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> Is there an ethical issue with flooding the market with replica ivory? It might lead to people being killed for knowingly or unknowingly passing off fake ivo

• coldtea 11y ago
  Doesn't sound like these people matter anyway. It's like saying "might lead to druglords being killed".
  • jackvalentine 11y ago
    Or the unwitting impoverished courier with poor education who doesn't know of the harm of the ivory trade.
  • cryptophreak 11y ago
    The drug war should already have taught us that it's counterproductive to view offenders as generic nuisances rather than people to be negotiated with. The ivory trade, like the drug trade, is entrenched. There are a lot of people involved. There’s a large, complex, long-standing, and covert structure to deal with. As law enforcement has so clearly demonstrated, you can’t solve behavioral problems at scale with contempt and violence. The really thorny problems in the world won’t be beaten into submission. To negotiate our way out of this problem, it’s necessary to see the offenders as real, valuable human beings.
    • littletimmy 11y ago
      Is the life of an African smuggler or Chinese merchant really more valuable than the life of an elephant? 500,000 elephants, 1 Billion Africans, 1.5 Billion Chinese. It is clear who we should be saving.
      • PhasmaFelis 11y ago
        You really should stop thinking of people who do a bad thing as abstract, one-dimensional monsters. Poachers and smugglers aren't smirking Captain Planet villains; many of them are thugs, but many of them are men with wives, children, elderly parents, trying to make ends meet in a desperately poor part of the world. What they're doing is harmful and needs to be stopped; sometimes violence may sadly be necessary to protect elephant and human lives. That doesn't mean that the life of a mere courier is worthless and can be thoughtlessly discarded.
        • littletimmy 11y ago
          I never meant to say that the life of a courier is worthless. I do apologize if it came across that way. I just meant to say that the life of an elephant is worth more.
      • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        How many elephants do we need to save by selling one person into slavery to make it justified?
    • deciplex 11y ago
      > The drug war should already have taught us that it's counterproductive to view offenders as generic nuisances rather than people to be negotiated with. The lesson of the drug war is twofold: it is immoral to dictate what a person does with their body to the extent they are not harming society, and it is impractical to try to limit the harm drug use does to society by criminalizing drug use and sale. However that is not equivalent to saying, for example, that we ought to try to reason with and come to an understanding with vicious drug cartels. I was proud that I could vote to legalize marijuana in Washington State, and I hope it's a small step on the road to a total dismantling of the War On Drugs. But the point of all that is to weaken the cartels so that they may be destroyed. I would happily bury every member of Los Zetas at the center of the Earth. So it goes with poaching syndicates.
  • Intermernet 11y ago
    That's a very dangerous precedent, and one I have personal experience with, and a very strong opinion on. People matter. Life matters. Killing those you judge to "not matter" is the beginning of the spiral slide to inhumanity. Catch, incarcerate, re-educate. Don't ever kill as a punishment. The death penalty is barbaric, and is only condoned by barbarians. The people at the bottom end of the ivory trade are probably very similar to the people at the bottom end of the drugs trade, or the piracy (real, not digital) trade. Uneducated, and desperate.
    • jlebrech 11y ago
      we shouldn't try and prevent criminals from killing each other especially when it comes to the extinction of another species.
      • Intermernet 11y ago
        Yes, we should. The prevention of the extinction of this species would work just as well (probably better) if the perpetrators of the ivory trade were re-educated, rather than killed. Killing is a simple solution, espoused by simple minds, for very complex problems.
        • logfromblammo 11y ago
          Nevertheless, bullets are cheaper than career counselors. With the exception of high profile politically motivated assassinations, where the victim becomes a rallying point for civil unrest, murdering your enemies tends to result in having fewer enemies. The world as a whole simply does not care enough about individual humans to invest its resources into rehabilitating criminals rather than punishing them. And when the humane solution would involve a complete overhaul of an entire economy, including improvements to the public education system, you're talking some real money. Training up a few wildlife rangers and keeping them well stocked with bullets is a minimum viable solution for keeping the elephant herds alive long enough for the local economy to develop enough to make poaching for ivory obsolete. Re-education requires infrastructure that we take for granted in industrialized countries, but is simply not yet present in rural Africa, away from the cities. Not even the U.S. can pull this off in its own backyard. Re-educate all you want, but if the guy still can't find a job good enough to pay his family after you finish, he'll go right back to growing weed, cooking meth, distilling moonshine, running guns, poaching ivory, or whatever other illegal thing that pays a month of wages or more in one score. And never mind re-education, if educating the first time isn't good enough for a decent job. How many people with a BA in History work in a restaurant or cafe or retail store for their living? Is an ex-con with a GED going to do any better? Execution may be barbaric, but it produces immediate, visible results, which may be touted by politicians as "doing something about the problem." There's no way they would spring for a solution that would take at least a full generation to take hold, stress the treasury to the breaking point, and end up putting more power in the hands of the common people, rather than keeping it vested in the elites. You can't rehabilitate just the criminal. You also have to rehabilitate all the circumstances that led to the crime. Otherwise, just as with killing, someone else steps in to fill the niche vacated by the ex-criminal. Rehabilitation is an expensive solution, espoused by compassionate but impractical minds, for very complex problems.