PyramidHead
Contributor
A team of firefighters rush into a burning building to save an elderly lady. They get her to safety, but many of them die in the process. From a genetic standpoint, this is a massive waste of reproductive resources and they should have let the elderly woman burn to preserve the more valuable assets in the gonads of the firefighters.
The firefighters are duty bound to protect the lives, and to a lesser extent the property, of their community.
So what would be the explanation if it was just a bunch of random guys with no social duty to save people from burning buildings?
A less extreme example would be dedicating one's life to improving the welfare of non-human animals. This is done purely out of compassion for other sentient beings and does nothing to further the replication of one's own DNA, which would rather we use that energy to make stable copies of itself in other humans.
If we used all the energy and resources at our disposal to reproduce we would overpopulate the Earth and create misery and chaos for ourselves and our decendants.
True, but we are definitely not doing everything in our power to maximize the population of organisms that carry our genes. From a social engineering perspective, it could be done a lot more efficiently if we didn't worry about things like respecting the bodily autonomy of women of childbearing age. We have a lot of unused resources and plenty of room on the globe, enough to sustain maybe double our current numbers if we all hunkered down. Once we reached the maximum carrying capacity we could slow down and divert resources to colonizing other planets. From a genetic perspective this strategy would be fantastic.
I would argue that it is pointless and cruel. What is inherently valuable about there being more carriers of human DNA?
What's the actual purpose of prolonging the lifespan of our species, or any other, from a moral standpoint?