Thank you, organicAnt, for continuing to explain your perspective. I am happy to see that the tone of dialog is more congenial than it was earlier.

I suspect that many in your audience think you have sentimental reasons for believing what you do. I think your position can be grounded on something stronger than feelings, but I don't see it expressed clearly. The fly vs. dolphin question seems like a good one to clarify values.

A dolphin is unquestionably more valuable to me than a fly. All of my experiences with dolphins have been positive. Dolphins are awesome.

Flies are terrible. Every experience I have had with flies has been annoying. I can't name a single good thing that flies do, at least not anything that some other creature couldn't do as well. Flies spread disease:

enteric infections (such as dysentery, diarrhoea, typhoid, cholera and certain helminth infections), eye infections (such as trachoma and epidemic conjunctivitis) (Fig. 6.6), poliomyelitis and certain skin infections (such as yaws, cutaneous diphtheria, some mycoses and leprosy).

I wish to see the amount of suffering in the world minimized, and these illnesses cause significant suffering. I would happily trade a billion flies for one dolphin. If I had the power to eradicate all flies, I would consider it.

Now, to put my cards on the table, I will point out that I am a human, and more concerned with human welfare than the welfare of other creatures. This is partly an in-group bias, and partly a belief that humans are capable of suffering more acutely than many other living things. No doubt I would have a completely different opinion of flies if I were a bat.

What values inform your position?

You clearly have a great respect for life as an idea. But it seems a bit ... monochromatic. By the time you learned to read, you had certainly annihilated vast numbers of microorganisms. The plants and bugs in your organic garden are engaged in a vicious, thoughtless war for survival, with violence and chemical warfare regular features of their ordinary existence.

You recognize that we humans are special, in that we are capable of making informed choices about how we interact with our environment and affect other forms of life. Yet the "web of life" diagram is a random jumble of living things, with no acknowledgement that single-celled organisms are incapable of suffering, or that humans have no natural predators.

If "every living thing is valuable," how do you decide what to eat out of necessity? What is the value you wish to maximize?