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Notes
Though Fischer and Delon both attribute a hedonic conception of wellbeing to me, I’m actually a pluralist - I think wellbeing has many constitutive elements, including objective elements. The only form of hedonism I commit myself to in WAE, is a hedonic conception of the threshold below which a life is not worth living. It seems to me that, at least with respect to non-human animals, an individual’s life is no longer worth living if and only if, throughout the foreseeable future, her suffering exceeds her positive experiences.
For a general discussion of how animals’ wellbeing can vary over the different periods of their lives, and of how to take this variation into account when estimating the wellbeing of populations, see Hecht, 2021.
For a discussion of the distinction, see Shriver, 2006.
In his commentary, Fischer argues that habitat destruction is more feasible than gene drives, since habitat destruction is already happening. However, the unintentional (but foreseeable) habitat destruction caused by climate change, habitat encroachment, etc., doesn’t reliably reduce r-strategist populations. R-strategists tend to be adaptable generalists, and habitat destruction sometimes increases generalist species’ populations (for a relevant study that focuses specifically on bird populations, see Devictor et al., 2008). Only habitat destruction that significantly reduces biomass and primary productivity, such as desertification, reliably reduces r-strategist populations.
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Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to Bob Fischer, Clare Palmer, Gary O’Brien, and Nicolas Delon, for their thoughtful commentaries. I also owe thanks to Queen’s University’s A.P.P.L.E. research group for hosting the online book symposium these commentaries were initially presented at. Special thanks to Paulina Siemieniec for her help with advertising the A.P.P.L.E. symposium, and to Will Kymlicka for chairing it.
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Johannsen, K. Defending Wild Animal Ethics. Philosophia 50, 899–907 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00424-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00424-5