Misogyny sucks...Misandry sucks...

[Distant Quasar]

120. "Superior" is a value judgment

Last edited Mon Feb 17, 2014, 03:50 PM - Edit history (13)

It's based on what you care about and what you think is important. That makes it inherently relative to your goals. If you and I agree on the goals, yes, we can hopefully come to a shared standard for making value distinctions in some non-arbitrary way - but that still won't be an "objective" standard in the sense of being universally true no matter what specific values we hold.

Aliens from a spacefaring civilization might not find our capabilities any more impressive than those of a chimp pounding a rock, because their perspective would be so removed from ours. You think your judgments about this issue are indisputable and obvious and that any other point of view is crazy only because you take your (human) perspective for granted.

I happen to enjoy music, and science, and other activities that humans excel at. This is inevitable - I'm a human being and I like the kind of things that members of my species tend to like. But I don't need to believe that these are objectively superior to the activities of chimpanzees in order to appreciate them. That's like saying human intelligence is "superior" to photosynthesis in plants, or that oxygen is "superior" to carbon; what is even the point of applying those kinds of judgments to the natural world? I'm not saying human intelligence isn't valuable; it's just that it's valuable only to us. (When you say "reasonable people" should be able to agree on a standard for making such judgments, note the key word there: people.)

Finally, I just want to note that my original comment was on the phrase "more evolved." You will never hear a contemporary biologist saying one kind of organism is "more evolved" than another, because that particular distinction is meaningless in light of evolutionary science; it belongs to an earlier era when people thought (wrongly) of evolution as some sort of ladder leading upward, from microorganisms to humans at the very top. So anyone who is using the word "evolved" in this way is using it incorrectly. I said nothing about superior or inferior. You are the one who dragged these concepts into the conversation.