Lower than low?

[Big D]

Consider, if you will, the human species as a whole.
In particular, look at our bad aspects.
We continually expand, alter our environment, dominate other life, destory entire species for fun or profit. kill each other for land and religion, show little regard for preserving the crucial natural balances of life and ecology that keep us alive.

In some ways, you could say that we're the lowest, most destructive, most savagely wanton beings on this planet.

What do you think?
Is humanity and unredeemable blemish on the world, our do we have positive aspects to outweight our negatives? Do our many great accomplishments prove that there really is hope and goodness?

[Montoya]

I remember one of my teachers humans are the most useless species on the Earth. But in my opinion our positives outweigh the negative, for human life that is. There will always be problems with what humans do. We are not perfect.

[Anaralia]

Well, we could disappear tomorrow and the ecosystem would survive perfectly. The same could be said for all animals and other forms of life that find themselves between the plant link and the decomposing bacteria link on the food chain.

We exist by consuming other resources, sometimes to the point of destruction, yes. Just like parasites. And, uh, *cough* viruses. But that doesn't make us "unredeemable"; it just makes us, well, beings that exist at the cost of other beings around us.

As for our "great accomplishments", I dunno, aren't most of them oriented towards the propagation of our own species, which can then continue to expand and destroy? I can't think of many great accomplishments that benefit any other species other than ourselves, unless perhaps as an additional side benefit.

That doesn't make us evil though, any more than a tick is evil. Maybe we give the universe some kind of balance. Or maybe we were supposed to, but got off track somewhere along the way.

A psychiatrist once told me that he believed firmly that man was a bad seed from birth. He pointed out that babies bit their mothers if no milk came out, and that children who grew up with little supervision turned out horribly violent. I hope he was wrong.

[Dr Unne]

Every creature on the planet lives by killing other creatures, and we're not better, but we're also no worse.

Human beings are the only beings that understand "value". A dog doesn't care whether it lives or dies; "caring" is beyond its mental capacity. A dog doesn't care if we destroy the ozone layer or spread garbage around or waste fossil fuels. We are everything good in the world and everything evil; those concepts only apply to people. Without people there would be no good or evil; there might be worth in the world, but there would be no one and nothing to appreciate worth; there might be beauty, but nothing could understand it. The world might as well not exist, if we aren't on it.

[Shadow Nexus]

It's not that we are bad, it's that we have degenerated. I really don't feel like writing a whole text about this...just...read Poet in New York.

[Mr. Mojo Risin]

Very nihilistic.

I believe there is a difference between survival and domination over resources(and each other) to the point of extinction. We now know we came within a single word of nuclear destruction. Such human institutions cannot be considered healthy, but are openly supported. For what? Power? Wealth? Ideology? None of these are necessary for survival or the advancement of humanity.

[Nait]

We're no worse than those damn shrimp and their accursed plankton-plantations. >:O Only if they'd never had evolved intelligence.

[Peegee]

Dr Unne has it right -- regardless of philosophical justification the end result is that humans are the ones responsible because of our ability to understand value and act upon it. This is why there is such philosophies as 'free market environmentalism'. Anyway, it can be argued that intrinsically speaking even if there were one human alive, s/he would still be morally bound to environmental ethical concerns. However if there were no humans, no sentient being would be bound to environmental ethical concerns (at least within the confines of this planet).

Anyway, specific to this topic, the only reason we're 'bad' to the 'environment' is because we engage in activities to 'it' that we would otherwise consider 'bad' to 'us'. So in order to avoid being hypocritical, we must acknowledge that what we are doing to the environment is also 'bad'. It's really that simple, because there exists no logical argument proving conclusively that we ought to do good to the environment*.

*actually there is, and the argument can be reduced to 'not being hypocritical', which is what I was talking about earlier

[War Angel]

For what? Power? Wealth? Ideology? None of these are necessary for survival or the advancement of humanity.

These things are the ONLY things moving humanity forward.

[Mr. Mojo Risin]

Originally posted by War Angel
These things are the ONLY things moving humanity forward.

Science and the arts can exist independently of those things. Indigenous cultures all over the world did it for thousands of years.

[gokufusionss1]

that's why we're special!

[War Angel]

Science and the arts can exist independently of those things

No, they can't. Both are a result of a desire to use one's intellect, to get better, to achieve things. A desire for power, for knowledge, for a better life. Humanity seeks to advance, and that is the only thing that matters.

[eestlinc]

Like all other past human institutions, I think we will find money become outdated as a method of pursuing happiness. As a smaller and smaller percentage of the world's population collects a larger and larger percentage of the world's money, it will eventually lose value because the vast majority of the world's people will go on living without it. The power of money will make it obsolete.

[Garland]

Ants and termites regularly hold wars both against each other, and amongst themselves. These wars are for territory and resources. When civilized humans (read: non-extremist exceptions) go to war, we don't annhilate the other side completely, we've advanced beyond genocide. Ants and termites haven't. Army ants go on long treks, killing every creature in their path, indiscriminantly. Some, they eat, and some they don't. This sounds like indiscriminant animal killing to me. Are ants and termites "evil"? Are they an irredeemable plague upon the planet? If you say that humans are because of war, then be sure you label ants the same way. You probably noticed how foolish you'd sound, if you started calling various insects "evil".

Beavers clear down trees to build their homes. Population control keeps them from becoming too damaging, but it's not a conscious decision by the beavers. If the beaver population grew too large, forests would be cleared for beaver homes. If deforestation is evil when humans do it, it's evil when beavers do it too. If it sounds foolish to label beavers as evil, then perhaps you should question applying such labels to humans who do the same thing, only on a larger scale.

Are bacteria and viruses beyond redemption? Are they the most destructive and evil life on the planet? They exist only to kill and cause sickness. This is worse than humanity, that tries to do good, but sometimes slides into evil. Somehow, I don't often hear such descriptions in bacteria and virus discussions.

Why the double standard? Someone should make a thread for the flaws of each and every other species that commits the acts we describe as wrong and irredeemable. Non-awareness is no excuse. I don't consider it an excuse when for example, a retarded person commits murder, and is excused as mentally unaware of his actions. Murder is murder. The analogy fits here too. If these labels sound stupid when applied to other species, they sound equally stupid when applied to humans.

[Big D]

[q=Garland]You probably noticed how foolish you'd sound, if you started calling various insects "evil".
[/q]Don't flame me for asking a question. I never said I believed the things I was saying, merely bringing them up as a topic for discussion.

Compare people to other animals.
Besides humans, only two other species commit rape - ducks and apes. Out of the countless millions of living forms, we're one of the few that perform such barbarism.[q=Unne]A dog doesn't care whether it lives or dies; "caring" is beyond its mental capacity.[/q]Dogs care for one another, and their offspring. Survival and nurturance are instinctive to them, like they are to us. However, grey dogs have never banded together and decided that all brown dogs are inferior and need to be annihilated.[q=Unne]A dog doesn't care if we destroy the ozone layer or spread garbage around or waste fossil fuels.[/q]We actually have the capacity to care about such complex matters; doesn't this add to our culpability?[q=PG]there exists no logical argument proving conclusively that we ought to do good to the environment*.

*actually there is, and the argument can be reduced to 'not being hypocritical', which is what I was talking about earlier[/q]Actually, the argument for caring for the environment is thus: failing to do so will ultimately kill every living thing, including us. There's nothing else alive that's capable of causing this kind of destruction, nothing else that can comprehend such an act - humans understand the consequences of their acts, yet continue anyway, in the hope and expectation that someone else will make things right.

What separates us from beavers, shrimp, viruses in this regard is the notion of the conscious will to do something, and the fact that animals in nature simply don't go to the destructive extremes that we do. Beavers don't clear-fell entire forests, wiping out everything in the area; viruses don't decide to kill everything and then actually do it.
Therein lies the difference.

This is merely a discussion of possible views and sides of this question, not some guy trying to flog his nihilist doomsday philosophy. As a matter of fact, I love humans to bits. We've done a few silly things, that's all.
All that's being debated here is whether an objective examination of human behaviour and history could paint a picture of us as being completely out of line with what's right and good in this world.