Another example how human civilization, in its present form, is generally incompatible with Earth's flora and fauna. Obviously, going back to stone-age is not a solution for us. But we certainly need to update/devise methods that do not harm anyone living creatures (or at least the sentient ones). Poor monkey had no idea what he got into and suffered a brutal death.
> we certainly need to update/devise methods that do not harm anyone living creatures (or at least the sentient ones)
Nature is brutal. I distinctly remember a hike where I stumbled on a mother bear (RIP) tearing apart a still-alive baby elk for her cubs. Human civilisation has done a lot of damage. But we might also be able to spare a lot of sentient suffering, bringing care to the biosphere and taking station as nature’s ethical guardians. Food for thought if you find yourself going full misanthrope.
Humans are far and away the most cruel species that has ever walked the face of the earth. No other species has the capacity to invent torture, using our analytical abilities to keep the victim alive indefinitely while inflicting the most vicious agonies possible (e.g. torturing the child in front of the parent).
Bears with baby elks, cats with their prey, orcas playing catch with baby seals... none of them come close to what humans are capable of when they put their reasoning to work in service of inflicting agony.
Have you ever visited a museum exhibit on torture? The engineering creativity that has gone into exploiting physiology and psychology to cause unendurable, unimaginable pain is astonishing. You'll want to look away. You'll want to forget, to believe once again that cats are worse... but cats are to a first order approximation indifferent to suffering, in contrast to humans hellbent on maximizing it.
JumpCrisscross is taking a techno-optimist's perspective, but while I personally believe that humans should voluntarily seek to serve as "ethical guardians" and to minimize "sentient suffering", I don't trust them to do it. Not as individuals, since empathy is a weak force compared with first-person pain. Not as cogs within societies where inflicting pain is often a means to gaining and maintaining power.
I'm primarily responding with skepticism to JumpCriscross about humans minimizing "sentient suffering" — which would be measured by the aggregate of total suffering inflicted by all members of a species.
The extremes contribute the most in the ledger of agonies, but I don't think they are the most relevant — rather I fault human nature for tending to produce extremes. Is it Vladimir Putin who is personally responsible for all the suffering inflicted by the Russian state, or can we say that the environment from which Putin emerged played a role?
Thanks to their reasoning abilities, humans have enormous capability to inflict violence and suffering, which is not matched by a commensurate empathy which would dissuade violence.
I think there is a tremendous amount of empathy, if one isn't blinded to it. For every person that dies a violent death, there there are thousands engaging positively with friends, family, loved ones.
If you care about sums, you must also acknowledge positive within the Russian state as well? On a given day, it also has lovers meeting, mothers nursing children, friendships.
Surely, humanity doesn't have enough empathy to dissuade violence, but that is an argument about purity, not aggregates. The typical person spends an exceedingly small amount of time engaged in violence, and this is a testament to both our empathy, intelligence, and the social systems we have built.
All those Ukrainians basking in that tremendous Russian empathy…
It only takes a moment for you or your loved ones to receive death or grievous injury, but not to worry because they’re “spending an exceedingly small amount of time engaged in violence”. Rape might be over in minutes! And besides, it only affects… how much of the population?
Those who are most confident about human righteousness are the least qualified to minimize “sentient suffering”. It is often said that one’s foes “only understand violence”, and the essential truth in that assertion is that indirect empathy is utterly insufficient compared with direct, personal pain as a motivator for changing behavior.
This is clearly a disagreement about weights. You don't seem to weigh empathy and joy very highly in comparison to violence. How much kind empathetic deeds do you think it takes to outweigh 10 minutes of violent murder? A hug? A romance? A lifetime of Love? One hundred lifetimes of kindness?
Sometimes it helps to make the context personal? How much violence would you endure for a year of kindness and love?
If Russians were sufficiently empathetic towards the suffering of Ukrainians, if they truly felt the pain of Ukrainians as keenly as if they had experienced it themselves, they wouldn't freaking invade. But since empathy is a weak force and it's human nature to not feel much about the suffering of outsiders, Russians are not dissuaded from their war of conquest.
With regards to the weight of violence: Have you considered that "10 minutes of violent murder" may mean only 10 minutes of acute agony for the deceased but years of suffering for the deceased's surviving loved ones?
The only possible answer to your thought experiment is "I don't need s1artibartfast sitting in judgment about whether my life is appropriately balanced between violence and happiness".
That is falling back to the purity tests and cynicism.
To be clear, I'm not judging your life, but challenging your claim about the forces driving human behavior, and the aggregate vale of the species.
I disagree with the idea that just because empathy doesn't prevent all violence, it is weak, or less meaningful. A bird can fly, but that doesn't mean gravity is weak.
Violence is real, and important to understand, but Empathy and good intentions are real too, and a huge part of human psychology. I would argue they are a greater driver of the two.
Yes, human "good intentions" are very, very real and a great driver of history. It is human nature to believe fervently that your own actions are just and right — to which cynicism, or at least skepticism, is the proper response.
I imagine, for example, that government officials involved in managing California water rights[1], have "good intentions" — just as good as the intentions of those in this thread offering monstrous philosophical propositions about bartering violence that trivialize its enduring damage, or the intentions of those who contemplate becoming "nature's ethical guardians" and reducing "sentient suffering".
To the extent that human social systems have evolved to reduce "sentient suffering", it has been by applying forcible restraints on such individuals, confronting them with how the consequences of their actions affect others, even when the natural human inclination is to downplay and dismiss suffering when it clashes with self-interest or "good intentions".
I already brought up orcas and baby seals in a sibling comment[1], forty minutes before your response appeared. Have you grappled with my reasoning there?
