🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm glad to see that my remarks on "fainess and justice" have provoked
some interesting discussion. However, in my opinion the discussion is
becoming focused a side issue, namely whether other species have any
notions of "fairness and justice."

Historically, human notions of fairness and justice arose out of reciprocal
altruism and so there is an automatic tendency to feel that if other
species cannot reciprocate in the same way that humans do, they cannot be
part of our ethical sphere. But it is possible that what needs to be
expanded is just what we count as reciprocation, accepting e.g. the
shade and climatic moderation of the tree as sufficient "reciprocation",
without demanding that it articulate its powers in hominid hoots. We
may have to learn to look a little more deeply for our "reciprocation".

JONATHAN HASKETT wrote:

>Fairness and justice are strictly human concepts,

Certainly they are, but it doesn't follow from that that the concepts
can only be *applied* to humans.

>which can have meaning *only* in a human social context.

But the question is -- what *is* a "human social context"? Does it
include only other humans or can it include our nonhuman kin and the
natural environment as well? Is the social context "man apart" from
nature or should it be Aldo Leopold's "land community"? To point out
that as a matter of historical fact it is currently restricted to
"man apart" would be beside the point; the social community of nineteenth
century southern plantation owners didn't include their slaves either,
but that changed. Perhaps our eternal verities can also change. Perhaps
they never were eternal verities at all, but an aberration of an expansive
civilization.

>To the extant that wilderness and other
>species exist outside the human context, these concepts do not apply to
>them. Just as it is impossible for other species which exist outside the
>human context to have rights.

I see no such impossibility, and arguably the Endangered Species Act already
grants some "rights" to some other species. Whether other species or whole
ecosystems have "rights" is a matter of social decision, to be sure -- but
that is all that *human* "rights" are, despite the quasi-religious mythology
we wrap around them.

>"Fair share" is a biologically meaningless
>concept. Prior to the formation of the land bridge which is now Central
>America a whole diverse fauna of marsupials existed in South America.
>Once the land bridge was open species arriving from the north were
>notably successful at driving them to extinction. Was this fair or just?

But we were discussing a question of what is ethically good behavior for
humans today and tomorrow, not what has happened in the past. If there is
truly as complete an autonomy of ethics from nature as Hasket apparantly
thinks there is, then is no reason why humans should be ethically limited
by the behavior of nature in decisions about the meaning of "fairness
and justice": that argument devours itself. But to argue from the occurrence
of mass extinctions in the past to the view that humans cannot extend fair
treatment to other kinds of life under our control of earth's resources is
rather like arguing that past mass atrocities in human history prove that
the notion of human rights is inapplicable to humans. Fairness and justice
for humans include a resolve that such atrocities are impermissible and that
we shall act to prevent them. Fairness and justice for other life is no
different: it is a declaration that mass extinctions are not permissable
and that we shall act to prevent them.

It's a resolve about what kind of life *WE* are to be, not what kind of
life others are to be. Thus the inability of bears to argue constitutional
law like a Justice Bork is beside the point.


Alan McGowen