[jjoonathan]

That's the point: naturalism can justify anything, and that makes it a poor guiding principle. As do many other things.

There are many natural things that are good. Clean air, unique little ecosystems like GP describes, endless variety -- and we should strive to respect and preserve those, but not because they are natural. Poor animals teeming with parasites, population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?), predators feasting on the organs of their prey while the prey is still alive. All these things are natural but not good and we should not seek to replicate them.

[berdario]

> population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?)

Thinking about this, I just realized a simple thing: balance in animal population via starvation might not be as grim as we expect (i.e. it happens completely because the weakest/least fit individuals cannot compete for food and literally starve).

The sexual reproductive system is apparently one of the things that stops working earliest when you're affected by disease or malnutrition. This means that malnourished deers will just start having fewer/no babies while they're being famished.

Still grim, because lots of animals would starve, and still very uncomfortable for the deers which, even if they might survive to "old age", will fail to breed due to starvation... but still better than the alternative in which every baby deer gets born in the world as usual, only to then starve to death while they're still very young.

[TeMPOraL]

It's still very grim if you recognize that animals - particularly advanced animals like deer - feel and suffer. Also makes you wonder if the fragility of reproductive system wrt. malnutrition isn't an evolutionary adaptation that smooths out the population crash a little bit after hitting the carrying capacity of a niche.

(Also: many (most?) living things have things that eat them, which is another population maintenance mechanism, and no less grim.)

[nwienert]

Even more grim: a world where we lose touch with death and suffering and start treating them as grim and unnecessary.

[newen]

Humanity should strive for that world instead of accepting this world.

[nwienert]

Without it we’re not human, people raised without it would have a value system alien to you and likely disgust you.

We can certainly avoid the worst of it - but entirely is more dangerous than none.