h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I tried posting this in "Today's the day", but it just kept cycling round and round and not letting me, but no error message. So I'm trying here...

"Do you believe that there is a difference in moral worth between animals and humans?"

Yes.

Why? Because humans can invent a concept like "moral worth", and then use it try to make other humans stop doing something that they do naturally.

However, and back to something I often come back to in discussion here, it's not a black and white thing with a neat line, it's a continuum with shades of grey. Not many shades, I think, but there are shades. If you want, you can draw a line between what you can/should eat and what you can't/shouldn't. And the positioning of that line will always be arguable, and it's my contention that you cannot, in principle, be unarguable *right* about where you draw it, wherever you put it.

I, by virtue of my ability to participate in this conversation, am clearly 100% at one end of the continuum. Something like, say, a scallop is, I would contend, 100% at the opposite end, by virtue of not even being able to perceive that the conversation is happening, on any level, to understand the concept of conversation, of moral worth, or even the concept of me as an entity different and separate from it. I'm comfortable eating scallops, and can see no reason why anyone who eats mushrooms or tomatoes would object to me eating a scallop.

But between me and the scallop, and much closer to me, is a chimp. It would be possible to hold a conversation with a chimp. Not a particularly complex one, perhaps, but such a creature clearly has a sense of itself and its relation to me. It's hard to know whether it has a concept of "morality" as we would define it, beyond "I shouldn't do that because if I do I might get the cattle prod again".

Is a chimp capable of a thought along the lines of "I shouldn't do that because I wouldn't like it if someone did it to me"? "I shouldn't do that, because it's wrong."?

I think such a thing is amenable to experiment. I'd be fascinated to know. I should not be surprised to find chimps are capable of that level of abstraction. Gorillas, maybe not. Orangs, ditto.

"Lower" animals (e.g. dogs/chickens) I doubt are capable of thinking beyond "if I do that I'll get hit/bit/killed". Some animals (e.g. cows/sheep) I doubt are capable of even that much, going by some of their behaviour. Sheep in particular come across as dumb as rocks.

As far as "moral worth" is concerned, I think if a creature is capable, in potentia, of itself making a moral choice, then I think it has moral worth. (In potentia because I'm not saying the mentally handicapped or infants lack moral worth).

Whereas if an organisms motivations are primarily motivated by instinctive self-preservation, then in my mind they are no more worthy of moral consideration than is a plant which turns to face the sun.

There exists the problem of explaining observed altruism in lower animals - creatures sacrificing themselves "for the good of the group". I don't have a comprehensive answer to that, but since it appears neither does anyone else, I don't feel too bad about it.



Of course, it's easy for me to say that. I'm not a vegetarian, and I have no desire to eat chimps. I'd be placed in a very difficult position if it were discovered that either
(a) pigs are capable of complex moral reasoning or
(b) chimps taste of bacon.