Not necessarily so, unless you believe that natural phenomenon do not hold inner contradictions (I will spare you the weekly rehash of nature vs nurture and that whole line). There are a lot of things that are programmed into us biologically, evolutionarily, chemically, etc, but eradicating, limiting, overcoming or masking them is also part of the bag of tricks we are endowed with.
> As a point of clarification, I am not proposing that
> status diffrences are ethically desirable. On the
> contrary, I consider them ethically undesirable, just
> like killing other living things. However, they are
> also unavoidable, a basic fact of life if you will,
> just like killing other living things is. Therefore,
> minimizing the negative consequences of status
> attainment (e.g. deprivation or suffering of others)
> is the best we can hope for.
Given your pitch for the concern for the suffering of all living things, I can definitely concede the above ;-) i.e., "basic fact of life". But we can go very far in minimising the negative effect -- perhaps to the point where this basic fact of life has no more impact on us (and our lives) than the fact that the sun will one day explode and swallow up the earth extinguishing all life!
--ravi