On Equal Species Welfare

Researches of environmental ethics and ecological ethics in the West have always been trying to solve the tension between human and the earth. Several schools like animal liberation theory, animal rights theory and life equality theory have emerged one after another. They have made equal achievements in terms of the issues of animal and environmental protection, but they all fail to solve the problems of the relations between human and environment, human and other species, they do not propose effective strategies either. The thesis probes into the specie equality problems to which people barely attach significance, for example, How to establish and sustain an equal relation between species? What kind of position does human being occupy among species? What functions does human have? Etc.The thesis divides into three parts. The fast part simply showed the general situation of giant panda protection, after that a series of established reasons defending giant panda protection which were generally approved were summarized, for example, researchful value of "living fossil", species diversity value, species and environmental protection value. The analysis indicated, these reasons either were farfetched, or put the cart before the horse, or external. At the last of the first part, especially we discovered that the established protection strategies and defensive reasons of giant panda seriously contained the inequality in species protection.In order to solve the problem of inequality in species protection, the second part showed the correlative theory resources detailedly, the elementary theory including Kant's Natural teleology and Bentham's Natural View of Utilitarianism, and the concrete theory involved animal liberation theory, animal rights theory and the theory of life equality on which the equal species welfare theory was mainly developed. Firstly the differences between equality and fairness, right and welfare were analyzed in the third part. Equality was based on the form of the non-difference, fairness was the equity of the content; Right depended on the claiming of moral agent, and the welfare was the satisfying to the need of what object granted. The equality of species welfare was discussed subsequently: Various species were equal to each other when they are indistinctive evolutional and ecological unit, but the human-being who accidentally become rational existence in the evolution have moral responsibility to grant them equal welfare. Any principle has its boundary condition to adapting in the practice. Finally, these boundary conditions were induced, which were based on the species welfare equality: the principle of avoiding annihilation, the human first principle and the negative protection principle.In the final part of the thesis, namely the conclusion part, the author proposed the strategy of giant panda protection which based on the policy and the principle: protect the panda and avoid unnatural annihilation as far as possible, restore their primitive ecological environment, reduce intervention to natural ecosystem to the best of our abilities, Etc.The new point mentioned in this article is the issue about whether the giant panda be protected is reasonable or not. Based on this question, the concept of equal species welfare is raised. Through combining equal species welfare and practice of species protection, this article is trying to solve a particular problem of giant panda protection. The production of some inspiration about species protection is where the author's intention lies.