A previous topic is getting off track. Is it possible for moderators to work their magic and move relevant comments to this new thread?
To answer the question in the title, no.
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No. Non-human animals do not debate the effects of their actions in terms of being good or bad in any abstract sense (as far as we know). Their actions are amoral, not judged on a good to bad axis. We may label their actions good or bad, but that’s our issue, not theirs.
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Yes, that seems to be the consensus of all but one person.
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Our system of ethics is based, at its core, on our ability to feel compassion. When we see another being in distress we feel compassion and are driven to help. Without compassion, we wouldn’t even be discussing ethics, as we would have no feeling of care for the suffering of others. I would say that ethical arguments apply to the actions of other animals only insofar as they can feel and act on compassion. We know that many animals can and will do this, while many others are incapable. Animals who are incapable of compassion exist outside of the system of ethics as we know it.
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Most scientific approaches to ethics are guided by
(a) self-consistency / non-contradiction
(b) statistical similarity to human social norms
So from (a) we can try to put something together, but (b) is always goes to be a matter of taste.
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I got in trouble way back in college (left in 07) for arguing that human rights and ethics was a useful fiction and that while I liked them, I couldn’t pretend they were an objective truth.
So no, I don’t think ethical arguments apply. I get the argument from Rawl’s veil of ignorance and appreciate a society that takes that into account but I don’t think they’re a bright shining star that is “The Truth” and I certainly don’t think applying human ethical concepts to animal interactions is useful as far as understandign them. And yes I consider humans animals. I like laws banning murder, sexual assaults, etc, but I dont’ pretend those are “unnatural” or against natural law either
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see, I’d do a hard disagree on that. If we know that total disregard to other animals equates to a total disregard to other humans we, as a society of human animals, are well served to take notice of that and act on it in some way.
I meant that ethics only applies to the actions of other animals insofar as they can feel and act on compassion.
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see, I think that’s a relevant distinction. But maybe I’m splitting hairs and arguing about angles dancing on pinheads again. Arguing about penalizing animals for being what they are to other animals is dumb. But expecting human animals not to care about what other animals can do do them (i.e: spray for mosquitos, take precautions against big cats and bears, etc) is also a total waste of time. I love predators but I’d also shoot a bear or cougar that was trying to eat me given half a chance.
Ethics apply to moral agents. Moral agents are held accountable for their transgressions under the law and social conventions. Moral agency requires the ability to tell right from wrong and some adult humans are deemed unable to make the distinction and are therefore not considered to be moral agents. Can animals be ethical? Hypothetically, yes, if they could be shown to possess moral agency. I don’t think we’ve got there yet.
This is getting close to a discussion of ethics that has significant real-world implications. Artificial intelligence is not yet sophisticated enough to be considered a life-form but there is every reason to suppose that AIs that not only satisfy the admittedly rather murky definitions for life but are capable of abstract reasoning are not only possible but likely in the not too distant future. Moral agency for machines? Wait for it.
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To go on a tangent: first of all, I have never really found things like forest bathing to be therapeutic to me. I’ve never understood those people who shudder with ecstasy while doing nothing except stroking blobs of moss for hours or staring at a houseplant’s flower (also for hours). They seem to be behaving more like aliens than humans to my perception, if I am to be honest.
I suspect that my perceptual neurobiology is fundamentally different from many people.
I mean, mosses are rather comfortable to the touch and their ecology is pretty fascinating, but I have never found their texture soothing enough to warrant being stroked by me for more than a few halfhearted seconds (and stroking mosses with one’s hands is an objectively inefficient way to acquire data about their fascinating ecology).
…Before you ask, this has nothing to do with a lack of mindfulness or my inability to be “in tune with nature”. I am very self-aware of both the organisms around me and my own mind, and I can instantly ID most insects/angiosperms I encounter (if not to species, then to morphospecies).
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Anyways, tangent aside. I’m not a fan of the whole “nature-apologist” rhetoric that’s been dominant on this forum thread. Conscious taxa murdering and attacking each other all day is not something to be romanticized, or labeled “not horrible”, or considered something that ought-to-happen-in-a-utopia for the “cycle of life”. Nature may be amoral but that doesn’t make all its murdering okay.
Look, I am well aware that if carnivores did not eat herbivores the latter would defoliate everything and cause all sorts of imbalances. Deleting all the wolves is a terrible idea (and this is why wolf populations are being protected by ecologists).
But its necessariness doesn’t make it ethical/nonhorrible - it only makes it a necessary evil. Preventing wolf extinction is not A Utopian Thing To Do but it has to be done anyways because there is no sane alternative available as far as science can tell. The laws of physics do not currently allow utopias to exist, after all (and this is why I hate the laws of physics with every fiber of my self).
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Also, just because something is horrible doesn’t prevent it from being fascinating/beautiful. I think it’s very cool and brilliant how semelparous salmonids are “designed” to maximize their genetic fitness by investing so much energy into reproduction that their bodies decay inside-out before they even stop breathing. It’s just so… efficient at accomplishing its goals that I have to admire it. And I find it similarly fascinating how cell phones and toothbrushes are designed to fall apart prematurely so customers buy more of them and make more $ for the company, even though I of course hate Throwaway Culture Capitalism.
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With all that being said, the only taxa I voluntarily have in my house are autotrophs. Watching animals torture themselves and each other all day isn’t traumatic for me but it… doesn’t look nice in my living spaces.
Don’t get me wrong, I love watching tasteful violence! But when beetles and spiders do it it’s all melodramatic and dark and emotional and that clashes with the aesthetic of my favorite desk, okay? Competing plants niche-segregate more “geometrically” and that suits the equally minimalist aesthetic of my room decor.
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(Golly gee, what a huge text wall I just made!)
Ethics were created by humans, for humans. To me it’s nonsensical to describe a natural process as either ethical or unethical. Ethics only extend to nature in relation to its human components. For example, I would hardly describe a European Starling displacing a native North American bird from its nest as unethical behavior, but I would say purposely introducing European Starlings to North America was unethical.
The word “horrible” is subjective, especially in this context. While you have your definition, you can hardly expect everyone else to share it. In this context, I would additionally argue the word “murder” is subjective. I’m not sure if your definition of murder extends to herbivory as well as predation, but I can’t see how you could separate the two. Both involve either the death or harm of another organism.
Finally, I can’t see what purpose it serves to call predation horrible. As you said, it is necessary. What does it matter if its good or bad or neither. It just is. You describe preventing wolf extinction as the only sane action, but are we supposed to be simultaneously disgusted by wolf conservation?
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“Murder” is used here simply to mean “killing”. If you see any connotations in that that’s your business, not mine. I even occasionally use it to refer to plants being killed by other plants or by herbivores but I clearly have no problem with plant death.
Also yes yes I know nonhuman animals aren’t inherently evil, blah blah they’re only doing what the things they were built to do blah blah nonhuman animals don’t understand human moral codes anyways. Doesn’t prevent them from engaging in ethically undesirable behavior, even if they are not to blame for it.
I probably sound like one of those rabidly overzealous activists when I ask this, but what, then, do you think the point of nonwild animal welfare is? Not a rhetorical question; I’m merely in need of clarification about your stance.
Human-human ethics have objectively quantifiable benefits for humans whenever they aren’t botched, reciprocal cooperation being an advantageous strategy for organisms as long as it’s not kleptoparasitized by selfish individuals, you get the idea.
And if the newspapers can be trusted, laboratory rodents may rescue trapped conspecifics for no obvious benefit (and seemingly have innate empathy-related emotions which encourage them to do so); apparently this is because natural selection makes altruism indirectly advantageous in rodents too.
And humans improving the psychological health of captive nonhuman vertebrates can have tangible benefits for both the humans and their captives. But not always.
Why is mistreatment of, say, a dog considered deeply unethical and subject to heavy punishment whether or not the mistreatment resulted in ecosystemic/societal damage? Causing completely-unnecessary and easily avoidable pain has no benefits and is arguably pointless. But under a condition where no ecosystemic or societal harm comes from the dog’s misery, why spend so much effort punishing the mistreater? Every dollar and minute used up on punishing such cases is a dollar/minute that was not dedicated to, let’s say, conservation or something. And in the grand scheme of things, if the dog’s misery was disadvantageous to no one except the dog itself, then should its life even matter to anyone besides itself?
Hi moderators I swear I’m trying my best to stay on topic!
Animal abuse has a human component, therefore ethical arguments apply to it. Also, animal abuse serves no purpose, while natural predation does as you yourself describe.
My counter question is, what purpose does applying ethics to wild animals serve? Can we hold wild animals accountable in the same way we would for a human who beats his dog?
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Although I’m not the one you asked this question to, I’d like to give the answer a shot anyways (I did already note that I have a fondness for philosophy).
I think the simplest answer I can provide off the top of my head is: respect and obligation. Non-wild animals have been dragged into our society by us and as long as we are forcing them to be part of human society we should apply the same moral code as we do to the rest of society. They don’t have enough agency (and, in most cases we don’t know about their capacity for self-consciousness and thus their ability to rationalize which is vital in ethics) to opt out so, as long as we are opting them in it can be argued we are obligated to respect them on the same level.
I realize that “wild” animals can also show up in societies – say, a bear raiding a trash can – but if not forcibly dragged into our lives by us then we don’t have quite the same moral obligation either.
Of course, this can certainly be argued and I’ll be interested in others’ input.
On another note (and to slightly get back to the main thread), this is an excellent point and one that I think several of us were already dancing around with words like “tragic” instead of “horrible”. Sure, there’s some distasteful stuff in nature but we can accept those things as they are, in the world we have, knowing that there is no utopia (but we can still try to find respite in an imperfect world).
I actually had very much the same experience and still to this day don’t receive the same feeling in different “natural” environments. There certainly does seem to be something almost instinctual about it, but I also agree that in the end, even if it’s not ideal:
A dog is nothing like a wild animal in the mountains, it’s an element of our society (albeit a non-human one) and as such it enjoys rights that guarantee its wellbeing for the sake of harmonious coexistence within the community.
Still, the persecution of animal abuse is more about the abuser than the victim.
An individual who revels in torture and neglect is not fit for living among other people, their sense of morality is incongruent with common human values and must either be reformed with punishment or banished from the group.
The abuse of wild animals is also punished, but hunting isn’t as long as regulations are followed.
That’s because the intention of the perpetrator is of primary importance, even if abuse and hunting both lead to the animal’s suffering/death.
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I just said that wild animals do not fully comprehend the nature of their actions and thus cannot be held morally responsible for them, utopianism or no utopianism. Holding wild ones accountable would not only lack benefits for all parties but be irrational and waste time/resources.
My argument was never about holding wild animals accountable. It was about living in a predation-powered ecosystem being a suboptimal but necessary outcome for such animals (“our ecosystem is not the most ethical of all hypothetically possible ecosystems, but no human has seemingly ever figured out a way to implement anything less unethical; the local optima are not the global optima”). Note that local and global are used metaphorically here and don’t refer to geographic localness/globality.
I would be tempted to say “for their benefit, and not necessarily ours”, but that just raises a whole lot of other questions. Why bother helping any other entity, human or nonhuman, wild or nonwild, if it 1. has neither direct nor indirect benefits to oneself 2. costs resources, including time, that could have otherwise been used to gain benefits (direct or indirect) for one’s self? In other words: let us suppose a hypothetical person exists, and that this person causes unnecessary harm to a small number nonhuman (and only nonhuman) conscious organisms but is unerringly careful to do so in a way which doesn’t compromise the stability of wild ecosystems, human society, you name it. Let us also assume that, while administering a minor societal punishment to said person costs no resources, administering a major punishment would cost many resources, and that if not utilized for this purpose these same resources could be used to improve the lives of a large number of already-happy conscious-animal-non-harming people. Therefore, not wasting one’s time and effort on administering the major societal punishment would cause a net gain in life-improvement if we consider the large number of people benefitting to outweigh the moral value of the few organisms harmed. So why does popular opinion still seem to agree that the major punishment should be carried out and that the perpetrator of the harm is “evil” despite its resource-costliness?
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Long story short: I am rather confused about a philosophical scenario resembling in many aspects (but not identical to, I believe) the Nozick Utility Monster thought experiment. My (perhaps weak justification) for why I took the trouble to go on such a massive off-topic tangent is that I have realized my confusion about ethics has prevented me from satisfactorily answering the original question this forum topic was created to address. Also, I have not managed to finish addressing every point made in reply to me because I seem to have some sort of near-unavoidable tendency to write massive text walls filled with run-on sentences.
If you’d rather read a short but oversimplified-for-brevity’s-sake version of why nature causing conscious wildlife to be sad doesn’t prevent me from finding “respite” in it:
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According to my own definition of respite I don’t exactly find any true respite in it, but I do experience a negligibly small benefit from finding natural entities beautiful/fascinating. Consider that respite if you will.
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Just because an organism is “designed” to cause and/or experience massive amounts of physical pain or emotional distress doesn’t prevent it from being beautiful or fascinating to me.
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