The Future Of The World Depends On

It Would Be Nonsense To Say That It Was Not In The Interests Of A Stone To Be Kicked Along The Road...a Stone Has No Interests Because It Cannot Suffer. The Capacity For Suffering And Enjoyment Is, However, Not Only Necessary, But Also Sufficient For Us To Say That A Being Has Interests - At An Absolute Minimum, An Interest In Not Suffering. A Mouse, For Example, Does Have An Interest In Not Being Kicked Along The Road Because It Will Suffer If It Is.

People Tend To Care About Dogs Because They Generally Have More Experience With Dogs As Companions; But Other Animals Are As Capable Of Suffering As Dogs Are. Few People Feel Sympathy For Rats. Yet Rats Are Intelligent Animals, And There Can Be No Doubt That Rats Are Capable Of Suffering And Do Suffer From Countless Painful Experiments Performed On Them. If The Army Were To Stop Experiments On Dogs And Switch To Rats Instead, We Should Not Be Any Less Concerned.

The Hope Of Internet Anarchists Was That Repressive Governments Would Have Only Two Options: Accept The Internet With Its Limitless Possibilities Of Spreading Information, Or Restrict Internet Access To The Ruling Elite And Turn Your Back On The 21st Century, As North Korea Has Done.

With The Eventual Acceptance Of Darwin's Theory We Reach A Modern Understanding Of Nature, One Which Has Since Then Changed In Detail Rather Than In Fundamentals. Only Those Who Prefer Religious Faith To Beliefs Based On Reasoning And Evidence Can Still Maintain That The Human Species Is The Special Darling Of The Entire Universe, Or That Other Animals Were Created To Provide Us With Food, Or That We Have Divine Authority Over Them, And Divine Permission To Kill Them.

There Is An Obvious Evolutionary Explanation For The Scarcity Of Altruistic Saints: Without A Strong Predilection For Their Own Interests, Our Ancestors Would Have Been Unlikely To Survive, Reproduce, And Give Their Own Offspring A Chance Of Doing The Same. Now Conditions Have Changed And For Most Of Us, Surviving And Reproducing Isn't Such A Struggle But We Still Carry The Genes Of Our Ancestors And They Influence - Not Determine, But Influence - Our Behavior.