Survival of the fittest would dictate that the answer be yes.
Religions portray to all who listen that we are supposed to be the caretakers of this planet, to protect all creations of God or whoever you choose or don’t choose to believe in, if you believe in anything. They preach that we were created in the image of a deity, and are inherently superior to all others. Supposition and shameful, baseless rationalization, without any reason beyond “God says I’m special,” is going to get us nowhere we should morally be.
Mankind has the ability to reason, and our reasoning has led us to believe, not due to any apparent evidence, but due to a lack thereof, that we are the only species on our planet and, less assuredly, the universe, that possess this ability. We commit unflinching xenocide on a regular basis (the saying “squashed like a bug” could only exist in a world where this is true). Any species that doesn’t think in a way we can easily understand is inherently inferior to us, and therefore not worthy of our respect, or any semblance of equality.
I submit that mankind is in fact a hypocritical, pompous plague of fleshy locusts that deserves no less than what would happen to the termites under a house. They destroy our homes and we destroy them. We threaten the lives of every species by fulfilling our greed, destroying the homes of countless species simply so we can have a more comfortable place to live… there is no dire threat to us as a species, and minimal opposition. Do we deserve to thrive simply because there are no known entities capable of challenging our reign? If our progress were slower, our advancement toward the stars less rapid, perhaps evolution would have a chance to catch up before we fuck over every possibly life-sustaining planet we come across.
Exdividual, what is the moral principle with which you damn mankind and find it guilty and deserving of destruction? You have made it clear that you do not favor a religious moral stance, so which moral stance are you coming from? What is your core value/meaning, on the basis of which you conclude that mankind is so woefully lacking and insufficient?
“Deserve” in the sense of what is, ultimately, right and wrong. Does our ability to reason give us the right to trample everything in our path on our quest to increase our numbers? Simply because a creature doesn’t match our definition of sentience doesn’t mean that it isn’t capable of reasoning. We just don’t understand. The ability to think and rationalize should supercede our instincts, and in the case of most, it does. However, the drive to constantly reproduce, the need to make room for our expansion, these are treated in a manner contradictory to the way we treat the rest of our baser instincts.
We destroy millions of other species’ homes every year, so we can write down our frivolous thoughts on paper. What happens if we, out in the universe, meet another species so different from our own that it seems to us to be non-sentient? What makes us think we are mentally equipped to even make that determination? Perhaps the species simply communicates in a way we can’t understand, or doesn’t need to communicate.
Do we deserve to be judge, jury and executioner without due process for any but ourselves? Our non-understanding of sentience is reminiscent of “guilty until proven innocent”. And in my opinion THAT makes us wrong.
As far as the latter, I certainly wasn’t underestimating the rate of our advancement. As far as the size of the universe, does blowing up half of a school full of children make it any less wrong than destroying the whole thing?
I have no core values, I look at things in terms of absolutes. I am taking my “moral” stance based on that of the majority of humanity, and calling us all hypocrites. Since I lack any social tact whatsoever, I’ll apologize in case I offended you. I include myself as part of humanity, and I’m not assuming I’m better. I’m simply posing a question, giving my perception of the situation, and asking for arguments for or against to satisfy my curiosity about the human animal. Whether anyone agrees or not is unimportant to me.
Essentially, it’s not a matter of choice to be here. To not be here is, however, a choice. If we deserve our place? That’s a highly subjective question and can only be relevant to very specific cases. I don’t think there can be an appropriate, general, valid answer to this.
Ah, so your critique of man is based on the idea that man contradicts his own stated values, and is thus a hypocrite – so “not being a hypocrite” would then count as your basic value here?
What if I were to say that, in the context of the vastness and depth of human history and the highly complex and evolutionary nature of human social systems, not to mention the deep-seated psychological mechanisms that drive man to deceive himself as a survival defense mechanism (so as to guard against fear, anxiety, guilt, doubt, depression, apathy, what have you – to keep him invested in life, in his own being alive in a world that he has at least the sufficient capacity to conceive and make sense of), being hypocritical (i.e. the asserting of values even when [and perhaps because] man is unable to act in accordance with those values) is not only a necessary and inevitable aspect of what it means to be a finite living being in a mostly unknown and ever-changing world, but is also in fact a useful and indeed beneficial aspect of human nature? That man wills or esteems that which he otherwise has the incapacity to realize or carry out rather allows him to keep these notions alive in the realm of human ideas, of myth and meaning – that the inadequacy, the insufficient strength of mankind is given breathing room to grow, to evolve? That a forward-looking space is created in which new ideas and values form and actualize on the horizon of human potential, not subject to the stark confines of the reality of the present human moment and condition? How might you respond?
Some might say our ability to reason is what created right and wrong in the first place. But presumably you’re a moral objectivist?
I would think that anything that can reason would be classified as sentient. Or at least, anything that shows any signs of reasoning. Otherwise you’re going to have to worry about leaves and stones and clouds and all sorts of things, aren’t you?
And clouds?
Since we invented the roles, why not? Are you hypothesising some higher order that we can be judged by?
Well, it probably does, doesn’t it? Blowing up two schools would presumably be wronger than blowing up one.
But if you’re talking representative orders of magnitude, scratching the paint with your fingernail might be considered a lot less wrong than either.
Clearly you have core values; your language is heavily value-laden. Here are some examples:
Finding out the core values that underlie your assumptions is always a step in the direction of self-knowledge.
All excellent points, and I have to say I agree with you all now that I have gotten your perspectives. As I found out in another thread, I’m a psycho/sociopath, so I attempt to form a hodgepodge of values to live by through logical evaluation of other peoples beliefs. Please don’t make any attempts to derive any meaning from my words other than their definitions, as you will only be misleading yourself (not that anyone is, I’m just pointing out… damn I’m terrible with figuring out what people are trying to say, knowing that most people usually intend to say something other than the sum of their words.)
I suppose it’s just my limited understanding of my own species that has led me to think what I think, and now I’m not really sure what to think. Very confusing.
