[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.