Question I read somewhere that a human being's DNA is almost the same as a rat's. (I think the percentage of similarity is 90%.) In other words, we're animals. If I saw a group of grey squirrels killing a group of brown squirrels in a park, I wouldn't judge the actions of the grey squirrels as "immoral." I would just wait for a biologist to give me some explanation. (There is a limited supply of nuts in the park; the grey squirrels have a mutation in their brain that makes them overly aggressive; etc.) So when one group of human beings commits genocide against a different group of human beings, why do we label it as "immoral" when we wouldn't do the same for squirrels (considering that humans are merely animals in the end.)

Accepted:
February 16, 2012

Comments

The knowledge that human beings are animals didn't, of course, await the discovery of DNA. We've known it for millennia. But your question puts enormous weight on our being merely animals: the word "merely" is being asked to do all the argumentative work. I take it you're suggesting that anything that's merely an animal can't act immorally. It's open to someone to reply that either we're not merely animals or else some mere animals can act immorally. Indeed, if there's anything we know of that can act immorally, it's an animal -- rather than a plant, bacterium, or fungus. The capacity to act immorally arises from ongoing self-awareness, rational agency, the ability to reflect on one's actions, and the like -- features possessed by some animals (including but probably not limited to our species in this vast universe) and lacked by other animals (such as squirrels). On Earth anyway, the ability to philosophize seems to be restricted to human animals. Why not, then, the ability to act immorally?