To be honest it wasn’t my intention to argue that fish eggs have moral weight—I included them to give a sense of the scale of impact—but I can see how that came across, so apologies.
Fish eggs may more clearly have moral worth under non-utilitarian value systems, such as believing that all life that will eventually be sentient has intrinsic moral worth, or that impacts to nature should be minimised for intrinsic reasons (to be clear I don’t hold these views personally, but maybe having some level of moral uncertainty leads to a non-zero moral weight).
On evidence for fish eggs having moral worth under a utilitarian-ish values system, 1) I don’t know, it’s not my area, but 2) it seems pretty unlikely given fish larvae themselves seem to generally have pretty weak evidence for sentience immediately after hatching.
(Can you point me to something about the moral weight of fish eggs? I have never heard of this before)
To be honest it wasn’t my intention to argue that fish eggs have moral weight—I included them to give a sense of the scale of impact—but I can see how that came across, so apologies.
Fish eggs may more clearly have moral worth under non-utilitarian value systems, such as believing that all life that will eventually be sentient has intrinsic moral worth, or that impacts to nature should be minimised for intrinsic reasons (to be clear I don’t hold these views personally, but maybe having some level of moral uncertainty leads to a non-zero moral weight).
On evidence for fish eggs having moral worth under a utilitarian-ish values system, 1) I don’t know, it’s not my area, but 2) it seems pretty unlikely given fish larvae themselves seem to generally have pretty weak evidence for sentience immediately after hatching.