Of all the views concerning nature and morality I have come across, the view that nature as a whole is morally neutral seems to be the most common. Some thinkers have held that nature is either good or bad. These last two views seems to antiquated today.
When it comes to individuals in nature, the dominating opinion also seems to be that animals and plants cannot be subjected to moral judgements. The argument is usually that these animals or plants are simply following their nature and thus can not be said to be either good nor evil.
I can agree with this to a certain point. As a species, you can not say that wolves are evil because they kill sheep. That makes wolves an enemy of sheep and the sheepfarmer, but not objectively evil. The wolf must kill to survive. Killing is natural to a wolf. So when a wolf kills, it is not an act of murder, but an act of necessity.
But, this does not account for individual differences between animals within the same species. For example, we have heard tales of man killing tigers in India. Tigers as a species does not hunt humans as a rule, they generally keep away from humans as most predators do. Still sometimes, for reasons unknown single tigers go amok and turn into veritable serial killers. All killings of humans performed by tigers can be ascribed to just a few individuals each killing many.
I would state that such tigers are evil, as opposed to a normal tiger that kills only to eat, and only it's natural game. These few tigers are partly responsible for the emnity between man and those beasts. Explanations abound as to why these killings may be seen as justified, like men killing tiger cubs and the like. That may well be, but such explanations are to be found about human serial killers as well, and accepting their actions on these grounds would be absurd. Having a good reason generally does not excuse murder.
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To do that for a tiger is unnatural. The explanation that comes to mind is that we live in a crazy world. Why should that not affect tigers? A tiger is prone to contact with humans, and humans are mostly quite mad. The question is then: What is the origin of madness? Is madness inherent in nature? When did humans alternatively become mad? There are reasons why the origins of madness could be sought in stress. When populations of birds or other animals become large or when they otherwise get stressed "mad" behaviour arises like the killing of the young etc. So in that sense madness is inherent in nature. When an animal evolves a certain way of life this results naturally, but when that way of life suddenly leads to a situation of stress, like in lemming-populations, the result is madness. Take for instance agriculture. The ascent of agriculture in the Middle East led to a burgeoning population in an area where there was different ethnic groups. Agriculture was not pathological in its infancy, but it could have led to an increase in population that resulted in increased tension between ethnic groups. That is: You would have to accept for this example to be valid that people do kill each other without this being madness. Killing would only lead to stress and madness when the population size made this violence escalate...
ReplyDeleteMadness is also explained in spirituality as a step in all awakening. That is: We need to transcend this madness to become whole again. The wholeness we attain is then not the wholeness of a dumb animal, but a conscious wholeness. The wholeness of knowing that we exist. The question then is: How could we be conscious of ourselves and create misery? How could we consciously perpetuate an insane way of being? :)
The thing about animals is then that they aren't conscious of what they are doing when they go mad... And how could we living in an insane world manage to create a society which isn't stressful? Do we need to or do we miraculously being stressed when we become enlightened? It seems that the practical way of regarding this since I am not enlightened is that we need to create less stressful societies... As to population control: That would be nice, but I feel just knowing this that it is easier to relate to stress...
ReplyDeleteThat should read: do we miraculously stop being stressed when...
ReplyDeleteA few more lines...
ReplyDeleteStress results when we cannot escape a situation. If we can move on it is no problem. The reason for madness in our modern societies lies in us being nailed. Just like a bird is nailed by stress when it eats its young. Actually the bird is just doing something to stop being nailed...
Maybe the analogy with serial killers was not entirely wise on my part. I'm not quite sure the tigers I am talking about are actually mad. I don't know enough about it. My main point was that there are individual differences between animals, and thus it is possible to rate their behaviour on a moral scale.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to animals not being conscious about their actions, I agree this is a major problem which probably topples my entire reasoning in this post. Can you be morally culpable if you do not make conscious choices? Probably not.
On the other hand, we know little of consciousness and cannot rule out the possibility that animals on some level do make conscious choices. I don't know. This is problematic, I think I might discard this entire idea.
Actually, my goal with this line of reasoning is to try and tear down the barrier that has been put up between humans and nature/animals. In social biology, this is being done to some extent with support from Darwin, but by making man part of the deterministic world of natural law, they also remove man's moral responsibility and the value of all philosophical thought. Everything is described in terms of it's evolutionary effectiveness.
ReplyDeleteThe traditional response from the humanities is to place man, as he has a unique form of consciousness, in an entirely different world, where free will and lofty speculation can exist and have value.
I find this last view not only hard to accept and grasp fully, but also slightly chauvinistic. Making man into something entirely different in the most basic way from nature, is putting him above these at the same time. At the very least it makes an equality extremely difficult to uphold.
So this is what I want to accomplish; by not making man a part of the world of animals, but making animals and even plants part of the world of men, I can assert natures equality with man while at the same time preserving mans free will.
It is then necessary to ascribe the trait of free will to the natural world. In other words, animals make choices that are based on more than their instincts as dictated by the evolutionary process. It follows that some of these choices must be of a moral nature. These choices may not be as informed or rationally worked out as choices made by humans, but they are nonetheless choices and as such can be subjected to moral judgements.
It is quite often the case, in hunter-gatherer societies, to think of animals, trees and rocks as persons. They relate to the world as they do to their fellows. This is called animism and fetishism. The thing, in my experience, is that it feels very good to talk to nature. That way you actually get to know nature and it reveals itself to you. You see a bird but that is no coincidence, it is the bird relating to you.
ReplyDeleteThis is not scientific. You can't be sure that this isn't just play-acting, but it feels right. It's good even though I think that this is just daydreaming sometimes, but daydreaming feels different from this. Daydreaming is trying to escape, while relating to nature is actually the opposite...
Beautifully said, and the problem, and the goal of this blog, is to make it possible to unite the view of the world that marks such an attitude as an absurdity, and the view that finds it meaningful.
ReplyDelete