Matter Arising

Matter arising from my last post: can an ethical society based on moral principles thatare held to have universal significance leave anything alone?

If ethical society is our nation, does that mean we have a responsibility to people within our borders, but not beyond it?

Given that there is no difference between an animal suffering in nature and an animal suffering because it has been brought into the human world, why help one but not the other?

It could be that we have a moral responsibility to allow for the freedom of other beings. But this doesn't quite play out. The freedom of an animal to eat another animal greatly hinders the freedom of the animal being eaten. It would therefore be our responsibility to prevent all carnivores from ever eating.

It could be a matter of resources: we cannot feed all creatures on the planet, so we have to leave them be. But if this is the case there would be no moral reason to help one entity rather than another. Instead our resources go on the nearest problems or where they do the most good.

This leads to two contradictions: helping the nearest entities leads to the contradiction of a person wanting to prevent a specific animal from being killed for food, while supporting the principle that carnivores eat herbivores. Helping the most needy leads to another paradox. One's money may be best spent helping one group of people, but there are still other people less "deserving of help" who are starving to death.

Maybe morality has no standards which can be agreed upon, in which case all ethical decisions become arbitrary. So it might be best to think in terms of general over-arching principles which are subordinate to a long-term view. If this is the case, it stands to reason that we should have some idea of a long-term view for the development of life in general, so that we can use our resources effectively.

It still leaves me wandering whether society based on rights should be extended to cover all beings possible, or whether some things should be left outside of rational universality in order to remain in accordance with their own natures.

Veganism

Recently, I've been thinking about veganism and deep ecology.

My justification for veganism is that humans are capable of transcending the state of nature in order to establish an ethical society. We have no responsibility for animals in the state of nature, but once we bring a creature into the society of ethics we have to take responsibility for it.

Humans have to defend their society from nature, so it is necessary to innoculate against germs, kill pests, pull weeds, punish criminals, etc. But once an animal of any form is brought into ethical society, it becomes subject to moral judgements. Hence, capital punishment, meat eating, etc is wrong because it uses other beings merely as means to an end, and because we would not wish to be farmed or murdered ourselves. The problem is that this distinction between the ethical and natural worlds implies that there is a qualitative difference between animals and humans, and I'm not sure what this could be.

If humans are different from animals, there must be an "anthropogenic moment" - a point where humans become qualitatively different from animals. This means that there needs to be some kind of experience which we are capable of that animals aren't.

Hegel places the development of self-consciousness at the moment of frustrated desire, when a human first realises that there is a distinction between the world and the self. But this moment is experienced by animals. Bataille says that tool use separates us from animals because the tool is a "nasceant non-I" through the mediation of which we build knowledge of the world. But tool use again is found in animals.

It seems that language, compassion, a knowledge of the future, an awareness of self, the ability to abstract, subtract, etc, etc are all found in many different animal species. The difference between animals and humans is never more than quantitative.

This worries me. The only solution I can think of is that the ethical society is based on ethical principles which all conscious beings living in a society must necessarilly be able to conceive. For instance, the golden rule and the categorical imperatives. The ethical world is therefore qualitatively different from the animals which establish it.

Ethical society can only establish ethical responsibility between beings which are quantitatively, rather than qualitatively distinguished - for instance between rich and poor, or the strong and the weak. here, the principle established is based, as far as I can see, on the categorical imperative to act on maxims which we might wish to be universal laws. One such maxim is that the strong have some ethical responsibility to the weak.

Therefore Humans, as quantitatively more intelligent and adaptable beings have a responsibility to all living things.

This is fortunate, and answers another long-term question of mine; which is how we can morally justify an alliance to the underlying instincts of life when living things are just one class of thing in the universe and of have no inherent value.