Hacker News Reader

Comment by shlant | Hacker News Reader

animals do not have a concept of good and evil so why would we apply it to them?

I think looking at how things in the animal kingdom work and using that as a justification for our actions is a very low bar. We have the cognitive and emotional ability to understand that things like murder/rape/etc. are wrong do we not? If you just take a small step from that and recognize the sentience of animals, it doesn't seem too unreasonable to afford them the same respect.

PS: I think the idea of good/evil is pretty reductionist to begin with, but I understand it's a common way of looking at things

View on HN

They don't have words for it but if you've met shelter dogs or animals that have suffered abuse, they definitely understand the concept of evil. I have a rescue pig that I adore but he doesn't trust men because he lived a life of abuse. I can only assume that he sees men as evil, even if he can't make that statement. Some things are just natural. Humans seem to think we have a superior understanding of all things but some things are immutable truths and natural law. They don't require calculus to understand, just to describe.

Your example of evil just seems like the animals having a sense of danger to me. Animals usually instinctively will try to avoid danger. This doesn't require them to have a concept of evil.

What's your definition of evil? If an animal finds a specific set of traits to be characteristic of something that's dangerous and/or likely to inflict harm, is that not the definition of evil?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evil

We wrote these things down so that we describe them to each other. The concepts already existed. We didn't invent evil, we defined it but it was already there. We've also used arguments like this to separate ourselves from what consider be lesser, to distance us from our actions. This is mental gymnastics though.

Whatever you have to do to feel ok about eating a chicken is fine but pretending we have some better sense of self than anything else feels like hubris. If our position in the world is truly better because we can articulate out feelings and we're smarter, why don't we eat dogs and mutes and the mentally handicapped?

good and evil is a moral concept. Unless you believe in moral realism (which you would have a hard time proving) then yes, we did invent evil. You could probably snag yourself a Nobel Prize if you could prove morality is objective and that animals have an awareness of it.

> why don't we eat dogs and mutes and the mentally handicapped?

This is exactly the kind of point you would have to bite the bullet on if you were to be logically consistent and made arguments for meat eating being ok because you believe animals are intellectually/morally inferior. If you believe a cow is ok to eat because they are not as smart then you would have to be ok (being logically consistent) with eating anything that is not as smart as you such as the mentally handicapped.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com