Anthropocentrism vs Biocentrism

Anthropocentrism is an extension of the basic respect for one's self and one's fellow Man.

Biocentrism is the placement of unthinking animals above your fellow Man.

It is not a coincidence that Anthropocentrists are capitalists. I.e. the people who make the products we all consume in order to go on living. And that the Biocentrists are the socialists and the communists and the fascists. I.e. the people who lobby for more regulation in every sphere of life, and promote general theft, and de-industrialization; The type of people who banned DDT in Africa because it might have some minor effect on the environment, thereby reintroducing malaria which had all but been eliminated.

Biocentrism, like socialism, places upon man the notion of original sin; The original sin of existence. They claim that man is evil in his nature, and therefore must spend his life atoning for this evil.

It is quite frankly the philosophy of non-existence.

 

It's not a correct conception to think the two things sit at opposite ends of a single spectrum. Anthropocentrism pertains to what is good for man and man's life. This includes a good environment, so far as environment affects man. This is why we eat greens, keep our yards free of wild animals, and live in insulated homes.

Biocentrism pertains to what is good for 'the environment' or 'gia'. I.e. the world as it would exist without man.

 

No.

You do not value your own life above animals?

 

How rank and vile; This is biocentrism.

What determines value?

If there are no humans to attribute value, then how can value exist?

Value presupposes the question: value to whom? What is the good in anything if there is no sentient mind to observe it. Why does it matter what structure reality possesses. What would the laws of physics care between a slaughterhouse of brimstone and a tropical oasis.

In a naive unthinking sense, perhaps.

In direct contradiction with the filth I just replied to.

I think you should, given that you attribute less value to man's life than you do to fucking trees.

 

Which?

Significant to WHOM? To whom???

No humans == no humans to assign value. There is no such thing as value without a human to attribute it to something in the first place.

So the first human being or other-world being you meet who is of greater nobility than you, you will subjugate yourself to?

I'm trying **painfully** to explain to you that values, morals, 'judgments of significance' require _two_ existents. The thing doing the judging, and the thing being judged. You cannot have just the thing being judged, it makes even less sense than science without scientists.

Valuable to whom?

If all life is equally valuable (to you), then why haven't you sacrificed yourself for any of those -- be they human or animal -- who are presently dying?

Things of perfectly equal value are exchanged without guilt, thought, or pain. That is the definition of equally valuable. If you have a chocolate bar and you value it equally to a newspaper, then you are perfectly indifferent to the exchange of the two. Were the cashier to give you the chocolate instead of the newspaper you would not raise a fuss, and the same applies visa versa.

So let us apply this to your evaluation of life. If all life is equal then you should not differentiate between the saving of your own life and the saving of someone else's life.

Is this what you mean, then?

Clearly, if this is what you call biology.

OK, where are your facts (to back the claims in bold above)? And even if these were the case, what of it?

I put it to you that it is a perfectly random occurrence that trees exist. And it is an equally random occurrence that humans breathe what trees produce. Life exists. Life exists via the exploitation of other life. It is called the food chain. It has no inherent value, other than that which you give it.

Were it the case that we were a race of sentient dung beetles, you would declare, in the same unthinking scientism, that "the horse is higher than manbeetle, because manbeetle requires the horse's dung to survive." When actually, this is simply the way manbeetle had evolved, and this fact is of no inherent value or importance outside of its truth value -- I.e. that understanding that "manbeetle requires dung to survive". How it gets that dung, and the value it attributes to all things, including its own life, is up to it.

Now were it also the case that humans could only get their oxygen from trees, and their sunlight from the sun, and so on and so forth, then it would still not follow that these things should be of higher value to man than man himself. For if they were of higher value, then man would be forced to kill himself that these things might exist without his interference. It is precisely because man values his own life over the lives of trees and other things that exist in a state of nature that he builds farms and structures of production, to promote that which is of the highest value to him: His own life and his family and his offspring.

Yes it is perfectly valid to be religiously fanatic about the preservation of one's own life. Perfectly valid because it is perfectly true, and perfectly within the nature of man.


I'll close with this statement:
Have you actually thought about this ... at all? Because I have given it significant thought. And if all you have to offer is prejudice, then we might as well skip to the end.
Incidentally, I am trying to help you, as I am trying to help everyone in this thread. You have been taught not to respect man, and therefore not to respect yourself. And yes, your life will be pointless precisely up until the point you assign it value, as is proper to one who assigns value.

Value is ultimately subjective -- requiring both a thing to evaluate and a thing to do the evaluation (yes things have objective attributes, but the valuation you assign to these attributes is solely up to you.)
You are a being capable of assigning value, you exist, and you think, and yet you have assigned no value to your life. Simply put: why?

 

I'll be the first to admit that I am not a particularly good writer. Sometimes I have my good moments though.

I think my entropic writing style comes partially from computer science (from technical writing) and partially from the pre-20th century [particularly philosophical and legal] books I read.

I am of the opinion that good English isn't taught anywhere anymore anyway; A bit like re-discovering the wheel, one must hammer it out until it works as desired.

 

See *this* is self respect.