I agree . I ' m not a fan of fossil fuels either but it is what is right now . I would understand the clean water argument except for the fact that this is a state of the art pipeline that is capable of detecting leaks designed to replace an out of date pipeline . If they actually cared about their water and not just crying about not being payed enough for Access Rights , they ' d pick up a shovel and help dig . <| sep |> I think the answer that resonates most with me is that it would be morally acceptable as an individual action to do whatever you wanted to a human who could never gain the capacity to feel , respond , or know of your actions , assuming that nobody else would know or be affected by your actions . I think that in a social situation , though , doing so and witnessing others doing so has such strongly programmed psychological effects that it would actually cause great suffering and harm in a wide variety of ways and whether or not that suffering has a rational basis , we can avoid it by acting as if all things with a certain degree of similarity to things that uncontroversially have moral importance themselves have moral importance . In essence , the argument is that we do a lot of good by maintaining social order by treating certain categories of being as special human being an obvious one , though you could think of others like mammals or animals or responds to touch or has a nervous system or looks cute so we should do it even when there ' s no harm in our killing something in one of those categories per se .