For people who think wild-animal lives are net positive, there are many things that contain even more sentient value than rainforest.
Doesnât this lead to replacement anyway for welfarists/âconsequentialists, like discussed here? I.e. we should replace rainforest with things that produce more value.
At the same time, I feel like the discourse on this topic can be a bit disingenuous sometimes, where people whose actions otherwise donât indicate much concern for the moral importance of the action-omission distinction (esp. when it comes to non-persons) suddenly employ rhetorical tactics that make it sound like âwrongly thinking animal lives are negativeâ is a worse mistake than âwrongly thinking they are positiveâ.
It may be intuitions about reversibility. Itâs harder to bring a species back than it is to eliminate it. Or, not only welfare matters to them. Or, maybe they really shouldnât consider themselves consequentialists.
I believe weâre already replacing the rainforest with many things of more (economic) value, like palm oil and cows. I guess in future weâll just have the palm oil, at least until we discover plants can suffer and they have to go too.
If being a consequentialist implies I should, under certain circumstances, destroy the world, I think Iâm going to prioritise the world over consequentialism.
Doesnât this lead to replacement anyway for welfarists/âconsequentialists, like discussed here? I.e. we should replace rainforest with things that produce more value.
It may be intuitions about reversibility. Itâs harder to bring a species back than it is to eliminate it. Or, not only welfare matters to them. Or, maybe they really shouldnât consider themselves consequentialists.
I believe weâre already replacing the rainforest with many things of more (economic) value, like palm oil and cows. I guess in future weâll just have the palm oil, at least until we discover plants can suffer and they have to go too.
If being a consequentialist implies I should, under certain circumstances, destroy the world, I think Iâm going to prioritise the world over consequentialism.