I'm fairly cynical about humanity myself and find us to be miserably greedy beasts, but I have to agree that the argument here isn't holding up. I think we do need to know exactly what we're talking about as "natural." I think humans are animals, and as such our organization into civilized animals is a natural development of our particular matter, but I can see an argument opposing that...
You might say that animals affect their environments in an instinctual way and are thus not morally responsible, whereas humans stopped relying on instinct and allowed intellect to take over millenia ago. To take civilization as an example, the argument would go: if it were instinct that drove us to civilize ourselves, then we would not have made so many errors in its implementation (slavery being the prime example that comes to mind). The answer must be that ordering ourselves is a product of reason and not instinct. If one were to make this distinction, I think a case could be made for holding humanity morally responsible for the ways in which we effect our environment. However, one can not make the leap to say that reason itself is unnatural and anything produced by reason therefore evil. We are forced in this scenario to recognize ourselves as reasonable creatures in the here and now, and perhaps unfortunately, reason may be the only way solve the moral problem of our relationship with the planet.
Let's look at farm bred animals. It can be debated elsewhere whether humans started out as herbivores. I take it for fact that today we are omnivores. There are too many people in the world today for us to be able to go out and hunt the oldest and weakest animals for our consumption. If we did that, we really would destroy every species on the planet. Instead we've developed the alternative of breeding animals (and plants) specifically for consumption so that we don't have to go into the forest and kill all the wild beasts. I eat beef because the only reason cows exist is for me to eat them. You wouldn't find a modern day cow running around in the wild because it's been bred to be a consumed product. To not eat the cow would be to prevent it from fulfilling its destiny. Is breeding animals in such a way sacreligious, and have we done it at the expense of certain "natural" species? Probably, but I'd prefer this to even more mass extinction to fulfill our consumptive needs.
I often hear the argument from "veggies" that breeding animals just to be slaughtered is wrong, but is there really a difference between breeding cows and growing corn? It's all manipulation of the environment for our own gain, and I can't see the solution being that we stop eating and sustaining ourselves altogether. We're a part of this planet too, and the world would suffer an imbalance from our extinction just like it does fom the extinction of other species. Now I will admit that argument that we could be feeding starving people all over the world with the grain we give to our cattle holds some weight, so perhaps we should be looking into a new system of consumption.
It's not that we're superior to other species, and I don't believe we have a right to destroy them, but we do have a responsibility to sustain our own species, and reason is the tool we've been given to accomplish this. In some ways that makes us the weakest species because we can't instinctually fit in with our environment - we have to think about is and mess it up and learn from our mistakes and try again. I am glad you have optimism that things can change, Skit, because in order for it to change you're going to have to embrace being human and the particular capabilites that entails in order to enact that change. |
