Biodiversity Loss, the Motivation Problem, and the Future of Conservation Education in the United States Page: 47

                                
casualties of shootings at schools like Columbine and Virginia Tech, and when the veil is
temporally lifted, animals suffering under the inhumane conditions of industrial feedlot
operations. Although the heritage of the Enlightenment has made possible the concept of
regulative obligations and the expansion of moral principles to spatially and temporally
distant moral patients, morality's evolutionary origins largely preclude the principles
from becoming operative. Such a disconnect explains why citizens routinely come to the
aid of victims of natural disasters while at the same time they falter when challenged to
act on behalf of the faceless and the statistical. The faceless and the statistical fail to
engage the altruistic faculties whereas the particular and concrete experience of suffering
does so reliably.
6. The Motivation Problem and Biodiversity Loss
Because the motivation problem ultimately stems from a disconnect between the
demands of an impartialist ethic and the human motivational faculties as they have
evolved, it is not inherently anthropocentric. Though some degree of human chauvinism
is perhaps inevitable-certainly empirical evidence bears this fact out-moral agents
respond to particular and concrete instances of the suffering of other-than-humans almost
as regularly as they do to particular and concrete instances of human suffering. Animal
suffering, especially when experienced by companion and higher-intelligence animals,
reliably generates feelings of shock, horror, empathy, and the like. It is the rare person
who passes a wounded animal and doesn't experience some tinge of desire to help.
While perhaps not everyone who witnesses such suffering is so moved as to become

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