Most people seem to assume that animals cannot commit immoral acts - if a person

Most people seem to assume that animals cannot commit immoral acts - if a person

Most people seem to assume that animals cannot commit immoral acts - if a person murders another person, this is immoral, but when two alley cats fight and one dies, we generally don't say the surviving cat is a murderer, at least not in a sense that implies moral guilt on the part of the cat (though of course the cat is the causal source of the other cat's death). The immorality of the act does not lie in the act itself, else the surviving alley cat is a murderer. Yet the act and its context (why, where, why, etc.) are the only objective (i.e. human-independant) features relating to the act. So where does moral objectivity come from, then? Why don't moral objectivists accuse animals of behaving immorally? The difference can't be as simple as "The animals didn't know they were acting immorally", because if morality was found in the act itself, the action would be immoral. Thus the morality of an action must lie in the cognition concerning that action, rather than the action itself, yet why should we expect all cognitions about acts to come to the same conclusions? And even if they did, it would only be a fact - Hume's Is-Ought problem still holds, doesn't it?

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