Thread 2837800

The edge of morality
A case of transforming nature

A common slogan regarding evolution is “evolution doesn’t stop at the neck.” The basic idea is that the same evolutionary forces that work on our bodies—determining our height, method of reproduction, and so on—also work on our brains. Our minds are not unfiltered Cartesian egos, unaffected by evolution, and the assumption that they are is a source of serious error.

But there’s a similar dogma when it comes to ethics that is as widespread as it is indefensible. This is roughly the notion that ethics stops at the edge of society—that ethics, in other words, has nothing to say about nature, and there are no values to be promoted in nature; all we should do, with respect to nature, is preserve it. This idea strikes me as clearly wrong!

When you tell people that you support modifying nature to reduce suffering—trying to get rid of predators that rip their victims limb from limb and of flies that lay eggs in the bodies of live animals, eating their way out from the inside—they act like you have grown another head. But I think the worthwhileness of modifying nature follows from every plausible ethical view.

We normally accept that it’s bad when animals suffer. We think there’s something noble about helping out an injured deer, but nothing comparably noble about helping out an injured plant. When, in the 1980s, surgery was performed on live dogs without any anesthetic, we correctly recognize that such a practice was ghastly and horrific. The reason it was horrific is that it’s bad to be in excruciating agony. The fact that huge numbers of dogs were in excruciating agony was a bad thing. Surely it can’t be that it’s only bad for dogs to suffer if humans are the culprit—this would imply that it’s wrong to treat horrible diseases dogs have, if treating the diseases causes them any suffering.

>>2837800 (OP)
Thus, I think we should all recognize that animal suffering is bad. And the badness isn’t restricted to dogs—torturing a deer would be similarly bad. But once we recognize that animal suffering is bad, and that nature is filled with it, shouldn’t we try to reduce animal suffering in nature? If we accept:

1. Some things that happen in nature are good and other things that happen are bad.

and

2. We can affect what goes on in nature.

Then shouldn’t we think:

3. We should promote good things in nature and try to avoid bad things.

It sounds obvious when you say it that way. But in practice, almost no one seems to support it. People think that we simply should not interfere in nature—that if the screw worm reproduces by laying larvae in the skin of live animals, eating them out from the inside, causing agony so excruciating that humans often request suicide when they experience it—then that is simply the natural order and we shouldn’t do anything about it.


Imagine someone thinking this way about human society—thinking that even though humans being in pain is bad, we shouldn’t give people antibiotics, because dying at a young age of disease is part of the natural order. That would be silly. But the common view on nature is just as silly. The fact that something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good. Nature optimizes for passing on genes, not anything of value.

Now, other people might have different values in nature that they wish to promote. Maybe beautiful nature has intrinsic value, so we should preserve and enhance natural beauty. I disagree with that view, but I understand that a person with different values might think that there’s more to be optimized for in a natural ecosystem than just lives going well (though certainly, on any plausible view, lives going well is going to be one of the important values being maximized).

>>2837801
Similarly, if you disagree with my empirical claim most animals live bad lives, https://benthams.substack.com/p/most-animals-have-bad-lives you might want to increase animal populations. So let me be clear what I’m not saying: I am not saying that it’s obvious that we should promote exactly the things in nature that I think are good.


But what I am saying is obvious is that we shouldn’t adopt a non-interference policy with respect to nature. We shouldn’t just seek to preserve the status quo. If we grant that it’s bad to be in excruciating pain—that an experience of being ripped apart or starving over days is genuinely unfortunate—then we can’t be indifferent when this happens in nature. We should try to change nature, if possible, once we recognize that lots of terrible things happen in nature, and other good things happen in nature.

Now, I can also imagine practical objections to interfering in nature. Maybe a person would think that trying to interfere in nature will inevitably make things worse. I’m a bit skeptical of this; it would be surprising if opposite interventions (say, increasing and decreasing plant growth) both turned out badly. What could possibly be the explanation of why every single environmental policy done for the sake of wild animals is inevitably designed to fail and backfire?

>>2837802

Even if you think that most interventions in nature so far have failed to better animals’ lives, this can be explained by the fact that there have been no wide-scale interventions designed to ease the suffering of wild animals. We treat the effects of our actions on wild animals as irrelevant. But this doesn’t mean that helping wild animals is impossible, any more than the fact that a child knocking over stuff in your house made your house messier means that house-cleaning is impossible.

There are real debates to be had about how and when we should change nature. But the idea that we should never change it, that we should just leave it be is, in my judgment, indefensible. Billions of years of evolution have not optimized for anything of value, and aside from status quo bias, it’s hard to see why we’d think that nothing about nature could be improved upon.

The idea that we should try to modify nature to make it better, therefore, isn’t some weird utilitarian fever dream, but follows from any view that holds that animal suffering is bad! It is imperative that if we have the ability to change it, we do not keep around nature in its current form—as a hideous pit of misery, death, starvation, and predation, that produces a quantity of suffering every day that surpasses what the most hideous sadist could dream of. If extreme agony is both bad and widespread, why wouldn’t we try to make there be less of it?

We owe it to the billions of animals who have perished since I started typing this sentence to do something about their cries, even when their cries are distant, and outside of the reaches of society.

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-edge-of-morality

tldr, sounds gay, you're gay, etc.

>>2837800 (OP)
You must be very bad at ecology if you think ecosystems can be healthy without predators

>>2837880
Everybody look! A strawman has been killed!

>>2837800 (OP)
Interfering with nature in such a way just feels wrong. I don't need any further moral reasoning.

>>2837800 (OP)
Here is how we can end all the suffering in the world

>>2837907
Yes
debate an efilist

>>2837800 (OP)
You must have the sweetest tightest boipussy to think thoughts so weak and stupid. I want to rape that tight twink bussy till you kill yourself.

You're against one set of animals harming another, but you aren't applying your concern evenly. For instance, most songbirds eat bugs. Do you want to kill them all since they are killing other animals? How about the herbivores that take habitat from the bugs and other herbivores? When does it stop?
I think we should have diversity in our environments, but that nature should primarily be managed for man. We shouldn't necessarily strive to make an area like it was before the white man came. Maybe, we should keep it as it is now, make it how it was 10,000 years ago, or maybe transform it to something totally different.

>>2837800 (OP)
>nothing comparably noble about helping out an injured plant.
speak for yourself, i routinely apologize when i make a mistep and crush a plant or break a branch. you can move through an ecosystem in a gentler way to cause less impact across all species

Thanks for the insight gpt

>>2837800 (OP)
I agree. Humans should end the suffering of existence by nuking the entire world with cobalt bombs and eradicating all higher lifeforms.

>>2837800 (OP)
You’re full of shit and have your head up your ass if you think humanity is capable of determining what is either good or moral in nature. There is no inherent good or bad. That’s a human construct your little ape brain thinks it can impose on a system.

>ethically we should kill off predators to reduce suffering of other animals

>ethically we should make predators suffer until extinction, and then let herbivores make everything else suffer until extinction, and then have no more nature

It's all a balance goober. If you "care" about nature, that means caring about all of it and not doing silly hippy shit.

>>2837988
The author is a utilitarian obviously

Bump

Didn't read

>>2837800 (OP)
Suffering is natural, nature contains lots of suffering. Take away all the rape, torture, beastiality, murder, incest, and cannibalism from nature and all you have is a fucking petting zoo

>>2838702
Good

>>2838909
By petting zoo I meant playpen for bitches so stupid, apathetic or arrogant that they think the drugged lion cubs they play with are 'happy'

>>2838935
My cat seems pretty happy to me.

>>2837800 (OP)
Interesting take you've got here, I'd like to know how you define suffering though, is it just amount of pain x hours of pain felt? If that is the case isn't the morally right thing to do to painlessly kill everything, so as to eliminate the chance of suffering ever occuring? Furthermore how do you define good here? This suffering is a figment of the mind, and is the data read from arbitrary sensors, interpreted as pain. That is not bad, and if you really don't like it you can always die pretty easily! And if your "good" is just pleasure then how is that defined per creature? If an ant is as happy as can be with a piece of food, is it more worthwhile to feed as many ants as possible than to house a single dog, as the dog hasn't gotten near it's maximum percieved happiness there? No, obviously not, nature is not about pain and pleasure nor good and bad, it is very much a robotic system of interacting algorithms, where a deer sees danger and runs, and a wolf feels hunger and hunts.

>>2838952
Go talk to A utilitarian. Emphasis on the word talk

>>2837884
Your argument relies on consensus on "good" and "bad" being reached for application. In the absence of that, you're going to have an absolute shitshow of widespread extermination and creation campaigns. Best of luck.

>>2839017
That's called politics