It means they're lying about their motivation and you give them false respect for it.

The practical reality is that they will use arguments as soldiers in a religious culture war and innocent people are going to be the victim of the practical social consequences of it.

Practical ethics implies practical memetics; if you are faced with a culture war you would do well to remember it's a war, not a benevolent debate in good faith.

You're right that the logical structure of consequentialist arguments are not inherently bad. The argument you mention is the class of argument that I find relevant, and many other people too.

But my point is that this is why we can expect endless rationalization in this form.

It is very easy to turn your argument upside down: "Allowing the state, rather than the private individual, to decide about the time and manner of the individual's death sends the wrong kind of cultural message around and makes those people who don't think logically but rather associatively more likely to violate people in other ways and other areas of life against their will, as they will not see the destruction of the informed consent principle in itself as bad, but only the mere end of a life whose span was limited anyway."

You can make the same framing for making people suffer against their will, and even murdering people if you frame it in terms of "ownership of life" (the government decides who has to live and who has to die).

The religious people who honestly say, "It's a sin", can be countered with, "That is your right to believe, but freedom of religion says you can't ban something for everyone just because you think it's a sin. If you want freedom of religion for yourself, you have to accept it for others, which means you have to try to convince people instead of coercing them."

That is the cultural foundation for a peaceful existence in a pluralistic society.

I have no doubt that this is true in some cases, but it is not true in others.

If you stage a "debate" between evolutionary scientists and creationists, give both sides equal speaking time, treat both with the same respect and social credibility signals, pretend that both are equally interested in the scientific truth, then you are doing the common good a disfavor.

Because the very framing of the debate is happening in the wrong terms. It just allows people whose true rejection is "it's in the bible" or "God said so" to pretend that they're interested in something else, such as the common good or the scientific truth.

If we had true freedom of religion, the debate about voluntary euthanasia would be over (*). Logically, it's a total no-brainer. To pretend that Catholic spokespeople give two shits about the common good, and calculate some kind of utilitarian calculus and then conclude one way or another, is total bullshit.

This is not their true rejection, and everybody knows it. To let them publicly pretend otherwise is doing the true common good a disfavor, because it allows them to implicitly attack other people's freedom of religion, without explicitly having to say, "Look, that freedom of religion thing is fine as long as everybody obeys our religious demands - but not otherwise."

Because the latter is an open attack on the Schelling point of basic human rights and implies a form of defection that they do not want the rest of society to reciprocate. They are rational, instrumentally, in lying about this and pretending otherwise, but we are irrational, instrumentally, in letting it happen.

(*) There would still be discussion about euthanasaia's legal details, but the fundementals would be obvious. Perhaps it would be illegal for voluntary members of religious organizations who decide it, but that is just another form of consent.

First, I would question if it's the most effective thing (on the margin) someone could to to maximize pleasure. If not, prioritize other things.

Second, I would question whether the suffering outweighs the pleasure in wild animals. Reasonable activities here could be research and awareness raising.

Finally, there's a level of activities many professions are already engaged in, such as maintaining and monitoring deer populations when their natural predators have been displaced by humans, or welfare-related activities in dedicated wildlife parks. Other ideas are vaccinations for some wild animals, or research into softer ways to control wild animal populations, e.g. affordable depot contraceptives. David Pearce has even suggested a welfare state for elephants. I think costs are a limiting factor here.

I personally am pessimistic that suffering causes like live predation can be outweighed by wild animal pleasure; I think it would probably be easier to make human lives better (e.g. better painkillers) and more humane (better vegan food), and then make more of them. Or just make happier domesticated animals. But I'm sure if you're looking you'll find something of value. I'd also keep an eye on Animal Ethics

I had nothing of value to add to the discussion, but I found the summaries and alternate views outlines useful.

Relatively speaking, yes. We have invented and/or improved water filtration and desalination techniques, hydroponics, synthetic pharmaceuticals, and many technologies to capture, store and use energy without photosynthesis. We even replaced horses in transportation with automobiles.

It's easy to imagine more efficient versions of many of these in the future. (I mentioned Star Trek because of its iconic production and energy technologies, especially the replicator.)

We also replaced a lot of nature, which tends to make the remaining nature more valuable, but this is relative.

Your position supports the argument that it could be a good thing -- it is inadequate for supporting the argument that it will be a good thing.

You're right; perhaps there will be e.g. more suffering than the whole thing is worth.

A "technological civilization" with enough resources can implement much better versions of all of these.

Yes, that's why I'd expect the value of nature to decrease as technology progresses. If you look to science fiction, the Star Trek Federation certainly had no need for any untouched nature for any purpose other than sentimentality.

Perhaps, except for sustaining and improving the technological civilization we have now, as well as all efforts to push against opposing values... that contains a lot of what humans do. (The rest is due to the fact that humans usually don't really maximize anything systematically.)

And as I said, there is probably a margin where nature is optimal; we want clean water, air, resilience of food production, tourism etc. anyway. But that margin is finite and it becomes smaller as technological know-how increases.

I think that precisely because natural ecosystems make possible - indeed require - very many relationships between components, they are not optimal for maximizing something we value, except for values tailored to their nature (status quo biased environmentalism, deep ecology).

They are unsuitable to maximize anything else, such as happiness, pleasure, even biodiversity. At least compared to what a technological civilization could implement, given enough dedicated resources.

As an example, take rodents, who have relatively high number of offspring but require stable populations in their niche most of the time (due to fixed carrying capacity). If you have 5 or more offspring, all capable of feeling pain, fear, starvation, thirst etc., and only 2 can survive to reproduce successfully, you have a strong prima facie argument for a suffering surplus.