Do you have an intuition that the last 1000 elephants (or humans, if you consider elephants to have weight zero or some such), are more valuable than 1000 elephants/humans if there are a million of them)?
(It’s not obvious you should have such an intuition, just that it seemed like the conversation was predicated on that, and the most obvious reason it’d be the case is that one might care about preserving a species existing at all [for various possible reasons] than being slightly more numerous)
That is the view the OP describes (with respect to elephants—it’s different for humans), and as I said, my own view is effectively the same, for the purpose of the current conversation.
Do you have an intuition that the last 1000 elephants (or humans, if you consider elephants to have weight zero or some such), are more valuable than 1000 elephants/humans if there are a million of them)?
(It’s not obvious you should have such an intuition, just that it seemed like the conversation was predicated on that, and the most obvious reason it’d be the case is that one might care about preserving a species existing at all [for various possible reasons] than being slightly more numerous)
That is the view the OP describes (with respect to elephants—it’s different for humans), and as I said, my own view is effectively the same, for the purpose of the current conversation.