The truth is that the "best ones" are often obsessed with their work and endure painful tradeoffs in their lives, for example their family lives, because of it.
People who do great work tend to think about their work all the time. No one thinks about their fourth priority all the time.
The argument isn't primarily a quantitative one. It's asking what it says about the so-called life sciences that they are based on torturing living beings.
>It's asking what it says about the so-called life sciences that they are based on torturing living beings.
I think it says more about the observer than life sciences.
Morality in the real world is complex and most of the heuristics we use in our daily lives rapidly break down when examining most anything in detail.
While life sciences have a tremendous potential to help humans and the world at large, but there are also hidden costs that laypeople may not be aware of.
> Who are we as humans to decide what that means for them?
Is that a joke? Rats, cockroaches, and mosquitoes are all life forms. Poison ivy is a life form. Guinea worms are life forms.
We as intelligent beings get to decide what it all means. We can crush them, we can use them to our advancement, or we can set them up as gods and worship them.
But none of those things are beings. It's our language, and we , not mice, get to decide what the word "being" means.
It's not a joke. It's a frank question. We might decide what the word "being" means to us, but that doesn't change the reality of what the word is pointing to.
Nope. That's not how it's defined. A guinea worm is also a living creature, as is a mosquito, but they aren't beings. Beings is used to refer to intelligent life.
The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic… asshole. -- George Carlin
The reason it can recover is the biodiversity, according to an ecology book I read once. As we reduce our biodiversity, the recovery is slightly less certain in an extreme case. Our attempts at biodomes show (at least as of 15 years ago when I read about it) that we don’t actually understand what the minimum mix of species needed for sustainability is
That's kinda the joke. The whole point of humanity is to create plastic, be baked to death in our own waste, and leave behind a wasteland populated by single celled organisms, some insects, and plastic. Carlin's jokes are way too close to the truth and freaking DARK.
People who do great work tend to think about their work all the time. No one thinks about their fourth priority all the time.