Endangered Species Ethics Essay

According to scientists, around 150-200 species of plant and animal go extinct every 24 hours. This statistic doesn’t seem so shocking until the realization comes that this is almost 1,000 times the natural rate for extinction. Humans contribute a great amount to this pandemic. A prime example is that of the dodo bird, which was famously hunted into extinction. Around 20,000 species are currently listed as threatened by extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). When assessing the status of a species, one of the factors for the IUCN is that the species must be declining at a certain rate over the course of a certain number of years. People need to work to protect endangered species. There are several different …show more content…
While some laws, such as the 1973 Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 have worked on animal conservation, humans as a whole need to feel more inclined to help the animals in need in any way they could. There are laws and rules all over the world for the protection of species, but some people, such as poachers, simply ignore these laws and continue to pursue the endangered creatures. People should want to help protect these endangered species, more than the people who want to harm them. The protection of endangered species is supported by different ethical theories. One of the ethical theories that supports protecting endangered species is consequentialism. Consequentialism is the ethical theory that makes the moral decision of whether something is good or not based on the consequences that come from said action. With consequentialism being a sort of umbrella term, underneath it includes other ethical theories such as utilitarianism, altruism, egoism, and negative …show more content…
Negative consequentialism is a branch of consequentialism that focuses on reducing as much suffering as possible. It supports the protection of endangered species because as these species decline in population, they are suffering greatly in numbers. As the hit the point of extinction, everyone suffers from the loss of the species from the world. By not protecting endangered species, they will continue to go extinct and many more species could join the trend, causing everyone everywhere to suffer to some degree with the loss of these species. With this being the exact opposite of what negative consequentialism is about, it would make sense to support protecting