3 days to save elephants

[miriam_e]

Elephants are highly intelligent and are one of the few animals that can recognise themselves in a mirror. They are social animals who experience great anguish when a member of their group is hurt or dies, they are known to make art, music, show compassion, and look after one another's young. Their long lifespan (they can live to more than 80 years) gives them extremely low birth rates and makes them very prone to extinction. In the wild, adult elephants have no natural enemies, except humans. We were wiping them off the face of the Earth until the international ban on ivory dried up most of the profit in killing them. Now Tanzania and Zambia want to lift the ban on ivory sales, which will open the channels for poachers again, even in countries that keep the ban.

Keep the ban on ivory.

We have a rapidly closing window of 3 days to make public opinion heard here.

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/no_more_bloody_ivory_gg/

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

That's an odd thing to say. Calm down, take a deep breath, and ease up on the coffee, perhaps. :)

The internet filter isn't an economic sanction. It is censoring of the many by the few -- the complete opposite of what I'd like to see. I'd like to see a minority of ivory traders be unable to encourage the murder of elephants. If sufficient people wanted to get the sale of ivory stopped then it would please me greatly. If insufficient people agreed with me I'd be okay with that. I wouldn't be happy that killing of elephants was still encouraged, but I have no desire to be an evil bastard and impose my will dictatorially upon the bulk of the population. Life's too short, and we already have a surplus of evil bastards. :)

The situation with the internet filter couldn't be more different. It is the cynical manipulation by politicians of a tiny minority of vocal religious zealots in an attempt to impose censorship on the majority. Even worse, it will not do what it is promoted as doing, but actually be used for other purposes entirely: to crack down on sharing, as well as isolating politically inconvenient views from the net.

It is perfectly valid to attempt to control things that genuinely hurt others. This is why machine guns, surface to air missiles, and anti-personnel mines are banned in Australia. Owners of machine guns might not have done anything wrong, but naturally you don't think it is reasonable to let them sell them. It is similar for ivory (though selling body parts of an intelligent creature doesn't look quite as scary as selling the weapons to do the actual slaughter). Sure, the person who has the ivory may well be innocent in a sense, but selling it still encourages murder of elephants -- an eventuality I'm sure you'd not want to foster. If blocking that sale saved lives then surely that is a good thing. Coins in the pocket of an ivory trader hardly compare to lives of intelligent creatures, do they?

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

It's not an odd thing to say. It's a principle. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about "minority" or "majority". Screwing people over doesn't become ok just because they are the minority (ivory owners) and isn't wrong just because they are the majority (those affected by internet filter).

I quite agree that, economically, guns are similar to ivory. And when the government made previously-legal guns illegal, they compensated owners by buying the guns back, just as (I believe) they should.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Absolute principles can blind us to practical realities. Absolute principles are what make fundamentalists so dangerously inflexible.

I still don't think compensating ivory sellers would be a sensible thing to do; it would undermine the intention. In this example the intention would be to send the price of ivory crashing through the floor and sparing the remaining elephants.

I actually don't think the government had an obligation to compensate gun owners in the big gun buy-back, but I do think it was the best way to achieve the objective of getting guns off the street.

And speaking of majority vs minority I'm sure you'd love (as I did) the confounding set of talks called "What's the Right Thing?" by Michael Sandel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY
You'll find yourself surprised by your own intuitions as to what is right. It had me laughing at myself. I love having my mind turned upside down the way he did.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

Absolute principles can blind us to practical realities. Absolute principles are what make fundamentalists so dangerously inflexible.

I agree with that, when the principles are not basic ones. For example, some people believe that government is better at running large public services, while others believe the opposite. I believe that the reality lies in between, because private competition makes some entities (e.g. banks, airlines) run better, while private competition in some areas (e.g. water supply, electricity supply) is a total waste of resources that doesn't provide anything.

However, there are some principles which are basic and should never be broken, which includes freedom of action, so long as you are not harming others. I can see the possibility of a community deciding that they wanted a nanny government to make our decisions for us, but I don't wish to be a part of such a society and would resist such in any way possible.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

Freedom is always a relative thing though, as my freedom to do things is always circumscribed by my neighbor's freedom to do conflicting things. That's where we have to take account of practical realities. I and my neighbor can tolerate some curtailment of our freedoms in order to obtain wider benefits. Such restrictions of freedoms are ideally voluntary, but in the case of intractable problems may need to be imposed upon some. Reality intrudes here too. Practicality means that the majority will usually win out over a minority (even if the majority is wrong). In cases where a minority succeed in imposing their will upon a majority it is easy to predict long-term instability developing.

I wish it was simple to divide life into clear-cut principles. The closest to a basic principle which I see as almost inviolable is the right to life. However even that is negotiable. I can imagine circumstances where my death might be of benefit to those I care about, or where the death of a dangerous person might be required for survival of others. And although I don't eat meat (unless it is impolite to refuse it), I recognise that others wish to kill animals for food. I don't even kill ants... though I do kill mosquitoes that attempt to sup upon my blood.

Sadly, few things are really basic.

In spite of that I still hold 3 rules as pretty-much central to my existence:

• enhance life
• help other people
• learn

They come from a simple understanding of what is important (for us) in the universe:

• we are alive, and the main purpose of life is to grow more life
• we are a social species, so looking after one another is necessary
• we are an intelligent species -- we must learn

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

My freedom to do things may be circumscribed by my neighbour's freedom to do conflicting things. There is no reason for freedom to be "relative" when there is no conflict. But one person's selling ivory doesn't not inherently affect anyone else's freedom. (If there is a poaching problem in another country, that is the problem that should be fixed.)

Practicality means that the majority will usually win out over a minority.

I'd suggest that's not "practicality", but subjugation. That's the way we get governments making laws against homosexuality, "unnatural" sexual acts, etc. Basing laws on what the majority does just unnecessarily restricts everyone's rights. My assertion is that outlawing any private interaction (whether it be sexual activity, prostitution, ivory collection, dangerous sports, or whatever) is ultimately bad for human self-determination. Even very dangerous activities, such as keeping of dangerous animals, can be allowed so long as there is a strict regulatory framework in place.

Without freedom, we are limited in our ability to do anything, including enhance life, help other people and learn.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. You limit "freedom" (as do most people) as applying only to humans. It used to only apply to white, adult males, but has now widened to people of any color, recently in many places to include females, and to some degree, children. It has also begun to include some animals. For me it is natural to include all highly intelligent beings. Elephants' freedom is definitely affected by the profitability of the market for their body parts.

In pointing out that reality means we must expect that the majority will often win over the minority I'm not saying I like it. As you say, it has from time to time produced abhorrent results. I'm just pointing out that this is how things work (and, incidentally, why we are unlikely to ever get a blanket ban on ivory). I've been enjoying James Suroweicki's amazing book "The Wisdom of Crowds" lately, which points to some possible ways to avoid just such glaring problems in democracy. I highly recommend it. (Want me to send it to you? Email me at mim at miriam-english dot org if you want me to send it. It's actually an audiobook.)

While I like to agree with your final point that our enjoyment of life is limited by our lack of freedom, that is surprisingly not the case. There are many situations where we can be much happier with reduced freedoms. This is a bit of a worry which I think we should all be very careful of because it can easily become a rationale for restricting freedom beyond what is practical into what is comfortable and then into what becomes draconian repression -- just an interesting side-issue to be aware of.

I'm in favor of maximising our freedoms and limiting how much we tread on the toes of others... even elephants' and other intelligent creatures'. The boundary for each person is where a lot of the problems in society occur.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Oops. Damn. I misspelled his name. It is James Surowiecki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Surowiecki).

Read about The Wisdom of Crowds on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds) and at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706). And listen to a talk by him that gives the gist of it at ITConversations (http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail468.html) (the audio is freely downloadable).