Morality: Allowing the natural extinction of Tobacco

[Lagmonster]

Presume you discover a brand new naturally-occurring organism (doesn't matter what it is) that has got a taste for the Tobacco plant. This predator is unique and so specialized that it will render the Tobacco plant functionally extinct faster than the best human efforts to preserve the plant could be thrown into effect.

In other words, natural selection is about to make the tobacco plant its bitch, with the accompanying downfall and loss of livelihood of an entire agri-business industry.

Now say you have an opportunity to stop this critter before it gets started. Are you morally obligated to do so?

Would it be worse if you found this critter isolated on an island somewhere surviving, but not thriving, on some close cousin to the tobacco plant, and then purposely transported it to the mainland and released it among some wild tobacco? Would you do it anyway?

[Davis 51]

Not really. I would embrace the chance to kill tobacco outright.

Personally, I would also want to make sure it doesn't take out any other plants in the process.

Plus, the look on the tobacco lobbyist faces would be priceless.

[Turin]

This seems like an easy one. You're measuring the economic livelihood of several hundred thousand people (worldwide) against the annual death of millions. Those people who will lose their livelihoods will suffer in the short term, but ultimately they're employed in agriculture, and agricultural industry can eventually be re-tooled into other products.

[CJvR]

Species dies out by the dozen on their own or with our assistance anyway! I would jump at the oppertunity to whipe out the tobacco scourge although I would keep a few seeds isolated in case some none destructive use for it was discovered.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

Why should we stop the natural (And by natural, I mean non-human cause) extinction of any species? Besides, IIRC, species don't suddenly naturally disappear. Only human activity can do that. But at any rate, I don't see what's so bad about collapsing the tobacco industry if it will prevent the suffering of millions now and the untold number of preventable deaths to come in the future.

[General Soontir Fel]

I wouldn't. Ecosystems are fragile, and mutations occur too easily. The potato (and several other agricultural plants) is a rather close relative to tobacco, and if the virus or whatever takes a taste to that, the number of human deaths will probably be exponentially greater than from smoking. It's too much risk.

[Galvatron]

Nope.

I like to smoke occasionally.

/puts noose around own neck and waits for the lynching

[Darth Servo]

Species dies out by the dozen on their own or with our assistance anyway! I would jump at the oppertunity to whipe out the tobacco scourge although I would keep a few seeds isolated in case some none destructive use for it was discovered.

Not to mention the fact that it just might play an important yet unknown role in the ecosystem. Treat it like we did with small pox. Wipe it out but keep a couple small samples around just in case.

[Molyneux]

Nope.

I like to smoke occasionally.

/puts noose around own neck and waits for the lynching

...why bother? You're doing it to yourself bit by bit anyway.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Presume you discover a brand new naturally-occurring organism (doesn't matter what it is) that has got a taste for the Tobacco plant. This predator is unique and so specialized that it will render the Tobacco plant functionally extinct faster than the best human efforts to preserve the plant could be thrown into effect.

In other words, natural selection is about to make the tobacco plant its bitch, with the accompanying downfall and loss of livelihood of an entire agri-business industry.

Now say you have an opportunity to stop this critter before it gets started. Are you morally obligated to do so?

Would it be worse if you found this critter isolated on an island somewhere surviving, but not thriving, on some close cousin to the tobacco plant, and then purposely transported it to the mainland and released it among some wild tobacco? Would you do it anyway?

Since potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes are close enough relatives to the tobacco plant to catch many of the same diseases (tobacco mosaic virus, for example.) I'd have to think long and hard before introducing something that might decide that a tomato, potato, or pepper plant is similar enough to eat.

On the other hand, if the hypothetical bug had some magical +infinite resistance against mutation, then I'd probably sleep very well at night since the number of people who might go hungry having their livelihood taken away from them is substantially less than the number of people who'd ultimately suffer premature ends due to tobacco.

[Kuja]

Presume you discover a brand new naturally-occurring organism (doesn't matter what it is) that has got a taste for the Tobacco plant. This predator is unique and so specialized that it will render the Tobacco plant functionally extinct faster than the best human efforts to preserve the plant could be thrown into effect.

In other words, natural selection is about to make the tobacco plant its bitch, with the accompanying downfall and loss of livelihood of an entire agri-business industry.

Now say you have an opportunity to stop this critter before it gets started. Are you morally obligated to do so?

Would it be worse if you found this critter isolated on an island somewhere surviving, but not thriving, on some close cousin to the tobacco plant, and then purposely transported it to the mainland and released it among some wild tobacco? Would you do it anyway?

To quote Shredder, "Go. Play."

[dragon]

Also if the thing only eats tobacco plants after the plants are all or mostly gone then they will start to die out as well. Then once they are all dead then just bring out some tobacco seeds and start over. Now if its a virus or bacteria then it might go dormant untill new tobacco plants grow.

[Pick]

I would need to do extensive testing before I introduced an exotic species. For the purposes of the hypothetical, however, assuming it targets tobacco only and nothing else, then yes. Yes, I would wipe it out.

[Darth Wong]

Taking the scenario at face value, I'd obviously let it wipe out tobacco. There's no intelligent reason not to.

[Zor]

Getting rid of that bastard Tomato Relitive at no expense to myself. Sure i would. No skin off my back and it would save lives and the canadian government billions of dollers.

Zor

[Lagmonster]

It seems reasonable to agree that given some sort of limit, allowing this one species to go extinct is okay (even though most greens argue that losing any species is unacceptable to our ecosystem). Even so, I imagine most people would argue that it would not be okay to allow the extinction of, say, dogs, or rice plants. But I'm curious how people arrive at the conclusion that we are morally required to protect some species. It would seem to me that we have no outright moral mandate to protect any species other than ourselves, but of course we require other species to preserve ourselves and the integrity of the ecosystem that we live in. Where does moral mandate end and pure survival kick in, or are they somehow intertwined?

[LordShaithis]

Like someone else said, if the organism eats only tobacco and is voracious enough to destroy all of it, then it will starve itself into extinction in short order. At which point some enterprising fellow, who put away a warehouse full of tobacco seeds in sealed drums when this all started, gets richer than Bill Gates. A few years later everything is more or less back to normal.

[Lost Soal]

Let it burn. Can't stand the stuff and its legalised poison tolerated only because governments know they can rake billions in from taxing it.

As an aside, Lagmonster:

It seems reasonable to agree that given some sort of limit, allowing this one species to go extinct is okay (even though most greens argue that losing any species is unacceptable to our ecosystem). Even so, I imagine most people would argue that it would not be okay to allow the extinction of, say, dogs, or rice plants. But I'm curious how people arrive at the conclusion that we are morally required to protect some species. It would seem to me that we have no outright moral mandate to protect any species other than ourselves, but of course we require other species to preserve ourselves and the integrity of the ecosystem that we live in. Where does moral mandate end and pure survival kick in, or are they somehow intertwined?

Am I going barmy, or have I read this exact same paragraph on this board before?

[Talanth]

If I could guarentee that the extinction would be limited to the tobacco breeds which are used for smoking and that the organism wouldn't mutate to damage other types of plants, or otherwise disrupt the ecosystem, then yes I would unleash it.

I don't think these things could be guaranteed, so I wouldn't, especially since hearing about close relations of the tobacco plant in relation to medicines.

[Lagmonster]

Am I going barmy, or have I read this exact same paragraph on this board before?

I don't know; I have a very bad memory and not a lot of variation in the types of things that puzzle me.

[Lisa]

Let it burn. Can't stand the stuff and its legalised poison tolerated only because governments know they can rake billions in from taxing it.

I disagree on that it's tolerated only because governments make $ off of it. It's not like prohibition of anything has ever worked in the past (booze, drugs, gay sex).

Now if there were a virus that made the addiction reverse it's self violently causing people who get the urge to puke at the thought of a smoke....

[RedImperator]

Let me throw in a caveat here: there's not a lot in the history of drugs to suggest that magically making tobacco go away will simply make tobacco addicts get clean and that's that. The classic example is cocaine--in areas of the country where enforcement has succeded in driving up the price out of the range of regular users, it's been replaced by meth. Not an improvement. If tobacco goes extinct overnight, there's going to be a huge market for a synthetic replacement, and absolutely no guarantee that replacement will be better than tobacco. Considering the lack of quality control or scruples on the part of the producers of synthetic recreational drugs, it's very likely to be worse.

[Agent Fisher]

No. I like to smoke, not a huge amount, but i do enjoy a cigar or a pipe or my coffin nails. So, no, I would not wipe out tobacco.

[Darth Servo]

RedImp, there is this little thing called "the patch"

[Lord of the Abyss]

As others have said, if I could be assured it would only target tobacco I would release it.

Besides, IIRC, species don't suddenly naturally disappear.

They do; it doesn't normally happen because of scale. Short of a dinosaur-killer impact, or nearby supernova, not much is going to kill off a widespread species suddenly, and we've never experienced those.

Some species are confined to a single island or other small location. Plagues and volcanos and such can easily rapidly kill a species under those conditions; if Krakatoa harbored a unique species of rodent, I doubt any survived.