Bryan wrote
Chris Perley wrote
>If you take the perspective out from the individual "bits" that make up an
>ecosystem to the processes that provide the ecosystem with its diversity
and
>life, then you HAVE to accept a sometimes very painful death for individual
>structural components.
Can you give an example of this? I just don't see why such a death would
necessarily have to be very painful.
Chris Perley here
I didn't say that such death NECESSARILY HAS to be very painful; I said that
sometimes very painful death is what happens due to either predation or
disease and we have to accept that - witness the
buffalo-arse-end-eating-hyena or the slow death by peritonitis starting from
the testicles and penis. That's nature. We cannot go around policing all
the lions and hyenas (or bacteria) to make sure they kill painlessly and
clean - though I for one would have put a bullet into the head of the water
buffalo rather than see it suffer such a slow, painful (and undignified)
death. I often wonder whether the film crew did that after they finished
filming.
This raises an interesting distinction between pain and the process of
predation. In such a one on one situation (if you ignore the three hyenas)
I would have no problem with reducing significant pain by inflicting death
on the buffalo, but whether I should deprive the hyena of its kill is an
entirely different question. I think such an act might be considered
"immoral" if the health of the ecosystem was your benchmark because we need
hyenas as much as we need water buffaloes (whatever our anthropocentric
prejudices). On the other hand a utilitarian might favour "saving" the
water buffalo from those mean hyenas, and think we have a responsibility to
do so. That's why I think utilitarianism in an environmental ethics context
is pretty inadequate because it removes the context from the "environment"
to the individual bits. That means it places itself in a context that lacks
overall understanding. It justifies an illusory moral behaviour that, taken
to its logical conclusion, is harmful to ecosystem processes because it
doesn't value the PROCESS of predation and the sometimes painful suffering
to INDIVIDUALS (of whatever Kingdom) that is associated with such predation.
It values the individuals AT THE EXPENSE of the whole - the worst type of
short term, ultimately self-defeating reductionism.
We don't help the world by saving all the butterflies from all the webs - or
all the zebras from all the jackals - or even all the mule deer from all the
hunters. Some may like to do so to appease their consciences, but I think
it may actually be morally wrong to do so.
CP
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