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If I find a homeless person in an alleyway, ask him about his friends and family, and he tells me that no one knows or cares that he's alive, it's ok to eat him
by eurleif 14y ago
If I find a homeless person in an alleyway, ask him about his friends and family, and he tells me that no one knows or cares that he's alive, it's ok to eat him, as long as I don't tell anyone about it?
- pyre 14y agoI think the parent was explaining why "don't eat humans" exists as a social faux pas.
- StavrosK 14y agoNo. What the gp is saying is basically the categorical imperative. "It is bad to eat people because I don't want to live in a world where I could be eaten (me also being people)". He's not saying it's okay as long as you don't get eaten he's saying "as a human, I do not want to get eaten. Therefore, I do not want to inflict this on other humans either".
- eurleif 14y agoBut why is "human" the privileged class? We could use a subclass, like "human with an IQ above 100", or a superclass, like "animal". You're just restating where he or she is drawing the line, not explaining why that's the right place to draw it.
- Dylan16807 14y agoThe privileged class is not human. The logic was handed to you, you just ignored it. "smart enough to to look at our behaviour and decide whether or not we're fair based on whether or not we also eat animals" Yes of course an IQ number is a ridiculous way to draw a line; moving on. 'Animal' is a logical measure but 1. who cares about sea sponges and 2. it's not universal, what if aliens show up. Drawing the line at creatures that are intelligent enough to draw this same line is a very clean and clever solution to the problem. Anything with minimal critical thinking skills is saved. Any dumb brute is fair game.
- jessedhillon 14y agoOh, I found a problem in your clean solution: nobody knows how to detect, in non-humans, the presence or absence of a mind sufficiently capable to pass your test. Or have you been interviewing all the animals you eat?
- Dylan16807 14y agoIt's pretty easy to do some basic tests for intelligence in social animals. The test concept is quite sophisticated, so you can definitely rule out species. Humans raise a lot of dumb animals. Just don't ask me to eat dolphin.
- eurleif 14y agoSo it's ok to eat sufficiently mentally-retarded humans?
- Dylan16807 14y agoI already answered that one way http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5329829 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5329829 Another way of going about it would be to allow/disallow in aggregate, not in specific cases. AKA all humans or no humans. In which case it wouldn't be allowed even with a braindead person.
- eurleif 14y agoThere exist people who aren't braindead, but who don't have sufficient intelligence to have a concept of "being fair". I don't know where you got the idea that they don't exist. (You may counter that even the least intelligent person will get angry if you attack them, and that's largely true; but the same is true of any animal, so we must be talking about a more complex understanding of fairness than that.) And you could say that being part of a species gives you special moral standing if other members of your species have the attributes required for it, even if you don't personally have them, but it would be a completely arbitrary thing to say.