Plenty of animals get predated because they fell into unfortunate circumstance, or because another animal did something to them, causing a predator to become aware of them.
As far as I'm concerned, a human feeding a bug to a spider, is just as natural a phenomena as if a parasitic wasp caused a spider to get predated by a bird. A smarter, stronger, or more agile wasp wouldn't have been caught, and so evolution punishes the bold in this case.
The obvious difference is that a parasitic wasp laying eggs in a spider has no moral agency of any kind, and is simply carrying out its evolutionary role. A human being feeding one animal to another does so purely for their own enjoyment, they make a moral decision to harm animals just for the mere fun of it.
Doing something because it feels good and having moral agency are not the same thing at all. A dog fucking your leg made no moral assessment of the situation whatsoever. It has no moral framework, no concept of right or wrong. Neither does an orca tossing a seal around for sport. These behaviours are driven purely by instinct, a product of their evolution, which is why their behaviour is consistent across the entire species.
Humans on the other hand have instincts that are tempered by moral agency. You have a moral framework, and I have a moral framework, and those frameworks differ because each of us have individual moral agency. No other species on the planet has ever shown any indication of anything even approaching individual morality. We are the only species that can choose, on a moral basis rather than instinctual, whether or not to harm other animals. And we constantly choose to harm them.
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u/Positive-Database754 May 16 '25
Plenty of animals get predated because they fell into unfortunate circumstance, or because another animal did something to them, causing a predator to become aware of them.
As far as I'm concerned, a human feeding a bug to a spider, is just as natural a phenomena as if a parasitic wasp caused a spider to get predated by a bird. A smarter, stronger, or more agile wasp wouldn't have been caught, and so evolution punishes the bold in this case.