For people who think wild-animal lives are net positive, there are many things that contain even more sentient value than rainforest.
Doesn’t this lead to replacement anyway for welfarists/consequentialists, 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 don’t 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 “wrongly thinking animal lives are negative” is a worse mistake than “wrongly thinking they are positive”.
It may be intuitions about reversibility. It’s harder to bring a species back than it is to eliminate it. Or, not only welfare matters to them. Or, maybe they really shouldn’t consider themselves consequentialists.
I believe we’re already replacing the rainforest with many things of more (economic) value, like palm oil and cows. I guess in future we’ll 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 I’m going to prioritise the world over consequentialism.
Doesn’t this lead to replacement anyway for welfarists/consequentialists, like discussed here? I.e. we should replace rainforest with things that produce more value.
It may be intuitions about reversibility. It’s harder to bring a species back than it is to eliminate it. Or, not only welfare matters to them. Or, maybe they really shouldn’t consider themselves consequentialists.
I believe we’re already replacing the rainforest with many things of more (economic) value, like palm oil and cows. I guess in future we’ll 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 I’m going to prioritise the world over consequentialism.