On Associating Extinction with Death: Fatal Implications for Conservation?

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the question whether arguments about the badness of death can offer useful analogies for understanding the badness of extinction. The two main lines of argumentation, the Epicurean approach and the deprivation view, are analyzed from this perspective. The analogies offer some interesting viewpoints to killing and anthropogenic mass extinction, for example. Nevertheless, we conclude that the analogy to death fails to explain badness of extinction. As the major (Western) moral theories also seem to fail on this task, we propose that the badness of extinction should be understood as a tethered concept: extinction is then bad as a loss to someone who understands and experiences that loss.