| You have a somewhat naive view about how our moral compass moves as a straight lines from bad to good. Before the Nazis performed experiments on humans, it was considered horrible to perform experiments on humans. What Nazis had that allowed them to perform experiments on humans was a carte blanche to do whatever they want by contemporary law, and the ideology that those human beings were in fact "inferior" human beings. I don't know if you eat fish, chicken and so on, but probably you don't think of yourself as a Nazi if you would. Because you don't consider a chicken at the same level as a human. And this gives you carte blanche to have chicken for dinner and feel absolutely no remorse. Is it right or wrong? I don't pass judgment. I know all beings have a sense of self and we shouldn't cause pain and take a life for no reason, yet, killing each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life. I know that if we consider life sacrosanct and we eat chicken fingers at Chipotle, we need ideology to justify our actions, and so we'll consider animals inferior. If we consider them inferior, they'll be target for experiments, because medical science will continue to evolve. Depending on how our culture evolves, the moral compass may move in an entirely different direction, where we stop regarding life of any kind as so precious, even human. We'll acknowledge how replaceable we are, and our mortality. This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward. You never know. |
The pattern that I see is that society is giving moral value to groups that have less power; groups that we have historically harmed without thought.
We must define "group" though, because obviously the most powerless things on this planet are plants and inanimate, nonliving objects. And it would be very short-sighted to define "group" as "everything that society currently gives moral value, i.e. all humans and an arbitrary subset of animals". I define "group" as persons that can feel emotion (not necessarily human emotion), have some sense of their environments, and have some sense of desire. In short, our "group" includes all sentient beings.
If we follow this line of thought, it feels obvious that all sentient beings will be recognized as valuable. And that the question is not "if", but "when".
I want to address your counter example:
> This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward.
As a society, we believe that a moral being does not have the right to take their own life. It doesn't say anything about who is or isn't a moral being, which is what I am addressing.
The counter example you were looking for was a society where all humans had no moral value. If humans have no moral value, then it does not matter if a human kills themselves, because it also doesn't matter if humans kill and harm each other.
Disclaimer: I have lived my entire life in the United States. When I say "society", I usually mean "the west".