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>For example, if a far advanced civilization was out there, merely observing us while they knew they had the cure to our dying loved ones and general suffering
by jeswin 7y ago
>For example, if a far advanced civilization was out there, merely observing us while they knew they had the cure to our dying loved ones and general suffering on this planet, would we not find the only ethical solution to provide said cure?
When we slaughter other animals by the millions (often in very painful ways) though it can be avoided, are we in a position to ask such questions?
We're basically a cruel species lacking empathy.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoYes and I hope some day that practice goes the way of common human slavery. Perhaps some day we will stop killing our fellow earth creatures. For now we still kill even other humans at will.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agoI think one could make a good argument that in fact, humans are the species with the most empathy, out of all other species. The very idea of one species caring for another, which many humans do, seems completely unique in the animal kingdom. I would say the rest of the natural world is very ruthless. Humans have empathy for other species, nothing else in nature seems to.
- bsdz 7y agoI think there are a few counter examples. Many pet owners have posted videos of their dogs and cats being protective of their (human) babies. In fact, Koko the gorilla was very affectionate towards her kittens.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agoSure, but those situations probably wouldn't arise without human guidance.
- bsdz 7y agoPerhaps for those situations I mentioned one could argue that human guidance had a hand. However, there many other examples of cross species altruism where humans play no role (other than observational).
- ses1984 7y agoI believe similar situations have been observed rarely in nature, although I wonder if they were indirectly influenced by humans.
- sooheon 7y agohttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-whales-save-animals-killer-whales-explained/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-wha... I don't think empathy is uniquely human. That would be very unusual for a trait to have emerged fully formed for only one species in all animal kingdom--I think most things are on a gradient.
- marci 7y agoWould you call torture human guidance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcs-H5p-MYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcs-H5p-MYw It's an extreme situation that created this, but I think if you take species in which empathy has been observed, and put them in a secure environment, where they are all well fed, I don't think it's crazy to imagine that they too will have the luxury of inter species empathy, without any human involve in that regard. In general, "That's actually why people keeps mammals in the home and not turtles or snake or something like that who don't have that kind of empathy." (Moral Behaviors in animals | Franz de Waal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk)
- 52-6F-62 7y agoAnd yet my dog would also regularly show up at the back door with a freshly caught bird’s legs sticking out of her mouth even though she was provided with ample and a wide variety of food.
- tempguy9999 7y agoDoes your dog understand that another animal can suffer, and that the bird it has is suffering?
- 52-6F-62 7y agoIt's a complex problem. Would it matter?
- Drakim 7y agoWhile I do think that the human species is the one with the most empathy, we are definitely not the only species to take care of another species.
- wtetzner 7y agoI'm not sure humans have the most empathy. In fact, there's a good chance that even when other species have empathy to other creatures, we don't necessarily recognize it.
- nicoburns 7y ago> The very idea of one species caring for another, which many humans do, seems completely unique in the animal kingdom. A quick youtube search would provide you countless counterexamples to this.
- goatlover 7y agoIndividually there are counter examples, but does any other species display empathy at the scale of another species? I doubt it. And the species that do display empathy at an individual level will also display cruelty.
- cetalingua 7y agoHumpback whales appear to show empathy towards other species. We have 115 documented cases of them doing so (and it is a lot given how hard it is to observe them). http://oceanwildthings.com/2018/06/what-humpback-whales-can-teach-us-about-compassion/ http://oceanwildthings.com/2018/06/what-humpback-whales-can-... They also have mirror neurons that have been an important component in theory of mind. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061127111607.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061127111607.h...
- wtetzner 7y agoHow many other species can afford the time to express empathy as much as humans do? Most of them are just struggling to survive, so it's not like we get a lot of opportunities to observe that behavior.
- goatlover 7y agoSo two examples come to mind where it wasn't just survival. One, a wolf pack in Yellowstone invades another wolf pack's territory, chases them away from their dens, forcing their cubs to starve to death. And two, the brutal Chimpanzee war Jane Goodall observed between two tribes. A third example could be any ant conflict between two colonies where they could in theory both survive but instead choose to try and wipe each other out. In fact, some ants form super colonies instead of fighting one another.
- jcranberry 7y agoElephants and cetaceans may show empathy towards humans without cultivating a relationship with one first.
- sergioj97 7y agoDo you have citations for that? I'm interested and couldn't find convincing sources
- jcranberry 7y agoNo, unfortunately I made this assertion based on unscientific anecdotes I've read previously.
- meowface 7y agoHumans are also the species with the most intelligence and the most wisdom. That doesn't mean we still may not be very low on an absolute scale of intelligence and wisdom. Saying we're better relative to other species is pretty meaningless.
- Robotbeat 7y agoI think it's a mammalian thing, not just a human thing. It's right in the word: mammal, "of the breast." Animals which suckle their young. Some level of empathy for things other than oneself is required, and this spills over to other individuals and species. And for social animals, having a broader net of empathy that encompasses non-directly-related individuals, empathy also enhances survival. And I think you could make the case that animals sometimes help each other out when facing a common threat, i.e. warning of predators, etc. As humans, we can perhaps see the importance of spreading the net of empathy ever-wider.
- vekker 7y ago> We're basically a cruel species lacking empathy. I don't think that's the case. It's just ignorance that can lead to cruel behavior, which is just amplified the bigger our society is. That's more actionable than simply judging our species as cruel (call me naive, but I honestly think most of us want to be good).
- andai 7y agoMost people already think they're good.
- meowface 7y agoIgnorance plays a large role, but even when people are overwhelmed with (accurate) information, I'd say over 90% of people still take the cruel but easier path.
- vekker 7y agoIMHO there's different kinds of ignorance. There's a difference between the absence of knowledge and misperception of reality. The first is an intellectual type of ignorance: the lack of information. The latter is the lack of wisdom/insight and leads to superimposing a view of reality onto reality itself, which leads to cruel behavior and suffering.
- INGELRII 7y agoRobert D. Hare (known for Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised PCL-R) has described psychopath as intraspecies predators. Psychopaths relation to other humans is similar to how humans relation to other animals. Humans have pets they like, but they still put down or abandon their best friend if something else comes along. If you reverse this line of thought, we are psychopaths in our relation to animals. Our relation to animals is selfish, callous, and remorseless use (interpersonal-affective factor) and chronically unstable and antisocial lifestyle in or relation to pets (social deviance factor). Humans have also tendency to act like predators towards our outgroup. Maybe this ability selfish, callous, and remorseless behavior is important part of being a human.
- psychoslave 7y agoThat's a rather extreme generalization, isn't it? Not all humans are equally remorseless and prone to carelessly harm others, whatever the entities they interact with and the acculturated categorizations they project on them. Now we can certainly come with statistics of tendencies, but to my mind they seem to be condemned with cultural biases. Not only the human brain plasticity is molded by the culture where it is immersed, so any data will tell us more about the result of such a culture than about "human inherent tendencies", but even the way we will decide to analyze them and consider/interpret the outcomes will depend on our culture (and our current mood or other more "local" psychological factors). With that in mind, it's hard to categorically conclude that humans are fundamentally "psychopaths in [their] relation to animals". Dominant cultures, offspring of predatory cultures, surely help to foster such a behavior. That doesn't require it to be an intractable instinctive trait.
- Haga 7y agoYes, we humans are systematic when it comes to remorseless ess. We are remorseless to a dedicated poor person who the is remorseless for the delicate person to nature. Abstraction makes all the things easier.
- bsdz 7y agoAs an alien observer from a far one might wonder how humans might want to exploit my knowledge, technology or even the flavour of my flesh (if I have any). That's assuming that alien has mostly inquisitive intentions. Alternatively, aliens with more exploitative intentions might be just as bad as some humans are. Perhaps, because we are still in our technological infancy we have little to take advantage of for now. Even less to warrant the work/energy expenditure required to plan a visit to our neck of the galaxy.
- wvh 7y agoWe're far from a cruel species lacking empathy. We need to eat, we're omnivores and it's more like our "production methods" have not yet caught up with our magnitude. We act like any other similar animal would do, except on an unprecedented scale. To reduce mankind through your favourite moral grievance also precludes any capacity for evolutionary change.
- JackFr 7y agoWe’re a cruel species because we have empathy.
- tpfour 7y agoYou personally have the luxury of reflecting on food ethics. That doesn't make the whole of humanity "cruel" and "lacking empathy". Raw, brutal hunger simply does not exist in advanced societies anymore. You have the privilege to be allowed to question your and others' eating habits. For most of our history that wasn't really a possibility.
- kaesar14 7y agoAlmost every one in America has the "luxury" of examining food ethics, when 95% of people in this country actively consume a product made through what amounts to a holocaust. Of course we all are part of some systemic oppression one way or another in the products we consume, but with the availability of information on how brutal and sadistic factory farming is, nobody has an excuse in the first world.
- whatshisface 7y ago>what amounts to a holocaust. Hyperbole aside, I think we can all agree that farming and killing animals isn't as bad as mass executions of people.
- meowface 7y agoOf course. The Armenian Holocaust also wasn't as bad as the Jewish Holocaust, by numbers. I'd still consider all three a kind of holocaust.
- whatshisface 7y agoI still think the Armenian Holocaust was worse than farming. In fact I would go so far as to say every human genocide was worse than farming.
- meowface 7y agoIt depends what value you attribute to a life. For example, is the life of one adult human more valuable than the life of one hundred million adult chimpanzees? These things are very hard to quantify. It might be best to split human and non-human slaughter into entirely separate categories. You don't need to make comparisons between one and the other; you can just accept that both are unacceptable.
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoExcept that we 'invented' the empathy. Or the concept of it. I'm all for acting ethically. And mostly because we are the creature to compose the concept of ethics. Nature is an idea; a human idea... or a bucket of ideas. One that different people or cultures put different things into. One needs to be highly suspicious of anybody who appeals to nature for some value in itself, or as a source of natural laws. People tend to see in 'nature' what they already believe. And I think a similar principle holds for how we apply ethics in relation to the not-human, natural world. Careful.
- ElFitz 7y agoPutting a name on something isn't enough to make one it's inventor Pretty sure empathetic behaviors existed before anyone identified and conceptualized them. Roses, names and all that.
- eloff 7y agoYou're afforded the luxury of not doing that now, if you like. For the entirety of our evolution we did not have that luxury. Every primitive culture pre agriculture ate meat whenever they were successful at the hunt. I can't believe someone downvoted this. Show me one counter example, I dare you.
- dang 7y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122778.