Animal morality: are humans merely animals?

[brownjenkins]

Originally Posted by Fat middle

What I meant is that almost everyone have denied the existance of morals in animals: some because we think that moral are related to free will and that's only in humans, others because you don't think that morals exist at all: neither in animals nor in humans.

woah! lots of stuff here... and people say i get off-topic

there seems to be a kind of absolutism in the above statement and many others that is exactly what i was trying to address... the idea that somehow you're governed completely by free will or completely by instinct, with no space in between

if for the moment we accept the basic concepts (which is the best we can do, though the concepts may be imperfect) that instinct is an ingrained action that you have little control over, while free will is the ability to act according to thought processes only, and then look at the real world...

many examples have already been given of animal actions that seem to be at least in part due to thought processes, and maybe even a certain amount of trial and error and deduction

how about some human actions that seem to defy thought processes? i mentioned the fact earlier that mothers (and fathers) always protect their offspring... not only that, but there is an almost universal tendency for this to happen even if that offspring has done something truely terrible to society... one would think that if we were governed totally by free will, logic would allow someone to see this situation more objectively, but time and time again humans do not... this is just one of many examples... there are many other involving love or anger where human reactions become extremely predictable (almost instinctual), even among the most intelligent

i see this as a kind of reversion to what we call instinct... so if humans still have some instinct intermixed with their 'free will', whats to say that some animals do not have a bit of 'free will' mixed in with their instinct?

You cannot deny the validity of the concept of morals and also claim it for animals...

sure i can, any concept is our best guess at reality, but at the same time... it is just that, a guess... so it 'is true to the best of our knowledge'

i however was not denying the concepts of morals, free will and instinct... i was saying that maybe the division between these concepts is not as absolute as some of us like to think