An objective measure of importance would, by definition, be independent of what I view as important. Everything is subjectively important. In nature, everything is important inasmuch as other things need to eat them. Flies are very important- lots of things eat them. It's also important that we keep flies out of our homes as they can be vectors for infection. From an evolutionary point of view, it's usually more efficient to swat the buggers and thus have more energy left over for sex then it is to chase them, catch them, and release them. There is no amount of swatting which will appreciably diminish the number of flies in the world: they have had to evolve a rather wasteful reproductive strategy because so many things eat them. There will always be extra flies.Existentialist1844 wrote: To a certain degree there is an objective measure of importance. But that would all depend on what you view as important-that is, what the end should be.
And everything survives by killing something else. Which requires a tremendous logical contortion if everything has a right to live. We can get away with avoiding contorted logic if we discard the rather useless notion that everything has a right to live.Yes, everything DOES have a right to live.
We kill flies to stay alive. We just don't eat them afterward- because doing so would sort of defeat our purpose in having killed them to keep them out of our food.Of course stuff dies. But there is a difference between something dying because of natural causes, or one animal killing another to stay alive, and the senseless killing of something without justification.
Oh, but you might say that birds, for instance, MUST kill flies in order to survive, while we have the option of not killing a particular fly. Bullshit, my friend. No bird ever starved to death by missing one fly. Every animal is able to choose not to kill another particular animal and still live. But if the other animals suffered from this bullshit ethical baggage and decided never to kill, we would quickly see things begin to go to shit. Life is all about death. Animals kill, and that includes us.
