Newsgroups: sci.environment

/ hpindda:sci.environment / steinly@topaz.ucsc.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson) /  8:27 am  Apr  2, 1992 /
In article <24C302Se0faj01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com> jjh00@outs.ccc.amdahl.com (Joel J. Hanes) writes:

   bkottmann@falcon.aamrl.wpafb.af.mil (Brett Kottmann) writes:

>   >	Every time someone mentions space colonization, someone else jumps in
>   > and starts with the rape/pollute the rest of the universe comments.
>
>   >	Mankind is not inherently evil.
>
>   Evidence please.  
>
>What a neat conundrum. Provide evidence that mankind is
>not inherently evil. Now how should we do that...

Very well, if no evidence is relevant to the truth or falsity of the 
assertion, the assertion itself must be meaningless, no? Brett either 
has to produce evidence, or 'fess up to talking nonsense.

What *are* we to say about a species as destructive as H. Sapiens? If
it were any other species performing similar destruction, say Jim Lovelock's
bug that liberates chlorine from seawater, we wouldn't call it "evil" --
just deadly, or toxic. Perhaps we should say, not that humans are evil,
but that they are toxic to the biosphere?

We believe that we have minds capable of moral agency. If that is true, then
the toxicity of humanity is evil, not morally neutral. Only if humans are
no more moral agents than bacteria are our actions morally neutral, merely
toxic, and not truly evil. 

If humans are moral agents then we are responsible for the harm that we do,
responsible for each species we extinguish, or deprive of a chance to leave
descendent species, and it is *evil* when we do it. If we are not moral 
agents, then why should we be deserving of any more status than any other 
species? To deal with toxic pests you use a pesticide, right? If humans are 
simply toxic pests, the same treatment would be in order.

We had better be evil, rather than merely toxic. If we are evil, then we
have potential to be good (or else it wouldn't be evil). If we have no 
capacity for good, then we are merely toxins, the sooner done away
with the better for the biosphere. 

The fact that we can imagine doing better proves that our destructiveness
*is* evil, and not merely toxicity. That we can envision ecocentrism is
enough to make anthropocentrism wrong, just as the fact that it was possible
to envision a world without slavery made slavery wrong. Moral insight is
social evolution yet to occur. "Good" is the direction of the social future,
the direction of increasing altruism, the direction of increasing symbiosis,
of increasing coadaptation, of increasing stability. The capacity for good,
for cultural evolution, for moral growth and change, is our strength and our 
only hope -- and the only hope for the biosphere. Just as all past social 
progress occured by expansions of the domain of individual fitness to group 
and cultural forms of fitness, so the next step in ethics is to maximize 
fitness not just in terms of our species but in terms of the whole biosphere: 
tomorrow's "good" is whatever increases the health of the whole biosphere, 
whatever will clean up the mess we have made of it.

We need to make tomorrow today, and very quickly.

------------
Alan McGowen

"Whatever you are doing, stop and ask yourself,"Is this going to diminish 
the capacity of the Earth to support life?", and if the answer is yes,
don't do it." -- Roger Payne.