Shelly Kagan on 'How to count animals, more or less' (2/3)

[@entivreality]

It seems to me that there is a big disanalogy between the “kill a person to save a life” scenario and the “kill an animal to save _your own_ life” scenario. The latter is confounded by issues concerning self preservation. So it would have made more sense to ask whether _we_ can kill the deer to save Tom Hanks, not whether _he_ can. For example, some might say that you can’t kill a person to save 5 lives, but surely you can kill another human to save your life (because of some sort of scarcity or something).

[@endoalley680]

Is it moral for a mountain lion to kill a deer?

[@MrSpectralfire]

Endo Alley, I think that's a nonsensical question. Mountain lions don't have the cognitive capacity to understand morality. That might be a good reason to give them a lower status compared to humans because humans do have the ability to consider the morality of their actions. With that ability to consider morality comes an expectation of moral behavior. That's why we have IQ tests for death row inmates. The lack of cognitive ability shows a lower expectation for their moral behavior.