The burden falls on you due to the logical impossibility of proving a
negative.
Steve
--- Adam Gottschalk <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> on 10/13/00 18:06, Steve at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> > First, I don't have to prove animals can't think or don't know right
> from
> > wrong. It is your job to show that they do indeed think and know
> right
> > from wrong.
>
> I am not at all clear on why you think the burden falls on me. Just to
> touch the tip of the iceberg, as I said here:
>
> > Dolphins, dogs and many others have been known to save humans in
> > distress--why? Because their machine is programmed to? No, because
> they have
> > a moral sense of distress and how to respond to it, just as they have
> some
> > degree of built-in understanding of what to eat and how to survive
> > themselves (they recognize the fight for survival and act on that
> > recognition in morally significant ways). Our pets mourn for extended
> > periods, sometimes until the very end, when a friend or family member
> dies;
> > they show all the supposedly "human" characteristics of mourning, they
> howl
> > and moan into they night, they are clearly depressed, they won't eat
> for
> > days, etc.
>
> It is patently obvious to me from all that I know of non-human animals
> that
> they do "feel" their worlds in moral ways: longing, mourning, shame,
> depression, etc. Again, to refer back to Descartes, supposedly one of
> the
> West's greatest thinkers, ludicrously aiming to prove that animals are
> mere
> automatons, poking them with sharp objects and declaring, "Oh, they cry
> out
> in pain, but that's only a built in mechanism. They're programmed to
> make
> that noise." I have always felt all related arguments to distance our
> species from others in some elitist and self-satisfied way stemmed from
> not
> much more than the frightened efforts of mortals hoping for a little bit
> of
> "I win! I'm better!" in their short lives.
>
> No, I think many, many of us, especially if we haven't been too tainted
> by
> all the sublimation that goes on in "maturing," many of us genuinely
> understand that non-human animals _do_ know right from wrong, as they
> feel
> pain and cherish love and affection, as they know what's right for them
> to
> eat (another psychological ill in humankind that I keep getting into
> over
> and over again), etc. A large animal like a bear or an alligator is not
> likely to jump all over you and kill you just for the fun of it. A
> mother
> bear will protect her young, will stand tall and howl and warn you to
> get
> away from her family fast; she makes the decision not to immediately
> pounce
> and destroy though she easily could. An alligator might see you swimming
> along and think, yeah, I could cut that person in half if I wanted, just
> for
> the hell of it, but every case I've ever heard of of alligator attacking
> humans (I have lived and now live again on a lake in Florida) involved
> things like kids taunting the creatures, humans water skiing right over
> an
> alligator's head, or humans mucking about and coming across an
> alligator's
> stash of decomposing meat, or their nest of little ones; even these
> cases
> often involve a lashing out, a scare tactic more than an attack. All I
> can
> say is, and it's not much of a response, is that it seems more obvious I
> think to me and others that animals think, feel, and know what's right,
> "what their place in the cosmos is," and the burden falls on those who
> would
> refute what is so clear.
>
> Down to you say NO and I say Yes.
>
> Adam
>
=====
"In a nutshell, he [Steve] is 100% unadulterated evil. I do not believe in a 'Satan', but this man is as close to 'the real McCoy' as they come."
--Jamey Lee West
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