Meat Morality and Human/Animal/Alien Rights

How can an amoral animal commit an immoral act?It would seem to me that only a moral agent is ruled by morality. An animal that is amoral can not, by definition, commit an immoral act so there is no need to genetically modify these animals to prevent them from consuming other animals. A shark eating a squid is no more immoral than an asteroid slamming into the Earth and wiping out entire groups of species. Plankton do not have a CNS. Whenever there is a conflict between moral imperatives one will have to lose out, or both.

I disagree. Morality only applies to moral agents. In our own court system we excuse people from moral judgement if they are incapable of discerning right from wrong. As an example, Brinkley shot Reagan, but he was not found guilty of attempted assisination because he was nucking futs. In fact, Brinkley may be released in the near future due to the fact that his psychosis appears to be gone. Are we trying to stop the asteroid because the asteroid wants to commit an immoral act or because we want our species to continue?But then again, how much of our morality is based upon the best set of rules needed for a working and self perpetuating society? How much of our morality is tied up in the imperative of survival? My mistake. I wrongly associated "plankton" with "unicellular photosynthesizers". Plankton denotes a lifestyle or niche, not a particular taxonomic group.

Sorry if you feel misquoted. I was trying to show that I disagreed with the premise of your argument, the "if" part. Yes, until such time that they demonstrate their competency. However, we don't punish them for their acts, nor find them to be immoral. It is no different than capturing a cougar found at a day care. The only difference here is that an amoral human probably couldn't survive on it's own so we supply shelter, food, etc. Fair enough. This relates to human morality. It is a crime (i.e. immoral act) to show depraved indifference towards other humans. For example, if your actions lead to a situation that threatens another human being and you do nothing to prevent it you can be convicted of depraved indifference. This can even extend to domesticated pets, such as the awful conditions found at puppy mills.But does this extend to the rest of the animal kingdom? I would say no. I think this is tied in with the Naturalistic fallacy. The fallacy is that if something is natural it is good. That is wrong. I think it can go the other way as well. Just because it happens naturally does not make it bad. Nature is amoral. We look at wolves predating on elk as natural. It is their nature. We humans transcend nature as moral agents. I think that is where the difference is.

I think there is a universal moral code, or at least a common human moral code. Problems arise when we try to apply these morals to complex issues. It's kind of like our understanding of gravity. We understand gravity quite well in a general sense, but we still have trouble modeling gravity in systems with multiple bodies, variable velocities, etc. This doesn't mean that our understanding of gravity is subjective or wrong, only that the complexity of a system makes it difficult to apply. I believe morals are the same. Murder is wrong. People are not put to death for killing in self defense, nor are soldiers put to death for killing enemy combatants on the field of battle. One could argue that there is no difference, but we do treat them differently in today's society.

Are you as aware as a person who actually sees the damage they inflict? That is the question here. Death from a distance vs. Death in front of your face. Do we really understand the consequences of our actions if we don't actually see the consequences of our actions? Are the commanders at the Pentagon affected in the same way by the orders they give as the way in which troops are affected by seeing death firsthand? I have not heard of rearguard commanders suffering from PTSD the same way that front line troops are suffering.

I am arguing that the actions of an amoral being are just actions. Period. I am viewing this through the lens of Hume's Is/Ought problem and the naturalistic fallacy. Moral agents are different in that they go beyond what is, they look beyond the natural state. They can picture how they WISH the world to be. That wishing is morality. An amoral being just is. A moral agent separates what is from what ought to be. Therefore, only the actions of a moral agent can be "right or wrong" in that only they can knowingly go against what ought and ought not to be.

For the purposes of this discussion I am assuming that morality is objective. We can certainly debate the objectivity of morality separately, but in this trollip through the philosophical tulips I am assuming morality to be objective.

More to the point, what ought to be the way that nature acts. For example, should amoral predators be allowed to kill and eat amoral herbivores. Since I have already eliminated "what is" from "what ought to be" I can not claim that predation should be allowed on those ground alone. IOW, I can't have the Is/Ought problem on one hand and go with the Naturalistic Fallacy on the other. So where does that leave me?Well, how do we want nature to be? What is our wish for nature? It seems to me that our current wishes as a species is to leave very little human imprint on nature, to let nature proceed as it has for the 3.5+ billion years that life has been on this planet. We can not justify this by claiming "natural is good", but we do see an inherent good in letting things advance without interference. It is a subtle difference, but I think it is a difference nonetheless.

First off, I will gladly bow to your expertise and experience as to the experience of war. Perhaps the Maher comment was farther off base than I intended. The question I was trying to get at was this:"This technology would also allow the alien species to distant themselves from ethical considerations in the same way that pushing a button to launch a cruise missle distances the Navy ensign from seeing people blown apart."If launching cruise missiles is a poor example we can replace it with other examples that fit better. What I was trying to get at was that technology allows us to distance ourselves from the visual and physical consequences of our actions. Does technology deaden our empathic response? Is the old saw "out of sight, out of mind" in play?

I don't know. Are you? Does seeing another person die by your own hand, regardless of it being in defense of your own life or not, trigger an empathic response? Is that empathic response lessened if you actually don't directly see that person die as a result of your actions?Earlier in this thread it was mentioned that most people have no idea where their meat comes from, how animals are slaughtered, how the carcasses are processed, etc. There are even anecdotal stories of people becoming vegetarians after seeing an animal slaughtered and butchered for the first time. In today's society we keep these processes out of sight for the most part and in doing so people have less of an emotional response to seeing slabs of meat in the store. This seems to indicate that the old saw "out of sight, out of mind" has some bit of truth to it.Could this lessened empathic response due to technology distancing actions from consequences also carry over to our alien scenario? Should we be more afraid of a fleet of robots (e.g. butcherbots) descending on to our planet than we should fleets of spacecraft filled with alien beings capable of the same type of empathic responses we have?