Free Will: Excellent discussion (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, February 16, 2015, 19:40 (3568 days ago) @ David Turell

GEORGE: I'm not sure if this is the right thread for this link on the is-ought debate:
but you may find it interesting-https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/on-being-right-about-right-and-wrong-I like his arguments that homicide and violence are public health issues, 
and that witch-burning was not immoral but simply mistaken.-DAVID: Excellent piece. I don't care which link it is in. it doesn't prove or disprove free will but it does speak to moral thought and individual rights.-It certainly is excellent. The section on individual rights that David has quoted is great, but I was also struck by the paragraphs that preceded it. Please note the definition of sentience and the fact that prominent cognitive neuroscientists consider these attributes to be a common characteristic across species, including all organisms on this planet, and to provide continuity between humans and non-human animals.
 
Shermer: The criterion I use—inspired by your starting point in The Moral Landscape of “the well-being of conscious creatures”—is “the survival and flourishing of sentient beings.” By survival I mean the instinct to live, and by flourishing I mean having adequate sustenance, safety, shelter, bonding, and social relations for physical and mental health. I am trying to make an evolutionary/biological case for starting here by arguing that any organism subject to natural selection—which includes all organisms on this planet and most likely on any other planet as well—will by necessity have this drive to survive and flourish. If it didn't, it would not live long enough to reproduce and would therefore not be subject to natural selection.-By sentient I mean emotive, perceptive, sensitive, responsive, conscious, and therefore able to feel and to suffer. Here I'm following the argument made by Jeremy Bentham with regard to animals: It isn't their intelligence, language, tool use, or reasoning power that should elicit our moral concerns, but their capacity to feel and suffer. To this I add the recent Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness—issued by an international group of prominent cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists—that there is continuity between humans and non-human animals, and that sentience is the common characteristic across species. [MY BOLD]-I am beginning to wonder whether my autonomous sentient conscious organisms- as opposed to David's automatons - may not in fact represent the current majority opinion after all.