Let me pick out a few quotes from Pandaemoni, in no particular order.
Why did slaves not have a "right"? Because, according to Pandaemoni, it was "not respected"? Why was it not respected? Because slaves had no inherent value, and the powerful people found slavery more advantageous than freeing the slaves. Why is there no slavery in modern-day America? Only because the powerful in society settled on a new social contract following a bloody war.
Note that there is no inherent moral problem with slavery according to a Hobbesian contractarian like Pandaemoni. Slavery isn't "bad". People have simply agreed that it is no longer "morally permissible" - it isn't allowed by the current implicit contract. Note also that nothing inherent in the slaves themselves makes a difference here. They were irrelevant in the social bargaining process. People now abide by the morality that slavery is wrong (in America), because not to do so would be to risk personal loss or condemnation from others of equal or greater power.
I think that is more or less accurate. There was nothing inherent in slaves that gave them the right to be "free", nor is there anythings special about me that gives me the right. Society gives slaves the right (and, based on the social acclimatization I have experienced in my life, I am glad that they do and would struggle against any attempt to change the current rule).
Thus, according to Pandaemoni, a "murder the disabled" rule would be just as good a "moral" rule as any other regarding that group, as long as the powerful agree to it.
Here, I would quibble. It's not "the powerful" that matter. It is everyone contributing to society. There is no cadre of the powerful who make up moral norms and force them down on the rest of us schlubs. In a society as diverse as ours no one, and no group, is in fact so powerful that they can force norms of behavior onto others.
*If* there were such a group—so powerful that they could dictate morality to "the weak" and get the weak to agree with and internalize those dictated norms as if they were their own (in which case, in fact, they would be their own), then the agreement of "the powerful" would be enough. I don't think the real world works that way, though.
What the disabled people themselves want doesn't particularly matter, except to the extent that those people can exert other influence and power in society.
Subject to the quibble above, this is right. Again though, if anyone proposed making it legal to murder the disabled, I'd still fight it, as the moral norms with which I was raised have taught me that that would be bad. I also tend to believe that such a regime would be innately unstable in the long term, because the disrespect shown for the disabled would lead to a plethora of other issues. There though, I may be rationalizing my position based on the moral norms I was taught.
Presumably, Pandaemoni would have no particular a priori view on issues such as abortion or capital punishment either.
A priori I do not. I personally think capital punishment needs to be reevaluated in light of the high error rates, but I believe that sound moral systems can be developed that support both practices, ban both practices or support one and ban the other.
In considering such issues, he would look at his "society" and ask to himself "what's in this for me? What position should I adopt that will be most likely to benefit myself in the long term?"
No. I do not get to simply make up the rules as I see fit. I am a social animal and I learn the moral rules from my friends, family, teachers, and others around me in the society. And they did not make up the rules either, they also learned them. At some stage we absorb the behaviours of those around us and internalize them, we make them our own with only relatively minor variations from those we acquired externally. Those minor variations may include things like "Animals should have full rights," which you may believe despite no one else agreeing. You may then take that belief and influence others to share it. Over time, it may seep in to society as a whole and itself become the norm. These variations are always, in the grand scheme of things, very small in an individual, but they accumulate across time making it easy to see how the world's societies wound up with such different sets of moral intuitions, notwithstanding our common descent. Separated populations developed different variations and those differences accumulated over time.
In general though, you take what you learn from the culture wholesale. Say society had a rule that said "Pandaemoni is bad and needs to be beaten," and I would very likely learn to believe that I was bad, and that, if you think about it, I really need to be beaten. There's no self-interest there, there is merely the social mind of a primate mimicking the mores of the social group to which he belongs.
The only time self-interest enters into it is when either (a) I am confronted by a moral situation that is not covered (or not covered fully) by the internalized moral rules to which I adhere, (b) in the case of a moral rule that severely cumbersome to me, my own personal inconvenience may cause me to rethink the rule (like "Pandaemoni deserves to be beaten") (in that case, my reevaluated rule becomes one of those little variants that I hope I get to spread to the rest of society) or (c) I am considering whether or not it's "worth" violating my own moral norms. There might be a role for it in analyzing moral norms as well, my in actual day-to-day moral practice, the exercise is not a rational process, but an intuitive one.
One side note, though, do you know why we internalize the rules and acts of others? Self-interest. By internalizing the rules we see practiced at a young age we make it easier to join in to the society, and, being social animals, that is the key to our survival.
The rights of a foetus would be non-existent, since it has no power in the relevant sense that Pandaemoni cares about.
Here, I'd say this is wrong. Fetuses do not influence the moral norms directly, that is true, but that does not limit them to never having rights (again, it's not all about "the powerful"). Others in society, even though who think like me, advocate on their behalf. Why? Not every child is unwanted. Some women get pregnant and are happy about it. To such potential parents (men and women alike) the fetus—their fetus, at least—is a good thing. Others generalize that further and have warm feelings about fetuses in general. We as a species have a tendency to want to protect infants, and the protection of fetuses is a somewhat extended version of that impulse, so understandable enough.
Because people have these bases, and upon them, they advocate for the protection of fetuses, the consensus position in the west is that fetuses do have some rights (though the exact extent of those rights varies from place to place). Animals develop rights in the same way. Go outside and kick your dog to death, and the police will come and arrest you. Why? Dogs clearly have no power in society, but we in society are raised to have an affinity for dogs (and dogs for us). Based on that there are those willing to advocate on their behalf. Based on that, in turn, we have afforded dogs some rights.
Where I would object is if someone claimed that fetuses and dogs (or you or me) had "innate" rights that exist separately from the law and from the morality of society. That is an argument that "rights" exist objectively, and that even if everyone on Earth agrees that such rights did not exist, it could be declared that everyone on Earth is "wrong" even if they do not know it. In my view finding everyone to be "wrong" in that sense is sophistry.
Hypothetical: Suppose everyone on Earth agreed that for any year just ended, people should pay their taxes on January 1 on the following year. Suppose the law stated that to be the rule as well and made Jan. 1 "tax day." Further suppose an alien came down from on high and told us, "Bah! Everyone on Earth is wrong, because tax day is April 15!" In my view declaring something to be a "right" when the people and the law disagree with you, is just as silly as that. It is taking an arbitrary social construct and trying to fix it as if it were an objective standard (when it is not)...and then, on top of that error, selecting a standard that is different from the prevailing view.
The rights of a convicted criminal would similarly count for nothing.
Again, people do care about criminals. Criminals have families. Criminals also influence moral rules in the same way everyone does, by communicating their views on things to others. Just as powerfully, not all convicted criminals committed the acts with which they were charges. Together I think there is input by and on behalf of convicts into the moral dialogue, and so unsurprisingly, they do have rights. Their lack of "power" has nothing to do with it.
This doesn't mean that Pandaemoni wouldn't frame his argument in such terms, because hiding his true self-interested motivations may make him look better in the eyes of the powerful, and possibly increase his own power and influence.
It's not about self-interest except as described above.
Take the convict example. *If* I were setting up a moral rule in a ruleless state of nature, I would know that some day I may be falsely accused of a crime and convicted, or I might be driven to committing a crime. Even in a crude self-interest test, that gives me ample cause to want criminals to have some rights, since some day I might benefit from such rights myself. One step removed from that, I may know someone about whom I care who will be convicted, and then I would want them to have rights. One further step removed those I care for may know someone who is convicted, and that person's having no rights would make my loved one sad. That reduced my happiness because I have subsumed their utility function as part of my own.
In such a "rule crafting" mode, I would give criminals rights because I know that if I do not then society will not afford me, those I care about and those who affect those I care about rights in cases where I or they fall into the clutches of the justice system.
*BUT* That is not the way the rules work. I work with the rules I learned, not the rules I might craft of given time to study the issue, and I do not make up a new rule every time I am confronted with the situation.
Hypothetical: Let's say I am a judge on an appeals court, I have committed to rule that gives criminals limited rights (including a right to a fair appeals process). A man I have never met before is convicted of murder. The father of the victim offers be $1 billion is I agree to rule against the convict, without ever hearing his arguments and no matter what the merits, and there is a way I can do so without ever getting caught. Is it in my self interest to take the father's deal? Is it immoral to take the father's deal? The answer to both questions is: Yes. It is in my self-interest to take the billion dollars, but it would be immoral to do so.
Why? Because the rule was set ages ago, and I merely internalized it. The convict, in the moral system I use to evaluate the world is afforded rights and I ignored the rule to get the money. I do not get to "re-evaluate" the rule later on because now there's money on the line.
The key, though is that if I encountered a culture where the fate of a criminal turned on how much money the victim's family was willing to pay the judge, that culture is not "immoral" and is not depriving the criminal of "his rights." They have a different ethical system and the morality of taking the money has a different implication there.
And, don't forget that Pandaemoni has to live in a world with people who have very different views of morality than he has. Some of those people have power, too. Better be careful, then.
Everyone has roughly equal power. There are no moral trend setters who get the rest of us what to internalize. Morality is a meme that society transmits, nothing more. "The powerful" do not have any especial power to transmit memes than others. There are variations to be sure, but even the most powerful of these trend setters (i.e. Oprah) is extremely limited in her influence. If she decided to try to convince people that animals have the right to free medical care, I don't think she'd get tremendously far. If she tried to convince them that animal testing was bad, she'd get further, but that's because that meme has been seeping into the existing moral order for a long time. She'd merely be reinforcing an existing element of the consensus, rather than trying to implant something new. In either case, she surely would have a greater influence than me, but her efforts would not likely be "transformative" so, influential though she is, even she is not a significant power in and of herself.
Same for Jesus. His ideas became a powerful meme, but his personal ability to impress them into the hearts of others yielded only limited results viewed on a grand scale (though better than most would have managed). Others then took his thoughts and pushed them further. It's a process that should not be attributed the singular power of Jesus, but the ability of variant rules to spread through adoption and repetition by others. In the end though, it look a lot of people a lot of time to spread them to their full extent.
It only really depends on the strength of the short, doesn't it, Pandaemoni? If your society can get away with exploiting short people without fear of retaliation or other negative repercussions from them, then there's nothing to lose.
That is true. Society maintained slave populations for most of recorded history, and did not seem to crumble to dust as a result. Rome survived with only a few slave revolts. Europe survived centuried of feudalism. In the grand timescale of history, the dominant cultures only just recently eliminated chattel slavery, so it has yet to be seen if it will lead us to some obviously superior position in and of itself.
Again, though, it has nothing to do with strength, except perhaps to a very limited extent, the strength of the ability to transmit the proper memes. That said, suppose tall person memes spread more easily than those of the short. Would the short be screwed? Not necessarily. Convicts have limited moral authority to use in influencing others and yet we give them rights. The same could go for the short.
Your focus on strength and power yet again is based on your not truly comprehending my position.
Certainly, there's no kind of innate equality between short people and tall people. You have to look at whether they are wealthy short people, or politically powerful short people, or short people who have an army, or whatever, then decide on that basis.
Wealth is irrelevant. Power is irrelevant in the sense you mean it. My philosophy is not the law of the jungle nonsense you keep suggesting it to be. Humans have rights. That's well established in my morality, and not something that gets disregarded. In yours, of course, every rat catcher in existence is some sort of murderer, because rats have some degree of rights even if killing them helps humans to live. Right? How is killing sewer rats to help humans live any different than killing lab rats? The scale is certainly grander in the former, but shouldn't that make it the greater atrocity?
Pandaemoni says: Because non-human animals have no bargaining power, relative to human beings, therefore animals don't "count" in forming a social contract.
Truly, eating meat is then "amoral", for the same reason that keeping slaves would be considered "amoral" by Pandaemoni. It's just what people have implicitly agreed to do.
That is absolutely right. It is what people have agreed to do, and animals do not have any of the tools needed to influence the human moral rules that led to this state of affairs. So the state will continue (unless humans decide to change it, which by and large we have no interest in doing, save a few rare outliers in the developed nations). Animals do not even have the intellect needed to imagine that the state of affairs is alterable. They cannot conceive of such a thing and arguing away someones desire to feed on their normal food source.
Certainly, animals have no desires or interests that we need to consider in deciding how to deal with them. They won't fight back. They won't take our money. They won't vote anybody out of office. And, as a bonus, they taste great!
More to the point, as it's not about fighting back, Animals cannot, for obvious reasons, get up and try to convince people to change their ways. Animals cannot attempt to argue that the system would be better if they had more rights. The most animals can so if fight back, and eat a human, which would turn out to be counterproductive methinks. Voting people out of office could be useful, mostly because it signals a believe, and implies a certain moral attitude. That implication could make people reflect and possibly change their own position (in response to the social stimulus, which is how the intuitions form and change in any event).
The animals only hope is for humans to make that argument convincingly enough to sway other humans, which for my money you have failed to do.
Preventing rabbit suffering does nothing[/b]. Hmmm...
Because rabbits can't fight back. Because rabbits can't take your money. Because rabbits can't retaliate against you in any significant way if you hurt them. So, nothing to worry about. Sharing a rabbit stew with the guy who might give you a salary raise or who might lend you his lawn mower in return is infinitely more valuable. And the rabbit tastes great!
Sharing rabbit stew with an invalid who due to a bad heart has no hope of surviving more than another day is also good. Social rules dictate that we care for the sick and the inform where I'm from. Your parents must have been odd (by the standards of western morality) if they taught you that it's better to let the invalid die hungry, than feed him cow meat.
You're not a member of chimpanzee society. Ergo, chimpanzees don't get to vote in your social contract. Ergo, chimpanzees get no rights.
It's true that chimps so not have a direct voice in the social contract, but untrue that they have "no rights" within the western moral system (of which I am a part). Chimps do not influence the human moral scheme directly, and were I lost in the jungle and found by a tribe of chimps (whom I believe likely have a moral order of a similar, if of a less sophisticated sort), I would not have the skills to influence them, and they would likely injure and kill me.
Chimp rights (limited though they are) come not from chimps, but from humans who anthropomorphize them and argue that because they are "just like us" or "share 95% of our DNA" etc., that we need to be kind to them. There is nothing wrong with that and there is nothing wrong with that becoming the dominant moral position, though it has not yet.
In my opinion, people who do that are (in a sense) "fooling" themselves into believing that chimps have a humanlike consciousness, without good evidence for that proposition.
There's nothing intrinsically valuable about a chimpanzee.
That is true. There is nothing "intrinsically" valuable about a human either, not even me.
If you test drugs on chimps, or whatever, and that benefits the society you are a member of, it's win win for everybody important. The chimpanzee doesn't get a say. Why should it?
Here I agree. The issue I have with the pro-chimpanzee people, is that I was raised in a culture that believes that humans are valuable. I recognize that we are not intrinsically valuable, but we are extrinsically valuable as measured against the dominant moral framework. Moreover were are (extrinsically) far more valuable in that framework than chimpanzees.
As a practical matter then, anyone who has internalized the norms I have would believe (as I do) that sacrificing the live of a chimp for that of a human is a good deal. There's nothing irrational about that either, as it is, in essence, a wholly subjective matter on which, as a result of common culture, most westerners would agree (at present). It is no different than being willing to trade away a peanut butter sandwich for a ham sandwich. If you like ham more than peanut butter, the gain from the tradeoff is obvious.
On the other hand, if you believe that letting you grandma die is a fair price to pay if Chimp No. 117642-D gets to live, that is a perfectly fine moral view as well. It is not grounded in mainstream western morality as I see it, but rather (most likely) a subgroup that has come to value animal rights as highly as human rights. Good luck with spreading that meme. Hopefully you don't think the condecsending attitude from your post helped your cause.
Yuk! What a disgusting view of the world you have, Pandaemoni.
Oh no. James R disapproves! Now what will I do??? He's the arbiter of all morality, and I got a thumbs down! :bawl:
Your dispproval might sting more if you actually attacked my view of the world, but you went down some "power is everything and self-interest is the key to all morality" path that I don't actually advocate (though the interests of humanity, as compared to other animals are alive and strong is western moral thought). That said, do you honestly believe that anyone comes here to get your personal assessment of whether their world view is acceptable to James R? Do you think voicing your disapproval in such tones is either "constructive" or an "argument"?