Don’t be silly, there’s no point in making absolute statements like that. Everything needs to be qualified.

If you could become an imaginary micro unit more happier but it would cost 14 orangutans their lives, does it still hold? And for people on the opposite side, if saving one orangutan was guaranteed to cost a human their life - or perhaps their eyesight or a limb - would it still be worth it?

We’re not living in a 20s silent film, there are shades of gray in this world.

>If you could become an imaginary micro unit more happier but it would cost 14 orangutans their lives, does it still hold? And for people on the opposite side, if saving one orangutan was guaranteed to cost a human their life - or perhaps their eyesight or a limb - would it still be worth it?

Neither of those situations exist.

Neither does your false premise. We do not have to choose between the well being of orangutans and the well being of people.

Actually it does. I can buy cheaper food because Palm oil and orangutans die. I'd rather pay extra and leave them alone.

I agree to an extent. I think I would happily trade my second Lambo or private jet for them, probably even a couple of cups of coffee a week.

I don't blame anyone to choosing to send their kids to school or fix their roof though.

Who exactly is making the choice about palm oil? The dude who owns the plantation? The guy who works on it? The guy running the company buying the palm oil to make Nuetella? The person buying the Nuetella?

Someone is deciding it's better to have palm oil then orangutans. It's hard to value something that you'll only ever see on a screen or in a zoo. How can you even say you'll miss it? Compare that to your second lambo. Even if you never drive it you see it in driveway every day.

No one person is making the choice, that's the problem. The decision is distributed over many people and each step is only a tiny bit "rapacious" on average (meaning some steps may even be conserving), but over all, the collective decision is to kill 100k orangutans for tastier Nütella.

Secondly, it's not about difficulty in valuing something that's hard to see; our markets do plenty of that and are very good at it. It's that there is no value placed on orangutans. Even if you get to see one every day, that may affect your personal decisions but it has no effect collectively because orangutans, like anything else that exists freely in nature such as unclaimed resources, are priced close to $0 in the markets. Only if someone "owned" all the orangutans, for example, then you can talk about value.