You are dismissing the massive destruction of the environment by man because of YOUR (faulty) definition of the term “abuse”?! You can abuse anything. Part of our student use policy in our district covers “student abuse” of equipment. What utter nonsense.
The massive and accelerated damage to our environment for which humans are directly responsible is not “natural”. It is man-made. You need to stop playing with words and address the issues.
If you want to call breeding canines until you get Great Danes and Pugs “natural” then sure, it’s all part of natural selection. But we’ve called that something different from natural selection for some time now and I don’t think we’re likely to change soon.
Abuse in that sense means to use something inappropriately or against its intended use. The environment has no intended use. It’s something that simply exists. I can’t abuse a rock because a rock has no intended use. I can simply use it in a way that other people may or may not like.
Man is nature. Why the need for a dichotomy. If we’re not nature, then what exactly are we? Supernatural?
You don’t seem to grasp that ‘man-made’ IS natural…for man. It’s not a word game, it’s a fact. Things that man does are part of our nature, as much as bacteria poisoning the earth with that oxygen stuff and killing off most life by doing it. The difference is that we are aware of the consequences and aware of the value (to us) in other species and the planet as a whole. THAT is why we, on the other hand, try and save or protect endangered species from going extinct, even though we understand the mechanisms by which species not only are going extinct but have gone extinct for hundreds of millions of years.
Your argument is implicitly that if some Y is a product or descendent of X, then it is also X.
So humans, Tetraetyllead and Minecraft are all part of “nature”.
It’s obviously trivial to think of examples of X and Y that don’t work for this, so the real question is why describing everything as natural (when the word was always meant in contrast to human activities) is so appealing.
I think it’s because some people like anything which, to them, takes humans down a peg. We’re “just” part of nature, nothing special.
But of course, in saying that human activity is something separate to nature is not actually a value judgement (and in fact, in the context of endangered species, we often are being critical of human behaviours / “artificial selection”).
This whole idea that “Natural” = “Good” and “Unnatural” = “Bad” is something that REALLY bothers me, because it makes no sense at all. Dying in childbirth is “Natural”. We still want to stop it. If we saw an asteroid the size of Texas headed for Earth, it would be a natural even, about to cause a natural extinction and the natural demise of humanity. We’d still try to redirect it. I absolutely detest this argument.
The worst is when proponents of marijuana legalization use this argument. Don’t get me wrong – I think weed should be legal – because it isn’t particularly harmful compared to other substances (tobacco, alcohol) that we as a society decided are OK. But “It’s NATURAL!” is a STUPID argument. Death cap mushrooms are natural, but you wouldn’t consume those. Advil is unnatural, but I take one when I have a headache. “Natural” has nothing to do with it.
So fine – for humans, building cities is just as natural as anthills are for ants and dams are for beavers. What’s your point? It’s still BAD to cause extinction, even if it’s NATURAL, because as human beings we derive some economic utility from the existence of species, even if it’s just the warm fuzzies we get when we see animals in the wild on TV. THAT is why I am against extinction, not because it’s “unnatural”.
This, on the other hand, is a stupid word game. Yes, it is in man’s nature to build cities. That doesn’t make cities natural. Cities are artificial because that is what we decided to call things made by man instead of nature. Even if Mankind’s inherent nature is to build cities, the cities themselves are artificial by definition. Why? Because words are arbitrary, and we’ve decided to construct our language in this way. Not every word has a single opposite. In the case of “Natural”, there are two words that could be considered opposite: “Supernatural” (which, as you correctly point out, human cities are not) but also “Artificial” (which cities most certainly are, by definition).
Exactly. It’s not about whether the extinction is “natural” or “unnatural”; it’s about whether there is value to us in keeping the species alive, which there most certainly IS. Biodiversity is a means to an end (the end being “lots of cool living things being around that we can benefit from, either by making medicine or food out of them or by enjoying the view”). There are times when I think most of us are totally cool with extinction, however unnatural it is – for example, the Smallpox virus.
I think for me it’s more of a classification. We are either nature, or we are something else. If we are something else, then what are we and why are we that thing? I think that it’s really what gets us to the heart of the original question.
Evolution isn’t a belief system. It’s just a successful means of ensuring change propagation in a competitive environment.
“Fit” isn’t something that you can assign a moral value to, a species can be evolutionary “fit” in the same way I can chisel a word in a piece of granite that lasts for a million years. Or flap my arms once and allow micro disturbances in the wind currents to continue on for eons. Or write a chain letter that gets sent to ten morons, promising them good luck if they could just send it to ten additional morons.
Either way its just a change in the environment that persists. Evolution is just a means of enabling the changes to be self-reinforcing over long periods of time. That’s it.
Erm…
The original question was, “why should we protect endangered species?” And the answer is “because species provide us with various benefits, like practical economic considerations such as potential uses in medicine, as well as the intangible benefit of living in a world full of astounding creatures”. Whether the extinction is natural or unnatural is irrelevant.
Pandas, for example, are a niche species that would struggle when any change occurs, human caused or not, but they are also cute and fluffy and we like living in a world that contains them. If we find out that their trend towards extinction is mostly due to natural processes (using the definition that most reasonable people can agree on for the world Natural, meaning “not artificial” as opposed to this “not supernatural” definition you seem to argue, which makes the word “natural” effectively useless as EVERYTHING is natural) then I’d still want to unnaturally save them because I like having them around.
And if we found out that supernatural vampires are killing the pandas, I’d send in the vampire hunters.
Thank you, language police, I’m sure people will now stop trying to make sense to each other and start restricting themselves to words that work for the hyper-literal.
It wasn’t meant to be a semantic argument. It was meant to question how exactly it is being abused. It’s not being abused in the classic sense of ‘being taken advantage of against its will,’ since it has no will. It also can’t be abused in the sense of ‘misused’ because it has no purpose. It can simply be used differently than another person would choose to use it. It’s a very different thing.
When we talk about abusing the environment, we are simply putting a cultural value on the environment and then telling everyone that this value is objective. A person from a different culture may say, “Wow, look at all of those trees that we could turn into charcoal, what an abuse of a resource to just let it sit there.” We’re erring in assuming that our subjective valuations are necessarily universal valuations.
Is everything this subjective to you senoy? Does child abuse not exist because there is no “intended use” of a child? If I want to force my child to work in the coal mines, that’s my subjective valuation, and how dare you question it?
Actually, I’m an objectivist (meaning someone who believes in objective valuations, not someone who follows Ayn Rand.) I believe in the complete objective value of every action, but not in the context of this discussion.
In the context of this discussion, then no. Child abuse is a cultural valuation with no objective value. You may like or dislike whether someone in Randombergistania is sending a child to work in the mines, but there is no inherent natural reason to do one or the other. It’s merely a cultural decision to approve or disapprove of the action.
We probably are, but that’s not intrinsic to using the terminology “abusing the environment”, and the meaning does not significantly change if the users are aware the value judgement is subjective.
So… You’re an objectivist, but in the context of this discussion, (
Why is this discussion so special?), you are arguing from a subjective point of view, which you do not actually hold. In other words – you’re making an argument that you yourself don’t even agree with.
Good to know.
Yes, I am. That’s something that I do pretty regularly. I take a given set of presuppositions and argue as though those presuppositions are true. That’s not uncommon in philosophy and I think it leads to a better understanding of those who hold those presuppositions. It also lets me know how people who agree with me attack the argument and gives perspective as to where the holes in their arguments are and perhaps where I have been flawed. Sometimes I take the opposite side as a way to wrap around to a different point. I sometimes take a Socratic ‘feigned ignorance’ that leads us to different conclusions. It’s all about a quest for truth.
So, yes. I don’t always stringently argue for beliefs that I think are true. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. The goal isn’t to be ‘right’, it’s about struggling ever closer to what the truth is.
So, for the record, I firmly believe in an objective right and wrong. I don’t know whether preserving biodiversity is objectively right or not, but I am inclined to say that it is. For the sake of this argument though, I will be presupposing that such an objectivity does not exist and all that exists is a physicalist world of process without any metaphysical arbiter of ‘good’ or ‘evil.’
I would also go so far as to say that I more frequently argue against my beliefs than for them. I am not challenging myself when I just parrot the same arguments that I’ve had for the last however long. It doesn’t teach me anything, so I find the exercise fairly fruitless.
Well, I would have appreciated knowing that beforehand, because I am not particularly interested in debating with someone who already agrees with me. I don’t agree that you need a “metaphysical arbiter of ‘good’ or ‘evil’” to have objective morality, but that’s a whole other debate.
Isn’t that a word kinda like “kobolding” that we aren’t allowed to use outside the pit?
I’ve never heard of the term. I assume that it’s related to trolling, but the purpose of trolling is to provoke an emotional reaction. I’m not trying to provoke a reaction at all. I’m simply taking a different set of presuppositions to my own and arguing them in good faith. I don’t think anything I’ve posted above is out of line with accepted lines of philosophical thought. The fact that people agree with those lines of thought tells me I’m not out of the pale or making intentionally disingenuous arguments.
And it would have been one thing if you let us know that you are playing devil’s advocate here, so we could respond accordingly. Like Darren Garrison I’m not sure what the rules about this are (and that might be a worthwhile thread for ATMB) but it’s frustrating in the sense that I certainly, and possibly others, would not have gotten nearly as invested in this debate if I know that you didn’t actually believe the points I was debating against.