Re: OT: Spiked Article/Atheists and EcoChristians

On Dec 31, 12:58�pm, Andrew Barss >
What I meant was this: �a group of people can act, jointly, and so
issues of morality come up in deciding whether such group actions
are good or not. �You're making a big leap in
attributing tribal guilt to my beliefs, and that's not justified by
anything I said.

I said guilt can only be individual. You said you disagreed.

In the example above--the one you gave--guilt is individual.
Each individual in the group is responsible for what he actually did--
the fact that they acted jointly does not make the guilt collective.

Collective guilt is when we assign guilt to individuals because
of their membership in the group--for instance, arguments that
affirmative action is justified even if the person hurt by it has
never committed an act of racism in his life, because he "benefits
from white skin privelege" or some other badge of his belonging to a
group.


�>
So, one person burning a patch of rainforest to build a farm helps him and his family,
doesn't harm much of the total forest, net gain. �A few million people burn small patches
of forest, suddenly there's a big problems.

I guess my main idea, not stated explicitly, was that oftentimes
innocuousness does not scale up.

I think that's a fairly common problem, and doesn't require
draconian top-down intrusions to solve.

Sometimes, to preserve individual autonomy, we have to make
adjustments.


But ... we are also responsible, in a sociey, for trying to make sure others
act responsibly. � Part of that is punishment for transgressions; but a part is also just
education and inspiration.

Well, I certainly think--from my Old Nontheistic Humanist
standpoint here--that you have a responsibility to advocate for your
point of view, especially in matters you consider important.

I also think, however, that your ability to legislate it should
be strictly limited.


: � � � �The �West's most spectucular superiority as a culture inheres
: precisely in its attempts to insist that you are Andrew, not An
: Atheist, An American, �A White Person, etc, but an individual, with
: individual rights, individual responsibilities and ONLY individual
: guilt.

This is pretty far off what I was talking about.

:> : ??? ??? ???A philosophical position that sees man as the highest form of
:> : life--higher as a matter of KIND, and not just of degree--sees
:> : "ecology" as doing that which benefits human beings.

What you're missing is that determining "what benefits human beings"
is a complicated and difficult endeavor, and that short-term benefits
often amount to long-term detriments.

But I'm not missing that at all.

I'm simply saying that "saving the planet" at the expense of
human life and comfort is unacceptable--we owe more to human beings
than we owe to sheep, or African elephants, and if their interests
collide, we should opt to benefit human beings.

The fact that that's sometimes a complicated matter doesn't
change the basic principle.


: � � But there's something wrong in perceiving the human being as
: ESSENTIALLY something that makes messes--as if his only significance
: in the scale of things is the messes he makes, and not the art and
: science, etc.

I think you (and possibly the author of the opinion piece) are the only ones who see things
this way.

Uh, no. Trust me. We're not.


� I certainly don't. �But I do realize that along with the creativity
and
brilliance of the human mind comes an unequaled capacity to change the environment around us. �

Absolutely.

And that such changes can, and often are, dramatic and difficult to reverse.

Yep.

�>
So, let me lay out three explicit ideas which I think you and I differ on:

a) large-scale, irreversable changes in the environment need to be considered and evaluated

By whom? On the basis of what principles?

not only on the basis of how the affect humans, but how they affect other living things in
them �and sometimes short-term human benefit should yield to the latter considerations.

Human benefit should NEVER yield to that of "other species and
living things." The "short term" thing is a red herring--short term
human gain is certainly legitimately forgone for long term human gain,
but it's never legitimate to benefit "other living things" at the
expense of the welfare of human beings.


b) �As a companion to the magnificent gifts humans have comes the ability to do such
large-scale, irreversible changes to the environment. � Couple that with individual greed, and
you get people acting in a way that maximizes short-term gain for them, without regard to

(i) long-term effects on other people, (ii) short- and long-term effects on other living
things in e.g. forests that are cut down and waterays that are polluted.

Sure. People sometimes act like idiots. So what?


c) Morality -- considerations of right and wrong -- extend to the domain of how we treat
other living things,

I agree.


and we do not have an absolute right to do whatever we want
to non-humans just because we feel like it.

I also agree.

�And by non-humans, I mean: other animals, plants,
and ecosystems. �We have a moral obligation to act not just in our own human interests, but in
the interests of e.g., minimizing pain in things we kill to eat, not disturbing other sentient
animals if we can avoid doing so (while not putting our own intrests aside),

Sure.

etc.


:> : as if our principle job is to make as little impact on the rest of the
:> : earth as we can--denies the central Humanist (both kinds) insight that
:> : human beings are the meaning and purpose of life on earth.

I'm getting a little lost in the language here--but I DON 'T
think our principle job should be to make as little impact on the rest
of the earth as we can.

In fact, I think we should maximize the impact we make on the
earth.


I continue to find you expressing the second half of this sentence very striking.
How can we as a species be the purpose of anything? �Actions have purposes.
And artifacts (things humans make) have purposes -- the purpose of a hammer is to hit nails.
But independently-evolved (as opposed to bred) species do not have purposes.

Of course they can have purposes--but that's not what I said. I
said the human life gives meaning and purpose to the world.

Which is not quite the same thing.

Hell, even Marx got that one--for him, meaning and purpose was
progress towards the just society. It was that for Adam Smith, too.


And thank you. �I thought that the Genesis conception of earth and all its things as being the
possession and dominion of humans was restricted to conservative and fundamental religion.I am
now enlightened on that matter.

Well, don't get enlightened by me--read Karl Marx, Adam Smith,
John Stuart Mill, NONE of them particularly religious people. Read
Kant, for that matter.

The idea didn't originate in Genesis, and was pretty much
accepted without question throughout Western society until very
recently And I mean VERY recently.

Here's a question for you, specifically. �Earlier in your post (and elsewhere)
you have claimed an inherent rightness in recognition of individual
rights and responsibilities, and criticized the whole concept of group membership as
conferring anything (identity, rights, responsibilities, faults). �But here you are, doing
exactly the latter: �you're saying every human is suprior to every non-human bcaue it belongs
to a GROUP, a group some of whose individual members have written symphonies, cured siseases,
and so forth. �How is that?

They're not the same things.

What I objected to was collective GUILT--that is, imputing moral
turpitude to a person because of his membership in a group.

Collective guilt is a negation of the very idea of morality,
which is founded on our responsibility for our actions.

But all members of a biological species are a particular KIND of
thing, and the particular kind of thing they are has parameters of
physical, mental, etc, development that are inherent in its very
genetic code.

All human beings are a kind of thing--human--that is different
from other kinds of things (dogs). No one human being can write the
Emperor's Concerto, paint the Guernica, discover DNA and develop a
vaccine for AIDS, but ONLY human beings can do that.

Which means that the status of the species is inherently superior
to that of species which, no matter how exemplary a particular
specimen can be, can never even attempt that sort of thing.

The fact that a particular individual belongs to the category
'human' gives him a claim on us--to be treated as an end in himself
and not a means to our ends (to quote Kant, here, another not
particularly religious person who thought human beings gave meaning
and purpose to life on earth).


If you hew to the purely individualist stance, then the humans who have
made vaccines, painted like Michelangelo (not his greatest talent, by the way) are
better in kind than humans who don't have the abilities to do those things..

No. There's no difference in kind between Mozart and my student
last term who complained to me because she didn't understand an essay
I assigned because "World War I happened before I was ever born--why
should I care about it?"

The equipment to be Mozart is there, it's just not as well
developed as it is in Mozart. But the equipment to be Mozart is not
in my cat.

\>
What I disagree with you on is the idea that humans are the major purpose of
life on earth; and that we have no moral responsibility at all to anything that
isn't human.

But I never said that we have "no moral responsibility at all to
anything that isn't human."

I said that ou moral responsibility to nonhuman life is
DIFFERENT than our moral responsibility to fellow human beings.


: � � � Yes, the fact that we can do those things--that we are capable
: of them, and that not a single other form of anything, life or not, on
: earth is--means there is a difference in kind, not just in degree,
: between ourselves and other animals

The difference between "a difference in kind" and "a difference ... in degree"
is not nearly so clear as it used to be, back when we didn't know much about
cognition, genetics, and the connection between the two. �I can give details if one likes.

I've probably heard them. The simple fact is that a difference
in degree may be so vast as to become, de facto, a difference in kind.


, and it means that we give meaning
: and purpose to the planet by definition. �We're the only ones that
: can.

Gotta be very careful here -- your phrase "we give meaning and purpose to the plant" is
ambiguous (and your "by definition" is just wrong).

No, I don't think so.

Since we're the only anything, as far as we know, who can even
think in categories like "meaning and purpose," I'd guess that my "by
definition" is exactly right.


True: �we give meaning to the planet in that we think analytically and emotionally about it,
and about things like "wat is the purpose of lfe?". �Arguably no other animal does that,
although we can't be absolutely positive about some of the primates and some other mammals.

Okay. Send me the first book on epistemology by a Great Ape.


False: We give meaning to the planet by simply being here. �The planet would have no meaning
(to some external observer) if we weren't here.

Which one do you mean?

I mean both--but I'd take out the "to some external observer.'

The issue is moot--there is no such observer.

And if there was one, the meaning of life on earth would be vastly
different if we were NOT here.

The rest of your post got crimped. I'll have to go looking for
it.

Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
.

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