For me, this article almost feels like a great argument against utilitarian thinking! Or at the very least, it suggests that the utilitarian calculus must include more than just suffering in its accounting. Habitats, for me, have a deeper value and worth which is difficult to quantify or compare with the suffering of wild animals. I also have to wonder if we really have any clue at all about the relative percentages of suffering for insects (at least), and if insects perhaps live in a state of vast neutrality. Human suffering may be dramatically worsened by our ability for self-reflection, death awareness, the stressors of navigating extremely complex social structures, etc for all I know!
You would think that someone who comes to the conclusion that the best thing in the world would be to turn the Earth into a parking lot, as far as possible, would realize he has gone wrong somewhere.
"To think insect suffering is the worst thing, you don’t have to think only pleasure and pain matter. I certainly don’t think that. All you have to think is that suffering is one of the things that matters, so that utterly incomprehensible quantities of it are very morally serious. But this is very obvious. That’s why we give people anesthesia during surgeries—we recognize that it’s bad when they suffer greatly."
Yet, if there were utterly incomprehensible qualities of natural beauty and goodness which are difficult to quantify then wouldn't this be a weaker line of reasoning?
You're arguing that the extinction of all life on earth would be the most moral outcome - doesn't that preclude you from invoking "generally people think" as an argument?
Before it all gets flooded with outrage and nitpicks want to thank you for writing this. Even though I could of course find a few personal disagreements here and there, I broadly agree with the claim, and yet it's near-impossible to discuss it (even in animal advocacy). Which is weird, since it's fairly commonly accepted that as an individual, it's not great to hurt insects (it's seen as cruel to rip off their limbs or to burn them with magnifying glasses). This is a few lightyears away from the overton window - as a lot of your stuff often is - and it obviously won't change most readers' minds, but it's a different style than Brian Tomasik's, and I appreciate you putting your own spin on this in order to cover an issue that's not that hard to understand, but extremely hard to acknowledge.
A few shout outs I'd like to make: Wayne Hsiung, founder of Direct Action Everywhere, called insect suffering the most important problem in the world (first seconds of this great discussion : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD1hEpD8B7o ) ; and if you're in France and dislike insect suffering, you could tax-deductibly donate to https://www.onei-insectes.org/ , doing great work to pragmatically act against the rise of insect farming (France being one of the world leaders in this space).
This doesn't assume consequentialism, just the utterly obvious notion--defended at length--that suffering is bad. I don't think it's a reductio that a view takes seriously the interests of the roughly 100% of conscious beings on earth, and the idea that it does reflects bare prejudice and speciesism.
If taking taking "the interests of the roughly 100% of conscious beings on earth" seriously means wanting them to no longer exist, please never try to take my interests seriously.
Yeah this could have easily been written by an anti-consequentialist as a parody of consequentialism.
In Cutter's recent post on this blog ranking arguments against physicalism, he brought up the idea of Moorean truth (“one of those things we know better than we know the premises of any philosophical argument to the contrary”)
That suffering is bad is obvious. This is why we anesthetize people during surgeries. It wouldn't be very surprising that the right ethical view implies we should take seriously the interests of almost all conscious beings on earth.
Babies would potentially care. There's potential reciprocity. If there weren't (say, I was a Jew watching a Nazi suffer, knowing he'd never reciprocate) I wouldn't bother with humans either.
Also there's a good case for going with the species as a whole
Why is suffering bad obvious? If you see someone having a nightmare, and you know he or she won't remember it, are we ethically obligated to wake them? I don't think so. So a bee or mosquito or shrimp doesn't have that memory that makes suffering meaningful.
Yes, if they as a species do not care about other humans. (I doubt that though).
Potential Reciprocity should be a baseline to ethics. There's no need to turn the other cheek.
When a bug starts caring about me, I'll care about it.
(That's beside the point that it is unlikely the bug is actually experiencing suffering in any meaningful sense as a human is.)
As far as the nightmare part: people would gladly be paid to experience a horrible nightmare if when they wake up they wouldn't remember it. It doesn't affect their sense of "you". Would one be ethically required to wake someone up experiencing such a nightmare? I doubt it. I suspect that bugs' consciousness or experiencing suffering are similar to that in that they have no consciousness in that sense where they experience things linearly.
(1) The most plausible versions of bounded aggregation won’t hold that insects are somehow below a threshold *to even count*, but I do think there are plausible renderings of BA on which no amount of insect suffering could ever outweigh some very large burdens, e.g., the torturous death of 1 billion humans. BA doesn’t *need* to endorse that, but it plausibly can. If people want to agree with the importance of the issue and yet still care more about other issues (say, slavery), this is how they ought to do it.
(2) I think it should be really emphasized that the issue here is insect *suffering*. The short lives and frequent deaths of insects aren’t really problematic by my lights. So even if creating new humans, or eating meat, reduces insect populations, we need to make sure they don’t also *cause the very suffering* that is the actual object of avoidance.
"The effective altruists started out wanting to do good. And they did: whole nine-digit-sums worth of good, spreadsheets full of lives saved and diseases cured and disasters averted. But if you really want to understand what you’re doing – get past the point where you can catch falling apples, to the point where you have a complete theory of gravitation – you end up with something as remote from normal human tenderheartedness as the conference lunches were from normal human food." -Scott Alexander
While I think the logic of this article goes through I still feel uncertain about the conclusion. I think my three sources of uncertainty are:
1) How certain can we be that the average insect life is net negative? How much joy / happiness do they feel?
1b) I have a vague uncertain intuition that evolution (outer optimizer) in the long run should make the baseline happiness near zero for the inner optimizer.
2) What about the effect of reducing the insect population on the broader ecosystem?
3) (less important for my uncertainty of the conclusion) I am very uncertain about the relative intensities of pain mean.
I do want to note that this article convinced me that insect suffering is more important than I previously thought, and I will probably give to some insect related charity.
Agree with point one. Also don't see evidence that a significant portion of their lives are spent in pain, but it may exist. I find these articles interesting but it seems obvious that our efforts should be pointed towards factory farming, since we know factory farmed animals experience a ton of suffering and eradicating it seems more plausible than meaningfully redressing insect or wild animals suffering, since it's at least somewhat in the public conversation.
I also suspect 1b ito be true. It's probably more evolutionarily beneficial for the pain/pleasure system to be calibrated to the real conditions. For example, I think the ancient people lived pretty terrible lives (by modern standards), but still strongly preferred their lives to nonexistence. This, I believe, is part of why factory farming is so terrible — it's unnatural, and it's not the unnaturalness itself that matters, but the fact that animals didn't evolve to find factory farms acceptable.
After all, the insects seem to want to live. They clearly don't want to be killed: they try to escape when you catch them, etc. Maybe it's just an automatic response not involving qualia, but it's a) unnecessarily complicated and b) inconsistent with explaining other animal behaviour with qualia.
But thank you for the article. I also think of that really often.
Why not do a carbon offset? E.g. you can donate to the Clean Air Task Force so you in expectation reduce your carbon footprint while reducing insect populations by eating meat?
This is such an important point because of how inexpensive offsetting the carbon emissions of your meat consumption can be.
According to United States Department of Agriculture[1], beef consumption per capita projected for 2025 is 59.1 lbs, for pork 51.4 lbs, broiler meat 103.1 lbs, turkey 13.4 lbs, lamb and mutton 1.3 lbs, and 270.7 eggs (33.9 lbs).
According to Our World in Data[2], greenhouse gas emissions per kg of product goes for. 99.48kg for beef herd beef, 39.72 for lamb & mutton, 33.3kg for dairy herd beef, 12.31kg for pork, 9.87kg for poultry meat, 4.67kg for eggs.
All of this gives 3788.6 kgCO₂eq per year for average American.
And lastly, according to Effective Altruism Forum[3], 4 climate change charities they looked for, they estimated the cost effectiveness as
Evergreen Collaborative – $0.54 per metric ton of CO2e
Rewiring America – $3.14 per metric ton of CO2e
The Sunrise Movement – $0.22 per metric ton of CO2e
Green New Deal Network – $0.73 per metric ton of CO2e
This means, for the lowest one, your cost to offset would be 83¢/year, and for 2nd highest, it is $2.77/year.
If the insect thesis is true, this would be quite extraordinary, because there are tons of vegans advocating all their life for veganism, and they will convince almost no one they see. However, if one were to tell them, change nothing else about your life, other than giving $1-3 a year for climate charities, and you are much much much more moral than a vegan (all else equal), so many more people would do it.
It's quite a radical position that donating a loose change under the couch worth every year makes you significantly more moral than completely transforming your lifestyle, (again, all else equal)
In many countries, especially the UK but also the US, habitat conversion for agriculture has already mostly occurred and isn't increasing. So the marginal impact of buying meat from these countries on habitat loss is going to be quite small. This might therefore be an argument for buying South American beef in particular, although then there might be additional welfare considerations. Also, there's the question of environmental impact from climate change more generally, which will likely be negative. Buying from South America will presumably be worse in this respect due to more transportation requirements, as well as carbon emissions from deforestation.
Many insect species have only a few hundred neurons in a genetically predetermined structure - I don't think those can be sentient enough to have any moral relevance. I'd be more worried about torturing ChatGPT by asking it dumb questions.
This is patently wrong, and being wrong here is morally reprehensible because you are diverting money from sensible charities designed to alleviate suffering in humans and mammals.
Things evolve because they are useful. A high resolution pain sensitivity set up is useful to the extent that it tends to preserve the life of individuals of K-strategy species. r strategists don't care about individuals so why kit them out with sensitive pain detectors (but virtually no flight or fight strategies which the detector could trigger)?
Name a brand of ordinary car to me and I can confidently tell you that it does not come with air-to-ground missile detection radar as standard, even if I have never heard of the brand or seen an example of it. I am equally confident on the same grounds, that insects are incapable of feeling more than the equivalent of very mild discomfort, because what would be the point?
Yes. But it is a matter of degree. The sensitive plant, mimosa pudica, folds up its leaves when you touch it. This is sort of analogous to me flinching when I touch an electric fence but nobody credits the plant with pain receptors. Your average k strategy insect has no more responses in its repertoire than a plant and is more closely analogous to a plant than to me.
Consider the mexican cavefish cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus). Had eyes, got into sunless caves, evolved into eyelessness. If evolution scraps unnecessary sensory systems when they have already evolved (so maintaining them would be reasonably cheap) why a fortiori would it evolve them from scratch?
So the challenge is Can you think of a scenario where k strategy insect individuals would differentially survive by having greater pain sensitivity than their conspecifics? If the answer is no, then their susceptibility to pain would disprove Darwin. So probably it doesn't exist. It is a real possibility that all the pain felt by insects in world history amounts to less than me stubbing my toe once.
“If you’re concerned about wild animals, therefore, you should support paving over ecosystems.” This is one of the most delusional and dystopian things I have ever read. It’s pathological.
"If aliens are real then we'll discriminate against them.
"We'll line em up and kill them all
"And nobody can call it a genocide.
"Place no value on their technical advancements,"
as part of an argument in *favor* of genociding as much wildlife as possible.
My overall problem with this whole line of argument is that it is anti-life. Yes, suffering matters, but by your logic anything that increases the number of living creatures is evil because it will also increase suffering, even if those creatures do not suffer very much! Even if they suffer 1/600,000th as much as we do, as you point out in the post. Yet this is an argument against life in general. It's as if someone took the "Torture vs. Dust Specks" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks) argument so seriously that they think the existence of a quadrillion people getting dust in their eyes would be reason to prevent a quadrillion people from ever existing. Because the sheer volume of suffering would be so large!
I find this anti-life attitude baffling, but I believe it comes down to a disagreement on moral intuition. I think that disagreement can be summed up succinctly by this question:
If you had a choice between being a bug for a week and then starving or getting eaten, or not existing at all, which would you choose?
It is intuitively obvious to me that being a bug is the right choice. I'm also quite sure that Bentham would say that not-existing is the intuitively obvious right choice. I'm not sure how we can close that gap. Existence, even painful existence, is so obviously superior to non-existence that I'm not sure how to put it into words. The best I've got is to say "Existence is literally all I have."
I'd need to know who made the machine, and for what purpose, and why we can't feed the 99% of people who starve, but in the abstract hypothetical I would say no, we shouldn't destroy the machine. At the very least it is not morally straightforward that we should destroy it.
In the less abstract case, when the machine is called "life", I would say that sterilizing a planet does not do anyone on that planet any favors, even in 99% of the planet's population starves to death.
That's simply unbelievable. But to be fair to the hypothetical I'm still not going to destroy it. It would wipe out the entire Ethicaldilemmamachine race. What did they ever do to me that I should destroy their mother?
After thinking about this a bit longer, let me tell you a story.
Deep underground, sealed off from the surface world, there is a muddy pit. By some strange chance of chemicals and fate this muddy pit gives birth to life. Every day 1,000 mudmen crawl from the pit and blink their new eyes in the light of biophospherescent fungi and worms.
Life underground is harsh. Food is difficult to come by, but the mudmen have found ways to farm and gather. But there is simply not enough to go around, not nearly. So each day the mudmen let one of the newly risen enter the gates of their subterranean city, Telos, chosen by lot. He may join their city, contribute to their society, and be fed in turn. The other 999 may not enter. They wander the caves, and basically all of them starve within a month.
A surface dweller, also purely by chance, finds their way to the sealed off subterranean world. They observe the miraculous pit of life, the drawing of lots, the remarkable mud city of Telos with it's complex society and many stone towers, and the mass of mudmen who scrabble and slowly die outside the walls.
And she says "No no no, this will simply not do at all. We can't be having any more mudmen." and proceeds to blow up the mud pit with dynamite.
Now when I read that story I see the traveler as a villain. I am quite sure you would read the story and find her to be the hero. I'm not sure how to cross this intuitive gap.
Though I know replying to your own comment twice in a row is the sign of a madman, I realized something. I realized that in the story I tell that is not at all how the mudmen would arrange things.
So let me tell you a different story with the same beginning.
Life underground is harsh. Food is difficult to come by, but the mudmen have found ways to farm and gather. But there is simply not enough to go around, not nearly.
So each day when the 1,000 newborns arrive they are greeted at the gates of the city of Telos by 1,000 mudmen elders. They've lived a good life, but the math of the caves is too unforgiving for happy retirements. There is not enough food. So today they are making the final sacrifice, which all mudmen make when their time comes. They leave the city, to make room for 1,000 children who will take their place, and take the food that was once theirs.
They will leave, meditate on their mortality, pray to their god, and within a month they will all have succumbed to starvation. It is how every mudman life ends: in pain, but pain chosen willingly to save the next generation. A proud duty.
After all, the mudmen are people, not monsters! They make the best of their bad lot, and live the best life they can.
Too bad their lives weren't good enough for the surface worlder, so now they're all gone.
Matthew (or do you prefer Bentham?), it seems that by the logical implications of your belief in theism (maximally good god) and extreme consequentialism (insect suffering is the worst thing ever), a rational thing would be to conclude that insects do not actually experience anything. Now yes this would be *crazy* and *counterintuitive* but so is the idea of Beth 2 people existing and so is the idea of insect suffering being the worst thing ever. (Not to say you don't have arguments for them, just that surely you must agree that those claims are quite counterintuitive on their face). It seems like you want to invoke God to defend against radical skepticism (i.e. you can have Beth 2 people with mathematical universe, but mathematical universe destroys induction, but God is good so he will not undermine induction. Apologies if this is not your actual argument, correct me wherever you think I'm wrong). But the upshot being that you haven't warded off skepticism at all, since skepticism seems to creep in no matter what you believe.
Even worse, by the logic of this post Beth 2 people existing is a moral atrocity, as it means there is *way* more suffering that exists than if there wasn't Beth 2 people. Imagine if half of the Beth 2 people have a really bad itch on their nose! The sheer volume of their suffering swamps all other moral concerns.
Well I grant their total existence is good including the afterlife. But I think they preexist and it's worse to be temporarily in this world as an insect.
Why don't you grant their existence is good currently as well? Perhaps they are experiencing extreme pleasure (since you are a dualist and believe in the possibility of inverted qualia). That fits with the theism hypothesis much better.
Why? By your own logic dying as a bug hurts around 80% less than dying as a human, so why is it worse to preexist, be a bug for a week, die, and move on? An average full human lifespan is going to include massively more suffering in it than any bug lifespan, if only because it is so much longer.
Well one could reply that since God is good he will only create the number of people that have positive net value (to do otherwise would be wrong). But according to SIA, the amount of people that exist is actually much more than Beth 2, it's an uncountably infinite number of people. But SIA gives us no reason to think that the amount of people who exist is only limited to the class of people who have net good lives on average. In fact, SIA gives us reason to think that there must be an uncountably infinite number of people who have lives of negative net value. So far from proving theism, SIA actively disproves theism.
>So far from proving theism, SIA actively disproves theism.
Only for utilitarians. Non-utilitarians can believe without contradiction that someone's life can contain more suffering than joy and still be a good life that was worth living.
In my opinion SIA doesn't prove theism because Bentham rules out alternatives to theism based on their anti-inductive conclusions (that is, they undermine induction), while I think theism has just as many anti-inductive conclusions as the rival views he rules out.
For me, this article almost feels like a great argument against utilitarian thinking! Or at the very least, it suggests that the utilitarian calculus must include more than just suffering in its accounting. Habitats, for me, have a deeper value and worth which is difficult to quantify or compare with the suffering of wild animals. I also have to wonder if we really have any clue at all about the relative percentages of suffering for insects (at least), and if insects perhaps live in a state of vast neutrality. Human suffering may be dramatically worsened by our ability for self-reflection, death awareness, the stressors of navigating extremely complex social structures, etc for all I know!
You would think that someone who comes to the conclusion that the best thing in the world would be to turn the Earth into a parking lot, as far as possible, would realize he has gone wrong somewhere.
But as I explain, the argument doesn't rely on the notion that suffering is the only bad. In fact, I don't think that suffering is the only bad.
Yes I see that here:
"To think insect suffering is the worst thing, you don’t have to think only pleasure and pain matter. I certainly don’t think that. All you have to think is that suffering is one of the things that matters, so that utterly incomprehensible quantities of it are very morally serious. But this is very obvious. That’s why we give people anesthesia during surgeries—we recognize that it’s bad when they suffer greatly."
Yet, if there were utterly incomprehensible qualities of natural beauty and goodness which are difficult to quantify then wouldn't this be a weaker line of reasoning?
Generally people think that the world's suffering is a bigger deal than many pretty trees
You're arguing that the extinction of all life on earth would be the most moral outcome - doesn't that preclude you from invoking "generally people think" as an argument?
"Also, when I scheduled this article to be released, I did not know it was April 1. Really, seriously, this is not an April fools day post"
I mean, it's kinda lame to preface an Apr fools day post like that IMO! But maybe so.
Before it all gets flooded with outrage and nitpicks want to thank you for writing this. Even though I could of course find a few personal disagreements here and there, I broadly agree with the claim, and yet it's near-impossible to discuss it (even in animal advocacy). Which is weird, since it's fairly commonly accepted that as an individual, it's not great to hurt insects (it's seen as cruel to rip off their limbs or to burn them with magnifying glasses). This is a few lightyears away from the overton window - as a lot of your stuff often is - and it obviously won't change most readers' minds, but it's a different style than Brian Tomasik's, and I appreciate you putting your own spin on this in order to cover an issue that's not that hard to understand, but extremely hard to acknowledge.
A few shout outs I'd like to make: Wayne Hsiung, founder of Direct Action Everywhere, called insect suffering the most important problem in the world (first seconds of this great discussion : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD1hEpD8B7o ) ; and if you're in France and dislike insect suffering, you could tax-deductibly donate to https://www.onei-insectes.org/ , doing great work to pragmatically act against the rise of insect farming (France being one of the world leaders in this space).
Obvious reductio to whatever system of morality this is a product of. Or to morality itself, if you claim that all of them do.
This doesn't assume consequentialism, just the utterly obvious notion--defended at length--that suffering is bad. I don't think it's a reductio that a view takes seriously the interests of the roughly 100% of conscious beings on earth, and the idea that it does reflects bare prejudice and speciesism.
If taking taking "the interests of the roughly 100% of conscious beings on earth" seriously means wanting them to no longer exist, please never try to take my interests seriously.
Yeah this could have easily been written by an anti-consequentialist as a parody of consequentialism.
In Cutter's recent post on this blog ranking arguments against physicalism, he brought up the idea of Moorean truth (“one of those things we know better than we know the premises of any philosophical argument to the contrary”)
I will start caring about insect suffering as soon they start caring about mine. Get off me you damn mosquito!
Honestly what this series is doing is showing me the weakness of caring about suffering as a moral theorem as it leads to ridiculous conclusions.
We need to limit it to humans.
Do babies care about your suffering?
That suffering is bad is obvious. This is why we anesthetize people during surgeries. It wouldn't be very surprising that the right ethical view implies we should take seriously the interests of almost all conscious beings on earth.
Babies would potentially care. There's potential reciprocity. If there weren't (say, I was a Jew watching a Nazi suffer, knowing he'd never reciprocate) I wouldn't bother with humans either.
Also there's a good case for going with the species as a whole
Why is suffering bad obvious? If you see someone having a nightmare, and you know he or she won't remember it, are we ethically obligated to wake them? I don't think so. So a bee or mosquito or shrimp doesn't have that memory that makes suffering meaningful.
What about mentally disabled babies?
You should wake people from a nightmare if it will make their life more pleasant overall. This seems obvious!
Even if they won't remember? You are weaselling out here.
As far as disabled people, I would say it may be based on a species as a whole.
But if they do not remember it at all I don't think we need to expend resources as opposed to fully conscious humans.
What weaselling out is occurring.
Okay suppose we discovered that some mentally disabled people weren’t humans but were their own species. Would their interests stop mattering?
Yes, if they as a species do not care about other humans. (I doubt that though).
Potential Reciprocity should be a baseline to ethics. There's no need to turn the other cheek.
When a bug starts caring about me, I'll care about it.
(That's beside the point that it is unlikely the bug is actually experiencing suffering in any meaningful sense as a human is.)
As far as the nightmare part: people would gladly be paid to experience a horrible nightmare if when they wake up they wouldn't remember it. It doesn't affect their sense of "you". Would one be ethically required to wake someone up experiencing such a nightmare? I doubt it. I suspect that bugs' consciousness or experiencing suffering are similar to that in that they have no consciousness in that sense where they experience things linearly.
I agree with so much of this. 2 points though:
(1) The most plausible versions of bounded aggregation won’t hold that insects are somehow below a threshold *to even count*, but I do think there are plausible renderings of BA on which no amount of insect suffering could ever outweigh some very large burdens, e.g., the torturous death of 1 billion humans. BA doesn’t *need* to endorse that, but it plausibly can. If people want to agree with the importance of the issue and yet still care more about other issues (say, slavery), this is how they ought to do it.
(2) I think it should be really emphasized that the issue here is insect *suffering*. The short lives and frequent deaths of insects aren’t really problematic by my lights. So even if creating new humans, or eating meat, reduces insect populations, we need to make sure they don’t also *cause the very suffering* that is the actual object of avoidance.
"The effective altruists started out wanting to do good. And they did: whole nine-digit-sums worth of good, spreadsheets full of lives saved and diseases cured and disasters averted. But if you really want to understand what you’re doing – get past the point where you can catch falling apples, to the point where you have a complete theory of gravitation – you end up with something as remote from normal human tenderheartedness as the conference lunches were from normal human food." -Scott Alexander
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/16/fear-and-loathing-at-effective-altruism-global-2017/#:~:text=The%20effective%20altruists%20started,from%20normal%20human%20food.
While I think the logic of this article goes through I still feel uncertain about the conclusion. I think my three sources of uncertainty are:
1) How certain can we be that the average insect life is net negative? How much joy / happiness do they feel?
1b) I have a vague uncertain intuition that evolution (outer optimizer) in the long run should make the baseline happiness near zero for the inner optimizer.
2) What about the effect of reducing the insect population on the broader ecosystem?
3) (less important for my uncertainty of the conclusion) I am very uncertain about the relative intensities of pain mean.
I do want to note that this article convinced me that insect suffering is more important than I previously thought, and I will probably give to some insect related charity.
Agree with point one. Also don't see evidence that a significant portion of their lives are spent in pain, but it may exist. I find these articles interesting but it seems obvious that our efforts should be pointed towards factory farming, since we know factory farmed animals experience a ton of suffering and eradicating it seems more plausible than meaningfully redressing insect or wild animals suffering, since it's at least somewhat in the public conversation.
1) See the linked posts. And we don't need to be that certain--it's expected value that matters.
1b) Why in the world would you think that?
2) Well I think most other members of the ecosystem have bad lives.
3) How bad the pain feels. Like, some pains feel worse. A pain feels twice as bad if it for half as long is just as intense of pain.
I also suspect 1b ito be true. It's probably more evolutionarily beneficial for the pain/pleasure system to be calibrated to the real conditions. For example, I think the ancient people lived pretty terrible lives (by modern standards), but still strongly preferred their lives to nonexistence. This, I believe, is part of why factory farming is so terrible — it's unnatural, and it's not the unnaturalness itself that matters, but the fact that animals didn't evolve to find factory farms acceptable.
After all, the insects seem to want to live. They clearly don't want to be killed: they try to escape when you catch them, etc. Maybe it's just an automatic response not involving qualia, but it's a) unnecessarily complicated and b) inconsistent with explaining other animal behaviour with qualia.
But thank you for the article. I also think of that really often.
Does this mean eating meat is morally good, to the extent it causes habitat loss, via less efficient land use that a plant-based diet (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969715303697)?
I don't think so because warmer temperatures = more insects. But it's pretty complicated and could be true for some of them.
Why not do a carbon offset? E.g. you can donate to the Clean Air Task Force so you in expectation reduce your carbon footprint while reducing insect populations by eating meat?
This is such an important point because of how inexpensive offsetting the carbon emissions of your meat consumption can be.
According to United States Department of Agriculture[1], beef consumption per capita projected for 2025 is 59.1 lbs, for pork 51.4 lbs, broiler meat 103.1 lbs, turkey 13.4 lbs, lamb and mutton 1.3 lbs, and 270.7 eggs (33.9 lbs).
According to Our World in Data[2], greenhouse gas emissions per kg of product goes for. 99.48kg for beef herd beef, 39.72 for lamb & mutton, 33.3kg for dairy herd beef, 12.31kg for pork, 9.87kg for poultry meat, 4.67kg for eggs.
All of this gives 3788.6 kgCO₂eq per year for average American.
And lastly, according to Effective Altruism Forum[3], 4 climate change charities they looked for, they estimated the cost effectiveness as
Evergreen Collaborative – $0.54 per metric ton of CO2e
Rewiring America – $3.14 per metric ton of CO2e
The Sunrise Movement – $0.22 per metric ton of CO2e
Green New Deal Network – $0.73 per metric ton of CO2e
This means, for the lowest one, your cost to offset would be 83¢/year, and for 2nd highest, it is $2.77/year.
If the insect thesis is true, this would be quite extraordinary, because there are tons of vegans advocating all their life for veganism, and they will convince almost no one they see. However, if one were to tell them, change nothing else about your life, other than giving $1-3 a year for climate charities, and you are much much much more moral than a vegan (all else equal), so many more people would do it.
It's quite a radical position that donating a loose change under the couch worth every year makes you significantly more moral than completely transforming your lifestyle, (again, all else equal)
[1] https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/outlooks/110972/LDP-M-368.pdf
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-kg-poore
[3] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H3aKKezuaG4EZSsBu/climate-recommendations-in-ea-giving-green-and-founders
In many countries, especially the UK but also the US, habitat conversion for agriculture has already mostly occurred and isn't increasing. So the marginal impact of buying meat from these countries on habitat loss is going to be quite small. This might therefore be an argument for buying South American beef in particular, although then there might be additional welfare considerations. Also, there's the question of environmental impact from climate change more generally, which will likely be negative. Buying from South America will presumably be worse in this respect due to more transportation requirements, as well as carbon emissions from deforestation.
Very likely for some meats - nearly certain for most animals who were "grass fed". https://reducing-suffering.org/how-cattle-grazing-affects-insect-populations/
Much less certain for small animals such as chickens, even less likely when it comes to insects, shrimps, and fishes. Not to mention fishing has probably increased the number of sentient animals living in the ocean at any time : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oms5N5K5HxL2KJcmb/the-moral-ambiguity-of-fishing-on-wild-aquatic-animal
Actually, grass fed beef is more effective land use. Veganism is environmentally destructive. The contrary claim is vegan propaganda.
Citation? Rationale?
Many insect species have only a few hundred neurons in a genetically predetermined structure - I don't think those can be sentient enough to have any moral relevance. I'd be more worried about torturing ChatGPT by asking it dumb questions.
This one is a banger, Bentham!
Thanks for using your audience to raise this issue. I filled out the Defra consultation
Just wait until you hear about all the millions of sperms that don’t complete the journey 😂
This is patently wrong, and being wrong here is morally reprehensible because you are diverting money from sensible charities designed to alleviate suffering in humans and mammals.
Things evolve because they are useful. A high resolution pain sensitivity set up is useful to the extent that it tends to preserve the life of individuals of K-strategy species. r strategists don't care about individuals so why kit them out with sensitive pain detectors (but virtually no flight or fight strategies which the detector could trigger)?
Name a brand of ordinary car to me and I can confidently tell you that it does not come with air-to-ground missile detection radar as standard, even if I have never heard of the brand or seen an example of it. I am equally confident on the same grounds, that insects are incapable of feeling more than the equivalent of very mild discomfort, because what would be the point?
It's still evolutionarily beneficial to feel pain if you're an insect because it influences behavior to avoid harmful stimuli.
Yes. But it is a matter of degree. The sensitive plant, mimosa pudica, folds up its leaves when you touch it. This is sort of analogous to me flinching when I touch an electric fence but nobody credits the plant with pain receptors. Your average k strategy insect has no more responses in its repertoire than a plant and is more closely analogous to a plant than to me.
Consider the mexican cavefish cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus). Had eyes, got into sunless caves, evolved into eyelessness. If evolution scraps unnecessary sensory systems when they have already evolved (so maintaining them would be reasonably cheap) why a fortiori would it evolve them from scratch?
So the challenge is Can you think of a scenario where k strategy insect individuals would differentially survive by having greater pain sensitivity than their conspecifics? If the answer is no, then their susceptibility to pain would disprove Darwin. So probably it doesn't exist. It is a real possibility that all the pain felt by insects in world history amounts to less than me stubbing my toe once.
“If you’re concerned about wild animals, therefore, you should support paving over ecosystems.” This is one of the most delusional and dystopian things I have ever read. It’s pathological.
It's very strange to include the song lyrics
"If aliens are real then we'll discriminate against them.
"We'll line em up and kill them all
"And nobody can call it a genocide.
"Place no value on their technical advancements,"
as part of an argument in *favor* of genociding as much wildlife as possible.
My overall problem with this whole line of argument is that it is anti-life. Yes, suffering matters, but by your logic anything that increases the number of living creatures is evil because it will also increase suffering, even if those creatures do not suffer very much! Even if they suffer 1/600,000th as much as we do, as you point out in the post. Yet this is an argument against life in general. It's as if someone took the "Torture vs. Dust Specks" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks) argument so seriously that they think the existence of a quadrillion people getting dust in their eyes would be reason to prevent a quadrillion people from ever existing. Because the sheer volume of suffering would be so large!
I find this anti-life attitude baffling, but I believe it comes down to a disagreement on moral intuition. I think that disagreement can be summed up succinctly by this question:
If you had a choice between being a bug for a week and then starving or getting eaten, or not existing at all, which would you choose?
It is intuitively obvious to me that being a bug is the right choice. I'm also quite sure that Bentham would say that not-existing is the intuitively obvious right choice. I'm not sure how we can close that gap. Existence, even painful existence, is so obviously superior to non-existence that I'm not sure how to put it into words. The best I've got is to say "Existence is literally all I have."
Suppose a machine created a thousand people and left 99.99% to starve to death each day. Should we destroy the machine?
I'd need to know who made the machine, and for what purpose, and why we can't feed the 99% of people who starve, but in the abstract hypothetical I would say no, we shouldn't destroy the machine. At the very least it is not morally straightforward that we should destroy it.
In the less abstract case, when the machine is called "life", I would say that sterilizing a planet does not do anyone on that planet any favors, even in 99% of the planet's population starves to death.
It formed purely by chance! And sealed off!
That's simply unbelievable. But to be fair to the hypothetical I'm still not going to destroy it. It would wipe out the entire Ethicaldilemmamachine race. What did they ever do to me that I should destroy their mother?
After thinking about this a bit longer, let me tell you a story.
Deep underground, sealed off from the surface world, there is a muddy pit. By some strange chance of chemicals and fate this muddy pit gives birth to life. Every day 1,000 mudmen crawl from the pit and blink their new eyes in the light of biophospherescent fungi and worms.
Life underground is harsh. Food is difficult to come by, but the mudmen have found ways to farm and gather. But there is simply not enough to go around, not nearly. So each day the mudmen let one of the newly risen enter the gates of their subterranean city, Telos, chosen by lot. He may join their city, contribute to their society, and be fed in turn. The other 999 may not enter. They wander the caves, and basically all of them starve within a month.
A surface dweller, also purely by chance, finds their way to the sealed off subterranean world. They observe the miraculous pit of life, the drawing of lots, the remarkable mud city of Telos with it's complex society and many stone towers, and the mass of mudmen who scrabble and slowly die outside the walls.
And she says "No no no, this will simply not do at all. We can't be having any more mudmen." and proceeds to blow up the mud pit with dynamite.
Now when I read that story I see the traveler as a villain. I am quite sure you would read the story and find her to be the hero. I'm not sure how to cross this intuitive gap.
Though I know replying to your own comment twice in a row is the sign of a madman, I realized something. I realized that in the story I tell that is not at all how the mudmen would arrange things.
So let me tell you a different story with the same beginning.
Life underground is harsh. Food is difficult to come by, but the mudmen have found ways to farm and gather. But there is simply not enough to go around, not nearly.
So each day when the 1,000 newborns arrive they are greeted at the gates of the city of Telos by 1,000 mudmen elders. They've lived a good life, but the math of the caves is too unforgiving for happy retirements. There is not enough food. So today they are making the final sacrifice, which all mudmen make when their time comes. They leave the city, to make room for 1,000 children who will take their place, and take the food that was once theirs.
They will leave, meditate on their mortality, pray to their god, and within a month they will all have succumbed to starvation. It is how every mudman life ends: in pain, but pain chosen willingly to save the next generation. A proud duty.
After all, the mudmen are people, not monsters! They make the best of their bad lot, and live the best life they can.
Too bad their lives weren't good enough for the surface worlder, so now they're all gone.
I wouldn't even choose to be born as myself if I could choose nonexistence instead. Life is pretty terrible in general.
I wrote a response post, if anyone wants a read me blather on about this for a few hundred more words: https://open.substack.com/pub/flyinglionwithabook/p/utilitarianism-the-anti-life-equation
Matthew (or do you prefer Bentham?), it seems that by the logical implications of your belief in theism (maximally good god) and extreme consequentialism (insect suffering is the worst thing ever), a rational thing would be to conclude that insects do not actually experience anything. Now yes this would be *crazy* and *counterintuitive* but so is the idea of Beth 2 people existing and so is the idea of insect suffering being the worst thing ever. (Not to say you don't have arguments for them, just that surely you must agree that those claims are quite counterintuitive on their face). It seems like you want to invoke God to defend against radical skepticism (i.e. you can have Beth 2 people with mathematical universe, but mathematical universe destroys induction, but God is good so he will not undermine induction. Apologies if this is not your actual argument, correct me wherever you think I'm wrong). But the upshot being that you haven't warded off skepticism at all, since skepticism seems to creep in no matter what you believe.
Even worse, by the logic of this post Beth 2 people existing is a moral atrocity, as it means there is *way* more suffering that exists than if there wasn't Beth 2 people. Imagine if half of the Beth 2 people have a really bad itch on their nose! The sheer volume of their suffering swamps all other moral concerns.
Well I grant their total existence is good including the afterlife. But I think they preexist and it's worse to be temporarily in this world as an insect.
Why don't you grant their existence is good currently as well? Perhaps they are experiencing extreme pleasure (since you are a dualist and believe in the possibility of inverted qualia). That fits with the theism hypothesis much better.
Why? By your own logic dying as a bug hurts around 80% less than dying as a human, so why is it worse to preexist, be a bug for a week, die, and move on? An average full human lifespan is going to include massively more suffering in it than any bug lifespan, if only because it is so much longer.
Because humans have more positive utility.
More positive utility than whatever being the pre-existing bug spirit goes on to be in the afterlife?
Well one could reply that since God is good he will only create the number of people that have positive net value (to do otherwise would be wrong). But according to SIA, the amount of people that exist is actually much more than Beth 2, it's an uncountably infinite number of people. But SIA gives us no reason to think that the amount of people who exist is only limited to the class of people who have net good lives on average. In fact, SIA gives us reason to think that there must be an uncountably infinite number of people who have lives of negative net value. So far from proving theism, SIA actively disproves theism.
>So far from proving theism, SIA actively disproves theism.
Only for utilitarians. Non-utilitarians can believe without contradiction that someone's life can contain more suffering than joy and still be a good life that was worth living.
In my opinion SIA doesn't prove theism because Bentham rules out alternatives to theism based on their anti-inductive conclusions (that is, they undermine induction), while I think theism has just as many anti-inductive conclusions as the rival views he rules out.