Animal Minds (Animals)

by dhw, Sunday, June 12, 2011, 08:43 (4694 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The following has one moral. Play only with satiated cheetahs:-http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1246886/Pictured-Three-cheetahs-spare-tiny-ante...-Disregarding the controversy over what actually happened to the antelope in the end, I think one can go a bit deeper into this. The whale story illustrated the empathy and sensitivity shown by other animals, while David's moral illustrates the fact that unlike us, other animals kill only in order to survive. They have no choice. Long before humans ... the cruellest of all species ... came on the scene, the world was inhabited by a vast variety of creatures, some herbivorous and some carnivorous. We know that life can go on without killing, since herbivores do not need to kill other creatures in order to survive. And so for those who believe in a loving, caring, all-good God, the question arises: why would such a deity introduce carnivorousness as a way of life?-The question is only a starting point. Apart from natural catastrophes ... insurance companies sometimes call them Acts of God ... most of the evil in the world stems from selfishness: the pursuit of one's own interests at the expense of others, accompanied by a lack of empathy, compassion, considerateness. This principle is essential to the survival of the carnivorous animal (although it doesn't preclude selective empathy etc., any more than it does in the omnivorous human animal). In other words, the basis of evil was laid down long before humans arrived. Why, then, do so many religious people attribute the origin of evil to man and not to God?-This too, however, is only a starting point. I noted above that carnivores have no choice ... and so we wouldn't dream of describing their selfish actions as "good" or "evil". These terms are judgemental, and as we have seen in earlier discussions, the judgement itself has no objective authority ... it's dependent on social consensus. Theologians will argue that humans do have a choice, but if a human pursues his own interests at the expense of others, and has no feeling of empathy, compassion etc., can we be sure that he does have a choice? Why does he not have the feelings we think he ought to have? Here the topic of animal minds links up with the topic of free will, but this is not my point of focus. Once we have recognized that we too are animals, it seems to me that whole areas of human existence become a great deal clearer than they were under the foggy blanket of theology. I would argue that, whether God created life or not, and in spite of our astonishing technology, science, art, philosophy etc., the human world is based on the same mixture of instincts (which we may subjectively judge as "good" or "bad") as that of the animal world. However, through the sophistication of our language and the complexity of our cultures and societies, we have constructed a network of institutions that prevent us from seeing this simple truth. As usual, Shakespeare sums it all up: when King Lear meets Edgar, who is disguised as a mad naked beggar, he observes: "Ha! Here's three on's are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art."-*******-This was drafted before I read the latest exchange between David and Matt. I agree with David that we are "king of the heap" ... but as Lear discovered, being a king does not make you basically different from the rest of the heap.