Can a sentient, intelligent being be amoral?

[mr friendly guy]

Amorality usually refers to the quality of having no concept of right and wrong. For example a shark attack may leave a victim dead, is amoral in regards to the shark since it has not the intelligence to make that distinction. With humans if some one was retarded, I can also accept that they can be (not necessarily) amoral.

Now can this be applied also to sentient, intelligent human beings? I have heard arguments before that some criminals are amoral as opposed to immoral and hence are not evil. I have also seen on another website (where I occasionally lurk) that the Decepticons from transformers are amoral rather than immoral. I found the arguments interesting so I thought I would start a discussion here.

My thoughts are that if the person is sentient and has some level of intelligence (ie not mentally retard) they can't be amoral. They have enough intelligence to grasp the consequences of their actions even if they see their actions as not wrong. I would argue they are either moral or immoral.

To give you an idea of some of the arguments / examples I have seen

1. a "punk kid" who goes in robs a store and then shoots the owner "just for kicks" is amoral, as he doesn't realise what he did is wrong?

This smacks of circular reasoning (a) if he knew it was wrong he wouldn't do it, and b) he wouldn't do it if he knew it was wrong). Part a) is blatantly wrong as the possibility exists that you can know its wrong and still choose to do it.

The other part is that if the kid shot someone "for kicks" he must on some level realise the consequences because he did it expecting to be entertained. Now you could argue that the kid saw nothing wrong with his actions, and from his POV the death of store owner is NOT outweighed by his entertainment. However the fact that one does not see anything wrong with it, does not make him amoral. The fact that he can decide (erroneously) that there is nothing wrong shows on some level he must have a concept of right and wrong. Thus he is immoral and evil rather than amoral.

2. Decepticons are not evil because (taken from librium arcana)

The harm of the humans was more by accident and that they were in his way as opposed to the direct target. Hydro-electric dam was the same situation. The air field for the jet fuel, same thing. All through the series you see him going after goals of gaining energy for energon to escape Earth and return to Cybertron. The humans were rarely even thought of, much less the direct target. These were the actions of someone who believed himself to be so far above the humans that they weren't even worthy of the nanosecond required of their well being. The only real comparison I could make to this is the gods from the Cthulhu Mythos. They were amoral. They weren't evil. We view them as evil in the series based on their actions and the consequences thereof. To them they did nothing wrong for we as a race are so low on the preverbial totem pole that we're not even worthy of consideration.

In other words the humans got in the way. This is in effect analogy with "lower" animals, just as we destroy some animals if they get in the way (as a side effect) of our main goal.

The suffers from a few suppress premises, namely

a) it assumes that a human life has the same value as animal life. Despite the rantings of PETA this is not true. We have greater rights by virtue of our sentience - " I think therefore I am"

Now I suppose from a humanist POV, you could have an abstract argument that if some aliens were smarter than us, then our rights will be lessen relative to theirs. However while the Decepticons display technological superiority that does not translate into superior intelligence. You can also point out that the fact that the transformers totally stuffed up their planet from civil war also argue against the intelligence of the one side which wanted to keep on fighting forcing the other to.

b) the idea that if you don't "give a shit" about something, you can't be immoral when you harm it. Note for this purpose, he clearly means that you don't care either way whether someone is harmed or not. He seems to be using similar arguments to people advocating a case of negligence rather than deliberate harm.

Just in case he is, I should point out that negligence implies carelessness, which clearly is not the case as the Decepticons made a deliberate decision to steal human resources and were also harming humans if that helped with their goal. The fact that they don't kill humans for the sake of killing but to achieve some other goal (energy for energon) is irrelevant.



Thoughts on the matter.

[Johonebesus]

Some argue that, to a degree, morality is instinctive. The ability to empathize with others is a fundamental foundation of basic morality, and lack of empathy is considered pathological. One could make the case that a sociopath may intellectually understand the concept of right and wrong, and might be able to memorize rules, but he cannot really get why it is wrong to hurt others on an intuitive level. Thus, he lacks the ability to truly comprehend morality, as opposed to legalism, and so is amoral.

[Covenant]

Some argue that, to a degree, morality is instinctive. The ability to empathize with others is a fundamental foundation of basic morality, and lack of empathy is considered pathological. One could make the case that a sociopath may intellectually understand the concept of right and wrong, and might be able to memorize rules, but he cannot really get why it is wrong to hurt others on an intuitive level. Thus, he lacks the ability to truly comprehend morality, as opposed to legalism, and so is amoral.

Morality is really a fairly subjective thing. A normative description of morality as something that would be accepted by all rational persons, such as "don't muder folks" falls apart real fast. Pacifists say don't kill people ever. Most people, however, would be all for self defense. And you have some people who believe that self defense not only means defense but offense and that doing harm in order to prevent personal harm is alright. And then there's examples of doing the least harm. Such as, if you have a choice to kill one person or 100, you kill 1 right? If it's a baby? If it's a little girl? What if it's 100 people in a painless fashion or 1 after horribly painful rape and torture?

So then you quantify and qualify things, look for minimizing pain and suffering, look for social motivations, and so on. The debate rages. But I think humans are inherently as amoral as animals, but we look for reasons and justifications for things. We're taught things, like stealing is bad, in the sense that it makes people feel bad when stealing happens to them. So we base it on personal experience, and reflect ourselves on others and societies. That's where so much of this starts to break down. Emotion isn't a good basis for morality, since somethign that feels good has nothing to do with ethics.

Religion steps in to set down ironclad rules about things, and people flock to it. This is more evidence for an amorality, since nobody has trouble accepting a "Thou shalt not kill, except for these times enumerated below" messages where an inherently moral person would stand up and say "But wait, isn't it wrong to kill anyway, even with a diety's blessing?"

[SirNitram]

Yes. I beleive it's generally called Sociopathy. Sure, you may get told what's right and wrong, and perhaps you'll even play by those rules out of fear of the consequences. But this is not the same as being moral.

[R. U. Serious]

If I read the replies so far correctly, all the distinctions goes twoards differentiating "being moral" into:
a) (the capacity for) acting morally
b) innate drive for doing so, instinct, little voice in the head, feelings of guilt etc.

The former is a property of every sentient, inteligent being. Even a machine could be constructed to follow certain rules and thus appear to be acting morally. Whereas the latter is not a constituting characteristic of a sentient, intelligent being. However my guess is that when such beings live in a society where they have lots of repeated interactions with other people, a lot of other motivating factors (like self-interest) come into play besides b) that would favour at least some moral behaviour.