personhood

[seeds]

Seeds wrote:

Belinda, you are free to confer personhood on any creature you so desire.

I mean, many a human thinks of their scruffy old poodles as being their children. Do you honestly hold that a poodle is a person in the same way that a human is a person?

Do you consider a house cat, or a chicken, or a mosquito, or a head of cabbage as possessing personhood?

Where do you draw the line, B?

There is no line.

Of course there is a line, B. It is the line that I laid out for you earlier in the “2001: A Space Odyssey” post.

It is the line that was drawn between the early hominids and the other animals on this planet when a specific branch of hominids awakened into full self-awareness and began the direct and willful manipulation of the infinitely malleable fabric of their minds, thus establishing their familial (offspring) relationship with the greater mind of this universe (God).

If I am permitted to use one of my standard illustrations...



...then the “line” to which I am referring is the one that establishes the fact that just as any self-propagating lifeform in all of reality has its own unique seed of itself, likewise, so does God.

Now of course I am not suggesting that my wild theory can’t be complete nonsense. However, just look at that illustration and realize that just as you cannot implant the embryo of a fruit bat into a human womb and expect the bat to be born as a human a few months later, likewise, you simply cannot plug-in any random lifeform...

(i.e. a warthog, or a field mouse, or a trout, or a hornet, etc.)

...Into the position in the illustration that represents the seed of God.

No, it must be something after God’s own kind. It must be something that is awake enough to realize that it is imbued with the same creative potential as God. In other words, it must be something that is capable of creating its own universe out of the fabric of its own mind just as God has done with his own mind.

As I have stated many times before, the simple and ultra “natural” truth of reality is encapsulated in the old Hermetic axiom: “As Above, So Below.”

Or in the more apt version: “As Below, So Above,” wherein it can be understood that even the highest lifeform in all of existence (God) replicates itself by conceiving its own offspring (us humans) within itself, as is depicted in yet another of my crazy illustrations:



The captions from top to bottom read as follows:

“Let us make man in our image.” (Genesis 1:26, KJV)

“...one of us...” (Genesis 3:22, KJV)

“The occupants of the realm on the other side of this barrier are as profoundly ‘more awake’ relative to adult humans on earth, as adult humans on earth are ‘more awake’ relative to a fetus in the human womb.”

Btw, before you reassert your complaint that the notion of God conferring something unique and special upon humans alone, as being an instance of, as you said: “prejudiced vanity”,...

...realize that I also include the likely existence of no doubt countless numbers of other (non human) beings throughout the universe who have also crossed the qualifying “line” into full self-awareness and have acquired the same form of eternal “personhood” (and potential) as is possessed by God.

Poodles can't vote, or fight for their countries, or wonder what next year will bring. Yet poodles can feel a lot of what we can feel. Like us, poodles can feel pain, affection, pleasure, hunger, thirst, need to do behaviours basic to their species, anxiety, uncertainty, and maternal care.

Because of the above poodles should be granted personal rights.These rights would differentiate between poodles and cabbages.Or between cabbages and these poor souls that are kept in American feed and breeding lots to provide cheap and nasty food.

B, I fully agree with everything you are expressing above, for I too have agonized over our horrible treatment of other lifeforms (especially the ones relegated to the hell of factory farming). However, it just doesn’t change the fact that whatever personhood we bestow upon poodles, or cows, or chickens, or salmon, it simply is not the same form of personhood that we - as humans - share with God.
_______

[FlashDangerpants]

Yeah, it does. It means that morals are all fakes, constructs, illusions, with no relation to moral truth. So their existence as fakes is immaterial. You're logically amoral, then.

You have a circular dependency on moral realism there,

Not at all. I'm not asking you to assume moral realism. I'm understanding very well that you do not.

It's YOUR view that there is no basis to legitimize morality. You're saying that people believe it, cultures have it, systems require it, but it's all based on nothing. They can't ever show it legitimate. It can only ever be arbitrary, ungrounded, unrelated to reality...in a word, "fake." "Fake" is the word we use when something seems to have something behind it, but really doesn't. And that's what you believe about morality.

I get that.

So what that looks like is a moral-realist assumption that in the absence of some absolute truth of right and wrong in all cases, then discussion of right and wrong is hopelessly doomed because if it's not 'real' then it is 'fake'?

I must be missing some important detail, because that would be a circular argument that only works if one already believes it, and arguments that only exist if you close your eyes and believe in them really hard should be segregated to the religion sub.

[Belinda]

Seeds wrote:

Belinda, you are free to confer personhood on any creature you so desire.

I mean, many a human thinks of their scruffy old poodles as being their children. Do you honestly hold that a poodle is a person in the same way that a human is a person?

Do you consider a house cat, or a chicken, or a mosquito, or a head of cabbage as possessing personhood?

Where do you draw the line, B?

There is no line.

Of course there is a line, B. It is the line that I laid out for you earlier in the “2001: A Space Odyssey” post.

It is the line that was drawn between the early hominids and the other animals on this planet when a specific branch of hominids awakened into full self-awareness and began the direct and willful manipulation of the infinitely malleable fabric of their minds, thus establishing their familial (offspring) relationship with the greater mind of this universe (God).

If I am permitted to use one of my standard illustrations...



...then the “line” to which I am referring is the one that establishes the fact that just as any self-propagating lifeform in all of reality has its own unique seed of itself, likewise, so does God.

Now of course I am not suggesting that my wild theory can’t be complete nonsense. However, just look at that illustration and realize that just as you cannot implant the embryo of a fruit bat into a human womb and expect the bat to be born as a human a few months later, likewise, you simply cannot plug-in any random lifeform...

(i.e. a warthog, or a field mouse, or a trout, or a hornet, etc.)

...Into the position in the illustration that represents the seed of God.

No, it must be something after God’s own kind. It must be something that is awake enough to realize that it is imbued with the same creative potential as God. In other words, it must be something that is capable of creating its own universe out of the fabric of its own mind just as God has done with his own mind.

As I have stated many times before, the simple and ultra “natural” truth of reality is encapsulated in the old Hermetic axiom: “As Above, So Below.”

Or in the more apt version: “As Below, So Above,” wherein it can be understood that even the highest lifeform in all of existence (God) replicates itself by conceiving its own offspring (us humans) within itself, as is depicted in yet another of my crazy illustrations:



The captions from top to bottom read as follows:

“Let us make man in our image.” (Genesis 1:26, KJV)

“...one of us...” (Genesis 3:22, KJV)

“The occupants of the realm on the other side of this barrier are as profoundly ‘more awake’ relative to adult humans on earth, as adult humans on earth are ‘more awake’ relative to a fetus in the human womb.”

Btw, before you reassert your complaint that the notion of God conferring something unique and special upon humans alone, as being an instance of, as you said: “prejudiced vanity”,...

...realize that I also include the likely existence of no doubt countless numbers of other (non human) beings throughout the universe who have also crossed the qualifying “line” into full self-awareness and have acquired the same form of eternal “personhood” (and potential) as is possessed by God.

Poodles can't vote, or fight for their countries, or wonder what next year will bring. Yet poodles can feel a lot of what we can feel. Like us, poodles can feel pain, affection, pleasure, hunger, thirst, need to do behaviours basic to their species, anxiety, uncertainty, and maternal care.

Because of the above poodles should be granted personal rights.These rights would differentiate between poodles and cabbages.Or between cabbages and these poor souls that are kept in American feed and breeding lots to provide cheap and nasty food.

B, I fully agree with everything you are expressing above, for I too have agonized over our horrible treatment of other lifeforms (especially the ones relegated to the hell of factory farming). However, it just doesn’t change the fact that whatever personhood we bestow upon poodles, or cows, or chickens, or salmon, it simply is not the same form of personhood that we - as humans - share with God.
_______

Species snobbery is why I am a pantheist.

[FlashDangerpants]

you're an anti-realist, flash, not an amoralist

you're morality is etiquette & convention...you're not indifferent to morality

Indeed. We have the moral language and practices and we can't really live together without them. But we constructed the edifice just as we have with poetry and fashion and law, none of which can be discovered already created for us by the universe.

That view doesn't commit anybody to amoralism, it just means that where there is disagreement that needs resolution, the tools available are those of persuasion, as there is no holy rock we can flip over to discover the answer.

[Immanuel Can]

You have a circular dependency on moral realism there,

Not at all. I'm not asking you to assume moral realism. I'm understanding very well that you do not.

It's YOUR view that there is no basis to legitimize morality. You're saying that people believe it, cultures have it, systems require it, but it's all based on nothing. They can't ever show it legitimate. It can only ever be arbitrary, ungrounded, unrelated to reality...in a word, "fake." "Fake" is the word we use when something seems to have something behind it, but really doesn't. And that's what you believe about morality.

I get that.

...discussion of right and wrong is hopelessly doomed because if it's not 'real' then it is 'fake'?

Correct.

You can still then "discuss" morality, but only by pretending there's something to it when, as a moral skeptic, you know there's not anything to it at all.

I must be missing some important detail,

Yes. It's a thing called "legitimation."

If any morality exists, not just objectively but subjectively as well, it can be in only two conditions: legitimized or unlegitimized. If it's unlegitimized, it means nobody has, or can have, any rational explanation as to why the moral precept in question is obligatory.

So then, you can still say, "Thou shalt not murder," if you want to; but somebody else can say, "Why not, if I want to, and I feel I can get away with it?" The precept has been uttered, but it has no further basis. You can't defend it. It's a ruse created by you or your society, to fool people who don't think carefully into thinking morality is obligatory for them, when really, there's no reason it ever can be. It's just a ruse, a strategy, a fake.

On the other hand, if your moral precept is legitimized, it means you can provide a reason why, based on how things really are, the listener must regard him or herself as obliged not to murder anybody. And then you can also say why, if the person does commit murder, the attached penalties are just and deserved.

Your view of morality, if I believe what you say, is totally unlegitimized. It floats on nothing real. It's a fake, a ruse, a dodge. Behind all that, it's nothing at all...in which case...amorality.

[FlashDangerpants]

If any morality exists, not just objectively but subjectively as well, it can be in only two conditions: legitimized or unlegitimized. If it's unlegitimized, it means nobody has, or can have, any rational explanation as to why the moral precept in question is obligatory.

Why do I have to keep pointing out that makes no sense as a criticism of moral anti-realism? You may as well complain that cars can't exist because they don't have enough legs to be a horse.

So then, you can still say, "Thou shalt not murder," if you want to; but somebody else can say, "Why not, if I want to, and I feel I can get away with it?" The precept has been uttered, but it has no further basis. You can't defend it. It's a ruse created by you or your society, to fool people who don't think carefully into thinking morality is obligatory for them, when really, there's no reason it ever can be. It's just a ruse, a strategy, a fake.

You are relying on freighted language to smuggle your argument here. All this talk of ruses, lies and fakes only makes sense from a moral realist perspective. As I explained for Vestigial Aquaduct in some other thread recently, we typically discuss our beliefs as if they are facts as a amtter of daily course, there's nothing unusual or significant about discussing our beliefs about morality in the same way we do all our other beliefs.

On the other hand, if your moral precept is legitimized, it means you can provide a reason why, based on how things really are, the listener must regard him or herself as obliged not to murder anybody. And then you can also say why, if the person does commit murder, the attached penalties are just and deserved.

This point continues your theme of just assuming moral realism and the implications thereof in a circular effort to defend moral realism and the implications thereof.

Your view of morality, if I believe what you say, is totally unlegitimized. It floats on nothing real. It's a fake, a ruse, a dodge. Behind all that, it's nothing at all...in which case...amorality.

Moral anti-realism is supposed to float in that way, there is nothing "real" upon which to stand. This notion of legitimacy you are applying is nonsensical mysticism, no such thing applies or could apply to normative moral values. This is why this criticism is not my problem, it is a failing of your imagination rather than of my position that you cannot seem to consider the prospect of what morality as a non-divine human construct without suffering cognitive dissonance.

[commonsense]

I would like some clarification, please.

Flash & Henry:
Can there be personhood without morality?

IC, Belinda, Seeds:
Can there be personhood without God?

[Immanuel Can]

If any morality exists, not just objectively but subjectively as well, it can be in only two conditions: legitimized or unlegitimized. If it's unlegitimized, it means nobody has, or can have, any rational explanation as to why the moral precept in question is obligatory.

Why do I have to keep pointing out that makes no sense as a criticism of moral anti-realism? You may as well complain that cars can't exist because they don't have enough legs to be a horse.

Not the right analogy.

It's more like this: some people say unicorns exist, and some people say that they don't. You happen to be totally convinced they do not, but you're impressed with the fact that many people still believe in them. They "exist" only in the limited sense that they "exist as a belief," not that they have any existence at all as a real thing.

So you might say, "Unicorns exist": but what you really mean is that they "exist" as a social fiction, a deception in the minds of the people who believe in them. But you're NOT saying that there are real unicorns.

In the same way, you're saying "morality exists," but only as a socio-cultural fiction. That is, we still have to deal with other people who happen to believe in morality, but the deep truth, according to you, has to be that they are all deceived. No reality stands behind their belief.

So then, you can still say, "Thou shalt not murder," if you want to; but somebody else can say, "Why not, if I want to, and I feel I can get away with it?" The precept has been uttered, but it has no further basis. You can't defend it. It's a ruse created by you or your society, to fool people who don't think carefully into thinking morality is obligatory for them, when really, there's no reason it ever can be. It's just a ruse, a strategy, a fake.

You are relying on freighted language to smuggle your argument here.

Not at all. You can do exactly the same operation with something purported to be positive. You could use the precept, "Being a good boy shall be rewarded." But if somebody asks, "Why should we suppose we owe a reward to somebody else for 'being good,' when 'good' is a fiction?" And you would still have no answer.

No moral realism assumed at all. I'm using your suppositions, not my own.

Your view of morality, if I believe what you say, is totally unlegitimized. It floats on nothing real. It's a fake, a ruse, a dodge. Behind all that, it's nothing at all...in which case...amorality.

Moral anti-realism is supposed to float in that way, there is nothing "real" upon which to stand.

Now you've got it.

This notion of legitimacy you are applying is nonsensical mysticism,

It's not one bit "mystical." Habermas, for example, who if you know about him, is no friend of metaphysics, insists that morality's fundamental problem today is the question of legitimation. And many other secular heavyweights in philosophy, like Buckley or Blumenberg agree with him. In fact, the whole end-of-ethics school...people such as Margolis and Caputo (to say nothing of Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus) begins with the realization that if ethics have no legitimative base, there is a desperate need for something else to function to legitimize secular ethics.

Are they all "mystical"?

They also obviously don't think it's "nonsensical." They think it's fundamental. It's their starting point. So you'll find you're quite alone out on that limb that imagines we don't need a legitimation for ethics.

As Nietzsche saw, the only alternative to legitimation is going to be raw, amoral power.

no such thing applies or could apply to normative moral values.

Actually, it applies to all of them. But you're right about this: that it is possible for a person to jump from the legitimation problem to just accepting some school of normative ethics...on faith. But it will no longer be possible for such a person to explain to anybody else, or even to himself, why he is obliged to choose, say, Pleasure Utilitarianism over neo-Kantianism or Neo-Aristotelianism, over Wellbeing Utilitarianism, or Communist Utilitarianism... or even over nothing at all, like the Nihilists.

This is why this criticism is not my problem,

It's not your problem only because up to now, clearly, you haven't understood it. Once you do, you'll understand what all those other secular philosophers have understood...that it's really a basic problem with your view, and one for which you've got nothing.

[FlashDangerpants]

In the same way, you're saying "morality exists," but only as a socio-cultural fiction. That is, we still have to deal with other people who happen to believe in morality, but the deep truth, according to you, has to be that they are all deceived. No reality stands behind their belief.

Further continuing your theme of just assuming moral realism and the implications thereof in a circular effort to defend moral realism and the implications thereof.

[Immanuel Can]

Further continuing your theme of just assuming moral realism and the implications thereof in a circular effort to defend moral realism and the implications thereof.

Not at all. The assumptions...and the consequences of the assumptions, are 100% yours. You just don't know it yet.

And it's not that you can't have them, if you want to choose that line. You can. But I hope better for you than that you do get them.

[FlashDangerpants]

I would like some clarification, please.

Flash & Henry:
Can there be personhood without morality?

IC, Belinda, Seeds:
Can there be personhood without God?

The morality thing is a side issue, although I believe this whole thing started in a ethics dispute about that and so perhaps the personhood thing is the side issue...

The fundamentals of this are basically a rehash of the endless nonsense that went on the gender sub last year with a similar cast list presenting similar stuff, so underneath all the fluff this is a dispute about essentialism, and by extension, what things can change and which can never change. Whether beings, actions and so on all belong in supernatural unchanging categories that grant them an eternal essence that defines them perfectly, versus a less rigid view of matters where assignment of particulars to some universal category is very much in the eye of the beholder. Which object you are currently categorising isn't going to make a significant dent on any of that, today it's persons and how we decide what a person is, last year it was chicks with dicks ... are they more chick or more dick. While for ever and ever and ever amen, it's always rape, genocide, murder and slavery.

[FlashDangerpants]

In the same way, you're saying "morality exists," but only as a socio-cultural fiction. That is, we still have to deal with other people who happen to believe in morality, but the deep truth, according to you, has to be that they are all deceived. No reality stands behind their belief.

Further continuing your theme of just assuming moral realism and the implications thereof in a circular effort to defend moral realism and the implications thereof.

You are criticising a brand of anti-realism with "No reality stands behind their belief" and you either can't or won't see that isn't legitimate criticism. This is stupid.

[Immanuel Can]

You are criticising a brand of anti-realism with "No reality stands behind their belief"

Look at your own wording.

You call yourself "anti-realist," and then try to day it doesn't mean "No reality stands behind" a belief in morals. If you succeeded in that, you'd prove yourself a variation of "realist," not an "anti-realist" at all. If you succeeded, you'd fail.

That at present, you can't see that the problem is inherent to your view, I understand; but it is. And all those secular philosophers I cited can tell you it is.

[FlashDangerpants]

You are criticising a brand of anti-realism with "No reality stands behind their belief"

Look at your own wording.

You call yourself "anti-realist," and then try to day it doesn't mean "No reality stands behind" a belief in morals. If you succeeded in that, you'd prove yourself a variation of "realist," not an "anti-realist" at all. If you succeeded, you'd fail.

That at present, you can't see that the problem is inherent to your view, I understand; but it is. And all those secular philosophers I cited can tell you it is.

I'm not in any way denying that no reality stands behind the belief, the not-reality is the entire fucking point. I'm pointing out that this isn't a criticism. You can't criticise a chicken for tasting like chicken.

Yet a-fucking-gain you have a circular dependence on moral realist assumptions here, you've had that all the way through this conversation and it is blatantly obvious, how can you be blind to it?

[Immanuel Can]

I'm not in any way denying that no reality stands behind the belief, the not-reality is the entire....point.

Then you're an amoralist.

But you say you're not. You say you still believe in morality, though you also believe there is nothing real behind it.

So I want to know one simple thing:

"How"?