I think the typical animal-welfare moralist argument against eating meat has more to do with the conditions of the animals' lives rather than the circumstances of their deaths.
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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When I try to think about why this is so, I can't escape the conclusion that there are two different "moral systems" at play here -- one of "city-dwellers" and another of "rural dwellers."
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at least two different ones. very different ethical calculus between first-world and third-world versions of those as well. environmental ethics atomizes very quickly based on local conditions.
End of conversation
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