| | James,
Thanks. My sound is blown on my computer, but just as soon as it is fixed, I will listen to it. I want and need to become more familiar with Kelley's works anyway.
Ed,
Well, hell. Let's get down then. (I HATE the "I said/you said" method, so I will address the points of this discussion as in a normal post, not chop chop chop mental laziness mode - oops, I forgot, you like to do reps //;-).
I would state that the "choice" to live in a healthy living organism is pre-programmed at birth. It is inherent.
I presume, when you mention "choice," you include the possibility of actually making one from among alternatives. Is that correct? If so, then I cannot imagine a baby committing suicide by choice. I cannot imagine a healthy baby ignoring hunger or pain and not crying because he "chose" death over life. (I am not talking about sick kids, only healthy ones.)
As a human organism matures, that automatic "choice to live" (which I prefer to call "automatic drive to live" or something like that) can become corrupted by faulty use of the emerging faculties of volition and concept formation - which I believe develop somewhat like the testicles descending in a male child, except much earlier and more gradually. Stating that a baby has a choice between life and death to me is like stating that a male baby can get an erection to have sex and ejaculate. Too much too early. The inherent undeveloped capacity is there, but growth is needed.
But am I understanding you correctly in that you are postulating that a baby can choose to die by thwarting his innate survival mechanisms other than reason (like breathing)? He can hold his breath until he suffocates because there is a cold cruel world out there and he doesn't want to live anymore? Hmmmmmmmmmmmm...
I will admit that there comes a moment when volition in the primary human survival faculty (the mind - principally reason) starts to kick in - and that is when the choice to direct the integration of concepts (including integrating higher ones) is made over letting some basic concept integration occur by chance and whim.
Despite Ayn Rand constantly saying that integrating concepts is volitional, which it predominantly is, even she was aware of the automatic nature of the faculty. From For The New Intellectual, p. 16:
But a human being cannot live his life moment by moment; a human consciousness preserves a certain continuity and demands a certain degree of integration, whether a man seeks it or not.
Also from For The New Intellectual, p. 19:
Since no man can fully escape the conceptual level of consciousness...
She is basically acknowledging that the conceptual capacity is inherent to man and that some level of activity will be done whether a man likes it or not. That to me spells "automatic" as opposed to "chosen."
(On your politician example, puhleeze! We are discussing animals with a conceptual faculty.)
So maybe I should have stressed that the capacity to integrate concepts was inherent (i.e. automatic), not merely integrating them - despite that being true for some aleatory ones. Part of the nature of living organisms is that an inherent capacity will always come with some degree of automatic activity. Otherwise it will not be able to develop.
As I said, the choice to think conceptually (differentiating by using the senses and integrating logically - stressing that both are needed) or by whim or feeling (which basically means "differentiating" in any old way without sensory evidence, then engaging in some half-assed integrating) is a moral choice. The morality (sometimes I HATE that word!) for a child is developed, not intrinsic, to the extent his volitional capacity grows and descends... er... develops.
So as regards your question, to the extent that "to live" is a choice and not an automatic drive, yes it is not pre-moral (whatever the hell that is). But the capacity to choose is developed through maturation, it is not intrinsic at birth.
Automatic processes of living organisms have no "morality," which needs reason, although they do have basic good (survival enhancing) and bad (death causing). I cannot imagine a moral or immoral heartbeat or bowel movement.
That is why I cannot imagine a baby morally or immorally crying for his bottle. He does that because he's hungry, that's all. And that is automatic.
Michael
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