Beyond Food and People

This article is easily disproven by the fact that humans have dramatically increased our lifespan, so no, we are not completely at the mercy of nature and we do have agency, as well as effective free will.

And a huge part of why we’ve achieved this is morality driven by reducing suffering.

In fact, we’re only extending our moral circle. At one point we would enslave and kill anyone outside our tribe, then outside our nation, skin color, etc. We continuously included those with differences in our circle of empathy and have now added certain species of animals to reduce suffering further.

The obvious next steps are to include other species of animals who also are sentient and feel suffering and we will be better off for it as well.

Feels like cultivating acceptance and indifference to your own entanglements is the most isolationist thing you can actually do. To be entangled is to be biased about what's happening to you... do we think the crocodile was indifferent to the escape of his prey, or to being culled in an act of revenge?

Anyway, if folks enjoy this theme I recommend Scavengers Reign, which does a beautiful job of illustrating struggle with biological entanglement.

The whole first analogy feels a bit backwards.

Crocodile tries to kill human, human kills it as the stronger animal. That seems very natural.

Crocodile tries to kill human, human decides it’s natural for crocodile to do so and lets it live due to complex human morality. That feels much more “human exceptionalist”!

Oh no, not again. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1970/11/05/the-gentle-nietz...

That's a very nice peek into the thoughts of Nietzsche. But the ship of thinking has sailed. School of thinking has closed. People don't have time to think, and much less to act. The general populations are subjects, not agents. A soldier doesn't want to think, they expect commands. The current social context only has groves to move in, not the plains to roam around. Perceived risks of self-determination are high. Let the evolution take its subjects wherever they ought to go. They deserve it. They need to find an equilibrium between the forces of nature and artificial adaptations of the humans.