Why not? If the goals of something like “universal healthcare for pets” are worthwhile and justifiably extended to all life, then why wouldn’t those goals justify disruptive influence? Why would there be any line at which they aren’t worth it? And if there is some competing moral imperative that justifies the existence of a line, then why wouldn’t it be further in the other direction?
I feel like people have a skewed perspective on this stuff due to living in controlled environments where they are largely isolated from the sheer scale, brutality, and hopelessness of it all. The animals they see on a daily basis are pets, their lives depend on them, and to an extent they are empowered to help those particular individual animals, the only ones they are really very aware of, with some of their problems (while seeing never and not at all the animals used for meat to feed them). But that’s artificial. If you live closer to nature, maybe you’ll see a little more; the carcass of a rabbit, covered in ticks. Territorial robins, killing the chicks you’ve been watching another robin raise. You’d go insane letting yourself feel full empathy for all of them, just the ones you can see, but then there’s billions more you can’t, none of them cared for, all living in some relative state of desperation. And in reality you can’t do anything for them, you can try, but it’s basically spitting into the ocean. Save one injured animal (mostly an impossible task, but maybe you could succeed sometimes with effort), that will distort the ecosystem very slightly, but the system will self adjust to undo your influence over time, at least in terms of the quantity of death and suffering, if not which species are more prevalent.
Ultimately I think there is a choice to make. Accept this state of affairs and your place in it, or aspire to overthrow and remake it, but you can’t really have both.
No, but an advanced civilization wouldnt add to it thats for sure.
Why not? If the goals of something like “universal healthcare for pets” are worthwhile and justifiably extended to all life, then why wouldn’t those goals justify disruptive influence? Why would there be any line at which they aren’t worth it? And if there is some competing moral imperative that justifies the existence of a line, then why wouldn’t it be further in the other direction?
I feel like people have a skewed perspective on this stuff due to living in controlled environments where they are largely isolated from the sheer scale, brutality, and hopelessness of it all. The animals they see on a daily basis are pets, their lives depend on them, and to an extent they are empowered to help those particular individual animals, the only ones they are really very aware of, with some of their problems (while seeing never and not at all the animals used for meat to feed them). But that’s artificial. If you live closer to nature, maybe you’ll see a little more; the carcass of a rabbit, covered in ticks. Territorial robins, killing the chicks you’ve been watching another robin raise. You’d go insane letting yourself feel full empathy for all of them, just the ones you can see, but then there’s billions more you can’t, none of them cared for, all living in some relative state of desperation. And in reality you can’t do anything for them, you can try, but it’s basically spitting into the ocean. Save one injured animal (mostly an impossible task, but maybe you could succeed sometimes with effort), that will distort the ecosystem very slightly, but the system will self adjust to undo your influence over time, at least in terms of the quantity of death and suffering, if not which species are more prevalent.
Ultimately I think there is a choice to make. Accept this state of affairs and your place in it, or aspire to overthrow and remake it, but you can’t really have both.