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Nature doesn't deal in morality, right or wrong. Nature deals in balance. A fox that kills all the rabbits one year will die of hunger the next. The question is
by m12k 5y ago
Nature doesn't deal in morality, right or wrong. Nature deals in balance. A fox that kills all the rabbits one year will die of hunger the next. The question isn't whether the fox has a moral right to kill rabbits or not, the question is whether the fox maintains the balance needed to maintain the ecosystem that it is part of. Act too unsustainably and break the balance by too much, and you disrupt the ecosystem, and your place within it.
What we need to do isn't to anthropomorphize animals and project our morality onto them. What we need to do is acknowledge our place in the ecosystem and start acting like an omnivore that knows how to maintain balance instead of taking a saw to the branch we're sitting on.
- user-the-name 5y agoNo. We are unique in that we have the ability to develop morality. We will not throw that gift aside just because the rest of nature can not. We can and we should judge our actions by our morality. And nature itself is not exempt from judgement by that morality. It is entirely valid to ask ourselves if nature itself is morally wrong. It is not a stretch to make an argument that it is, in fact, not. Nature is built around massive, unending cruelty. Just because it has existed for a long time, or because we can out of that chaos, is no reason to accept it as a given.
- anthony_d 5y agoWe have the ability to develop _a_ morality. There are infinite possible variations. Being human means we judge ourselves and others. You should expect to be judged as well. If your sense of morality includes a sense of superiority or an entitlement to enforce your will on others, you can expect to be judged poorly.
- user-the-name 5y agoI really don't know what to make of this. Any at all useful morality would include things like "killing people is wrong", and ways to enforce this. This is not really something people "judge poorly", it is the very basis of a functioning society.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago> We have the ability to develop _a_ morality. There are infinite possible variations. And some of them are better than others.
- yboris 5y agoRubbish. By this logic, we can just say that we shouldn't upset the "balance" of the slave owners -- they were able to to "maintain the balance needed to maintain the ecosystem that it is a part of".
- m12k 5y agoUm, no. Humans do have morality, and can and should apply it to one another - and can expect and even demand the same in return from others. We can't do that with nature, and nature does not need or want that in return from us. Humans are both animals, that need to fit into an ecosystem, and social creatures, that need to fit into a society. Both domains require rules for how we interact with and fit into them, but those rules are not the same.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoSo are you saying humans are super-natural?
- m12k 5y agoWhat on earth makes you think that? No, I don't think humans are super-natural. But in addition to being creatures sprung from nature, we are also something else (indeed, the very definition of something being anything other than natural, i.e. cultural or artificial, is that humans have had a hand in its creation).
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago> in addition to being creatures sprung from nature, we are also something else Super-natural: More than natural. You are literally saying humans are supernatural (using the Latin prefix 'super-' meaning "in addition to" [1]). [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/super#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/super#Latin
- troyvit 5y agoI think the only flaw there is that our morality came from nature and therefore is one of the things we use to fit into our ecosystem. There's nothing to say we shouldn't apply it to other members of the system. If nature didn't "want" that we wouldn't be capable of doing it. Given how far up the food chain we are it could be argued that our morality exists precisely for this purpose.