As i've already stated, WE HUMANS have the luxury of holding our own in higher regard because WE HUMANS are the only ones able to define retarded ethical standards that have no application in the real world. Again, like I said.. go save a fishbowl instead of a human child and see what that gets you.
I see two possible fallacies committed here, though they essentially correlate with each other. The first concerns ethical reciprocity. The implication is that only humans are worthy of ethical treatment because only humans are capable of formulating ethical standards themselves, and the only beings capable of understanding such an ethical conception and reciprocating through a social contract of sorts.
Something of this nature was articulated by Glaucon in a statement to Socrates in Plato's
Republic.
Glaucon said:
They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice; --it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honored by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of justice.
Of course, I doubt that you accept such a view entirely, unless you believe that it is permissible to brutally torture animals, and your more likely view that it is morally wrong to torture animals but less wrong than to torture humans is not entirely consistent with this ethical view because most nonhuman animals apparently have no moral conception of ethical reciprocity whatsoever.
Nonetheless, this view would pose problems for more beings than nonhuman animals. Returning to the issue of human fetuses, they cannot possess such a moral conception; nor can human infants, for that matter. Nor can the severely mentally disabled. We might even say that this would apply to persons existing in the future, as Peter Singer has pointed out. Persons existing 500 years in the future can do nothing to us, and thus cannot enter into such a social contract with us. What then would be morally impermissible about storing nuclear waste in capsules that would only last for 500 years, and would then be the problem of whatever generation existed then, rather than our own?
Of course, your response then commits another logical fallacy that I pointed out to you before, and that you then distorted. You evidently believe that although human infants, fetuses, and severely mentally disabled are not capable of forming preferences and interests about the future and are clearly not as self-aware as regular human persons, they should be treated as though they were, since they are members of a species that is generally capable of forming such preferences and interests.
The reason I pointed out the issue of blacks and IQ was to illustrate the fallacy of treating individual members of a larger group as though they possessed the same average capacities of that larger group even when their capacities clearly differed from those of the larger group. Hence, should you meet an extremely intelligent black person, you would treat him or her as the extremely intelligent person that he or she was, not as though he or she possessed the lower average IQ of blacks as a whole. Similarly, this should remain true for fetuses who possess an even more drastic difference between average members of the larger group of the human species.
awareness levels are a null factor in relation to comparing the value of humans to other animals. It doesn't matter to me if you need to see some name dropped philosophical opinion in order to validate the superiority of humans over animals. Hell, you are a prime example of why soft sciences differ from hard sciences.
You assert that awareness levels are a "null factor" when it comes to comparing moral values of humans versus other animals, yet you fail to explain why that is. Other than the fallacy that you committed above that has been rebutted, on what basis do you make this claim?
Indeed, you HAD to leap to comparing humans because your comparison of humans to animals fails on its ******* ******* face. And, I didn't make a value judgment between black and whites even if you need to think so in order to feel less like the freshman you are. The most retarded white OR black human being is STILL more valuable than the smartest, most aware animal. If that chaffes your laughable utilitarianism then so be it. Again, there is a reason why this goofy ******* ethical standard is not universal.
All that did was reveal that you are incapable of understanding the most fundamental tenets of the ethical system in question.
It's no more a circular argument than you are an intelligent human being. Indeed, both black and white developmentally challenged humans are more valuable than ANY animal. don't like hearing that? Take it to your ******* peta rally.
Nice avoidance of reason there.
WHO the **** are YOU to put more utility in a chimp than a rabbit, *****?
oh... yea.. the HUMAN with a moral obligation to self-rationalize!
check mate, cocksheeth.
This appears to be a reversion to the fallacy of ethical reciprocity that you committed above. Duly rebutted.
Checkmate, cocksheeth.
Monkeys make a meal of human babies
From The Times
January 01, 2004
Chimpanzees struggling to survive amid the destruction of their forest habitat are snatching and killing human babies.
At least eight children have died in the past seven years in Uganda and Tanzania after being taken by chimpanzees and a further eight have been injured. The children were found with limbs and other body parts chewed off.
Monkeys make a meal of human babies
Hey, you stupid ****, no harm no foul, right? The utility behind an APE eating a human baby to fend off hunger SURE IS an ethical excuse since the half eaten baby could't SEE as well as the hungry ape taking a bite, right dipshit?
******* moron.
If I objected to the violent preparation for the consumption of nonhuman animals, any mentally stable person would be able to see that I would possess a similar objection to the consumption of human infants. Chimpanzees
cannot necessarily be faulted with ethical wrongness if they have no conception of it, though it's possible they could learn it.
At any rate, this is ethically impermissible through a utilitarian analysis on two grounds. The first is that the direct consumption of human infants is likely to be a monstrously painful act. Hence, this causes them to
suffer, and using the felicific calculus set out in Jeremy Bentham's
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, the intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, and purity of the suffering caused by the painful consumption of human infants vastly exceeds the happiness obtained by the chimpanzees. Thus, if you want to hold that chimpanzees ought to be considered moral agents on those grounds, it is wrong in that sense.
It is also a question of extrinsic moral value since human infants are likely to be treasured by their biological families. Hence, depriving an infant of life, particularly in such a heinous manner, would constitute a denial of a preference of its parents and extended family for the infant to live, and would cause them to suffer emotional distress. Thus, it is also morally wrong on those grounds, and you seem to possess a rather egregious misunderstanding of utilitarianism.
I kinda figured you'd get the **** out of dodge after I posted that last article about Apes using utilitarianism to rationalize eating human babies. Gosh, if only the mothers of those dead babies knew who Bentham was.
All that did was reveal your profound ignorance of utilitarianism.
