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by Jach
5946 days ago
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I think your assumption, that valuing human life more than trees instantly implies we should kill trees without end, is wrong. I have to throw my name in the hat for those who value a single human over 150,000 trees. That's saying that, were I forced to make a choice between shooting a human and cutting down 150,000 trees, I'd chop the trees. Outside of that choice I don't think we should be killing humans, and the trees we chop should really only be for useful purposes. (i.e. not random chopping just because you can do it.) I'm for environmental protection stuff like mandating tree farms or replanting or (if we get far long in nanotech) simply 'creating' wood from dirt. Of course you can muck up my values by throwing in effects, like if I cut down 150,000 trees then 30 humans die somehow, in which case I have to change my position and select the single human. (And you can further muck up values if that human is somehow more significant than the 30 others combined.) But in isolation, human > trees. |
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Could you elaborate on that because it sounds like you're contradicting yourself :-) Unless you're making the point that 150,000 != 'without end', in which case I would venture that 150,000 was originally just chosen as an arbitrary large number, and the two are therefore effectively equivalent in the context of this discussion.
And yes, when posed in the abstract, chopping the trees versus shooting the human is a different question as when posed in the real world - as I said previously, the balance of the Earth's macroscopic ecosystem is fiendishly complex and not well understood, so destroying the trees may indeed wreak all manner of havoc and result in the loss of other lives elsewhere, and/or at a later time.
That's not to say that I advocate shooting people either - I believe we must find ways to coexist with our surroundings.