"Imagine that humans had all left earth and we could destroy the world, killing every living thing painlessly. I would, in an instant, support doing so"
Just imagine an alien civilization thinks our lives are terrible and decides to kill us all to spare us from our misery.
I think I don't need to explain further why I think you're wrong on that
This is a really great article and it really made me think. I've seen many tiktok videos from people who own pet snails, explaining the importance of smashing their snail eggs. Snails are also k strategists and a number of these eggs develop into runts, snails which are very small, yet their organs keep growing to their regular side, eventually crushing them. I've been unable to find how accurate this information is, and I'm not sure about the extent of snail sentience, but the important thing is that people generally seem to be sympathetic towards this cause, and see it as altruistic, despite probably not being okay with something like this in nature.
I think there is definitely something weird going on with how we approach our responsibility for animal wellbeing, when it's a pet we can make extensive medical intervention, even viewing pet wellbeing in a utilitarian sense (for instance, my dog wants to reproduce, but I neuter it because I know it would neuter the wellbeing of dogs overall). When we find an injured deer, we can treat its injury before foregoing responsibility and releaseing it back into the wild, where it's bound to suffer greatly again. I don't really see why zoos are immoral, for instance, if it can provide animals with a much better experience than in the wild, free of threat of predation, and with medical treatment and painkillers.
Well, with zoos, the question would be whether they decrease wild animal suffering. If there weren't zoos, there would probably be other buildings in their place -- thus, it seems like they probably don't affect wild animal suffering much. I'm glad you liked it!
Yeah, in the big picture of "nature" its effects on animal wellbeing are minimal, but if zoos improve the lives of the releatively few animals in them I see no reason to avoid supporting them.
Doesn't this prove too much? As in, it would suggest that the overwhelming majority of historical *human* lives were not worth living, could not possibly be worth living? And yet those people, despite presumably having the capability to end their own lives in a less painful fashion than e.g. starvation, overwhelmingly chose to stick it out to the bitter end! Would you deny them their choice?
I could take your argument about the (adult) octopus and rewrite it with premodern humans - just as with wild animals, premodern humans overwhelmingly died violent and miserable deaths, after a life filled with much fear and drudgery. The fate of a premodern human was to hold on in the ever-present battle against starvation until killed by some combination of starvation, predation (by other men, more often than not), or disease - all without painkillers. War is horrifying, war before the invention of antibiotics even more so, and the percentage of people who lived lives of peace and security followed by a painless death in old age was vanishingly small.
Which modern humans would, as you ask for the octopus, be willing to live a longer life, if it meant going hungry in the winter and dying if the tax man took too much? Which of us would add a year to our lives, if it meant that we died two deaths, one death the one we expect, and the other a slow death to an infection, treated only by bloodletting and honey? I would, in fact, strongly prefer to have a limb ripped off by a shark than to be subject to the majority of human living conditions, and we haven't even gotten to the slavery!
"let us, for a moment, ignore the fate of the baby octopi and merely focus on the life of the adult octopi. We can ask whether her life was worthwhile. The answer, it would seem, is a no, so resounding, it should ring out for miles."
Oh yeah oops lol, wrote this a while ago. I’d say I’m pretty agnostic about the life of the adult octopus just like I’m pretty agnostic about the life of primitive humans, though I’d guess them to be better than octopus lives.
A couple of thoughts. Feel free to ignore, since this is an older post I've just read now.
Is being a squirrel or rabbit so bad? I don't think I'm wearing rosy lenses when I perceive a joy in their existence, a confident competence in being alive and doing their thing, as fraught as their lives can be. I'd be careful about painting all "Nature" with a red brush, and even more careful about dropping that X-Bomb on all of it!
I have a very privileged life, relative to the trillions of babies getting eaten alive, but there's a sense in which I'm always being chased by sharks, too. A "low-level anxiety" always with me, about a hundred different sharks swimming in the murky margins of my days and dreamy nights. To a Buddhist demi-god, our lives are an intolerable dukkha we're dumbly accustomed to. Perhaps we'll all diasporize into a galaxial Civ of enlightened angels, but perhaps squirrels will too, if we give them 20 million years!
Maybe in the extreme long term, cephalopods will become highly sentient tool users, supplant humans and populate the universe with 10^some-large-number of supremely happy beings. As a longterm-ist you should be concerned more about those than the relatively small number currently living harsh lives.
We evolved from creatures that had even shorter lives. And isn't the point of longterm-ism that you have to deal with multiplying absurdly unlikely outcomes with extreme large utility?
I don't think it's clear at all what rule by cephalopods who don't really practice altruism would be like--whether good or bad. I'd guess bad, actually.
It's arrogant to say nature is bad so we should reduce it, all else equal, but not that nature is good so we should preserve it, all else equal? Why is that?
My time is very limited, so this will have to be my last reply. If we, you and I, were just philosophers, living on foraging, without any belongings, living a pure life as philosophers without interacting with Nature in any significant way, then yes, I would say both the views "Nature is bad" and "Nature is good" could be humble, since neither bears much on reality, namely a simple co-existence with Nature.
This is, however, not the case. Humans destroy nature, and we are partly responsible. There is a vast asymmetry between stewardship and co-existence on the one hand and destruction and exploitation on the other. Similarly, there exists a vast asymmetry between making love and rape, regardless of the moral fortitude of the partner in the former case and the victim in the latter.
It is truly not up to us to even have an opinion on Nature. Our views are just ripples on a lake and do not amount to any significant truth when we try to judge something indescribably more complex than ourselves that has evolved over billions of years. None of your designations, like "miserable life" or "torture chamber" do justice to the reality. And I am sure that you, as an intelligent person, would come to agree with me that you are mistaken about octopuses if you would study them and their inner lives deeply.
There is another sense in which it is not up to us. Indigenous people's views and problems are routinely marginalized. The same holds for those in the Global South. By destroying nature, their lives are destroyed as well. Besides, for thousands of years, many indigenous people have acted as stewards of Nature. But no, they must be wrong, because they didn't read your letter.
PS: the issue with factory farms is different. We created those. And thus, we are responsible. We are not responsible for "correcting" the "mistakes" of Nature out of a deluded God complex.
God fucking damnit your one of those religious freaks who loves to believe nature is some evil entity. Just burn the rain forest down and start mass hunting animals
Thank you for covering such an important, difficult, and neglected topic.
"Imagine that humans had all left earth and we could destroy the world, killing every living thing painlessly. I would, in an instant, support doing so"
If the assumptions you are making about wild animal well-being are correct and if we take the impartiality requirement of utilitarianism seriously, then such destruction would still be the right solution (regardless of humans leaving earth), correct? If you are assuming there is massive net suffering (over pleasure) in nature and consider the population ratios, it is very unlikely any pleasures humans get from nature directly (or even any pleasures they get at all in their lives) could outweigh this suffering. (I don't have one personal view on the topic but I think what I stated follows from the assumptions you've made.)
It isn’t much of an argument, is it? Vividity of description is one thing, but a large chunk of the essay is taken up by what would, in a single sentence, amount to “humans severely under-estimate the utilitarian weight of animal suffering in the wild”, and then you ridicule environmentalists a bit. I could argue with that sentence if it at least took seriously the view that animals probably have clearer eyes on their own suffering than do humans, or that there might be unforeseen consequences to getting rid of nature at all, but I don’t feel much like getting into a debate with the kind of person who openly says that this kind of thinking is only for tree huggers.
Yes, you vividly evoked the unpleasantness of animal lives. We haven’t yet established that that suffering is morally significant beyond the domain of humans’ intuitive right to interfere, for example. Your qualified justification of that right assumes that we are longtermists: now your argument is very weak if there are things epistemically wrong with longtermism!
Those who point to the epistemic problems with taking an anthropocentric view on the suffering of animals in the wild are invited to consider that you are a longtermist, with the clear intended effect that this is the counter-argument to any “don’t mess with nature man” objection (or more sophisticated words to that effect). Your argument is *reliant* on longtermism insofar as your longtermist inclinations are the bulwark behind which you can hide when people point out that it would be crazy to go about ending nature now.
This has the dual effect that your argument is substantially weakened (deliberately so, to make it less crazy) and substantially trivialised: after this passage it really doesn’t seem like you want to actually *act* on any of your vivid intuitions about suffering, you want to kick the can down the road whilst sneering at environmentalists.
It’s a fun thought experiment, but doesn’t seem to fold in the opinions of the octopus and all the other creatures dying in agony as I write this comment.
But it does work well against that stupid argument about how cows wouldn’t live at all if we didn’t eat their produce.
Just that any theory of whether the fact of octopuses consistently having shit lives makes their existence a net bad might need to include some agential octopus perspective.
If one was creating miserable beings that subsequently wanted to live, that would be bad on every view of population ethics. If octopi for evolutionary reasons want to live, but their lives are terrible, it doesn't seem like actively bringing lots of them into existence is good.
"Imagine that humans had all left earth and we could destroy the world, killing every living thing painlessly. I would, in an instant, support doing so"
Just imagine an alien civilization thinks our lives are terrible and decides to kill us all to spare us from our misery.
I think I don't need to explain further why I think you're wrong on that
This is a really great article and it really made me think. I've seen many tiktok videos from people who own pet snails, explaining the importance of smashing their snail eggs. Snails are also k strategists and a number of these eggs develop into runts, snails which are very small, yet their organs keep growing to their regular side, eventually crushing them. I've been unable to find how accurate this information is, and I'm not sure about the extent of snail sentience, but the important thing is that people generally seem to be sympathetic towards this cause, and see it as altruistic, despite probably not being okay with something like this in nature.
I think there is definitely something weird going on with how we approach our responsibility for animal wellbeing, when it's a pet we can make extensive medical intervention, even viewing pet wellbeing in a utilitarian sense (for instance, my dog wants to reproduce, but I neuter it because I know it would neuter the wellbeing of dogs overall). When we find an injured deer, we can treat its injury before foregoing responsibility and releaseing it back into the wild, where it's bound to suffer greatly again. I don't really see why zoos are immoral, for instance, if it can provide animals with a much better experience than in the wild, free of threat of predation, and with medical treatment and painkillers.
Well, with zoos, the question would be whether they decrease wild animal suffering. If there weren't zoos, there would probably be other buildings in their place -- thus, it seems like they probably don't affect wild animal suffering much. I'm glad you liked it!
Yeah, in the big picture of "nature" its effects on animal wellbeing are minimal, but if zoos improve the lives of the releatively few animals in them I see no reason to avoid supporting them.
Doesn't this prove too much? As in, it would suggest that the overwhelming majority of historical *human* lives were not worth living, could not possibly be worth living? And yet those people, despite presumably having the capability to end their own lives in a less painful fashion than e.g. starvation, overwhelmingly chose to stick it out to the bitter end! Would you deny them their choice?
No, it doesn't suggest that.
I could take your argument about the (adult) octopus and rewrite it with premodern humans - just as with wild animals, premodern humans overwhelmingly died violent and miserable deaths, after a life filled with much fear and drudgery. The fate of a premodern human was to hold on in the ever-present battle against starvation until killed by some combination of starvation, predation (by other men, more often than not), or disease - all without painkillers. War is horrifying, war before the invention of antibiotics even more so, and the percentage of people who lived lives of peace and security followed by a painless death in old age was vanishingly small.
Which modern humans would, as you ask for the octopus, be willing to live a longer life, if it meant going hungry in the winter and dying if the tax man took too much? Which of us would add a year to our lives, if it meant that we died two deaths, one death the one we expect, and the other a slow death to an infection, treated only by bloodletting and honey? I would, in fact, strongly prefer to have a limb ripped off by a shark than to be subject to the majority of human living conditions, and we haven't even gotten to the slavery!
But the adult octopus isn't the one who has a bad life. It's the babies who live a day or two and then die painfully.
"let us, for a moment, ignore the fate of the baby octopi and merely focus on the life of the adult octopi. We can ask whether her life was worthwhile. The answer, it would seem, is a no, so resounding, it should ring out for miles."
Oh yeah oops lol, wrote this a while ago. I’d say I’m pretty agnostic about the life of the adult octopus just like I’m pretty agnostic about the life of primitive humans, though I’d guess them to be better than octopus lives.
A couple of thoughts. Feel free to ignore, since this is an older post I've just read now.
Is being a squirrel or rabbit so bad? I don't think I'm wearing rosy lenses when I perceive a joy in their existence, a confident competence in being alive and doing their thing, as fraught as their lives can be. I'd be careful about painting all "Nature" with a red brush, and even more careful about dropping that X-Bomb on all of it!
I have a very privileged life, relative to the trillions of babies getting eaten alive, but there's a sense in which I'm always being chased by sharks, too. A "low-level anxiety" always with me, about a hundred different sharks swimming in the murky margins of my days and dreamy nights. To a Buddhist demi-god, our lives are an intolerable dukkha we're dumbly accustomed to. Perhaps we'll all diasporize into a galaxial Civ of enlightened angels, but perhaps squirrels will too, if we give them 20 million years!
Maybe in the extreme long term, cephalopods will become highly sentient tool users, supplant humans and populate the universe with 10^some-large-number of supremely happy beings. As a longterm-ist you should be concerned more about those than the relatively small number currently living harsh lives.
That's absurdly unlikely because they live such short lives.
We evolved from creatures that had even shorter lives. And isn't the point of longterm-ism that you have to deal with multiplying absurdly unlikely outcomes with extreme large utility?
I don't think it's clear at all what rule by cephalopods who don't really practice altruism would be like--whether good or bad. I'd guess bad, actually.
TLDR; natura mala sic est delenda.
Stunningly arrogant. And so very, very wrong.
It's arrogant to say nature is bad so we should reduce it, all else equal, but not that nature is good so we should preserve it, all else equal? Why is that?
My time is very limited, so this will have to be my last reply. If we, you and I, were just philosophers, living on foraging, without any belongings, living a pure life as philosophers without interacting with Nature in any significant way, then yes, I would say both the views "Nature is bad" and "Nature is good" could be humble, since neither bears much on reality, namely a simple co-existence with Nature.
This is, however, not the case. Humans destroy nature, and we are partly responsible. There is a vast asymmetry between stewardship and co-existence on the one hand and destruction and exploitation on the other. Similarly, there exists a vast asymmetry between making love and rape, regardless of the moral fortitude of the partner in the former case and the victim in the latter.
It is truly not up to us to even have an opinion on Nature. Our views are just ripples on a lake and do not amount to any significant truth when we try to judge something indescribably more complex than ourselves that has evolved over billions of years. None of your designations, like "miserable life" or "torture chamber" do justice to the reality. And I am sure that you, as an intelligent person, would come to agree with me that you are mistaken about octopuses if you would study them and their inner lives deeply.
There is another sense in which it is not up to us. Indigenous people's views and problems are routinely marginalized. The same holds for those in the Global South. By destroying nature, their lives are destroyed as well. Besides, for thousands of years, many indigenous people have acted as stewards of Nature. But no, they must be wrong, because they didn't read your letter.
PS: the issue with factory farms is different. We created those. And thus, we are responsible. We are not responsible for "correcting" the "mistakes" of Nature out of a deluded God complex.
You very clearly haven't read the article. As I say, I'm mostly in favour of nature preservation in the real world.
God fucking damnit your one of those religious freaks who loves to believe nature is some evil entity. Just burn the rain forest down and start mass hunting animals
*You're
Haha. I'm not religious. I'm opposed to mass hunting animals and burning down the rainforest.
If you think nature is some evil entity ( which you obviously do ) you’re religious.
I think it's bad -- not evil or an entity.
Thank you for covering such an important, difficult, and neglected topic.
"Imagine that humans had all left earth and we could destroy the world, killing every living thing painlessly. I would, in an instant, support doing so"
If the assumptions you are making about wild animal well-being are correct and if we take the impartiality requirement of utilitarianism seriously, then such destruction would still be the right solution (regardless of humans leaving earth), correct? If you are assuming there is massive net suffering (over pleasure) in nature and consider the population ratios, it is very unlikely any pleasures humans get from nature directly (or even any pleasures they get at all in their lives) could outweigh this suffering. (I don't have one personal view on the topic but I think what I stated follows from the assumptions you've made.)
I think that humans can experience vast amounts of future well-being, as I argue here https://benthams.substack.com/p/longtermism-is-correct-part-1. Thus, I'd be really worried about human extinction.
It isn’t much of an argument, is it? Vividity of description is one thing, but a large chunk of the essay is taken up by what would, in a single sentence, amount to “humans severely under-estimate the utilitarian weight of animal suffering in the wild”, and then you ridicule environmentalists a bit. I could argue with that sentence if it at least took seriously the view that animals probably have clearer eyes on their own suffering than do humans, or that there might be unforeseen consequences to getting rid of nature at all, but I don’t feel much like getting into a debate with the kind of person who openly says that this kind of thinking is only for tree huggers.
It’s all a bit tabloid.
Well, I appeal to the obvious badness of suffering, compare it to factory farming, appeal to the intuitive wrongness of animal suffering, and so on.
Yes, you vividly evoked the unpleasantness of animal lives. We haven’t yet established that that suffering is morally significant beyond the domain of humans’ intuitive right to interfere, for example. Your qualified justification of that right assumes that we are longtermists: now your argument is very weak if there are things epistemically wrong with longtermism!
Why does thinking that vast amounts of suffering is bad and that we should reduce it require being a longtermist?
You make it a requirement that we should *act* on this against nature conditional on the longtermist point of view in your essay!
No part of my argument assumes longtermism.
Those who point to the epistemic problems with taking an anthropocentric view on the suffering of animals in the wild are invited to consider that you are a longtermist, with the clear intended effect that this is the counter-argument to any “don’t mess with nature man” objection (or more sophisticated words to that effect). Your argument is *reliant* on longtermism insofar as your longtermist inclinations are the bulwark behind which you can hide when people point out that it would be crazy to go about ending nature now.
This has the dual effect that your argument is substantially weakened (deliberately so, to make it less crazy) and substantially trivialised: after this passage it really doesn’t seem like you want to actually *act* on any of your vivid intuitions about suffering, you want to kick the can down the road whilst sneering at environmentalists.
It’s a fun thought experiment, but doesn’t seem to fold in the opinions of the octopus and all the other creatures dying in agony as I write this comment.
But it does work well against that stupid argument about how cows wouldn’t live at all if we didn’t eat their produce.
I'm not sure what you mean about not folding in their opinions.
Just that any theory of whether the fact of octopuses consistently having shit lives makes their existence a net bad might need to include some agential octopus perspective.
If one was creating miserable beings that subsequently wanted to live, that would be bad on every view of population ethics. If octopi for evolutionary reasons want to live, but their lives are terrible, it doesn't seem like actively bringing lots of them into existence is good.