On Human Morality & The Rights of Nonhuman Animals

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"Life," or more specifically, the "life force," is generally thought of as an animating power or vital potency, the presence of which distinguishes members of the plant and animal kingdoms from inanimate objects.  The life force is not separable from – is in fact dependent upon – the internal ecology of a given organism:  its cells and tissues, roots and stems, organs and glands, etc.  In order for life to exist, the component parts of an organism's internal ecology must retain a state of functionality – or, at the very least, enough overall functionality must be maintained to keep the organism operational at its most basic level.  When the body's ecology becomes too severely damaged, by accident, disease, or the ravages of age, its organizational integrity breaks down, functionality is lost, and life ceases to exist.  Thus, by measure of the manner of its cessation, life is seen to be dependent on a substrate derived from the material realm.  Likewise, it may be concluded that this substrate is not imbued with the life force by some outside agency; rather, that force evolves from material factors which, having been organized in ever more complex ways, yield ever more specific results:  one of which is consciousness, and, in humans, consciousness as characterized by the process of self-reflection.

Ultimately, however, the body's ecology, and the "life force" which is sustained by it, is not self-sufficient, but is dependent on that ecology which exists external to the body:  i.e. the world of nature.  The world of nature constitutes the larger "body" of which any individual organism is but one part.  The human organism for instance takes in oxygen and expels carbon dioxide; ingests food and water, then rids itself of solid and liquid waste matter; etc, etc; and in so doing demonstrates how constant and fundamental is the interplay which exists between each individual and its surrounding environment.  Because each individual's bodily ecology and that ecology which lies external to it are so profoundly intertwined, to speak of life properly one must speak of a totality of ecologies.  As with the case of an individual organism's internal ecology, the functioning of this larger ecology is dependent on the overall health of its individual parts.  As with the internal ecology of an individual organism, the decay or death of one small and relatively insignificant member of that ecology need not necessarily be a matter of much concern.  So it is that, with regard the larger ecology of nature, the death of one individual organism will in almost all cases be of minor significance, or no significance at all.

This is a difficult concept for humans to accept.  Having achieved the ability to conceive of self in the abstract, humans tend to assume the existence of a transcendent self.  This erroneous conclusion is reached when consciousness, as epitomized by the capacity for self-reflection, is taken to imply the presence of something supra-human – a self existing above and beyond that which has material causality.  This supra-human projection of the self, extended to the larger ecology from which the human organism is derived, and with which it is inextricably intertwined, is then conceived of as being not only greater than the individual self, but as being greater than all human selves, and indeed greater even than nature.  Thus is born the concept of a god or gods.

Here then we come to the source of the feeling humans sometimes have that life "owes" them something, whether that be happiness, justice, pleasure, freedom from unbearable hardship, physical well-being, or whatever.  Humans tend to feel that something exists above and beyond the material plane, which thereby supersedes those laws which govern the material plane; it is to this supra-human something that we direct our appeal.  Even as we do this, however, we intuitively perceive that the cause of that supra-human "something," having its origin wholly within ourselves, is inherently limited; thus we are tossed back and forth between doubt and belief, suspicion and hope, the condemnation of sin and the desire for salvation, etc, etc.  The only way out of this impasse is to recognize that no supra-human power exists, and to accept as fundamental to our nature the principle of material causality.  Being born of material causes and subject to material laws, it cannot rightly be said that life "owes" us anything; or at least, it owes us nothing beyond that which can be defined by – and is thus limited to – that field of physical constructs to which we are by nature bound.