beginnerhunter
Well-known member
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2016
- Messages
- 1,320
Enjoy at your own risk.
Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
A reasonable way of hashing out the disagreement is as follows. Imagine that humans had all left earth and we could destroy the world, killing every living thing painlessly. I would, in an instant, support doing so. Most environmentalists would seem opposed to this idea. It would likely strike most people as crazy. Yet this common hesitance to embrace it seems, in my view, to be a result of a dramatic defect in our thinking about nature, which almost entirely ignores what things are actually like for nearly all of the beings in nature.
This conclusion follows from all plausible views. As long as one holds that intense suffering for quadrillions of beings is a bad thing, they must hold that nature is bad, all else equal. If one really appreciates how bad it is to be eaten alive—a grisly fate which no doubt many animals are enduring as I type this sentence—it becomes quite clear that ending the natural death and torture machine is quite an important priority. The fact that the location of this grisly torture chamber has a serene appearance does not vindicate it. Factory farms wouldn’t be vindicated, even if they were in a serene setting.
So environmentalists and I can find lots of common ground on a variety of issues. As a longtermist, my primary considerations will always be about the long run future. And yet, there is a very fundamental difference between our views. I regard nature as intrinsically bad, yet instrumentally worth protecting often, and they regard nature as intrinsically good and instrumentally worth protecting.
It's incredible! For the longest time I thought it was satire. Then I read more of his substack and it was in the same vein. Many of his articles are on factory farming, which I thought were overly exasperated..until I read this one.This guy just sounds like an antinatalist but applied for all organisms. Suffering in nature = nature is bad and shouldn't exist.
I couldn't be further opposed to this paragraph. I genuinely think I don't agree with them on anything regarding nature in this post. Surface level understanding of population dynamics and no depth to their points besides brutality and suffering = wholly bad and not worth existing. Views everything in a human-centric lens and doesn't seem to be able to develop their perspective beyond that. Maybe they aren't trying to.
Ending the natural death and torture machine? The only reason nature is important is because it's pretty?
Mr. blow up the planet to end suffering is worried about the future? Nature is intrinsically bad? Just what does this guy's long term future hope look like? Goofy
I wish he had some interesting points or perspective because he clearly views the world in an entirely different way than I do but I really didn't get much out of this at all
He has another essay where he argues that eating meat is the moral equivalent of beastiality. Seriously. Scoff now but these ideas will be mainstream in a decade or 2. You don't want to be on the "wrong side of history" do u? Lol.