There's a folk view that I sometimes round off as "deep ecology," though I think it extends to more than the academic definition[1]. Roughly speaking, tenets include:
1) Ecosystems have an inherent right to exist, and have value beyond aggregating individuals' preferences or happiness.
2) *Species survival* is a coherent concept, and preserving current biodiversity is a worthy goal not just instrumentally but as an end in itself.
3) Humans are bad.
4) Ecosystems are by default in equilibrium.
5) Nature and her children were in harmony before some subset of {white people, capitalism, industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, homo sapiens, great apes} fucked it up.
6) The "Earth" will in a meaningful sense be better off without humans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology
I think a lot of these points are not just wrong but incoherent (especially 4 and 5, but I think to some degree or the other, the remaining points rest on those). Is there a clear writeup of what deep ecology entails and why it's wrong? (The arguments on wikipedia seem noncentral).
Good links Max. I've often felt there is a conflict between ecosystems/species preservation and animal welfare and these are really useful for exploring that idea more.
However, I one point that I still get some cognitive dissonance from is the low-importance ascribed to (species) diversity. It seems like if resources are to be used to make more happy individuals (so using resources to improve the lives of unhappy individuals is not an option, maybe we're in a utopia where the lives of all sentient individuals are already net-positive and we value totalist population ethics), then it could, for instance, be better to produce more happy rhinos than happy humans, as there are far fewer rhinos than humans (if our utopia has the same current species numbers as the world today), so we will get more increase in the diversity of happy experiences. A moral weighting should also be applied between humans and rhinos, but if there is a huge difference in relative population numbers then it would probably be the dominating factor. How do others value a world with 7,700,000,000 people and 40,000 rhinos vs. a world with 7,700,010,000 people and 30,000 rhinos (using rough current species numbers and assuming all were fairly happy)?
I think my intuition is to incorporate diminishing returns (for a given species) into multi-species population ethics, given that the experiences (phenomenology) of species differs, so they experience happiness in different ways. Does this make any sense, and is there a name for such ethical views? It works best for me from the totalist population ethics standpoint, and I probably wouldn't extend this to saying we should help unhappy rhinos over unhappy humans, even given the current populations of both species.