More on animal rights

[Faust]

“Humane” just means “kind, caring and compassionate”. “Unhumane” means, well, not humane.

In answer to your recent question - I think it’s better to die quickly than to suffer your whole life and die slowly, but that’s a pure judgement call.

[SinisterUrge]

@faust

“Humane” just means “kind, caring and compassionate”. “Unhumane” means, well, not humane.

In answer to your recent question - I think it’s better to die quickly than to suffer your whole life and die slowly, but that’s a pure judgement call.

“Humane” just means “kind, caring and compassionate”. “Unhumane” means, well, not humane.

In otherwords these words which describe sentiments merely revolve around relative feelings and nothing more.

There is nothing beyond myself or another person commanding me to choose one over the other.

In answer to your recent question - I think it’s better to die quickly than to suffer your whole life and die slowly, but that’s a pure judgement call.

Judgement being another extension of relative feelings.

[Faust]

The definitions of words do not drop from the sky, no. Humans make them up. No argument there. They describe moral judgements, which also do not drop from the sky. We make those up, too.

Hope that clears things up for you.

[Wonderer]

@SinisterUrge

@Wonderer

@SinisterUrge

Why does it matter in how you kill a deer when the end result of going after the deer is still nonetheless the act of killing?

let’s pretend that to survive you must kill a deer…

would you kill the deer fast and painlessly, or throttle him with a fork?

Why does it matter in how I kill the deer when the goal of my encounter with it is it’s death for my own gain?

If I want to kill the deer it seems to me that it really doesn’t matter what means I use to my own disposal so long as the task of killing it is complete.

it is because the rights of the deer entile him to the least amount of suffering possible. respect for the deer leads us to let him die as painlessly as possible…

If a cannibal was going to eat you, would you rather him eat you alive or kill you first.

[SinisterUrge]

@faust

The definitions of words do not drop from the sky, no. Humans make them up. No argument there. They describe moral judgements, which also do not drop from the sky. We make those up, too.

Hope that clears things up for you.

And that which one creates another can destroy.

[SinisterUrge]

it is because the rights of the deer entile him to the least amount of suffering possible. respect for the deer leads us to let him die as painlessly as possible…

If a cannibal was going to eat you, would you rather him eat you alive or kill you first.

What rights is the deer entitled to?

If a cannibal was going to eat you, would you rather him eat you alive or kill you first.

Why would it matter? In both instances I would die in the end result.

[Wonderer]

@SinisterUrge

@faust

The definitions of words do not drop from the sky, no. Humans make them up. No argument there. They describe moral judgements, which also do not drop from the sky. We make those up, too.

Hope that clears things up for you.

And that which one creates another can destroy.

you cannot destroy my beliefs. and i cannot force them on you…

Morals are about doing what we think is right, which is entirely optional.

[SinisterUrge]

@Wonderer

@SinisterUrge

@faust

The definitions of words do not drop from the sky, no. Humans make them up. No argument there. They describe moral judgements, which also do not drop from the sky. We make those up, too.

Hope that clears things up for you.

And that which one creates another can destroy.

you cannot destroy my beliefs. and i cannot force mine on you…

Morals are about doing what we think is right, which is entirely optional.

you cannot destroy my beliefs. and i cannot force mine on you…

If one man kills and enslaves another I think the result of the dead or enslaved individual would be the destruction of his being along with all his beliefs.

In such a scenario the one man’s will was forced on the other.

Morals are about doing what we think is right, which is entirely optional.

If everything is optional centered around relative feelings what is the use in having the dualism of right and wrong?

[Wonderer]

@SinisterUrge

it is because the rights of the deer entile him to the least amount of suffering possible. respect for the deer leads us to let him die as painlessly as possible…

If a cannibal was going to eat you, would you rather him eat you alive or kill you first.

What rights is the deer entitled to?

the same rights you give your fellow man in terms of not causing uncessary harm

@SinisterUrge

If a cannibal was going to eat you, would you rather him eat you alive or kill you first.

Why would it matter? In both instances I would die in the end result.

it matters because if we grant others the same courtesy’s we would grant ourselves then everyone would be happy

[SinisterUrge]

@Wonderer

@SinisterUrge

it is because the rights of the deer entile him to the least amount of suffering possible. respect for the deer leads us to let him die as painlessly as possible…

If a cannibal was going to eat you, would you rather him eat you alive or kill you first.

What rights is the deer entitled to?

the same rights you give your fellow man in terms of not causing uncessary harm

@SinisterUrge

If a cannibal was going to eat you, would you rather him eat you alive or kill you first.

Why would it matter? In both instances I would die in the end result.

it matters because if we grant others the same courtesy’s we would grant ourselves then everyone would be happy

the same rights you give your fellow man in terms of not causing uncessary harm

What is unnecessary harm?

it matters because if we grant others the same courtesy’s we would grant ourselves then everyone would be happy

You may wish that all you want but to be honest I don’t think such a ideal is realistic.

[Wonderer]

@SinisterUrge

If one man kills and enslaves another I think the result of the dead or enslaved individual would be the destruction of his being along with all his beliefs.

i die but my ideas still exist.

@SinisterUrge

Morals are about doing what we think is right, which is entirely optional.

If everything is optional centered around relative feelings what is the use in having the dualism of right and wrong?

alot of the time right and wrong is determined by the majority

but having the difference is in the interest of promoting wide spread content.

[Wonderer]

@SinisterUrge

[

the same rights you give your fellow man in terms of not causing uncessary harm

What is unnecessary harm?

let’s say i’m a cannibal and i have you to eat.

no matter what you’re gonna die.

If i tortured you before i ate you instead of killing you quickly, you will have experienced a great amount of pain.

This torture is a prime example of unnecessary harm.

[Cyrene]

We make those up, too.

We don’t only ‘make up’ morals, as plenty of experimentation shows.

[SinisterUrge]

i die but my ideas still exist.

Do they?

alot of the time right and wrong is determined by the majority

And?

but having the difference is in the interest of promoting wide spread content.

Unrealistic.

[SinisterUrge]

@Wonderer

@SinisterUrge

[

the same rights you give your fellow man in terms of not causing uncessary harm

What is unnecessary harm?

let’s say i’m a cannibal and i have you to eat.

no matter what you’re gonna die.

If i tortured you before i ate you instead of killing you quickly, you will have experienced a great amount of pain.

This torture is a prime example of unnecessary harm.

It doesn’t really matter because in both instances the end result will be my death and death equals the pain of losing my own life.

[SinisterUrge]

@Cyrene

We make those up, too.

We don’t only ‘make up’ morals, as plenty of experimentation shows.

Such as?

[Faust]

Even birth leads to death, Sinister. I’m not sure you’re thinking this one through.

[SinisterUrge]

@faust

Even birth leads to death, Sinister. I’m not sure you’re thinking this one through.

Birth leads to death no denying that. What should I be paying attention to in this context?

[Cyrene]

@SinisterUrge

@Cyrene

We make those up, too.

We don’t only ‘make up’ morals, as plenty of experimentation shows.

Such as?

The gap between people’s convictions and their justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.

When psychologists say “most people” they usually mean “most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.” But in this case it means most of the 200,000 people from a hundred countries who shared their intuitions on a Web-based experiment conducted by the psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and the biologist Marc Hauser. A difference between the acceptability of switch-pulling and man-heaving, and an inability to justify the choice, was found in respondents from Europe, Asia and North and South America; among men and women, blacks and whites, teenagers and octogenarians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and atheists; people with elementary-school educations and people with Ph.D.’s.

Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost. The impulse against roughing up a fellow human would explain other examples in which people abjure killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep it afloat.

By itself this would be no more than a plausible story, but Greene teamed up with the cognitive neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen and several Princeton colleagues to peer into people’s brains using functional M.R.I. They sought to find signs of a conflict between brain areas associated with emotion (the ones that recoil from harming someone) and areas dedicated to rational analysis (the ones that calculate lives lost and saved).

When people pondered the dilemmas that required killing someone with their bare hands, several networks in their brains lighted up. One, which included the medial (inward-facing) parts of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in emotions about other people. A second, the dorsolateral (upper and outer-facing) surface of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in ongoing mental computation (including nonmoral reasoning, like deciding whether to get somewhere by plane or train). And a third region, the anterior cingulate cortex (an evolutionarily ancient strip lying at the base of the inner surface of each cerebral hemisphere), registers a conflict between an urge coming from one part of the brain and an advisory coming from another.

But when the people were pondering a hands-off dilemma, like switching the trolley onto the spur with the single worker, the brain reacted differently: only the area involved in rational calculation stood out. Other studies have shown that neurological patients who have blunted emotions because of damage to the frontal lobes become utilitarians: they think it makes perfect sense to throw the fat man off the bridge. Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.

• steven pinker

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people almost have incest avoidance mechanisms to avoid incest (which largely depends on cohabitation in childhood) specific brbain mechanisms to avoid/detect it and all this stuff, not that it can’t be averted or subverted or whichever, but people cross-culturally are morally appalled by incest (at least in comparison with non incestual sex with close relatives).

Theres other examples.

Not that cultures don’t wildly influence moral beliefs (only an idiot would think otherwise) but its not just somthing we ‘make’ up. Like we have an inherent mechanism to produce language, we have a universal moral ‘grammar’, that makes people set up morals, which is highly dependent on environment, but a lot of shit is pretty constant across cultures too.

[Cyrene]

So anyone who says that morality having a biological link isn’t established is an idiot. (Aka faust).

The brain area in rational calculation lights up when we’re killing someone from indirect to save other lives. But given a new context (manhandling someone) emotional systems evolved to prevent casual killing of innocents lights up.

The only reason for that is because hunter-gatherers in the past who would manhandle innocent people in X situation, probably weren’t viewed as stable or trustworthy members of the group.