Sometimes I am alarmed that so few people are “species ethicists.” In a Darwinian sense, the chicken had won a genetic lottery by being tasty, horse by being fast, dog by being friendly. Discontinuing meat is ethically equivalent to species extinction.
an interesting variant on Ort's original premise might be, instead of vat-grown meat, suppose that you had the option to live in a community where ALL of the available meat was from hunted wild animals. is vegetarianism morally superior in that situation?
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Assuming hunting carries no risk at all of bringing the hunted species to extinction (unlikely with humans numbering in billions), a "species ethicist" should see as morally equivalent to farming.
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what's the underlying virtue behind privileging preservation of number of species in the world?
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I dunno, but I would rather live in a world with many animal species than with few, because it would be more interesting from my (human) perspective.
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The point though is that most people (frequently the same people who are concerned about welfare of domesticated animals) consider environmentalism to be good and morally justified. It is difficult to imagine environmentalism that doesn't have as its goal preserving species.
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difficult in that I've never seen it because all of the environmentalists I've heard from are committed to biodiversity. not difficult in that I can easily imagine ways of measuring ecological health that are independent of number of species.
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I think there's an underlying aesthetic preference for pristine/virginal wild spaces. Those ecosystems are characterized by very high biodiversity (usually, there are exceptions, e.g. Antarctica) and so the association of biodiversity with ecological health is made.
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I'm also fond of that aesthetic but there are most certainly places that are not even close to pristine and we ought to still care about their ecological health. A healthy farm would have very low species diversity, for example.
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So what do you draw from this?
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