1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | February 10, 2025
An isolated human would still locate a primitive goodness in food, water, and shelter as a matter of their corporeal predisposition(s). Social examples are used to discuss and observe ethical phenomena, but ethics is not confined to social environments. Humans don't act according to ethics merely for the sake of others—as is so easily observed in how contrary one's actions can be to another's ethical principles.
Comment by Shield_Lyger at 14/02/2025 at 15:59 UTC
1 upvotes, 2 direct replies
An isolated human would still locate a primitive goodness in food, water, and shelter as a matter of their corporeal predisposition(s).
But that isn't a matter of *ethics*. Good can be placed on a scale of thriving just as easily at it can on a scale of justice, and those two need not have any intersection. The choice of which stream on an otherwise deserted to drink from does not have an ethical valence in and of itself in Western philosophy. Ethics may not be confined to social environments but it *is* confined to interactions (even tenuous ones) with other agents.
Humans don't act according to ethics merely for the sake of others—as is so easily observed in how contrary one's actions can be to another's ethical principles.
But if there isn't another whose ethical principles can be violated around, what difference does it make? I'm pretty sure that *someone* in Borneo has done something that I consider unethical. They don't care, and neither, frankly, do I. Our isolation from one another renders the question moot.
Yes, certain animist viewpoints render *everything* an agent that deserves consideration, and is thus covered by ethics... making a stone tool does violence to the stone, and it must be shown respect to make recompense. But for many people in "the West," that's often viewed as somewhere between quaint and actively (and sometimes dangerously) superstitious.
It's understood that early people in the Americas hunted certain of the megafauna to extinction. That's not universally considered unethical, even if it's damaging to our modern interests, because of the remoteness in time. I presume that there are vegans who have a problem with it, but even then, their complaint is not that *their* interests were harmed, but that the animals themselves had rights and interests that the early hunter-gatherers contravened.