Having done business with local governments around the country, I can tell you that the stereotypes about southerners or northeasterners are inaccurate. It's not like everyone from Georgia is a conservative and everyone from Massachusetts is a liberal. You find the same *kinds* of people everywhere, but in slightly different mixes.
Control of most states happens at the margins. If you have slightly more conservatives in a state, you get consistent conservative victories and if you have slightly more liberals you get consistent liberal victories. Incumbents tend to get re-elected too; that gives the ascendant fringe leverage over the low-information middle voters, and puts the weaker side in an up-hill battle for success. Lack of success for a minority party powerfully weakens that party, and it may have difficulty fielding strong candidates. Things tend to *look* hopeless after several decades of dominance by one party, but I think that's an illusion. A strong centrist candidate can win anywhere against a weak majority party candidate, as with Scott Brown who won the Ted Kennedy Senate seat in Massachusetts 2010.
Red states tend to have a history of hard luck and social upheaval, and this produces marginally more skepticism about government. By contrast Massachusetts, indisputably the bluest state in the nation, has enjoyed remarkable good fortune since the founding of the nation, and that produces *marginally* less skepticism about government here. But it's still there. In Massachusetts you still hear *exactly* the same range of opinions as you would in a red state. It's just that minority parties are structurally disadvantaged in states where one party has had a long record of success.
We just had a special election here to fill Ed Markey's congressional seat. The Democratic winner walked away with 65.9% to the Republican's 31.7%. That may seem like a landslide, but consider this. Almost a third of the voters came out for a totally unknown Republican, a political neophyte who nobody thought had a chance of winning against a well-known and popular politician. That strikes me as a remarkable showing, and I think it shows that even the bluest state is more purple than we imagine.
May have been. The Russians have always had a lot of great mathematicians, and they certainly understood the concepts. They had a significant computer industry, often copying western systems to be sure, but they were certainly could and did make their own designs going all the way back to the 50s.
Anyhow, they wouldn't have needed to Turing complete machines. In many ways back in the 60s specialized circuits might have been simpler and more robust. By the mind 60s they had ballistic missiles with multiple, independently targeted reentry vehicles, so they clearly had a lot of capability when it came to guidance systems. In some ways a lunar landing controller would have been simpler than MIRV guidance.
What makes you think this 'research' isn't a prank?
This Arielle Schlesinger person doesn't appear to have any social media or web presence prior to a few months ago. There is no link to published articles on or related to the actual "research", either in peer-reviewed journals or on-line forums. There's only a couple of brief blog posts in what looks like a deliberate parody of critical studies jargon ("reifies normative subject-object theory" and "non-normative paradigm").
It sounds like a parody to me. Granted, it's often hard to tell the difference, but one thing that strikes me that the example is rather puny. Yes, it is dense and incomprehensible, but real examples academic writing in the critical theory style go on at great length and detail. The Frankfurt School of neomarxism is very influential in this kind of academic writing, so what you're aiming for is a kind of faux teutonic grandeur.
There's no evidence that the purported research has taken place; nor is there evidence that this person is actually preparing to do research. The very first thing you'd do in this kind of academic research is to assemble a bibliography, yet the post doesn't even bother to drop names (e.g. Michel Foucault, Andrea Dworkin). It strikes me that the post displays little actual knowledge of the field it is supposedly discussing, other than a superficial familiarity with the jargon.
A black market is a market in which transactions can be presumed to be illegitimate. For example a market in stolen organs is a "black market".
A gray market is one which transactions can be presumed to be legal, but are considered undesirable by the original sources of the products. In a "gray market" transaction, the seller has valid title to the goods but is undercutting the manufacturer's attempts to establish different retail prices in different countries.
So, I should think a "dark market" would be one which ostensibly exists for supporting legal transactions, but in which it is also commonplace to trade in stolen goods. That might better be called a "gray market", but that term is already taken.
But those who behave like humans should be treated like humans.
This is where I disagree with you. Human beings should be treated like human beings, regardless of their actions. Anyhow "treated like humans" is too broad for our purposes.
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You may be the second person today to read that into what I am saying and I must think you do not know any mentally handicapped people, because in my experience that paints them with far too broad a brush.
Here you are doubly wrong. My late brother had fragile X syndrome. When died in his 60s, he was intellectually about five years old. He could not have participated in the discussion we are now having. He did not have *less* rights because of his handicap; his handicap imposed a greater duty of care among those around him. We had to defend his rights because he could not do so himself.
I am not saying you believe that mentally handicapped people don't have human rights; I'm saying your formulation of the basis of ethics towards animals is faulty.
Torturing an animal, in particular, is a horribly dehumanizing thing to do - to yourself.
Here is the problem with your formulation; the transactional basis you have posited for ethics doesn't work for you in this case, so you are patching your model with a totally different ethical basis: aretaic ethics. I actually think you'd have better success using *that* as a basis for ethics than some kind of social contract theory.
Well, you can't express complex ideas without grammar, but that's not the same as not being able to have complex ideas. If you know anyone with stroke-induced aphasia, you know that one of the immense frustrations of aphasia is not being able to express what you have conceptualized. You can SEE it happening.
I had aunt in a nursing home who had expressive aphasia. She as always getting mad at her roommate for moving stuff onto *her* side of the room. Clearly she could *conceptualize* "My side" vs. "her side", and even property rights (my stuff vs her stuff). She just couldn't put it into words.
Because morality involves rights and obligations. Your right to be left in peace is only half of it - the obligation to respect the same rights in others is the other half.
You are taking me out of context. I was asking "Why is it necessary for a chimp to show he can master human grammar?" You have not addressed that question.
Because morality involves rights and obligations. Your right to be left in peace is only half of it - the obligation to respect the same rights in others is the other half.
This is an interesting position, but it seems to me to have some problems. If I understand your position, rights and obligations arise out of each other. In other words, if I expect you to respect my private property, then I have to respect yours. That seems reasonable, but this framework also seems to suggest that I can opt out of this arrangement; that I can steal from you as long as I'm OK with you stealing from me.
Your framework also suggests that children have no human rights until they have the developed the cognitive capabilities to understand their responsibilities. They cannot participate in any kind bargain over rights and responsibilities. Likewise mentally handicapped people could be murdered since they can't understand the philosophical bases of the anti-murder bargain.
Likewise under your framework torturing an animal is OK, as long as the animal isn't capable of understanding the philosophical basis for why torturing animals is wrong. I understand that some people believe torturing animals is OK, but not because animals can't understand why torture is wrong. Most of those same people would say it is wrong to torture a mentally incompetent human.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly *do* believe in your basic principle -- that which we demand of others puts an obligation upon ourselves. I just don't think ethics can be entirely reduced to that principle.
Sure, deer can outsprint humans, to the point where the human loses track of the deer, but nothing outruns a human over long distances. There was an article in Runner's World back in the 70s about running down deer in the Pacific Northwest. It takes about 4 hours.
The Tarahumara Indians of Mexico are famous for hunting deer precisely this way. Tarahumara have been known to run distances up to 200 miles without rest.
Pretty sure a small (20'x40') garden would give you enough to survive just fine.
I agree. But that's not the question. The question is whether it can do that without any tools whatsoever. That means no baskets and jars for storage and re-hydrating your beans. No fire for cooking them either. You'd eat those potatoes raw, which greatly reduces the calories you can extract from them.
I'm talking about having no tools at all; no hoes, rakes, clippers or knives; no stakes for your beans to climb or cordage to tie them up with. No rocks for grinding your grains, not even pointed sticks for planting seeds. Nothing to crack your nuts with but your teeth.
As for fruits and corn, the huge, succulent varieties we take for granted are dependent upon (tool-based) agriculture. Wild apples are crab apples. Wild maize looks more like wheat. In any case without lime (the byproduct of fire) maize is a very poor foodstuff.
With tools and fire, 1600 sq ft is easily enough to support the nutritional needs of one human. With nothing but your bare hands, teeth, and nails, you'd need hundreds of acres of prime foraging habitat per individual -- habitat like modern chimpanzee habitat. But we're a lot less well adapted than chimps to exploit that habitat, from our relatively weak limbs to our puny, brittle teeth.
That's a strawman argument. Why would a chimp have to *master* ASL, which is of course a human language, in order to show it has the same kinds of cognitive capabilities as humans? In other words is human language grammar the dividing line between a human with rights and an animal with none? Why should that be necessary? What does this say about humans afflicted with aphasia?
The key ability demonstrated by ape language experiments isn't grammar; it is the ability to form cognitive categories. This in turn underpins an ability to conceive of oneself as distinct from everything else. That ability to conceive of oneself as a distinct actor seems to me to be connected to a right to life. Compare a chimpanzee to a clam; they're both animals, but a clam doesn't have any sense of self. A chimpanzee does. Therefore it's quite consistent to draw a line somewhere between a chimp and a clam. You can even argue for a right to chimpanzee liberty without arguing for a similar right for clams, because chimpanzees have the cognitive ability to make use of liberty and clams do not.
Let me stress I am undecided on the idea of chimp personhood. I'm not convinced, but I see no reason not to entertain the possibility if the facts suggest that chimps are more like us than we thought.
I expect one problem with thinking in this area is the assumption there has to be just *one* cognitive that separates humans with their *entire* package of rights from animals. It seems to me the right to self-determination, the right to life, and the right not to be treated cruelly -- all of which rights humans possess -- might well stem from different sources. For example we might agree that torturing a dog is wrong, but it makes no sense to talking about torturing a clam.
Try farming without tools to plant, harvest, process and cook the result. Same goes for foraging. Without tools to process and prepare foraged food, you'd do very well in vitamins and minerals but you'd never get enough calories to support the needs of your anatomically modern human brain. Go to the produce store and imagine living off this stuff if (a) you had to find it and (b) you couldn't use tools to prepare and cook it. You need about 1000 calories per day to survive. That's ten pounds of spinach -- if someone harvests it and hands it to you. If you forage it for yourself you might need to eat 20 pounds of tender plant leaves.
People often imagine our ancestors living in a Garden of Eden filled with modern, selectively bred fruit trees (e.g. hybrid apples grown on grafted trees) bearing year-round. But such a favorable environment has never existed. The ability to prepare and eventually cook difficult-to-eat foods such as roots, grains and nuts with shells was a major driver of later human evolution.
We also imagine *chimpanzees* as the way we see them in the Tarzan movies, but in fact those are always baby chimps. Adult male chimps are much larger; not quite as big as an adult male human but 4x as strong a human of comparable size. Look at the way chimps climb; humans can't do that without some kind of aid. Just take a look at chimp teeth. Obviously chimps are much better prepared than humans to survive without tools.
Sure. Take away *all* human tools, including the lever, the rock, and the pointed stick, there are very few places on Earth where anatomically modern humans could survive.
Physically, if you were well-trained you could run a deer to death from exhaustion. Then you'd be stuck, because with your itty-bitty incisors you wouldn't be able to eat the carcass without some kind of cutting tool.
Suppose you are an alien judge in a galaxy-spanning, multi-species civilization -- something like the Federation in Star Trek, but humans haven't joined yet. Furthermore it's permissable for members, some of whom are carnivores, to kill animals, but not other natural persons.
A case is brought to you in which a research team has captured a human hunter who has just killed chimpanzee. They bring the hunter back for trial on the charges of murdering of a natural person.
What are your instructions to the prosecution? What dos the prosecution have to prove in order to get a conviction?
What are your instructions to the defense? What proof is sufficient to get the defendant off?
Stipulations: (1) The facts of the case are undisputed: the hunter did kill the chimp and did so knowingly.
(2) Personal ignorance on the part of the hunter is no defense. The hunter is guilty if, and only if, human civilization possesses enough facts to conclude that chimpanzees are likely to be natural persons with natural rights (what we would call "human rights") according to the galactic definition of "natural person".
(3) Only observable facts are admissible as evidence. Assertions about things like the presence or absence of a soul are not admissible.
(4) Your court has jurisdiction to convict any natural person of the murder of any other natural person, anywhere in the galaxy, even on non-member planets like Earth.
The difference is on average humans have the ability to plan, use tools, and effectively modify our environment.
It's almost certain you can't separate chimps from humans this way. Chimps not only use tools, they *learn* to use certain things as tools and the knowledge spreads between chimpanzee groups through individuals -- in other words they have a rudimentary technological culture.
Chimpanzee groups engage in warfare to annex territory, and it's not just a case of encountering other groups and spontaneous fights breaking out. They *invade* the territory of other groups. Surely that shows rudimentary planning. Within a group there is politics. The dominant male is not necessarily the strongest; a clever male can defeat a strong one by forming alliances.
Psychological experiments support the notion that chimps have a consciousness of self. Chimps have been taught American Sign Language, and appear to use all the cognitive features of language. Objections have been raised that this is just operant conditioning, but the same objections would apply to human use of language.
A hundred years ago, the idea that chimps might be persons from the point of view of ethics would be ridiculous. They were just animals in the forest. But a century of research has seriously undermined nearly every substantive distinction between humans and chimps. At this point the verifiable differences between chimps and humans aren't ones of *kind*, but of *degree*. Chimps use tools, but simpler ones than humans do. Chimps can use human language, even learn it spontaneously, but their vocabulary is in the hundreds of words, not thousands for a fluent human speaker.
If there is a defensible *ethical* distinction between the status of chimps and the status of humans, that distinction ought to arise out of clear-cut differences between humans and apes. At present there are only two clear-cut distinctions between humans and chimps. The first is genetics; chimps are close, but past attempts to create human/chimp hybrid have failed. Second, humans *rely* upon our advanced behavioral capabilities to survive. Tools are useful to chimps, but *essential* for us. Yet it is hard for me to see how we get from "chimps can get along without tools" to "it is immoral to experiment on chimps." One doesn't follow from the other.
If the answer is "well, they just aren't *human*," that has implications which are nearly as counter-intuitive as the notion that chimps have some of the same rights as humans. Most people would assume that if we ever met an alien, non-human civilization made up of self-conscious individuals, that hunting those individuals for pleasure would be morally wrong, and perhaps legally impermissible because while not human, they are "natural persons" with at least some of the basic rights of humans. Furthermore, if genetic tribalism is the ethical basis of law, why not favor Europeans over Africans, or vice versa?
plus time (which we always move forward through at a constant rate...
This is a meaningless assertion. What units would you use to describe the "rate" or "time" flow? Images like "moving through time" or "time flowing" implicitly assume an independent time-like dimension.
In reality what all these analogies characterize is not time, but things we might use as a clock. The passage of a water molecule down a clear, straight section of stream can be used to mark out a certain length of time from any starting point in time. It's not in any way *like* time, any more than a pendulum is like time. It's just a way of measuring a certain length of time against a fixed extent of space (in this case the arc of the pendulum rather than a length of stream).
When I was a teenager back in the 70s I knew a kid who put a solenoid controlled bleach dispenser over his rear tires to achieve that truly obnoxious white smoke burnout.
Why, do you ask? What possible purpose could that serve? Well, when his girlfriend dumped him, he backed up into her parent's driveway and blanketed their house in smoke for ten minutes.
This pretty much shows the level of mentality involved.
Well, start with the conservation status of the birds. Both species are rated as "Least Concern" -- which means no identifiable conservation issues.
In the 1950s there were only 412 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the US, due to hunting and DDT. By 1995 they were taken off the endangered lists, and five years ago they were taken off the "threatened" list. By now there are nearly ten thousand breeding pairs in the lower 48. Half of US states have at least 100 breeding pairs.
From an environmental viewpoint it's quite reasonable to stop treating an occasional accidental bald eagle death as some kind of serious event. For healthy population, an individual removed is room for another individual, just as with reasonable levels of deer hunting. Emitting more carbon in order to stop a handful of eagle accidents makes no sense at all.
Models work from assumptions. The assumptions you put into them don't have to be plausible; a model simply spits out the consequences of the initial conditions you choose. Thus you could start a simulation of the Earth which started with the tropical seas being frozen and the polar seas being at 38 C. Those initial conditions are impossible, but the computer program will faithfully spit out *some* kind of result.
Well, how about this for a system: instead of counting how many papers a researcher publishes, count the number of times a paper he has written has been cited by somebody else.
This is truer measure in any case. I recently had occasion to review the information science research literature on ontologies, and discovered that about 5% of the literature was absolutely vital to read, and were cited by a substantial fraction of papers in the field -- hundreds of times in my own literature search, and likely thousands of times in total in peer reviewed literature.
About 20% dealt with abstruse and narrow technical topics which were nonetheless useful to people working in the field; or were case studies. Such papers make up the bulk of citations in the research literature, although any single such paper probably gets only a few dozen citations. Still that's useful work.
The remaining 3/4 of papers are trivial, a complete waste of anyone's time to read. They may score a handful of citations, but from authors scraping the bottom of the barrel. They're so trivial, obvious, and unoriginal.
Odd side note: the less an author has to say, the more elaborately he says it. The really important papers tend to be written in straightforward, easily understandable prose. The trivial papers read like parodies of academ-ese.
Well, C.S. Lewis had an interesting take on this. He obviously believed in miracles, but he thought of them as becoming "naturalized", in the way a foreigner becomes a naturalized citizen in his adoptive land, and is subsequently bound by the laws of that land. So when the *supernatural* occurs (e.g. drowning the northwest corner of the continent at the end of the First Age), the consequences should follow *naturally*.
I bring this point up with my fantasy writing friends. Just because your world *has* miraculous things in it doesn't mean *everything* should be a miracle. People should have common-sense responses to miraculous things. If wizards throw lightning bolts in battle, then the cavalry shouldn't charge in a tightly packed formation until they're right at the line of battle.
George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire conspicuously soft-pedals magic, but ironically a lot of the world of those stories fails the naturalization test. For example kind of society depicted is dependent upon consistently generating a massive agricultural surplus, something that's not compatible in my opinion with decade-long winters. But I gave up after only a million words into the stories, so maybe that's explained elsewhere.
They're going to die a horrific, slow, and painful death. While I agree they brought it upon themselves, the picture of what they're likely to go through brings me no pleasure or satisfaction.
Neither of these analogies seem quite right to me.
If there are any morally legitimate uses for military weapons, you cannot say the working on weapons per se is automatically immoral. On the other hand, that doesn't make working on any weapon development program for any client morally neutral.
When Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, the Soviets were busy trying to repel German invaders -- surely that was a legitimate goal. They needed a cheap, rugged, lethal weapon that could be easily manufactured in large numbers. These same properties that have caused to to proliferate into unstable regions of the world. In some countries it is cheaper to buy an AK-47 than a live chicken. Some have called it a "slow motion weapon of mass destruction."
If somebody had asked Kalashnikov "Design me the ideal weapon to arm a conscripted child-soldier," he'd have told them to get lost. He designed the weapon to liberate his homeland; and he always regretted seeing his inventions in the hands of terrorists. He remarked on one occasion that he'd rather have invented an improved lawn mower.
Clearly, the ethics of weapons engineering is complex. But complex is not the same as "morally neutral". Heisenberg made errors in his atom bomb calculations, leading him to believe that a bomb was not feasible in time to affect the course of the war one way or the other. If his calculations had shown the way to an easier, practical bomb much earlier, then he'd have faced the ethical problem that arming a regime such as the Nazis with such a weapon would be a bad thing.
Today people working on aerial drone warfare are faced with serious ethical questions. Yes, you can construct scenarios in which the drone does the work of a human piloted vehicle without exposing the operator to risk -- clearly that's a good thing if you believe the operator is fighting in a just war. But one of the tenets of just war theory is that killing people pointlessly is never moral. Suppose you believed (as many do) that the Obama administration's use of drones was self-defeating, that we'd never be able to kill more legitimate enemies than are recruited to to the cause by civilian "collateral damage". Working to supply *this* regime with *that* weapon would present a moral dilemma.
Here's a simple analogy that I think works. Selling someone a gun is morally neutral, if you know nothing about what they intend to do with a gun. But if you know for a fact someone is going to use that gun to committ robberies, then selling the gun becomes wrong. The point is that you can't make generalized decisions about weapons development in a vacuum. Circumstances matter. For example it is possible to believe that under the circumstances the Manhattan Project was justified, but believe that North Korean or Pakistani nuclear program is not, without necessarily stipulating that the United States has more rights to nuclear weapons than any other country. You just have to show the circumstances are different.
Slashdot Mirror
Having done business with local governments around the country, I can tell you that the stereotypes about southerners or northeasterners are inaccurate. It's not like everyone from Georgia is a conservative and everyone from Massachusetts is a liberal. You find the same *kinds* of people everywhere, but in slightly different mixes.
Control of most states happens at the margins. If you have slightly more conservatives in a state, you get consistent conservative victories and if you have slightly more liberals you get consistent liberal victories. Incumbents tend to get re-elected too; that gives the ascendant fringe leverage over the low-information middle voters, and puts the weaker side in an up-hill battle for success. Lack of success for a minority party powerfully weakens that party, and it may have difficulty fielding strong candidates. Things tend to *look* hopeless after several decades of dominance by one party, but I think that's an illusion. A strong centrist candidate can win anywhere against a weak majority party candidate, as with Scott Brown who won the Ted Kennedy Senate seat in Massachusetts 2010.
Red states tend to have a history of hard luck and social upheaval, and this produces marginally more skepticism about government. By contrast Massachusetts, indisputably the bluest state in the nation, has enjoyed remarkable good fortune since the founding of the nation, and that produces *marginally* less skepticism about government here. But it's still there. In Massachusetts you still hear *exactly* the same range of opinions as you would in a red state. It's just that minority parties are structurally disadvantaged in states where one party has had a long record of success.
We just had a special election here to fill Ed Markey's congressional seat. The Democratic winner walked away with 65.9% to the Republican's 31.7%. That may seem like a landslide, but consider this. Almost a third of the voters came out for a totally unknown Republican, a political neophyte who nobody thought had a chance of winning against a well-known and popular politician. That strikes me as a remarkable showing, and I think it shows that even the bluest state is more purple than we imagine.
Pretty much, for someone likely to do this kind of post, chances are it is not their first post ever.
May have been. The Russians have always had a lot of great mathematicians, and they certainly understood the concepts. They had a significant computer industry, often copying western systems to be sure, but they were certainly could and did make their own designs going all the way back to the 50s.
Anyhow, they wouldn't have needed to Turing complete machines. In many ways back in the 60s specialized circuits might have been simpler and more robust. By the mind 60s they had ballistic missiles with multiple, independently targeted reentry vehicles, so they clearly had a lot of capability when it came to guidance systems. In some ways a lunar landing controller would have been simpler than MIRV guidance.
What makes you think this 'research' isn't a prank?
This Arielle Schlesinger person doesn't appear to have any social media or web presence prior to a few months ago. There is no link to published articles on or related to the actual "research", either in peer-reviewed journals or on-line forums. There's only a couple of brief blog posts in what looks like a deliberate parody of critical studies jargon ("reifies normative subject-object theory" and "non-normative paradigm").
It sounds like a parody to me. Granted, it's often hard to tell the difference, but one thing that strikes me that the example is rather puny. Yes, it is dense and incomprehensible, but real examples academic writing in the critical theory style go on at great length and detail. The Frankfurt School of neomarxism is very influential in this kind of academic writing, so what you're aiming for is a kind of faux teutonic grandeur.
There's no evidence that the purported research has taken place; nor is there evidence that this person is actually preparing to do research. The very first thing you'd do in this kind of academic research is to assemble a bibliography, yet the post doesn't even bother to drop names (e.g. Michel Foucault, Andrea Dworkin). It strikes me that the post displays little actual knowledge of the field it is supposedly discussing, other than a superficial familiarity with the jargon.
So -- yes. The entire thing appears to be hoax.
A black market is a market in which transactions can be presumed to be illegitimate. For example a market in stolen organs is a "black market".
A gray market is one which transactions can be presumed to be legal, but are considered undesirable by the original sources of the products. In a "gray market" transaction, the seller has valid title to the goods but is undercutting the manufacturer's attempts to establish different retail prices in different countries.
So, I should think a "dark market" would be one which ostensibly exists for supporting legal transactions, but in which it is also commonplace to trade in stolen goods. That might better be called a "gray market", but that term is already taken.
Yeah, those guys totally got that truck full of manhole covers from remodeling their basement.
But those who behave like humans should be treated like humans.
This is where I disagree with you. Human beings should be treated like human beings, regardless of their actions. Anyhow "treated like humans" is too broad for our purposes.
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You may be the second person today to read that into what I am saying and I must think you do not know any mentally handicapped people, because in my experience that paints them with far too broad a brush.
Here you are doubly wrong. My late brother had fragile X syndrome. When died in his 60s, he was intellectually about five years old. He could not have participated in the discussion we are now having. He did not have *less* rights because of his handicap; his handicap imposed a greater duty of care among those around him. We had to defend his rights because he could not do so himself.
I am not saying you believe that mentally handicapped people don't have human rights; I'm saying your formulation of the basis of ethics towards animals is faulty.
Torturing an animal, in particular, is a horribly dehumanizing thing to do - to yourself.
Here is the problem with your formulation; the transactional basis you have posited for ethics doesn't work for you in this case, so you are patching your model with a totally different ethical basis: aretaic ethics. I actually think you'd have better success using *that* as a basis for ethics than some kind of social contract theory.
Well, you can't express complex ideas without grammar, but that's not the same as not being able to have complex ideas. If you know anyone with stroke-induced aphasia, you know that one of the immense frustrations of aphasia is not being able to express what you have conceptualized. You can SEE it happening.
I had aunt in a nursing home who had expressive aphasia. She as always getting mad at her roommate for moving stuff onto *her* side of the room. Clearly she could *conceptualize* "My side" vs. "her side", and even property rights (my stuff vs her stuff). She just couldn't put it into words.
"Why should that be necessary?"
Because morality involves rights and obligations. Your right to be left in peace is only half of it - the obligation to respect the same rights in others is the other half.
You are taking me out of context. I was asking "Why is it necessary for a chimp to show he can master human grammar?" You have not addressed that question.
Because morality involves rights and obligations. Your right to be left in peace is only half of it - the obligation to respect the same rights in others is the other half.
This is an interesting position, but it seems to me to have some problems. If I understand your position, rights and obligations arise out of each other. In other words, if I expect you to respect my private property, then I have to respect yours. That seems reasonable, but this framework also seems to suggest that I can opt out of this arrangement; that I can steal from you as long as I'm OK with you stealing from me.
Your framework also suggests that children have no human rights until they have the developed the cognitive capabilities to understand their responsibilities. They cannot participate in any kind bargain over rights and responsibilities. Likewise mentally handicapped people could be murdered since they can't understand the philosophical bases of the anti-murder bargain.
Likewise under your framework torturing an animal is OK, as long as the animal isn't capable of understanding the philosophical basis for why torturing animals is wrong. I understand that some people believe torturing animals is OK, but not because animals can't understand why torture is wrong. Most of those same people would say it is wrong to torture a mentally incompetent human.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly *do* believe in your basic principle -- that which we demand of others puts an obligation upon ourselves. I just don't think ethics can be entirely reduced to that principle.
Sure, deer can outsprint humans, to the point where the human loses track of the deer, but nothing outruns a human over long distances. There was an article in Runner's World back in the 70s about running down deer in the Pacific Northwest. It takes about 4 hours.
The Tarahumara Indians of Mexico are famous for hunting deer precisely this way. Tarahumara have been known to run distances up to 200 miles without rest.
Humans aren't wimps; we're just specialized.
Pretty sure a small (20'x40') garden would give you enough to survive just fine.
I agree. But that's not the question. The question is whether it can do that without any tools whatsoever. That means no baskets and jars for storage and re-hydrating your beans. No fire for cooking them either. You'd eat those potatoes raw, which greatly reduces the calories you can extract from them.
I'm talking about having no tools at all; no hoes, rakes, clippers or knives; no stakes for your beans to climb or cordage to tie them up with. No rocks for grinding your grains, not even pointed sticks for planting seeds. Nothing to crack your nuts with but your teeth.
As for fruits and corn, the huge, succulent varieties we take for granted are dependent upon (tool-based) agriculture. Wild apples are crab apples. Wild maize looks more like wheat. In any case without lime (the byproduct of fire) maize is a very poor foodstuff.
With tools and fire, 1600 sq ft is easily enough to support the nutritional needs of one human. With nothing but your bare hands, teeth, and nails, you'd need hundreds of acres of prime foraging habitat per individual -- habitat like modern chimpanzee habitat. But we're a lot less well adapted than chimps to exploit that habitat, from our relatively weak limbs to our puny, brittle teeth.
That's a strawman argument. Why would a chimp have to *master* ASL, which is of course a human language, in order to show it has the same kinds of cognitive capabilities as humans? In other words is human language grammar the dividing line between a human with rights and an animal with none? Why should that be necessary? What does this say about humans afflicted with aphasia?
The key ability demonstrated by ape language experiments isn't grammar; it is the ability to form cognitive categories. This in turn underpins an ability to conceive of oneself as distinct from everything else. That ability to conceive of oneself as a distinct actor seems to me to be connected to a right to life. Compare a chimpanzee to a clam; they're both animals, but a clam doesn't have any sense of self. A chimpanzee does. Therefore it's quite consistent to draw a line somewhere between a chimp and a clam. You can even argue for a right to chimpanzee liberty without arguing for a similar right for clams, because chimpanzees have the cognitive ability to make use of liberty and clams do not.
Let me stress I am undecided on the idea of chimp personhood. I'm not convinced, but I see no reason not to entertain the possibility if the facts suggest that chimps are more like us than we thought.
I expect one problem with thinking in this area is the assumption there has to be just *one* cognitive that separates humans with their *entire* package of rights from animals. It seems to me the right to self-determination, the right to life, and the right not to be treated cruelly -- all of which rights humans possess -- might well stem from different sources. For example we might agree that torturing a dog is wrong, but it makes no sense to talking about torturing a clam.
Try farming without tools to plant, harvest, process and cook the result. Same goes for foraging. Without tools to process and prepare foraged food, you'd do very well in vitamins and minerals but you'd never get enough calories to support the needs of your anatomically modern human brain. Go to the produce store and imagine living off this stuff if (a) you had to find it and (b) you couldn't use tools to prepare and cook it. You need about 1000 calories per day to survive. That's ten pounds of spinach -- if someone harvests it and hands it to you. If you forage it for yourself you might need to eat 20 pounds of tender plant leaves.
People often imagine our ancestors living in a Garden of Eden filled with modern, selectively bred fruit trees (e.g. hybrid apples grown on grafted trees) bearing year-round. But such a favorable environment has never existed. The ability to prepare and eventually cook difficult-to-eat foods such as roots, grains and nuts with shells was a major driver of later human evolution.
We also imagine *chimpanzees* as the way we see them in the Tarzan movies, but in fact those are always baby chimps. Adult male chimps are much larger; not quite as big as an adult male human but 4x as strong a human of comparable size. Look at the way chimps climb; humans can't do that without some kind of aid. Just take a look at chimp teeth. Obviously chimps are much better prepared than humans to survive without tools.
Sure. Take away *all* human tools, including the lever, the rock, and the pointed stick, there are very few places on Earth where anatomically modern humans could survive.
Physically, if you were well-trained you could run a deer to death from exhaustion. Then you'd be stuck, because with your itty-bitty incisors you wouldn't be able to eat the carcass without some kind of cutting tool.
Suppose you are an alien judge in a galaxy-spanning, multi-species civilization -- something like the Federation in Star Trek, but humans haven't joined yet. Furthermore it's permissable for members, some of whom are carnivores, to kill animals, but not other natural persons.
A case is brought to you in which a research team has captured a human hunter who has just killed chimpanzee. They bring the hunter back for trial on the charges of murdering of a natural person.
What are your instructions to the prosecution? What dos the prosecution have to prove in order to get a conviction?
What are your instructions to the defense? What proof is sufficient to get the defendant off?
Stipulations: (1) The facts of the case are undisputed: the hunter did kill the chimp and did so knowingly.
(2) Personal ignorance on the part of the hunter is no defense. The hunter is guilty if, and only if, human civilization possesses enough facts to conclude that chimpanzees are likely to be natural persons with natural rights (what we would call "human rights") according to the galactic definition of "natural person".
(3) Only observable facts are admissible as evidence. Assertions about things like the presence or absence of a soul are not admissible.
(4) Your court has jurisdiction to convict any natural person of the murder of any other natural person, anywhere in the galaxy, even on non-member planets like Earth.
The difference is on average humans have the ability to plan, use tools, and effectively modify our environment.
It's almost certain you can't separate chimps from humans this way. Chimps not only use tools, they *learn* to use certain things as tools and the knowledge spreads between chimpanzee groups through individuals -- in other words they have a rudimentary technological culture.
Chimpanzee groups engage in warfare to annex territory, and it's not just a case of encountering other groups and spontaneous fights breaking out. They *invade* the territory of other groups. Surely that shows rudimentary planning. Within a group there is politics. The dominant male is not necessarily the strongest; a clever male can defeat a strong one by forming alliances.
Psychological experiments support the notion that chimps have a consciousness of self. Chimps have been taught American Sign Language, and appear to use all the cognitive features of language. Objections have been raised that this is just operant conditioning, but the same objections would apply to human use of language.
A hundred years ago, the idea that chimps might be persons from the point of view of ethics would be ridiculous. They were just animals in the forest. But a century of research has seriously undermined nearly every substantive distinction between humans and chimps. At this point the verifiable differences between chimps and humans aren't ones of *kind*, but of *degree*. Chimps use tools, but simpler ones than humans do. Chimps can use human language, even learn it spontaneously, but their vocabulary is in the hundreds of words, not thousands for a fluent human speaker.
If there is a defensible *ethical* distinction between the status of chimps and the status of humans, that distinction ought to arise out of clear-cut differences between humans and apes. At present there are only two clear-cut distinctions between humans and chimps. The first is genetics; chimps are close, but past attempts to create human/chimp hybrid have failed. Second, humans *rely* upon our advanced behavioral capabilities to survive. Tools are useful to chimps, but *essential* for us. Yet it is hard for me to see how we get from "chimps can get along without tools" to "it is immoral to experiment on chimps." One doesn't follow from the other.
If the answer is "well, they just aren't *human*," that has implications which are nearly as counter-intuitive as the notion that chimps have some of the same rights as humans. Most people would assume that if we ever met an alien, non-human civilization made up of self-conscious individuals, that hunting those individuals for pleasure would be morally wrong, and perhaps legally impermissible because while not human, they are "natural persons" with at least some of the basic rights of humans. Furthermore, if genetic tribalism is the ethical basis of law, why not favor Europeans over Africans, or vice versa?
plus time (which we always move forward through at a constant rate...
This is a meaningless assertion. What units would you use to describe the "rate" or "time" flow? Images like "moving through time" or "time flowing" implicitly assume an independent time-like dimension.
In reality what all these analogies characterize is not time, but things we might use as a clock. The passage of a water molecule down a clear, straight section of stream can be used to mark out a certain length of time from any starting point in time. It's not in any way *like* time, any more than a pendulum is like time. It's just a way of measuring a certain length of time against a fixed extent of space (in this case the arc of the pendulum rather than a length of stream).
When I was a teenager back in the 70s I knew a kid who put a solenoid controlled bleach dispenser over his rear tires to achieve that truly obnoxious white smoke burnout.
Why, do you ask? What possible purpose could that serve? Well, when his girlfriend dumped him, he backed up into her parent's driveway and blanketed their house in smoke for ten minutes.
This pretty much shows the level of mentality involved.
Well, start with the conservation status of the birds. Both species are rated as "Least Concern" -- which means no identifiable conservation issues.
In the 1950s there were only 412 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the US, due to hunting and DDT. By 1995 they were taken off the endangered lists, and five years ago they were taken off the "threatened" list. By now there are nearly ten thousand breeding pairs in the lower 48. Half of US states have at least 100 breeding pairs.
From an environmental viewpoint it's quite reasonable to stop treating an occasional accidental bald eagle death as some kind of serious event. For healthy population, an individual removed is room for another individual, just as with reasonable levels of deer hunting. Emitting more carbon in order to stop a handful of eagle accidents makes no sense at all.
Models work from assumptions. The assumptions you put into them don't have to be plausible; a model simply spits out the consequences of the initial conditions you choose. Thus you could start a simulation of the Earth which started with the tropical seas being frozen and the polar seas being at 38 C. Those initial conditions are impossible, but the computer program will faithfully spit out *some* kind of result.
Well, how about this for a system: instead of counting how many papers a researcher publishes, count the number of times a paper he has written has been cited by somebody else.
This is truer measure in any case. I recently had occasion to review the information science research literature on ontologies, and discovered that about 5% of the literature was absolutely vital to read, and were cited by a substantial fraction of papers in the field -- hundreds of times in my own literature search, and likely thousands of times in total in peer reviewed literature.
About 20% dealt with abstruse and narrow technical topics which were nonetheless useful to people working in the field; or were case studies. Such papers make up the bulk of citations in the research literature, although any single such paper probably gets only a few dozen citations. Still that's useful work.
The remaining 3/4 of papers are trivial, a complete waste of anyone's time to read. They may score a handful of citations, but from authors scraping the bottom of the barrel. They're so trivial, obvious, and unoriginal.
Odd side note: the less an author has to say, the more elaborately he says it. The really important papers tend to be written in straightforward, easily understandable prose. The trivial papers read like parodies of academ-ese.
Well, C.S. Lewis had an interesting take on this. He obviously believed in miracles, but he thought of them as becoming "naturalized", in the way a foreigner becomes a naturalized citizen in his adoptive land, and is subsequently bound by the laws of that land. So when the *supernatural* occurs (e.g. drowning the northwest corner of the continent at the end of the First Age), the consequences should follow *naturally*.
I bring this point up with my fantasy writing friends. Just because your world *has* miraculous things in it doesn't mean *everything* should be a miracle. People should have common-sense responses to miraculous things. If wizards throw lightning bolts in battle, then the cavalry shouldn't charge in a tightly packed formation until they're right at the line of battle.
George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire conspicuously soft-pedals magic, but ironically a lot of the world of those stories fails the naturalization test. For example kind of society depicted is dependent upon consistently generating a massive agricultural surplus, something that's not compatible in my opinion with decade-long winters. But I gave up after only a million words into the stories, so maybe that's explained elsewhere.
... as were nearly all examples of tengwar and dwarf-runes we have from Tolkien's own hand.
They're going to die a horrific, slow, and painful death. While I agree they brought it upon themselves, the picture of what they're likely to go through brings me no pleasure or satisfaction.
Neither of these analogies seem quite right to me.
If there are any morally legitimate uses for military weapons, you cannot say the working on weapons per se is automatically immoral. On the other hand, that doesn't make working on any weapon development program for any client morally neutral.
When Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, the Soviets were busy trying to repel German invaders -- surely that was a legitimate goal. They needed a cheap, rugged, lethal weapon that could be easily manufactured in large numbers. These same properties that have caused to to proliferate into unstable regions of the world. In some countries it is cheaper to buy an AK-47 than a live chicken. Some have called it a "slow motion weapon of mass destruction."
If somebody had asked Kalashnikov "Design me the ideal weapon to arm a conscripted child-soldier," he'd have told them to get lost. He designed the weapon to liberate his homeland; and he always regretted seeing his inventions in the hands of terrorists. He remarked on one occasion that he'd rather have invented an improved lawn mower.
Clearly, the ethics of weapons engineering is complex. But complex is not the same as "morally neutral". Heisenberg made errors in his atom bomb calculations, leading him to believe that a bomb was not feasible in time to affect the course of the war one way or the other. If his calculations had shown the way to an easier, practical bomb much earlier, then he'd have faced the ethical problem that arming a regime such as the Nazis with such a weapon would be a bad thing.
Today people working on aerial drone warfare are faced with serious ethical questions. Yes, you can construct scenarios in which the drone does the work of a human piloted vehicle without exposing the operator to risk -- clearly that's a good thing if you believe the operator is fighting in a just war. But one of the tenets of just war theory is that killing people pointlessly is never moral. Suppose you believed (as many do) that the Obama administration's use of drones was self-defeating, that we'd never be able to kill more legitimate enemies than are recruited to to the cause by civilian "collateral damage". Working to supply *this* regime with *that* weapon would present a moral dilemma.
Here's a simple analogy that I think works. Selling someone a gun is morally neutral, if you know nothing about what they intend to do with a gun. But if you know for a fact someone is going to use that gun to committ robberies, then selling the gun becomes wrong. The point is that you can't make generalized decisions about weapons development in a vacuum. Circumstances matter. For example it is possible to believe that under the circumstances the Manhattan Project was justified, but believe that North Korean or Pakistani nuclear program is not, without necessarily stipulating that the United States has more rights to nuclear weapons than any other country. You just have to show the circumstances are different.