I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game
Then you’re a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That’s 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.
From there you’re now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc…
Humans aren’t friendly little forest nymphs, we’re megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That’s a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.
That’s just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance.
Uh ooooooh… someone isn’t familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬
We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don’t even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.
Not everything is black and white. You are painting a picture where we have two options: (1) cause as much harm as we please and not worry about the consequences, or (2) cause no harm at all by eradicating our species from the face of the Earth (which would actually cause a lot of harm to members of our species but we’ll sidestep that for now).
But this is of course a false dichotomy. Because there are degrees to this. A vegan diet is undoubtably less harmful, both in its carbon footprint and in the direct harm in causes to other species. So if someone wants to reduce the amount of harm they are causing it’s the way to go. So why try to diminish that with this ridiculous dichotomy between death to all humans or unmitigated animal torture? If someone wants to decrease of amount of harm they are causing shouldn’t we be encouraging this sort of prosocial mindset?
I’m not the one making the dichotomy! I’m fully in favor of all harm reduction possible (including a vegan/utilitarian vegan diet) for the obvious benefit of our own species. The commenter above is positing that there is no ethical direct/indirect violence toward any animals. It’s impossible to hold that position while simultaneously pretending billions of people can exist.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. A simple rational examination of our limited resources is being discarded because “animals have human rights/you support slavery/you want animals to be raped”. No, I have a very obvious and consistent position:
Humans are a higher class of animal and being good stewards of our only planet is crucial for our own well being. We thrive with nature and unnatural violence (like industrial animal farming) is bad for our psyche anyway. That doesn’t mean animals can’t or won’t die to support our existence.
This stuff is so basic and fundamental; tradeoffs HAVE to be made. Pretending that the world can support life (let alone a good life) for billions of people without animal death/displacement/extinction is deranged. It’s on the commenter to pick up the shambles of that position and make anything that can fit in the real world.
You could argue that our way of life in wealthy countries is impossible without the exploitation of the third-world. Does that mean we are a higher class of humans? No.
Let’s just strive to be as harmless as possible and leave our grand philosophical ideas about who is better than who aside.
Dude, I never, ever wrote that there would be no competition for resources like land. That’s fucking obvious. That doesn’t make life a “zero sum game”, a zero sum game means that every gain is someone elses’ loss, and that at the end of the game there are no new resources created. That is strictly not true. We can take actions in life which benefit us without harming others.
In real life, humans have rights, but we also take a balanced view of rights when there are conflicts. For example, if we need to build some important infrastructure, that takes priority over the rights of whoever is living where that infrastructure needs to go. My argument is that the rights of animals not to be killed is more important than our desire to have a tasty meal. I’m not out here arguing we shouldn’t build wind turbines because of their negative impacts on wildlife, because I know the positive impacts on countering climate change is better overall.
You’re still in denial here. There can be symbiosis in nature where species can cohabitate to the benefit of both, but that’s just two different niches being filled. It’s a completely orthogonal topic to species competing for the same niche. It’s not about building windmills and good vibes; human beings have overstepped our natural boundaries with billions of people in places we have absolutely no evolutionary excuse to be.
We’ve done this strictly because we can; it’s the natural animal inclination to favor your own progeny and expand your access to resources. Our ability to adapt has broken the evolutionary game. We won. The mere existence of 8.3 billion humans causes an unfathomable amount of harm that can’t be fixed by skipping “tasty meals”. That’s the ethical equivalent of whitewashing guilt and ignoring the structural problem.
So asserting something like “all animals have equal rights” is asinine. They clearly don’t, and we can’t change that without abandoning the 99% of human souls who stress the system beyond its natural ethical bounds (within the expected balance of evolution).
The carrying capacity of Earth is 2-4 billion people, and that’s assuming an ultimate human primacy with no regard to other species (except in the amoral ways they could sustain human existence). A “harmless” existence is a fleeting fraction of that, the small niche filled as hunter-gatherer megafauna mammals. This is a hard physical fact no matter what universal rights we put on paper. The choice is quite literally billions of human lives against trillions of birds/insects/fish/critters/predators/prey in conflict with them. There’s no free lunch.
Wait, are you saying that earth is overpopulated, now? I didn’t realize I was in conversation with a nazi, but honestly, it explains a lot. Which ethnic group do you want to exterminate?
How’s the weather in your fantasy land? You winning your fight against that straw man? I didn’t say anything about over or under population, that’s a completely different philosophical discussion. That would be a debate over questions like:
What quality of life is acceptable?
Is putting a finite lifespan on civilization acceptable? If so, how long?
Is it ethical to depopulate? By what methods?
Would it be ethical to conserve resources to sustain civilization in perpetuity by euthanizing the infirm?
What about a hard limit on personal consumption a laLogan’s Run ?
You are constricting your ethical ideal to automatically answer some of those questions. Here’s a rephrasing of our conversation:
Fact 1: Humanity is confined to earth with a finite supply of completely non renewable resources [I’d encourage you to look into the impossibility of inter-planetary human civilization, the gist being that humans evolved for the specifically for Earth and it’s ecology; we’ll never have the energy and raw materials to reproduce that]
Fact 2: There is a hard limit on Earth’s capacity to sustainably support life. This would be a carrying capacity in the low billions if all resources were dedicated to humans.
Fact 3: Earth has 8 billion humans and counting. This is sustained entirely by a limited reserve of biochemical energy stored over millions of years. [I can get into the technical details if you’d like but there is no escaping the physical laws of entropy + our energy usage. ie: solar panels can’t cover the resource cost of more solar panels.] Depending on your thoughts on population management, this is either fine and we’ll just burn through our civilization’s resources or our population will be reduced by some method in conjunction with resource management to extend the lifespan of human civilization
Fact 4: Humans evolved to fit a specific niche. This natural ecological role is as a primitive hunter gatherer, foraging in balance with other species. This minimal impact state has a far lower maximum sustainable population in the range of 10s of millions. Perhaps lower depending on how many modern life improvements you let expand the ecological footprint.
Your ethical axiom: All creatures have the exact same rights as humans
This axiom automatically answers many questions raised by the other facts.
If reproduction is a natural right in any capacity, humanity can’t ever ethically exceed earth’s carrying capacity. Until we reach a sustainable usage of our resources, humans must be equitably and fairly culled to preserve the rights of humans and other animals (because other animals don’t have the agency to cull themselves like humans)
Civilisation must be sustainable or the rights of our progeny will be infringed by our own consumption
The sustainable state must not infringe unnecessarily on the rights of other animals. This, defacto, limits us near our primal state described in Fact 4.
Ergo: Getting to that state requires a 99%+ reduction in the human population. That low level of human population without access to our resource intensive modern tools is basically a collapse of civilization.
You can whine and sarcastically deflect but that’s the conclusion of your statement on total, universal animal rights. It’s not an undefendable position, but you must understand you’re pushing for a heavily restrained form of Anarcho-primitivism. If the concept of near total human civilization collapse for the benefit of other animals makes you uncomfortable (as it does for me), you’d want to reconsider that view in some way:
All lifeforms have rights but our human existence requires us to value human rights above others
Species suicide is the only ethical option because humans are the only creature capable of making that choice
Any ethical framework for universal animal rights is unenforceable in reality even if correct. ie. The personal choice to harm another animal is unethical but the act itself is not. Indirect and accidental harm is more acceptable than direct harm
So I ask again, what’s your choice? There’s no free lunch.
Then you’re a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That’s 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.
From there you’re now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc…
Humans aren’t friendly little forest nymphs, we’re megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That’s a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.
That’s just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.
Uh ooooooh… someone isn’t familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬
We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don’t even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.
Not everything is black and white. You are painting a picture where we have two options: (1) cause as much harm as we please and not worry about the consequences, or (2) cause no harm at all by eradicating our species from the face of the Earth (which would actually cause a lot of harm to members of our species but we’ll sidestep that for now).
But this is of course a false dichotomy. Because there are degrees to this. A vegan diet is undoubtably less harmful, both in its carbon footprint and in the direct harm in causes to other species. So if someone wants to reduce the amount of harm they are causing it’s the way to go. So why try to diminish that with this ridiculous dichotomy between death to all humans or unmitigated animal torture? If someone wants to decrease of amount of harm they are causing shouldn’t we be encouraging this sort of prosocial mindset?
I’m not the one making the dichotomy! I’m fully in favor of all harm reduction possible (including a vegan/utilitarian vegan diet) for the obvious benefit of our own species. The commenter above is positing that there is no ethical direct/indirect violence toward any animals. It’s impossible to hold that position while simultaneously pretending billions of people can exist.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. A simple rational examination of our limited resources is being discarded because “animals have human rights/you support slavery/you want animals to be raped”. No, I have a very obvious and consistent position:
Humans are a higher class of animal and being good stewards of our only planet is crucial for our own well being. We thrive with nature and unnatural violence (like industrial animal farming) is bad for our psyche anyway. That doesn’t mean animals can’t or won’t die to support our existence.
This stuff is so basic and fundamental; tradeoffs HAVE to be made. Pretending that the world can support life (let alone a good life) for billions of people without animal death/displacement/extinction is deranged. It’s on the commenter to pick up the shambles of that position and make anything that can fit in the real world.
You could argue that our way of life in wealthy countries is impossible without the exploitation of the third-world. Does that mean we are a higher class of humans? No.
Let’s just strive to be as harmless as possible and leave our grand philosophical ideas about who is better than who aside.
Dude, I never, ever wrote that there would be no competition for resources like land. That’s fucking obvious. That doesn’t make life a “zero sum game”, a zero sum game means that every gain is someone elses’ loss, and that at the end of the game there are no new resources created. That is strictly not true. We can take actions in life which benefit us without harming others.
In real life, humans have rights, but we also take a balanced view of rights when there are conflicts. For example, if we need to build some important infrastructure, that takes priority over the rights of whoever is living where that infrastructure needs to go. My argument is that the rights of animals not to be killed is more important than our desire to have a tasty meal. I’m not out here arguing we shouldn’t build wind turbines because of their negative impacts on wildlife, because I know the positive impacts on countering climate change is better overall.
You’re still in denial here. There can be symbiosis in nature where species can cohabitate to the benefit of both, but that’s just two different niches being filled. It’s a completely orthogonal topic to species competing for the same niche. It’s not about building windmills and good vibes; human beings have overstepped our natural boundaries with billions of people in places we have absolutely no evolutionary excuse to be.
We’ve done this strictly because we can; it’s the natural animal inclination to favor your own progeny and expand your access to resources. Our ability to adapt has broken the evolutionary game. We won. The mere existence of 8.3 billion humans causes an unfathomable amount of harm that can’t be fixed by skipping “tasty meals”. That’s the ethical equivalent of whitewashing guilt and ignoring the structural problem.
So asserting something like “all animals have equal rights” is asinine. They clearly don’t, and we can’t change that without abandoning the 99% of human souls who stress the system beyond its natural ethical bounds (within the expected balance of evolution).
The carrying capacity of Earth is 2-4 billion people, and that’s assuming an ultimate human primacy with no regard to other species (except in the amoral ways they could sustain human existence). A “harmless” existence is a fleeting fraction of that, the small niche filled as hunter-gatherer megafauna mammals. This is a hard physical fact no matter what universal rights we put on paper. The choice is quite literally billions of human lives against trillions of birds/insects/fish/critters/predators/prey in conflict with them. There’s no free lunch.
Wait, are you saying that earth is overpopulated, now? I didn’t realize I was in conversation with a nazi, but honestly, it explains a lot. Which ethnic group do you want to exterminate?
How’s the weather in your fantasy land? You winning your fight against that straw man? I didn’t say anything about over or under population, that’s a completely different philosophical discussion. That would be a debate over questions like:
You are constricting your ethical ideal to automatically answer some of those questions. Here’s a rephrasing of our conversation:
This axiom automatically answers many questions raised by the other facts.
You can whine and sarcastically deflect but that’s the conclusion of your statement on total, universal animal rights. It’s not an undefendable position, but you must understand you’re pushing for a heavily restrained form of Anarcho-primitivism. If the concept of near total human civilization collapse for the benefit of other animals makes you uncomfortable (as it does for me), you’d want to reconsider that view in some way:
So I ask again, what’s your choice? There’s no free lunch.
Yep, nazi shit. Fuck off.