RE: Secular Humanism and Humanity: What are they?
March 14, 2015 at 4:34 pm
(This post was last modified: March 14, 2015 at 4:37 pm by Whateverist.)
(March 14, 2015 at 3:28 pm)Ignorant Wrote: So when you say "human nature is nothing special", does that also mean that the life of say, an antelope, has just as much value as the life of a human? Or have I misinterpreted that?
This gets at an essential difference. I would take an antelope's life to nourish my own or that of my family, but I never would regard a human in the same way. But other animals exhibit repulsion toward cannibalism so that isn't distinctly human. Plus a few humans and chimpanzees (apparently from what I have read) can experience abnormal personalities in which cannibalism is featured.
But apart from the issue of which life forms are okay to regard as food source -and every food source is a life form- I do not exalt humans above other animals. That is, I exalt that which is common with other animals in me as highly as I do that which is distinctively human. I'm not a humans-first kind of guy. If I were the ruler of the world, I would cut the human population drastically over a short period of time. I like being part of a varied and therefore healthy web of life. Transforming the entire planet over to meeting only our human needs strikes me as ugly both aesthetically and morally.
