Originally Posted by Purandara88
It's not popular, but you have to look at things holistically. Human life at the individual level is a meaningless thing. The species matters. Cultures matter, but people individually? Not very much. When weighed against the future, what do a percentage of the lives of the present really amount to? Again, not very much.
You're not going to live to see the survival or destruction of mankind, so why do you give a damn?
Originally Posted by Purandara88
Here's what I think. If you've got people dying of famine, or fighting a bloody war over water and food, or a massive pandemic, that's a message from nature, and the message is, "There are too many people living here, it's time to thin the herd." The problem of pity is structurally akin to the problem we frequently face with wildfires; misplaced altruism now frequently means the coming disaster is made worse by several orders of magnitude. Technological society can temporarily sustain far more lives than could ever be sustained in the past (and 'temporary' could be quite a long time), but entropy being what it is, all it does is delay the big die off, and ensure that it will be more catastrophic when it DOES come.
As you say, thermodynamics tell us that the extinction of the human race is inevitable (from a materialist's point of view, at least). You use this to demonstrate that we must allow some people to die and suffer now. Why? To ensure the survival of a species that you admit is doomed to suffer one way or the other. You claim that, unless we discard our pity and euthanize now, the suffering will be "more catastrophic when it DOES come."
But if the minimization of suffering is the ultimate goal, advocating that the species survive in the first place is counterproductive. The only way to avoid it is to preemptively kill ourselves before the "big die off." Any argument based on the prevention of suffering is self-contradictory.
I see little more in your worldview than a mangled web of motivationless goals. Survival for its own sake, and the sacredness of the collective without any regard for an individual's humanity. A level of respect for "nature," but apparently no regard for the self-evident truths our own nature screams at us when topics like eugenics are discussed.