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.
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.