From: russ@wpg.com (Russell Lawrence)
Subject: Re: Hunters: Legitimate concern?
Organization: WP Group
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 03:44:46 GMT

From article <xtdmraf@dixie.com>, by refrig@dixie.com (Todd Hedenstrom):
th> It's not a great moral offense against the species that you're 
th> killing, it's a great moral offense against all the OTHER species 
th> (including man) that benefit from or are in some way reliant on 
th> the extincted species.  

Russell Lawrence writes:
rl> Apart from man, which "OTHER" species would be offended by such 
rl> extinctions?  If you can't offend an animal by using him in a 
rl> medical experiment or by killing his companions prematurely, I 
rl> don't understand how you could offend him by killing the last 
rl> remaining members of a different species.  

From article <Brrut3.F4y@acsu.buffalo.edu>, by rms@acsu.buffalo.edu (Robert M. Straubinger):
rs> Maybe a clarification of the usage of 'offended' would be in 
rs> order here;  there exist in nature very some tight, highly 
rs> specific predator-prey relationships;  one could surmise that 
rs> extinction of the prey could lead to extinction of the predator.  
rs> With some twist of the word, such a happening might be considered 
rs> to 'offend' the dependent species.  

Only if you're willing to treat a class-construct as though it's
a thinking/feeling entity, endowed with some sort of personal agency.

What sort of mental qualities would a given entity need to have
in order to take offense in some meaningful way?  Surely a car is
not "offended" if we smash it to bits, nor is a head of cabbage 
offended if we chop it into cole slaw.   To the extent that we
pretend otherwise, we're guilty of personifying impersonal things.

I can understand why a thinking/feeling animal might be able to
take offense at our treatment of him/her, but I don't understand how
an abstract concept like a "species" is capable of taking such
offense.  

rs> I'm having a hard time following the thrust of this argument;  I 
rs> believe you would agree that humans are not the only creatures 
rs> that benefit from biodiversity, nor the only ones to 'suffer' 
rs> should extinctions occur.  From the standpoint of biodiversity, 
rs> there is a difference between the deaths of individual members of 
rs> a species, and the death of the last members of species.  

Perhaps.

Vis-a-vis life in Louisiana, it seems to me that it would, 
indeed, make a difference if wolves were still able to 
play a meaningful roll in the ecosystem by killing diseased
or aging animals.  Unfortunately, wolves in Louisiana are 
practically non-existent.  

Oddly enough, the few individual remaining Louisiana wolves are 
unlikely to benefit from any sort of federal protection because 
they're not considered to be unique.  This uniqueness is 
measured, not by the feelings and emotions of the individual 
wolves, but by their taxonomic classification.  As a hybrid cross 
between coyotes and wolves, they apparently don't count for much.  

I suppose everyone would make quite a fuss if coyotes and grey 
wolves were endangered everywhere on the planet, but practically 
speaking do you think it would make any difference to wildlife in 
Louisiana?   In view of the fact that the domain of the average
mammal is restricted to a few square miles, would it really make
much difference if wolves were nonexistent as opposed to living
five thousand miles away?

rs> That said, I can't decide which way to interpret the above -- 
rs> only humans are 'salient enough' to be 'offended' by extinction?  
rs> Humans are the only ones who 'use' animals in such a way that 
rs> they would be inconvenienced by extinctions?  Killing any 
rs> individaual of a species is (morally) no different from killing 
rs> the last member of a species (or driving the population to a 
rs> non-sustaining level)?  I suspect your argument is the latter, 
rs> but it just *seems* like there is a difference.  

Again, it seems to me that an action has no ethical importance if 
it's not perceived mentally in some way.  It seems to me that 
mammals and birds, at the very least, do, indeed, have the mental 
wherewithal to be affected, as individuals, by our treatment of 
them.    

As you know, many of the contributors to this newsgroup choose to 
treat non-human animals as mindless entities.  Yet, they'll turn 
around and treat a "species-as-a-whole" as though the "species" 
is a person with some sort of collective mind.  Do you consider 
such turnabouts to be reasonable?  
-- 
Russell Lawrence, WP Group, New Orleans (504) 443-5000
russ@wpg.com   uunet!wpg!russ