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I find the final question about human intervention fascinating. The scientists aren’t recommending intervention, even if the perpetrators tend to be the same

• denkmoon 5mo ago
  We’ve a storied history of making ecological interventions without fully understanding the consequences. Doing the work to fully understand the consequences is time consuming and expensive. IMO it comes a position of leaving well enough alone.
• nerdsniper 5mo ago
  The mature view is that it boils down to the “Chesterton’s Fence” concept. Rather than “humans bad, nature good”, we just don’t know if the result of intervention might be an unfit population / ecosystem. The result of this, of course, is that we tend to intervene a lot when humans are affected (massive industrial footprints, screw-worms, etc) and a lot less when it’s irrelevant to human welfare. We are, by nature, biased towards the anthropic.
• oaiey 5mo ago
  I always read this as: when something is doomed by itself, it is the normal unaltered way of things. Let it flow.
• TimByte 5mo ago
  I think it's less "nature knows better" and more "we usually don't know enough"
  • 21asdffdsa12 5mo ago
    It's also a inability to accept the cthullian horror built into nature. Sentient eating sentient, everything being at constant warfare with everything else- the Grass wars the trees for the light. Add to that, the likelihood that nature will adapt new defenses in our lifetime, by for example having animals propagate hyper-allergenic plant-species - and you can begin to grasp why humanity does not want to look at the real, rather at the idyllic paintings we made ourselves.
    • noelwelsh 5mo ago
      There are plenty of examples of cooperation in nature.
      • 21asdffdsa12 5mo ago
        Which though, are not a sign of harmony- its more a sort of horrific balancing act at the abyss having clear winners and losers, the losers becoming cattle, organs or worse and usually they do not defect only because then some horror from the abyss eats the whole gametheory board and their abilities have atrophied -aka cooperation usually is a sort of slavery.
        • kergonath 5mo ago
          > its more a sort of horrific balancing act at the abyss having clear winners and losers No need to appeal to emotions this way. At the individual level there are only losers, and we all die. At the universe level, whatever happens, happens, and it’s up to us to find beauty in it.
          • rixed 5mo ago
            and it's up to us if those ugly old seals murder those pups or not :)
            • kergonath 5mo ago
• operatingthetan 5mo ago
  It kinda seems like they have a serial-killer seal in the population.
• vasco 5mo ago
  So strange when you look at our total interaction with the environment. We kill millions of animals, many just for literal sport, but to save an animal from another is 'too much intervention' And I bet the moral scientists sat there feeling sorry for themselves and for the seal. Meanwhile other people are destroying full ecosystems. If you feel like saving an animal from another, do it, what a ridiculous horse to decide to sit on. This to me makes as much sense as me walking my dog, another dog attacking it and me throwing my hands up "nothing I can do, nature is doing its thing".
  • dlcarrier 5mo ago
    There's a species where each individual literally eats a billion animals over its lifetime. If saving animals from an early death is important, then we should do everything we can to make blue whales go extinct.
    • Dusseldorf 5mo ago
      Finally, a cromulent argument to nuke the whales!
      • dlcarrier 5mo ago
        Gotta nuke something
  • kergonath 5mo ago
    > So strange when you look at our total interaction with the environment. It’s less strange if you realise that different people have different opinions and react differently. The biologists saying that we should not intervene because we don’t understand are unlikely to be the ones hunting lions for fun. On the other end, some specimens of human beings would have absolutely zero qualms about killing every single seal on the planet.
• tsimionescu 5mo ago
  I think the idea is simple, and clear. First, we value human life above animal life, so we always prioritize humans and their pleasures above animals (with the limits being either another human's property, or when the human is showing signs of excessive brutality, such as intentionally torturing animals instead of simply killing them). Then, when a human is not directly involved, what matters is the potential impact of any intervention. Nature is extraordinarily brutal by itself, and we can't hope to change that overall, regardless of what we might prefer. Even at a basic emotional & moral level, we can't protect every baby animal that gets killed by a predator or a parasite, regardless of the suffering we see in it, or we would be causing the death of the predator's babies to starvation. And then, at a more rational higher scale, we know that this type of intervention would typically end up destroying the entire ecosystem if we actually tried to do it consistently.
  • rixed 5mo ago
    I think the idea is simple, and clear. Simple and clear yet everything that follow is controversial. :) First, humans are animals. You mean "each species value itself more than others"? I don't know, but I certainly do not value any human life above any other species life; Humans are amazing, but when they are malfunctioning they can do a lot of damage ;) Of course I was not thinking about preventing predation, or life would be limited to some bacterias, plants and algaes that can power their metabolism from some minerals and/or sunlight. Some violence in nature is gratuitous (like a cat killing a mouse for fun) and this looks like an example of that. If we let this happen, why stop human hunters from killing seals too?
• somenameforme 5mo ago
  I think the main point is that nature is in a dynamic equilibrium that's built up over eons. We disrupt that equilibrium unintentionally by things like development, but well intended disruptions can have just as negative effects. The typical example would be something like removing a predator (or even a disease) from an area which results in a population explosion of its former prey which results in increased pressures on what that prey eat and so on all the way down the food chain. And it's not just hypothetical - for instance gray wolves were largely eliminated from many areas with catastrophic consequences. They're now being reintroduced in many places and you get interesting effects like it turning out that gray wolves were effectively helping keeping a healthy beaver population, which is particularly interesting given that beavers are prey for wolves! [1] It's just a really interesting interbalance, and changing one thing can have consequences that are practically impossible to predict. This is the reason I'm not a fan of the idea of eliminating even mosquitoes at large. Unforeseen consequences are very much a thing, and those consequences don't inherently become 'seen' because of a study or two. [1] - https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem/ https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-r...
  • 21asdffdsa12 5mo ago
    I want the bill for damages caused with reintroduction- to be sent to the local GREEN party and its voters, thank you very much. Reintroduction of the beaver in europe has caused millions in damages
  • rixed 5mo ago
    By that logic, then we "disrupting" that equilibrium is also part of the equilibrium. Is it consistent to let a few adult male seals murder hundreds of pups while at the same time forbid hunters to hunt a few seals for fur, or fishermen in Faroe islands to catch dolphins once a year? To me, it sounds that the fear of unintended consequences that you mentioned is what I called "distrust of human society". Yes, I am aware of the risk, and that's an argument that I accept in general. But it applies only at large scale, so not in the case at hand. Or we can picture an even smaller scale: picture a single old male attacking a single defenseless pup. Interfering?
• QuadmasterXLII 5mo ago
  I’m not sure there’s a philosophical understanding yet, but the learned flinch response from how badly the last X interventions went is real
• deleted 5mo ago
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• BlackFly 5mo ago
  We have absolutely no way of reconciling ethics with animals. In human society, the same individuals will often be using force against others but those individuals may be the police or criminals. The notion of righteousness or injustice in a given situation is contingent on context. Until we can speak with animals, we lack that context. Violence is not inherently wrong: we do not know their nature.
  • aziaziazi 5mo ago
    > Until we can speak with animals One can probably can have a better communication with, say a dog, than a sever autist or someone in the state of deep coma. We don’t apply our ethics based on the communication (or same-language ability) but instead on an arbitrary selection. That selection evolved recently to includes a wider set of humans (anti-racism and feminism). Antispecism is an interesting view as it state a the specie itself (humans /dogs/caw/cat/chicken…) isn’t a valid denominator to define what is ethic what isn’t.
    • BlackFly 4mo ago
      We definitely apply our ethics and premise it based upon communication. Given a stranger, all I can do is, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and make assumptions about how they want to be treated. This will be generally more successful given my broader exposure to the world or if they are from the same culture as me but individual differences can be stark. After some interactions where they can make their preferences known to me I can then follow the better precept of, "Treat others how they want to be treated," assuming the actions required of me are not especially burdensome and I can find compromises with them otherwise. I have an easier time imagining a severe autist in a consensual BDSM relationship than that I could believe that someone knows that their dog actually likes being slapped. I have an easier time believing this because an autist in abstract may have some communication problems but it is not impossible for them to make their preferences known. These are both so hypothetical though, real situations would require much context of which communication forms a basis (I am not saying we don't understand dogs at all, just that the gap is large). There is no real anti-specism. What there is the proposition that a central nervous system is a prerequisite for consciousness and from that stems moral value (few people argue that we shouldn't enslave and consume members of the Brassica species). But even then, few of the staunchest vegans are against pesticides or anti-parasitic medication, how many animals (insects) must die to bring one carrot to my table? I don't know the answer but it will always be more than 0. Meanwhile, it is instead possible to believe that the guinea worm has as much inherent moral value as a human but that it is ethical for humans to try to eradicate the guinea worm completely.
• kergonath 5mo ago
  > Is it coming from an understandable but misleading distrust of human society and idealisation of "nature", or from a deeper understanding that "nature always knows better", I can't decide. I don’t think it’s either. It comes from the realisation that if we intervene we are most likely to fuck things up in difficult to foresee ways. It’s humility and understanding that even though we are powerful, our understanding of things is actually quite limited. I know a couple of biologists, and none would say anything like what you mentioned. They don’t tend to anthropomorphise nature.
• bell-cot 5mo ago
  Before invoking any moral or philosophical principals, I'd consider the PoV of wildlife & natural area professionals. They know the public can react strongly to situations proximate to charismatic fauna, or "morality play" scenarios. But the public's actual appreciation of animal behavior, ecology, and natural area issues is little beyond "parks are pretty" and cartoons about anthropomorphized animals. Meanwhile - gov't funding and support for real-world animal, ecological, and natural area work is paltry, with many critical problems neglected. And trying to somehow force lions to be monogamous, and hawks to be vegetarians, and cuckoos not to abandon their young, and etc. is the sort of idealistic black hole that all their funding and support could easily be poured down - with less-than-nothing to show for it.