I haven't seen the most recent two series of Doctor Who, I lost interest after Christopher Ecleston made way for David Tennant.
But I think your point is a good one. Animals seeking to fulfill their biological needs are not necessarily functioning within the kind of moral framework which can determine the difference between good and evil, and even if they can it would not affect their choices. For example, there have been many human cultures who have cultivated the belief that eating human flesh is evil but even among those folks, in times of starvation and famine, there have been known cases of cannibalism. For the most part, history looks back on them with pity rather than thinking of them as evil, per se. (Did you know that Russian has two different words for "cannibalism"? One of them means "killing someone in order to eat them" and the other is "eating someone who has died from no fault of your own," in accordance with the Russian Orthodox Church, only the first one is a sin.)
Was the mother otter in this story evil? It's hard to say how. But she did inflict pain on another being, and her actions certainly don't hold with Kant's categorical imperative. If all pregnant fish were eaten then there would be no more fish and the entire ecosystem would be destroyed. This is not in the otter's interest.
Is it our ability to assess sustainable and unsustainable patterns of satisfying our biological needs what separates us as a specie? If so, we aren't particularly good at it.
The troubling thing about this passage, for me, is the idea that if we as humans can imagine a world better than the one God made, what does that say about God? And what does that say about us?
But I think your point is a good one. Animals seeking to fulfill their biological needs are not necessarily functioning within the kind of moral framework which can determine the difference between good and evil, and even if they can it would not affect their choices. For example, there have been many human cultures who have cultivated the belief that eating human flesh is evil but even among those folks, in times of starvation and famine, there have been known cases of cannibalism. For the most part, history looks back on them with pity rather than thinking of them as evil, per se. (Did you know that Russian has two different words for "cannibalism"? One of them means "killing someone in order to eat them" and the other is "eating someone who has died from no fault of your own," in accordance with the Russian Orthodox Church, only the first one is a sin.)
Was the mother otter in this story evil? It's hard to say how. But she did inflict pain on another being, and her actions certainly don't hold with Kant's categorical imperative. If all pregnant fish were eaten then there would be no more fish and the entire ecosystem would be destroyed. This is not in the otter's interest.
Is it our ability to assess sustainable and unsustainable patterns of satisfying our biological needs what separates us as a specie? If so, we aren't particularly good at it.
The troubling thing about this passage, for me, is the idea that if we as humans can imagine a world better than the one God made, what does that say about God? And what does that say about us?
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