Rupert wrote:
> On Jul 28, 7:26 pm, Dutch > wrote:


>>> The argument that individuals should be treated according to the
>>> characteristics typical for their species is a different argument.
>>> That's Carl Cohen's argument. It's not the argument in the essay we've
>>> been talking about.
>> Yes it is, you don't know what you're talking about.
>
> Pfffft.
>
>> Cohen says that
>> species itself or "kind" is significant. Wetelesen says that it is the
>> "capabilities" that are significant, not an animal's species per se,
>
> Yes, I know, this is exactly what I said....

No it is not. You claimed that I am referring to characteristics typical
for the species as Cohen does. I am not.

>> and
>> if other species exhibited the abilities then they would be due the same
>> consideration.
>
> Carl Cohen thinks that as well. The point is, Wetelesen accepts moral
> individualism, Carl Cohen denies it. You're obviously not clear on
> that distinction.

Cite where Wetlesen mentions moral individualism.

> If you want to go with an approach that denies moral individualism,
> that's fine, but it's not consistent with the approach taken in this
> essay.

I don't, that's a strawman.

>> He even mentions that other species already deserve the
>> benefit of the doubt. The irony is that you claim to deny this approach,
>> yet your own approach of "relevantly similar" appears to be basically
>> the same thing.
>>
>
> My approach accepts moral individualism, like Wetelesen's.

Show where he uses that term.

However,
> unlike Wetelesen, I deny that there is any set of characteristics
> common to all humans with a brain which no nonhumans have. Hence I
> accept the argument from marginal cases.

This is a false argument by abuse of the absolute word "all". There is
no characteristic of *any* species that is exhibited by ALL members of
that species, therefore the requirement is unsound. What there ARE are
limitations within species which apply to ALL members of those species.


>>> That essay thinks that it can identify some
>>> characteristics that almost all human individuals have but no nonhuman
>>> animals have. That may be, but we haven't been given an adequate
>>> explanation of what those characteristics are yet.
>> Yes you have, you're blind as a bat. I have repeated them a half dozen
>> times in this very post.
>>
>>
>>
>>>>>> The same sense that baby eagles have the inherent ability to soar
>>>>>> hundreds of feet above the ground detect the slightest movement of a
>>>>>> mouse in the grass below. These are species-specific inherent capabilities.
>>>>> Most eagles will develop the abilities you are talking about, and
>>>>> there are various causal mechanisms for that. However, some baby
>>>>> eagles will never develop such abilities, for various reasons, and to
>>>>> get clear about whether these baby eagles still have the "capability"
>>>>> to do it we need to get clear about what that *means*.
>>>> They are assumed to have the capabilities specific to their species, and
>>>> barring some birth deformity, accident, disease or other unusual event,
>>>> they will.
>>> And why is that, exactly? Is it because the capability consists in
>>> having certain types of genetic information in your cells, or some
>>> such thing? Just try to give an explanation of what having the
>>> capability actually consists in.
>> It consists of having the capabilities, that's all. Why can planes fly?
>> Why can birds fly? Why can humans reason? It's in their nature because
>> of the way they evolved.
>
> This is all just babble. I can reason because of the structure of my
> brain. Infants can't because their brain hasn't developed all that
> structure yet, though there is some structure in common. You're saying
> that the infant still somehow has the "capability" to reason.
> Presumably you'd also say a broken plane still has the "capability" to
> fly if it is some structure in common with a functioning plane, even
> though it has some structural defects which prevent it from flying.
> You've got to specify how much of the structure needs to be present.
> This is why it's a matter for scientific investigation, not common
> sense. It's a promissory note on a scientific research programme,
> nothing more.
>
>> The key is that we are able to recognize which
>> beings have which capabilities because we know about them from
>> experience, and experience tells us that certain species have certain
>> capabilities and not others.
>>
>
> How? How does it tell us this?

Ten thousand generations of human beings tells us.

> How does experience tell me that an
> infant has the capability for reason? I don't even know what that
> means. Does a fetus have the capability for reason?

Yes, of course.

> A zygote? A sperm-
> egg pair?

Yes.

> What about humans who will never develop cognitive
> capacities beyond that of a dog?

No, but a rare aberration in development does not invalidate a general
rule that works 99.999% of the time.. Nonetheless, other reasons exist
to extend consideration to marginal humans.

> What makes it reasonable to say that
> they have the "capability" for reason

> We may not know at an early state that they are impaired, but it's
not reasonable to formulate a rule by a rare exception.

> but a dog doesn't?

We know enough about dogs that we can form an extremely accurate opinion
about their capabilities, and it has nothing to do with impaired humans.

> Where is this
> capability, in the genes, in the neural structure? How can this be
> something that I can just observe from "everyday experience", as
> opposed to a scientific hypothesis that needs to be substantiated by
> research?

What more research do you require beyond ten thousand generations of
humans born with the capability of reason, and countless generations of
non-humans without it?

> There's nothing in my everyday experience that tells me that a
> permanently radically cognitively impaired human has any
> "capabilities" that a nonhuman animal doesn't.

Wetlesen deals with this objection on pages 20-21

"This kind of argument can also be applied to the most difficult cases
of marginal humans who have never had the ability of being moral agents
and will never get it, such as the severely mentally retarded.
Theoretically, it is not inconceivable that the capability is still
there, and that this can be used as a ground for ascribing an equal
moral status value to them. If this justification is not accepted,
however, it does not necessarily follow that they have no moral status
value at all. They may have a gradual moral status value, depending on
the argument which we shall discuss below. As for those who are borne
without a brain, they do seem to be excluded.
According to the present argument, inherent value is ascribed equally to
all moral persons. Hence this position is universalistic and
egalitarian. If this way of understanding the relation between moral
persons and moral agents works, there will be no need to distinguish
Agent's Rights and Human Rights the way Warren does. They will be
grounded in the same internal property of moral persons, and there will
be no need for a supplementary justification based on an external
relation such as membership in a human society.
The second consequence which follows from this position is that there
will be a relevant difference between human and non-human beings, which
can justify a differential treatment with regard to the ascription of
moral status. Humans have a property which other animals lack, notably
the capability of being moral agents, and if this property is accepted
to be a necessary condition for the ascription of moral status, then its
absence in other animals will be a sufficient condition for denying
moral status to them."


> There's nothing in
> accepted science that tells me that either. Unless "capabilities" is a
> code-word for "what's typical of the species". In that case, I don't
> think you should confuse the issue by using the word "capabilities",
> and I also think you're misinterpreting Wetelesen, I think you're
> presenting Carl Cohen's argument using his words, mistakenly thinking
> that it's his.

No "capabilities" is exactly what it says, the fact that it, like
everything else in life, is not 100% verifiable does not alter the fact
that it is real.

A plane has a value of millions of dollars based on the educated
assumption that it has the capability to fly us to our destination. A
bus is valued far lower because we know it has no such capability. We
are willing to risk our lives on the surety on our first assumption,
even though it is not 100% verifiable, nothing is. We CAN however be
100% sure that the lower valued bus will NEVER fly us to our destination.


>>>> Those that do NOT possess the capabilities of their species
>>>> due to one of these unfortunate eventualities are anomalous, they don't
>>>> provide a basis to discard the rule which governs the species.
>>> The author of that essay accepts moral individualism, which says that
>>> individuals should be judged on the basis of their characteristics as
>>> individuals, not on the basis of the characteristics of their species.
>> That's fine, that term is not found in the essay, however we are judging
>> individuals based on their individual capabilities,
>
> Yes,

Are you conceding that the term "moral indivudualism" is NOT used in
Wetlesen's essay?

> whereas Cohen does not. This is the point I was making earlier
> when you said I didn't know what I was talking about.

You said that I was repeating Cohen's argument, you were wrong, I am
not. Cohen refers to "kind" as being the morally significant factor,
although I agree that is a strong component, I am agreeing with Wetlesen
that it is "capability" that is the key issue, and "kind" is secondary,
primarily a way of ascertaining capability, or lack of.


>
>> and discovering what
>> those capabilities are by referring to their species.
>
> But why is species membership by itself a sufficient basis on which to
> make the judgement?

How do you determine which of these vehicles can fly, a plane, a car, or
a bicycle? Do you examine each one and test it in a lab? Is it not
sufficient to be aware that the capabilities and limitations of each is
already known from past experience?

Should we assume that every chicken will potentially be the first one to
reason and talk? Isn't it more sound to assume that chickens can't
reason and talk? Do we need "research" to prove what we already know? Why?

I can't think of a plausible account of anything
> that should reasonably be called "capability" on which species
> membership alone would be enough to make the judgement. I mean, you
> might be saying, having the right DNA is enough, and we are justified
> in assuming that members of the same species have the right DNA. It's
> a pretty bizarre interpretion of "capability" if having the right DNA
> is enough. I really don't see what's the big deal about having the
> right DNA. And what about a Tay-Sachs infant? You might say, that's
> just an inessential variation on the right DNA, they've still got
> enough of the right DNA to have the "capabilities" in question. That's
> a scientific hypothesis that has to be verified by research, not
> something that can just be observed from everyday experience.
>
>> Just like we board
>> a plane when we want to fly, not a bus. We know by experience what the
>> capabilities of each are.
>>
>
> Yes, but if I find out that the plane is still being built, or that it
> has serious structural defects in its engine which prevent it from
> flying, I usually conclude that it didn't have the capabilities I was
> after. How close to a functioning plane is "good enough"? What if all
> the parts of the plane are lying disassembled on the floor, is the
> capability still there? If I start to put them back together again, at
> what point does the capability re-emerge? I have no idea how to go
> about answering such questions, because I've been given no real clue
> as to what having the "capability" amounts to.

You're deliberately making it difficult when it's not at all. Capability
is exactly and literally what it says, nothing more or less. We deduce
from billions of examples what it is and what it isn't, depending on the
species. We know when a human is born that it will NOT be able to fly,
even though that is not 100% verifiable until the human grows to
maturity and tries to leap off a building.

>>> In this respect, the author of that essay and I are in agreement. So
>>> if the rebuttal of the argument from marginal cases is to succeed, he
>>> must show that all humans (except perhaps those without brains) have
>>> the "capabilities" in question. He would certainly accept this. Now, I
>>> don't know how we would go about deciding which marginal humans have
>>> the capabilities in question.
>> They all do. Marginal humans have the capabilities, but the capabilities
>> are hampered by a disability so the operative abilities do not all
>> develop.
>
> What do you *mean* by this? I don't see how you could justify this
> claim without giving some sort of account of exactly what went wrong
> with their brain development. I don't see how the claim can be made
> sense of without being tied to theories of brain development which are
> a matter for scientific research, not everyday observation.

We don't NEED to understand brain development to know that humans can
reason and talk and eagles can fly. Eons of experience are the best
scientific research you could ever want.

>
>> Since all humans by their inherent nature have the
>> capabilities, and no other species has them,
>
> Well, it's very easy to say that. You apparently think this is
> something that we can all immediately observe from everyday
> experience. I have no idea what it means.

You should, it's very, very simple.

You know Popper's
> falsifiability criterion? For a hypothesis to say anything, it has to
> be capable of being falsified. What future observations would lead you
> to conculde that you were wrong about this? In particular, what future
> observation would lead you to say "I was wrong, this human doesn't
> have the capability in question"?

I would refer you to this quote," Popper discussed this critique of
naïve falsificationism in Chapters 3 & 4 of The Logic of Scientific
Discovery. For Popper, theories are accepted or rejected via a sort of
'natural selection'. Theories that say more about the way things appear
are to be preferred over those that do not; the more generally
applicable a theory is, the greater its value."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper

This seems quite apt in this discussion. Wetlesen's thesis of moral
personhood based on capabilities says more about the way things appear
than the argument from marginal cases, which leaves us more or less in a
conundrum about how we should act. It doesn't describe how we act or
our intuition, and it can't even be expressed without esoteric lingo.

>> then deciding by species is
>> the only reasonable way to accomplish the task. We could interview every
>> chicken, mouse and cockroach, but that would be time consuming and we we
>> know already what the outcome will be.
>>
>> > This is because I don't understand what
>>
>>> having the capabilities in question consists in, I haven't been told.
>> It consists in having them, and the way we know if an individual *might*
>> have them is by checking to see if the individual belongs to a species
>> that has had ONE member which has exhibited them at least once in all of
>> recorded history.
>
> As I say, I think this is a misinterpretation of Wetelesen. You seem
> to be saying if one conspecific has the abilities, that is sufficient
> for the capability to be present.

It is sufficient to assume that others may, and to give them the benefit
of the doubt. In other words, if *one_single* chimpanzee exhibited the
capabilities, that would be sufficient to create an exception for the
entire species..

If no bus EVER flies, we can safely assume that no bus will, that buses
can't fly.

> I think that it is ridiculous to
> call such a property a "capability" and I'm sure that's not what
> Wetelesen means.

If I understand you correctly that is exactly what he means.

> Do you have the capability to understand the proof of
> the independence of the continuum hypothesis, because I have the
> ability to understand it?

Yes, absolutely. Of course some concepts may be just too complex for
some individuals, but in general they possess the "kind" of cognitive
abilities necessary.

> This is more like Carl Cohen's argument,
> although I'm not sure he would regard one conspecific having the
> abilities as being enough, he might want a majority of them to have
> the abilities.

If one chimp started talking, that would immediately change our outlook
on chimps, ALL of them.

>> If so, then he does, if not, then he does not. It is
>> pure scientific reasoning. Lo and behold, aside from the occasional
>> malfunction, the operative abilities manifest or do not manifest, as the
>> case may be, every time. And no anomaly ever gives a non-human the
>> abilities. When that happens we will be forced to re-think.
>>
>
> Is it an a priori truth that all members of a given species have the
> same capabilities?

They have the same "kind" of capabilities, not to exactly the same
degree. Some chimps are stronger than others, but all have great strength.

> Or is that a hypothesis that we check by
> investigation? If so, how would we go about verifying it? Why are you
> so sure that it's true, how can you know?

The investigation has been going on for thousands of years. We already
know the capabilities and limitations of different animals, and those
are accurately delineated by knowing the species they belong to.

The major flaw in the argument from marginal cases is that it cannot
deal with the complete inability of any non-human to exhibit the kinds
of advanced cognitive functions that normal humans do.

It relies on comparing healthy animals with severely brain damaged
humans. Besides the fact that this is a fundamentally skewed approach,
there are any number of reasonable explanations why such humans are
accorded special status, based on faint hope, emotional attachments,
fear, religious beliefs etc. etc..