Towards A Multispecies Population Ethics

Abstract

Current ecological threats, such as the sixth mass extinction or climate change, highlight the need to evaluate the moral implications of changing populations, both human and non-human. The paper sketches a non-anthropocentric and multispecies sufficientarian account of population ethics. After discussing several other options for multispecies population ethics, the paper proposes a two-level account of multispecies sufficientarianism, according to which the value of populations depend on two kinds of sufficientarian thresholds. First, there is a species-relativized individual-level threshold for what species-specific flourishing is for an organism. Second, there is a population-level threshold for a sufficiently viable population enough to support the species-specific flourishing of the current and future members of that population. The paper concludes by discussing some of the practical implications and concerns raised by the two-level account suggested.