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Humans First
The other day, a friend of mine was asked to present the conservative view of climate change to an environmental group. He thought it fair to begin by letting them know where he stood:
If doing so would enable me to save one human baby, I would personally kill every polar bear in existence with my bare hands.
My friend was going for a certain humorous shock value, of course, but he really did state the correct scale of values, didn’t he?
Image Credit: Flickr user Amanda Graham.
Published in General
For a contrasting statement about Leftist values: millions of children in Africa are already dead because the Left prohibits the killing of mosquitoes with DDT.
Rather a modification of Lincoln’s comments some 150+ years ago, ?eh.
Okay, challenge: In order to save the life of one baby, you have to kill every dolphin, chimpanzee, and gorilla; for the sake of simplicity, all these deaths would be instantaneous and painless.
I understand and respect those who would unhesitatingly choose the baby, but I’m honestly not sure what I’d do given that hypothetical. I’m wholly in the camp of valuing human life over that of animals — I’d save the drowning stranger over my dog in Dennis Prager’s hypothetical — but the moral calculation gets complicated when you use animals with some levels of sentience in numbers as high as that.
Quick answer: yes, he got it right. Obvious disclaimer: we don’t need to obliterate every species indiscriminately.
For those of us of a religious bent, we take the “stewardship” of the earth seriously. We are only part of God’s creation. We treat the entirety of life as a gift from God. To the degree possible, therefore, we’d like to preserve it. But if push comes to shove, and it’s between me and the cute, cuddly animal … tough crap for cutesy.
I think he has it right. People first, and the DDT is a great example of white Liberals causing poor blacks to die. Not using DDT is killing more blacks than the KKK ever dreamed of, just because of one woman’s made up book.
It gets more murky when you are destroying habitats just to have cheaper lumber or some such. The current coconut oil meme for example. I don’t know enough to know if it is a real issue, or the latest “thing”.
The truth is, on the left, they are really socialist that want us to use less energy. Less energy = lower standard of living. Period. Everything comes back to energy. Al Gore wants to use as much as he can, while the peons burn dung to heat their homes.
It’s an easy question if it’s your child.
I don’t agree at all. Let me put myself out there: I would not want to be saved by science if, by science, we mean making all kinds of innocent animals suffer because I happen to be dying (though I admit I’d be more willing in the case of my child, but how can absolute morality pertain in such a situation?). This is humanism at its worse, IMHO. We are very important, but human life is not the only life that matters.
My common refrain…without the human race, I couldn’t care less about the planet Earth. The planet is here to serve us. There are many billions more planets. I am not a pig. I want to keep my planet clean. I love my fellow animals and have no interest in unnecessarily harming them. Humans must eat…they come first. Humans need energy to survive and advance. We must use the energy stored in our planet while we search for ways to create more. We do not know if climate change is a good thing or bad, but the climate has always changed and will continue to do so. These are simple statements. I believe them to be true.
No argument there.
I’ll press the hypothetical to say I would allow any number of human strangers to die to save my child but I would not murder any human strangers to save my child.
Just think what they’d do to save a polar bear! Why, they’d blight the land by carpeting it with wind turbines and turn off all the sources of cheap fossil fuels, making it expensive, if not completely out of reach without subsidies, for poor people to heat their homes and drive their cars. They’d drive the first-world into third-world subsistence living. All based on the notion that an unseen gas, naturally produced and consumed by living things was a pollutant….
Oh. Wait…
Let’s pick a more realistic target. 166 children were killed by dogs in the U.S. since 2005. Better start strangling now.
How many eagles is a polar bear worth?
The conservative view of climate change is to follow the science where it leads, not rig the science to make it fit a pre-cooked agenda. The science shows that human-caused global warming is a flawed hypothosis — not least because it has not warmed for 18 straight years.
3.46 at last market trade though the price does vary considerably throughout the year.
I refuse to believe that there is not an option where both the baby and the Polar Bears can be saved.
Sacrificing one for the other is not good in the “every” case (i.e. every Polar Bear must die to save one baby); however, if it were one to one, (kill the Polar Bear because he is attacking a baby) there is no question.
Hypothetical situations and hyperbole are annoying. No one wants to kill *all* Polar Bears or *all* babies.
As for (for lack of a better term than conservative) free market incentives for conservation – I would say make Polar Bear meat available for food and you will see an increase in the Polar Bear population…..
Perhaps knowing the baby’s name and his mother as a friend might help clarify your thinking.
The non-strawman argument–presuming a sincere belief that the AGW hypothesis is beyond doubt and that AGW is reversible by human action at this point–would be that what’s bad for the polar bears is also bad for us. I don’t think anyone’s seriously arguing that the polar bears or the minnows will suffer but humans will be better off. The argument is always that we’ll all perish in some extreme weather event, the polar bears just being–to mix zoological metaphors–the canaries in the coal mine.
The much-stronger conservative argument (to the extent that this argument has anything to do with conservatism) is that a) the AGW hypothesis isn’t as secure as advertised; that b) even if it is, we don’t really know for sure what we can do; and c) that these hypothetical risks need to be balanced against other hypothetical risks of great damage to the economy should we try to remedy a problem that we don’t fully understand.
KC Mulville
Quick answer: yes, he got it right. Obvious disclaimer: we don’t need to obliterate every species indiscriminately.
For those of us of a religious bent, we take the “stewardship” of the earth seriously. We are only part of God’s creation. We treat the entirety of life as a gift from God. To the degree possible, therefore, we’d like to preserve it. But if push comes to shove, and it’s between me and the cute, cuddly animal … tough crap for cutesy.
Does this help?
I think the underlying issue is clarity of outcome. Many conservationists are similar to many conservatives in that they don’t so much want more Polar Bears – they want some version of the “good old days” preserved forever. That is a pipe dream.
Diversity of species is a good thing – however – those who want “a moment in time preserved forever type conservation” will not buy into the idea of eating Polar Bear meat – even though their stated goal is increase polar bear population.
To confront people like these, then, the best approach is to ask them questions to figure out (for them as well as us) what they really want. Some will, upon examination, understand the folly of their thinking. Others will insist on the utopia of freezing time.
No. As John Kerry would say, Peter Robinson and his friend are “on the wrong side of history.”
The preservation of the delta smelt has led to over 81 billion gallons of water to flow to the sea, enough to return 85,000 acres of farmland back into production.
California is in a huge drought, but a portion of the loss in Lake Oroville is due to the fact that some of its volume came from water properly belonging to the smelt. Below is the lake in 2011, then in 2014.
Peter, I hope you can get over some of you hugely inappropriate speciesism! Besides, the people affected in the pictures above are mostly rich boating-class people who deserve to have the scale of their planetary rapaciousness reduced. Right?
Haha – and, yes, you can definitely make it a harder question by making it impossible. I think the best thing to do would be to just point out that it is impossible and then answer yes. Humans simply take priority, no matter what. I mean, would you do any of that to save a human baby with downs syndrome? I know what Richard Dawkins would answer. I agree with Jon that we occupy the fairly undeniable right side of that issue.
This week’s Ricochet essay contest: come up with a plausible scenario in which a baby child’s life is in peril simply because polar bears exist.
In all seriousness, such absurd “hypothetical scenario” situations were fun in high school ethics class but become strikingly irrelevant once one hits the real world.
Obviously Peter’s friend is trying to state a strong first principle: people come first – by a mile. Great, no argument here.
But the real-world nature vs. human situations will never be so cut and dry. So an animal species is less important than human life – but is it also less important than human vacation homes in the mountains? Or even more relevant: how many barrels of oil would need to be below Yosemite Valley or Shenandoah National Park to justify clearcutting them and drilling?
You could do it with a simple newspaper article:
“Churchill, Manitoba toddler Zachary Freckelbaum wandered away from his family home today, ending up at the local dump.”
The struggle I see is against interference with nature, not simply it’s destruction. I romanticize the late 19th century notion of man bending nature to his will–building dams, reversing rivers, etc. There were certainly excesses, but now it’s assumed among environmentalists that anything man does is harmful. We are Agent Smith’s virus, which is why the left is bent on population control. Instead of the sentient crown of all creation, we are just the most destructive animal.
Total special extinction is squandering a resource, but manipulating their numbers carries no moral dilemma.
A lot, but without “tough crap for cutesy” or “would personally kill every polar bear in existence with my bare hands.” Especially the latter. What an absurd pun. It’s agony, the situation, no matter how important we humans actually are (which is not the same as feeling that we are). I am a conservationist, not an environmentalist and so fall on the conservative/free market side of the climate change debate (Claire makes excellent points). But that doesn’t mean I get to sit in judgment of another being’s value to existence. And I certainly don’t think the earth is here just for our purposes. Egad!
If a baby were somehow being attacked by all polar bears at once, I would kill all the polar bears, if necessary, to save the baby. On the other hand, if I could somehow save a baby, but the method for saving the baby involved killing all polar bears, I probably would refrain from doing so.
Our actions our governed by absolute moral laws. If an action, like murder, is evil, you should never do it. But the consequences of our actions have to be weighed as economic decisions. I wouldn’t kill an innocent human to save the galaxy, but if a single person had a terminal disease that could be cured at the cost of a billion dollars, the cure wouldn’t be worth the money. With a billion dollars, you could build entire hospitals and cure many more people.
It’s possible the loss to the world of a single human would be worse than losing all polar bears forever, but it’s a judgement call. If you’re actively murdering the baby then it is not a judgement call.
Full disclosure: My Zoology grad student career was focused on mammals, so that’s my bias :) .
It’s also worth noting that attempting to kill all polar bears with one’s bare hands would lead to more human deaths (i.e., yours).
I’m glad I live in the real world, where there’s no plausible way for me to cure a disease by killing all polar bears. Reality is merciful in that really hard judgement calls don’t come up all that often.