Re:Re:Re:On Violence

"... ... My reservation for your Initiation of Force (IoF) concept is that it is widespread in nature. There are food chains and animals hunting other animals, and this process is inherently violent. Given this occurs all the time, I would hesitate to consider all of these IoF to all be immoral."

Yay! Great argument!

I should change it to "IoF by a human against other humans is immoral." We are, after all, talking about human morality.

Thanks for the bug report!

Below are some other approaches to the problem.

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So the problems are "Are all IoFs immoral? What about animals hunting OTHER animals? Why are humans different from other animals?"

Questioning 

Is it reasonable to apply human morality to non-humans? From bacteria to the whole universe we call "nature"?

You can't communicate with them, so what's the point? For the civil engineer in you, have you tried to talk a hill out of making landslides onto the road? Lecture it about human morality? No, you reinforce the slope and prevent it - self-defense against slopes.

So yes, it's immoral. And there's no choice but self-defense.

Naive

Do prey animals prefer to live or be eaten? No. Do I prefer harmful bacteria giving me a cold? Not particularly.

So is it immoral? Yes. It's no different from human murder, assault, robbery.

Should we stop it? Can you? No. What would you do...imprison all the tigers? :) It does feel good for everyone involved to save creatures from the slaughter though.

What about humans killing other animals?
This is the most telling of all the cases. Why do we kill other animals? For food, for hunting,... We haven't been able to make more humane versions, so if we want meat, it's 'slaughter the cows' or don't eat beef. So in the strictest sense, it's immoral too. And as for hunting, that's still violence, just violence with far less consequences than hunting other humans.

Short

That's why we have morality to guide us and animals don't. Humans have far more choices and no biological guide about what to do with our lives. Some sense of morality also helps some organizations refrain from wiping the species out. Animals? Morality is inconsequential and pointless for them, as nature selection is their priority.

Cynical

Sure, if we want to end civilization as we know it and start hunting the weaker humans (Hunger Games!!!), why not? It would just be turning back thousands of years of human progress :)

Long

As Short Me said, that's why we NEED morality to LIVE, as a human society. Animals know what they have to do, since birth. Humans need love, care, parenting, education, skills, direction, a will to live. Babies fresh out of the womb have none of these things but need all of them to become fully functioning humans.

And to live together, we need morality. Actually, that's half-true, because the moment any group of humans come together, morality will arise naturally. Because we have choices. Should we shoot each other on sight, or trade, or work together? If we trade, how do we trade so that everyone gets what they want? Before you know it, you have to make decisions on what's moral.

Some moral codes allow some civilizations to do better than others overall. A city considers armed robbery illegal and tries the suspects will generally do better than another that considers armed robbery a nuisance, but does nothing about them. Why? Economics. The robbers would rush to rob the latter because it's more profitable!

That's an extreme case but I think you'll find examples everywhere, for all sorts of IoF. It's not even that IoFs are immoral, it's just not economical or people don't like it.

So let's say humans do become animals. Great. But even in survival situations where sadists or "mother nature" forces humans become animals, people WILL work together or against each other. Morality arises again.

Animal Me

Even animals have morality among themselves. It's good for passing down the genes. I wonder where it came from, but they would just not do very well without something like this.

- Don't eat all the offspring and family! (obvious)
- Kill the prey! Don't cannibalize (unless you have to)!
- Breed as much as possible!
- Take care of offspring. (Parenting species)

Humans on the other hand, generally don't just want to pass down the genes. We have way more choices than that. So we have different rules.

Conclusion

All IoF is immoral and the victims don't like it(By definition), but morality is important to the degree in which the agent have choices and consequences. Telling the cat to stop eating mice is pointless. But telling a kid to not eat other kids may help - he has the capacity to understand that nobody would play with a kid-eater, and the ability to override feral instincts and eat something else. Without choice, human morality doesn't simply become useless or inapplicable, the whole phenomenon just doesn't occur.

"Widespread in nature"... doesn't make it moral by human morality. Rather, it just means that animal nature doesn't care about human morality. No, animals aren't even an active part of humanity that the phenomenon of morality arose from. Well, except as resources. It also precedes any humans or morality by millions of years.

Morality as described here arises naturally, then people try to write it down as best they can. But actions, moral/immoral/inconsequential-morally, have consequences for us. That's why it's worth studying.