Since there has been more of a discussion on Socratic questioning in a couple of the posts, one of which was mine, I thought we could apply this reasoning to life, non-human animal life in particular. So I’ll start it and see where it goes:
If any human cannot initiate life-threatening or life-ending force against any other human because that human has a natural right to life, how is it that the same force against a non-human animal species is permitted when these animals are just as alive as humans are?
The criteria for non-aggression isn’t life. That is too broad.
Or else eating a banana would also be murder. Plant life is alive after all.
Also, if a lion kills gazelle few people are going to call for it to be thrown into prison. Obviously, there must be a distinction.
Lierre Keith points out in her book ‘vegetarian myth’:
“What do plants eat? They eat dead animals; that’s the problem. For me that was a horrifying realization. You want to be an organic gardener, of course, so you keep reading ‘Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil…’
All right. Well, what does the soil want to eat? Well, it wants manure, and it wants urine, and it wants blood meal and bone meal. And I…could not face that. I wanted my garden to be pure and death-free. It didn’t matter what I wanted: plants wanted those things; they needed those things to grow.”
and
“Life is literally a process of one creature eating another, whether it’s bacteria breaking down plants or animals, plants strangling each other, animals going for the throat, or viruses attacking animals. “All of nature is a conjugation of the verb ‘to eat,’” in the words of William Ralph Inge.”
LOL. So in that case, if everything is relative, you must agree that if anybody wanted to steal from you, it ought to be permitted and not prevented, right? Or does force determine who lives? For instance, you could use your relative stance that theft is wrong (presumably, of course) and physically prevent the thief from stealing. Is liberty relative too?
“if anybody wanted to steal from you, it ought to be permitted and not prevented, right?”
No, it ought to be permitted, you also ought to give me money while you’re preventing others from stealing from me. You ought to make payments using bills of twenty or higher. If you’re going to make payments digitally you ought to make payments divisible by five.
“Or does force determine who lives?”
It’s in the nature of our very universe that physical conditions always determine who lives and who dies. If one individual has extensive enough a control over the physical conditions in which another man lives then he will always determine whether or not the other man lives. Morality and rights ultimately have nothing to do with it.
“For instance, you could use your relative stance that theft is wrong (presumably, of course) and physically prevent the thief from stealing.”
Of course I can, is this impossible if morality is objective?
Relative, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary, means “existing or possessing a specified characteristic only in comparison to something else; not absolute.” This definition suffices for my purposes.
So again, I must ask: do humans have a right to life?
Well then yes, everything which is based upon human opinion, like morality, is relative to that person’s understanding of the world and his preferences.
Humans do not have an objective right to life. Human do have the right to life according to some people.
Animals are like any natural resource such as water or rocks or soil trees etc.
First a book:
Ive only read parts of it on my ereader before it broke
An animal’s life is not equal to a human’s life.
Human exceptionalism; meaning that humans are not animals, since humans know the difference between right and wrong.
“Because we are unquestionably a unique species–the only species capable of even contemplating ethical issues and assuming responsibilities–we uniquely are capable of apprehending the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, proper and improper conduct toward animals. Or to put it more succinctly if being human isn’t what requires us to treat animals humanely, what in the world does?” -Wesley J smith
Isnt that a self contradictory sentence?
I think that absolute truth exists.
And yes, there are some relative aspects of life also.
If we assume the existence of a single universe which abides by immutable laws regardless of time and space (and yes this is an assumption) then there are still things which are relative, such as my preference for ice cream over chocolate ice cream. The weight of either of these wonderful delicacies, however, is objective. Should I eat one or the other? Depends upon preference, because ought has no physical existence or something to base it off of. Therefore morality is something entirely dependent upon human opinion, unlike weight, since that has an external and observable standard upon which to judge its existence.
“Do you have it? If yes, where did you get it from and where do you keep it?”
I keep mine in my back pocket, or in my suitcase when I’m traveling because the TSA won’t allow it for a carry-on item. Where the hell do you keep yours exactly?
Ultimately it means what one ought to do under certain situations. It take some f***ing around with a thesaurus to get there though. That’s part of what I hate about talking about morality, good and evil, and all the nonsense surrounding ethical practice. It’s pretty meaningless all told, and the hundreds of thousands of pages written on the subject don’t change this fact.
The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “Principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior or the extent to which an action is right or wrong.” Fine by me.
To say that it is means that morality held by any human is moral because he or she perceives it to be. So therefore if person Y thinks that killing is not wrong and kills person X, who here is in the right or wrong (sorry if this is a bit loaded: instead of kills, steals)? Each one has a different subset of values upon the subject of murder.
