Different in degree or kind: moral animals? (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, March 13, 2016, 14:02 (3177 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: We have seen all sorts of stories and videos of animals acting in a moral way, helping other animals or rescuing people. Do the animals understand what they are doing is the point of this essay, in the same or different sense than we recognize the morality of the act:-https://books.google.com/books?id=BTbvCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=weaver+b...-QUOTE: "Most philosophers have been united in their reasons for thinking that animals cannot be responsible for what they do. To be responsible requires an ability that animals do not have — the ability to scrutinise their motivations critically......What is crucial is that it cannot do this — it does not have the ability to scrutinise its motivations."-***
QUOTE: "But there is another tradition, associated with the philosopher David Hume and developed later by Charles Darwin, that understands morality as a far more basic part of our nature — a part of us that is as much animal as it is intellectual.....
Our morality is rooted in our biology rather than our intellect."-David's comment: The gap of 'different in kind' makes the argument difficult to resolve.-As I see it, there is no conflict between these views. Because of our self-consciousness, we theorize about and give fancy names to everything we do and feel. The word “morality” is an irrelevance in this context, as is the word “responsible”. Not translating concepts into human language does not make the concepts themselves any less real, and in any case lack of what we call moral responsibility does not mean the non-existence of morality. Animals could not survive without caring for their young, without individuals making sacrifices for the community, without helping and sharing with one another; at the same time, there are often individuals within an animal community that are more selfish than others - sometimes they are even driven out for what humans would call “immoral” behaviour. But the name doesn't matter. Animals, in my opinion and in that of many who have lived with and studied them, have both the feelings and the social codes that underlie what we call “morality”, and both of these are essential to their survival. So I would say, in response to the above, that “morality” is rooted in the nature of all living things, including ourselves, but only humans through their extra degrees of consciousness theorize about it, with questions concerning comparative values and responsibility. It's my usual argument: the basics are the same, but humans have a broader, deeper view because of their enhanced self-awareness.