A house is on fire. You are a rescuer whose goal is to save the beings stuck inside. There is one human, one animal (say a dog), one plant, and one object (with no monetary value but destroyable). All else is equal. You can only rescue one at a time. Who would/should you rescue first, second, third, and fourth? — Samuel Lacrampe

I understand your forced-choice set up here, but we are not in forced-choice situations. In our ordinary unforced choice situations people don't rigorously honor the great chain of being. Our emotional commitment to the GCB (and the ethics of who ought to be saved first) is pretty heavily affected by physical distance, how much affinity we feel, how pressing the various (frequently trivial) demands on our attention are, and so on.

People may not be literally thrown under the bus very often, but by intent, neglect, indifference, and so on we are throwing lots of people under the bus all the time. If my neighbor's house was on fire, I would call the fire department. I would attempt at a reasonably safe distance to assess the environment inside. I would not just rush in to save these people, let alone a plant or their cat.

I haven't donated a dime to save refugees or migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean (and often drowning) or the US-Mexico border (dying in the process often enough) and I probably won't.

Up close and personal, however, the hungry and homeless will get a donation. Again, it's a question of proximity. I don't think I am unique in this. Absent proximity and felt urgency, The GCB fades into an abstraction with no motive power.

I think the christian doctrine says that Jesus condescended down to the human level to become human, thereby not being perfect in every way during that time. — Samuel Lacrampe

Perfection is one of those weird words that has taken on a modern-day meaning which may not be consistent with how the word was used thousands of years ago. If you study the way the word is most commonly used in a biblical context, it seems to refer to motivation, maturity, and sincerity (e.g. he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, but not with a perfect heart). This sounds very much like what Jesus described when the pharisees gave huge amounts of money to the church, but did so "out of their abundance" while commending a poor person for giving in a way that would keep them poor. Motivation, and not amount, was what concerned Jesus.

The writer of Hebrews says Jesus, "learned obedience through the things he suffered" and as a result was made perfect. The Revelation talks about a special army of people who are "redeemed from among men" and who are "without blemish".

Humans always seem to get spiritual principles turned around. Animals sacrifices were meant to make them appreciate the consequences of their sin; it worked for a while, until they turned it into a business. The Sabbath day was meant to give people a rest at least one day a week, until it became so holy that the day itself became a burden (I personally witnessed a group of religious Jews who had to walk up 6 flights of stairs because pushing an elevator button on the sabbath day was considered work).

The Bible seems to strongly suggest that perfection is not a lack of any kind of problem ever, but rather, that sincere desire deep down inside to never stop trying to overcome the problems we face. The perfect person is the one who never stops trying to be good no matter how much they struggle along the way.

I understand your forced-choice set up here, but we are not in forced-choice situations. — Bitter Crank

We are. That's the trick to free will. Within the limits of reality around us, we have the freedom to choose, but every choice we make is only relevant within the context of the same morality which affects every other human. We cannot choose to exist in a reality where our choices do not have some kind of moral effect on others around us, but within that context, we are still responsible for the choices we make.

In our ordinary unforced choice situations people don't rigorously honor the great chain of being, — Bitter Crank

A choice we all make in dozens of different ways every day.

Our emotional commitment to the GCB (and the ethics of who ought to be saved first) is pretty heavily affected by physical distance, how much affinity we feel, how pressing the various (frequently trivial) demands on our attention, and so on. — Bitter Crank

I agree (or I agree with what I think you are saying, here). All of reality around us acts as an influence on how we will make our choices. It is not possible to escape all influence, which is why learning how to use wise, fair judgment is so important.

People may not be literally thrown under the bus very often, but by intent, neglect, indifference, and so on we throw lots of people under the bus all the time. If my neighbor's house was on fire, I would call the fire department. I would attempt at a reasonably safe distance to assess the environment inside. I would not rush in to save these people, let alone a plant or their cat. — Bitter Crank

I really like your straight-forward assessment here. I find it easy to imagine the best about myself, that I would run into a burning house to save someone. But if I were faced with the reality, I don't know that I would. Who knows what one is capable of when it comes to real life, but still, I think the examination of hypotheticals like this makes for good practice.

You are right that it does not prove the ethics to be true. But likewise, the argument that some people do not act according to the GCB does not prove the ethics to be untrue. To avoid circular logic, we can look in ourselves for this innate knowledge.

You wrote that you want to "show that we all have an innate knowledge of it". Then you asked what we'd do in a specific situation. How would you show that it's innate to all of us based on our answers? — Πετροκότσυφας

Like any experiment, by using the good old inductive reasoning. If most answers are "I personally believe we ought to save the human first, animal second, plant third, and object fourth", then we can reasonably draw that conclusion. Say there are a few exceptions? Well the exception makes the rule!

Would I say if people who have pets are unethical? No, they are not. That's just an absurdity resulting from the GCB's lack of nuance regarding ethics. — Πετροκότσυφας

Maybe I misunderstood what you originally said. The GCB ethics does not entail that having pets is unethical, inasmuch as doing something for pleasure is not unethical. Choosing to have a pet is unethical only if that choice results in the harm of a higher being.

That is correct. And they don't, do they? They are only represented as humans with wings as a symbol, like God is represented as a light or an old man.

Mr Crank, I understand your point. But I think this is not a case of the ethics decreasing with distance, but rather accuracy of facts decreasing and technical issues increasing. I too would rather contribute to local charities and avoid contributing to distant charities. This is not because I am a nationalist, but I reason that my money is more efficient if spent close by. I also have direct experience of my area, and only indirect experience of distant events. Our ethical goal is to optimize the net outcome. It would be absurd to ask each individual to help all the poor in the world, as opposed to focus their effort to help the poor in their proximity. Also it is not unethical to avoid rescuing a human being if you are not confident in your skills. Getting killed in the process does not result in the greatest net gain at all.

Bottom line is that the GCB ethics is still the standard to follow, and we can only do our best in practice, given the limited info and abilities we have.

Yeah I agree when it comes to moral perfection. Kant says 'ought implies can'. Thus being morally perfect means doing the best we can do.

Even if we would all answer that we'd save the human, even if in practice we would all save the human, that would still not entail innateness. It could still be learned behaviour. — Πετροκότσυφας

Yes. One way to check this, as Pascal and Descartes say, is that "we cannot doubt natural principles [or innate knowledge] if we speak sincerely and in all good faith". I personally cannot doubt that it is my duty to save the human first, and cannot imagine that it is my duty to save another first (given the conditions established before). To clarify: I can imagine myself behaving otherwise, but not out of duty.

The money you spent on your pet could very well be spent for people who don't have food, shelter or access to doctors. — Πετροκότσυφας

That is a good point. Where is the right balance between duty towards others and personal pleasure? Using common sense alone, it seems too extreme to spend all our money on our own pleasure, and also too extreme to spend all our money to help others with nothing left for our own pleasure. The right answer is somewhere in between and I don't know it. But I don't think it really harms the GCB ethics, it only makes it complicated to apply in some cases.

So, it is indeed an axiom, not a conclusion reached through argument. — Πετροκότσυφας

It is indeed an axiom or first principle, but it is found through argument. The whole point of the thought experiment is to demonstrate that the GCB hierarchy is innate.

Pets (and other animals) are not mere pleasure. — Πετροκότσυφας

Indeed. This works in favour of the GCB hierarchy which claims that animals have ontological value of their own.

Who knows what one is capable of when it comes to real life, but still, I think the examination of hypotheticals like this makes for good practice. — John Days

I agree. One of the things that makes it possible for the tough to get going when the going gets rough is rehearsal of hypotheticals. Of course, fire-rescue requires more than a little hypothetical rehearsal; I don't think about it very often. My neighbors had better install a sprinkler system.

If you cannot even doubt it, it can't be reached through argument. — Πετροκότσυφας

Can you explain why?

Since it also shows that there are countless cases where humans care for animals while they could have cared for humans instead. — Πετροκότσυφας

Aside from their ontological values, humans also care for plants and animals because they benefit humans as a means to survival like for food, transport and clothing. So it all abides to the GCB ethics.

No, it doesn't. Humans care for animal life besides its utility and every instance of such care is care that could have been provided to humans but it wasn't. There's no escaping this. And this difficulty pervades every ring of your chain. — Πετροκότσυφας

I already addressed this issue here. Let's put it another way. It would be unethical for me to use all my money to buy a pet if a poor person was at my doorstep begging for food. But if I give a reasonable amount of money, then it seems correct to keep some money to buy a pet. Don't you agree?

If you can't doubt it, you can't genuinely entertain alternatives, and if you can't do that, there's no contrast. — Πετροκότσυφας

That sounds right. So what? If indubitable, then it is necessarily true, then you cannot disagree.

Homeless people or other needy humans do not simply disappear if they're not at your doorstep thus making it fine to violate your hierarchy by privileging other animals over them. If you're going to introduce other criteria (like proximity or quotas of care) which, at times, take precedence over your hierarchy, you have to provide an explanation as to how that's possible - since your axiom, by itself, does not warrant such exceptions. — Πετροκότσυφας

The goal is optimize the net outcome, and you are forgetting such factors as efficiency of care and law of diminishing returns. It is less efficient to give to the needy that are far away; and once the needy in proximity have received the basic care, then any additional marginal amount of care diminishes. In fact, they might not even want too much charity at some point. And yes, if you give absolutely nothing to the needy when you could have, it follows that you are an unethical person according to the GCB ethics.

The problem is that being unable to doubt what you're out to defend, does not make it necessarily true. — Πετροκότσυφας

Yes it does. The highest kind of proof is logical proof, where the contrary of the conclusion entails a contradiction. Can you prove the law of non-contradiction to be true? No, we cannot logically prove logic to be true. But it is strong because, and only because, it is indubitable. So if you deny that an indubitable proposition is necessarily true, then you must also deny that the laws of logic are necessarily true.

The concept of the "Great Chain of Being" begins with a marriage of Plato's Idea of the Good who is bound by its own principle of plenitude to generate every possible Idea and temporal being, and Aristotle's Scala Naturae (Ladder of Nature). Later, Plotinus, one of the greatest systematisers and mystics of late Antiquity, integrated Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic philosophy, developing a panentheistic metaphysic in which behind the material universe are a series of transcendental realities, called hypostases, as follows:

• The One - the Absolute Reality, source of emanation.
• Nous - the Divine Mind - Platonic archetypes.
• World Soul - the principle behind the cosmos, that moves all things, the universal equivalent of the individual mind or soul.

Following Plato rather than Aristotle, these higher principles were considered distinct metaphysical realities that were the archetypes of the natural world. Each higher higher hypostasis gives rise by a process of emanation to the next, with the lowest one generating the material world. There, "beneath" (although not in any spatial sense) the three hypostases, at the maximum point of emanation, is the world of the senses, the material world of pure quantity (hyle), with nature (physis) sometimes as an intermediate principle between the world soul and matter. Later neoplatonists such as Iamblichus and Proclus built on Plotinus' scheme, adding ever more hypostases and replacing the mystical immediacy of the One with a series of progressively transcendent strata.

With the fall of classic learning the last formulation of pagan metaphysics was lost, and the Middle Ages reverted to the more classic Platonic and Aristotelian approach, via Augustine and Aquinas. But at the same time, later Neoplatonism, especially as propounded by Proclus, the last of the great Neoplatonic synthesisers, was to have a strong influence on both Christian and Islamic medieval metaphysics (via Pseudo-dyonsius and Avicenna respectively). Plotinus himself became one of the major metaphysical sources of Islamic philosophy, via the pseudepigraphical "fourth book" of Aristotle. The elaborate cosmology and theology of mystical Judaism (Kabbalah) was, if anything, even more strongly influenced by Neoplatonic ideas of emanation.

For the most part though, in the middle ages, the highly metaphysical Neoplatonic concept of emanation and hypostases became God and the hierarchies of angels and archangels bridging the divide between First Principle and the human world. At the same time, beneath man was the hierarchy of nature as described by Aristotle. Between these two was the feudal system, showing how secular and religious social strata fit into the larger divinely ordained pattern. As a result, during the medieval period The Great Chain of Being represented a visual metaphor for a divinely-inspired universal hierarchy ranking all forms of higher and lower life. At the top is God, immediately underneath are His angels, then Kings and Queens (or Pope if one is Catholic), and the whole feudal social stratified sequence of Archbishops, Dukes and Duchesses, Bishops, and so on, down through the ranks of greater and lesser nobles, to commoners and tradesmen, servants, tenant farmers, beggars, pirates, thieves (and actors and gypsies who were likewise placed near or at the bottom) then the various kinds of animals, birds, reptiles, insects, worms, plants, minerals, and rocks. Drawing from both the Aristotelian and the Biblical (including the modern creationist) understanding of the world (which were synthesised in the theology of Aquinas), the great chain of being presented an essentialist worldview of immutable species, and, in Feudal society, a social strata.


The Great Chain of Being: Medieval Woodcut


Source

I know you've said it was your last response, and I am just leaving this for completeness of the argument.

Then you need to argue in favour of utilitarianism. Regarding the rest of the paragraph: special pleading. — Πετροκότσυφας

I agree that utilitarianism is compatible with this GCB ethics; the difference being that instead of the subjective happiness found in utilitarianism, the evaluation criteria is on the amount of good done to a being, with more weight given to higher beings in the hierarchy. You keep calling special pleading, but never explained why.

Except that: We're not talking about the law of excluded middle, Samuel. We're talking about the GCB hierarchy, which of course is indubitable only to you. — Πετροκότσυφας

The claim that the feeling of duty is indubitable only to me is again unfounded. And whatever reason comes up to debunk indubitable thoughts, watch that does not accidentally debunk the indubitable thoughts that are the laws of logic along with it, or else it is my turn to call special pleading.

Man that was a lot of technical terms, but great summary of its history.
If, as I suspect, the GCB hierarchy is innate knowledge, a first principle or an eternal truth, then it can be rediscovered over and over again from its roots, without having to worry about its bumpy evolution throughout history.

a first principle or an eternal truth, then it can be rediscovered over and over again from its roots, without having to worry about its bumpy evolution throughout history. — Samuel Lacrampe

I don't hold out a lot of hope, really. There are powerful historical forces behind the rejection of the concept of an hierarchical ontology. There will always be some who recognise it, but no form of materialism can accommodate it.

You keep calling special pleading, but never explained why. — Samuel Lacrampe

Yes he did:

If you're going to introduce other criteria (like proximity or quotas of care) which, at times, take precedence over your hierarchy, you have to provide an explanation as to how that's possible - since your axiom, by itself, does not warrant such exceptions. — Πετροκότσυφας

Your only defence was:

It is less efficient to give to the needy that are far away; — Samuel Lacrampe

which is simply incorrect. Saving a life in sub-Saharan Africa costs far, far less than saving a life in an OECD country, even after administrative expenses and travel are taken into account.

If what you say about the needy in Africa is true, then it follows that we ought to provide as much help as we can offer before considering our personal pleasures, in accordance to the GCB ethics. The one obstacle I (and I think many others) have, is matters of facts about the problem: Is there a real lack of resources, or a bad distribution of it? Are there not people within their own country that can help out, and if so, why don't they? Will giving money provide a long-term solution, or is it missing the root cause? The further away it is, and the harder it is to know the real facts about the problem, the cause, the best solution, and even about the charities we are giving money to.

But I want to reiterate that, if we could have certainty on efficiency, then that is what we ought to do.

None of those questions make any difference to the only relevant question, which is whether more human suffering can be alleviated by giving locally than by giving in sub-Saharan Africa. If you have a magic bullet solution to improve distribution, or to make corrupt governments and officials miraculously disappear, go out and implement it. But in the absence of such a magic bullet, we know we can relieve suffering by giving to carefully chosen aid agencies, and that more suffering is relieved in that way than by giving locally. And, as you say, we should do that to the maximum extent before considering our personal pleasures. Yet most people don't. So the evidence is powerful that your GCB principle is not innate to them.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with nearly everything you have said.

None of those questions make any difference to the only relevant question, which is whether more human suffering can be alleviated by giving locally than by giving in sub-Saharan Africa. [...] we know we can relieve suffering by giving to carefully chosen aid agencies, and that more suffering is relieved in that way than by giving locally. — andrewk

I do not know that in any obvious way, and it is improbable for it to always be the case. Thus the point of these questions is to find out when it is the case. If in doubt, my personal advice is to give locally because of direct experience of the problems and outcomes; others don't have to agree with me. Regardless, this disagreement is on facts, not on the goal of abiding to the GCB ethics.

Yet most people don't. — andrewk

Still unconvinced. I could not tell you if being charitable is a trait found in the majority of people, but it is not an uncommon trait by any means. And for those who are not, it is possible that they cannot.

So the evidence is powerful that your GCB principle is not innate to them. — andrewk

Even if you happen to be right about everything else, this conclusion still does not follow. We cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. The GCB ethics is backed up by an innate knowledge of duty, not by acts. Your claims are compatible with the existence of the ethics, and in which case, it would follow that these people are unethical. Does that really sound surprising? Even without the GCB, surely you have heard of the Golden Rule, which "occurs in some form in nearly every religion and ethical tradition." (Source). Would you not want to receive help from others if you were in need?

A house is on fire. You are a rescuer whose goal is to save the beings stuck inside. There is one human, one animal (say a dog) — Samuel Lacrampe

I've heard enough, dog it is.