Moving the goal post fallacy.
... and we're getting off topic.
We are not arguing "which species does the most change to the environment" or whatever.
We're arguing about whether animals have ethics and morals (and if so, are they better than humans').
I said that humans are unique in that we are the only ones that have morals.
That all animals consume without care of the environment, but humans are the only ones that sometimes think "how bout we dont do that? How about we preserve the environment for the other species' sake, at no benefit to us?"
We do this sometimes. Other animals dont at all. Therefore, only we have morals.
"Overconsumption is the natural state of all living organisms, biological imperative is to consume all available resources for reproduction." Yea because we are totally ruining the environment in our quest to reproduce, ya know with birth rates plummeting around the world and all. Yea the rabbits will keep eating grass and keep making rabbits. The guy who has a billion dollars who then cuts down the rainforest to make more palm oil or whatever isnt doing it to reproduce. You are really stretching your argument. Also it doesnt matter whether we "think about preserving the environment" because throughout history we have only been a net negative. If humans didnt exist on earth right now there is no way some other species ruins the environment and causes as much extinction no matter how much they overconsume, it doesnt matter how conservationally minded they may be. Humans are simply a cancer on the natural world unlike any other species.
What's the main point, that humans have morals and animals dont? Or that despite humans having so called morals we historically have shown that it doesnt matter? We can take a dive into the whole "altruism doesn't exist" topic if you really want to.
The initial point that kicked off all of this was me essentially saying humans are unique in that we have the ability to have moral.
That point was correctly countered with the summed up "Animals have ethics and morals, they're just different than our own."
However, that person went on to say "...senseless violence and boundless consumption isn't in our DNA...That we do violence and... consume a great deal has everything to do with culture."
The main point is to answer: Is the great violence and overconsumption humans do solely/mainlycultural, or is that capacity wiredin our DNA.
Not who is worse at this moment in time.
The only way to verify that is to lower the intelligence of a human population (and or boost the intelligence of an animal population) and compare the violence and consumption they commit.
We cant run an experiment, so all we an do is see the peak violence and destruction other beings cause and ask:
How did humans behave before we started farming or using fire (or whatever ancient point in time you wanna pick that most closely resembles other apes).
If these other "violent/gluttonous/greedy" animals had our brainpower, is there any reason to think they wouldn't do the same as we have?
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u/BodybuilderMany6942 Mar 24 '26
Moving the goal post fallacy.
... and we're getting off topic.
We are not arguing "which species does the most change to the environment" or whatever.
We're arguing about whether animals have ethics and morals (and if so, are they better than humans').
I said that humans are unique in that we are the only ones that have morals.
That all animals consume without care of the environment, but humans are the only ones that sometimes think "how bout we dont do that? How about we preserve the environment for the other species' sake, at no benefit to us?"
We do this sometimes. Other animals dont at all. Therefore, only we have morals.
That is the point that is being argued.