If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

by Justin Gregg

We can, and often do, use our human intellect to divine the secrets of the universe and generate philosophical theories predicated on the fragility and transience of life. But we also can, and often do, harness those secrets to wreak death and destruction, and twist those philosophies to justify our savagery.

There is no denying that death wisdom generates beautiful things that add value (and meaning) to the human condition. But it is precisely our faith in the importance of our cultural immortality projects and their absolute central role in our feelings of worth that brings out the worst in human behavior.

Morality, while not necessarily wholly arbitrary, is largely culturally determined.

maybe there exists a universal moral code that is part of the fabric of existence that our species alone has the mental tools to contemplate. These conclusions are natural outcroppings of our why specialist nature. Combine this line of inquiry with our death wisdom and you have the question of “why do you have to die?,” which is intimately tied to the problem of how we should behave while we’re alive in case it impacts what happens to us in the afterlife.

Being able to question why + knowing everyone will die leads to trying to understand WHY DEATH happens. This leads to the evolution of eschatology.

This example underscores the dark reality of the human moral capacity: We, as a species, can justify—on moral grounds—genocide. Not just cultural genocide, but the murder of entire populations and racial groups, including children.

Being able to justify an action or thought doesn't mean it won't cause more harm than good.

while same-sex attraction is not unique to humans, homophobia is.

The conclusion here is that humans, through our complex capacity for moral thinking, have taken something that does not constitute a normative problem for any other species and turned it into an issue for which we can justify marginalization, criminalization, execution, and even genocide.

There is simply no way to get inside the head of another creature and measure their experiences.

Lawns are a monoculture wasteland that are almost entirely useless as a habitat for wildlife.

Humans have an amazing ability to justify our actions even if there is evidence that there will be negative consequences in the future.

Prognostic myopia is the human capacity to think about and alter the future coupled with an inability to actually care all that much about what happens in the future.

our decisions are often the product of unseen emotions and heuristics in our minds, even if we are still consciously pondering a problem.

intelligence sometimes results in very stupid behavior.