What humans do is fundamentally the same as what any animal species is doing - extracting resources from our surroundings. There only difference between human mining and ant foraging is that humans happen to do it at a larger scale.

I heartily disagree with this analogy. Ants are nature's cleaners, not polluters, and they don't extract more than they need. Really the only species that knowingly extracts in excess, pollutes and destroys its environment, wipes out sixty percent of the planet's species in 50 years, creates weapons and machines that could destroy the entire planet, and is actively planning on taking its scathing mindvirus into the greater galaxy, is humans. We are the only one that consistently and ongoingly acts crazily out of balance with its natural surrounds. This is the definition of a parasite of terrifying proportion.

Profits are not an "irrelevant consideration" as you say, because the ignorance that drives this whole disproportionate pillaging and poisoning is always money/power. Even the human endeavors that claim to be for the simple greater good (like health care or policing) have been grossly perverted by their respective monetization. Everything now is being twisted into a cancerous quarterly-profit endless growth model that is impossible and leads to decisions like this, and to products and services that have less and less value and less and less lifespan.

And as for the "simple means by which humans divide resources within the colony," this is a disingenuous representation of the current imbalance and crappy accounting that has led to a drastically widening divide between the haves and have-nots, and to devastation around the planet of which you may not be aware, or perhaps have no concern.

Devotion to the current version of capitalism looks to me like some kind of delusion, in that it refuses to look at the inherent flaws in its design and implementation, and focuses only on the enjoyments of short-term gain gleaned by parasitism, slavery, and destruction.