judgments about other species

[arynash]

Shaun Nichols treatment of interspecific moral judgments leaves something out. (Chapter 8 of Sentimental Rules.) I feel that by concentrating on judgments made about aliens versus humans, he's skipping over a whole other category of moral judgments made about non-humans- the ones we make about animals

Comments

[philosophyjeff]

I'm quite generally a critic of x-phi, so let me voice a concern over your proposed survey.

There's going to be a bias in favor of treating orangutans in person-like ways which is generated by the similarity in phenotypes between us and them, including behavioral phenotypes. Moral judgments, it seems to me, shouldn't be based on properties like shapes or movements per se.

But this is just a thought off the top of my head.

[arynash]

I don't think it would be based solely on shape or movement. Shared phenotypes also imply that there would be shared cognitive architecture, including similar emotions. Since I tend to think moral judgments to some extent supervene on emotional ones (but not perfectly), I'm unconvinced that people's reactions would be based solely on irrelevant similarities.

On the other hand, we could rule it out by looking for a similar type of enforcement or quasi-moral instance in the Corvid literature. If the agents involved were birds, the objection wouldn't hold.

Corvid cognitive research is still rather young, and their group dynamics are different from ours, so I'm not sure any instances of this sort would be easy to find. However, given what has already come out about crows, I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of fairness norm enforcement somewhere.

Thanks for the thought!