stui magpie wrote:...
The point is, every group shows a sense of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours. Right and wrong.
K wrote:Monkeys, now and always, can behave in appalling ways. ...
But it seems the anthropological (which we're generalizing to zoological) argument for the reality of morality is the alleged similarity of those rules. I guess one could strip it down to whatever subset of rules the different groups do agree on. e.g. "killing another member of the group is Wrong."stui magpie wrote:Appalling to us, within the rules to them.
Apart from differences (which, as we've said before, are not a convincing argument against morality, but just a possible problem with the zoological argument) , a possible criticism of the zoological survey is that it involves an arguably arbitrary cutoff on which species are included. Then we risk getting into the murky territory of what it looks like some bioethicists do, simply declaring to suit ourselves which species have "moral agency" and which don't. (These bioethicists' contortions appear even more painful when they also simply declare a different selection of which species have "moral status".)