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Comment by fromdoon | Hacker News Reader

As someone already said, we should not worry about our planet, for it is going to be here, long long after we are finished. We should be worried about ourselves. We rely on our planet for our existence and the current state of our planet hangs on a fine balance of its constituent elements.

If we were to change the balance, the planet would not die, it would only enter into a new different state. But we would surely die or at least most of us would.

Some of us think that sooner or later, humans would be able to colonize other places in Universe and then our survival would not wholly rely on Earth. That is certainly possible. But how far into the future would that be possible and whether we would be able to survive another hundred years of drastic pollution of Earth is anyone's guess.

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"As someone already said, we should not worry about our planet, for it is going to be here, long long after we are finished. We should be worried about ourselves."

See, this is something I don't get about most people. Does nobody else feel sympathy for individual animals? We're inflicting immeasurable amounts of suffering and death and nothing will ever make that less of a tragedy.

That's a particular kind of scope insensitivity on your part, though: although we're inflicting suffering and death... so is the rest of nature, greater in most cases by enough signifiant figures that our effect gets lost in the noise. For every individual animal suffering at the hands of a human, millions die of starvation and disease in exactly their "adaptive habitat"--when they're not slowly chewed to death by predators, or hijacked by parasites to live horrible zombie lives.

Perhaps we like to imagine that animal populations are, on average, as healthy as we are when left to their own devices... but we have society, and medicine. Life as a wild animal sucks.

If you want to imagine a utopia, first imagine a world where both the lion and the gazelle somehow survive, without one dying to feed the other. This will probably take you a long time to picture, unless you've really given thought to problems like Friendly AI before.

Some good points, but let's look at the context: millions of fish and other sea animals die as bycatch every day. This is a huge amount of death and suffering that can be avoided and serves no purpose whatsoever.

Plus, we're humans, we have the power to manipulate and control (to a certain extent) nature, so saying "we're doing no worse than nature" is not good enough, IMHO. It's within our power to do less damage, and we should do what we can.

Doing "better" or "worse" than nature in human activities is a social more that sounds nice to humans, not a sound consequentialist policy for making animal lives better. Looking at the relative scale, you have to realize that cutting back on things humans do would have a lot less of an impact on a "global species-neutral utilitarian metaethics" than changing the things animals themselves do to one-another.

Here's an analogous situation: residential garbage accounts for about 1% of total garbage. The real way to "reduce, reuse, recycle" is to lobby industry to do those things. But instead, we see constant attempts to get people to put things in blue bins instead of green bins. Why? Because residential recycling is a mechanism for signalling pro-social values, and people can do it conspicuously to prove they're "better than you." So it gets emphasized, and the real problem--industrial waste--gets de-emphasized.

I think my point has gotten lost somewhere. My point is that we can and therefore should do less damage, not for the sake of the human race's karma or to "fix the planet", but for the sake of individual animals. Not because it's right in the philosophical sense, but because thinking about animals not suffering makes me happy.

Sorry if I am misunderstanding you, but all your replies seem to be about the big picture, while that is exactly what I was saying I "don't get about most people".

> Not because it's right in the philosophical sense, but because thinking about animals not suffering makes me happy.

Right, and that's exactly what I'm responding to: "following your happiness" in helping animals is, on the whole, actually pretty shitty for the average, randomly-selected animal (where any randomly-selected animal will tend to live in the wild, not near any humans) compared to other things you could do, like introducing invasive plants with known anti-parasitic properties to foraging ranges.

If you actually care about animals suffering less, rather than the fuzzy feeling you get by seeing an animal near you suffering less, then you should do things that maximize global animal welfare, not urban animal welfare.

Read http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa....

I have no idea why you think I'm talking about animal welfare.

Let me rephrase my original post: People often say "the planet will recover once we're gone", which to me sounds like something intended to make us feel better about the direction the world is heading in because the human race can't "truly destroy the planet". I disagree because in the process we'll be destroying billions of individual animals, which I think will be a tragedy in itself.

This is all I've been talking about since the beginning.

"like introducing invasive plants with known anti-parasitic properties to foraging ranges"

Completely off-topic now, but what about suffering of parasites themselves in presence of those plants? Why do people care about cute animals and not about and often at the expense of less cute ones? (that's a rhetorical question, because they are cute duh)

We can't make things better for some living organisms without destroying others. Since there is no objective way to weight outcome of an intervention, we can't "maximize global animal welfare". Most of the time it will benefit one fluffy thing at the expense of another, usually less fluffy.

Undoing results of our own actions is a defensible thing though. As is maximizing some kind of utility to us, for example working to increase or maintain biodiversity to avoid being next extinct species on the list. But biodiversity just means shitty life for more kinds of animals as far as maximizing animal welfare goes.

Not that I am an animal whisperer but I think most animals would prefer to be in the wild for 5-6 years and then die a gruesome death compared to being locked in a tiny, literally shitty, cell as part of a CFO for 1-2 years and then dying a slightly less gruesome death.

Sure, but again, that's a failure to do the math. Humans put one animal in a cage; nature infects ten-thousand with worms and rips off the limbs of ten-thousand more. Our impact, however horrible per-animal, is lost in the noise when multiplied by the number of animals affected.

I'm not sure that affects the morality of it though.

He's not disagreeing with that statement!

A lion doesn't know any better than to eat a gazelle.

You do.

What possible difference does that make to the gazelle?

Every difference, if you choose not to eat it.

Depends on our choice then, doesn't it?

What is "knowing better"? How can there be any intrinsic moral compunction to eat or to not eat the gazelle?

While I do indeed feel sympathy, mother nature does not. The animal kingdom is brutal at best. To think we are the only ones inflicting suffering and death is kind of ignoring the larger picture. Nature itself inflicts immeasurable amounts of suffering and death.

Our capacity for empathy is one of the things that supposedly separates us from those we dominate over. I think there's some worth in cultivating the thing that makes us different, and it shouldn't necessarily stop at human-human interaction.

In some ways, empathy's extension to non-humans is the only social tool we have to start caring and prioritizing the maintenance of the living systems around us. Because it's sure as heck not going to be a pragmatic decision like "we need to keep these animals/plants around because they keep us alive" :) People don't respond to that shit.

imho we must create a societal narrative that /cares/ about other living things, or else we're honestly kinda fucked. If nothing else, think of cultivating our ability to empathize with animals as socially hacking our own brains so as not to succumb to the the J-curve crash that is expected of every other species on our trajectory.

Nature itself inflicts immeasurable amounts of suffering and death.

There's a view that says that there's a balance and grand scheme in nature -- the Gaia hypothesis. I don't subscribe to this, and have been seeing a few fairly persuasive arguments that it's fairly wishful thinking.

Which isn't to say that the biosphere won't exact its own vengeance on humans if we continue down our present path.

What distinguishes humans from other life forms, that we're aware of, is, well, that we're aware. We can form models of understanding about the world and Universe we inhabit, and we've done a fairly impressive job of this over the past 300 years or so: Newton, Darwin, Mengel, Einstein, et al.

And one of the things we've been aware of ... for a fairly long time ... is that the very things which have given us an advanced industrial civilization cannot continue unabated forever. William Stanley Jevons wrote of this in The Coal Question in 1865, and referenced works back to 1789 (John Williams, "The Limited Quantity of Coal in Britain"). The alarm's been pulled repeatedly since (CO2 induced global warming: 1932, peak oil: 1945, 1956, 1972, 1998, ..., pollution and environmental impacts: 1962, 1972, ..., population: 1798, 1972, ...).

While moral arguments do get invoked quite a bit, I prefer a more empirical basis for argument. Joshua Greene (http://www.merrimack.edu/live/news/1124-joshua-greene-phd-re...) has some very interesting things to say on moral decisionmaking with which I find myself in generally strong agreement.

Life exists to find and exploit entropic gradients in stocks and flows. Humans have done a bang-up job of finding and exploiting one particularly copious class of stocks (fossil fuels). The end of that stock is well within sight, and with our job done, we may well find ourselves unemployed, biologically speaking.

I'd prefer to avoid that unemployment if possible. And I think that's the question at hand.

In the words of the immortal George Carlin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

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