It Shouldn’t Happen to a Philosopher

[Philosophy Now]

Fiona Dalzell finds it hard being a philosophical vet.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/67/It_Shouldnt_Happen_to_a_Philosopher

[Arising_uk]

[Impenitent]

there can be no moral culpability without choice; yet the free fleas appear guiltless...

-Imp

[FionaD]

Hello Imp,

I agree, the fleas were the totally innocent parties....
But I am now doing a PhD in philosophy and arguing that some spiders are sentient, conscious and decision making and therefore agents. I have moved on.

[-1-]

Hello Imp,

I agree, the fleas were the totally innocent parties....
But I am now doing a PhD in philosophy and arguing that some spiders are sentient, conscious and decision making and therefore agents. I have moved on.

To be a decision-making agent has the prerequisite that their ability to act ethically promotes the survival of the individual or of the species or the individual's community. After all, ethics, as we define it, is a sacrifice brought on the self by the individual which invariably promotes the passing on of its DNA or the closest possible facsimile of it to posterity. Every ethical act, or ethical decision, can be reduced to this theme, and therefore if something can't be reduced to this theme, it has nothing or little to do with ethics.

Spiders, to my knowledge, do not form communities. Therefore their evolution needed not to create a code of ethics to live by.

This, of course, does not exclude the possibility that a code of ethics was nevertheless created by evolution, which manifests in changes to individuals, by individuals' getting their DNA strings randomly altered; Therefore a strain may have been created in spiders, which, though it had no survival advantage, still remained in the strain, due to it bearing a neutral value to survival, if the individual's species do not form communities.