Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Looking To The Animal Kingdom

Enamored selectively and emotionalistically by animals, some people think that the other creatures we share the world with have some obvious, verifiable, universal moral lesson to prompt us to dwell on such things--and it is not even obvious if anything is morally good or evil (this cannot be proven, but it is logically possible, and even probable because of evidence for Christianity).  One example I have encountered is a certain kind of person who makes dogs sound morally superior to humans, as if they would by default all be kind and loyal if it was not for humans feeding and caring for them, and as if humans all inevitably act out of malice and selfishness.  Singling out some animals out of all of them to praise or imitate, assuming that the way things are in the world is the way they should be (and assuming that morality exists at all in addition to this), and assuming that non-human animal lifestyles match what the proponent would always prefer them to be are some of the errors here.  

Many people do think about how savage animals can be and imagine them to exhibit a moral ideal that has itself already been merely assumed.  Female praying mantises might eat their partners after sex, much like how female black widow spiders cannibalize their male partners after copulation--they are called widow spiders because of the reported eating of their partners, though males have been alleged to eat their mates as well.  Sand tiger shark egg babies in the mother's oviducts also eat each other.  Male dolphins can engage in group rape of females (no, this does not mean female creatures cannot or do not rape males!).  Shrike birds impale their prey, such as mice or insects, on sharp, pointed objects to kill or store the bodies for consumption, using protrusions like branches to accomplish this.


Emerald wasps, a kind of parasitoid wasp, subdue roaches using a venom to override ordinary neurological/phenomenological responses and lay eggs so that the larvae eat the "zombified," submissive roach.  Tarantula hawks do something similar with tarantulas, bringing them to a burrow and laying an egg on the body of the spider.  The arachnid becomes food for the larva.  No, it is not just humans that have the capacity for brutality.  Some other animals rely on such acts to literally continue their species.  Humans do not need to, but morality is not about what is helpful or pragmatic except by happenstance overlap.  It is what should be done out of obligation no matter the consequences.  Maybe it is morally mandatory to be casually, constantly brutal, but no amount of animal patterns prove this.  Besides these and other errors, people who think looking to the animal kingdom for moral epistemology is correct do not even really want humans to carry out plenty of things they would find.

Which of these animals are we to supposedly emulate?  Are we to have nonconsensual sex, kill the offspring of other people, and eat our siblings?  There are many different organisms with wildy diverse behaviors, and yet even if there was only one other observed species and every individual member of it was benevolent, nothing about the existence or nature of morality could be known from this, and not just because the senses do not prove anything (with one exception [1]) except that the perceptions are being experienced.  This would tell us how we perceive another animal to act.  It would not reveal anything about how we should live or if there is such a thing at all.  However, a person who already feels as if something is morally good and sees it in the natural world, they might fallaciously believe they have found epistemological proof that some activities are metaphysically valuable instead of just useful for a certain end that might or might not be moral.

Just as it does not logically follow from having a reaction of conscience to something like stealing that it really is wrong, it does not follow from the way a random animal behaves that there is such a thing as moral duty and that this exact set of actions is what that duty consists of.  Now, the Bible does mention some animals as displaying characteristics some people would be good or pragmatic to in turn display.  Proverbs 6:6-8 uses ants as an example of productive beings in contrast to someone so lazy that poverty might appear to them like a thief.  These traits can be good in humans, but are not always obligatory, and animals are never the metaphysical grounding of morality.  God is.  Whether or not Christianity is true, theistic moralism, whatever the obligations therein are, is the only possibly valid moral framework.  If the uncaused cause has no moral nature, nothing is good or evil; whatever it's moral nature consists of it it has one is good.  Animal behaviors could neither metaphysically dictate morality nor epistemologically reveal it.


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