Never thoguht I’d say this, but I wholeheartedly agree with you. The only people who are ‘expendable’ in my books are the likes of foolsguinea.
I think it was aimed at me.
I didn’t mention stalin, but I gave the example of an official in a totalitarian state genuinely believing (or at least thinking there is a good chance) that killing dissenters would ultimately save lives.
It doesn’t matter whether the official is correct in this belief for the example to be relevant. Only that he believes it.
In the case of the “food crop” argument, we don’t know whether that species of fig is going to be a key food crop, let alone that it will directly save the lives of more than 10 million people.
Initiating an evil on the basis of what you think might happen in the future is evil, end of.
The problem with radical conservationism is that is denies the most basic tenets of the continuance of life; change. Habitats, species, and their various demographics all change over time. Species arise and go extinct. Climate changes and habitats shift. In time, speciation happens again. Conservation is only valuable to us in that it preserves a viable habitat for a large enough variety of life to sustain both the ecosystem and human life. There is no inherent value to preserving any given species merely for the sake of preservation itself.
a distinction between right and wrong;
a system of morality according to a particular philosophy, religion, culture
This is classic Marxism pure and simple. First articulated by Karl Marx, Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans collectively produce the necessities of life. The collective has more value than the individual.
Is an apt statement of “radical conservationists” who obviously believe that
[ol]
[li]the Human species must survive[/li][li]That species diversity is essential to human survival. [/li][li]The individual is expendable in order to achieve A. & B.[/li][/ol]The points are not in evidence nor do I concede them.
We live in a country which requires the “consent of the governed” from which Jefferson and other Founders conceived “individual” sovereignty. This means the RIGHTS of the individual outweigh the RIGHTS of the many.
As “independent, sovereign entities” with “unalienable rights” the individual does not have the “positive” right of receiving his needs filled. He has only the “negative” rights of being left alone, and having that right protected by the government.
Any government that operates by the “needs” principle is a tyranny.
I will not become a fools guinea pig.
Oh yes I am wise
But it’s wisdom born of pain
Yes, I’ve paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to I can face anything
I am strong (strong)
I am invincible (invincible)
I am woman
Well stated coping mechanism, with the fear that you might be one of the few, to return to the goo, and we would miss you!
90% of all the species that have lived on the planet were extinct millions of years before you arrived on the scene.
But don’t step on that cockroach, it may be someones grandmother, or become the progenitor of a future arachnid galactic empire.
“Value” is a human concept, and has no objective meaning whatsoever. The universe certainly doesn’t care whether or not its atoms are arranged in the form of what we call “life”.
It’s not a “coping mechanism”. It’s a simple fact; we don’t have the ability to make detailed, long range predictions like that. Not for good purposes, not for bad ones; we just can’t do it at all.
And? We are discussing human actions and choices here. And the fact that the universe doesn’t care just means that it has no opinion to take into consideration; we get to define “values” because nothing else is.
Really? Because I haven’t, and I dare say I’ve known at least as many believers as you.
On the contrary, whenever the conversation is about killing millions of people in the name of some alleged social good, it’s always appropriate to bring up Stalin. And Mao and Pol Pot as well.
Then you haven’t been paying attention, “suffering and death in the present don’t matter because we’re going to live eternally in the afterlife” is a pretty standard argument made by people trying to defend God from accusations of being evil or uncaring. Including on this board.
And Christianity, and Islam, and Hinduism, and Aztecism*, and pretty much every religion around at one point or another. But this thread is about “radical conservationists”, not religions and not communists (even assuming the two are actually separate things).
*Or whatever the heck their religion was called.
Well if life has no objective meaning than logically Hitler, Stalin, and other mass murders simply rearranged some atoms.
Nothing wrong with that, correct? If not please objectively demonstrate why mass murder is wrong. If you can’t then maybe objective meaning doesn’t have much to do with moral meanings
Or if it does, who cares? If there is some “objective morality” and it says that mass murder or rape or torture are OK, then screw “objective morality”. People assume that an “objective morality” would be a good thing; in reality being objective (and therefore not based on human opinions, needs or desires) there would be no reason to assume that it agreed with their morality in any way.
Healthcare to the poor is expendable if it takes money from the rich. That should give you a clue how much the poor matter.
Medicare, dump it. old people don’t make enough money for the bosses. They are not worth having medical help. Let them croak.
Iraqi and Afghanistani lives are collateral damage. Not really people at all. Kids, men , women and old people just get in the way.
Torturing possible terrorists? No problem. If you torture and jail a few innocents, no matter.
You’re making an epistemological argument against consequentialism, but consequentialism is axiomatic to me, so you won’t get very far.
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I can make educated guesses, and some outcomes really are more likely than others.
1a) Plants don’t just spontanenously go extinct for no reason after several million years.
1b) If you’re really arguing from total we-can’t-knowism (agnosticism, skepticism, evs), then what’s the point of morality? At all times our decisions choose between one opportunity or another, one life or another. So by your logic, why shouldn’t I just kill everyone I don’t like? I can’t know that they’re not really as smelly, evil, and dangerous as my chimpish instincts tell me. And I have to follow my instincts in the absence of higher knowledge, which according to you is impossible. -
It was a thought experiment, a hypothetical involving an outrageously high level of information & an unusually specific conflict, as a way of bringing the principle into relief.
You can’t base a standard of morality on your subjective valuation of your life, and expect anyone else to care. You think you’re so wonderful, Beware of Doug thinks he’s worthless, & I think you’re about the same. Mr Hitler would think you were in his way. Whose subjective opinion means anything objective?
Unluckily for the future of life on this rock, yours is the dominant opinion. We’ve already seen what simple humanism does to quality of life per human. And mathematically, we can easily see that there are limits to our resource base. Your point of view should be shelved until someone invents a warp drive (that is, forever). Unfortunately, it will empty our oceans of fish & wreck the world. No one wants to admit we’re over carrying capacity already but the crazies and the depressives. But we are, and you will live to see your grandchildren turn to cannibalism out of lack of other options.
Don’t expect me to humor your stupid unsustainable beliefs.
Can you objectively define"I’m experiencing seeing the color blue" such that someone who hasn’t seen anything blue could be made to understand it’s meaning?
If not, then objective meaning isn’t demonstrated to describe everything that has meaning.
Do on to others as you’d have them do on to you sounds like a pretty good standard. Compassion is another similar one. Societies that value compassion tend to be nicer places to live based on poverty, health, safety, and happiness levels.
People generally agree on the value of healthy, safety, and happiness. If nothing else, out of enlightened self interest.
You know maybe if an opinion is just shared primarily among the crazy, maybe that says something about the quality of the opinion.
They made similar predictions before the invention of modern agricultural methods. Further in the developed world fertility decreases. Therefor population growth isn’t long term trend. The solution to depleted oceans, is farm raising fish. The solution to crop failure is better farming methods. The solution to technological troubles isn’t mass cullings and reverting to hunter gathers until an asteroid takes us out, but environmentally sustainable energy production and cleaning up industrial methods.
For starters, if nothing else, we’re making our first tentative steps into cheaper access to space. There’s a giant fusion reactor up there that can give us all the energy we want to power our tractors, or even skyscrapers of hydroponics.
Getting it is just a large engineering problem.
If we were over carrying capacity, we’d be seeing an overall decline in our population numbers. We may be approaching K. We may be at K. But we haven’t surpassed it.
Conservation biology does not need people lacking an understanding of basic ecology to represent it.
They have reasons for it, but they do go extinct.
That’s not what I was saying at all. I was pointing out that we can’t just dismiss killing people as having no long term consequences since we have no way of knowing what those long term consequences are. And while some outcomes are more predictable that others, the long term consequences of killing people is highly unpredictable; we aren’t talking about orbital mechanics here.
It was like the “would you torture someone to stop a nuke from going off” scenario; an extreme and highly implausible scenario designed to screw with people’s judgment and produce a desired response that wouldn’t work in the real world.
Of course you can. I and most people consider our lives to be of value, so we collectively decide to treat them as of being of value.
You’ve missed the point so badly there that you’re now arguing my point, for me.
I was arguing against the idea that there is inherent value in duration; that something around for 1 million years is necessarily more important than a different entity around for only 100 years, for example.
My position is that there is no inherent value in anything; value is a human concept and we can completely differ in what we value.
However, it is far from arbitrary; it’s really the product of our instincts / dispositions, plus the (dynamic) influence of society.
And people can be convinced to value something. If I show you that controlling an open file in chess can be the key to victory, you may start to value open files when you didn’t before.
The position that a species of fig has greater value than millions of human lives is not one that is instinctive to us, it’s not currently endorsed by society, and I have not heard a good argument for why I should value a species so highly.
<pointless nitpick>la is Spanish for “the”. Don’t be redundant, comrade Qin, or you will be shot for squandering the precious verbal resources of the Rodina !</pn>