Sea Otters Are Jerks. So Are Dolphins, Penguins, and Other Adorable Animals
slate.com
slate.com
It's just that cooperation, exchange, and division of labour benefit all of us better than some zero-sum game. If this were not the case, savagery would rule the world, instead of global trade.
Enlightened self-interest favours respect of diversity and non-conformance - because exploration is more effective when everyone tries a different approach (instead of the same one). And exploration, especially in science and technology, benefits us all, particularly in increasing carrying capacity so we needn't choose between intertribal warfare, infanticide and starvation.
I took the following from studying world war two in school (though I don't think it was explicitly stated): the Nazis started WWII and sought to eliminate many groups, including Jews, on the basis of eugenics (apparently, eugenics was broadly popular at the time). Yet Einstein, a German Jew, created the basis of atomic weapons which ended the war (if not, they would have ended it).
Eugenics is a misunderstanding of the Darwinian value of a human life.
To some people, this point of view may seem cynical, ugly and horrible. But to me, it is the most hopeful view I've ever seen. It means that if some overly-controlling group tries to enslave the world, they will likely fail - because their very nature weakens them. It also means that over time, the Darwinian pressure is for us to become ever more good, as that is what gets rewarded. Therefore, if one day we meet powerful aliens, they are likely ethical aliens. Taken to the furthest extreme, one could see symbiosis as the nature of the universe.
Is that taking it too far? Maybe. But it follows from the evidence, and the logic of division of labour. Of course, it's just a probability - selfishness can strike at cooperation at any time. And does. All I claim is that cooperation is the way to bet.
Ethics is power.
It seems like you need to work on your critical reading skills before getting so snarky.
You see, the unspoken assumption of many bad-guys throughout history as well as just about all of the annoying jerks on the Internet is the same. It's the assumption that one is somehow special, ultimate, or "exceptional." It's really the unacknowledged blasphemous assumption of nearly every human being -- that we are all some kind of significant shard of God.
Well, we're all significant as valued individuals, but in the grand scheme of things, we are just one iteration and point of view amongst billions. To be unaware of this and rampage about the world is to use the confidence our species had to evolve to survive in a rough and uncertain world. To be open to the possibility of our being wrong is to be enlightened.
Ethics is power.
The ethical codes of behavior we inherited from our cultural traditions are a lousy approximation of the way a superior intellect would behave. That said, it's still a lot better for most people than no ethical code. Any ethical code that could fit into a human mind is probably such a lousy, static approximation. However, to rampage about the world without one is a good way of becoming another of history's villains -- especially if you think of yourself as one of the good guys. Almost all of history's villains thought of themselves as the "good guys."
(Also, I'm not religious.)
From the publisher's summary at Amazon: "In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright asserts that, ever since the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern. Organisms and human societies alike have grown more complex by mastering the challenges of internal cooperation. Wright's narrative ranges from fossilized bacteria to vampire bats, from stone-age villages to the World Trade Organization, uncovering such surprises as the benefits of barbarian hordes and the useful stability of feudalism. Here is history endowed with moral significance–a way of looking at our biological and cultural evolution that suggests, refreshingly, that human morality has improved over time, and that our instinct to discover meaning may itself serve a higher purpose. Insightful, witty, profound, Nonzero offers breathtaking implications for what we believe and how we adapt to technology's ongoing transformation of the world."
I can't agree with this kind of reasoning. Evolution doesn't have direction, there's no such thing as "good" in this process. Even historically some factors made certain level of cooperation better for survival it doesn't mean it'll be true forever and the balance is always shifting even in recent history. And aliens is guaranteed to have a vastly different "evolution" history than us, using the word "ethical" is nonsense.
In fact, it seems that the whole "jerk" thing is rather contrived, and the occurrences as a whole seem to merely suggest "this is what it is to be an animal."(They seemed to be going in this direction; but then turned it into a "this is why animals aren't actually good and nice and our superior reasoning ability allows us to avoid this" but I would respond with, "it hasn't.")
I don't mean to legitimze, but rather to suggest that it puts any suggestions that humans are more than "just animals" (tm) in an interesting light.
I don't think mixing up the three groups helps. At I don't want to be punched in the face tomorrow with the excuse that amoeba do the same thing. :P
Eugenics. Sloppy reasoning using evolution.
Please don't post this type of comment in the future.
As far as I can tell, you didn't have the background to know what the gp commenter was saying, so you counterfactually knee-jerked a reaction amounting to censorship.
It would be nice if we could rationally talk about the Nazi regime in a historical and cultural context. It's especially instructive, as they sincerely believed they were "the good guys." What was the most used word referencing an emotion at the Nuremberg Rally the year Leni Riefenstahl filmed Triumph of the Will?
"Love."
The Nazis thought they were the good guys, and they were able to convince enough of an entire country to achieve a totalitarian state. What they did afterwards was truly horrible -- which is a glaring indication that we have lots of valuable stuff to learn about how human beings can go horribly wrong by thinking about what happened.
Godwin's law is an anti-rational knee jerk.
The person who originally introduced me to this idea? (Not in specific reference to Godwin's law, but generally.) A young jewish woman I had fallen in love with. Chew on that.
(Off-topic)
Actually, I think parent poster and you misunderstand Godwin's law. Godwin's law is just the empirical observation that, as an Internet thread grows longer, the probability of someone making a Nazi reference approaches unity. It's a "law" in the same way that Moore's Law is one. It's not (originally) intended to be a way to shut down discussion. There's nothing special about the Nazis in this regard - there is a tendency toward a "race to the bottom" when constructing analogies, and it just so happens that in our culture they're considered the worst thing that ever happened. If the Nazis never existed Godwin's Law would have referenced something else - slavery, some other genocide, etc.
– Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club.
The fallacy, of course, is that yes we can, and in fact, that's exactly what we've been doing with these whole "civilization" and "culture" things since day 1.
http://www.amazon.com/Parasite-Rex-Bizarre-Dangerous-Creatur...
I thought that anyone who has raised a cat knows that animals are jerks (playing with bleeding mice for hours and all), but I was shocked by the added layer of terribleness from parasites in almost all species.
Raising this point on Reddit only gets you downvotes.
1. Original studies over estimated the amount of animals a typical cat kills.
2. Cats roam over a lot less area than you'd think, rarely going even half a mile away from their home. Putting the majority of wild animals out of reach of a house cat's range.