I would need to know (or have some prior for) which species, or animals of which species, are affected by policies A and B. I would give very different odds for monkeys, cats, mites, and moss.
Also, individuals (whether human or animal) are a natural sort of thing to assign moral value to. But “species” are not. Species are defined as “groups of individuals, all of whom are capable of interbreeding”. (Even then there are exceptions like ring species, and also things like parthenogenic clans; it’s not a definition that cuts reality at its joints.)
There is no particular reason for me (or, I think, most people) to care about an animal in inverse proportion to its number of potential mates (= size of breeding group = size of species). I do care about variety, but the 5500 or so known mammal species are far more diverse than many sets of 5500 different insect species, for instance. And the set of all rodents (almost 2300 species) is far less diverse than the relatively tiny set of (Chimpanzee, African elephant, Great white shark). Being separate species is incidental to the things we really care about.
I would need to know (or have some prior for) which species, or animals of which species, are affected by policies A and B. I would give very different odds for monkeys, cats, mites, and moss.
Also, individuals (whether human or animal) are a natural sort of thing to assign moral value to. But “species” are not. Species are defined as “groups of individuals, all of whom are capable of interbreeding”. (Even then there are exceptions like ring species, and also things like parthenogenic clans; it’s not a definition that cuts reality at its joints.)
There is no particular reason for me (or, I think, most people) to care about an animal in inverse proportion to its number of potential mates (= size of breeding group = size of species). I do care about variety, but the 5500 or so known mammal species are far more diverse than many sets of 5500 different insect species, for instance. And the set of all rodents (almost 2300 species) is far less diverse than the relatively tiny set of (Chimpanzee, African elephant, Great white shark). Being separate species is incidental to the things we really care about.