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?
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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