Someone had posed a question once if another would take $100.00 to step on a cochroach. That person answered “Yes!” The questioning continued assuming ‘yes’ would be the next reply. They were asked if they would pull the wings off a butterfly for the same amount. The answer was a resounding “NO!”
Why is beauty so important?
My response to this question is this:
Beauty, however we perceive it, in my opinion is a gift from God. I believe what the questioning is alluding to is if you would do this one thing for gain, would you desensitize yourself more in an exponential sense. When our values diminish over time, things get a little more easy in successive order. The Buddhists revere all life and hold it sacred. Christians should too in my estimation. The cochroach, however we may revile it’s nature, is a survivalist. Yes it is even one of God’s creatures. Though God may have given man dominion over the animals on the earth, we should still respect their existence and consider ways to let them add their specific role to this planet, so that they might coexist in the manner in which God had intended. Beauty can be found in all things if we allow it to show itself.
This is true realunoriginal. I have seen films of people who eat something I would just as soon spray with an insecticide. Not due to the fact that they appear repulsive to me, but for the fact that they inadvertantly leave harmful bacteria that could potentially make me ill. I’m sure the cochroach has some level of impact on our environment. If for some benign reason they disappeared, how would this affect our ecological base?
There may be a good practical reason to kill cockroach, but it is harder to find a good reason to kill a butterfly. And, we can find beauty or ugliness in anything. The moral or ethical problem is in the enjoyment of the killing and the habituation to it. Also our tendency to turn every specific circumstance into a universal means that our actions are often completely inappropriate to the actual situation.
For example last year when I painted my house I painted to within a few feet of a bees’ nest. After the first night of deep frost naturally killed the bees I knocked the nest of the house and painted the rest (the minimum temperature for the paint was 35F or 40F I think). It is obvious that we need bees and butterflies as pollinators. It is less obvious whether cockroaches are in some sort of beneficial relationship to humans but our knowledge is quite limited. Ultimately I’m not sure if it matters.
I had the same situation with a wasp’s nest the other day. I wanted to hang a house number sign I had made for my wife, but near the palce the wasps were swarming, I didn’t want to risk getting stung. That evening I had heard the weather was going to be cold in the next couple of days so I bided my time. The morning it turned cold, I found a short pole and pushed the nest off of the framework and swept the wasps off of the porch. I’m not the type of person who will kill a creature if another avenue presents itself.
The cochroaches must have some type of symbiotic part in nature. I may look on the net to see what that could be. Thanks anon for your reply.
I just realized I didn’t directly address the question of the value of beauty. In the context of my previous post one value of beauty is to remind us of virtue. It could be said that we don’t necessarily kill the cockroach because we transfer our feelings regarding butterflies. So we start with the subjective (“I wouldn’t kill a butterfly”) and then extend that intuition based on our logical (and not necessarily intellectual) deconstruction of or extension of the subjective concept of beauty. Aesthetics affects us as ethically minded creatures and vice versa. In a world of only heterosexual men, if such a thing were possible, we might have been much more likely to have all killed each other by now.