Reply #33: Am I a "moral actor" because I am human?

[hunter]

Or am I a human because I am a "moral actor?"

Around and around we go.

Personally I do not believe it cheapens the value of the human soul to attribute some kind of spirit to animals. I consider the "moral actor" argument meaningless. One can easily imagine a continuum of soulfulness, from creatures that are essentially soulless (bacteria, etc.) to creatures like ourselves. The Creation is a big place, with room for lots of souls.

Okay, now I'm going to get booted out of Mass for sure, since it's one thing to support gay marriage and birth control, but it's quite another thing to argue that animals have souls...

Christianity has always been at war with spiritual traditions that include animals as part of the spiritual continuum. This is partly good, in that we are commanded to treat all humans as our brothers and sisters and not as "lesser" beings like animals, but it is also bad in that it often allows us to dismiss the suffering of animals.

So yeah, I think a goldfish has a soul, or at least some kind of spirit. It's is nowhere near the complexity of a human soul (or a gorilla, or a dolphin, etc.) but there is still something there within that being worthy of our respect.