... biodiversity.¹

A cynic might well conclude that the discussion we've just completed is evidence that it probably isn't worth it to try to conserve biodiversity. I'm not a cynic, or I wouldn't be teaching this course.

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... respect.²

This section draws heavily from Chapter 4 of [2]

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... compelling.³

Although you do have to wonder whether we would genuinely believe that biodiversity is infinitely valuable. Certainly I think we'd all agree that it is extremely valuable, but would any of us claim that it is so valuable that preventing loss of biodiversity is more important than anything else?

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... done⁴

Of course, I'm an amateur philosopher at best, so me being unaware of a philosophical theory is weak evidence of its non-existence.

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... do.⁵

Feel free to ask me why, if you're curious about my reasons.

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... defined⁶

Does it include only humans, for example?

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... value.⁷

Rawls' approach is based on the idea that just outcomes are those to which any of the participants would agree if they didn't know their role in society. It is clearly focused on determining just outcomes within human society and considers other parts of the world, if at all, only to the extent that those other parts of the world influence outcomes that affect human beings.

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... proposed.⁸

See, for example: Nussbaum. M. C. 2006. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

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... biodiversity.⁹

I should mention that Nussbaum's approach does, to some extent, involve something like the rights of individual animals to be free, but it develops those rights in the context of a contractarian ethical system, not a libertarian one.

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... resources).¹⁰

I'm going to use the phrase ``conserve biodiversity'' throughout the rest of these notes. I don't mean to imply that conserving biodiversity is the only thing we might have an ethical obligation to do towards the environment. I just don't want to repeat myself constantly.

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... composed.¹¹

In the case of landscapes we might even hope that we'd be able to place values on inanimate objects.

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... extinction?¹²

The reason everything isn't extinct is that some species give rise to one or more new species before they go extinct.

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