Cyrene - you ignored some important points that i made - but I think I know why you did.
So we have “moral hardware” - and we all do? So, as far as humans go, this is an absolute? Again, you seem to be saying that this is an absolute, but it is not. (Yeah, I could find the quote). And you are saying that the defective humans should, or maybe should not be held to a moral standard. You say it’s questionable. But that they are held to this standard is the basis of your criticism.
So, in the end, you have said nothing.
I agree that morality is arranged in concentric circles. But not that these circles are absolute - that we have no choice, and that if we re-arrange them, we are stupid and sick. And you have made “absolutely” no argument to that effect. You simple assume that these groups are etched in stone, and that anyone who deviates is stupid and/or sick. This would make most philosophers stupid and/or sick.
They don’t mind seeing people in pain because often times people hurt them more than any animal. Seeing someone in pain gives them pleasure because they could quite possibly despise them. In contrast,an animal doesn’t tell them they’re fat and they should kill themselves.
Cognitively unimpaired people share universal human architecture. If you ran into a bear instead of away from it theres a chance you are missing an adaptation taht the rest of us has, a mental one, if you value animal suffering above the suffering of people with your own genes and friends, theres a very good chance you are missing a part of mental hardware or architecture that most people have.
It doesn’t need to be ‘absolute’.
Yes I have, I have made that claim that mentally fit individuals (barring some pretty special circumstances) have cognitive mechanisms meant to value human suffering (ingroup) above animal suffering. I have said that people who do not react the same way are missing or have faulty mental mechanisms that most humans don’t, its an impairment, whether we should judge this as a moral crime on the same level we would a person without an impairment is irrelevant to my topic, its a moral issue regardless.
If you believe that these cognitive mechanisms don’t universally exist in cognitively fit humans, and that there is massive evidence that they are cross cultural, then yes, the person believing that would be stupid and ignorant, the evidence is everywhere. Any human that gets more cognitive stress out of animal suffering then their family, or friends or ‘in-group’ would BE COGNITIVELY IMPAIRED.
Morality is strongly connected to biology, we have morals because of biology, not inspite of it. Many many of our morals have huge evolutionary advantage, say like, valuing the suffering of other humans in your ingroup, who will in turn value your suffering above that of other animals.
I really don’t have to MAKE this ARGUEMENT anyone with the slightest powers of observation can take it on face value. Humans globally value the suffering of family/friends/ingroups more then animals, people GLOBALLY do this for biological reasons, no one is being universally taught since childhood about the moral philosophy surrounding it, it’s innate.
Thats why your arguement is ridiculous, because its for arguement sake, not because what i’m saying isn’t obvious to anyone who would check. Anyone w ho can watch their own ingroup (friends, family, group, whatever) be chained up and slaughtered for food, as easy as they could watch animals, would be cognitively impaired.
Thats what I said, anyone who wants to argue that isn’t thinking clearly. Not only would it show an emotional/cognitive impairment, it can’t be argued on any kind of rational level. Comparing the suffering by some kind of measuring tape, the person still wouldn’t be justified, even if humans didn’t have this universal architecture.
So, the set of impaired people share architecture within that set, but the set of unimpaired people do not share architecture within their group?
So if you run into enemy fire (becasue that is your job at that moment) instead of away from it, you are impaired?
What are these special circumstances? You seem to be hedging your bets, now. You make a blanket statement, and then back off. But you don’t spell out the exceptions. How am I to know what you are talking about?
If it’s irrelevant how we judge the excpetion morally, then why bring in morality? Why bring in an irrelevant issue? I am trying to take you seriously, Cyrene, but you won’t let me. You back away from every claim you make. Morality means nothing if it doesn’t guide our judgements.
That’s okay, Cyrene. If you don’t want to actually make a case for your position, you don’t have to. If you’d rather simply call eveyone who disagrees with you stupid, go right ahead.
Pssst, Faust, Cyrene is on my ignore list so I do not have to see her posts,that is why I don’t stop her, I learned you can’t. Its the energizer bunny gone berserk. The ignore list is pretty good, its better than sticking your fingers in your ears and goingNNNNaaaahhhnnaaaannnhh or pulling your hair out because, she just does not get it or does not quit. I take she has gotten to the point where the insults are coming out faster than any actual rebuttal?. try the list, man, try the list
People share universal mental architecture, if you are impaired in part of that universal architec ture that all humans share, you’re impaired.
Hah, I already said there are exceptions, are soldiers going to war use cognitive flips to take that humanity away from the person/people that they are killing. People to make killing easier, engage in all sorts of psychological tricks, the main one is somehow stripping the humanity away from your opponent, in situations where soldiers can’t do these, they experience massive psychological damage.
I said it before and i’ll say it again; after ww2 (after even in the middle of slaughters, not 1 in 20 people were firing rifles) they had to engage in systems of psychological preparedness. Do you think they hand a soldier a gun and then tell them to go kill people? No, they psychological train these people for dealing with it, and you ask almost any soldier, what is easier, killing humans (ingroups) or animals. This is why I MADE THE DISTINCTION OF INGROUP TO BEGIN WITH, because I knew you’d take this arguement into an absurd place and tried to circumvent you before you could.
Having fight/flight mental mechanisms activated by other humans, in situations like this humans no longer cognitively view humans as ‘human’ they view them as dangerous animals that must be either avoided or killed. (being seperated from your platoon and being hunted by enemy soldiers for example).
People allowing themselves to project ‘essences’ onto people, we put animals into natural kinds based on their ‘essences’ (a cognitive trait humans have, for more see folk biology). Most times this envolves manipulation of people’s fear/anger, depicting people as predatory or subhuman, like I said, this is grasped intutively by people who make propaganda.
Humans have always had the tendency to treat outgroups as nonhuman, I specifically said INGROUP, for one of those soldiers to go home and do the same thing to their friends/family/ingroup society, would make them impaired.
Its a moral issue and thats not very hard to grasp is it Faust. Deciding whether they are impaired and need treatment is a moral issue.
I honestly don’t know what you’re babbling about. Its an issue of morality, just because we its hard to make judgement calls over impaired people, doesn’t mean that its not an issue of morality. The dots couldn’t be anymore connected for you.
People who have an easier time dealing with ingroup suffering then animal suffering are impaired.
Besides them being impaired, theres no rational ground for them to make the judgement call on.
Because they are impaired its an issue of morality, when a psychopath kills someone it doesn’t cease being an issue of morality because they are cognitively impaired, it becomes more of one.
If someone is emotionally impaired, we can still as a society decide to condemn the action or thought based upon our ACCEPTED moral standards. A murderer is impaired and may not be able to help their actions, we still condemn it on moral grounds, because as a society, at large, we don’t accept those values.
really, whats wrong with you that you can’t follow? I mentioned ingroups early on, people don’t go to war or murder ingroups (outside of crazy domestic disputes, that do happen, but irrelevant)
So again, don’t brring up murder and genocide, the only reason people are systematically capable of it, the cognitive flips to PROTECT from the psychological damage of war (which is rampant, people getting dischaged faster then new members coming into the active military) is by DEHUMANIZING people, by giving them ANIMAL qualities.
People find it EASIER to kill other people WHEN THEY THINK OF THEM AS OTHER ANIMALS, preadtory, ANIMALISTIC, etc. Not only does genocide and war not support your claims about animal/human suffering, it positively DESTROYS it. People use cognitive flips to deal with the psychological horror of killing, if the average human had an easier time killing humans, soldiers, genocidal maniacs and etc, wouldn’t have to continously delude/lie to themselves/cognitive flip.
Do I need to make a case for the obvious? No. Did I? Yes. Did you ever give one sensical arguement towards that case? No. Probably because you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Its simple, no sane human values animal suffering above ingroup suffering. No one would let their children suffer and value that as less note-worthy then animal suffering, no one would do that to their family, friends, or ‘ingroup’ that they valued, if they did, they would have a COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT not shared by MOST humans.
Again if put in the situation of helping a horribly injured human and a horribly injured animal right beside each other, and you only had time to help one, and the human was in your in-group, and you chose to save the animal, not only would you be mentally impaired, but if you weren’t a wretched human being. Seeing as how i’m sure most people would be brought up on legal charges if they let someone die like that to help an animal, I guess the rest of society agrees.
(unless a special circumstance) like you were taking this special monkey or cat to a lab that had the chance to cure somthing, barring that I don’t really think anyone would argue with the above statement.
Would you help the human Faust? If you chose to help some animal above a friend or familymember horribly injured would that not make you cognitively impaired?
Cyrene - you are changing the case. Read the OP - the choice isn’t between an ingroup of humans and (any) animals. A pet is in an ingroup compared to a wild animal. We can choose ingroup members. There is nothing insane about valuing a pet, or making it part of some ingroup. That pet may be valued more than strangers in a faraway land. And they regularly are. Not many people would starve the family dog in order to send alms to the poor half a world away.
You are mixing logical types. That is neither "obvious"ly good, nor part of a sound argument. In any event, what we do here is to make cases - not to simply state the “obvious” and then call all those who disagree stupid.
Again, you seem to ignore the fact that I have taken no position on the issue at hand - my only issue is with your claims, how you make them, and how they are backed by argument. You may remain in denial about this, but you must be the only one here who is.
I would feed my cat before I sent food to an unknown stranger. And I have done so for years. And so have many others.
We can choose our ingroups - or we can bow to the demands of others - others who don’t care about us, but who have their own agendas. You can’t rely on common law here - morality is precedent to that, and so is biology.
Which is why I made the point of ingroup suffering almost right-away, though. The op never made the distinction between outgroups and ingroups, I did fairly early on to avoid this. None the less, even people killing outgroups deal with more psychological damage then people who slaughter animals for food. People STILL need to use cognitive flips, cognitive illusions, certain forms of mental breakdown, to even deal with killing OUTGROUPS.
Even outgroups are more ‘respected’ then animals and pets, if you had to put an outgroup human down by knifing it in the chest until it died, or to knife your dog in the chest until it dies, not many humans are going to be able to deal with killing, even an enemy without engaging in MASSIVE psychological illusions/war with themselves.
Sorry but when soldiers are being taken out of active duty faster then they can recruit people f or it, due to the psychological damage of warfare, its STILL TRUE. The onyl way humans can deal with it period is massive psychological deception/war with themselves and even then many murderers (who aren’t insane) deal with massive psychological issues for the rest of their lives.
After ww2 the army had to specifically train people to over-come their horror at shooting at other people, vietnam attained higher soldier kill rates, higher willingness for soldiers to fire at each other, this doesn’t happen out of thin air though, the people are specfically trained to be able to surpress part of their humanity.
This doesn’t happen to people who work at slaughter-houses consistantly, this doesn’t even happen to people who have been forced to put down pets.
I am not ‘mixing logical types’ whatever the fuck you think that means, I am supporting this arguement on more then one front. 1. It can be morally argued. 2. It can be argued based on the criteria chosen.
Which is even more annoying and irritating. What I said was obvious to anyone who would do the 10minutes of internet research to confirm it. I said people have universal architecture, I said people who value human suffering above animal suffering are cognitively impaired (I talked about ingroups and outgroups fairly early on to make the distinction between in-group pets and outgroup murderers, but even that aside, you’re still wrong, people suffer more killing enemies that they are convinced are the spawn of the underworld. (regardless of whether someone will pay some poor person instead of their dog).
I can rely on the massive statistical information coming from psychological damage in war and animal issues alike, I can talk about how humans value animals based on how much of a face they have. (theres a reason its harder for most people to torture a lamb then a crab, because of ITS FACE). THe more of a face an animal has, statistically, the more likely humans will fawn over them and have problems killing them.
Its annoying talking to you because you take issues with subjects you either don’t understand or don’t care about. If you have an issue with me making posts and refusing to explain them at length, its because anyone that remotely cared about the knowledge would take the ten minutes to find online resources, but thats not your game, your game is to wax nonsensical philsophy every thread, every post. Fine.
Of course vets should feel the same kind of suffering as a doctor who had ‘put down’ a comparable amount of humans? No, you knew from your first post that your posts were BS, you know that soldiers have psychological damage statistically higher then almost any other profession, including putting down household pets personally.
I have an idea, Cyrene - since you are basing your agument on ten minutes of googling, why don’t you provide your sources? maybe then i will know what you are talking about. For instance, i didn’t know that our active fighting force is shrinking, which it must be, if soldiers are being taken out for psychological reasons faster than they can be recruited. I’d like to see those numbers.
I never once said my arguements were based on 10 minutes of googling searching, I said the arguements for them could be found within ten minutes or verified within ten minutes of google searching. Theres a giant difference here and we both know it, purposely trying to be antagonistic.
in ww2 apparently over a million US soldiers had serious psychological problems. ricard a gabriel informs: ground forces 504, 000 lost to war effort, 596, 000 lost for weeks or months, 330, 000 in european theater lost, 464, 000 reported to psychiatric facilities. only 800, 0000 us ground soldiers saw direct combat, of those 37.5percent were lost for psychological reasons.
over 24% of us soldiers in korean war became afflicated. 20% of nam vets (18-54% reported after the war)
Psychological casualties in war is common, its not unheard of for psychological casuality rates to exceed recruitment in warzones. Keep in mind psychological problems are hugely under-reported as well.
But these were people who didn’t necessarily want to kill anyone. They were drafted. This says nothing of people who wish to kill. The OP was about a personal preference.
If you seriously think that in ww2 a great deal of people didn’t want to kill nazi’s then you’re past delusional. If you think a vast number of soldiers didn’t ‘want’ to kill vietnamese you’re delusional.
The US army has concluded most soldiers experience psychological collapse after eighty to ninety days in combat, only 2% don’t, and the psychological examinations of these individuals doesn’t reveal much about them thats good, they are called ‘natural psychopaths’ who had little empathy for fellow humans to begin with.
the point you are trying to make is beyond absurd anyway, like nazi’s or genocidal murderers have a lot more ‘choice’ in thousands and thousands of cases then drafted soldiers. Genocidal maniacs may enjoy cutting up babies and etc, that doesn’t mean that if they rebelled they wouldn’t be murdered for it.
My father’s generation went to war in WWII. Once there, the vast majority just wanted to get home. They didn’t want to kill anyone - they wanted to get home. There is overwhelming evidence for that.
You are just making this up as you go along.
You got nothing here.
There are many factors in combat that cause stress. The act of killing is only a part of that. If you can’t cite studies that separate these factors, you have no evidence.
