Doesn’t this depend on assuming negative utilitarianism, and suffering-focused ethic, or a particular set of assumptions about the net pleasure vs pain in the life of an ‘average’ animal?
> The experiences of individual conscious animals are what’s valuable
Are you saying it’s the ONLY thing that has value, and that everyone who thinks otherwise is wrong? (For example, I imagine this doesn’t hold in preference utilitarianism, and maybe not in longtermist thinking.)
> the welfare of wild animals is basically orthogonal to biodiversity, at least as far as anyone can tell
What’s your scientific evidence to support that, and is it refutable? Or can the opposite be asserted with the same data?
I think most ecologists/environmentalists would strongly dispute that, and I have certainly heard them making that case. They would contend, with evidence, that a biodiverse ecosystem is essential for resilience, health and maintaining a variety of ecological niches, and is essential for almost all species to thrive and adapt and evolve.
I’ve observed a group of gardens over several decades as gardeners stopped using pesticides, and seen a flourishing of bird species, some of whom spend hours apparently flying as a group just for fun. (I presume this is teleologically a preparation for migration, but they wouldn’t do it without some form of pleasure feedback, which we can presume they value.)
>even if biodiversity and wild animal welfare are positively correlated, I’ve never seen a good argument to that effect,
Did you steel man on this, or search for good arguments? How are you defining wild animal welfare?
Please allow me some what-aboutism:
What about the whole science of ecology, and evidence from degraded ecosystems (including consequences for individual species and animals?)
What about changes in the rate of animal and plant pathology where keystone and maintenance species are lost? (Wolves in Yellowstone and cleaner wrass in coral reefs are easy examples, also snails in ponds.
What about pollinators?
Taking your argument to it’s logical extreme, we would eliminate almost all wild species. Would that really be a good planet for most people and most animals to live in? You would also be closing off many evolutionary pathways, with innumerable potential positive outcomes. As far as I can tell, this only makes sense if you place a massive priority on suffering cf pleasure in the very short term, and consider most wild animal lives as net negative in suffering vs pleasure. If you do. on your scale of suffering vs pleasure, where is the zero on the X-axis, and how do you justify that as being the balance point?
Wild animals themselves seem to want to live strongly enough to make great effort to stay alive—why should you (or any human) be deciding FOR them that they are better off not existing at all? Does this not apply even more, given that we can’t even prove that you and other humans have free will?
>and surely increasing biodiversity isn’t the best way to improve wild animal welfare.
At the moment I think we’re just talking about reducing the rate of biodiversity loss, so if your original contention is correct, wild animal suffering is already reducing fast, at least in absolute terms, maybe not per individual.
But in many ecosystems maintaining or protecting it may indeed be the best way. Yellowstone wolves and coral bleaching provide great examples.
You’d also have to presume that as the proportion of domestic animals to wild animals increased, as you terminated the wild species, the domestic species were, from their own experience and with their ‘animal’ consciousness, happier than the lost wild species. Assuming you are very conscientious, that may be true for any pets that you yourself look after, but can we be sure that many generations of bears, stags, foxes etc would not miss vast pleasure from many lifetimes of behaviour.
You could perhaps argue that loss of biodiversity poses an existential threat to humanity
Yes, both medium and long term, perhaps through a reduced portfolio of anti-virals, and probably most of all in the far future, in ways we can probably not imagine, no more than early humanoids could understand the importance of sand/silicon for AI.
, which matters more for the long-run future than wild animal welfare. But it seems like a very weak x-risk compared to things like AGI or nuclear war.
AGI and nuclear war are both risks, whereas biodiversity loss is certain: it has been happening and will continue to happen. Whether it becomes an obvious X-risk in future centuries is very hard for us to assess right now, but again it’s probably through reduced capacity to deal with pathogens that we would experience it most.
At the very least, could we consider the distress to those who love many of these species, and loss of a popular phenomena which has been much observed lately: cross-species friendship?
>Most people who prioritize biodiversity (IMO) don’t seem to understand what actually matters,
Really?! That’s very pejorative, don’t you think?
Your evidence? And your sample size?
> and they act as if a species is a unit of inherent value, when it isn’t
On what grounds are you dismissing that contention, for those with slightly or very different philsophical and ethical positions to yourself?
—the unit of value is an individual’s conscious experience.
Doesn’t this depend on assuming negative utilitarianism, and suffering-focused ethic, or a particular set of assumptions about the net pleasure vs pain in the life of an ‘average’ animal?
I don’t think it depends on those things, what they meant by species not being inherently valuable is that each individual of a species is inherently valuable. It’s a claim that the species’ value comes from the value of the individuals (not taking into account value from stuff like possibly making ecological collapse less likely etc).
(I only read the beginning of your comment, sorry for not responding to the rest!)
Doesn’t this depend on assuming negative utilitarianism, and suffering-focused ethic, or a particular set of assumptions about the net pleasure vs pain in the life of an ‘average’ animal?
> The experiences of individual conscious animals are what’s valuable
Are you saying it’s the ONLY thing that has value, and that everyone who thinks otherwise is wrong? (For example, I imagine this doesn’t hold in preference utilitarianism, and maybe not in longtermist thinking.)
> the welfare of wild animals is basically orthogonal to biodiversity, at least as far as anyone can tell
What’s your scientific evidence to support that, and is it refutable?
Or can the opposite be asserted with the same data?
I think most ecologists/environmentalists would strongly dispute that, and I have certainly heard them making that case. They would contend, with evidence, that a biodiverse ecosystem is essential for resilience, health and maintaining a variety of ecological niches, and is essential for almost all species to thrive and adapt and evolve.
I’ve observed a group of gardens over several decades as gardeners stopped using pesticides, and seen a flourishing of bird species, some of whom spend hours apparently flying as a group just for fun. (I presume this is teleologically a preparation for migration, but they wouldn’t do it without some form of pleasure feedback, which we can presume they value.)
>even if biodiversity and wild animal welfare are positively correlated, I’ve never seen a good argument to that effect,
Did you steel man on this, or search for good arguments? How are you defining wild animal welfare?
Please allow me some what-aboutism:
What about the whole science of ecology, and evidence from degraded ecosystems (including consequences for individual species and animals?)
What about changes in the rate of animal and plant pathology where keystone and maintenance species are lost? (Wolves in Yellowstone and cleaner wrass in coral reefs are easy examples, also snails in ponds.
What about pollinators?
Taking your argument to it’s logical extreme, we would eliminate almost all wild species. Would that really be a good planet for most people and most animals to live in? You would also be closing off many evolutionary pathways, with innumerable potential positive outcomes. As far as I can tell, this only makes sense if you place a massive priority on suffering cf pleasure in the very short term, and consider most wild animal lives as net negative in suffering vs pleasure. If you do. on your scale of suffering vs pleasure, where is the zero on the X-axis, and how do you justify that as being the balance point?
Wild animals themselves seem to want to live strongly enough to make great effort to stay alive—why should you (or any human) be deciding FOR them that they are better off not existing at all? Does this not apply even more, given that we can’t even prove that you and other humans have free will?
>and surely increasing biodiversity isn’t the best way to improve wild animal welfare.
At the moment I think we’re just talking about reducing the rate of biodiversity loss, so if your original contention is correct, wild animal suffering is already reducing fast, at least in absolute terms, maybe not per individual.
But in many ecosystems maintaining or protecting it may indeed be the best way. Yellowstone wolves and coral bleaching provide great examples.
You’d also have to presume that as the proportion of domestic animals to wild animals increased, as you terminated the wild species, the domestic species were, from their own experience and with their ‘animal’ consciousness, happier than the lost wild species. Assuming you are very conscientious, that may be true for any pets that you yourself look after, but can we be sure that many generations of bears, stags, foxes etc would not miss vast pleasure from many lifetimes of behaviour.
Yes, both medium and long term, perhaps through a reduced portfolio of anti-virals, and probably most of all in the far future, in ways we can probably not imagine, no more than early humanoids could understand the importance of sand/silicon for AI.
AGI and nuclear war are both risks, whereas biodiversity loss is certain: it has been happening and will continue to happen. Whether it becomes an obvious X-risk in future centuries is very hard for us to assess right now, but again it’s probably through reduced capacity to deal with pathogens that we would experience it most.
At the very least, could we consider the distress to those who love many of these species, and loss of a popular phenomena which has been much observed lately: cross-species friendship?
>Most people who prioritize biodiversity (IMO) don’t seem to understand what actually matters,
Really?! That’s very pejorative, don’t you think?
Your evidence? And your sample size?
> and they act as if a species is a unit of inherent value, when it isn’t
On what grounds are you dismissing that contention, for those with slightly or very different philsophical and ethical positions to yourself?
Measured and compared how?
I don’t think it depends on those things, what they meant by species not being inherently valuable is that each individual of a species is inherently valuable. It’s a claim that the species’ value comes from the value of the individuals (not taking into account value from stuff like possibly making ecological collapse less likely etc).
(I only read the beginning of your comment, sorry for not responding to the rest!)