I think someone brought it up that that's the sort of question that would have to be broached in the hypothetical situation of meeting intelligent extraterrestrial life with radically different views on "morality" from ours.
Which is interesting. How would you go about policing dolphins like that in a way that didn't radically interfere with their lives?
Becuse if they're intelligent enough to ask for emancipation then they're presumably intelligent enough to understand our morality, or at least that we have a system morality/rules. At that point how do we interact with them? A lot of our morality applies beyond our own citizens. Hell if we develop the ability to communicate with them what's to stop them asking for our help in certain situations?
From a political perspective it'd be like there suddenly being a mass of heavily mentally disabled people with no citizenship just kinda wandering the planet, do we stop them killing each other? Do we have that right? Do we have the right to stand by and let intelligent beings kill other intelligent being for fun? Do we have a responsibility to care for them the same way we would humans who were intellectual stunted to the same level of intelligence?
Even beyond the heavy science fiction stuff, dolphin communication is presumably developed enough that they can call for help, if we started to communicate with them and one was then attacked by others and asked for help what the fuck do we do?
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranEither they're animals who need our help or they are sapient beings who are more than capable of having their own civilization independent from us, thank you very much. You can't have it both ways. What gives us any right to tell them how to behave?
edited 7th Apr '16 4:18:04 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The same thing that gives us the right to tell Saudi Arabia how to behave?
If they're simply another civilisation of intelligent being then that carries a lot of weight, do we acknowledge them? Do we sanction them? Can member of their civilisation come to ours asking for refuge? Do we have people making speeches about "Dolphinland's" terrible Dolphin Rights record?
Dude... Dolphin asylum seekers, I kinda want that fiction now.
edited 7th Apr '16 4:23:44 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThere's this nice facility, I forget the name, they keep rescued dolphins there. It's set up so they can easily leave to the wild if they wanted to, and so far they seem to have decided they prefer it in there. Probably because they realize they're disabled and they're getting taken care of.
Something that no one has mentioned yet is that there are different types of cognition. I can identify one necessary test for sapience: Displaying any type of learning strategy other than trial and error.
I don't understand why people seem to be linking sapience, or the possession of wisdom, with moral value. Sentience, a subset thereof, the possession of feelings, seems far more relevant. Possessing the ability to feel pain automatically gives a creature moral weight under vanilla utilitarianism and requires that they be respected. Kantianism or social contract theory might require some form of sapience, but utilitarianism most definitely does not.
As to whether or not insects have either sentience or sapience, well, they are too efficient. Their brains have an itty bitty living space. And most of that is occupied doing what a computer would do if it was tasked with control of and responsibility for an organic body. No room for the doing of the philosophy implied by sapience or feeling of the pain implied by sentience or whatnot.
I don't really understand the association between practicality and whether or not it is right to be cruel to animals. We are nice to them—because of tradition? Either it always makes sense to be cruel to animals or it never makes sense to be cruel to animals. Morality is not a practical thing. All moral theories are associated with the concept of respect, which is a thoroughly impractical idea, as it implies that sacrifices may need to be made. The only exception I can think of is the theory of rational self interest. In all other cases, respect implies we should never be cruel to animals.
I also don't understand the idea behind what's natural is what's right (or wrong). That falls in the same category as "It's right because god says so", and for no other reason. (Which, to be fair, is a moral theory.) Nature, to me, seems like a game of dice. It's random. We have three choices: Let the dice fall where they may, intervene to improve the outcome, or intervene to worsen the outcome. I actually think this is the point of free will, if you think about it. If nature is right, then free will is wrong.
I also noticed that no one has proposed the alternative to a binary model of sapience. (or sentience for that matter.) Since sapience is the ability to possess wisdom, and one can be more or less wise, perhaps one can be more or less sapient. Of everything said in this thread so far, true or false, I have found nothing to refute this claim.
As an example, consider learning strategies. Perhaps trial and error qualifies one for degree one sapience. Demonstrating deduction would qualify for degree two, and existential inquiry would qualify for degree three.
edited 7th Apr '16 8:21:58 PM by war877
First, if the calf is male, then it is somewhat unlikely that he will have any value aside from being sold for meat, because his milk production will probably be very low. Second, the problem is not at all that the calf takes the cow's milk, the problem is that you can't own an infinity of cows, unless you have unlimited range to herd them. If you have n cows at year 1, considering a 50/50 sex ratio, then your number of cows will increase far too quickly if you keep all your females... Even if there is mortality, cow life expectancy is not short enough to make it necessary to keep all female calves.
And by the way when I say "kill" I mean "send to the slaughterhouse", not "gratuitously murder for fun". It is not a "drown the last kitten" situation, but producing milk still is a business where most newborns are destined to being killed for meat before reaching their first year.
Note that I was originally referring to that point:
...just to say that they really weren't that different. Plus, since someone mentioned burgers, it is typically the kind of meat that is produced with "low-quality cows", ie milking cows that cannot produce enough anymore. T-Bone steaks and other high-quality parts are another matter, those come from cows that were raised for meat production, but I highly doubt Burger King, Mc Donald's or Taco Bell only pick burgers produced from these cows. Ditto with frozen prepared meals.
edited 8th Apr '16 2:09:09 AM by Julep
I just want to point out, that the main reason we have to hold back on enforcing our morality, is that we might be wrong, and force doesn't discriminate well between right and wrong.
But past a point this concern vanishes. Paperclip maximizing isn't a moral theory, just because it's a consistent value system, that some alien (probably artificial) mind could have. The baby-eater's values in Three Worlds Collide is closer, but again it's more likely we're simply not talking about the same thing.
If our hypothetical dolphin culture can get along without bothering us, then we have no inherent moral right to bother it about its internal values. Hell, considering how many dolphins we murder every year, they'd have every right to demand concessions and/or reparations from us. When was the last time a dolphin caught a human in a net?
The Babyeater scenario is the same way. However repugnant we find the situation, we are absolutely not in the right if we choose to force them to live by our rules.
edited 8th Apr '16 12:23:22 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"According to me.
Morality is, of course, subjective. Rights are things that we declare to be true and then make true by use of force, so if we can force dolphins to follow our rules, or the Babyeaters to stop eating babies, then whether we had the right to do so is moot.
I just hope that there aren't any Superhappies out there to observe us jailing dolphins or forcibly genetically engineering Babyeaters and deciding whether we ought to be punished for those acts.
edited 8th Apr '16 1:42:43 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I don't want to cause suffering. I really couldn't care less whether that's "right" or not.
Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.Suffering is inevitable, unless we somehow cross the singularity and eliminate privation. One can certainly desire to prevent unnecessary suffering, but to prevent it entirely is impossible; the attempt makes you either an ascetic living on a mountain or a neurotic wreck, ironically inflicting suffering upon yourself in order to avoid doing it to others.
edited 8th Apr '16 12:49:34 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Believe me, I know. But I wouldn't exactly be the first person who's aspiring towards an impossible goal, would I?
You'll have to forgive me for not applauding.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"We could unpack that one over in the philosophy thread; getting into it here is an entire side argument that I don't feel like having again and again. Morality is subjective; it does not exist anywhere that one can point to and empirically validate. I cannot dissolve a rock in a lab and find morality. I cannot dissect your brain and find the morality in it.
To claim that morality exists as an external fact usually unpacks into: "I believe in a divine being that has imposed a fixed morality on the universe; further, I believe that I have been granted some special insight into what this being thinks should be moral, and I am charged with making everyone else go along with it whether they want to or not."
Morality arises in our shared subjective experiences and becomes adopted by a society via a memetic process. We use our collective ability to apply violence to enforce it upon those who refuse to agree.
edited 8th Apr '16 2:14:48 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"A side argument it may be, but whether morality is subjective or objective directly impacts whether or not it would be wrong to impose our beliefs on liminally sapient dolphins.
It also impacts the question of whether or not asking for emancipation is the right dividing line between the in crowd and the out crowd.
Dare you to repeat that last paragraph in a more appropriate thread.
edited 8th Apr '16 2:24:20 PM by war877
Whatever floats your boat.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I would consider this a case of Blue-and-Orange Morality more or less. The thing is, when it comes different peoples, you can argue there is a case of relative morals etc to a degree but at the end of the day we're all still human and have similar emotions, dreams, etc, which makes arguing about whether things are right or not a little easier since we have a similar baseline to work with.
The same would not necessarily be said for a different species because their existence and frame of reference could be completely alien to our own. We might literally not be able to understand or relate to it.
Then why are we right to force other countries to play by our rules? If we must respect Dolphin culture must we not also respect Saudi Arabia or North Korea's 'culture'? The point I'm trying to make here is that either all morality is subjective (I which case shouldn't we respect other Abusive's human cultures?) or only the difference between human and non-human morality is subjective, in which case why? What's the difference between baby eating in North Korea and in a hypothetical dolphin cultur? Why should we condem one but allow the other?
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Why would we presume to apply our own moral values to them? And how would we do it, more practically? If dolphins want to live in human society, presumably they would have to follow its rules, but that is unlikely to say the least.
edited 7th Apr '16 4:01:07 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"