Compassionate conservation in practice: A values-driven, interdisciplinary, pluralistic, and deliberative community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conservation biology's purported remit is conserving nature by protecting species, habitats, and ecosystems. Because of this the field has historically given short shrift to the wellbeing of individual animals themselves and their role in nature protection. This approach ignores substantial scientific and ethical evidence showing that many animals are sentient, sapient and social beings who have intrinsic value and individual wellbeing. Compassionate conservation (CC) is an emergent paradigm of conservation arising to redress this absolute or relative dismissal of wild lives. Noting that the practice of CC is not well characterized, we used a modified Delphi method to explore the meaning and significance of such practices. Contrary to the stereotypes of critics, CC is not a “do nothing” but a “do better and do right” approach to working in the field. Recognizing that all science is value-laden, CC is self-consciously guided by a bounded pluralism of ethical values that inform its practice. We characterize these values as a commitment to the intrinsic moral value of people, animals and nature, and an ethics of care for their wellbeing. CC emphasizes the alignment of values and practice, coexistence as an overall goal, cooperation in the sense of working with and not against nature, honesty about the competing demands of individuals and groups in ecological and social communities, humility about the extent of our knowledge, restraint in undertaking interventions that lack efficacy, and strict scrutiny of both the ethical and scientific justifications for actions affecting animal wellbeing. • Compassionate conservation (CC) is an emergent paradigm of conservation. • The values of CC are characterized by a bounded pluralism. • Practitioners embrace a wide body of established conservation practices. • CC embraces the wellbeing of individual animals and the community of life. • CC practice is typified by: Alignment, Honesty, Coexistence, Humility, Deliberative, Restraint, Co-operation, Strict scrutiny
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.075 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.106 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.040 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".