What is the value of a species? (I still can’t tell you)
Epistemic status: I wrote most of this as a PhD student in 2019, and am still failing to answer the question.
TL;DR: If conservationists hope to convince others to support conservation and help us save species, first we ought to be able to articulate why we believe animals have value at the taxonomic level. This is a more difficult proposition than many would imagine. I couldn’t do it in 2019 and I can’t do it now (and I changed cause area anyway). I would love forum readers from moral philosophy or wild animal welfare to suggest alternative theoretical frameworks!
A prominent conservationist once said, “saving individual animals should always come second to saving species”. This is a common position in conservation, but few of us can adequately explain why. Intuitively I, and I am sure most other conservationists, feel that species are valuable. We ought to protect them, and indeed that is our life’s work. But if we are going to dedicate thousands of manhours and pounds to saving species, and sometimes kill individual animals in the process, surely we should be able to articulate our reasoning beyond instinctive feelings?
Let me get the easy part out of the way. We can of course value nature (from individuals up to ecosystems) for instrumental reasons, because we benefit from a whole range of ecosystem services, including provisioning (food, timber, medicine) and regulating (carbon storage and sequestration). These are not absolute reasons for conserving species however. Not all species are useful to us, or irreplaceable, and there are threatened species that are non-resources. An anthropocentric focus on the certain species that benefit us feels morally empty to me, and is ultimately piecemeal. It doesn’t address the urge to defend biodiversity generally, or rare species specifically. So I turn to intrinsic reasons.
There are two questions I challenge you to answer:
Why is it worse to kill an individual member of an endangered species than an individual member of a common one?
What value does a species have outside of the value of the individual animals that comprise it?
Rarity
So many answers to the first question come down to rarity that we should start by establishing some conceptual clarity. Despite how it is often used, rarity is not a property characteristic of a species. One species cannot be rarer than another, because there is only one of each of them.
Rarity is also not a characteristic that belongs to an individual animal, unlike number of legs or diet. The classification of an animal as a Saiga antelope or an oryx does not change depending on how many other animals are similar. Instead rarity is a descriptor of the world, rather than of the animal or species itself.
It is also worth noting that we do not value rarity in itself. Rarity is an intensifier of value, which is why we consider ourselves lucky to see a rare bird but unlucky to catch a rare disease.
So why does trophy hunting an elephant feel worse than hunting deer? Support for sentientism is well established, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to support for species, endangered or otherwise. If it was wrong to kill a helmeted hornbill, it might not be any less wrong to kill a crow. To the crow, the number of his flockmates around the world has no bearing on the pain of his death.
We treat ‘species’ as some sort of superentity, but how can you talk about the interests of a species in the absence of desires, purposeful actions, or capacity to suffer? Having interests is generally accepted as a necessary condition for having rights, so arguments based on the duties we have to animals (because of their interests) will not reach species at all.
(An aside, since I’m sure someone will raise it—the interests test is the standard route into arguments about AI moral status. I am not knowledgeable about AI welfare, but this is an intuition rather than an argument, which is precisely the failure mode this whole post is about.)
And this general desire to “save” species doesn’t always hold up. Consider:
A common willingness to eradicate disease-carrying mosquitoes
Strains of lab rats bred for specific research purposes, then killed off
Little concern about purposefully breeding new species, or reclassifying existing ones
If we valued the sheer diversity or number of species, then the above wouldn’t happen. So what makes a group of animals “special” enough to warrant concern, over and above the individuals within it?
Aesthetic value
One argument from environmental philosophers which is well supported, but which feels unsatisfactory to me, rests on aesthetic value. It seems what we really value is the continued existence of individuals that may or may not have some distinctive characteristics. But is conservation really just down to aesthetic value? (Again, outside of any instrumental value.)
Aesthetic value isn’t a moral absolute, and when applied to nature we are essentially saying that certain individual animals have value. We admire the grace and beauty of individual Bengal tigers that we may encounter, and rarity matters because when there are few members of a species we encounter them less, so we value them more. So is moral conservation just a duty to protect individual animals (that aesthetically matter), and to ensure that there will continue to be animals of this sort?
If that is all it is, how do you morally justify common conservation actions like killing deer to protect plant biodiversity? Surely the lives of the individual sentient animals would be worth more than the aesthetic value of a collection of plants. Or how about keeping animals in zoos to fund in situ conservation work? It is of no relevance to a captive elephant whether visitor funds will help save others like him.
Some people escape the philosophical murk by embracing their anthropocentric viewpoint, and only work to save species with instrumental value. They are conservationists in the traditional sense. Thirty years ago Alastair Gunn defined conservation as the saving of resources for our later consumption: to conserve a species is to use it in such a way that we can keep using it for the indefinite future. He contrasted this with preservation, the saving of species and wilderness from damage and destruction, and to a preservationist the very conception and treatment of animals as a resource is illegitimate.
Intuitively, a traditional anthropocentric definition of conservation feels “wrong” to me. I feel like species should matter in their own right, but I have no idea how to articulate why. And this is a problem.
Two objections I want to get ahead of
Option value. The best instrumental argument I left out is that we cannot know in advance which species will turn out to be useful, informative or load-bearing, so keeping them around has value under uncertainty. I think this is right, and I think it justifies a great deal of conservation spending. It just doesn’t touch the question I’m asking, which is whether a species matters in itself. Option value is a reason to keep our options open, rather than a reason to think the taxon is the thing that counts.
Wild animal welfare. If you follow my argument to its conclusion, that individual sentient welfare is where the value actually sits, then you land somewhere uncomfortable, because some people who take that view seriously think habitat conservation may be net negative if wild lives contain more suffering than flourishing. My deer example walks straight up to this and I don’t have a resolution. I will say that I find the confidence with which that position is sometimes held much harder to justify than the confidence conservationists have about species, which is not a small claim given that the entire point of this post is that conservationists cannot justify theirs.
So why did I leave conservation?
Not because I stopped caring about species. I very much still do, and a world without tigers or polars bears would feel like and immeasurably poorer place to me.
I moved to farmed animals because I get to do both welfare and environment work at the same time, (and without the cultural problem of travelling to the Global South to lecture people about their consumption). My PhD was on demand reduction in the illegal wildlife trade, which in practice often means researchers from wealthy countries telling consumers in poorer ones to stop. In a seminar I once had British school students working on a campaign to reduce demand for pangolin meat in Vietnam, and a 14 year old girl asked the very good question: “But how can we tell them to stop eating pangolin meat when we eat lots of meat and have killed loads of wild animals over here?”
Working on my own society’s consumption of farmed animals both allows me to neatly sidestep that moral quandary, and gets me two outcomes for the price of one intervention. Neither of those is a moral argument about the value of species, though. They are arguments about tractability, and about who has the standing to ask.
Which raises something else interesting: I changed cause area without ever settling the moral question underneath it. I don’t think that was irrational, but it does mean my prioritisation rests on foundations I can’t fully defend (or articulate), and I suspect I am not at all unusual in that.
So many of our moral positions seem to come from intuitionism, and that makes it very hard to convince other people why they should act as we want them to. We try to appeal to them from the values that we hold, and struggle to connect on the values that they hold.
I apologise for not providing any satisfactory answers, but I would love forum readers from moral philosophy, conservation, or wild animal welfare to suggest alternative theoretical frameworks!
Reading
Newman JA, Varner G, Linquist S. Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics. Cambridge University Press; 2017.
Gunn AS. Preserving rare species. In: Regan T, ed. Earthbound: New Introductory Essays in Environmental Ethics. Temple University Press; 1984:289-335.
Russow L-M. Why Do Species Matter? Environ Ethics. 1981;3(2):101-112.
Feinberg M, Willer R. The moral roots of environmental attitudes. Psychol Sci. 2013;24(1):56-62.
I plan to make a much much more comprehensive post on this topic in couple months. But I will try to answer off the cuff right now.
Variety. People prefer to live in a world with not just the single best version of things, but many varieties of things. I think it is really important that there are other lives and other experiences happening on this earth. Not only other people, but entirely other ways of being, gestalts, perspectives, lifestyles/forms, and umwelts. More variety is better, all else equal.[1]
Eliminating a disease carrying mosquito: People value both health and variety, but health over variety. The worst diseases are a worse negative than the value of variety provided by a mosquito species existing (some conservationists contest this).
Eliminating lab rat strains: Strains of lab rats are both very similar to other lab rats and could be created again. They are not seen as a new species. People do care about losing special strains of crops/livestock and work to preserve unique breeds!
Little concern about purposefully breeding new species, or reclassifying existing ones: People do care about reclassifying existing ones, when they are aware of it happening. And fight over it a lot. Its seen as trying to find the “true definition,” at least.
I think people under-rate the value of creating new species. This is somewhat confused by what we picture. We tend to picture a new breed of livestock, which is not as different a natural species with 5+million years of accumulated differences, so it feels inferior. It doesn’t account for how different creating a new species could be, in theory. People are against creating species for other reasons like responsibility, potential bad outcomes, precedent, power, etc...
Also ending species (life) versus creating a species (life) is often considered morally unequal.
I think we also chronically under-rate the immense loss of living in a world without american camels, moas, Meiolania, passenger pigeons, Quinkana and other extinct species. Existence bias.
I think people are a little overly attached to “species” and ought to care more about the variety of traits (captured by evolutionary distinctiveness: phylum > family > genus > species > population). I think we ought to care about species in proportion to how different they are from each other, and how much of the tree of life they enact. (A sawtooth shark species matters more than another wood-warbler.)
Irreversibility. Losing something forever. We can’t re-create a species once its gone. Forever is a long time.
Obviously once we gain the ability to reverse extinction, this changes the calculus. Because reversibility matters! It’s relevant that it might be impossible to reverse some extinctions, even after we can de-extinct some kinds of species.
I think saving tissue samples in biobanks (and recording everything tissue samples don’t preserve—eg life history, social transmission, gestational conditions) is REALLY important so that we don’t lose species forever!
I think one of the strongest argument for species (or my preferred evolutionary distinctiveness) comes from looking back 1000+ years from now and thinking what we will continue to value as our lives are transformed by comfort and technology. I think wildlife/nature will become increasingly valuable as human-generated wonders increasingly dominate, and even if just a few people/beings continue to appreciate the earth’s trajectory and non-human [everything, lives, stuff, processes, ways of being, the before times etc], there will be less to “go around” between them. An argument from cost disease and irreplaceability.
Speaking to your examples—“the lives of the individual sentient animals would be worth more than the aesthetic value of a collection of [the last plants on earth]” “To the crow, the number of his flockmates around the world has no bearing on the pain of his death.” For any individual (crow’s) life, what matters most is their own experience. Their life matters more than their participation in the aggregate species. (I’m saying this is true both from the collective moral worth determined by humans, and also the crow’s own perspective.) But once you are down to only a few left, and zoom out to the world scale, then their individual life’s value is dwarfed by their value as the last living member of a species. (Not to the crow, but to the human arbiters.) At least, that is the position. It’s not easy to compare across moral values like this. People stand in different places on their relative worth. I’m honestly not sure where I land either. I know I care about both. I would extinct some species to reduce global suffering, and I would choose to cause suffering to prevent some extinctions.
This isn’t a universal position. I’ve been surprised at how many people seem to desire a world filled with identical people having identical (great) lives.
Some conservationists do bite the bullet of opposing the eradication of disease-carrying mosquitoes. I think those rat strains would typically not be considered a separate species. There is interest in de-extinction, though I don’t know if that qualifies as breeding new species. Some people classify domestic dogs as a separate species from wolves, and I think it’s interesting to think about how humans could create new species to somewhat compensate for past extinctions.
The rationale for it being worse to kill an endangered species will be wrong for two reasons. I personally strongly believe the first reason, and am really agnostic about the second—though I do think it is strong.
First, endangerment is a historical injustice upon a particular marginalized community—we, you and I, are (the vast majority of the time) the ones endangering some animals while benefitting some others. There is likely a duty of restitution, or at least, a stronger pro tanto reason to not further historical injustice.
Second, the thing that is valuable isnt rarity per say, but maybe something like diversity. In the human case, I think it is both instrumentally valuable and intrinsically valuable that there are a lot of different people living a lot of different ways. I think human diversity is beautiful, and the world would actually be worse if one particular mode of life dominated the rest. Something like this justifies a pro tanto stance against cultural imperialism. In the animal and plant world, I do value that there are so many different ways of experiencing life. The world would actually be worse if every animal was a rat. Not just for environmental reasons, but because it would be boring and lack the full expression of life.
Thanks Ryan! Restitution definitely speaks to me as a personal value (we made this mess, so we have a duty to try to clean it up), but I’m not sure it fully captures why a species in itself is valuable? If the wronged parties are the individual animals whose habitat we cleared, then the duty tracks individuals. Rarity is almost just a proxy for how much harm we have already done.
Diversity clearly has instrumental value (e.g., from an ecosystem services perspective, as an option value), and I think that justifies a great deal of conservation spending. But in the abstract, where does it take us? Ought we be actively breeding new species, and be roughly indifferent between saving one and creating one? That feels wrong to me (again, the intuitionism!)
Of course! I love thinking through environmental ethics :)
On the first one, I believe it still makes sense to talk at the level of groups even if the benefits go to individuals. We can think of it the same way we think of other systemic harms. Where benefits and burdens are distributed along class lines on the basis of class membership, treating the affected parties as mere individuals is reductive; the class is the level at which the harm operates. We couldn’t reasonably conceive of giving each individual piping plover their due, but we could generate structures that benefit them as a class (such as closing stretches of New York’s cost to humans). The reason for that would be on a more systemic level: piping plovers have been harmed due to their membership to a form of life like that of a piping plover. Thus, we need to (systemically) reduce those harms at the source by removing barriers for those with a form of life like that of a piping plover. This is the familiar justification for reparations, or for programs aimed at getting more women into STEM.
It also doesn’t touch the value qua species—though very few people in the environmental ethics literature believe that our taxonomizing itself generates value. This argument is, though, a good reason to protect endangered species over non-endangered species in virtue of them being ‘endangered species,’ which seemed to be the heart of the post.
On the second, Tandena below did a good job articulating my position. It’s not clear to me that diversity is merely instrumental, and I think there would be something bad about a world where everyone, keeping happiness equal, were social, cultural, and biological clones of one person. The Borg as a villain in Star Trek seems like an analagous point. Tandena did a good job on the species breeding point. But another point is, if I had a kid, I would encourage them to live life weirdly, to break the mould, and be a little freakish. I think that’s really cool!
Tandena’s history point is also solid—one of my professors in undergrad, Ron Sandler, wrote a lot on it. Eric Katz also cares a lot about it.