Philosophical Vegan Forum

Swayze (Unnatural Vegan) says in her video on species preservation/extinction (https://youtu.be/P2amJ-kFO84) that carnists should not use species preservation/ biodiversity as a reason not to go vegan and vegans should not be using it as a reason to go vegan.

I've been a strong supporter of conservation work because of the ecological importance of species on Earth, which leads me to the following question.

Given that animal agriculture causes or will cause a lot of species to go extinct in the next decades, isn't it valuable to use conservation of species as another reason to decrease animal products consumption?

david84 wrote: ↑Tue Sep 05, 2017 12:24 pm Given that animal agriculture causes or will cause a lot of species to go extinct in the next decades, isn't it valuable to use conservation of species as another reason to decrease animal products consumption?

Yes I agree, UV thinks it's another thing like justice that doesn't fit neatly into a consequentialist ought, so isn't an ethical argument, but rather an aesthetic or intuitive one, I think those can be the best reasons.

Que Brim saying the reasons are yet to be put and can't strictly be called reasons and let's get ready to rumbleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Welcomes David

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Will farm animal species go extinct if the world goes vegan? If so, does it matter? (Unnatural Vegan)
Published on Aug 28, 2017
Species extinction is a controversial topic, but it's an important one to address because we see these arguments on both sides, and it's logically associated with some rather troubling concepts.

Full transcript:

Hey guys so species extinction, obviously this is a pretty controversial topic but I think it's really important to discuss because we see arguments for it on both sides and also because it is logically associated with some rather troubling concepts on the vegan animal agriculture side it's clear that deforestation for grazing and growing feed for livestock is one of the leading causes of species extinction today this study reported on in science suggests that it is the leading cause the habitat loss is so great that it will cause more extinctions than any other factor particularly when coupled with other deleterious effects of livestock production including climate change and pollution these changes will have major negative impacts on biodiversity many, many species will be lost and then from the Karnas perspective many argue that you know if we don't eat cows and pigs and chickens etc that they'll go extinct but this reasoning has some pretty obvious weaknesses first even if the world did go vegan it's not likely that these animals would go extinct yes their numbers would drop drastically but that's not extinction due to the number of zoos and sanctuaries that already harbor these animals extinction of any species or even subspecies just isn't a plausible outcome of the world going vegan and yep it's true farmed animals are really in zoos cows seem to be the most common and it's not just zoos and sanctuaries you know while not as common as dogs and cats many of these animals particularly pigs are already kept by people as bets and second even if we do consider the implausible scenario of actual extinctions so no farms no sanctuaries no pigs as pets we're really only dealing with a few species comparing extinction caused by animal agriculture to extinction prevented by it is no contest if biodiversity is what's valued animal agriculture is the opposite of that we're talking about only a handful of species for billions of individual animals take cows for example of the genus boasts there are only seven species 9 if you include bison less than half of which are domesticated and of those that are domesticated most of them have why relatives that probably are just subspecies rather than separate species so all farmed cows vanishing from the earth means one or two species in terms of domestic sheep we're looking at just one species even less diversity applies to domestic pigs a subspecies of wild boar and chickens which are a subspecies of red jungle fowl likewise ducks are various breeds and subspecies of two species with wild populations as well the same with goats and turkeys where domestic and wild are the same species and the many different fish that people eat are all wild species so to actual species three if you push it and a handful of subspecies basically breeds versus countless species we can only make ballpark estimates about its likely in the millions the only arguments meat eaters are left with are appeals to Allan savory style claims about grazing and how traditional animal agriculture is good for the environment which have been thoroughly debunked

In other words if you care about species preservation and biodiversity then you should not support animal agriculture but should you care I mean does the biodiversity argument even matter and what are its implications if we insist that it does?

From an ethical perspective individuals are sentient they have interests they feel happiness and pain and suffering and they don't want to die the forces that cause species extinction can do harm to individuals but a species is not a being if a species dies out is that any more of a loss than the sum of individuals suffering caused by its individuals a dying and what if they die due to old age and natural causes and the species went extinct because they just couldn't reproduce.

It's very hard to argue that species have intrinsic value and if we go there we enter into some pretty shaky territory species is pretty arbitrary as animals become more distantly related it's harder for them to reproduce together but even between more distant species there's still introgression.

Consider hybrids and ring species genus species subspecies breed when we talk about the notion of an organism having some kind of intrinsic evolutionary prerogative to preserve its kind that argument very easily slips from species to race because it's not based in anything

Okay this was gonna happen your great-great grandkids yeah all going to be brown

Spencer can laugh all he wants and pretend that it's not true what it is more importantly it's perfectly fine because there is no intrinsic value to race instead there is intrinsic harm caused by people like Spencer who are struggling to preserve some illusion of purity

The problem here is that if we make these kinds of arguments for species preservation, arguments for the intrinsic value of an arbitrary category of living things then we risk legitimizing racist arguments like white nationalism or concerns for white genocide.

So are there any pragmatic arguments for preserving species, it doesn't seem so, or at least not very many.

In terms of biodiversity ecologists enthusiastically tell us how important it is but their arguments tend to center on aesthetics, basically that nature is beautiful, the only pragmatic ones involve exceptional examples like pollinators for useful plants but we already burn eat pollinators we need for agriculture and not just honeybees but bumblebees and various other insects too. Obligate mutualism is very rare.

There's also talk about efficiency of ecosystems but in reality there are only a handful of niches with interchangeable species that live all around the world usually species die out because something else took their place and fill the niche more successfully advocates for preservation also talk about all of the potential life-saving medicines that we could find but that's not how medicine works anymore they don't find and test every random chemical in the rain forest that would be completely impractical molecular biology has advanced to the point that scientists look for proteins or enzymes to target they understand the kinds of molecules that can do it based on the mechanisms and even computer simulations.

So hopefully I've shown that meat eaters should not be using species preservation biodiversity as a reason not to go vegan and vegans should not be using it as a reason to go vegan, as strong and intuitive as it may seem, these arguments for biodiversity species preservation, they have some serious problems in term of the reasoning behind it, the best arguments for veganism still come down to individual suffering and climate change, not saving species.

Thank you so much for watching everybody and for those who are interested in the whole like world going vegan thing and the consequences of that I did do a response to BBC to a video they did on the topic so you can check that out here and yeah thanks again everybody I hope you enjoyed it comments and questions down below if you want to subscribe that's super cool and if you want to support the channel you can do so at patreon.com slash unnatural vegan thank you again and I will have a new video very soon


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*References*

Meat-eaters may speed worldwide species extinction, study warns
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/0...

Domestic animals in zoos
http://www.lpzoo.org/animal/domestic-cow
https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/do...
https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/do...

Cow taxonomy
https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRp...

Sheep taxonomy
https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRp...

Pig taxonomy
https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRp...

Chicken taxonomy
https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRp...

Duck taxonomy
https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRp...
https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRp...

Goat taxonomy
https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRp...

Turkey taxonomy
https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRp...

George Monbiot on Allan Savory/Holistic Managament
https://www.theguardian.com/environme...

Ligers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vybfy...

The changing face of America
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/201...

david84 wrote: ↑Tue Sep 05, 2017 12:24 pm Swayze (Unnatural Vegan) says in her video on species preservation/extinction (https://youtu.be/P2amJ-kFO84) that carnists should not use species preservation/ biodiversity as a reason not to go vegan and vegans should not be using it as a reason to go vegan.

I've been a strong supporter of conservation work because of the ecological importance of species on Earth, which leads me to the following question.

Given that animal agriculture causes or will cause a lot of species to go extinct in the next decades, isn't it valuable to use conservation of species as another reason to decrease animal products consumption?

David, I agree with you. I watched this video very closely, and I think Swayze has missed something about biodiversity. She says it is only a matter of esthetics: nature is beautiful. She says no individual species really matters so much, on the grounds that other species can always move in as conditions change. But I think there are two other reasons, one practical and one ethical. Practically, if the world was healthy then where one species can't compete as well anoother will move in. But in a scenario where humans are rapidly destroying whole ecosystems it does not hold up. We don't just need biodiversity to make new drugs, and, as she says, we hardly use it for that at all. We need ocean, forest, jungle and marsh habitats to survive because once we have killed them it will take thousands, if not millions, of years for them to recover. The projections currently show that the 6th major extinction is underway and will kill 99% of the species on earth, which will likely cause an environmental collapse that will not only wipe out almost all of nature's beauty but will also lead to erosion and desertification. Biodiversity is what makes it possible for new species to move in as conditions change. It is a reservoir of flexibility the planet developed over a long time to adapt. We may find that a dead, desert Earth is a lot harder to live in. As an extreme example, if the oceans and forests die they won't create oxygen anymore. But erosion alone can be a costly problem and a living earth protects against that.

She does support going vegan to reduce the climate change caused by greenhouse gases produced from animal agriculture, so she doesn't see letting the world overheat as being healthy for it. But she views the difference between preserving nature and paving it over as a matter of esthetics, presumably because human life is equally viable in either. But I think wide scale environmental collapse could prove very risky to human life in addition to killing off the beauty of nature.

The moral argument to preserve species is that gene lines have an ethical righ to life. Many gene lines will interbreed and preserve themselves using subspecies or races; I agree with here that such distinctions don't matter. But the gene line overall does matter. A gene line that has spent millions of years distinguishing itself from the rest deserves more consideration to perpetuate itself than our completely thoughtless behavior affords. I consider the destruction of a gene line to be a much greater ethical crime than killing or torturing large numbers of livestock, whose species are not remotely threatened.

I myself went vegan a few months ago after seeing Cowspiracy. My thought is that the planet can no longer sustain our lifestyle and we have to pull back environmental destruction in a big way if we want Earth to remain livable. I think it is a tragedy that climate change has overshadowed biodiversity as the sole focus of environmentalism; it isn't. Biodiversity loss is a bigger problem in my mind because you can only kill a species once. That said, if we don't take climate change much more seriously than the Paris Accord does, many species will die from climate change as well, but the greater threat to species in this century is habitat destruction.

Steve Wagar wrote: ↑Tue Sep 05, 2017 2:01 pmI consider the destruction of a gene line to be a much greater ethical crime than killing or torturing large numbers of livestock, whose species are not remotely threatened.

What? Why? Sounds like a deontological argument.

Destruction of one species could affect other species, and cause them death and suffering, but that only becomes a moral argument at the point of the death and suffering that results. Environmental destruction causes a lot of bad consequences in terms of suffering.
As long as we prioritize the moral argument, though, we don't even need to go that far: animal agriculture causes huge amounts of direct suffering to animals. The suffering of animals in wild environments just adds to that argument.

Species extinction without suffering or killing: I agree that it's a powerful aesthetic argument, but I don't think it goes much futher than that.

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Wed Sep 06, 2017 7:00 pm Destruction of one species could affect other species, and cause them death and suffering, but that only becomes a moral argument at the point of the death and suffering that results. Environmental destruction causes a lot of bad consequences in terms of suffering.
As long as we prioritize the moral argument, though, we don't even need to go that far: animal agriculture causes huge amounts of direct suffering to animals. The suffering of animals in wild environments just adds to that argument.

Species extinction without suffering or killing: I agree that it's a powerful aesthetic argument, but I don't think it goes much futher than that.

Ok, so let's factor out the other overwhelming reasons species extinction is bad and focus just the question of whether a a species/gene line has a right to live. I called it ethical, you called it aesthetic, and Jebus said it sounded deontological. As an atheist, my ethics are based on two principles, (1) valuing complexity over simplicity, e.g. life over death or diversity over barrenness, and (2) valuing sentience and intelligence, which is just a corollary of point (1). Consequently, I have said gene lines have a "right" to life, and secondarily, individuals have a "right" to operate within normal operating parameters, which excludes needless suffering. But genocide trumps abuse in this model, as more complexity is lost.

I don't consider them aesthetic points as beauty doesn't enter into it. It is deontological if you take these preferences as establishing a duty to behave some ways in preference to others, but I'm not sure what sense deontological is being used here.

~I didn't watch the video~

If cows "die out" because we stop breeding them for food, I don't see how that could possibly be worse than them being bred just to be tortured and killed prematurely...
Would you rather not be born or be born a cow in a factory farm? I would definitely rather not be born.

Idk if this is what you guys are even talking about tho, I can't read all this rn :/

Thank you all for replying, I think we should use conservation of species as a reason to decrease animal products consumption, to a certain degree.

The intuition regarding the beauty of a biodiverse earth is difficult to shake, and although I can't really make an ethical case for why biodiversity in and of itself has intrinsic value (indeed racists hijack this intuition and point to dwindling biodiversity in terms of human ethnicities in order to make a case for "ethnopluralism") I'm still not entirely on board. I guess if nothing else I can save some part by saying that these type of awe-bringing aesthetics are hugely important to human well-being, and so reducing biodiversity would cause less human well-being, even if we could hypothetically remove every other variable.

Gregor Samsa wrote: ↑Mon Nov 13, 2017 4:05 amthese type of awe-bringing aesthetics are hugely important to human well-being, and so reducing biodiversity would cause less human well-being.

Did the extinction of the dodo cause less human well-being? Probably yes, to the tiniest degree, but probably not enough to warrant any consideration.