Environmental Ethics -- fair share for the non-human?

[phyllo]

Confusion about random/chance. Natural selection is STILL a process governed by chance.

When I said that you had to go into more detail about "chance", you switched to using the "chance/random" wording.

When I said that selection is not random, you explicitly said that it is random : "Selection is random ---- a random change is "selected" if is advantageous. In some way, unspecified. And what we really mean is the probability is higher will survive and reproduce, nothing definite."

Now you switch back to "chance".

Maybe you are confused.

[thomyum2]

…
But secularism cannot accept such reasoning as the above. There can be no appeal to the Creator allowed, and no Protestant explanations of WHY people have these alleged rights. So we come back to the question: WHY would secularists be telling us to believe that all people have such rights? What's their basis for insisting we have them and owe them to each other?

Granted that those who are not religious won't consider these rights to be 'endowed by their creator', so they don't derive that moral precept from a religious belief, yet they still take it as a given or foundational principle that those right exist and derive their moral or ethical code from that basis.

Right you are. They can't be "endowed by the Creator," according to secularism. And you say, "they still take it as a given." But WHY? Why should people who doubt...even secular people who doubt...be rationally compelled to concede those rights to others? What's the basis?

Thanks, IC, for taking the time to respond thoroughly to my post. All this is a challenging topic for me and has generated a lot of thoughts, many of which I haven't completely worked through. Perhaps this long post doesn't belong on this thread and we should take it elsewhere. In any case, I'll go ahead and put this out there and hope to get some interesting feedback and discussion.

The basis, from what I’ve observed, is that even secularists, who may reject the idea of a God or divine source for morality (and even some who deny that there is such a thing as ‘objective’ morality) still do believe, and stand firmly by their belief, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. And this belief usually takes the form that human lives (and sometimes all life) does matter, and has rights.

I don’t think it’s a difference in metaphysics – it’s something more fundamental to human nature. Principles such as the right to life or the commandment to “love your neighbor” are things that people of all faiths, or of no faith at all, recognize as compelling. I find this commitment in secularists as well, even if they don’t confess a religious or metaphysical belief behind it. It suggests to me that rather than lacking a basis, this is the basis. Paul Tillich calls it the 'ultimate concern' - for many secularists, doing the right thing is the ultimate concern.

I’ve found that often when secular or non-religious people discuss their moral convictions, that when challenged to justify them and eventually finding that they have exhausted their store of rational explanations, will get to a point where they’ll say something to the effect of “well, that’s just wrong”. Which suggests to me that you’ve reached the ground at the point – that foundational premise. It reminds me very much of the “here I stand – I can do no other” words of Martin Luther – reaching the point where I simply can’t continue to justify this with reason alone and will stand by what my convictions tell me is right.

...
The English certainly doubted it. Despots and monarchs, whether secular or religous, would deny it. Slave owners certainly didn't believe it. Heck, there was even a question of whether such a passel of rights could be doled out to women...and that was to be settled still. There were no end of such doubters around; so something better had to be provided; a real basis for the claim.

It can't be "Well, this is just what our particular group of secularists takes to be given." Nobody else gives it to them. So they need more of an explanation, a real WHY to back their case.

The English? That’s quite a big generalization, isn’t it?

But do you think that they doubted it, or just disregarded it? Do you really think a really well-constructed rationally constructed metaphysical explanation would have persuaded a slave owner to change their ways? I don’t see these as examples of doubters, as much as people who had vested interests in a particular social structure that they were unwilling or constitutionally unable to set aside. Either way, though, I think the challenge of convincing or compelling other people to live by certain precepts is a different game than that of understanding morality – it’s an exercise in the art of persuasion rather than philosophical inquiry.

But I do think I see where you’re coming from – tell me if I’m wrong – that without a spiritual underpinning or a faith that one’s life is meant for more than just the worldly experience for this short duration on earth, a person may find it more challenging to set aside that one and only life and its present rewards to do what ‘duty’ calls for without the promise of a reward beyond. But is it really possible to teach something like that, or does an individual need to come to it on their own terms?

Your posts argue that secularist can't rationally support their moral positions, which suggests to me that you think moral positions must be rationally derived from a metaphysical basis.

Excellent. Yes, precisely.

But my experience has been that morality (especially for non-philosophers) is more intuitive than rational, and that people generally start with the moral precept and then develop the rational basis from there, when called upon to do so, rather than the other way around.

Two questions, then: 1) How would indifferent nature endow its products with a belief in morality, a thing about which nature it self knows nothing and can know nothing, since it's not sentient? 2) Assuming we have such an intuition, and assuming it were all the same for every one of us, why would any of us be duty-bound to follow it? (After all, we have many intuitions we do not follow, because they fail to correspond to some reality, or because we have some other interest that we find transcends our immediate impulse. So what makes this kind of "impulse" special?)

To question 1, some secularists do argue that nature endows us with morals - that morality a not just an intrinsic good in itself but believing in it helps the species to survive. I don’t find that a particular good argument, but I ask myself, why is that a problem. If you’re doing the right thing, does it matter where you happen to think that idea came from? I can eat an apple from my yard without knowing who planted the tree or how it got there.

And to question 2, we are 'duty-bound' if and only if we choose to be, aren’t we? That’s the case for morality whether we believe in a divine source or not, whether we listen to reason or don’t. People, almost universally, have a conscience and they either choose to follow it or not. It seems to me that reason informs us more about the possible consequences of action than it does tell us about what it right or wrong. What makes this impulse 'special'? Well, my own view is that conscience, as a sign of what has been 'written on our hearts', is the doorway to faith and the 'beginning of wisdom'. A secular person would not interpret it to be that, but why would I challenge them for not providing that reason? Like I said earlier, the task of persuasion is different from that of philosophy.

I might be misunderstanding you, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on the idea that a moral precept itself could be a premise that is taken as self-evident - as a starting point - in the absence of a specific religious or metaphysical commitment.

I'm guessing you're thinking of the opening of the D of I, which talks about "we hold these truths to be self-evident"?

We still need an explanation of why we should regard anything as "self-evident" or as "given." The founders referred that problem to "his Creator," but secularly, we can't do that. But the founders clearly recognized that problem; which is why they didn't let "self-evident" stand alone. Because without some metaphysical backup explanation, the response "Well, it's not self-evident to me" is all it would take to defeat the whole moral imperative they were hoping to assert. But they wanted something durable, compelling and ethically primary upon which to found their whole Declaration.

So "self-evident" plus no explanation will not work, even in responding to a secular doubter, let alone any religious one.

Actually, I was not specifically thinking of the D o I, but maybe it due to being an American and the fact that it's cited this often that I repeat that wording. It's kind of part of the culture. Actually, I think most people see this as a very secular document. I don't see that the addition of the words 'endowed by their Creator' provides a 'metaphysical backup explanation' for either rights or their original source. And regardless of the reference to a Creator, it does exactly what I’m saying many secularists do: it doesn’t build a metaphysical rationale for rights – it takes rights as a starting point and builds from there. So I’m not sure I'm understanding your objection that it ‘will not work’ – what do you mean more specifically? Why do we need an explanation? All rational proofs must have a premise at the foundation that is accepted as true, not proven to be so – how is this more deficient, as a premise, than any other? The axioms laid out by Euclid at the beginning of his geometry don’t offer any explanation as to why we should accept them – we accept them as true at face value (or not, if we so choose). Why then cannot the idea that all persons have the right to life and liberty be similarly accepted?

That's kind of my point here that I'll sum up and close - that I guess I see the commitment to morality as a positive thing and don't think less of it due to lack of a metaphysical argument or religious underpinning. I don't think that listening to the voice of one's conscience and seeking to do the right thing is not accessible or compelling through reason alone. Thanks if you've read this far! To be continued.

[MikeNovack]

Confusion about random/chance. Natural selection is STILL a process governed by chance.

When I said that you had to go into more detail about "chance", you switched to using the "chance/random" wording.

When I said that selection is not random, you explicitly said that it is random : "Selection is random ---- a random change is "selected" if is advantageous. In some way, unspecified. And what we really mean is the probability is higher will survive and reproduce, nothing definite."

Now you switch back to "chance".
Maybe you are confused.

I don't know how YOU were taught evolution in school, what experiments you were exposed to. When I was teaching this I might have this as the lab lesson. In an opaque jar, place 50 white and 50 black beads to start. A student draws out a bead, his/her lab partner notes the color and rolls a die. If the bead is white, and the die came up 1, 2, or 3, the bead has "died" (50% chance to survive and breed). Otherwise put two white beads into the jar. If the bead was black and the die came up 1 or 2, the bead "died" (67% chance to survive and breed). Otherwise put two black beads into the jar. In other words, the black beads are "fitter". After a time the beads in the jar are examined and it will be found that there are more black beads than white. Evolution has taken place.

Starting with 50 beads of each color is a large enough number that this outcome is close to certain. BUT (a very big but) the fate of any individual bead drawn, white or black, depended on a random event, chance (the roll of that die). It is chance whether a bead that is drawn dies or lives and reproduces. The fate of an individual bead is not the same as the fate of the population of beads over time. Enough beads, enough time, and they will end up all black.

But that "enough beads" is important, If I had each student team start out with just two white beads and two black beads it is NOT CERTAIN their beads will "evolve to become all black". If my lab class had 24 student, teams of two, it is likely that at least one team would have reported a failure to evolve, and that in fact, the black beads had become extinct in spite of being "fitter".

[Immanuel Can]

To be continued.

I've read your response carefully, and can see you're working through the issues with great thoughtfulness. And I realize you're not done, so I don't want to jump the gun. But maybe I can offer a couple of tentative caveats, as you continue.

You rightly understand the nature of my question: what is a secular reason for morality. And you rightly see that secularism offers no such reason. It cannot explain why we must do/not do this or that. The stock response I get to this is something along the lines of, "Well, secularists are still often moral, so maybe that's as good as it needs to be." But that just begs the question, and requests another: if human beings have some sort of conscience, some sort of impulse to be moral, how does such a thing get explained in secular terms? And again, it cannot be.

But there's a deeper problem with that observation. It may be that people do X or Y. But that does not grant durability, authority or moral force to their doing of X or Y. And this is easily seen with reference to two of humanity's oldest habits, prostitution and slavery. Both are, by the morality you and I recognize, immoral; but both are also ancient practices of the human race. The fact that people do them, even when the majority of the world did, doesn't move them from the category of the immoral to the moral, does it?

And deeper still: there's a huge difference between being moral for reasons one understands, and behaving in certain ways for no reason one can possibly understand. The religious person can say there is authority and intent behind moral precepts -- whether that religion gets them right or wrong -- but secularism cannot even establish that much. There is no authority or intent behind the moral habits the secularist practices...only habituation, which is no stronger than habit.

The "endowed by his Creator" and "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are not mere rhetorical flourishes. The men who wrote the document believed they had force -- decisive force, in fact. And they were borrowing freely from John Locke, who laid out the reasons why all men must have the three fundamental rights (including property, rather than pursuit). His explanation, if you look it up (as I have) is that on what Locke called "The Great Day," God will judge men for their deeds; consequently, and logically, therefore, it is God who gives life, God who grants liberty, and God who bestows property -- all with the view that a man may live, make choices, be a steward of God's creation, and then return to God an answer for his responsibility at the Great Judgment. Consequently, Locke argued, any man who deprives another of either life, liberty or property is working against God, defying God's purposes, and harming himself. He will face his own accounting for what he did to other men and women, and how he either respected or restricted the "inalienable" properties God had bestowed on all...the right to life, to liberty and to property.

This works for a Christian. A Christian can say, "I know why I recognize these fundamental rights, and why it is my obligation to be moral." The Christian worldview fits the Christian ethic. And the same remains true, even if secularists argue they don't believe in that worldview; right or wrong, it still is logically the grounds for the Christian ethic. There's consistency there.

By contrast, a secularist can only say, "I don't know why anybody has to be moral...I feel like it, but I don't know why." The secular worldview does not fit any ethic at all. It fits amorality. It offers no logical grounds why any ethics are obligatory at all. There's no judgment, no Judge, no duty to a particular teleology or plan, and no kind of code. The secularist can borrow from others, but not logically. His own worldview tells him he's lying to himself, pretending things are moral, when really, nothing ever is. And as Nietzsche told him, he might well be better to get over it all and become a kind of superman or ubermensch, somebody "beyond good and evil," who doesn't even worry about such things. But he's too scared or too habituated to do so, perhaps.

"The respecting of God is the beginning of wisdom." So says the Bible. But it's also the beginning of morality. If there is no God, then neither do right and wrong exist. There is, as Nietzsche insisted, only "the will to power" as exercised by different people with different levels of courage. But power, not truth or rightness, is what determines what gets passed off as "good" or "evil," though both are mere ruses used by the weak to control the strong. And that's the end of the secular story.

However, I truly should pause here, to let you develop the rest of what you wish to say. I hope I don't miss anything in your substantial explanations. If I do, please feel welcome to repeat it, and I'll go back to it.

Please continue.

[phyllo]

I don't know how YOU were taught evolution in school, what experiments you were exposed to. When I was teaching this I might have this as the lab lesson. In an opaque jar, place 50 white and 50 black beads to start. A student draws out a bead, his/her lab partner notes the color and rolls a die. If the bead is white, and the die came up 1, 2, or 3, the bead has "died" (50% chance to survive and breed). Otherwise put two white beads into the jar. If the bead was black and the die came up 1 or 2, the bead "died" (67% chance to survive and breed). Otherwise put two black beads into the jar. In other words, the black beads are "fitter". After a time the beads in the jar are examined and it will be found that there are more black beads than white. Evolution has taken place.

You have created an artificial environment which is more "deadly" for white beads than black beads. And you use random decision generators (drawing the bead and rolling the die) to simulate events.

I think that's where you accidentally introduce randomness (and chance) into your thinking about evolution.

Starting with 50 beads of each color is a large enough number that this outcome is close to certain. BUT (a very big but) the fate of any individual bead drawn, white or black, depended on a random event, chance (the roll of that die). It is chance whether a bead that is drawn dies or lives and reproduces. The fate of an individual bead is not the same as the fate of the population of beads over time. Enough beads, enough time, and they will end up all black.

But that "enough beads" is important, If I had each student team start out with just two white beads and two black beads it is NOT CERTAIN their beads will "evolve to become all black". If my lab class had 24 student, teams of two, it is likely that at least one team would have reported a failure to evolve, and that in fact, the black beads had become extinct in spite of being "fitter".

Conclusions about evolution are based on observing large populations.

It's the same as flowing water. One can observe that it flows in a particular direction and speed but individual water molecules may be moving in any direction and a range of speeds.

Nobody denies that there are elements of good and bad luck that affect the survival and reproduction of individuals. A fit animal may step into a hole and break it's leg. Temporary weather events may destroy food sources. An animal may be born in an area with many predators or few predators.

Individuals have a large set of characteristics and they exist within a complex environment. So, there is no straight forward way to predict which individual will survive and people fall back to looking at probabilities. But that's not randomness.

[Walker]

Those who are interested in "secular morality" have already discussed it with IC.

Interesting, then, that not one of those "20" you estimate to be present was able to suggest one single moral precept required of all secularists by secularism.

Is it the case, then, that "not responding" is all they have left? Not one can respond?

So it seems.

Wouldn't want you to get bored, IC.

The implication is that one must believe in secularism in order to understand secularism, which is itself a belief because one need not jump off a cliff to know what will happen.

*

Premise:
Ethics are intellectual constructs. Conscience is inherent, therefore neither secular nor religious, but because inherent morality is not religious and because of inherency, it can be called secular. Fairness is the root of conscience, which is why capitalism is an inherent motivator for relationships.

Inherent morality, or conscience, can be overruled by intellectual ethical codes that vary according to the society.

Therefore:
Because of inherent fairness, which is the root of inherently moral actions, an entire family can easily realize that the opportunity to work in a protein processing plant is a quite fair solution to their needs and options. I know because when I was young I worked in an extrusion factory.

The protein processing owner can easily realize that providing opportunity for employment, to provide good nutrition to the community and the way to pay for it, and to earn personal profit for himself, even if himself is a corporation, is a fair exchange for his considerable risk-taking.

Capitalism and win-win: Numbers prove that when a factory’s focus shifts to worker physical safety, productivity increases.

If the factory owner can match the pricing of competitors who use cheap labour, and who and pay off inspectors to ignore unsafe conditions, then to pay a fair wage to his workers and keep them safe, the moral protein processor will have to cut into his profits, and that’s not fair.

His only hope to stay in business amongst the corruption of inherent morality that is the crony-capitalism result of corrupting business ethics of fairness, is to offer a better product through product quality, distribution, and/or service, and to attract quality workers through incentives.

That's a big ticket, which is why service occupations can pay a lot if the service is Luxury, which was Trump's original business.

(Shooting premise need not kill therefore).

[Immanuel Can]

Those who are interested in "secular morality" have already discussed it with IC.

Interesting, then, that not one of those "20" you estimate to be present was able to suggest one single moral precept required of all secularists by secularism.

Is it the case, then, that "not responding" is all they have left? Not one can respond?

So it seems.

Wouldn't want you to get bored, IC.

The implication is that one must believe in secularism in order to understand secularism...

No, not at all, actually. And I can show that's true, because the person who recognized is it a celebrated arch-Secularist, whose views were, on many points, totally the opposite of mine. When two such strong opponents end up agreeing, I think you can have reason to believe they are both onto a truism they both are forced to accept, whether it's a comfortable one or not.

The truth is this: to get Secular moralizing right, one only needs to listen to what Secularists say about the nature and origins of the universe, and using simple and strict logic, deduce from those claims to the warranted conclusions about morality. One neither has to be religious nor has to be secular to do so. One simply has to be accurate in one's understanding of the secular premises, and accurate in one's deductions therefrom.

Nietzsche was probably as courageous in pursuing this line of inquiry as any Secularist has been. I have not personally met any living Secularist who was more rigorous in his deductions. And Nietzsche agreed with me, surprisingly. He accepted the implications of Secularism: "God is dead," he famously wrote, and by that he removed the question of divine sanction from morality for anybody who believes the same. And then he made the bold deduction from that premise to amorality...to the "beyond good and evil" of the "superman."

I suppose a Secularist could just reject Nietzsche. However, Secularists seem unable to provide any premises which deductively lead an objective observer to some warranted moral conclusion. So the rejection really won't help, and would only be gratuitous. To defeat Nietzsche, they'd need to show that at least one moral conclusion can be deduced from the fundamental beliefs of secularists. If they could do it, Nietzsche and I would lose our point. But so far, we're both secure on that.

Still, I welcome the effort, if anybody thinks they can make it.

[Walker]

From what I’ve gathered, Brownian motion is unpredictable and thus, random.

Question to AI: Is Brownian motion an example of pure randomness?

AI Answer: Brownian motion is not strictly “pure randomness” in the sense of being completely unpredictable from first principles, but it is a stochastic process whose behavior is effectively random for all practical purposes.

Human comment: If Brownian motion ain’t pure, then nothing must be pure.

[Walker]

Capitalism is neither secular nor religious, and a belief in capitalism is the intellectual result of inherent fairness, fairness being an inherent morality independent of ethics. The time-duration of this theory in practice hinges on corruption of capitalism and innate morality, as does the existence of an actual superman. Then, the question becomes how to reconcile idealism with reality ... which is why the idealism of socialism can never match the reality of inherent capitalism that stems from a relationship of inherent fairness.

[Immanuel Can]

Capitalism

There's no such thing at "an ideology of capital." There are free markets, there are profits, there are losses, there are shares and stocks, there is investment and divestment, and bankruptcy and gains, employers, employees, democratic governments, regulatory bodies and all of that, and there is even such a thing as "capital": but it has no founder, no party, no particular political plan, no particular prescriptions with it, and nobody actually worships it or subscribes to a "Capitalist" manifesto.

"CapitalISM" is merely a Marxist fiction. Don't buy into it, because it's part of their grift. They want you to think it's okay for them to be ideologically possessed, because they want you to think you're their ideological opposite, another secular "religion" instead of just "leave us alone, we don't want your nonsense utopia program." It gives them leverage to excuse their desire to control us, because they present us as indoctrinated the way they are.

[MikeNovack]

You have created an artificial environment which is more "deadly" for white beads than black beads. And you use random decision generators (drawing the bead and rolling the die) to simulate events.

Not really. The whole point is that the way in which A differs from B (the way is "fitter" is not the ONLY factor determining whether A or B will survive and reproduce, That is in fact the real world situation in which evolution takes place.

In the experiment, A is fitter, has a higher PROBABILITY of of surviving and reproducing than B (A is "fitter" than B. Exactly as in the real world of evolution it is still a matter of chance whether any particular A survives and reproduces. You are perhaps confused because mainly exposed to chance/random when the probability was 50% (outcomes equally likely). Here evolution (of the population) takes place because although the individual fate of a bead was determined by a chance event, when repeated a latrge number of times the outcome for the population becomes more certain.

Note this works in reverse when NOT random. For example, in our society, parents with three children are more likely than you might expect to have all boys or all girls. You might expect 1/8 all boys and 1/8 all girls and that would be true if random. But it isn't random, because in order to have three children must first have two children, BB, BG, GB, or GG. SOME of these parents with two choose to have a third (for others, accident, not choice). In our society, parents with two of the same sex are much more likely to try for a child of the other sex than parents who already have a child of each sex. That non-randomness if the cause of the result that there are more than 1/8 BBB and GGG.

Remember I said an OPAQUE jar (so could not see what color bead drawn). Suppose I changed the experiment so as to have an increasing population. If a white bead and the die is 1,2, or 3 discard the bead but if 4,5,or 6 put in THREE white beads. If a black bead drawn and the die is 1 or 2 discard but if 3,4,5, or 6 put in THREE black beads. Yes, the black beads are "fitter" (67% chnace of survival and treproduction vs 50% for the white beads. The experiment will still work as intended to show evolution. But now introduce non-randomness, introduce bias. Make the jar clear, not opaque so the person picking a bead can see what color it is, and have them prejudiced to prefer picking white beads. What will happen now?

[Walker]

My point is that person to person, capitalism is fair trade, value for value with each party satisfied, and the premise behind that is that capitalism is caused by a sense of fairness that is inherent to humans. The fundamental principle of fairness is recognized by all, although it can be corrupted.

[MikeNovack]

Neither capitalism nor socialism relevant to the question at hand. Mind there are traditional Marxists socialists who have a quasi-religious belief that capitalism is the source of ALL woes and if only we did away with capitalism these would magically vanish. But since we seem to hve none such here claiming "our environmental problems would vanish if we did away with capitalism" we can ignor that.

Go elsewhere with your arguing capitalism vs socialism.

[Immanuel Can]

But since we seem to hve none such here claiming "our environmental problems would vanish if we did away with capitalism" we can ignor that.

I think we do have them...and not a few.

[Walker]

You're asserting that capitalism and socialism have no effect, relationship, or connection upon governmental environmental policies and ethics?

You're asserting that capitalism and socialism have no relevance to ... fair sharing?

I think you could be wrong about that.