What makes a human...?

[Sair]

Hmm… this is an interesting concept; but why are you laying it at the feet of religious believers? Certainly, from a Catholic perspective, we wouldn’t say that a chicken’s telos is “to become my dinner”! If you want to argue in this manner, you’re free to do so: please realize that you’re setting up a straw man when you do…

To focus on this particular point, exactly what is the ‘telos’ of nonhuman animals? And why are they given such short shrift in monothesitic religious conceptions of the world?

 

[tonyrey]

If we have direct experiential access to our thoughts, they should be considered natural.

Depends upon what you mean by ‘intangible’, and what importance you attach to actually being able to grasp and hold any experience in order for it to be considered ‘real’ or ‘natural’.“intangible” means not accessible to the physical senses. Do you deny the reality of your thoughts? What are they precisely?

Again, the accessibility of an experience - our ability to actually experience anything - points to that particular phenomenon being part of nature.

Nothing in nature corresponds to our mental experiences because nature consists of tangible things.

We might not be able to cling to our dreams, for example, but that does not mean they are not part of the nature we inhabit. It seems to me that if they had some more permanent existence somewhere apart from being the fleeting, transitory products of our physical mental processing, we ought to be able to go back and analyse them after the fact - but if you’ve ever tried to recall a dream, you’ll be aware that the harder you try to pin it down, the more elusive it becomes.

There are many facts we can’t remember but they don’t cease to be facts.

How do explain the success of science, human rights and moral responsibility?

How do you explain them? My explanation is relatively easy - science is a product of our observation of the world we inhabit, and changes with the varying degrees of accuracy we achieve in this endeavour…Easy to the point of being inadequate and simplistic. How exactly does science explain its own success, human rights and moral responsibility?

…human rights boil down to our recognition that we are all the same type of animal, with similar (if not identical) needs and desires, and the notion that if we uphold said needs and desires in general, others will (mostly) do likewise for us - the ethic of reciprocity, writ large

Human rights are distinguished from animal rights by every civilised person.
The ethic of reciprocity is a principle that cannot be explained scientifically.

… moral responsibility is a useful concept for engineering our adherence to the ethic of reciprocity, of spelling out our social obligations and recognising the extent to which we are responsible for our own actions.

A moral concept is worthless if it is based on impersonal events.

You’re surely not suggesting that any of these concepts point to an entity fundamentally separate from our physical existence - if they did, why would we be discussing them in the first place?

There is no evidence that physical existence is the sole form of existence. Our mental experiences are so dominant and pervasive they should be our starting point, not “products of our physical mental processing”…

We could just leave it to our supernatural essences and let them hash it out.

Those terms are irrelevant and simply distract from the issue at stake: the power of the mind on which all reasoning depends.

First of all, what’s so straightforward about ‘animal activity’ that makes it in principle explicable in scientific terms, when ‘personal activity’ is not so?

Animal activity is only scientifically explicable as far as moral neutrality is concerned. There is no evidence that animals lack minds but nor is there evidence they have moral insight or responsibility.

Secondly, why do you imagine that other animals don’t have any notion of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the context of their existence?

There is no evidence that animals can grasp abstract concepts or principles.

I am referring in particular to other social animals, who do, according extensive field observation by naturalists, exercise a recognisable form of morality.

Why aren’t they regarded as morally culpable or innocent?

Finally, what’s ‘personal’ activity? What precisely separates it from the kinds of animal activity displayed by our furry, feathered, scaled or finned cousins?

All the achievements of human civilisation. Can they reasonably be described as animal products?

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[tonyrey]

Why should everything be regarded as a product of nature?

Since we have immediate knowledge of our thoughts why do we need a lump of tissue to access them?

In courts of law and daily life our actions are explained as “our” actions. They need no further explanation. “We” are the explanation! If our actions were natural events we would be impotent links in an impersonal chain.

“intangible” means not accessible to the physical senses yet the reality of our (intangible) thoughts is indisputable.

Nothing in nature corresponds to our mental experiences because nature consists of tangible things.

There are many facts we can’t remember but they don’t cease to be facts.

How exactly does science explain its own success, human rights and moral responsibility?

Human rights are distinguished from animal rights by every civilised person. The ethic of reciprocity is a principle that cannot be explained scientifically.

A moral concept is worthless if it is derived from impersonal events.

There is no evidence that physical existence is the sole form of existence. Our mental experiences are so dominant and pervasive they should be our starting point, not “products of our physical mental processing”…

Reasoning presupposes the power of the mind.

There is no evidence that animals lack minds but nor is there evidence they have moral insight or responsibility.

There is no evidence that animals can grasp abstract concepts or principles.

Why aren’t animals regarded as morally culpable?

Can the achievements of human civilisation be reasonably described as animal products?

No response!