About gods, if you suppose that you will have an infinite life for which this short life is only some sort of audition, then it isn’t at all important about injustices you endure here.
Also, who died and left you deciding what’s good and what’s evil? A god might have some higher purpose that makes your petty concerns irrelevant. All of nature is arranged in feedback loops—when one population gets too large it degrades its environment and then the population size gets adjusted downward. “Too large” can be defined as “large enough to degrade its environment to support fewer”. This goes on everywhere. When a human baby dies in a degreaded environment, isn’t it the same thing? Should we be exempt from the feedback loops that run the rest of the world? Of course we’d think so, but why would anybody else agree?
We are left deciding what’s good and evil because if we don’t, who will tell us? And even if someone did, how could we trust them? The nature of morality is such that everyone has to decide for themself, at least to the extent of deciding who to listen to. If a god has some higher purpose, they should explain it to us, and if they can’t explain it in a way that makes us agree it’s not right.
Just because feedback loops happen doesn’t mean they’re a good thing even when they happen to animals. We should be exempt under EY’s definition of should, and anyone who disagrees is either using a different definition or is just not worth arguing with.
About gods, if you suppose that you will have an infinite life for which this short life is only some sort of audition, then it isn’t at all important about injustices you endure here.
Also, who died and left you deciding what’s good and what’s evil? A god might have some higher purpose that makes your petty concerns irrelevant. All of nature is arranged in feedback loops—when one population gets too large it degrades its environment and then the population size gets adjusted downward. “Too large” can be defined as “large enough to degrade its environment to support fewer”. This goes on everywhere. When a human baby dies in a degreaded environment, isn’t it the same thing? Should we be exempt from the feedback loops that run the rest of the world? Of course we’d think so, but why would anybody else agree?
We are left deciding what’s good and evil because if we don’t, who will tell us? And even if someone did, how could we trust them? The nature of morality is such that everyone has to decide for themself, at least to the extent of deciding who to listen to. If a god has some higher purpose, they should explain it to us, and if they can’t explain it in a way that makes us agree it’s not right.
Just because feedback loops happen doesn’t mean they’re a good thing even when they happen to animals. We should be exempt under EY’s definition of should, and anyone who disagrees is either using a different definition or is just not worth arguing with.
Ants in a feedback loop.