I caught a part of an animation over Christmas. In it there were two animated animals getting married.
It started my weird thinking about the way we give animals human characteristics in cartoons, or even in real life.
Of course the truth is that animals have no concept of our rules of civilisation.
I started to think about where our rules of civilisation come from. Some come from religion, some from our deep thinking philosophers. Some from historical tradition with origins lost in the mists of time.
Why do we have them, which ones are important? We have the human rights wordings of various flavours that try to capture them. We have that wording from the USA “inalienable right to life…” that doesn’t apply in the case of a death sentence.
One concept started through Thomas Aquinas and further expounded by Hugo Grotius (or so people say) is:
Now the Law of Nature is so unalterable, that it cannot be changed even by God himself. For although the power of God is infinite, yet there are some things, to which it does not extend. …Thus two and two must make four, nor is it possible otherwise; nor, again, can what is really evil not be evil.
De jure belli et paci, Hugo Grotius
This concept was all about behaviours. And this leads on to another concept of rights.
A true system of politics cannot therefore take a single step without first paying tribute to morality. …The rights of man must be held sacred, however great a sacrifice the ruling power must make.
Immanuel Kant
Watching the series about Obama as president tonight was interesting and got me thinking about the concept. He certainly wasn’t perfect, but you could see a morality in his behaviour. Just how much attention do we really pay to morality in decision making? We certainly point out immorality in politicians – we can see immorality in the tapes of Trump talking “locker room”, but how about our own decisions?
Are we prepared to make decisions that harm us on the basis of the morality of the decision?