In another thread, this post appears:
I would like to ask foolsguinea – or any other radical conservationists on the board, if such there be --to expand on this position, if y’all are willing.
Well, situationally expendable.
It’s a function of moral hierarchies.
Life has value. The life of an individual has value on a lesser rank than the life of a kind or category of life.
Individuals, whose genes are still in the population though they are gone < genetic variations that give us kinds of individuals < genera and filled ecological niches
To kill one man, or a million, if it can be done without diminishing the human genome–while an atrocity all else being equal–is preferable to destroying some part of the genome of, say, the fig. Just as killing a billion individual mosquitoes is preferable to losing, say, the nappy-hair gene in humans.
Now, it may be that human beings decide that nappy hair isn’t worth saving, & future exemplars of our species all end up with relatively unkinked hair. And that’s not the worst thing in the world. But it’s a loss. And losing part of the genome of a potentially useful crop plant or ecologically significant predator might be a bigger deal.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.
That’s not the argument presented, though. Foolsguinea stated he would trade a million human lives to preserve a section of the fig genome. I don’t think he’d actually push the button himself if it was really on the line, though.
So saving a plant species from extinction is more important than the lives of a million human beings? You have just as much of a fucked up morality as Hitler or Stalin except in this case it is in the name of the Environment rather than that of the Reich or the Revolution.
Hopefully this is an extreme minority view
Clearly, individual human lives are expendable, with or without a conservationist viewpoint on it. Every one of us is going to die, and it’s not going to be the end of the world. Nobody really likes to talk about that, but I didn’t realize there was anyone who would argue against the point.
Only if the thing at stake is more human lives.
Let’s say it’s a variety of food crop, particularly well-adapted to a given environment, that could exist in its present form for 10 million years, & whose descendants could exist for 100 million years.
Versus 10 million human beings who will die in 100 years, & whose long-term effect on the human population approaches nil in about 300 years.
What’s the cost to quality of life, for those millions of years, from losing the first? from losing the second?
Now, I figure you’re a Young Earth Creationist, & deny my major. But that argument is much simpler. The fig genome is part of God’s design for the earth. To eliminate part of it is to take part of his work, tear it off, wad it up, & throw it away. To sin against the will of God and expression of his imagination. I can accept killing someone if it is to stop that. I can accept killing a lot of someones.
But then, I’ve actually read the book of Exodus.
Firstly, the duration is pretty irrelevant. I don’t think anyone subscribes to the philosophy that duration necessarily equates to value, except when comparing like for like entities.
A yoghurt pot might be around longer than me, if it ends up in a landfill. It still has less value to me than my life.
For the second point, that more lives might be saved as a result; this is a “greater good” argument.
But it’s one based on initiating, causing, an evil thing to happen now, to try to prevent a greater evil later.
And this is morally reprehensible: it’s the kind of reasoning that tyrants use. “If we allow dissent, the state could tear itself apart, and millions could starve. Therefore it’s for the greater good that we kill dissenters”.
It’s also an argument that requires the power of prophecy to even be valid on its own terms. The fact is, you don’t know what’s going to happen in hundred years, much less a million. You don’t know that that crop won’t go extinct in another century for another reason. You don’t know that in a few hundred years we won’t all be uploaded into robot bodies or living off replicators and not need crops of any kind. And for all you know, letting those millions of people die will through a series of later consequences lead to a world war that kills off the entire planet; so by saving that crop and condemning those people, you’ve destroyed the whole biosphere.
Without the ability to accurately predict it, you can’t make moral choices based on what will happen in the far future. You don’t have the knowledge to base those choices on.
If I take your argument to its logical end, all of us are indispensible simply because our individual genomes are unique. Because no one has the same gene combinations that any other individual has. For instance, I have mutations somewhere in my genome that no one else has. Perhaps they are deleterious, perhaps they are beneficial, most likely they are neutral. Or perhaps the fireworks don’t begin until they are combined with someone else’s genes. If you take me out, who knows what possibilities the population is missing out on?
Millions of years ago, a proto-human possessed a mutation that allowed for upright walking. A single individual. Would you say that this person was “expendable”? What about their parents or grandparents?
I think we all share the same potential for carrying uniquely wonderful mutations and gene combinations that we don’t even know anything about yet. And I don’t think all genomes are created equal or need to be preserved all in the name of preserving biodiversity. I can believe both of these things and not feel conflicted. Because fact is, nature is full of redundancies and things will not automatically fall apart if diversity is lessened. There is a tipping point where it will, but once we get to the point of having to kill people to avoid it, then I think we’re kind of too late.
Maybe society would be stronger if, now and then, we offed some individuals just for the sake of being individuals. What do they add to humanity’s basic, physical wellbeing and survivability?
Never mind nonsense like hope and joy and inspiration that individuals bring - if we’re gonna strengthen the race, we’ve gotta beyond that crap anyway.
<nah>
What? The entire point of human exsistance is hope and joy and all that crap. If humans branch out and conquer every inch of the universe but give up all this emotional “crap” what possible value is there for their continued existance?
First of all for the record I am not a Young Earth Creationist. I am more or less certain the Earth is 4.6 billion years old and evolution occurred largely as described by biological scientists to-day. I consider myself an evolutionary creationist.
But to the main point: at the rate genetic technology is advancing, many new and hardy breeds of crops are being developed and we can expect it to keep going on and secondly if the crop is necessary for food like the various varieties of say the potato it will not be allowed to go extinct barring major disaster. Indeed under human ingenuity many new crops have been developed.
And Stalinist logic works very much the same way: considering all the proles who would starve to death in the next few thousand years without the la revolucion what’s a few million dead now?
And so does Christian logic; what matters the suffering or pleasure that exists now when there’s an eternity in Heaven or Hell ahead? If you kill millions now but save one soul from Hell you’ve saved them from an eternity of torture, and therefore done an infinite amount of good; far outweighing those millions of people you killed.
Arguably something some of the more violent Inquisitors believed but logically belief out of fear or torture is not real belief nor is it in the spirit of Christ but this is rather offtopic.
I’ve heard variations on that argument from plenty of believers. And you brought up Stalin, who is just as “off topic”.
What if those billion mosquitoes are the only examples of their genus?
Does your moral hierarchy take into account whether the organism in question generally causes happiness or suffering to other beings?
There isn’t a single organism that another organism doesn’t benefit from. As much as I hate them (don’t we all?), mosquitos provide food to other organisms…organisms who provide food to organisms who then find their way to our dinner plates (to be self-centered about it).
However, that doesn’t mean that if we exterminated mosquitos, the world would automatically collapse. Some or many individual ecosystems might, but ecosystems usually aren’t that unstable. Take away the mosquito and out goes the minnows that feeds on their larvae. Or maybe they shift to some other larvae that would have normally been displaced by the mosquito and the ecosystem just shifts but still functions.
We’re much better off protecting habitats than individual species. Preserving habitat is much more pragmatic than saving organisms just for the sake of it.