Abstract
The mass extinction visited upon us by capitalism involves many kinds of devastation. Here I clarify the grounds for assessing the most obvious of these harms, i.e., decimation of species diversity. The thesis that variety among species has intrinsic value motivates, and in turn follows from, the “variable value view” (VVV) of abundance within any given species. In contrast, standard axiologies have no place for the intrinsic value of species diversity. I show that the VVV provides a better justification than the latter do, of the way in which a widely-used empirical indicator summarizes the overall state of life on Earth. These considerations favor ecocentric value theory – which ascribes intrinsic value to properties of ecological wholes, like species diversity, that do not supervene on the well-being of their constituent organisms – over its main competitors. I conclude by widening the focus from wild nature alone to the biosphere comprising both wilderness and the domesticated realm. This broadened perspective helps to link the science and ethics of biodiversity with the political struggle to extract ourselves from the moral abyss of mass extinction.
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Notes
Throughout this paper, I use “well-being” and “welfare” to denote whatever it is that makes individual lives intrinsically valuable. I also assume positive average well-being. If average well-being were negative for a particular case, the claims to follow could be adjusted accordingly. On the implausibility of negative averages for nature in general, see Mikkelson (2018).
See van Dooren (2014) for a moving account of how differently particular individual birds have actually fared during the effort to save the whooping crane species.
Conversely, if coot numbers had increased by 34 while whooping cranes went extinct, the AP and TP would again register no gain or loss, whereas the VVV would entail a loss. See Odenbaugh (in review) for an actual example of a common species expanding at the expense of a related, endangered (sub-) species.
This implication is analogous to prioritarianism’s implication that equality of well-being among individuals within a species has intrinsic value. In other words, “prioritarianism is a sort of egalitarianism” (Gosepath, 2021).
The proposition, that species diversity has intrinsic value not reducible to the intrinsic value (e.g., well-being) of individual organisms, is distinct from the proposition that individual species, considered separately, have such value. Bradley (2001) rebutted several arguments for the latter proposition, and defended the former. I have not examined whether Bradley’s rebuttals also apply to Smith’s (2016) later argument for the irreducible intrinsic value of species.
Here I use base-10 logarithms, but could have used any other base, since it makes no difference to the final estimate. For the sake of simplicity I use the raw abundances, whereas the WWF uses more complex methods to estimate yearly changes within each population (McRae et al., 2017).
It is already weighted for differences in research effort across taxa and locations. In principle, the LPI could also be weighted according to other criteria, such as the evolutionary distinctiveness of different species (cf. Palmer & Fischer, 2021).
Individual well-being should not be ignored at finer scales, where decisions about how to conserve particular species have significant impacts on particular non-human persons as well as human cultural attitudes (Wallach et al., 2020).
This seems to be a particular instance of a more general problem, i.e., anthropocentrism in practice despite non-anthropocentrism in principle. For another example, see McShane’s (2016) critique of climate ethics and policy for instantiating this same problem.
See Washington et al. (2018) on the continuing importance of ecocentrism for conservation biology.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
Similarly – as Hurka (1983) already pointed out – the VVV does better than the average principle (AP) does in the face of the classic objection to the latter. While the AP always violates the so-called mere addition principle, the VVV does not always violate it.
This will not be the case when growth slows down for good, to below the economy’s rate of improvement in ecological efficiency – a point that will roughly coincide with the end of capitalism (Mikkelson 2017, 2021).
See Preston (2021) on difficulties in defining just when that final point has been reached.
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Acknowledgments
For feedback on this paper, thanks to Ron Sandler, Phil Cafaro, and other fellow participants in the workshop leading to its submission; as well as Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, and three anonymous reviewers.
Funding
Thanks to Phil Cafaro and Ron Sandler for funding my participation in the workshop leading to submission of this paper.
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Mikkelson, G.M. Abundance and Variety in Nature: Fact and Value. Philosophia 50, 2235–2247 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00451-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00451-2