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Comment by M_Grey | Hacker News Reader

At some point we're going to have to take something like responsibility for our actions in the face of other sentient species... Or accept that we do things only because we can, and abandon even the semblance of ethics. It's starting to become very clear even with a strong degree of skepticism, that while we may be the most advanced intelligence on Earth, we're not the only ones.

That should have implications for our species, if we let it.

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It was easy when sentience was considered binary. There were just 2 groups, man and animals. If not man then not sentient.

Once sentience is considered a continuum, you can say things that we kind of felt all along like "its less morally bad to eat a chicken than a dolphin".

The reason that this meets resistance is because it forces the question "is it morally bad to eat the chicken at all?" and then we have to pick a spot on the continuum as a dividing point. There may be some small disagreement as to where to draw this line...

Sentience being a continuum also suggests that there might be points where man overlaps animals. For example, an adult crow might have more ethical value than a newborn human baby. Taking such a notion seriously would require restructuring a lot of society.

Worse still, some people are more sentient than others. Its a deep rabbit hole that will lead you straight into conflict with many prevailing orthodoxies. Also very easy to abuse to create some very dangerous ideologies. Put some in the chamber of your Godwin accelerator and its damn near hypergolic.

Almost enough to make you shudder and try not to think so much.

It really does, but if we don't do the thinking, someone else will do it for us and come to conclusions we may not like.

The way you're thinking about things is very natural in the realm of computers and math, but insane in life at large.

We do not follow universal, perfect rules. Humans make judgements on what is appropriate or not based on preference.

It would be perfectly in keeping with sanity and normal behavior to decide something is worth the regrettable extinction of an intelligent species, while maintaining actual codes of morality.

What's the value in extinguishing intelligent species? Otherwise you're right, but it's not in keeping with the professed morality that the vast majority of the public appears to claim to follow. As I said, it might be time to simply admit that our overriding ethic is, "Because we can."

> What's the value in extinguishing intelligent species?

More resources for us.

What resources are we competing for with crows exactly?

Desirable tropical beachfront property?

Crow condos on the beach... the solution is clearly timeshare.

You think they would fall for free luau tickets and high-pressure sales techniques?

Well... it would be a real test of their intelligence.

It only appears that we do not follow universal, perfect rules because we have so many of them and even different from one individual to other. Our brains are too big to make sense about these rules. But if you take simple variant of brain, insect for example, you see that they pretty much have universal, perfect rules that they follow much like robots.

Humans don't respect even their own species, good luck with respect for other sentient species...

Depressing, but no less true for that.

Neither do other animals...? We're not all that different.

Most other animals won't fight to the death. They might fight far enough to determine a victor, but usually the fight or conflict is over quickly or before the conflict actually takes place.

Humans on the other hand will pursue the illogical course of self-destruction for the slight chance of "moral victory."

Animals have not created the concept of "wealth" and "money" to justify the death of other animals. In this regard, other animals are way ahead of our species.

Most of us actually do. Not all humans respect all other humans all the time, but most of the time we behave quite decently against each other.

> Or accept that we do things only because we can, and abandon even the semblance of ethics.

That's not abandoning ethics, just changing them.

The holocaust is something we almost universally consider unethical today, but it was within the nazis ethical framework.

Cannibalism is unethical too, until it's a matter of life and death.

Cannibalism isn't really unethical, it's unsafe. Murdering someone to cannibalize them is very unethical.

Was it? Was the "Nazi ethical framework" actually a framework or just a conveniently half-assed set of pseudo philosophies? Take the "Aryan" concept or their racial "science"; just because someone claims to have a different ethical system isn't reason enough to accept on its face.

Questions I'd ask would be along the lines of questioning whether or not there were actual ethical principles at play, and if so what were they? I'm not sure that racial or national supremacy is really meaningful when you're not the person believing in it. "Race" for example isn't a particularly rigorous concept, so what ethical structures could you build around it?

Then again Hitler banned vivisection, introduced hunting restrictions, required animals to be under aneastetic for slaughter and there were plans to ban slaughter houses after the war altogether.

I feel that only emphasizes how arbitrary and inconsistent any supposed "Nazi Ethics" were.

I know it was not a pleasant system to live in if you did not subscribe to it or fell out of luck and I am personally not fond of the extreme emphasize of race. I feel I have to state this because talking favourably of any aspect of the system is frowned upon.

Anyway, the system overall appears consistent to me: glorifying nature and culture. They have made advances with respect to animal-wellfare and protection of nature that we still benefit from today in that (a) they the raised the bar at the time and (b) the laws introduced then are still in place (when slightly modified).

They also introduced the first of a kind wellfare system for Germans and put a strong emphasis on family.

If you can understand and read German, this is a great documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vtfdfILdAw. It's funny just how much less tainted that documentary is then what we get to see to today.

I think there's a lot of hearsay about Nazi Germany and virtually anything you read on it is tainted either with hatred (99% of us) or fanatism (1%). I used to absolutely hate on the system, because no wonder, we are brought up in school to hate it just based on emotion and bad imagery. If you've read 1984 by George Orwell, going to history class in a way felt like the two minutes of hate. For example, there's plenty of evidence that Hitler did not want a war and tried his best to avoid it, yet in school it was already clear without a doubt that Hitler wanted a war for "world domination" or some none sense like that. Again, if you understand German, this is fantastic: https://www.amazon.de/1939-Krieg-Anlauf-Zweiten-Weltkrieg/dp... and a talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJuvWn7TFdY.

I'm the wrong audience to try and slow-sell this to, but I appreciate the try.

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