But we should care about individual orangutans, & it seems plausible to me that they care whether they go extinct. Large parts of their lives are after all centered around finding mates & producing offspring. So to the extent that anything is important to them (& I would argue that things can be just as important to them as they can be to us), surely the continuation of their species/bloodline is.
I’m pretty skeptical of this claim. It’s not evolutionarily surprising that orangutans (or humans!) would do stuff that decreases their probability of extinction, but this doesn’t mean the individuals “care” about the continuation of their species per se. Seems we only have sufficient evidence to say they care about doing the sorts of things that tend to promote their own (and relatives’, proportional to strength of relatedness) survival and reproductive success, no?
I’m pretty skeptical of this claim. It’s not evolutionarily surprising that orangutans (or humans!) would do stuff that decreases their probability of extinction, but this doesn’t mean the individuals “care” about the continuation of their species per se. Seems we only have sufficient evidence to say they care about doing the sorts of things that tend to promote their own (and relatives’, proportional to strength of relatedness) survival and reproductive success, no?