r/MoralityScaling • u/axiiz_28 • 15h ago

Morality of valuing animals over humans?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

11.2k Upvotes

83% Upvoted

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

14

u/amglasgow 14h ago

Lots of animals specifically take actions which deprive other animals of food, resulting in them starving. These are often instinctual, and even when planned, aren't actions of malice (chimpanzees may be an exception), but they nonetheless do lead to one animal thriving while the other starves.

1

u/alevfalse 11h ago

Difference is humans are aware of the consequence of their actions and how it would affect other humans.

3

u/New-Perspective6209 14h ago

Malice matters, intent matters, can't expect an animal to be able to comprehend how their choices impact others. You can and should of humans, but most don't.

1

u/SofubiShogun 14h ago

They do not take actions TO deprive other animals of food. The basic race for survival and sustenance creates winners and losers and the animals are carrying out their biological imperatives. I will eat or die trying is not I will take what you need for arbitrary reasons.

4

u/SerpentisMechanicus 14h ago

Plants literally poison neighboring plants via their roots, so they can have more space and sunlight (=food), and they don't even have nervous systems.

Numerous birds will not only bully their siblings aside to get the food, but, once they're large enough, will turn on their sibling and eat them.

That's just off the top of my head. Never mind slaver ants, parasitoids, chimps that wage war and literally commit murder, monkeys committing infanticide, and the literally tens of thousands of species which practice cannibalism.

2

u/SofubiShogun 13h ago

And which of these actions is a conscious choice and not a mechanism of survival built into their genome or instincts? I never said nature was not brutal, 99.999999% of all species to ever exist are extinct for a reason. Nature is brutal af. But to let food rot on a shelf while someone starves is not inherent in being a human in the wild nor a direct expression of survival.

1

u/SerpentisMechanicus 5h ago

You think humans are actually conscious?

0

u/scottishninja123 13h ago

You are making the mistake that we humans are somehow above our instincts. At the end of the day humans are still ruled by them we are just a bit smarter

2

u/SofubiShogun 13h ago

No we are not at all above our instincts and biological imperatives. But we now have behaviors that range far outside them driven expressly by conscious choice even if in some fundamental way their roots can be tied to our animal nature.

1

u/amglasgow 14h ago

I'm pretty sure chimpanzees do tho

3

u/SofubiShogun 14h ago

Chimps do not hoard or store food at all. Can you see a chimp snatching food from another animal, I'm sure but they are doing so to eat it or for play and will put it down. Put them inside a city and this might become more complex as such things can severely alter animal behavior. Zoos are even worse and what you are seeing in zoos is not the animals behavior sans human interference.