Somethings are growing out of the fallen bird seed. This is a little shelf toward the top of a little box bush.
And in response, I'm trying to conceive of a grand theory. Sort of.
I do believe that at some point before I started thinking about duties instead of rights. And I read a paper by Onora O’Neill on the topic… which I didn’t find totally explanatory.
But I want to think about it again.
If we conceive of morality as a means to function as a community, to break away from self-interest and take a pro-social attitude, then perhaps the focus on rights is not the most obvious way to go. The rights focus seems to be all about how to protect agents from the self-interest of others by imposing a cordon sanitaire around the self. It kind of separates us off into discrete noli me tangere subjects. But what about if in stead of starting from ‘how can I be safe?’ we begin with ‘what do I do?’
This seems to be particularly relevant when we are dealing with moral patients (infants, non humans, those with dementia or in a coma). Instead of saying this dog has a right not to be harmed or killed, what about if moral agents have duties not to harm or kill.
A moral patient (a lion, say) does not have those duties toward the dog.
Now, the more power we have over the dog, the more extensive our duties become (food, water, health, wellbeing).
This is where it gets more useful.
Humans have power over everything. But how extensive are our duties?
I think there are various factors. Relationship, dependency and vulnerability. Harm to the processes that would allow the animal to take care of herself. And there can be instrumental reasons to take on duties – for example, wanting to improve ecosystems to increase carbon sequestration. This gets complicated. Say we have decided that we will increase our duty to bees as we need pollinators. We notice that birds are eating bees. We wish to continue helping the bees by killing the birds. I would say the duty not to harm or kill the birds would supercede that.
Then, you say, we hit an impasse.
But no. I would say we then have to consider another option. Do we alternatively feed the birds to discourage bee eating until the bee population has increased? Do we increase support for the bees, by providing additional sugar solutions?
I think this is more interesting with something like deer eating saplings and preventing the scrubby growth that would dramatically increase biodiversity. The solutions that are never considered are: open up more space so the deer do not over graze any area and reintroduce predators that move deer and lower deer densities. As the lynx or wolf do not have duties to the deer, they are not culpable for killing deer. Nor is it I think true that hunters kill deer less painfully than do predators on average – unless you always have crack marksmen. In addition, predators tend to kill the weakest and oldest – who already may be struggling.
In addition, while I do feel that environments are so damaged that human intervention (like nursing care) is required to assist in regaining health and that humans should bear responsibility as the direct and indirect causes of the damage are anthropogenic, I would also like to argue that given complexity there are strong reasons to refrain from action.
What's more, while humans cannot bend nature to their will (try stopping a tornado) the power we do wield may position us in a semi-supra-natural realm and that regarding that position as above rather than different, ie regarding that position as putting the rest of nature in the role of to-be-rescued by hero-humans rather than seeing it as having derailed us in a sense from our position within natural processes, would be a sign of hubris and idiocy.
We may have power but not the wisdom, knowledge, resources or consistently-reliably-moral enough motivation to regard ourselves as the planet’s saviours. We can learn to stop harming and try to help, but massive intervention, I want to say, is inappropriate. Just as it would be for a crow to overthrow capitalism.
Oh, wait a minute. That might be a good idea.
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