Mary Midlgley brings back up the concept of a lifeboat. However, she changes the way we think about it. She focuses on the idea of competition and how competition structures the lives of humans. It is built into our way of thinking. The one example she gave is the story of the hunter and the elephant. The hunter was hunting for tusks and just for pleasure and self satisfaction of killing an elephant. She raised the question as to whether or not the elephants life is more important than the hunters pleaseure.
I agree with the fact that life is more important than pleasure for any circumstances. Midgley really helped to put that into perspective for me. One thing that also helped to understand and picture in my mind how we has humans kind of think are the graphs that she placed in the book. It helped to bring a real picture to my mind and understand Midgley's point more clearly.
I feel the entire concept that Midgley was trying to get her audiance to grasp during the part of the reading was that humans should not always want to be in competion mode. Competing structures our lives, but instead of competing we should overlap our interest. I understood this to mean that instead of competing we should think what is morally correct. Once again back to the hunter and elephant story. Yes the hunter wanted the tusk, but the elephants life was more important than the hunters pleasure. This goes for many other things in life as well. If we would just think before some of our actions and quit competing and just be at peace and satisfied with what we had, then it would be a start to fixing the idea of man verse nature.
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