The environment is immoral and needs to be engineered to accord with our measures of the good, claim animal ethics and effective altruist philosophers. We should engage in “paradise engineering”: the deliberate deployment of advanced biotechnology to engineer nature according to a welfare or utility-based metric. This movement has taken transhumanist thought, amplified and funded by the EA-rationalist movement, and then applied it to nature. This requires a denial of non-welfare-based forms of non-instrumental value. While I agree with critics that radical transformationalism is unwarranted due to feasibility and deference-based reasons, I will raise a more fundamental ethical objection. I argue that the subjugation of nature to accord with human moral metrics diminishes nature's ability to be a robust producer of non-instrumental values. I develop what I call a meta-option-value argument: nature is a robust and open-ended generator of non-instrumental value relations, and people reliably create novel forms of such valuation over time. The intentional transformation of ecological systems cuts this generative capacity in ways that no instrumentalist accounting can recover. The transformationist, therefore, needs to not only show that their displacement of existing value is legitimate but that they are justified in diminishing a source of future value.
