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I second @4bpp - this anthropomorphising of animals is and pretty much always will be extremely suspect. Mallards are one of these infamous species that supposedly participate in gang rapes - several males will pursue a female and attempt to forcibly mate with her, and as a result males' penises can shoot out with surprising speed, whereas females' vaginas will be corkscrew-shaped so as to make it more difficult to mate. Clearly something to feel disgusted about, right?
Except that female mallards actually covertly elicit this behaviour by intentionally flying over the territory of other males and initiating a chase, drumming up a fight over her, and the corkscrew turns of female mallards' vaginas actually are meant to let her influence the males which get to fertilise her egg.
Do mallards deserve death for this? Does the concept of "rape trauma" exist in such a species? Should the very emotionally-laden human concept of rape even apply? If it doesn't, how can you even tell what is rape and what is not in the animal kingdom? Animals in many cases are basically alien species and should be treated as such.
Some women not-so-deniably elicit rape 'threats' too.
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That's fascinating. I knew about mallard forced copulation, but I didn't know that the hens tried to elicit it. Science factoid providers not wanting to victim-blame mallards, maybe?
Reminds me of boxing hares.
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I agree in general, but moral judgement does seem like the one area where this could be justifiable, at least for some moral frameworks.
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I don't know, but it makes me feel a whole lot better about ordering the Peking duck.
Thoroughly unbased, you don't need a moral excuse to order Peking duck. It's delicious! I would eat a human if it tasted like Peking duck.
Still, I think the point stands - animals can't be anthropomorphised so easily, and behaviour that's aesthetically displeasing to us as humans can't necessarily be judged as immoral within its context.
Cannibals from Papua New Guinea tell us that human flesh tastes just like pork. "Long pork", if you will. I like bacon, and I'm not averse to alternative sources. Maybe lab-grown meat will let me have a me-burger, kinda removed the ethical downsides.
I would do that. To be honest I'm not inherently against the idea of eating human meat; this has always seemed to me like a nonsensical moral line people draw.
In fact there are hypothetical situations where I think it's only rational to do so - if I was in a survival situation involving a lack of food and somebody died, I would be a proponent of eating the body. Seems very anti-utilitarian for others to die just for the sake of a moral taboo.
As an aside, how was London?
I mean... yes? Most people aren't utilitarians, so hopefully it comes as no surprise that they aren't reaching the same conclusions a utilitarian would.
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I ended up extending my stay for a week! I'm due to fly out this Saturday morning, but only so I can make it to the Edinburgh ACX meetup.
I've had a good time. I haven't written up everything that happened, but highlights include a trip to Cambridge, Dover, catching up with @Corvos at a Wetherspoons and getting happily drunk in his company.
Overall, I've warmed to the city quite a bit. And it certainly makes where I currently live seem like a village. If only it didn't cost an arm and both of my legs. Maybe when I finish my current stage of training, and have a CV competitive with the strivers, I might try my luck.
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It's been done! Multiple times, even.
Though I'm tickled by the implication that the safest place in the world from cannibals is the Middle East.
Boo. Doesn't count! Especially with the name "Foot", how did they screw up so badly?
The second example does. I know of a senior doctor who, in his wilder days, swallowed an entire placenta raw on a dare. He won about the equivalent of $10, which is far less than I'd charge in all honesty.
I watched the program when it came out, I really thought I remembered him eating it but I guess not.
This used to be a granola girl thing, didn't it? Recreating every part of a natural birth and stuff. Apparently it's quite good for the mother.
I've heard of people doing it for that reason too. The placenta ought to come out mostly sterile, or no more dirty than getting busy with a beaver. If cunnilingus won't kill you, this wouldn't either. I don't think it's actually good, at least compared to other sources of protein. When animals do it, it's to hide the traces of birth from predators, and to prevent perfectly good calories from going to waste. While archeological evidence is lacking, it's highly unlikely to be a "natural" practice. Hunter gatherers usually bury or burn the afterbirth.
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Anthropomorphising animals is natural, it’s probably fundamental to the way humans see and comprehend the world around us, it far predates civilization. We are animals and they exist in the context of our shared environment.
In the same way that we assign some moral value to human strangers far away (even if it is less than we assign to ourselves, our families, etc), we assign some moral value to non-human animals too.
Just as with people, their behavior is obviously part of this. Even independently from their interactions with humans (a dog that bites vs a dog that doesn’t), those ‘closer’ to us intellectually (dolphins, elephants) and both intellectually and physically (great apes) have greater moral valence because we know that they have greater reasoning faculty, and therefore that the kind of moral standards we apply to young or intellectually impaired humans might begin to apply.
General free will debate acknowledged, it is fairer to describe a chimpanzee as ‘cruel’ than a mallard. The dismissive might say that each is acting within its nature when it does something nasty, but the same is true of humans. With greater reasoning ability comes more understanding of consequence and empathy, which is seems likely many of these animals have in some form.
It's certainly natural, but that doesn't mean it's accurate. We developed psychological projection to help us assess the states of other humans, and even then it kind of sucks as a tool. I for one believe we have already met aliens, and coexisted with them for 200,000 years straight. There might be one in your living room right now.
Animism is natural. It's an outgrowth of our tendency to anthropomorphise everything, including natural phenomena. Is it immoral to offend the river spirits? You can't assert a harm you don't know exists.
I don't see how a species having intelligence and reasoning faculty means human morality suddenly becomes applicable to it though. Human empathy and morality is not universal and is a consequence of our specific evolutionary trajectory, and you can't reason yourself into your most base-level moral principles or your emotional reactions to things, they just are. There is no reason why every intelligent animal should share it. I'm almost certain you've heard of the orthogonality thesis before (given that you're here), quite obviously this does not just have to apply to AI; it can apply to any agent at all.
I've long spoken about presentism and the projection of current moral values onto the past when it comes to historical analysis. When it comes to animals who barely even share the most basic of cognitive characteristics with us, I reject any attempt to moralise whatsoever. How can you even begin to judge something as a moral violation when it is not clear that the supposed aggrieved party would even consider it as a violation either, morally or emotionally? The range of possible minds is likely vast beyond belief, and all of humanity exists in a very tiny corner of that possibility-space.
Are dogs aliens? I must admit I've never seen a wolf piloting a flying saucer, but my lab has sent many a normal saucer flying. Unfortunately, they were only domesticated between 20-40k years ago, not 200k.
Dogs sure, but also cats, fishes, turtles, snakes, anything people own as pets and that you could conceivably find in a living room. Some of them can barely be considered "domesticated" (I would say even something as pedestrian as cats actually fits this definition of "barely domesticated" and are basically one step away from being straight-up feral in the manner of their wild counterparts, see Gwern's post about cats here for a firehose of info about how dogs are indisputably superior to cats. Yes this is a fact). Then there's of course the fully wild animals we routinely coexist with like mice, rats or birds.
@Hoffmeister25 I wasn't talking about other humans or referring to them as aliens, though I get your takeaway - the wording is a bit vague and I could see how it could be interpreted that way in retrospect. That being said, "alien" is not too far distanced from how I see most people. Freudian slip maybe.
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I think @problem_redditor was referring to “other humans” as aliens.
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On one hand, you and 4bpp give accurate and reasonable reasons to oppose anthromorphizing animals by applying human ethics to them.
On the other hand, topical dolphin memes.
So. Many. Topical. Dolphin. Memes.
Dean's personal photo unrelated.
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