might think torturing animals is not immoral. Why, you ask?
You answered your own question. The kid is ignorant, and his experience is limited.
Being ignorant of why your idea is a bad one does not make it a good one.
Unless you provide me with some reason to think why my “suggestion” is a bad one, I’ll have to think my “suggestion” is not just a random suggestion. I am open to the possibility that I am ignorant and that my experience is limited. In such a case my idea would be a bad one and I wouldn’t know it. So… go for it…
Well put. Maybe it’s just a different way to spell dasein.
Pav - Often enough, animals provide a surrogate for humans. Many people who have been abused in one way or another by humans take it out on animals, and not always only on their own. Many times they escalate this behavior to acts towards humans. Some moral claims against these people are based on that, or could be. Then again, we’re not so sure that the people who work in chicken factories are so dangerous. But the cues are not the same. And chicken factories pay wages, and we eat the chickens, so there are some factors that are quite different than for people who abuse pets - pets that are closer to us on the evolutionary scale, in particular. Dogs have mush more human-like responses and emotional lives than do chickens. That’s not to defend chicken-abusers - it’s just a gauge of how dangerous the different individuals might be to society at large. I’m not trying to get all pseudo-scientific about it - but it’s not too difficult to see the differing emotional reactions to the different cases.