Just to play devil’s advocate, here, Metacom…it’s clear that there’s limits to the consideration available for human life. I see very few people selling all of their worldly goods and giving it to Oxfam and such.
And I’ll take this one on. Estimates I just looked up place the world population between 1.5 and 1.7 billion in 1900. Today’s population is approximately 6.4 billion. I’d take the safe guess that there are MORE people in nutrition distress than 100 years ago. Smartass answer, I know, but true to the question.
Isn’t it a bit of a non sequitor to suggest that working to aid something is a necessary consequence of caring for it? I don’t see people selling all their worldy goods and giving it to the World Wildlife Fund either, but that doesn’t mean they don’t care about wildlife.
And, of course, each one had the potential to become the next Hitler, Pol Pot, or any of numerous other “human monsters”. The “potential” argument works both ways.
Destroying other species to save ourselves is certainly one option - probably the easiest option. We are supposedly the most intelligent creatures to ever grace this worthless rock with our presence, though. Why, then, can’t we come up with a way to both save ourselves and other species*? Seems to me that would be the most moral solution. There comes a point, of course, where we must look to salvaging other species simply to maintain our own existence. Granted, those species may well not include bald eagles or sumatran tigers. But the world would be pretty bland if we only had dogs, cats, cattle, pigeons and rats among our fellow animals to keep us company.
That wouldn’t work at all. War does not have a mellowing effect on the gene pool. The stupid might get killed, but the most aggressive will kill the weaker and then go on to rape as many women on the enemy’s side as possible.
How do you think we got all those aggressive tendencies in the first place?
There isn’t much, Adam. Bugs adapt to poisons and 19 species of mosquito had already adapted when DDT was banned in the US. But remember that “rationale” and “rational” differ by only one letter and “rational” is not a word I would use to describe many of the people so hot to return DDT to the market. The claim that Rachel Carson “killed” 40 million people is the purest hyperbole.
I find it disturbing that ‘enlightened’ people can have a calm discussion about whether or not we should care whether 40 million people died needlessly, and that some of you are arguing the case based on what those 40 million might have contributed to the world.
Human life is an end unto itself. To see people as commodities and to define the worth of their existence based on some ‘global good’ is exactly the kind of thinking that led to the killing fields of Cambodia, the forced famines in the Ukraine, and the Holocaust. All were cold, “rational” acts that treated people as cattle to be slaughtered or not based on what some monster thought would be best for the world.
What if we could save ONE life by eliminating an entire species. Let’s say that we know that if we wiped out the grizzly bear population, we could save one person. But just one person. But that species would be extinct forever. Now is that worth it, or is it too high a price to pay? I’d guess almost no rational person would advocate the hunting and slaughter of all remaining grizzly bears for the sake of one person, or even the handful of actual people who die by bear attacks. Now let’s go to sharks. Sharks do occasionally kill people. We might be able to wipe out all maneating species with a concerted effort. But no one advocates that, AFAIK. So what is the “break even point”? How many humans is equal to one species?
The reality is that these things don’t happen in a vacuum. It’s rare or impossible that it’s just one species affected. DDT most likely affected many different animal (and probably, tangentially, plant) species. It may well have been poisoning humans. So it’s unclear as to whether wiping out all malaria bearing mosquitoes is a net positive or negative.
To be extra realistic, at least in the world as we currently know it, the people who may die from malarial exposure are realistically unlikely to be inventing anything. Most are extremely poor and severely undereducated. This is not to say that they don’t have the potential to do something wonderful, but it’s very highly unlikely. And it’s the poverty and living conditions, exclusive of malaria, causing this.
I agree with you here (there’s a first time for everything, I guess) but I’m sensing a little cognitive dissonance re: your attitude in the globalization thread (where you treat “labor” as a mere statistic and have said nothing about the ways in which people’s spirits are harmed by globalization) and your attitude here. Clarify?
Well, realistically, the chance of you inventing something incredibly useful and beneficial to society is practically nil. I mean, how many people actually ever do a thing to affect “society”? Best to off yourself right now, dude, so you can free up space for the geniuses of the world. In fact, that goes for 99.9999% of us. The vast, vast majority of us aren’t going to make the history books–what good are we? By your logic, not much.
Oh wait, it’s only those brown people on the ass end of the world whose lives are expendable. American lives are precious no matter how much of a lazy, polluting, good for nothing slob you are.
This is true, on a macro scale. The world loses me, and not much is lost in the grand scheme of things. I am most likely too old to come up with a cure for cancer or a nonpolluting, renewable energy resource. As individuals I don’t know that human lives are worth much. I’m sure there’s a dollar figure somewhere, and it may sound insensitive, but the reality is that a life lost in the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India was not valued (by US society, at least) nearly as much as a life lost in the World Trade Center.
At least 15,000 people died at Bhopal in 1984. Union Carbide settled for $470 million, including monies to the estimated 150,000 to 600,000 additional injured. Just for the people killed that’s $31,333 per person. The families of the victims of the WTC were compensated on average of $3.1 million per recipient, or about 100 times more per person. This is a sad fact of life.
Sure. It’s part of the same thing. For example, globalization will help the poorest of the earth comparatively much more than the wealthy. Second, globalization is based on freedom - open borders, the right to associate with whoever you wish, no matter where they might live, the right to sell your products to whoever is willing to buy them, and hire whoever is willing to work for you. Thus I find capitalism a moral economic system founded in the rights of the individual to live for themselves. The same reason I deplore treating them as commodities or cattle.
Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m not opposed to helping out those who are hurt by globalization. What I’m opposed to is erecting barriers between people to stop them from trading with each other.
I even dispute the notion that “once a species is gone, it is gone forever”. Darwin showed that species evolve to fill environmental niches. After some hundred thousand or millions of years, Mother Nature can evolve some new birds which will do practically everything a bald eagle does.
If there are people still around to appreciate it, big whoop for them.
If a species harmful to humans like malaria gets wiped out, good riddance. My personal religion doesn’t forbid the removal of that particular bit of self-perpetuating DNA from the world. And if the ridiculously remote possiblity of “we actually NEEDED that disease species” comes true, I’ll rather face the consequences of that than having millions suffer and die. What could those consequences be, anyways? Millions of people suffering and dying? BILLIONS? Bah, that’s getting into science-fiction level of impossibility.
So you won’t mind if I kill your family to make more room for birds, right? Is it okay if I just hack 'em up with an axe? I won’t make you watch.
We can argue about specifics of DDT, but to say 40,000,000 people are merely a replaceable resource is just saying that your four most beloved family members are replaceable. Ten million times. Do you think they are?
Darwin showed no such thing, actually. He showed that organisms adapt to the prevailing environment. Niche theory is a lot more complex than simply “open space waiting to be filled by an organism”. Indeed, there are schools of thought wherein a niche does not even exist independently of the species which occupies it, so if the species is gone, so is that niche.
Bald eagles are the end point (from our temporally-static point of view) of a lineage. The ancestors of that lineage are all gone. If bald eagles go, where does the replacement species come from?
“Malaria” isn’t a species, but I do think you are making an important point.
We don’t mourn the loss of a species like the bald eagle just because we hate to see a species die out, but because that particular species has value to us as humans. In the case of the eagle, it’s mostly aesthetic value. In recent times, our society has learned to value many species purely for scientific interest. But it’s an interest to us none the less. Few, if any, people would regret the extinction of the Vibrio cholerae bacteria that causes cholera. We might want to keep a few specimens around in a lab somewhere, but that’s about it.
