Do we really want a perfect world?

• Position: YOUR LIFE - Religious views and environmental ideologies - Brief article

As science and technology advance to give humans more control of the world around them--from curing disease and lengthening lifespans to inventing new fuels and engineering genetically superior crops--people who study ethics find more questions to ponder. For example, at some point, is it important for humans to accept certain limitations? Maybe so, according to Lisa Sideris, assistant professor of religious studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

"In religious environmental ethics, environmentalists have tried to take religious ethics at the core of their traditions and extend them beyond humans to animals and the natural world, but that doesn't always work very well, because the resulting ethical imperatives fail to take into account the way nature actually works, particularly with regard to natural selection," she says.

Some Christian ethicists argue, for instance, that ethics should address all suffering in the natural world, not just that of humans. Yet, this very well may clash with biological realities, Sideris points out. Some organisms kill and eat other organisms, and nature is not set up to provide for the needs of all life forms simultaneously, without conflict. "Some Christians believe that nature is the way it is--characterized by suffering and strife--because it is 'fallen' from some more perfect, original state," Sideris...