Yeah, there’s a distinction there that seems to have gotten lost. Nuking the moon seems about as good an example of environmental destruction without short-term externalities as I can think of, and indeed it doesn’t trigger the same moral instincts in me as, say, nuking a national park would.
That doesn’t seem to bear directly on the OP’s main point, but a lot of the other supporting examples seem to show similarly sloppy reasoning.
Yeah, there’s a distinction there that seems to have gotten lost. Nuking the moon seems about as good an example of environmental destruction without short-term externalities as I can think of, and indeed it doesn’t trigger the same moral instincts in me as, say, nuking a national park would.
That doesn’t seem to bear directly on the OP’s main point, but a lot of the other supporting examples seem to show similarly sloppy reasoning.
Thanks for the link; I didn’t know about Project A119. Probably a good thing they didn’t do it, though.