My wife and I turned to look. A crow was pinning a robin to the ground with its beak. The robin seemed to be struggling a bit, although it was hard to tell whether it was moving on its own or being shaken by the crow. Then the crow flew up, carrying its prey a few yards farther before landing again. That happened one more time, the contending pair coming down too far away to see them clearly. I assume the crow got its meal.
The two were not the only actors on the scene. Five or six of each of their species darted and flew and called through the air, apparently encouraging them the way fans at a boxing match cheer on their favorite. Did the spectators carry lingering feelings of victory or of loss home with them after it was all over?
The robin and the crow are perhaps two of the most common and universally recognized of birds. We grow up being taught to know robins when we see them, and that they are signs of spring. They make their way across our yards listening for and consuming bugs and worms we cannot see, so feel little sympathy for. We sing songs and recite poems about them, and celebrate the blue of their eggs. Robins are good, the more the merrier.
Crows, on the other hand, eat flesh we see sprawled out on our streets, and make a really ugly sound. Plus, to their ever-lasting shame, they are as black as Darth Vader, not to mention as people who are by some wrongly regarded as inferior. Crows are bad, and we’d rather not have them around.
Because we humans have loaded robins and crows with conflicting moral values, it is tempting to assign moral judgment to what Maxine and I witnessed: The bad crow killed and then ate the poor, innocent robin.
But nature, operating without human interference or judgment, is not subtle about moral good nor moral bad. The natural world’s ethical norms are no more refined than those suggested in the razor-sharp dichotomy of eat or be eaten. Extended to entire species, eat or be eaten becomes reproduce or go extinct. To the extent nature itself measures good and bad, survival, whether at the moment or in the future, sums it up.
What the crow did was good for the crow. What happened to the robin was bad for the robin.
Something fundamental to humans—something animal, if you will—is attracted by the clarity of an ethic of eat or be eaten, of reproduce or go extinct. In this ethic, living is all about me, and perhaps about people like me. If another gets hurt or exterminated in the process, that’s too bad. It’s the way things are. It’s much easier to be a crow if you do not have to consider the interests of the robin. You probably sleep better at night.
But something else in us is repelled by that kind of ethic. As appealing as it is to make ethics and morality a series of stark contrasts between what’s good and what’s bad, we know it is not enough. Consideration of the other must play an important role in our decision-making when it comes to right and wrong or we become something less than human. We become inhuman, and do and participate in deeds of inhumanity.
When we consider ourselves or those like us to embody all that’s good, and people other than ourselves or unlike us to embody all evil and therefore to have no claim upon us, our ethic is for the birds.
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