That said, in a world of scarce resources and competition, tribalism and “team-thinking” are not bugs, but features, evolutionary tools for survival. From that lens, human supremacism isn’t a moral claim, but a pragmatic stance: of course we prioritize our own species. We are team human.
As for whether we're destroying the planet, it's a complex picture. I'd recommend False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg, it pushes back against overly apocalyptic assumptions and argues that while climate change is real and serious, we're not necessarily headed for collapse. Doesn't excuse inaction, but does complicate the narrative.
Ultimately, we are Team Earth. The scarce-mongering behind tribalist features does not bring pragmatism but rather sabotage.
Worth noting your hypocrisy too here. As a member of the human species who obviously participates in it and its complex technlogical sphere (you are after all using digital tools and the hardware they run on to comment about how terrible we are on HN), you're a direct beneficiery of background industrial processes that themselves kill all kinds of animals and plants every year, while you lecture people on things like slaughtering cows.
How is that arbitrary? It seems like one of the most clearly non-arbitrary delineations possible.
For what it's worth, IMO, humans have created seed banks and will be the only species to preserve and revive extinct species, so yeah, humans are more important.
That seems like a meaningless word salad. Human versus non-human is a clear, objective delineation with no randomness about it.
I'll take it one step further. The fact that your immune system prioritises you over the life of a single bacterium is no different to the Holocaust. Provocative, but it does make us realise that we're walking gas chambers who should take immunosuppressants immediately.
But besides, this is not the point. What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks to justify that we’re somehow a “disease” roaming the planet. As if a tapeworm that were to achieve total worldwide domination would stop and think “wait, I shouldn’t reproduce further because other creatures may suffer”. Same story with any other mammal.
The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species. Keeping the environment safe from us is extremely important, but undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species whose only virtue is being less successful at surviving than us is strange. With our own moral codes, no less.
Don’t worry, we’re correcting that in record time. Though it would have been nice to not destroy so many species along with us.
> To the point where as few as 1% of our species even needs to think about making food.
And the rest would just die, unable to find food, if left alone in the wilderness.
> What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks
The idea of exceptionalism is also human-developed, so as soon as you want to go that route no argument in this conversation matters.
> The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species.
Successful at good things and bad things. Including bad for us. You don’t really see other species developing whole profit industries to knowingly market and sell cancer on sticks, for example.
> undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species
That argument cuts both ways. It’s perfectly fair to say someone with your view is undermining the harm we cause and romanticising our achievements.
> being less successful at surviving
None of us can survive indefinitely under water, or in radiation, or in the vacuum of space. Yet we know of other species who do. Humans are exceptionally frail, considering. After we’re gone, other species will remain. We won’t be so impressive then.
The odds of continuing to be exceptional at survival are not looking great.
And compared to species that have been around for multiple geological ages, our survival time barely rates a mention.
The one thing we're truly exceptional at is influencing our own environment. The only creatures to have more of an impact were the cyanobacteria responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event, which literally transformed the Earth's atmosphere.
As for the disease line - we're supposed to be intelligent, and terraforming our home planet to make it more dangerous and less inhabitable when we know and understand we're doing this is not the most convincing proof of that claim.
And other species haven't been surviving on this planet any longer than us just because they didn't evolve significantly during that time while we did.
You do realise people are already dying of climate change, right? Not only directly from heat waves, but other natural disasters caused by the rapidly shifting climate.
We've wandered pretty much the entirety of the planet and made it to the moon. Nuclear weapons.
Controlling the scope of the conversation to exclude the counter-arguments, too, demonstrates the special place afforded humanity by the Creator.
In case it isn’t clear, I agree with you.
/Every/ other species that has /ever/ lived will cease to exist (at the latest, in a billion years or so).
Humans are the only ones (so far, anyway) that have any hope of surviving more than that.
That seems pretty exceptional to me :P
Disclaimer: the fact that we're exceptional doesn't mean we don't do dumb things and we shouldn't improve and do better.
"Will exist long after humanity" -> maybe, maybe not. If we're smart, capable and humble enough, we could, in principle, intentionally outlast them.
By "intentionally" I mean: we can design our future lightcone such that, by whichever measure you care to choose, there are still humans around. Yes, bacteria could be still around, but it won't be because they _chose_ to be around, it will be because it just so happened that the universe arranged itself in a way that they are still around.
By "in principle" I mean: if we spent enough resources, energy and smarts and built a civilization around this goal, we could plausibly (given the known laws of physics) do this. Whether we _will_ do it or destroy ourselves first any of the possible various means, is an open question.
Lineages of bacteria that exist today, here, will only keep existing in the _far_ future (billions of years from now, after the sun chars Earth and then spends its energy budget) if it just so happens that a panspermia event kicked some off our solar system and then they just so happen to find a suitable solar system to keep existing.
We can design our future, bacteria can't.
Even if I'm wrong, and it does survive _that_, then it eventually won't survive the sun spending its entire energy budget.
We're the only ones that could intentionally (as in, actively design our future lightcone) to survive that, so that makes us special in my book.
Choosing what traits one considers exceptional, will by definition select what species one considers exceptional. The average fish makes the most exceptional human look slow in the task of swimming. The average bird will sing a song way more complex than the best human singer. Sperm whales - and presumably other whales as well - have a complex language that rivals if not exceeds human language.
The term human exceptionalism - or a bit more provocative the human supremacist mindset - decides that humans are the most special and thus deserve to be treated differently than all the other life on earth. Killing billions of teenagers in an industrialized fashion is ok as long as it's just a cow.
I challenge you reader to ask yourself, is the arbitrary line of humans vs non humans more justified than the equally arbitrary line of white humans vs non white humans?