Is Eli a Person?

[sauvin]

The "worst of us" I was referring to are sociopaths.

Four percent sociopaths. You're probably not far off the mark.

http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

A few of those indicators make me worry about myself.

If you have to worry about it, forget it. You're fully human.

[bore]

... Do simians have an abstract concept of "right" and "wrong"?
I'm not prepared to contest anything else in this quote. Far from it - could you provide links? I'd like to read up a bit more on this. ...

Here's a link about monkeys showing they understand fairness.

Holy CRAP! The basis on which I conjecture a human sense of community may be MUCH older than I'd thought!

The sense of "right and wrong" is not necessarily limited to primates.
Vampire bats does at first glance share blood with each other altruistically. It has however been noted that they will try to return the favor.
I have read somewhere that those bats who tries to cheat this blood sharing system will be rejected by the group but does not find a good source for this right now.

Either way, this might be a language thing but why is it important that someone is being human or humane to be a person?
Are bad persons not persons?

[metoo]

The sense of "right and wrong" is not necessarily limited to primates.

Yes, I seem to remember having read about a similar experiment using dogs, with a similar result. Sorry, no links/references.

A point I try to make is that this kind of revelation invalidates claims of religion to be necessary for people to behave morally. Instead, apparently, people behave morally because it's in the human nature, and the religious explanation is just that - an after-the-fact explanation.

[sauvin]

Either way, this might be a language thing but why is it important that someone is being human or humane to be a person? Are bad persons not persons?

Yes, it's a language thing. Are bad persons not persons, this is the question we're trying to figure out, and watch out! We as a species have been trying to figure it out in written languages nobody but highly specialised scholars can read anymore - if at all. It depends on how you define "good", "bad" and "person".

Why is it important? Maybe it isn't. Good, bad or ugly, the folks we share our workplace with are still people we have to deal with - the only benefit to knowing who's good and who isn't is in knowing whom to rub elbows with and whom to avoid. Being able to figure out why they're "bad" might mean being able to figure out a way of co-existing with them.

As for being able to define "person", this can get tricky, and the "why" has uncountably many contexts within which a meaningful answer can be demanded. I'm confident the lawyers in the forum can back me up in asserting that US law doesn't recognise the illness called sociopathy as barring its "sufferers" from human status or exempting them from responsibility for obeying the law, even though the very definition of sociopathy precludes them from being able to do so without close supervision, except perhaps at a superficial level.

The definition of "person" is inextricably bound to xenophobia, or such is my impression. A "not-person" may not be suffered to exist in human society nearly as readily nor as comfortably as a "person". There is more than one person in this forum, in fact, who's said "Yes, she's so CUTE, and I love her to bits, but if either Abby or Eli moves into my neighbourhood and I find out about it, she's dead, end of story", and this is a semifictional case in point - semifictional because we often do express precisely such sentiment with varying degrees of actual physical hostility when we learn that a person with a history of child molestation has just moved in nextdoor to an elementary school.

I am elated to see scientists are finding evidence of altruism and cooperation among simians because it means some of the other long, boring posts I've put up on this board may not be completely clueless, although a question in my own mind arises on just how much such behaviours might be a matter of physical evolution (hard-wired neurochemically speaking, as it were) as opposed to learned behaviour (acculturation) - could these phenomena be coevolutionary?

And I am a bit dismayed because if human-like examples of altruism, cooperation and empathy trace back along simian lines of evolution, it means it's gonna be a bit harder for us Infected to piece together just how to decide just exactly what makes us human, and therefore "persons".

I, for one, think I'll stop calling people "great drooling chimps" when I'm irritated with them at work, though.

[thestich]

I, for one, think I'll stop calling people "great drooling chimps" when I'm irritated with them at work, though.

Raises them too high on the evolutionary/morality pedestal?!?

[shaggles]

If person means human then no.

[PeteMork]

The sense of "right and wrong" is not necessarily limited to primates.

Yes, I seem to remember having read about a similar experiment using dogs, with a similar result. Sorry, no links/references.

A point I try to make is that this kind of revelation invalidates claims of religion to be necessary for people to behave morally. Instead, apparently, people behave morally because it's in the human nature, and the religious explanation is just that - an after-the-fact explanation.

QFT. This and many other 'revelatations' I've run into over the years seem to lead to this same conclusion. Tests of this sort run on isolated cultures in undeveloped countries have long shown an interesting consistency in this type of morality. Basic cultural anthropology texts are full of them. Tests run on related primates just extend these 'human' characteristics futher back along the evolutionary tree to a time when religion of any sort simply didn't exist.

[a_contemplative_life]

The sense of "right and wrong" is not necessarily limited to primates.

Yes, I seem to remember having read about a similar experiment using dogs, with a similar result. Sorry, no links/references.

A point I try to make is that this kind of revelation invalidates claims of religion to be necessary for people to behave morally. Instead, apparently, people behave morally because it's in the human nature, and the religious explanation is just that - an after-the-fact explanation.

QFT. This and many other 'revelatations' I've run into over the years seem to lead to this same conclusion. Tests of this sort run on isolated cultures in undeveloped countries have long shown an interesting consistency in this type of morality. Basic cultural anthropology texts are full of them. Tests run on related primates just extend these 'human' characteristics futher back along the evolutionary tree to a time when religion of any sort simply didn't exist.

And we know this because . . . ?

[lombano]

From the 1968 Planet of the Apes: "Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death."

Not really true, chimps are pretty vicious. Probably anyone who's had a cat knows that primates aren't the only animals that kill for fun, either. Actually I think of human beings as much better than animals, we're nowhere nearly as vicious, just a lot more powerful - it's much easier to carry out a genocide with modern technology than with rocks.

[metoo]

And we know this because . . . ?

I might try an answer, if you could be more specific about what "this" refers to.

But, generally, we know things because we have made a logically sound explanation about what we expect to see happen, given a specific set of circumstances, and then observed this very outcome, as well as the absence of that outcome in other circumstances.