On May 17, 2005, at 9:04 AM, Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
At 10:12 PM Monday 5/16/2005, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
What about people who do brutal things deliberately? Is the label "human" applicable to, say, the BTK killer? Or the freaks of nature who raped and murdered those poor girls in Florida, or that Illinois creature that beat his daughter and her best friend, then stabbed them to death?
To complicate things, it is just as just as difficult to answer the question of whether those <entities> Warren named are to be classified as "not human." And if they are, how about the POSs who flew airliners into the WTC? How about anyone in the Middle East or elsewhere who thinks that the US is the Great Satan and/or that Israel has no right to exist? (For that matter, do [many] Jews and Arabs act like they think of each other as human?) How about slaves, who were defined in the US Constitution as counting as 60% of a person? Are they only 60% human? How about the poor or disabled who are a net drain on the economy rather than making a net contribution?
That's more of the same kind of problem, yeah. It's hard to find a bottom to this kind of thinking, yet we still have to behave as though we know what we're doing most of the time.
[What's going to follow here is going to come off as very abstract in some ways, possibly even foolish. That's okay with me.]
This morning I had the universe for breakfast. What it "was" was an IHOP breakfast skillet, but the potatoes, onions, peppers and cheese all derived from terrestrial organic sources, and they were produced through the labors of other humans. Rain, water and sunlight as well as soil went into that skillet. So did the remnants of many long-dead long-ago-exploded suns. All of which came from that first cosmic expansion.
It was pretty tasty.
I realized a few years back that nouns don't really exist. We put names on things but I think those names are really descriptions of ourselves. The suchness of a thing is untouched by what we call it, and furthermore the thing itself is impermanent.
Suppose you buy an axe from Home Depot and use it for a few years ... and then the handle breaks. You replace the handle and use the axe for a few more years ... and then the head chips and you replace that. It's still your axe, but is it the same axe any more? When did its axehood change?
We eat and excrete, we drop millions of cells each day and replace them with millions more, and yet we possess the idea of self-consistency. But where is that self actually located? Where is the "I" in anyone?
This suggests that the concept of self is an abstraction, just as the concept of "my" axe is, and that the big bang that led to stellar formation that led to supernovae that led to heavy elements that led to an accretion disk that led to Earth that led to lava that led to mountains that led to rocks that led to sand that led to mud that was clumped and made into bricks that got turned into "my" house is simply a concept that I hold, not any kind of reflection of permanence or immutability.
Is human -- I mean the definition -- a little like an electron's state? (Particle or wave? Both? Something other?) Do we determine the humanness of something in a completely subjective way, by deciding at the outset how we're going to conclude, and then only observing the things that support our conclusions? *Can* there be an objective definition of human? Or are we stuck with something that has fuzzy edges forever?
So I think that when labels get stuck onto things, we're heading into trouble. They're reflections of what we think, not what the labeled thing is. At the very least it doesn't hurt to remember that labels should be treated as subjective and consensual rather than objective, hard truths.
That said, a rock is still a rock and when it hits me on the head it hurts. Hard truth, indeed.
Until we can find or agree on a true, working definition of "human", then, it seems very clear to me that there are some grey areas to which no law should be applied, because there will always be some cases in which those laws are inappropriate or insufficient to address circumstances.
Many of us would answer "When there is the slightest doubt, treat them as human." Of course, we still haven't figured out what it means to treat someone as human. Some think that applying the death penalty or going to war is a statement that the condemned prisoner or the enemy is not considered human. Others would say that sometimes human beings choose to commit such evil acts that the only suitable punishment and/or the only way to protect society from them is to take their lives
Yeah, again, more of that bottomless reasoning. We very often behave as though there is no doubt about our conclusions. We have politicians who on one hand utter homilies about "erring on the side of life" but on the other hand are apparently quite sanguine about erring on the side of mass slaughter.
Now the cynic might say that they're acting to suit their own political agendas, and maybe that's true; or maybe they're lacking awareness of the inconsistency of their actions and stated beliefs; or maybe they're convinced that their actions are not inconsistent at all.
None of those possibilities strikes me as being particularly desirable, and that those possibilities exist suggests to me that we should *always* be very cautious about the choices we make, particularly when those choices can have profound impact on the lives of others. (This is so both for things such as abortion, and laws which would block it, of course, but that's only one example.)
The other problem I see with such an apparently straightforward definition is that it overlooks the simple truth that we share this planet with several other intelligent species.
Some indeed would argue with the word "other" in that sentence as assuming facts not supported by the evidence. :P
Yes, of course -- you're right that we don't have any conclusive indications that other species possess the traits of self-awareness or consciousness, which makes the question of what to do about gill nets or deforestation in Gombe that much more difficult to resolve.
The fallback is that diversity in a biosphere, as far as we can determine, is much better than extinctions. That sidesteps the consciousness question entirely but it does tend to shore an attitude of *true* conservatism when dealing with this one and only, remarkably fragile-yet-robust planet we've got, or with its inhabitants, each one of which is a mirror of the cosmos, a kind of pocket universe kept in a few hundred CCs of volume.
I think you need to find out what someone had added to the salt shaker at that IHOP . . .
-- Ronn! :)
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