It is not a question of should we intervene or not, we already do - the idea of compassionate ecosystems is to focus on what ethical principles should govern our interventions (our stewardship of nature). Should we aim for a traditional account of conservation biology in which the well being of individual organisms was not taken into account at all or should we aim for a compassionate biology.
--Countering Status-quo bias -- how would we react if we were to stumble across an alien civilization, who's members had phased out the biology of suffering, who enjoyed lives animated by gradients of bliss, and in their wildlife parks there was no longer predation, disease, parasitism, all the cruelties of nature as we experience them today.
What arguments, if any, would we use to try and persuade them to re-introduce suffering, aging, disease, parasitism, all the nastiness of life?
I suspect they [the aliens] would regard us not just as mistaken, but frankly they would regard us as almost psychotic, and I think they would be right to do so. Given that biotechnology does allow us in principle at least to re-engineer ourselves, to edit our own genetic source code and to re-engineer the rest of the living world and design compassionate ecosystems, I think ethically it is the appropriate thing to do. Now I personally am an ethical ethical utilitarian - but the Abolitionist Project is not critically dependant on your being any kind of utilitarian, whether it be a preference/hedonistic/negative utilitarian - you can be a deontologist, a virtue theorist, even a christian, certainly a buddhist - all that is neccessary is that you accept this basic principle that any sentient being should not be forced to suffer against it's will. If you are prepared to allow this quite basic ethical principle, then a lot of the Aboitionist Project follows quite naturally: [ Ссылка ]
---
Speciesism -- When is it ethically acceptable to harm another sentient being? On some fairly modest assumptions, to harm or kill someone simply on the grounds they belong to a different gender, sexual orientation or ethnic group is unjustified. Such distinctions are real but ethically irrelevant. On the other hand, species membership is normally reckoned an ethically relevant criterion. Fundamental to our conceptual scheme is the pre-Darwinian distinction between "humans" and "animals". In law, nonhuman animals share with inanimate objects the status of property. As property, nonhuman animals can be bought, sold, killed or otherwise harmed as humans see fit. In consequence, humans treat nonhuman animals in ways that would earn a life-time prison sentence without parole if our victims were human. From an evolutionary perspective, this contrast in status isn't surprising. In our ancestral environment of adaptation, the capacity to hunt, kill and exploit sentient beings of other species was fitness-enhancing. Our moral intuitions have been shaped accordingly. Yet can we ethically justify such behaviour today?
Naively, one reason for disregarding the interests of nonhumans is the dimmer-switch model of consciousness. Humans matter more than nonhuman animals because (most) humans are more intelligent. Intuitively, more intelligent beings are more conscious than less intelligent beings; consciousness is the touchstone of moral status.
The problem with the dimmer-switch model is that it's empirically unsupported among vertebrates with central nervous systems, and probably in cephalopods such as the octopus as well. Microelectrode studies of the brains of awake human subjects suggest that the most intense forms of experience, for example agony, terror and orgasmic bliss, are mediated by the limbic system, not the prefrontal cortex. Our core emotions are evolutionarily ancient and strongly conserved. Humans share the anatomical and molecular substrates of our core emotions with the nonhuman animals whom we factory-farm and kill. By contrast, distinctively human cognitive capacities such as generative syntax, or the ability to do higher mathematics, are either phenomenologically subtle or impenetrable to introspection. To be sure, genetic and epigenetic differences exist between, say, a pig and a human being that explain our adult behavioural differences, e.g. the allele of the FOXP2 gene implicated in the human capacity for recursive syntax. Such mutations have little to do with raw sentience.
[ Ссылка ]
Subscribe to this Channel: [ Ссылка ]
Science, Technology & the Future: [ Ссылка ]
Humanity+: [ Ссылка ]
