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.
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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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That I care about the ecological health of not just wild places but also human places and that species diversity is a good measure of wild ecosystem health and a poor measure of human ecosystem health
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and since domesticated animals and farms are human ecosystems I do not care about a domesticated species going extinct if the health of the ecosystem they lived within is improved because of it
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