The Universal Moral Code

[Aroura]

The wheat doesn’t chose to participate, and thereby becomes exempt. All beings that cannot understand the OP moral code fall into the second category, so it is no less ne’er morally wrong to harm them.

I guess? I wondered exactly the same when I read the op. Life feeds on life. No getting around it.

It’s a nice idea, but utterly impossible. Tigers eat meat. Even if we wish not to impose ourselves on the tiger, it must impose itself on the water buffaloes. Circle of love from and all that.

You are absolutely right. It is utterly impossible to live in a perfectly righteous way, respecting all forms of life equally, not inflicting suffering on any sentient being, etc, in the environment where we live, and having the needs we have: to eat, to kill foreign enemies, lab rats, insects, pests, bacteria, etc to protect ourselves. For that reason, I say that LIFE (the very nature of our lives) is evil, wrong, hurtful, violent, not good. As living beings that have the nature we have, which we did not choose but which was imposed to us arbitrarily, we have no choice but to do to other living beings things that we would not like others to do to us (evil). But, for every action we take there is an equivalent reaction that comes back and is done to us. This is called karma. What we sow, we reap. We sow evil, and so we reap evil. This is the cause of all human suffering.

You lost me when you got to Karma. Karma is this idea of some sort of inherent fairness, which clearly doesn’t exist. Babies get cancer, narcissists live to a ripe old age, happy and rich.

The reality is harsher. We must try to do our best and reduce net suffering even though there is no guarantee we will be rewarded for it. We must do it because it is right, not because God is watching, or Karma will cause us to reap what we sow, or any other silly notion of systemic reward and/or punishment.