I think the strongest counterargument to this is the value of "keeping options open" assuming that we will know more, and be better placed to make wiser decisions, in future.
If some adolescent Martian spent 5 minutes surveying the Earth, decided that humanity looked rather miserable on the whole, and so decided to permanently wipe us out for our own good, I would not be thrilled about that. Irreversible decisions require stronger evidential support. So my steelman of the biodiversity-loving environmentalists is that they've internalized a heuristic which says "Don't be like that adolescent Martian!"
1) The main error of the Martian is factual. Humans existing is, in fact, a good thing. But we have every reason to think the opposite is true of wild animals.
2) Much of the martian's error is coming to too hasty a conclusion. We should obviously think carefully before coming to a conclusion about how to influence nature. But after doing that--which I've done--we should be willign to accept that reducing the extent of nature is a good thing.
3) I don't see why my view prevents keeping options open. We can always bring biodiversity back.
4) I really, really don't trust humanity to make the rational decision about wild animal suffering in the far future. Most people are ethically braindead and don't even think it's wrong to torture animals for a burger.
5) At best this is a pro tanto consideration likely outweighed by the opportunity to prevent utterly unfathomable quantities of suffering.
1) It is somewhat unclear how bad it is for animals, personally my intuitions would be that the life of most animals is mostly decent with some occasional genuinely awful parts, not necessarily a life not worth living. (My bar for a life not worth living seems substantially lower than yours from what I can tell.)
2) Our current understanding of the biosphere is nowhere close to being able to come to this conclusion for sure.
3) We really can not bring biodiversity back, we just don't know how for many ecosystems. Please speak to a biologist.
4) Humanity seems to be improving morally over time, and I suspect if the meat issue was out of the way, from vatmeat or something, people would feel more able to accept these conclusions. I realize this says unfortunate things about human nature. Also, much of the information needed to make the decision rests on researching the animals involved, which is difficult if they've gone extinct in the meantime.
5) Most likely a much vaster amount of suffering will occur in the 800 million years or so until the sun's expansion renders Earth uninhabitable, and the benefit of information in the future may be able to avoid enough suffering, and perhaps produce enough animal joy, to outweigh the current suffering.
> Humans existing is, in fact, a good thing. But we have every reason to think the opposite is true of wild animals.
1. I don’t see how this is at all obvious given how few reports we have from wild animals in regard to their experienced well-being. I’m not sure the gap between wild animals and humans in well being is as large and distinct as you assume.
2. Most people don’t appear to believe that as you assert there is every reason to think that wild animals existing is, in fact, a bad thing.
When you advocate for sweeping changes, it concerns me how casually you assume a sufficient understanding of both how other animals experience the world, and how other people experience the world.
The argument about humans existing being a good thing isn't necessarily super-solid. After all, even if humans have a positive impact on the world, it's possible that their replacement by smarter, healthier, happier, more ethical non-human aliens will have an even better impact on the world, which would then be an adequate justification for aliens to wipe out or at least phase out humans, no?
The utilitarian bites the bullet and takes a morally repugnant conclusion lol. Tale as old as time. As an anthropocentric environmentalist, I’m sympathetic to some of the specific arguments. I’m ok with killing the bugs to save a human life. (Maybe you can make nice with Lyman Stone over this!) I think most laymen are unaware with how much we humans already are responsible for managing “natural” areas and how more management would be needed for a more ecological society. But I’m also an ecologist by training and so need to poke some holes in your overall thesis.
1. First you criticize environmentalists who seem to value ecosystems on the basis of how pretty of a David Attenborough doc it would make. In fact, this seems more rational then you may think. Ecosystems bring humans a lot of happiness, improved mental health outcomes, ect. I think you at least need to try and account for the relation of that to the pain of insects or whatever.
2. Ok, but your argument isn’t against ecosystems per se, its against biodiversity. I’d point you to the research of my former teacher David Tilman. His research (which I also worked on and can attest to their validity) shows that more biodiverse ecosystems are more stable. That’s because species specialize in evolution to fill specific niches.
3. I also don’t know what you’d do about trophic levels. If you kill all the miserable insects, the frogs die without food. Ok, maybe you still don’t care but then the snakes die and so on until you reach the large predators that could conceivably do have lives of pleasure. How can you possibly solve this problem? The lion is not ready to lay next to the lamb.
4. At this point, you might be ready to bite the bullet and say that all ecosystems should be destroyed. In this case we both return to point 1, and also need to see that ecosystem services are basically the only way we can have a functioning society for reasons that are surely evident to any person with a passing interest in environmental issues.
5. Finally, Chesterton’s Fence! Even if I’m sympathetic to the idea that ecosystems can be managed by humans, that still doesn’t mean we should disregard how ecosystems naturally function! Sometimes you never know how much a single change can ripple out and mess with an ecosystem. See the famous wolves in Yellowstone example. Did killing the wolves save some sheep from suffering? Yeah, sure. But then the elk population gets out of control, eats all the vegetation, and suddenly every species is experiencing excess suffering from starvation.
BONUS) We have such a small understanding of millions of plant and animals species in the world. Historically, many of our medicinal advancements come from gaining understanding of more species. In other words, when you wipe out an endangered toad in Cuba, who’s to say you didn’t just kill the source of the discovery of a chemical that cured luekemia?
Despite my disagreement, thanks for highlighting a topic that desperately needs more in-depth ethical analysis from the public.
Well as I say, my argument doesn't assume utilitarianism--just that extreme suffering is a bad thing!
1. Ecosystems bring happiness to humans but this is obviously outweighed by the profound suffering of quadrillions.
2) No it's generally in favor of reducing wild animal numbers.
3-4. I'd want to reduce the size of each trophic level but at this stage we probably can't eliminate them. So I'd want fewer forests, for instance.
5. Chesterton's Fence only works if you have reason to think the thing you're disrupting likely is a good thing in the first place. Burning down gas chambers is even better than it would otherwise be for Chesterton's fence reasons--you might even cause broader disruptions of Nazi killing. Similarly, if you have reason to think the environment is very bad, then the fact actions might have ripple effects on it is a feature not a bug.
It's true there are costs of destroying nature. There are also obvious benefits. But the suffering of quadrillions is a much bigger deal. More suffering is likely had by animals in a week than humans in all of history.
This concluding argument splits the costs into “mostly marginal” and “enormous suffering” and the benefits into “mostly marginal,” but I think it’s at least plausible that “enormous value of existence” is also hiding inside the benefits category. How do we way the experience of a bug eating sugar to the experience of a bug getting eaten? Most animals spend a lot more time living than dying, and if we followed your argument as it is stated in this comment we’d swiftly do away with humanity as well.
I mean I still think its insane to look at the potential damage this worldview would have on our water cycle, air quality, ect. I don’t think this makes sense of the literature on ecology. But hey I respect the commitment!
It also doesn’t make sense from a theological view. As a Christian, the Bible moves from a Garden to a City and so naturally assumes some human role in shaping ecosystems to serve our purposes but our dominion is supposed to also include taking care of and stewarding creation as fundamentally good. You’re not a Christian, but as a theist you are committed to the idea that God created nature in some sense.
I suppose if I were to steelman this, you could say that God needed to guide evolution to produce an ecosystem capable of supporting humans but we are still ethically obliged to phase out wild animals as part of our continued moral evolution and improvement. But you’ll pardon me in saying this does not seem compelling.
On a humorous note, I’d like to conclude this diolouge with the thoughts of my roommate when I shared this conversation; “This guy sounds like Ultron before he tries to wipe out humanity.”
I'm not a Christian. But I agree we should steward creation--my view is that involves stewarding the conscious bits of creation at least primarily. It's not good stewardship to allow beings to be born by the quadrillions and then starve to death after a few weeks.
I agree with you pretty much entirely from an ethical perspective, but I think the steelman for biodiversity is very simple. I eagerly await the day when we make efficacious and principled interventions in the natural world to free all conscious beings from suffering, but that day is not yet come. We REALLY don’t have any ability to do this currently, and while we wait for better tech and science we should focus on making sure we don’t fuck everything up. Biodiversity is great for ecosystem resilience, and that should be our primary concern for now.
But if the ecosystem is really really bad, then fucking things up--at least at a low level--is a good thing. People don't worry about fucking up torture facilities. And I think biodiversity loss will obviously not collapse human civilization.
It's possible. But I don't think that destroying the environment likely makes individual animals' deaths much more painful. It does, however, reduce the number of animals living horrible lives.
I don't disagree with your conclusions, I just think that attempting and failing to destroy the environment certainly could make animals' lives more torturous (for instance, by increasing the ratio of their lives that they spend starving). As such I'm inclined to agree with Changeling's Crib that we should wait until we're sure we can do it successfully.
And that's good, but they're not close to eliminated; to eliminate them, more intentional measures would probably have to be taken, and it's not clear what those would be. We're not disagreeing about anything interesting though.
1. E.O. Wilson said "all life is insects to a first approximation,"
2. You advocated an irreversible experiment with no consideration for the collateral damage to the planetary systems that we rely on. Eradicating all humans too is one of the more likely outcomes, even if you could find methods of achieving your aim that don't directly harm humans.
This is in the "we don't need farmers cos we get all our food from the supermarket" level of understanding.
(E.O. Wilson needed to get out more too: insects are exceeded in numbers by fungi, bacteria and viruses (depending on the reference class) and in biomass by plants and probably fungi (are we talking wet weight or dry weight?).
That was my take-home message, but I only read enuf to get your drift.
You actually said "seek to reduce the extent of nature". We're already doing that very effectively.
The worry is that there are unknown tipping points (or expected tipping points at unknown residual extents) and we seem hell-bent on removing all nature.
The benefits to humans of "healthy ecosystyems" (ecosystem services) include fresh air, clean water, reduced flooding, recreation, dog-emptying, timber production. etc.
My first thought is that fucking up ecosystem could result in complex k selected species being replaced by simpler r selected ones. That could be good if the k selected species weren't living very good lives and the r selected ones are so simple that they can't feel much pain at all. On the other hand, if the k selected species lived okay lives and the r selected ones die many painful deaths, it could be much worse.
I generally agree with Bentham's general point. I find it unlikely that wild animals suffer as much as he thinks they do, but that shouldn't matter, they probably still suffer a great deal and humans can probably find ways to reduce that suffering while still preserving much of what we value about the natural world. But I do think that such interventions would be easy to mess up unless they are done carefully and with serious research. I suspect that we could get away with something like the extermination of Horrifying Flesh Burrowing Parasite #83 without throwing a complex ecosystem out of balance, but it would be good to be sure.
Idk, inputs for complex systems can have strange outputs. Perhaps my fear comes from a place of ignorance but it would be a real shame to fail now in what might be the home stretch after a billion years of wildlife suffering.
On the other hand, even small improvements in wildlife suffering are very meaningful, so I see where you’re coming from
I basically agree with this and think it's a very important topic which I'm happy to see you talk about. However, it should be noted that a certain number of actions that "reduce biodiversity" can increase the number of wild animals. Mass-scale aquatic animal slaughter is a good example of this, as Michael St Jules highlights in this excellent post : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oms5N5K5HxL2KJcmb/the-moral-ambiguity-of-fishing-on-wild-aquatic-animal
It's not obvious that even infant mortalities aren't lives worth living. If my 3 month old got eaten by a bear tomorrow, his life still would have been worth living. This post doesn't seriously consider the whole positive side of the ledger of wild animals' consciousness. Some species existing is probably better than not existing, ceteris paribus. But it's also possible we could get way more utils by demolishing their habitat to build a sugar plantation, kind of like what AI is likely to do to us.
While I strongly agree with your main point, I think there could be a persuasive counterargument:
It is probably evolutionarily beneficial to consider life worth living. At least for humans, preferring existence over nonexistence is adaptive because humans can commit suicide. I think humans are naturally calibrated to find their living conditions acceptable, and this might extend to some animals as well.
E.g., if an insect species could comprehend that a certain action would bring it a quick death (thereby ending its suffering), this could create evolutionary pressure for that species to be happier. Alternatively, the same might happen if its suffering significantly distracted it from reproduction.
This seems convincing to me. There are documented cases of animals killing themselves, mostly in captivity (both because they're being observed more and because captivity often involves "unnatural" suffering), but it's hard to say whether animals have the foresight or cognition to understand mortality: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/do-animals-commit-suicide
I think the consequence is that the options are:
1. Animals don't have the mental ability for the level of conscious self-aware suffering that could make life not worth living
2. Animals can experience conscious self-aware suffering but enough animals don't experience this in the wild that the species keeps going (same as with people)
Personally I strongly disagree with the intuition here about what amount of suffering is sufficient to make life not worth living. In Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning or probably similar texts, people are willing to persist through a lot of suffering in situations where it's particularly easy for them to lay down and die. A normal life involves much less suffering than that, whether human or animal.
If a person was going to die in a week, was very miserable, and was about to birth 10 million babies who'd starve to death, killing them would be permissible.
Let’s say we enhance your ability to see into the future beyond human. Let’s make you an alien looking at earth a few million years ago. You see a lowly ape banging together a spear in dreary misery. Its life is full of agony. But you can see further ahead. You can see that one day this ape will become a human. What does your philosophy tell you to do to that ape in the present?
Impossible to say. Don’t think of it like a human who lives seventy years. Some time ago the planet was covered with nothing but single celled organisms. We were not obvious then. You don’t only end a thing, you end everything it’s descendants might become.
A worldview built around suffering as the ultimate evil would have to make a strong argument for why "just kill everything and stop all suffering forever" isn't the ultimate form of benevolence. A highly advanced being that never experiences any form of misery could view human life as a sequence of unbearable tribulations and decide that it would be best for humanity to cease to exist therefore eliminating a significant amount of pain from the universe forever. How would you argue against this plan of action?
But I didn't say that suffering was the ultimate evil. In fact I think lots of things matter other than suffering. I just think it's one bad thing and most animals don't experience higher goods. Humans likely have positive lives.
I have more thoughts on this than can fit in a comment, and may write a post about it. Here I can only sum it up by saying that post makes you sound a bit like one of the villains from the Lewis book "That Hideous Strength":
"In fact, we *clean* the planet…In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould — all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds.”
I say this with the smuggest of all possible facial expressions: Book Boy, you need to get out more!
People who worry about wild animal suffering are universally nerds who stare at a screen somewhere in a basement all day. You say:
"I don’t know exactly how many months or years of happy life I’d have to be guaranteed to be willing to endure the experience of being eaten alive, but it’s sure as hell more than a week."
Get help! If this is not on the order of weeks to a few months for you, you have a problem! Ask a cancer patient: they could kill themselves at any moment; and cancer deaths can be much more protracted and painful than being eaten alive; and yet only 5%-20% of advanced cancer patients (as per ChatGPT) refuse further treatment. Heck, you of all people could write a damn book in those few weeks you would gladly throw away.
As you note, nature is "pretty". It is not only, pretty, it is breathtakingly beautiful. Taking in that beauty and taking part in nature, moving, exerting yourself, feeling its overflowing fullness, sweating under the burning sun, freezing in the cold rain, drinking, eating, fucking, triumphing over caught prey or rejoicing over a close escape is so intensely, thrillingly, pleasurable that nothing in the life of the mind can compare! The idea that most lives are net-negative intuitvely strikes me as so bizzare - even for R-strategists - that I would even regard a Panglossian view that we live in the best of all possible worlds as more probable.
Such an argument would go as follows:
1. You accept that utils can be aggregated across individuals (contentious, but ok).
2. You argue that evolution creates as much life as possible (easy).
3. You argue that the marginal life created by the evolutionary process under scarcety is in expectation net-positive (hard, but I think not ridiculous; you can use animals' revealed preferences).
4. You accept the repugnant conclusion (Difficult, but don't you do anyway?).
5. Conclusion: we live in the best of all possible worlds (keeping physical constraints fixed).
Neatly, from such a view interventions that reduce the planet's capacity to support live would be immoral thereby matching people's environmentalist intuitions.
I am not a philosopher, just a poor commenter on this blog. Maybe BB, you can work out this argument one day. It would fit nicely into your theodicy musings.
Brother. Please stop advocating for stupid stuff and repeating it. You can do better. Your way of thinking would basically would almost imply that we should exterminate every animal. When the AI god is ready, would you like him to think like you in regards to whether killing a all humans is good?
The « humans suffer so much that we should stop making babies » ideology already exists and is significant. You can even find much smaller online communities saying it is not fast enough and we need extermination.
That it to say, this is all a threshold of tolerance of suffering argument. Why wouldn’t an AI god consider us like cursed insects living a poor life that should just be saved by death? So we have those kind of ideologies just because some people do not like the idea of suffering, which is simply the signal the body sends to the brain that something is working poorly.
The funny thing, is that many people living materially comfortable life manage to become mentally ill and suffer a lot. It is like there is no escape from suffering.
1. To what extent does your argument for reducing the extent of nature rely on the assumption that arthropods, including insects, are living lives of constant, intense pain?
2. Doesn't this argument tend towards negative utilitarianism? or do you give humans some sort of added weight?
3. Do you have any specific policy prescriptions? I remember reading Tomasik years ago and he basically advocated everybody paving over their gardens
I don't mean to be rude, but if you are writing these articles to persuade, I think your marketing could use some work.
You referred to eating (meat and animal products) as bringing slight personal pleasure. I think this understates the pleasure it brings and the importance of "minor" pleasures to people's overall happiness. While there may be other aspects to happiness (meaning, autonomy), I would think that general enjoyment is largely a result of stringing together as many "minor" pleasures as we can. Food is surely one of the most basic and most highly rated sensory pleasures there is. To diminish ones enjoyment of it three times a day, every day for the rest of one's life seems like a more significant loss than you imply. This is surely borne out by the low % of people who are vegan, despite many non-vegans having concerns about eating meat or factory farms. Anecdotally, vegans and vegetarians I have met often told me they don't really enjoy eating meat or animal products, perhaps many vegans are not sacrificing pleasure or fighting temptation, hence their ability to stick with it.
I feel there is a similar issue with your arguments against biodiversity and for restricting nature in general. It's not necessarily that they are wrong (I'm unsure), but that they imply taking actions that many people find depressing. Just like food, humans love nature; both of these are hugely important parts of human culture and are *massive* sources of pleasure and meaning for most people. While some people may be enthused by preventing larvae from ever being born, it's hard to see people going along with these arguments that seem to demand we create a depressing, grey, joyless world; forests turned into car parks, botanical gardens converted to heroin-rat treatment centers, and a dismal daily diet. This is not intended as a rational, utilitarian argument against your own, but trying to articulate the instinctual repulsion many may feel towards it. Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic, but the vision of the world you are putting forward doesn't sound like a place many people would want to live.
The Borg is expected to have far more utility than pitiful humans because The Borg does not grow old or get sick. Therefore, anything that hastens the arrival of The Borg has infinite moral value.
There are some nitpicks about your reasoning here and there that I can make, like how this stance
> We can be pretty damn confident that when an animal starves or drowns, this is unpleasant—evolution would select for that and their behavior seems to indicate that.
Isn't compatible with your usual reasoning on evolution not being able to explain mind body harmony.
But broadly, I agree. With all likelihood there are a lot of conscious creatures who are suffering in nature and decreasing the amount of this suffering would be a good thing, while biodiversity itself is not a terminal value. Usual considerations of Chesterton fence still apply, of course.
I think the strongest counterargument to this is the value of "keeping options open" assuming that we will know more, and be better placed to make wiser decisions, in future.
If some adolescent Martian spent 5 minutes surveying the Earth, decided that humanity looked rather miserable on the whole, and so decided to permanently wipe us out for our own good, I would not be thrilled about that. Irreversible decisions require stronger evidential support. So my steelman of the biodiversity-loving environmentalists is that they've internalized a heuristic which says "Don't be like that adolescent Martian!"
A few points:
1) The main error of the Martian is factual. Humans existing is, in fact, a good thing. But we have every reason to think the opposite is true of wild animals.
2) Much of the martian's error is coming to too hasty a conclusion. We should obviously think carefully before coming to a conclusion about how to influence nature. But after doing that--which I've done--we should be willign to accept that reducing the extent of nature is a good thing.
3) I don't see why my view prevents keeping options open. We can always bring biodiversity back.
4) I really, really don't trust humanity to make the rational decision about wild animal suffering in the far future. Most people are ethically braindead and don't even think it's wrong to torture animals for a burger.
5) At best this is a pro tanto consideration likely outweighed by the opportunity to prevent utterly unfathomable quantities of suffering.
I think you seem a lot like the Martian in this scenario.
1) It is somewhat unclear how bad it is for animals, personally my intuitions would be that the life of most animals is mostly decent with some occasional genuinely awful parts, not necessarily a life not worth living. (My bar for a life not worth living seems substantially lower than yours from what I can tell.)
2) Our current understanding of the biosphere is nowhere close to being able to come to this conclusion for sure.
3) We really can not bring biodiversity back, we just don't know how for many ecosystems. Please speak to a biologist.
4) Humanity seems to be improving morally over time, and I suspect if the meat issue was out of the way, from vatmeat or something, people would feel more able to accept these conclusions. I realize this says unfortunate things about human nature. Also, much of the information needed to make the decision rests on researching the animals involved, which is difficult if they've gone extinct in the meantime.
5) Most likely a much vaster amount of suffering will occur in the 800 million years or so until the sun's expansion renders Earth uninhabitable, and the benefit of information in the future may be able to avoid enough suffering, and perhaps produce enough animal joy, to outweigh the current suffering.
> Humans existing is, in fact, a good thing. But we have every reason to think the opposite is true of wild animals.
1. I don’t see how this is at all obvious given how few reports we have from wild animals in regard to their experienced well-being. I’m not sure the gap between wild animals and humans in well being is as large and distinct as you assume.
2. Most people don’t appear to believe that as you assert there is every reason to think that wild animals existing is, in fact, a bad thing.
When you advocate for sweeping changes, it concerns me how casually you assume a sufficient understanding of both how other animals experience the world, and how other people experience the world.
That's why I gave arguments for wild animals having a negative life rather than just asserted it.
Radical changes don't have to be guaranteed to be good to have high expected value.
The argument about humans existing being a good thing isn't necessarily super-solid. After all, even if humans have a positive impact on the world, it's possible that their replacement by smarter, healthier, happier, more ethical non-human aliens will have an even better impact on the world, which would then be an adequate justification for aliens to wipe out or at least phase out humans, no?
The utilitarian bites the bullet and takes a morally repugnant conclusion lol. Tale as old as time. As an anthropocentric environmentalist, I’m sympathetic to some of the specific arguments. I’m ok with killing the bugs to save a human life. (Maybe you can make nice with Lyman Stone over this!) I think most laymen are unaware with how much we humans already are responsible for managing “natural” areas and how more management would be needed for a more ecological society. But I’m also an ecologist by training and so need to poke some holes in your overall thesis.
1. First you criticize environmentalists who seem to value ecosystems on the basis of how pretty of a David Attenborough doc it would make. In fact, this seems more rational then you may think. Ecosystems bring humans a lot of happiness, improved mental health outcomes, ect. I think you at least need to try and account for the relation of that to the pain of insects or whatever.
2. Ok, but your argument isn’t against ecosystems per se, its against biodiversity. I’d point you to the research of my former teacher David Tilman. His research (which I also worked on and can attest to their validity) shows that more biodiverse ecosystems are more stable. That’s because species specialize in evolution to fill specific niches.
3. I also don’t know what you’d do about trophic levels. If you kill all the miserable insects, the frogs die without food. Ok, maybe you still don’t care but then the snakes die and so on until you reach the large predators that could conceivably do have lives of pleasure. How can you possibly solve this problem? The lion is not ready to lay next to the lamb.
4. At this point, you might be ready to bite the bullet and say that all ecosystems should be destroyed. In this case we both return to point 1, and also need to see that ecosystem services are basically the only way we can have a functioning society for reasons that are surely evident to any person with a passing interest in environmental issues.
5. Finally, Chesterton’s Fence! Even if I’m sympathetic to the idea that ecosystems can be managed by humans, that still doesn’t mean we should disregard how ecosystems naturally function! Sometimes you never know how much a single change can ripple out and mess with an ecosystem. See the famous wolves in Yellowstone example. Did killing the wolves save some sheep from suffering? Yeah, sure. But then the elk population gets out of control, eats all the vegetation, and suddenly every species is experiencing excess suffering from starvation.
BONUS) We have such a small understanding of millions of plant and animals species in the world. Historically, many of our medicinal advancements come from gaining understanding of more species. In other words, when you wipe out an endangered toad in Cuba, who’s to say you didn’t just kill the source of the discovery of a chemical that cured luekemia?
Despite my disagreement, thanks for highlighting a topic that desperately needs more in-depth ethical analysis from the public.
Well as I say, my argument doesn't assume utilitarianism--just that extreme suffering is a bad thing!
1. Ecosystems bring happiness to humans but this is obviously outweighed by the profound suffering of quadrillions.
2) No it's generally in favor of reducing wild animal numbers.
3-4. I'd want to reduce the size of each trophic level but at this stage we probably can't eliminate them. So I'd want fewer forests, for instance.
5. Chesterton's Fence only works if you have reason to think the thing you're disrupting likely is a good thing in the first place. Burning down gas chambers is even better than it would otherwise be for Chesterton's fence reasons--you might even cause broader disruptions of Nazi killing. Similarly, if you have reason to think the environment is very bad, then the fact actions might have ripple effects on it is a feature not a bug.
It's true there are costs of destroying nature. There are also obvious benefits. But the suffering of quadrillions is a much bigger deal. More suffering is likely had by animals in a week than humans in all of history.
This concluding argument splits the costs into “mostly marginal” and “enormous suffering” and the benefits into “mostly marginal,” but I think it’s at least plausible that “enormous value of existence” is also hiding inside the benefits category. How do we way the experience of a bug eating sugar to the experience of a bug getting eaten? Most animals spend a lot more time living than dying, and if we followed your argument as it is stated in this comment we’d swiftly do away with humanity as well.
I mean I still think its insane to look at the potential damage this worldview would have on our water cycle, air quality, ect. I don’t think this makes sense of the literature on ecology. But hey I respect the commitment!
It also doesn’t make sense from a theological view. As a Christian, the Bible moves from a Garden to a City and so naturally assumes some human role in shaping ecosystems to serve our purposes but our dominion is supposed to also include taking care of and stewarding creation as fundamentally good. You’re not a Christian, but as a theist you are committed to the idea that God created nature in some sense.
I suppose if I were to steelman this, you could say that God needed to guide evolution to produce an ecosystem capable of supporting humans but we are still ethically obliged to phase out wild animals as part of our continued moral evolution and improvement. But you’ll pardon me in saying this does not seem compelling.
On a humorous note, I’d like to conclude this diolouge with the thoughts of my roommate when I shared this conversation; “This guy sounds like Ultron before he tries to wipe out humanity.”
I'm not a Christian. But I agree we should steward creation--my view is that involves stewarding the conscious bits of creation at least primarily. It's not good stewardship to allow beings to be born by the quadrillions and then starve to death after a few weeks.
I agree with you pretty much entirely from an ethical perspective, but I think the steelman for biodiversity is very simple. I eagerly await the day when we make efficacious and principled interventions in the natural world to free all conscious beings from suffering, but that day is not yet come. We REALLY don’t have any ability to do this currently, and while we wait for better tech and science we should focus on making sure we don’t fuck everything up. Biodiversity is great for ecosystem resilience, and that should be our primary concern for now.
But if the ecosystem is really really bad, then fucking things up--at least at a low level--is a good thing. People don't worry about fucking up torture facilities. And I think biodiversity loss will obviously not collapse human civilization.
I don't think this is obviously the case---things could quite possibly be fucked up in a way that accelerates torture.
It's possible. But I don't think that destroying the environment likely makes individual animals' deaths much more painful. It does, however, reduce the number of animals living horrible lives.
I don't disagree with your conclusions, I just think that attempting and failing to destroy the environment certainly could make animals' lives more torturous (for instance, by increasing the ratio of their lives that they spend starving). As such I'm inclined to agree with Changeling's Crib that we should wait until we're sure we can do it successfully.
We've been successful demonstrably at reducing numbers of wild animals.
Not so sure about that. It seems that we've favoured R-selectors through certain ecosystem changes we've fostered. For the overall reduction in numbers of wild animals, see also this remark by Tomasik : https://reducing-suffering.org/humanitys-net-impact-on-wild-animal-suffering/#Why_Im_cautious_about_taking_defaunation_studies_at_face_value
Also, we're likely to have increased the number of wild animals in the ocean, which seems to be a counterargument : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oms5N5K5HxL2KJcmb/the-moral-ambiguity-of-fishing-on-wild-aquatic-animal
And that's good, but they're not close to eliminated; to eliminate them, more intentional measures would probably have to be taken, and it's not clear what those would be. We're not disagreeing about anything interesting though.
Photosynthesis is pretty good for mankind. Good luck keeping human civilisation going without it.
And where do you think all our excrement goes? It's processed by assorted organisms from all the kingdoms. And all the dead plant material?
You need to get out more!
Did I advocate eradicating all life on earth?
1. E.O. Wilson said "all life is insects to a first approximation,"
2. You advocated an irreversible experiment with no consideration for the collateral damage to the planetary systems that we rely on. Eradicating all humans too is one of the more likely outcomes, even if you could find methods of achieving your aim that don't directly harm humans.
This is in the "we don't need farmers cos we get all our food from the supermarket" level of understanding.
(E.O. Wilson needed to get out more too: insects are exceeded in numbers by fungi, bacteria and viruses (depending on the reference class) and in biomass by plants and probably fungi (are we talking wet weight or dry weight?).
I'm sorry that you can't read.
That was my take-home message, but I only read enuf to get your drift.
You actually said "seek to reduce the extent of nature". We're already doing that very effectively.
The worry is that there are unknown tipping points (or expected tipping points at unknown residual extents) and we seem hell-bent on removing all nature.
The benefits to humans of "healthy ecosystyems" (ecosystem services) include fresh air, clean water, reduced flooding, recreation, dog-emptying, timber production. etc.
My first thought is that fucking up ecosystem could result in complex k selected species being replaced by simpler r selected ones. That could be good if the k selected species weren't living very good lives and the r selected ones are so simple that they can't feel much pain at all. On the other hand, if the k selected species lived okay lives and the r selected ones die many painful deaths, it could be much worse.
I generally agree with Bentham's general point. I find it unlikely that wild animals suffer as much as he thinks they do, but that shouldn't matter, they probably still suffer a great deal and humans can probably find ways to reduce that suffering while still preserving much of what we value about the natural world. But I do think that such interventions would be easy to mess up unless they are done carefully and with serious research. I suspect that we could get away with something like the extermination of Horrifying Flesh Burrowing Parasite #83 without throwing a complex ecosystem out of balance, but it would be good to be sure.
Idk, inputs for complex systems can have strange outputs. Perhaps my fear comes from a place of ignorance but it would be a real shame to fail now in what might be the home stretch after a billion years of wildlife suffering.
On the other hand, even small improvements in wildlife suffering are very meaningful, so I see where you’re coming from
I basically agree with this and think it's a very important topic which I'm happy to see you talk about. However, it should be noted that a certain number of actions that "reduce biodiversity" can increase the number of wild animals. Mass-scale aquatic animal slaughter is a good example of this, as Michael St Jules highlights in this excellent post : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oms5N5K5HxL2KJcmb/the-moral-ambiguity-of-fishing-on-wild-aquatic-animal
However, I'm still all for parking lots and gravel lawns : https://reducing-suffering.org/convert-grass-lawns-to-gravel-to-reduce-insect-suffering/
Yep agree!
It's not obvious that even infant mortalities aren't lives worth living. If my 3 month old got eaten by a bear tomorrow, his life still would have been worth living. This post doesn't seriously consider the whole positive side of the ledger of wild animals' consciousness. Some species existing is probably better than not existing, ceteris paribus. But it's also possible we could get way more utils by demolishing their habitat to build a sugar plantation, kind of like what AI is likely to do to us.
Genuine question: do you think that the existence of life was on net good? Or has there been too much misery
While I strongly agree with your main point, I think there could be a persuasive counterargument:
It is probably evolutionarily beneficial to consider life worth living. At least for humans, preferring existence over nonexistence is adaptive because humans can commit suicide. I think humans are naturally calibrated to find their living conditions acceptable, and this might extend to some animals as well.
E.g., if an insect species could comprehend that a certain action would bring it a quick death (thereby ending its suffering), this could create evolutionary pressure for that species to be happier. Alternatively, the same might happen if its suffering significantly distracted it from reproduction.
This seems convincing to me. There are documented cases of animals killing themselves, mostly in captivity (both because they're being observed more and because captivity often involves "unnatural" suffering), but it's hard to say whether animals have the foresight or cognition to understand mortality: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/do-animals-commit-suicide
I think the consequence is that the options are:
1. Animals don't have the mental ability for the level of conscious self-aware suffering that could make life not worth living
2. Animals can experience conscious self-aware suffering but enough animals don't experience this in the wild that the species keeps going (same as with people)
Personally I strongly disagree with the intuition here about what amount of suffering is sufficient to make life not worth living. In Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning or probably similar texts, people are willing to persist through a lot of suffering in situations where it's particularly easy for them to lay down and die. A normal life involves much less suffering than that, whether human or animal.
I look at you and decide you could be happier.
I disassemble you at the molecular level and build another, better and happier guy.
Have I helped you?
Was this moral?
Who holds the measuring stick that says whose life is more or less worthy?
If a person was going to die in a week, was very miserable, and was about to birth 10 million babies who'd starve to death, killing them would be permissible.
Is the person who is about to die consulted about that?
Not if they can’t consent because they are too mentally enfeebled to grok the world
Let’s say we enhance your ability to see into the future beyond human. Let’s make you an alien looking at earth a few million years ago. You see a lowly ape banging together a spear in dreary misery. Its life is full of agony. But you can see further ahead. You can see that one day this ape will become a human. What does your philosophy tell you to do to that ape in the present?
Probably keep it around. But that's obviously not the situation with wild animals.
Impossible to say. Don’t think of it like a human who lives seventy years. Some time ago the planet was covered with nothing but single celled organisms. We were not obvious then. You don’t only end a thing, you end everything it’s descendants might become.
A worldview built around suffering as the ultimate evil would have to make a strong argument for why "just kill everything and stop all suffering forever" isn't the ultimate form of benevolence. A highly advanced being that never experiences any form of misery could view human life as a sequence of unbearable tribulations and decide that it would be best for humanity to cease to exist therefore eliminating a significant amount of pain from the universe forever. How would you argue against this plan of action?
But I didn't say that suffering was the ultimate evil. In fact I think lots of things matter other than suffering. I just think it's one bad thing and most animals don't experience higher goods. Humans likely have positive lives.
I have more thoughts on this than can fit in a comment, and may write a post about it. Here I can only sum it up by saying that post makes you sound a bit like one of the villains from the Lewis book "That Hideous Strength":
"In fact, we *clean* the planet…In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould — all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds.”
I say this with the smuggest of all possible facial expressions: Book Boy, you need to get out more!
People who worry about wild animal suffering are universally nerds who stare at a screen somewhere in a basement all day. You say:
"I don’t know exactly how many months or years of happy life I’d have to be guaranteed to be willing to endure the experience of being eaten alive, but it’s sure as hell more than a week."
Get help! If this is not on the order of weeks to a few months for you, you have a problem! Ask a cancer patient: they could kill themselves at any moment; and cancer deaths can be much more protracted and painful than being eaten alive; and yet only 5%-20% of advanced cancer patients (as per ChatGPT) refuse further treatment. Heck, you of all people could write a damn book in those few weeks you would gladly throw away.
As you note, nature is "pretty". It is not only, pretty, it is breathtakingly beautiful. Taking in that beauty and taking part in nature, moving, exerting yourself, feeling its overflowing fullness, sweating under the burning sun, freezing in the cold rain, drinking, eating, fucking, triumphing over caught prey or rejoicing over a close escape is so intensely, thrillingly, pleasurable that nothing in the life of the mind can compare! The idea that most lives are net-negative intuitvely strikes me as so bizzare - even for R-strategists - that I would even regard a Panglossian view that we live in the best of all possible worlds as more probable.
Such an argument would go as follows:
1. You accept that utils can be aggregated across individuals (contentious, but ok).
2. You argue that evolution creates as much life as possible (easy).
3. You argue that the marginal life created by the evolutionary process under scarcety is in expectation net-positive (hard, but I think not ridiculous; you can use animals' revealed preferences).
4. You accept the repugnant conclusion (Difficult, but don't you do anyway?).
5. Conclusion: we live in the best of all possible worlds (keeping physical constraints fixed).
Neatly, from such a view interventions that reduce the planet's capacity to support live would be immoral thereby matching people's environmentalist intuitions.
I am not a philosopher, just a poor commenter on this blog. Maybe BB, you can work out this argument one day. It would fit nicely into your theodicy musings.
Weißt Du wie viel Mücklein spielen
in der hellen Sonnenglut?
Wie viel' Fischlein auch sich kühlen
in der hellen Wasserflut?
Gott der Herr rief sie mit Namen,
dass sie all ins Leben kamen,
dass sie nun so fröhlich sind.
But first: go outside, please!
Brother. Please stop advocating for stupid stuff and repeating it. You can do better. Your way of thinking would basically would almost imply that we should exterminate every animal. When the AI god is ready, would you like him to think like you in regards to whether killing a all humans is good?
Just a completely useless comment. Humans don't live for a week and hten starve to death.
The « humans suffer so much that we should stop making babies » ideology already exists and is significant. You can even find much smaller online communities saying it is not fast enough and we need extermination.
That it to say, this is all a threshold of tolerance of suffering argument. Why wouldn’t an AI god consider us like cursed insects living a poor life that should just be saved by death? So we have those kind of ideologies just because some people do not like the idea of suffering, which is simply the signal the body sends to the brain that something is working poorly.
The funny thing, is that many people living materially comfortable life manage to become mentally ill and suffer a lot. It is like there is no escape from suffering.
But an argument can be right even if other people believe an argument that sounds slightly similar but is wrong.
Interesting article, some questions.
1. To what extent does your argument for reducing the extent of nature rely on the assumption that arthropods, including insects, are living lives of constant, intense pain?
2. Doesn't this argument tend towards negative utilitarianism? or do you give humans some sort of added weight?
3. Do you have any specific policy prescriptions? I remember reading Tomasik years ago and he basically advocated everybody paving over their gardens
I don't mean to be rude, but if you are writing these articles to persuade, I think your marketing could use some work.
You referred to eating (meat and animal products) as bringing slight personal pleasure. I think this understates the pleasure it brings and the importance of "minor" pleasures to people's overall happiness. While there may be other aspects to happiness (meaning, autonomy), I would think that general enjoyment is largely a result of stringing together as many "minor" pleasures as we can. Food is surely one of the most basic and most highly rated sensory pleasures there is. To diminish ones enjoyment of it three times a day, every day for the rest of one's life seems like a more significant loss than you imply. This is surely borne out by the low % of people who are vegan, despite many non-vegans having concerns about eating meat or factory farms. Anecdotally, vegans and vegetarians I have met often told me they don't really enjoy eating meat or animal products, perhaps many vegans are not sacrificing pleasure or fighting temptation, hence their ability to stick with it.
I feel there is a similar issue with your arguments against biodiversity and for restricting nature in general. It's not necessarily that they are wrong (I'm unsure), but that they imply taking actions that many people find depressing. Just like food, humans love nature; both of these are hugely important parts of human culture and are *massive* sources of pleasure and meaning for most people. While some people may be enthused by preventing larvae from ever being born, it's hard to see people going along with these arguments that seem to demand we create a depressing, grey, joyless world; forests turned into car parks, botanical gardens converted to heroin-rat treatment centers, and a dismal daily diet. This is not intended as a rational, utilitarian argument against your own, but trying to articulate the instinctual repulsion many may feel towards it. Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic, but the vision of the world you are putting forward doesn't sound like a place many people would want to live.
this view of wild animal suffering seems to imply that paperclipocalypse would be a good thing
Unclear because it would prevent lots of far future well-being.
The Borg is expected to have far more utility than pitiful humans because The Borg does not grow old or get sick. Therefore, anything that hastens the arrival of The Borg has infinite moral value.
Many people have certain enviremental policy opinions because they like the aesthics of it
”Its beautiful” sufficies as reason to them
And on the interference part:
Many simply think that humans have too much hubris, and majorly suspect human ambitions to change things
There are some nitpicks about your reasoning here and there that I can make, like how this stance
> We can be pretty damn confident that when an animal starves or drowns, this is unpleasant—evolution would select for that and their behavior seems to indicate that.
Isn't compatible with your usual reasoning on evolution not being able to explain mind body harmony.
But broadly, I agree. With all likelihood there are a lot of conscious creatures who are suffering in nature and decreasing the amount of this suffering would be a good thing, while biodiversity itself is not a terminal value. Usual considerations of Chesterton fence still apply, of course.