When people say life has generally gotten better in the last several decades, this is the kind of thing I think of. Gotten better for who? Not the Orangutans.
When people talk about life getting better they generally mean human welfare, not wildlife welfare. Never the less, without progress in science and industry, I'm sure wildlife would be even worse off. Imagine if most people still burnt non petroleum resources for cooking and heating....
Trivia: Orang orang = people, orang utan = forest people.
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.
Neither of those situations exist.
I don't blame anyone to choosing to send their kids to school or fix their roof though.
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.
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.