That’s inane, on the level of claiming that firebombing a hospital isn’t ruining it, just modifying it to subjective disadvantage. Or like claiming that dismantling a machine & deforming the pieces isn’t ruining it. If you destroy the function that makes it what it is, that’s ruining it, objectively.
The Earth, unlike Mars, supports a biosphere. It doesn’t matter if no one designed & built it, it still serves a function. To take that function away is to ruin the system. To take away the functionality of a subsystem (like a river habitat) is to ruin that subsystem. That’s a real, physical loss. Nothing subjective about it. Now one may believe subjectively that the loss is unimportant, but that’s an erroneous opinion.
Because you were not always human nor will you always be human. The mass & energy that make you up will endure long after the human race is extinct & forgotten. Choosing the “interest of humans” is like the carrot I ate tonight choosing “the interest of carrots”–mistaking form for essence & assuming it exclusively holds meaning.
What are you talking about ? The Earth serves no function, nor does its biosphere. The Earth, the Earth’s biosphere, you, me, none of that has a purpose, role or raison d’etre. It is, by random chance. It has no further purpose than being. It hasn’t always existed in this state. It will not remain in this state. And as Dr. Manhatt…I mean, **Alessan **said, there is no objective difference between one state and the next, one configuration of matter and the next. Was the Earth ruined when the habitat of the dinosaurs destroyed ? Was its “purpose” lost when an ice age covered it in solid ice kilometers thick, wiping almost all life ? Of course not.
Um, yeah. Environmental groups certainly work to save ugly animals, although naturally the cute ones get more attention.
But basically, many in the environmental movement subsribe to a philosophy that the preservation of earth’s ecosystems is inherently moral, not just because the ecosystems are useful to us or in some cases look pretty.
Well, there are a number of moral arguments.
But you’ve hinted at such arguments yourself. Why did you say “any usefulness to humans”? Why not any usefulness to you?
Human beings, for the most part, care about more than themselves as individuals.
That’s not true. Humans are inherently cooperative.
To illustrate my point, consider the idea that everything outside of the observable universe (possibly quite a bit of stuff) simply ceases to exist in the next five seconds. Would that bother you? Not me, because it has nothing to do with us. If you can think of a better way to consider some theoretical inherent value in the environment I’d like to hear it. We can’t consider anything on Earth in this way, because everything here has some sort of value to someone, right?
Well, I’m cooperative, but also I care about people because I just care about people. Not because they’ll be useful to me down the line.
In short: yes.
In long: First of all, the hypothetical doesn’t work quite as intended because the observable universe is growing all the time, so removing something outside our light cone today may be removing something that someday would have been observable.
But in any case, would it bother me if something ceased to exist that could never have affected me or any humans? Depends what it is. If it’s planets with life on them, say, then yeah I wouldn’t like the fact that those planets were gone.
Of course, it would be hard to get emotional without even any photos or anything…
But put it this way: if I had the choice of my life or the lives of 1 thousand beings that no human will ever meet, that are basically sentient like we are and are capable of suffering, emotion, reasoning, morality etc, and will live long lives otherwise…I think I would sacrifice myself.
Mosier, you’re projecting your own limitations of moral concern onto the rest of us. Some of us believe that a thing matters just because it exists, whether or not we understand it, whether or not we know it to exist.
Kobal2, by your logic, we could remove your heart & replace it with a piece of dead oak, because nothing serves a function & one arrangement of atoms is just like another. “…there is no objective difference between one state and the next, one configuration of matter and the next”? That argument goes beyond sophistry to absolute nonsense.
I have an irritating habit of responding to an OP as it was written, not as it might have been written :). The question wasn’t whether there is any “element of the Earth’s biosphere that is valued by each and everyone of its denizens.” (Of course there is, and that element has an atomic weight of 12.0107).*
If things have value to nonhumans, then we may reasonably ask whether that value should be respected. Your house has no value to me whatsoever, but I am morally obligated to respect its value to you and not to burn it down. A stream may have no value to me whatsoever; the question is whethr I am morally obligated to respect its value to the beavers that live in it.
Incidentally, some of y’all may be unaware of a quasimystical tradition within the environmental movement called Deep Ecology. This tradition explicitly rejects the idea that the only worth of entities within an ecosystem is the worth to human beings.
No, his position makes perfect sense. It’s only possible to speak of something’s function within the context of a particular system. The function of a heart when it’s in someone’s body is to pump blood. Remove the heart and place it on a plate and it’s function may be to be a tasty meal for a cannibal. The function of an object is not an intrinsic property, but rather a description of it’s behavior within a larger context.
One way to assess the function of an object within a system is to observe the behavior of the system if the object is removed. If you remove the heart from the body, the body dies. If you remove the heart from the plate, the cannibal goes hungry.
If you remove the Earth from the rest of the universe, the rest of the universe is affected … how? For all practical purposes, not at all. Within the context of the universe, Earth serves no function.
In college I took a class on ecology that was team-taught by a couple biologists, an historian, and a dumbass flakey hippie. Mostly the class was great, except for her segments. One of hers was a “Council of All Beings,” in which we had to make a mask representing an entity within our local ecosystem and speak as if we were that entity in an ecosystem gathering, addressing such issues as our role in the ecosystem and our attitude toward human changes in it. She led us on a (I shit you not) “guided meditation” to find the organism we’d represent. In case you haven’t yet gotten an idea of the intellectual rigor involved, one of my fellow (excuse me, fyllyw) students asked Professor Flake, “Can I be a butterfly, as a symbol of feminine power?” The professor agreed enthusiastically.
Me, I was a botfly, as a symbol of screw you, stupid hippie professor. I cut a hole in a T-shirt, stuck a sock puppet through the hole, rolled my eyes and lolled my tongue, spoke with my best Brooklyn accent, and there you go. My classmates were divided between irritated at my irreverence and amused. The biology professors laughed their asses off.
Upshot: when I spoke about human effects on the environment, I realized it was mainly to my advantage. Anything humans do to weaken the immune systems of baby birds and rodents was 100% to my advantage, so bring it on! Many programs we consider environmentally harmful are just bonus for creatures like the botfly: to the botfly, they have a great deal of value.
I’d be dead, which *I *would object to. I suspect my family and friends would as well, at varying degrees, and that quite a number of people would cheer, as well ;). But what does the rest of the world care if I’m alive or dead ? Would a dolphin care ? Would *you *care ? In a thousand years, will it make a lick of difference whether I lived or not ?
But you can’t, is my point. The stream has value to the beavers and the fish and whatnot that live in it, but none to earthworms, who’d be all for replacing it with solid ground, or to a chicken who’d like to cross it or whatever. There is not one element of the biosphere the existence of which is valued by one and NOT opposed by another. To a vole, the total extinction of owls would be a big plus. To an owl, not so much. Turn the Sahara into a luxurious jungle, and you kill off every life form that adapted to live in desert conditions.
It’s meaningless to wonder whether humans are right or wrong in interfering with an eco-system, because humans are part of the eco-system, and so is their interference. Nothing is un-natural. Life adapts and works around. The existing state of the eco-system wasn’t set in stone, and it too stemmed from a constant war over it, and species adapting to better take advantage of the past, present and future conditions of it. Even a global nuclear war would be a mere delay before some species adapts to the new habitat conditions, go forth and multiply. No climate, topography or eco-system is inherently more valuable than another, it’s just valued differently by different species.
What isn’t meaningless, however, is asking ourselves whether or not interfering with that eco-system is to our total advantage, or disadvantage. Whether we don’t care if the beavers die if it means a power plant can run at full capacity, or whether we prefer it when cute beavers are frolicking in its waters and we’d like our children to be able to know the pleasure of sitting on the banks and watching the beavers dick around. That is what I meant when I said there is no ruining anything, only modifying it to our subjective disadvantage.
Some folks claim homeostasis, then, is the best approach: try to keep our effects to a minimum, recognizing that in the short term, we will be changing the ecosystem more than any other organism.
Moreover, within the human world, we’re constantly juggling conflicting desires and interests, yet we don’t throw up our hands in despair at resolving them. Why should we do so when some of those desires and interests are nonhuman in origin?
Woah, you just seriously conflated two idea there that have nothing to do with one another: “right” isn’t a synonym for “natural” any more than “wrong” is a synonym for “unnatural.” Of course we’re part of the ecosystem–but as far as we can tell, we’re the only part of the ecosystem able to discern between moral and immoral acts. Our participation in the ecosystem doesn’t obviate any duty we may have to act morally.
Meh. You want to keep the human effect to a minimum, Destroy All Humans !. Preserving the current ecosystem is no “righter” than encouraging its change, why would it be ? Again, the argument stems from a subjective point of view : we, as humans, would prefer to not fuck with the environment so much that it becomes hostile to humans. Thus, we’d like to preserve the existing order, because we know it favors us and gave rise to our pre-eminence over it. The Great Myrmicean Civilization would rather we hasten the demise of mankind so it can finally take over.
Because by definition, we can’t see things from a nonhuman point of view. Besides, I know* I *throw my hands in despair at resolving my conflicting desires
Right and wrong are human constructs and concepts, so is morality. I accept the right != natural, I consciously made that conflation for the benefit of **foolsguinea **to tell you the truth. But I fail to see how preserving the existing statu quo is a more moral position than not. It is in our own interest, certainly. How does that make it morally justified ?
In an extremely literal sense, no–nor can you see things from my point of view, nor I from yours, nor you from the point of view you had ten seconds ago.
More broadly, of course, you can see things from the point of view of people who aren’t you, even when they’ve had vastly different life experiences; if you can’t, we say you lack a theory of mind, and tend to diagnose you somewhere along the autism disorder spectrum.
I see no reason why we can’t see things from the point of view of a nonhuman. It’s trivially easy for me to figure out what the average dog wants, for example; and my flourishing garden indicates that I’m pretty good at figuring out what my tomato plant values.
Right and wrong are not necessarily human constructs; they may be objective observations about the universe. I won’t bore you with cites, trusting that you’re aware of different schools of philosophical thought on this position. I am a moral objectivist; if the thread comes down to the difference between moral objectivists and subjectivists, we may need to leave it there, with the concession on your part that both for some moral objectivists and for some moral subjectivists, there are right and wrong ways to treat nonhumans that don’t involve their value toward humans, and the converse concession on my part.
I am one of those moral objectivists who believes that, objectively speaking, there are right and wrong ways to treat nonhuman entities, and that these right and wrong actions aren’t always because of the effect on humans.
Except, as you rightly say, we are part of the ecosystem; the deliberate destruction of a species is absolutely not in keeping with a general idea of homeostasis.
Oh, we can - or at least, we can project our own value system onto a different lifeform, and we can also judge that the needs and wants of your dog are more important than those of its flies, or the miscellaneous creatures that had to die in order to come back as Kibble 'n Bits. Just as we can judge that your tomato bush has more right to be than the weed that tries to smother it to get at its nitrogen stash, or the aphid that really wants to suck it dry.
Objectively, however, it’s not our choice to make, nor can we ever see the Really Big Picture, consider every POV at once. You can figure what a lion wants, and what a gazelle wants, does it make it right to stop the lion from eating the gazelle ? Why would it be your decision to make ?
I’m literally in two minds about this. I’m a moral nihilist, acting as if there was such a thing as absolute Right and Wrong, but knowing there isn’t. Making up value systems and keeping them as internally consistent as I can, but knowing that they’re illusions and make-believe. It’s a very neurotic way of life, I can tell you that much
Precisely : our mere existence modifies the system. So why bother with trying to deny or limit the scale of our modification ? Why say that modifying it just so is right, but more would be wrong ? It’s an arbitrary line to draw. By limiting human growth and expansion, you inherently deem that humans are less important than anything else, it’s just as wrong as saying we are inherently more worthy than a beaver in a stream.
You’re projecting something onto the quote that I wasn’t saying.
There are some very strong arguments for moral objectivism; have you looked at them?
I’m not taking this position on myself; indeed, I find Tom Reagan’s argument that this may rightly be called environmental fascism to be somewhat compelling. I’m therefore not the best person to defend this; I was simply offering it as an alternative. I believe John Muir is the go-to philosopher for homeostasis as a goal.
OK, on re-reading, you’re right.
But I still fail to see where you’re getting at : assuming we can indeed see things from another species p.o.v., or even a totally objective point of view incorporating the views of all species, what would give us the moral right to juggle with the conflighting interests of these species ? “We can and they can’t” ? Who knows. If you listen to what Lovelock has to say, the Earth is one giant, self-regulating organism which already does the juggling so that optimal conditions for life are achieved. Push it too far, and it’ll push right back - in fact, according to him we’ve already done so and famine, draughts and floods are coming soon-ish with no way to stop them. Which is bad news for us, but perhaps not an objectively bad thing.
Besides, “We have conscience, intelligence and know right from wrong” doesn’t really cut it when you consider what conscience, intelligence and knowledge of right from wrong have done for *our *species…
Not the moral right, the moral obligation. And what gives us that obligation regarding other species is the same thing that gives us that obligation regarding our own species: we are moral agents. Anyone who can perceive the difference between right and wrong has an obligation to act in a right manner.
This doesn’t mean we need to blow the whistle and stop the lion from eating the gazelle, of course. We really lack the mechanism to parse their differing interests effectively, and the law of unintended consequences is a major player in an ecosystem.
But my point is that there are other values in the world besides those held by humans, and that it’s possible to give them some respect. We may not be able to resolve the essential conflict between the lion and the gazelle, but we can figure out that killing both of them to set up a theme park in their veldt thwarts both their sets of interests.
