[hohloma]

You’re missing survivorship bias - nature didn’t just create these balanced ecosystems, it creates anything that goes, and things that don’t work out just die. Humans ruining earth for themselves is just as natural, just that we might die as result. But life won’t - it’s much more resilient than just one species. Or several.

[nwienert]

Following this line of logic you can justify anything. If I kill your entire family, that’s natural. Would you be ok with that?

I think if you accept at all that there is suffering and there is beauty, then you shouldn’t hide behind “everything’s natural” and instead try and have a backbone and stick up for something more.

[jjoonathan]

That's the point: naturalism can justify anything, and that makes it a poor guiding principle. As do many other things.

There are many natural things that are good. Clean air, unique little ecosystems like GP describes, endless variety -- and we should strive to respect and preserve those, but not because they are natural. Poor animals teeming with parasites, population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?), predators feasting on the organs of their prey while the prey is still alive. All these things are natural but not good and we should not seek to replicate them.

[vikramkr]

Why should I be "ok" with natural? Screw natural. Nature does a lot of terrible things. People dying in hurricanes or at the hands of murderers isn't OK because its "natural" - its just not OK. We have the intelligence to influence our environment (and that intelligence is also a result of nature). Trying to categorize natural vs unnatural (whatever that means) is a fools errand and not a productive one in my view, since my ethics aren't based on "it's ok because the volcano was natural"

[naptiem]

Well, from nature’s perspective, yes it is OK. Nature won’t put you in jail. However, do it on a wide scale (you start murdering billions to prove a point) then yes Nature cares and the survival of the species is thrown into jeopardy. As a person, no it’s not OK - acts that do more harm than good are agreed to (by choice) by most as illegal.

Comparing to aborting a human-monkey fetus, the question of is there more good than harm is new. In a scientific setting where few cases are performed and a lot of Nature’s rules are revealed to us, I think that is mostly good. Genetic editing expanded to a large scale can also, I think, be done in a good way (by editing genes to increase intelligence or removing genes to reduce disease). It can also be done in a harmful way - say, raising an army of clones or some nightmare scenario where the rich and wealthy raise super intelligent human children that rules and obsoletes the rest of humanity.

I argue though that those nightmare situations will happen anyway and that human society has always had huge swings in well-being and suffering, with the average standard of living growing.

I think trying to contain the research is useful only up to some point - tracking the research and labeling successes and failures (science) and opening these studies and results to all of humanity is I think ultimately helpful. Keeping some competitive advantage over competing nations or corporations is also helpful. The more we learn, the more we can identify and prevent misuse.

Last thing to point out is humanity, and nature, share in common that we grow by making a ton of mistakes. Whereas Nature learns by not dying entirely, humanity adds a method by learning by thinking - this seems to be faster.

If we apply sentience to Nature, perhaps we were allowed to live in the hopes that we’d help Nature survive the next astroid attack.

[ylyn]

It is natural.

That doesn't make it okay.