| > I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass. Such thought experiments are fun to throw around (there must be a line somewhere, right? is all the grass in the world worth one human life? how about all the trees? all the rice?), but they sidestep the point which is that (without wishing to be harsh) it's arrogant of us to assume that being higher on one particular spectrum gives us some greater right to decide. Certainly we have the power to decide the fate of every living thing on the planet but that's a different matter. > The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe. This presupposes that progress towards sentience (or whatever is the right word for that spectrum) is the only meaning of life. As a counterpoint, do not the activities of those organisms that produce oxygen have much more meaning to life on this planet than whatever we come up with? Most of those organisms don't do much higher reasoning but we wouldn't be here without them. There are lots of other examples like that, as we exist in a web with all life on the planet, not as visitors separate from it. > As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again. This is a point of difference between us, as I believe that all life has intrinsic beauty and value regardless of who is doing the observing. That's not to say that I don't want us to be here doing the observing, but I do find it almost impossible to reconcile the beautiful things humans are capable of with the terrible price we're collectively extracting on everything else. Ultimately we're just one more animal on this fascinating rock, albeit that we make better sandwiches than the other animals. |