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Comment by bigbubba | Hacker News Reader

Children are ethically immature? Who could have guessed?!?

Ah, but the question is "is valuing all lives regardless of species ethically immature?"

Note that 'notRobot's "valuing all lives" is not saying "valuing all lives precisely equally" but rather opposing "humans are far more morally important" as per the abstract.

Indeed, great point!

The answer is yes.

Your comment is the opposite of what HN is supposed to be. You've taken up a stance, please explain your reasoning instead of stating it as fact.

Lots of reasonable points could be made to counter that opinion.

The question is inane, anybody who doesn't earnestly value the life of a human more than the life of a dog is morally bankrupt. And frankly, I think most who claim otherwise earnestly do not feel that way when put on the spot. Given the choice of dying young or receiving a porcine heart valve transplant, I am quite sure what damn near everybody except a handful of nutjobs would chose.

Repetition is no substitute for argument.

If only more people would be immature. There would be no COVID-19 and we would have much more time to tackle climate change.

Regardless of maturity, it's certainly computationally untenable. I wonder how many millions of bacteria I've genocided in the last few seconds...

No, that's not really the question - the question is whether kids can reason morally, which they can't.

And it's not that they value all lives equally, it's that they value dogs over humans.

It's more likely that the bulk of adults have stopped reasoning morally and instead go with socially prescribed conclusions. I mean, how else would you explain the killing if trillions of land animals each year?

Morality doesn't exist outside of "socially prescribed conclusions", it's actually a pure social thing, it has no other function, but to help individuals make socially acceptable choices.

That is a pretty bold proclamation. Still, the thought of killing and torturing an animal for your pleasure seems to violate ethics centered around reciprocity. You know, the old "do unto others...". Even if that rule is not based on something objective it still seems more axiomatic than, "Mmmm, they taste good therefore I have dominion."

kids can absolutely reason morally, they just don’t have all the scaffolding to support doing so well or coming to reasonable conclusions. kids even reason about the nature of the terms themselves (especially around christmas: “why do i have to be good? what does being good mean?”).

but the same five year old who is picking the 10 dogs over the 1 human is also grabbing their toy from their little sister and bopping her on the head with it and making her cry, so i am not trying to defend some notion of a developed sense of toddler morality.

Children can reason morally and do, they just didn't learn a lot of morals to reason with yet. Morals, i.e. what is good and what is bad, is something people never stop learning. Obviously learning moral values from cartoons isn't helping in situations with real people.

Or...

Adults become so overly conditioned to accept that killing animals for our daily lives is normal, that we no longer register animal death as an ethical issue.

> killing animals for our daily lives is normal

It is normal. Historically speaking, not doing so is what’s not normal. The nature of this planet is that every living thing lives off eating other living things.

It is normal for animals who don't think the same way that we do. They don't understand the concepts of "killing" or "life" and don't value life in the same manner as humans.

It's always struck me as odd when unethical treatment of animals is justified by saying "animals eat/kill/hurt other animals too!". We're different from animals. Our standards should be higher.

Many animals do understand killing and death. Elephants are a prime example of this.

Also, what is unethical about eating an animal? If this is really an issue, then we should be out there killing all those murdering predators like wolves, right?

Setting aside the obvious questions about how wild vs farmed animals are raised, wolves don't have a choice about what to eat, while humans do. Even if we wanted to improve the status of wild animals, murdering wolves isn't obviously the best way.

So what if they don't have choice? If a mentally deranged person commits a crime because they didn't have a choice, we still remove them from doing further harm from others. Would you not kill a wolf attacking a person? If we are saying that animals are equal, then we should also be protecting the innocent prey.

It is normal because for a very long time we didn't have a choice. I won't argue with the ethical aspects of killing animals but from a climate standpoint it makes sense to kill and eat a lot less animals.

I chose not to eat any animal products because I feel I don't need to eat animals to live and because the alternative is better for the world in general. The alternatives seem to either not live up to the claims or not be sustainable except at a small scale.

Also, for warriors, killing humans is normal.

I think it would be more likely that people are just so far removed from the killing in today's society that they don't know/care about the ties to their lives. How many of today's people have actually killed, butchered, and eaten an animal? I imagine the vast majority of people just go pick up pre-cut, pre-packaged meat at the grocery store.

This is exactly what I was trying to say, but you did better.

My using the word "normal" totally derailed the discussion.

I'm not a vegetarian or against killing animals. I just wanted to note that the natural relationship of killing to satisfy hunger is not what we have now at all. Many children don't even realize that the food they eat used to be animals until they are 5-6 years old. That's pretty detached from the "natural" order.

I don't buy this either. No-kill shelters wouldn't exist if that were true.

Maybe. Perhaps some killing is ethical. PETA (people for the ethical treatment of animals) has shelters and I hear they have very high kill rates, like >95%.

I would consider other organizations like Operation Kindness that have actual no-kill shelters. Personally, I do not like PETA, and would never have even thought their name in this discussion had they not been mentioned by someone like yourself. I get how other people might be enitced to believe in them as you pointed out Ethical is in their name. However, I don't put any more weight in that than MacBookPro is a professional device with its Prosumer specs (as I type this out on my maxed at 32GB RAM MBP).

your entire thread treats the premise of the paper as inane or making a moral implication about what this phenomenon means, but it is actually useful to know that value for human life over other life is socially conditioned.

if you treat it as a given that value for human life is innate then your society may fail to foster the conditions which promote human flourishing. many adults are also ethically immature and if the people who all do care about human life all say “well of course human life is valuable, it is stupid to study” then all those ethically immature adults spend their entire lives trampling on everyone else.

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