thoughtful"A rock has no moral status: we may crush it, pulverize it, or subject it to any treatment
we like without any concern for the rock itself. A human person, on the other hand,
must be treated not only as a means but also as an end."
It's such a very wašíču way of perceiving the world, as something without moral value, something to used and destroyed at whim. Which is exactly what they are doing, and the results of this include a great deal of harm along with the things that people like.
There are whole other ethical systems out there, one of which is framed as mitakuye oyasin. In this philosophy, everything is alive and everything is connected. What we do to the world around us, we also do to ourselves. This is factual in two ways: 1) We are all made out of the same elements: stars, planets, rocks, plants, animals, humans, came from the same source. 2) We all share the same biosphere here on Earth, and unbalanced destruction spreads whether you realize it or not. And so the tribal philosophy reminds us that we are part of a very large, very tight-knit family; that we must not do things on a whim, but think first whether it is needed, because other beings and things have a right to their own existence. The hunter would look for an animal ready to die, not a mother with young. The knapper would look for the knife within the stone, not a rock that was busy being something else.
To see the world as full of life and meaning and rights is to walk through a very different world indeed. But at least that one does not lead to lighting the biosphere on fire because driving cars seems like fun.
Times like this, it becomes obvious that I may have fair skin, but I'm not really white. I don't think like they do. The best description of my ethnicity, I got from a black friend in college: "Yeah, you can pass for white ... until you open your mouth."
What are some of your ethical principles or observations?
Deleted comment
Yes...
June 27 2016, 04:29:15 UTC 4 years ago
I have a harder time thinking of random little manmade things as alive. A ship? A building? I can do that. A napkin? It's harder.
Technically our hair is not alive, and yet it is part of a living being. It has health (or not) even though it's not alive. We certainly object to anyone tampering with it against our will, because it feels like part of us.
So too, these bits and bobs of seemingly inert matter are part of a vast being, the planet Earth.
When we behave as if everything is alive and matters, in some way, then we are more driven to act carefully instead of selfishly. When we believe that things don't matter, we're more inclined to devise reasons for making that category bigger -- to say that plants do not matter, animals do not matter, certain types of humans do not matter -- and then we may do with them as we please, regardless of the harm it does. Because they're not alive, not important; only the decider is important.
Take that to its ultimate conclusion and you get a psychopath who acts like everyone else in the world is a cardboard cutout.
Re: Yes...
June 27 2016, 11:13:02 UTC 4 years ago
-textbook definition I dredged up from my course notes.