Nit: The inalienable rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence. None of those things are broadly recognized as rights in the Constitution. I have been unable to determine to what extent referencing the Declaration of Independence is permissible in questions related to constitutional law. I'm inclined to believe that it depends on the party involved. (Scalia certainly objects to Declaration of Independence having legal sway [1]. Surprisingly to me, Clarence Thomas goes the other way [2].)
I stand corrected, but in any case, the very founding of the country was, in stark contrast to basically every country on Earth that had ever existed to that point, declaring that the "pursuit of happiness" is of utmost importance.
That says something about what America was striving to be, and comments like the one that sparked this thread show how absurdly far from that goal America has slid.
Gross Domestic Happiness is enhanced by caring about things beyond human flourishing for many people. Many people care about the environment. GDH was in fact invented precisely to capture dimensions beyond that of human material improvement (more dams, more houses, etc.)
A clean environment is a luxury good most people didn't even know they wanted until economies advanced enough to make them an option. To see a present-day version of this difference, one need only look at China. That's how Americans viewed the environment before WWII.
If you watch the evolution of, say, the Sierra Club, its focus has shifted to reflect the changes in values over time It's very interesting. One of the really fun! things about Micheal Crichton's "State of Fear" is his curmudgeonly way of bringing out the denial of the nearly axiomatic assumption these days of environmental purity being a path to happiness.
You're confusing "didn't even know they wanted" with "took for granted". In the pre-industrial era with much lower populations, human-sourced massive environmental pollution wasn't common. Many people didn't even realize it was possible. Everyone wanted and most people had clean environments and only learned to make it an issue when the clean environments started to disappear in places.
John Adams and others much like him thought cities were just dens of iniquity and filth. Since he lost a son to drink, it's no small wonder. You can only imagine the filth, crime and degradation of those places then.
Even before the Romantics, people like Jefferson considered networks of small freeholders the only sustainable way to have people live.
No. "Didn't know they wanted." There has been a protracted and concerted propaganda effort to change consciousness about this subject. What makes a Theodore Roosevelt exceptional is that he listened to John Muir decades before that kind of thinking was commonplace.
I think there was a long span of time where you could set rivers on fire, cut the air in cities with a knife and become sickened or killed by drinking water from a pubic well. The Thames was a severe, dangerous public nuisance in the time of Samuel Pepys ( who happened to write about it ).
This became a "thing" only since WWII.
People used open-belt farm machinery. 90% of electrical linemen died on the job. You could buy machine guns at paint stores, or by mail. "Safety" as a discipline is quite recent. Environmentalism is even more recent. My Dad worked for a Bell company and was decades ahead of the general flow of safety, and we picked up our trash as we left campsites, when most didn't.
Of course the Boy Scouts had this as a practice, but it was otherwise not mainstream.
"The past is a different country; they did things differently there." - L.P. Hartley.
From my comment: "… pre-industrial … most people …" etc.
There's been probably as much or more protracted and concerted propaganda from industrialists (who have more wealth and power to spread their messages) as the environmental sort.
You're just fantasizing if you think there have been large populations of people who lived next to rivers on fire and horribly polluted air and water and litter and yet "didn't know they wanted" a clean environment. They may not have had the political terminology to talk about it, but basically nobody likes living in trash.
The whole failure of large populations not to pick up their litter etc. makes complete sense to anyone who understands social-psychology, game theory etc. It's in no sense evidence that people liked living with litter or didn't want an unlittered environment.
The environmental movement correlates strongly with the increasing amount of pollution and other environmental issues in the world. This is not arbitrary coincidence. It also involves things like increased understanding of the impacts of pollution from advances in scientific knowledge.
The fact that people lived close enough to observe rivers on fire might imply that they were willing to put up with it, for "progress" or "jobs." I don't think anybody lived right next to them.
Zappa lays claim[1] to the first use of the word "pollution" in any popular ( meaning non-academic ) media, by virtue of a song title, "Nine Types of Industrial Pollution." That's from 1969.
[1] no doubt erroneously - he just meant in his personal light cone.
I am actually saying - people can get used to anything, including living in trash. People went for centuries without bathing. My ( born around 1900 ) grandparents were once-a-week bathers. You're projecting the mores of the present on people who lived in the past - presentism, IMO.
We also have a heck of a lot more trash than people used to. They'd use fire barrels and dig middens to dispose of trash of they could. Trash trucks are also relatively recent. Obviously, those in concrete cities could not do that necessarily.
Of course people are adaptable and get used to whatever. Once-a-week bathing is not a big deal at all. I hope you didn't intend to equate that with poisoned rivers. There's even lots of evidence that without bathing people maintain a healthier and less smelly bacteria population than happens with a regular bather who then has a bath-hiatus. There are even products now to promote a healthy probiotic skin culture and stop bathing…
Of course there's relativity here. People who never had clean water won't complain about it the way those who had it and then saw it poisoned will. What's relevant is the change that the industrial revolution brought — including the WEALTH it brought that allowed people to be more secure and start caring about environmental issues since fewer of us worried about whether we would eat or whether we'd die of polio etc.
My point isn't that there's no environmental propaganda or that things things aren't complex. The point is that the environmental movement is based on real on-the-ground issues that were going to come up because of the issues. It's quite unreasonable to describe it as though it's just some sort of manufactured concern.
Good points, but be careful to understand that there is a difference between environmental problems that are "tangible" or directly affect our everyday experience, and environmental problems that are "abstract" or refer to imperceptible hazards or hazards predicted in the future.
When we're talking about the early days of environmental awareness, those problems with coal smoke, industrial smog, and dangerous infrastructure all fall into the first category. The push to break dependence on non-renewable energy falls into the second category (except where using non-renewable energy also has a perceptible effect on air quality).
Eudaimonia is more like "ethics for virtuous and stable society" rather than saying very much about human relationship with the ecosystem. in the ancient world the human relationship with the ecosystem was extremely different than it is now.
Right, but the core principle underlying all that is that human happiness is a good in and of itself, and a virtuous and stable society is good only in that it allows for the greatest potential growth of human happiness.
If your grandkids are less happy because you destroyed the environment in order to increase your happiness is that a negative or a positive in this philosophical framework?
it was unthinkable in the original Aristotelean framework. They had no notion of being capable of destroying the environment in the way that we can now.
I don't think that's true at all. They could have easily over-fished, exhausted the land through improper farming, or cut down all the trees in a particular area. And they had a very good idea that they could do this and screw over future generations.
I don’t think that model takes ignorance into account. You would be unhappy if you knew you were doing a disservice to future generations, but you might accidentally do something stupid that screws things up for generations to come.
Well I'd much rather have Advancement over Happiness. We can be happy our entire lives but if everyones dies before 100 and humanity never goes anywhere I wouldn't consider that a successful society. Happiness is masturbating 24/7 until you die. If you truly believe that is the goal of humanity I can't help but disagree.
I guess I'm coming from the wrong side. I think happiness for its own sake is really meaningless. I'd much rather struggle and advance than be happy doing nothing until I die, but I guess I'm in the minority. Happiness, to me, is a choice to not let negative things make you unhappy. You can acknowledge negativities and not be consumed by them.
Fighting for happiness is like fighting for peace. You win by not fighting anymore.
I'm sorry if this opinion somehow reads like satire.
I would argue advancement ultimately begets happiness, eg, you cure cancer, you save lives, which makes those lives, and the lives that love them, happy.
If the advancement does not serve a purpose that brings happiness, what's the point of advancing?
well, that's not what you said. you said "Advancement over Happiness". I think most people would agree with "to be happy, don't struggle for it, just be".
Your original post, the one that seemed satirical to me, sounded like it was endorsing some notion of material accumulation at the expense of human fulfillment.
I didn't get the impression that Advancement == material accumulation. Advancement could be making the world better, gaining knowledge, or maybe advancement to a depressed person is finding happiness. Pretty broad meaning. But the same could be said for happiness. Some people find happiness in gaining knowledge.
Oh, yeah I didn't mean it to sound that way. In that context I'd say that I believe that moving humanity forward provides more fulfillment than just being happy.
that's just it, ask 100 people what "advancement" and "Moving Humanity forward" and you'd likely get 100 different definitions. Same goes for hapiness.
I read it as totally sincere show of support for continuous technological advancement. My belief is that ultimately humanity will take full control of their existence. Science & technology is what will lead us there.
Alex Epstien, who is widely despised, has written, in The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels that to withhold cheap abundant energy, and the technology it enables, from the world's emerging populations is immoral and fundamentally anti-human. Supported by people who think this Earth would be a much better place if Man never set his filthy foot upon it.
If you'd like a more nuanced version of that argument, I'd suggest Vaclav Smil, who's written at length on the topic of humans' interactions with the environment. I'm wrapping up his Energy and World History right now, which makes a similar case that fossil fuels have tremendously improved quality of life ... for a small fraction of humans currently alive. The impacts for others range from markedly less to net negative. The larger problem is that the situation isn't long-term tenable -- it will last so long as those fossil-fuel sources are cheap and abundant, and the sinks for their and associated effluvia are capable of absorbing insult without returning injury. Neither condition can be reasonably argued. (Yes, Epstein argues for both, he's not reasonable, and incapable of credible reasoned thought.)
The ultimate problem with Epstein's argument is that, in the face of limits to growth, the lives made possible through increased fossil fuels will only add to the deaths and suffering removal of that energy subsidy will result in.
Yes, overpopulation and overconsumption are problems. Systemic dynamics make addressing this exceptionally challenging.
I have second-order Facebook contacts who are overt environmentalists. Some of them are self-consistent enough to actually admit that they think human population level is the root of all these problems. That is in itself probably true, but I can't quite be hypocritical enough to attack a phenomenon that supports my very existence.
To that:
"There are too many people."
"You first."
But they don't have good operating knowledge of population dynamics and current birth rates. It's rather that they bought prior exponential analyses of exponential human population growth and never fully discarded it. They also appear to know that fossil fuels are a part of this phenomenon.
theres also religious folks who believe the earth was created specifically for humans, and so everything here is for us and us alone.
I find it a rather disgustingly self centered ideology. To presume that one (or ones species) is the most important thing in the world (or universe) is basically the definition of narcissism
> To presume that one (or ones species) is the most important thing in the world (or universe) is basically the definition of narcissism
Humans are the most important things in the world. Why? Because I am a human. My family are humans. To me, and likely most people, humans are most important.
If I were an Otter and capable of self reflection I would likely think Otters were the most important things in the world.
Now this absolutely does not mean I don't value Otters. In fact I do. Otters are awesome! Just because I feel humans are the most important thing doesn't preclude me from having compassion to help other creatures. It's simply an order in which you find things important.
You've essentially manufactured a belief here (parent believes humans are most important therefore all others are in the way), projected it onto the parent and then became outraged by it.
> You've essentially manufactured a belief here (parent believes humans are most important therefore all others are in the way), projected it onto the parent and then became outraged by it.
> I said nothing about what the parent believes, i said that there are religious groups that have an ideology i find narcissistic at best.
So you brought up a point that is unrelated to parent's about what people who belong to a religion believe in? I...should that even be in this thread? I don't get it unless you're actually replying to the parent above you.
> Thats a significantly stronger statement than you allude to
It's not though. They didn't say to bulldoze all the things. Why wouldn't humans flourishing and having happiness be a goal to hit? I can't think of a single thing that we do, when we interact with nature, that doesn't affect the environment in at least some fashion. It's all about balances. If you can add a dam, reducing carbon emissions from other power sources, but it displaces animals within X square miles that needs to be understood. It may be very worth it. It may not it.
What I got from your comment was that the parent poster was bad and that you think most people are bad because they find themselves most important.
Im not sure if english is your first language, but my response makes perfect sense to who i replied to, and we are discussing a comment by the grand parent.
> Why wouldn't humans flourishing and having happiness be a goal to hit?
you are /immediately/ softening the language - how do you not see yourself doing this?
now its gone from 'the whole point of existence' to 'should be a goal to hit' I'm not even going to read the rest, because youre flat out being dishonest here.
> Im not sure if english is your first language, but my response makes perfect sense to who i replied to, and we are discussing a comment by the grand parent.
I really don't enjoy the passive aggressive insults here. I provided criticism to your comment because, to me, it sounded wildly off base. If you want to ignore that then that's fine but don't say it makes "perfect sense" when obviously it didn't if we're not on the same page.
> now its gone from 'the whole point of existence' to 'should be a goal to hit' I'm not even going to read the rest, because youre flat out being dishonest here.
The initial language wasn't "hard" in the first place as I already explained. I told you it wasn't as huge as you made it out to be and your response is I'm making it soft...then I guess? In the context of your understanding of it I am but I still think you're making a giant crater out of a little ant hill here.
>The initial language wasn't "hard" in the first place
Right, literally claiming to know the meaning of existence - totally an interpretable statement.
My qualm was never that someone would put humans needs before animals, but that that should be the only consideration made is extreme - that its the very nature of existence to do so is beyond extreme.
Your responses are all combative and (from my perspective) seemingly off base; meaning I have difficulty parsing your intended meaning from your statements.
He/she's trying to have a discussion and you're trying to win an argument.
>My qualm was never that someone would put humans needs before animals, but that that should be the only consideration made is extreme - that its the very nature of existence to do so is beyond extreme.
If your initial comment had been solely about 'that religion that thinks the world is solely for us and us alone', that would make some kind of sense, but given the following statement(from the same comment) I didn't interpret it that way.
>To presume that one (or ones species) is the most important thing in the world (or universe) is basically the definition of narcissism
^this is the sentence that people were responding to.^
On this point I also agree with other commenters; narcissism is excessive interest in oneself, not in one's species. I don't think it's narcissistic to say your species is more important than any other, especially given the dearth of evidence to back that assertion up(in this case).
I think it's definitely interesting that we as a species have been so successful that members of this species are quite literally advocating for it's demise.
We all have to build up our own framework of morality. If your framework says to save the animals at the expense of humanities advancement that's fine, but you won't have much company and from my perspective you're not a 'better person' for having done so. (I also don't think the people espousing this "humans are evil" narrative would _actually_ save more animals)
Replace "humans" with "white people" in your post, and you'll get a sense of how silly your beliefs seem to me. Not to say my beliefs are more right than yours -- to each his/her own.
I'd personally agree with the view that small, simple life-forms which prey on humanity -- or on other large, complex organisms -- can be destroyed with impunity.
The Green Party's original manifesto rejected this view; their position has some logical consistency, but I don't think that the continued existence of smallpox and rinderpest, or Guinea worms, or mosquitoes (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html), or Dutch elm disease (which doesn't really harm humans, but elm trees certainly suffer), is worth the suffering and premature death they cause.
So, I guess I could reduce my position to saying that if a species can only exist by causing harm or premature death to something more biologically complex than itself, it shouldn't exist. Do you think that this is reasonable?
I'd add two corollaries: that predation is natural enough that we shouldn't kill all predators; and that a species should only be wiped out if it has to cause this sort of harm in order to live -- if it's parasitic or infectious, or possibly (as with mosquitoes) if it's an extremely serious disease-carrier. And I'm not at all interested in driving mostly-harmless species to extinction for purely economic benefits...
Many would call my answer ("not sure") to the original question monstrous. It's all very subjective. That was my initial point. We all draw the line differently. And no one can claim to be right.
The consequence is you've destroyed a species and set a precedent and for what? One life?
While human life should be preserved whenever possible, there are situations where you must realize that human life is, from the perspective of our role as planetary stewards, cheap and disposable.
Sacrificing some lab animals, even thousands, to cure some obscure but crippling disease that affects a handful of people could be justified.
Wiping out an entire species to save a single person is atrocious, and completely insane.
If you're prepared to wipe out, say, otters to save one person then what's next? Elephants for another? What if it takes two or three species to save someone else. At what point do you stop?
Like would it be acceptable to kill all non-human life to save a single life? There must be some kind of line.
The "no consequence to humans" part is hugely subjective, but a case could be made that we're worse off than our ancestors because of how many species we've obliterated.
It is highly subjective but of utmost importance. Let's say X species of hamster gives no benefit except diversity and there is plenty of hamster species. And let's say wiping it saves 1 person. You would need to consider if this species brings enough hapiness to human to warrant one death.
What I'm trying to say is (like the parents I believe) that the only thing affecting my judgement is humans qnd what the action does to them.
It's still not worth doing. That precedent of removing a species completely starts the ball rolling.
Shit happens, sometimes people die, and while it's unfortunate, it doesn't give us the license to turn one potential death into the extinction of an entire form of life.
Let's turn this around: What if some powerful alien life form had one of their citizens dying but they realized they could cure that individual by harvesting one planet worth of organisms. Given there's billions and billions of planets with life on them, what's the harm in killing Earth to save one of their own, right?
I dont believe we (or aliens) require license for anything that has a net benefit for us/them. It seems morally acceptable (it would, imo, be morally unacceptable to hold animal life higher than the human's, except if they actually provided more value).
If the OP answers it is anecdotal of course, but I'll point out that there's a whole field of bio-economics that tries to find survey/public answers to these questions for the purpose of making policies. And the result is laws such as the Endangered Species Act which dictates how far society thinks you should go in this direction.
Atheism is the lack of a religious ideology. It’s strange to assign an ideology to a group of people simply because they reject all religious ideologies.
Our brains seek patterns in coincidences. It's evolutionary! We can't stop seeking causal explanations in things that we experience.
Nothing is a gift. Life is not fair. Universe doesn't care about us. :)
I find the awareness that the Earth is the only place on which humans, let alone modern civilisation, is likely to be able to exist and thrive, to well within the likely timeframe in which we might well eliminate some or all of that capability (say, the next 10, 100, or 1,000 years) makes for far more nuanced consideration.
What humans do to this world in the immediate now will have profound implications to what humans will be able to do anywhere, in any possible future.
We hardly have enough data to say that. In fact we've found nothing remotely similar to Earth in all the thousands of samples we've taken. So if there are any others at all, they number in the dozens?
Estimates say there are ~100 billion planets in the galaxy.
I'm also not sure that In fact we've found nothing remotely similar to Earth in all the thousands of samples we've taken. is reasonable.
Take Proxima b. It orbits the Sun's closest neighbor, is in the habitable zone (doesn't mean it is habitable, necessary but not sufficient) and is roughly earth sized. Sure, we don't know a whole lot more about it, so it is quite likely to not be a nice destination for humans, but it seems to be at least remotely Earth like.
No, he really didn't - he said specifically, "So many, many things can be wrong and make a planet uninhabitable".
What if Proxima B has chlorine in its atmosphere? Uninhabitable.
Proxima B is a tidal-locked eyeball planet - what if the equatorial stable zone still shifts enough to not provide a stable environment for life? Uninhabitable.
What if Proxima B encounters too much ionizing radiation? Uninhabitable.
You've managed to ignore the sentence in the post that I did reply to. You know, the other one.
You've also apparently not payed much attention to Sure, we don't know a whole lot more about it, so it is quite likely to not be a nice destination for humans, but it seems to be at least remotely Earth like. that I said above (surely my making that statement implies some use of my imagination prior to your suggesting it).
I think we're all on the same page here. Just because something is in a fortuitous orbit, there are still a thousand things that can make it miserable or uninhabitable. Even earth, aeons ago, we would have found uninhabitable. Its very likely we have evolved for exactly the earth we have. To find another anything like it is astronomically unlikely.
This whole thread is quite a bit tangential to the fact that Earth is the only habitat planet we can actually get to, and will remain so baring a significant change in technology. Rockets won't get us elsewhere.
A closer truth might be that life can only happen on a habitable planet so it's not really a coincidence or 'gift', just the way it must be if life is to exist.
Consider that the galaxy is 100,000 light years across so even if there are a couple of other habitable planets out there, we aren't likely to get there for millennia.
Without invoking abuses of either relativity or the rocket equation, current physical understanding more-or-less limits us to long-term 'generation ships'. There is some potential argument about cryogenic freezing/revival, but it may be more accurate to talk about human-descended life forms walking on exoplanets rather than homo sapiens sapiens per se.
This argument is flawed. If there's a gift, there must have been a giver, so why don't we ask the giver? Well the Christians already have, and they like the answer they got. Why don't you like it?
Well, im not the one who used the phrase gift, so this isnt the appropriate place to nitpick that.
Other than, 'some other group of humans told me this' what evidence do you have that the earth should be the birthright of humans more than that of any other thing on earth?
It's self-evident to me, but you might suspect I'm biased, being human and all. (Is this the right context in which to assume that everyone on the internet is a dog?) When the martians come to take the planet away from us, I'll volunteer for the Resistance.
A book I read earlier this year really bent my brain when it included characters working against humanity and for an invading alien intelligence. Seeing it in print was enough to convince me that it would totally happen, but I hadn't considered the possibility before.
Humans being the most important thing in the world by virtue of simply being human strikes me as a tautology and logically problematic. It makes no sense.
I think "species-ism" is both honorable and necessary. I think the opposite is misanthropy and that it's hard to be moderately misanthropic, so one extreme or the other will win out.
Well, for the most part, that's the accepted interpretation. We just don't value non-human well-being as much as human well-being (which I think given the current species involved is acceptable). The problem is the difference in how we value non-human well-being between different subsets of the population causes strife between those subsets. I believe very few think it's alright to torture an animal for no reason, but to kill an animal (preferably with little pain) for food is acceptable to the vast majority of people. The many levels in-between those are where most people start having problems with the actions of others.
And when it comes to non-fuzzy animals, the gloves come off. We have massive industries to exterminate insects, fungi, bacteria and so on. Even fish are hardly protected. If we could perform genocide on some of them, we would.
Sure. Generally because they have their actions have a negative effect on our happiness, and we value their happiness so lowly that our loss in happiness overwhelms any concerns we have about theirs. We allow the raising of animals for slaughter because it affects our happiness so positively that we ignore that we are actually killing them at the end, and placate ourselves with platitudes about them having a relatively easy life up to that point (which historically was true).
I feel this keenly, being a meat-eater myself. Affordable (and hopefully palatable) lab-grown meet can't come soon enough.
you seem to be fixated on the notion of consciousness as being "consciousness sufficiently similar to a human that I would interact with it as if it was a human". maybe some domesticated animals and particularly precocious apes and cetaceans meet those criteria.
In many religious and philosophical traditions though the principle of Panpsychism is the guideline. It means, approximately, that consciousness is an inherent building block of reality and some form of consciousness is an emergent phenomena of just about any sufficiently complex system. This posits the existence of many forms of consciousness that are utterly alien to human consciousness and that we could not readily interact with.
I don't understand how my cat reacts to a mirror. He notices me in a mirror, but how come he doesn't react to seeing himself, either "hey that's me" or "what's that other cat doing here!?!"
You don't need an objective measure. An approximate one is already better than just "optimising for human happiness".
And I guess you do what I proposed already anyways: The suffering of a dog or a horse is probably also - to some extent - your concern. The suffering of a piece of rock probably less so. Should we learn that rocks can feel pain, too (granted this is unlikely), we should update our morality. It's also part of most countries' laws to prevent unnecessary suffering of animals. And this is all based on the assumed degree to which they are able to suffer. You will get fined for torturing a dog; you won't for torturing a mosquito.
Careful - fancy thoughts: I could imagine that we will update our morality regarding plants one day (given that we see more and more evidence that they communicate with each other, send stress signals etc.).
That's a very nice sentiment, but aside from the obvious (dolphins, a few whales, some primates, and elephants) do you have any sort of proof or justification for this statement? "Many many" is a very strong claim.
You just named "many", as far as I'm concerned. How many proven examples do we need before we start to think that the only reason we don't know of 1000s more is because of lack of research?
You also forget cephalopods. Oh, and Magpies and some other birds.
Having a theory of mind is another one of those big ones. The problem is differentiating true awareness of the concepts of 'self' and 'other' from rote instinct - is a leopard stalking a gazelle aware of the gazelle as an entity and takes actions accordingly, or is it merely reacting to known sets of stimuli?
Exactly. Being able to discuss what constitutes consciousness meets criteria handily because having a clear concept of self and other as well as being able to reason about that are both prerequisites.
It's sort of like the old question of what constitutes pornography? The border is fuzzy and unknown (in this case because people have different standards), but it's fairly easy to construct a case where the vast majority agree it's on one side or the other.
I adopted this definition from Sam Harris (it was probably his TED talk on science and morals). What I mean by consciousness (and some people in this thread do not seem to have understood this) is not necessarily human-level consciousness, but the ability to suffer. And of course, there are different degrees to which animals are "capable" of suffering.
I did not expect this concept of morality to be controversial at all. I am surprised by the discussion.
> Why only human? Why not the well-being of all conscious creatures?
The human race as a whole is still comfortable with snuffing out conscious human lives (death sentence, wars, 'collateral damage', etc). I think the other creatures should join the line...
By using the term 'conscious' I implied the ability to suffer. There is obviously a spectrum of the degrees to which a creature can suffer - and viruses are on the lower end, probably fairly close to rocks and water.
It was (arguably) the dominant way of looking at the world prior to the 1960s. It's possibly Biblical in its origins so it may have been around even before the Bible.
Yes, many people reject this idea. As a matter of fact, this is the first time I've ever heard anyone express this idea.