The Rights of Man
 

This is an offshoot of this thread right here: Linked!

The question being, do you believe in the primacy of man? Are we the most important species in existance, if so why and if not why?

My own take on the situation is pretty straightforward. We are a product of whatever universal trend lead towards life and the development of higher brain function, and as such our primal urges to propagate and survive are likely also a part of the trend. If we have the capacity to dominate in such a way that we render ourselves immune to extinction, I believe it's what we should do. Since currently we are the most successful higher organism on the planet, I think it stands to reason that we are the most important by virtue of nature's own egotism, the survival instinct.

But what do you think?

I'd just like to point out that this is a loaded topic, and all viewpoints regarding this cannot be adequately discussed given the rules of this particular forum.

I can say, however, that I believe that humanity is the most important species on Earth simply by the virtue of having the biggest impact. We have the power to create or destroy as we see fit, and because of this the future development of this planet rests on our slightly impotent shoulders. Because of our importance, we fall under the 'with great power comes great responsibility" clause. Our capacity to create and destroy gives us a huge responsibility to nature as a whole, and our role should be to protect and nurture it rather than dominate it.

I can't really go into the why I believe these things, but I tend to think the world would be in a lot better state if people saw themselves as tenants of the world rather than the owners.

note: lets keep religion as far away from this topic as possible, if the mods feel that is impossible I suspect they will close it post haste.

Not my intention to stir up a muck though, I'd rather have it closed prematurely than start a ruckus.

The irony is that I generally think that enviornmentalists -- you know, the ultra-green folks who eat strictly organic foods and actively protest the killing of animals in slaughterhouses and lobby Congress to advocate solar and wind power -- are essentially the ultimate believers in Primacy-Of-Man theory. If you're going to seriously suggest that human beings have the capability to have such a monsterous impact on nature and the world -- and then imply that it's our responsibility to clean our act up -- you're basically philosophically very much in line with the belief that human beings are unique and "superior." After all, if we thought we were just any other animal we'd use resources at our own whim -- that's what they do -- and not give a damn about the consequences.

So yes, I believe in the notion that we are the "most important species" (at least on this planet, I won't go so far as to say "in the universe," who knows what's out there.) But I believe that the fact that we are the "most important species" -- gosh, I'm actually going to borrow from Spider-Man of all places here -- denotes us a great responsibility to go along with our great power. We are the most powerful, most intelligent and most valuable species, and it is precisely that superiority that denotes us the responsibility of maintaining and preserving the rest of the world. No one else is going to do that for us, so it's up to us to maintain nature's balance.

(I'm actually not that much of an environmentalist "wacko," either, as the extremists annoy me nearly as much as the businesspeople on the other side of the equation. But I'm still cognizant of the underlying reality that humanity has had a massive impact on our planet, and it's our responsibility to do something about it. I'd still like to keep eating meat and pumping gas to my car for the time being, though. The important thing is that humanity keeps striving for progression -- we don't need an instanteous extremist enviornmentalist "revolution" to mess up our lives and livlihoods, like a let's shut off electricity and return to the dark ages mentality. but we do need to continue exploring better opportunities to improve our futures and preserve everything we can.)

Well, I'd say we have as much a right to consider ourselves superior to other creatures as they have to consider themselves superior to us. I don't see why "speciesism" is supposed to be such a sin. I do agree that outright cruelty is wrong, and I would definitely warn against some sort of slippery slope of trying to apply this to intra-human relationships, but species-wise, I don't see why we should consider ourselves equal or inferior to animals.

This means that we need to strike a balance; to borrow from Solid Snake's post, we should definitely realize that we ought to be taking care of our planet, since we're the only ones able to mess it up and the only ones able to heal it, too. But I don't see, again, why that means that individual animals should take primacy over individual humans. I remember a pretty good argument made by this fellow about how, unlike humans, individual animals don't feel the way we do and how, further, under our stewardship many animals have thrived, and get better treatment they would in the wild (how do you think cows would fare out there?).

To piggyback off Gorefiend for a moment, I remember reading a (different, though very similar) article in my college Biology class about mutually beneficial relationships between domesticated animals and humans, and the underlying irony that animals like cats, dogs, pigs, and horses exponentially increased their probability of survival as species by becoming attached to the hip with humans. Mutually beneficial relationships -- alliances of a Darwinian sort -- are common in all forms of species out there; those that "allied with us," so to speak, benefit in the unique sense of "allying" with the most powerful species on this planet.

Wolves and humans both neared extinction in the Ice Age -- then, something happened, and wolves were gradually "domesticated." What actually happened was a less one-sided affair; wolves and humans greatly benefitted from hunting together, survival of the fittest favored those (human) tribes and (wolf) packs that had intregated in such a unique way, and subsequently, you had hunting dogs and cavemen chasing mammoths and sharing the spoils of the hunt. That's a massive generalization for the sake of a narrative, but it's essentially what happened. And now look at dogs: no other mammilian species aside from humans themselves are less likely to go extinct, because humans have such a vested interest in ensuring that dogs stick around for the long haul. And there's like fifty gadzillion varieties of dogs (and cats, and horses) bred for a wide variety of purposes. From a Darwinian perspective, dogs won huge by allying with humans in a pivotal era thousands upon thousands of years ago.

So I agree entirely with Gorefiend with my inability to understand why some enviornmentalists (not "all" by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly some) have cried foul at the notion of humans domesticating animals. Domestication is a certainly a mutually beneficial relationship in cases where the domesticated aren't used for food (cats, dogs, horses) and is even arguably, on the balance, mutually beneficial when domestication is used for the express purpose of providing humans food. After all, cows will never be at risk of going extinct so long as humans continue to desire to eat beef.

Lets be careful of the fallacy of appealing to nature for moral justification. It doesn't work on a smaller scale so it certainly doesn't work now.

Solid Snake,

Animals tend to seek out their self-interest at the best of the capacities, do they not? They don't give a damn about the consequences because they can't. Us giving a damn about the consequences of our actions doesn't have to imply a special moral standing of humanity (in the form of rights or responsabilities to the rest of nature), it can just be a practical question.

Of course, it can be both, and I tend to agree that our sapience and capacities give us responsabilities beyond what has to be done to preserve the welfare of our own species.

[Edit]

Setting aside objections over individual cows (which would be relevant to an animal right/welfare argument), it's not that clear that domestication can't have negative effects on the survival of these species. Setting aside that ideally they'd eventually become living blocks of food (which I myself wouldn't count as that beneficial in itself), the process of breeding isn't ideal at all. There are concerns that the populations have been made susceptible to disease and even epidemics because of careless breeding, for example.

[/Edit]

Gorefiend,

You're not remember it that well, I think. He argues that it's possible to kill animals without making them suffer; that animals have thrived in their relation with humanity and that they can/could get better treatment in domestication (even to a non-vegetarian society) than they do in the wild. He doesn't argue that industrial slaughterhouses accomplish this.

I think that we've fooled ourselves into believing we are the highest being. In fact, we are next to nothing. We aren't born knowing how to swim, we are small, weak, have poor senses, lack balance possessed by quadrupedal creatures, are not particularly fast, lack natural defenses, have no natural weaponry, no longer possess organs capable of handling disease effectively, and have lost all but the most basic survival instinct. The only thing we have going for us is a unique combination of traits otherwise dispersed throughout the animal population.

1. We, like ants, have a complex society which gravitates around a central ruling power which makes all the decisions.
2. We, like bears, are omnivores, allowing us food variety.
3. We, like other primates, have thumbs.
4. We, like only the orangutan, are bipedal, allowing us to use our hands unimpeded.

These all come together with thousands of years of living in large communities, allowing us to invent technology. Because of technology, humans have thought for centuries that they were better than other animals, better than other humans who lived in more sustainable yet less technological ways, and better than other humans who had technology different from their own and who simultaneously thought that they were superior.




In our arrogance, we have forgotten that we are the most poorly-equipped animal. In our arrogance, we have destroyed societies that we considered lesser in Africa and the Americas. In our arrogance, we have established strained trade between continents to exchange materials and ideas that have been combined to subjugate those without the resultant technology, such as the use of Chinese gunpowder to make European guns for use in Africa and the Americas.



In our arrogance, we are the only creature capable of irreparably destroying our own environment and the world as a whole.

Because there is one other trait humans share with another animal on the planet, and arguably the most basic form of life: free-floating DNA. We, like the virus, are the only form of life that destroys our environment without giving anything back. Our world is in danger of destruction this very moment because of that. The only way to save ourselves and all the rest of the planet's life is to make ourselves better than the lowest form of existence, one that many argue isn't even advanced enough to be considered alive, in the immediate future.

In my opinion, that makes humans, despite all our technology, not the highest form of life. Not the lowest, but not the highest. I say not the lowest for good reason. While humans are the ones who screwed up the world, humans are also the only species capable of fixing it. That offers us opportunity to break away from comparison to the lowest of all beings and redeem ourselves. I believe once that happens, we can argue the point all we want, because we will have found a better understanding of our own place in the world, which is something every other animal knows from birth.


Edit: My point, I guess, is that we have no idea where we belong, and therefore can't argue our place in the world. We live outside of our own world. Once we find where we belong, we can argue about where it is we stand in comparison to other beings.

Hmmm... I thought I'd typed in here, but it was evidently somewhere else, something about humans having historically, though not recently, made the choice to not be cruel and about the rise of industrial farming as a recent event. I apologize, and qualify my argument to denote that while I believe that we are entirely justified in domesticating animals for various purposes, including food, I do believe we should aim to try to give those animals a decent life and a humane death.

And, bluestarultor, I had typed up a rant, which I TL;DR'd just in case you or anyone thinks its worth it, but Funka made my point so much better than I did and then included some things I'd forgotten... Read at your discretion. [TLDR]if anything the fact we made it so far while being so poorly equipped, as you demonstrated, should be a sign of our greatness. Truly, the very fact that we can destroy so much must mean something. And, the fact that we are capable of reason, that you can sit at a computer, made entirely from parts not found in nature, and tell us that our damage makes us bad, the fact you're capable of condemning your own species... That's what makes us great. Our minds. No other creature on earth (arguably a couple in the ocean may come close) has the brain capacity we do, to reason, think, communicate, and get things done. And, unlike the few that come close I mentioned earlier, none other anywhere we've been so far has the ability to do any of the things we do; to grasp things and make them completely different, to take many things and turn them into something completely new, that's more than the sum of its parts. That's what, so far, only we can do. And that's a rational reason why I choose to root team human.

Now, that we went ahead and made a terrible moral blunder, yes, we did, but at the same time, we have the capacity, and, increasingly, the will to fix it. Our morality doesn't impinge on our position as a species. As I was going to argue in the other thread, yes, man has shown itself to be truly inhuman not only to animals, but to man himself. But the fact we can make a distinction and say that something is wrong, and no other animal can really do so, is worth more than the (historically and in proportion to our total population) few bad apples that choose to make the wrong choice.

And its worth noting real quick that for the longest time, we didn't even know that, say, burning massive amounts of coal, was all that bad. Or that we could actually hunt a species to death. Blaming us for our blunders while ignorant is like citing malice in a dog that bites a mailman. I'm not saying it makes everything better and all, especially given the amount of damage done, but it always helps to put things in perspective.[/TLDR]