Like I said, it was implied by Tmills27 and heavily implied by the article linked by him in the OP.
Is it possible for nature to be unbalanced?
Yes. When a volcano erupts it can cause chaos around it. Nature has a balance, there is this thing of equilibrium. We see it in physics too I guess. Vacuums get filled, gasses spread evenly around in a chamber.
Or is it our very specific habitat, a tiny subset of nature, upon which we depend on, the one that is unbalanced?
There is a meta-balance. On small scales there can be unbalance bat that will sort itself out over time. All the spots in the world where there is unbalance are countered by places where there is equilibrium. You can scale it up to the cosmos itself.
And what's so good about balance, and so wrong about not being in it? Is that a subjective value judgment or an objective probable fact?
A fact according to physics. But not just there. Humans strife for balance too. Well, smart humans. Humans in highly urbanized and culturally programmed cities may not strife for it because their indoctrination and cultural biases and programming and what not dictate we should seek happiness above all else, or money or...whatever.
Well those are your beliefs, but there are plenty of things that one could argue aren't best about "human nature". Groupthink, violence, jealousy, impulsiveness, promiscuity, deceitfulness... those are also natural tendencies, which are commonly categorized negatively as vices (negative values), though the judgment of said badness is a subjective moral choice, not a moral absolute arising from "nature" as you hold them to be.
Are they natural? If so, why? I gave an example, bu you do not correlate them to evolutionary concepts.
Let's discuss this example you bring of infanticide.
Culling of diseased and malformed and "unsocial" offspring is a behaviour expressed in a large number of species. Hell, some of them eat their young. It helps to conserve scarce resources, eliminate weakest links that endanger groups of pack animals, keeps harmful mutations from spreading, lets the dominant parents genes spread, etc.... It is smart for a species to kill its own offspring, in certain cases. Their genes make them kill their children. A value in a society that murders some of its kids is therefore in line with their genetic makeup.
What species do this then? Do these species have a sense of right and wrong? Or a sense of genetics? Why do dolphins sometimes rip apart a..child dolphin?
Do they observe resources are scarce? Is there a genetic system that can discern these shortages? What do they know of mutations?
Some mutations are very beneficial.
But your conclusion is scary. But could be true. Should we genetically remove Down Syndrome from our species? Should we euthanize such children?
I said before that our values float on energy, that we have created a world of economics and social structures that allows us to uphold advanced values and morals and have the resources to care for people with all sorts of disabilities and handicaps.
If nature is indeed best, certainly you must find this agreeable?
Or is nature only best sometimes? And what is your actual criteria of choice?
I think the distinction could be to remove our bias of norms and values and focus on direct links to the natural world.
In a sense it is agreeable that we should remove some genes from the genepool. But what is the justification?
First of all, we lack understanding of genes. Not too long ago, scientists considered most DNA was junk, literally, junk! Who knows what a Down Syndrome causing gene might help with along the evolutionary path?
It is is a temporal issue, that we with our 80 year lives and science can intervene so deeply in our own genome that the timescale of evolution seems so far beyond our grasp of time that it no longer means anything to us. We look back on millions of years and yet in less than 100 years we mapped our genome and all bets are off.
Even if we understand genetics well enough - and who would ever determine we do? - is there a need to remove Down Syndrome, when these people can live happy lives? Surely we would not cancel those genes out just because they cost more than they bring in as taxpayers and economical issues go?
These people serve a purpose if only to allow us to elevate ourselves to a higher value system: to care for them is to sacrifice, ask any parent. Our world palces demands and expectations on us that can collide with the need for parents to care for said kids and adults, cause they do grow up. It is a sacrifice becausethe government only spends so much on aid to those people, and yet for most parents this is a natural thing to do, no sacrifice at all when it is about giving love and care. Caring is natural.
But apart from that, I wonder to what extent we allow Down Syndromed people to live, because most of our values are based on cheap energy.
What is this notion that we have of a perfect race, without any syndromes or handicaps and ailments? It sounds like heaven.
But there are diseases that make a child live two years in great pain. In Belgium now they allow euthanasia on such children, to the outcry of many people. But I think it is fair, who wants a child to suffer in agony for two years? It makes me wonder what genes we ought to remove from the genepool then, these monsters who fight for the right to live but not the right to die? Such genes we don't need. Nature would bite the throat of such a child in mercy. On one hand we defy nature and sometimes our moral values get twisted and we demand pain and suffering because it is 'right'.
I want the genes removed that cause these children to be born. And if possible, the genes that create monsters out of people who would want to reject euthanasia of such children.
You finally brought this up, though continue to make the issue hard to discuss because when you speak of the natural you have attached a set of moral judgments to it that are not made explicit, merely assumed, and certainly not shared by others. It would be far more easy to discuss moral values of society directly without all this silly fuss about "natural" or "unnatural".
Where are these others? Speak only for yourself until we find these elusive people.
I see it as vital to connect values and morals to nature. Because nature is the best template we have, as we are part of it, despite our technology and culture building. If at all there is a moral compass or judgment system to go on, why would it not be nature? What else is there? How should we judge ourselves? Maybe if aliens come and tell us their principles...
Well, if we continue down this evolutionary line of discussion, can we say that for a given species approximating extinction is negative and expanding its population is positive (as long as it does not destroy its habitat in doing so)?
No, the world is overpopulated because we do not act in accordance with nature. In nature when a population rises, its resources dwindle and there is die off and equilibrium is restored.
But we hit the energy jackpot with oil. Energy is the basic underpinning of our lives and societies. This allows us to be in the world in such a way that we can uphold advanced value systems. And morals. It also means we can keep sick people alive and satisfy Maslow's pyramid, the lower scale of it at least, for part of our population, at least.
Positive here means equilibrium. We need to cull 50% of the world population. Your percentage may vary. We don't go kill 'em all, but we should impos restrictions on ourselves.
In my country we have had this moral outcry. There is a natural park with deer and wild horses. It is fenced off. No animal comes in or goes out, because basically we have an urban nation and these wildlife reserves are barely connectible. Too densely populated, see?
So a few years ago there was a shortage of food and on tv we see deer literally dying on camera. Outrage! Bad management! An illusion, this park, because there is no balance. The goal was to let nature run its course, but then people said how cruel! This is not nature, this is astupid experiment, a delusion of free wild nature. We have a task to manage it, kill off deer so the rest can live better lives.
We do not apply the same discussion to our own species.
Civilization clearly has made us safe from the large majority of predators and countless diseases, secured resources for our sustenance, expanding our life expectancies and chances of reproduction, as well as giving us more time to experience life in both its happiness and misery.
Urban life and modern civilization has its pros and cons, just like other ways of living. To presume a bucolic golden past is extremely naive in my opinion, and has little ground to stand on, since we don't have knowledge of how people felt in such a remote past.
But how do we not know? We can study the earliest beginnings of man. But are you saying that someone alive in the Amazonian basin today is unhappy by default?
Is the present era more stressful than a hunter gatherer era, worried about getting eaten by predators and bad weather and disease and daily search for sustenance? Is the present era more stressful than the punic wars? That the era of the black plague? Than the renaissance? The roaring 20s? The great depression? World war 2? It would be extremely hard to prove that human happiness has steadily declined, while stress has steadily increased throughout history, though there are other, like previously mentioned, factors that are possible to measure that reveal a largely positive side to urban living.
I think the whole question is silly. People take life as it is. A medieval person cannot consider a plane. You row with the oars you been given. With hindsight we can project the question onto these people, but that is not how it works.
Now this is the crux of the matter. You imply there actually is a "for" that consciousness requires, a goal it must reach, and a proper way to use it.
There has to be. If you use nature as a model. It shows us ways to act and behave.
These are all your personal beliefs (which is fine) but there might ultimately be no universal answer to the question "how to be in the world". I do not believe in deities or ulterior supranatural guidance, so it is my position that it wholly falls on an individual and collective moral choice humans have to make, what they think it is for, and how they think they should use it, how to be in the world. And I think that nature is inherently amoral, as well as technology, and that the real discussion of these issues (the moral state and future direction of civilization) does not center on them as neither the source of the problems, nor their solution, but merely side facts to be considered.
You keep saying that these are all personal beliefs, as if that makes the points I make questionable. Do you realize this? And yet, you give your "position", as if that is somehow not a belief.
But without a model to align ourselves to, what do we have?
