Are you a natural-born killer?
One of the major questions we face as the ecological emergency deepens is whether or not we humans are natural, in the same way that the rest of the biosphere is. If we are natural beings who evolved with everything else, why have we had such a hugely detrimental impact on that biosphere, which also happens to be our home?
This is worth asking because most other living organisms, according to the latest research we have, are recognisably co-evolutes: they (and we) evolve together, and to a large degree (with obvious caveats) in cooperation with one another. (This does not mean cheetahs do not chase antelope, just that when they get faster, so do their prey, and vice versa). Lynn Margulis calls this process of evolution as involving the cooperation of different organelles endosymbiosis.
If humans are natural, then they evolved along with everything else. Many evolutionary biologists, from Roberto Cazzolla Gatti to Janine Benyus, have shown that there are stages to evolution of biosystems that begin with pioneer species, which are less cooperative, more competitive, and shorter lived (think of fireweed in a freshly cleared area of what had been forest). These move on to more complex, dynamic and diverse systems which are more cooperative, and more long lived (like a rainforest). Human activity fits the first model better than the last although, of course, for humans we have the capacity to know this, and that makes things more complicated (Elizabeth Sahtouris has written extensively about this).
Some philosophers, including Richard Watson, metaphorically shrug at the inevitability of our demise:
Yet this jars: our predominant understanding of human choice is that we have a large degree of freedom in how we choose to live. What job we choose, what friends we associate with, the kinds of past-times we decide to pursue in our leisure time, whether or not we have children, whether or not, in a pandemic, we decide to accept lockdown requirements, whether or not we become fully aware of, and respond appropriately, to the ecological emergency. All these, we believe, are freedoms we can exercise. And yet the emergency deepens.
This prompts the question, do we really have no choice about our self-destructiveness, to the point of extinguishing civilization, and all the suffering that this entails?
“Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”
In philosophy, we can focus on the question of our freedom of choice through the prism of moral agency, that is, our ability to choose to do …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
