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.
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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Okay. This doesn't avoid my utilitarian justification for environmentalism though -- our future descendants might find certain species (or breeds) useful. There already are extinct breeds of domesticated animals -- like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_White_Terrier …
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I didn't think we were debating whether or not environmentalism can be justified (it can be, in many different ways) the question is do we care about the loss of say, pigs, if a synthetic alternative becomes available. Lets just keep a few in a museum-zoo or something.
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My original argument was that existence of species has a certain "moral worth" from the perspective of modern environmentalism (I didn't argue whether modern environmentalism is inherently justified or not -- I simply stated what seems to be the case).
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I then wondered why it is that domesticated animals (many of which have a staggering variety of unique breeds) are not given the same status by the very people who seem to support modern environmentalist ethics.
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I agree that aesthetic have come to play a huge role in environmentalism. It could be argued that modern farming is not "aesthetic." Aesthetics are time-relative though. Romanticism glorified "virginal nature" in a way that other epochs didn't.
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