on 10/13/00 17:52, Steve at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Do I detect a bit of anthropomorphism here. Do you really want me to
> believe that sharks actually consider what their set of morals is?
>
> Steve
No, that's my point. It is sheer hubris to assume that a moral life is
peculiar to humans. My saying sharks have a set of morals is to deny that
morals (and self-awareness, and intelligence, and sentience) are only
aspects of homo sapiens. I am asserting that sharks and other sentient
intelligent low-entropy sorters do have moral frameworks within which they
survive.
However, it is important to point out that I do not figure that sharks weigh
morals in the same way that we or that any other species does. The sort of
moral framework I imagine for sharks, for example, is more of an intrinsic
one, one that contributes to a shark's basic understanding of its place in
the world and sea. Just because it's different doesn't mean its not moral.
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.
I think it is partly for this actual moral life of animals, and this
understanding of an "appropriate" (read, both practically and morally sound)
place in the cosmos, that slavery, for example, is not common among
non-humans :-) Why then, Adam, if we all have morality, do we humans
continue to experience slavery and genocide to this day? Well, I can
honestly say I believe it has a great deal to do with our separation from
any good sense of what our place in the world should be, our isolation for
"nature", our judeo-christian/abrahamic sense of being the master
controllers of a Global System we will only ever in fact barely understand.
Adam
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|