Simple post, but I can only agree! Brian Tomasik criticizes our "dyadic morality" and suggests that personifying Nature as an evil force might be a positive meme (see Bostrom's iconic "If mother nature were a real mother, she'd be in jail for child abuse" - though some of Bostrom's ideas, like Astronomical Waste, push towards horrible consequences for farmed and wild animals).
Many psychological egoists aren't actually that. I mean, they'll talk a big game about how everyone is selfish, but at the end of the day they think their husband really does love them and care for them for their own sake. Unfortunately, philosophical beliefs being associated with virtue signalling means you sometimes have to dig a bit deeper to find their true commitments (or be disappointed when it turns out they don't have true commitments and it's all virtue signalling). One of my intetests is teaching laypeople how to clearly express themselves without needing a philosophy degree, for this reason
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)
If by nature, you mean "the natural order of things", you should be able to see that most people are more "pessimistic" about that than about other people. Most people are much more pessimistic about aging, getting sick and dying than about what other people might do to them (except in war zones, probably).
The fact that you can write "We’re much more concerned about terrorism than disease, even though disease kills more people" is just mind boggling. People are overwhelmingly more concerned about disease than terrorism.
As for nature in the sense of "natural ecosystems", only a tiny lunatic fringe of people thinks that destroying them (including even gardens and parks) is a good thing in itself.
Well, if you don't agree slavery is wrong, feel free to ask him what his argument is. For me, I don't agree that video game developers are the arbiters of morality, so I figured I'd ask why you think so.
Just curious, let's say you hear abour a community of people living terrible lives. Now, you can go and build a parking lot where they live, which is gonna kill them all/stop them from reproducing. Is it morally good to do it ? This seems analogous to human civiliziation taking over nature. While I think it's an interesting moral question, I don't think it's that clear cut either.
This example brings in numerous disanalogous issues. We can communicate with other people, intervene in other ways to improve their lives, and by saying “parking lot” rather than “bustling metropolis” you are leaning on a “Big Yellow Taxi”-style caricature of the worthlessness of human civilisation. If you straighten out all the disanalogies, this scenario loses its force.
Let's say we are talking about a tribe of people that we can't communicate with. The only way to stop their bad lives is to go and bulldoze the place (which is gonna kill them all) in order to build a bustling metropolis. Is it morally fine to do that ?
What kind of people could we not communicate with? Even if we don’t understand their language, total inability to communicate at all with a discrete group like that would challenge the notion that they are indeed “people” according to many definitions. If they are still anatomically human, I might say no, let’s not kill them. But I’d support sterilisation.
Doesn't matter, I stipulate in the hypo that we can't communicate with them. Why does it matter if they are humans or not ? Are you a speciesist ? Urgh
It matters how or why we can’t communicate with them because it would change different aspects of the scenario. I do feel human life is more valuable than other forms of life we’ve encountered on earth, but not infinitely so. I also think killing a large number of humans would levy large costs on preexisting societies, in part because people largely hold human supremacist views and are adverse to moral tradeoffs. That would disincline me to support an equivalent amount of harm to a group of humans as I would to a group of animals in a tradeoff like this, because the social consequences of killing a large number of humans could be dramatic.
I like many people find nature very beautiful, but if you were to examine most of what I find beautiful in nature it often turns out to be plants. Quite fortunately it is unlikely plants feel pain so perhaps a future post-wilded world won't be so aestheticly depressing afterall if there are a bunch of gardens everywhere. Now this might make getting rid of bug populations harder but by the point you're really getting rid of bug populations at a scale larger than we currently are by habitat destruction you probably are gonna have pretty advanced insecticides so maybe the challenge isn't so daunting.
Darwin agrees with you - but in so doing he brings up the cruel nature/omnipotent God problem:
"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars..."
I believe that you have talked about a way to reconcile this problem of an omnipotent beneficent God with a cruel nature - but I forget where! thanks
It could be that both humans and nature are bad (meaning nonconforming with a moral ideal), because humans are an extension of nature, and most of the large-scale attempts to transcend that foundation completely have collapsed, due to natural flaws. In that case, it could be heroic to wage war against a system that encompasses everything immediately around us (the natural order), but there’s also a quiet, Quixotic heroism in recognizing the horror that permeates everything and striving to become something better.
Animals are not sentient beings and cannot comprehend any existential suffering. Nature can only be viewed as morally evil or cruel if we directly compare it to human existence. The argument "I would suffer if I was an animal, so all animals suffer" doesn't track. Sure, if you were an animal constantly worrying about getting enough food/avoiding getting eaten that would be a miserable life, but animals are not equipped with the self-awareness to perceive that. In reality, we can't comprehend at all what animals experience because they operate from completely incompatible reference points than us.
So to claim to conclude that what's best for nature is to destroy it only makes sense if we somehow know for a fact that animals intrinsically suffer, which we don't.
By the usual definition of sentience, many animals are sentient. And they can surely suffer via negative experiences including pain, fear and hunger; and those negative states can persist and prolong into something pretty miserable, if not "existential".
I find it implausible that animal experience is totally incomprehensible to us, and so do our labs, who use animals as models of human experience precisely because those animals experience states analogous to ours.
I'm effectively talking about consciousness, or an animal's actual self-awareness of their own existence. And while most animals are not self-aware, I would argue that the more intelligent ones (dolphins, chimpanzees, orangutans) live very nuanced lives full of joy and play, balanced with some suffering and pain. Just like humans do. Is that cause to broadly dismiss their existence and claim we know that what's best for them is the extinction of their species? Try claiming that about a group of people, and you'll look like a genocidal maniac.
In regard to animal experience, I think you are conflating animal models in a lab for experimentation purposes with an animal's actual conscious experience, or lack thereof. A human will never truly understand what it would be like to be born, live, and die as a different organism from their own point of view, no matter how many studies of neuronal networks we map in model animals.
The purpose of many experiments is to elicit particular experiences in lab animals: e.g. in pain research, or depression research.
A self/other distinction is probably one of the primordial functions & features of sentience. An animal need not linguistically conceptualize their existence to be self-aware. Proprioception, for example, is a kind of self-awareness.
The thing is, we've reduced wild animal populations by mainly doing the thing that makes natural predation so bad: by self-asserting at the expense of others. We've converted free animal biomass into trapped animal biomass [e.g. animal farms], and simply obliterated, intentionally or as a side-effect of our expansionism, lifeforms that are of no use to us.
Even if one agrees that non-human nature should be replaced - and I don't feel confident about that - it should be done euthanistically, not as we're now doing it.
One can be pessimistic about humans not because we're specially bad [we have indeed angelic capacities] but because humans tend to act like self-interested consumers, just like beavers and rabbits and fruit flies do, but human action has apocalypse-scale effects.
Interesting story, I never quite thought of nature in those terms. Love it or hate it, there is one thing that is very evident. Humans will not survive without nature. The further we cut ourselves off from it, the less likely we will survive, both personally and as a cohesive collectivist society.
Not entirely sure of your conclusion regarding human impact on wild animal suffering. Habitat destruction and global warming seem like the kind of things which would favour R selection over K selection. And unless this effect is really small, you would expect it to overwhelm any other impact. Humans have on wild animals. Honestly, I’m not really sure that given how much research into wild animal suffering is a field in its infancy i’m not sure we can have any great confidence in any conclusions about humans impact on wild animals yet. Also, I think part of the reason people are optimistic about nature is simply that they don’t care about wild animal suffering that much. I know this is classic pessimism about people, but they legitimately have not shown much interest in this area. Even if industrialisation has been good for wild animals, this is a pure coincidence, not intentional in any way, so we should be careful not to assume that it will necessarily continue to have the same effects, because there’s nobody trying to make sure it continues to have positive effects on wild animals. Also on something of a tangent given how much of the time wild animals spend trying to survive I think we should probably be a bit more hesitant about, assuming that killing them is necessarily doing them a favour, even if they are miserable right now. Of course realistically the impact on wild animals in the present from any intervention is probably a rounding error compare to its impact on future wild animals, so causing a lot of habitat destruction in the present could still be a great thing if it has positive impacts on future wild animals populations. Although I’m pretty uncertain of whether it actually has any beneficial effects, especially given the selection pressures it introduces. Obviously, none of this suggests that we should leave nature alone, but it does suggest that our impact on it so far may not hapve been all that positive.
Simple post, but I can only agree! Brian Tomasik criticizes our "dyadic morality" and suggests that personifying Nature as an evil force might be a positive meme (see Bostrom's iconic "If mother nature were a real mother, she'd be in jail for child abuse" - though some of Bostrom's ideas, like Astronomical Waste, push towards horrible consequences for farmed and wild animals).
Many psychological egoists aren't actually that. I mean, they'll talk a big game about how everyone is selfish, but at the end of the day they think their husband really does love them and care for them for their own sake. Unfortunately, philosophical beliefs being associated with virtue signalling means you sometimes have to dig a bit deeper to find their true commitments (or be disappointed when it turns out they don't have true commitments and it's all virtue signalling). One of my intetests is teaching laypeople how to clearly express themselves without needing a philosophy degree, for this reason
>Wild animal suffering is a problem many orders of magnitude bigger than poverty or war and we’ve made it substantially less bad.
I hate hearing this fact, it is painful and goes against everything I feel. I want to ignore it entirely.
Which is why it's useful that you repeat it.
Kinda like it was our mission all along…
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)
If by nature, you mean "the natural order of things", you should be able to see that most people are more "pessimistic" about that than about other people. Most people are much more pessimistic about aging, getting sick and dying than about what other people might do to them (except in war zones, probably).
The fact that you can write "We’re much more concerned about terrorism than disease, even though disease kills more people" is just mind boggling. People are overwhelmingly more concerned about disease than terrorism.
As for nature in the sense of "natural ecosystems", only a tiny lunatic fringe of people thinks that destroying them (including even gardens and parks) is a good thing in itself.
Here's some moral intuition for you: "End wildlife and nature to eliminate suffering" makes you sound like a bad RPG villain.
Okay, but that's not an argument.
Many of Bentham's arguments for moral facts are one liners like "You obviously sound bad for supporting slavery."
Well, if you don't agree slavery is wrong, feel free to ask him what his argument is. For me, I don't agree that video game developers are the arbiters of morality, so I figured I'd ask why you think so.
Video game writers are clowns. But few other writers invent the stereotype of the insane person who wants to kill everyone to end suffering.
Just curious, let's say you hear abour a community of people living terrible lives. Now, you can go and build a parking lot where they live, which is gonna kill them all/stop them from reproducing. Is it morally good to do it ? This seems analogous to human civiliziation taking over nature. While I think it's an interesting moral question, I don't think it's that clear cut either.
This example brings in numerous disanalogous issues. We can communicate with other people, intervene in other ways to improve their lives, and by saying “parking lot” rather than “bustling metropolis” you are leaning on a “Big Yellow Taxi”-style caricature of the worthlessness of human civilisation. If you straighten out all the disanalogies, this scenario loses its force.
Let's say we are talking about a tribe of people that we can't communicate with. The only way to stop their bad lives is to go and bulldoze the place (which is gonna kill them all) in order to build a bustling metropolis. Is it morally fine to do that ?
What kind of people could we not communicate with? Even if we don’t understand their language, total inability to communicate at all with a discrete group like that would challenge the notion that they are indeed “people” according to many definitions. If they are still anatomically human, I might say no, let’s not kill them. But I’d support sterilisation.
Doesn't matter, I stipulate in the hypo that we can't communicate with them. Why does it matter if they are humans or not ? Are you a speciesist ? Urgh
It matters how or why we can’t communicate with them because it would change different aspects of the scenario. I do feel human life is more valuable than other forms of life we’ve encountered on earth, but not infinitely so. I also think killing a large number of humans would levy large costs on preexisting societies, in part because people largely hold human supremacist views and are adverse to moral tradeoffs. That would disincline me to support an equivalent amount of harm to a group of humans as I would to a group of animals in a tradeoff like this, because the social consequences of killing a large number of humans could be dramatic.
I like many people find nature very beautiful, but if you were to examine most of what I find beautiful in nature it often turns out to be plants. Quite fortunately it is unlikely plants feel pain so perhaps a future post-wilded world won't be so aestheticly depressing afterall if there are a bunch of gardens everywhere. Now this might make getting rid of bug populations harder but by the point you're really getting rid of bug populations at a scale larger than we currently are by habitat destruction you probably are gonna have pretty advanced insecticides so maybe the challenge isn't so daunting.
Darwin agrees with you - but in so doing he brings up the cruel nature/omnipotent God problem:
"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars..."
I believe that you have talked about a way to reconcile this problem of an omnipotent beneficent God with a cruel nature - but I forget where! thanks
It could be that both humans and nature are bad (meaning nonconforming with a moral ideal), because humans are an extension of nature, and most of the large-scale attempts to transcend that foundation completely have collapsed, due to natural flaws. In that case, it could be heroic to wage war against a system that encompasses everything immediately around us (the natural order), but there’s also a quiet, Quixotic heroism in recognizing the horror that permeates everything and striving to become something better.
Waiting for the day when people finally come out and start condemning nature to show how morally virtuous and wise they are
Animals are not sentient beings and cannot comprehend any existential suffering. Nature can only be viewed as morally evil or cruel if we directly compare it to human existence. The argument "I would suffer if I was an animal, so all animals suffer" doesn't track. Sure, if you were an animal constantly worrying about getting enough food/avoiding getting eaten that would be a miserable life, but animals are not equipped with the self-awareness to perceive that. In reality, we can't comprehend at all what animals experience because they operate from completely incompatible reference points than us.
So to claim to conclude that what's best for nature is to destroy it only makes sense if we somehow know for a fact that animals intrinsically suffer, which we don't.
By the usual definition of sentience, many animals are sentient. And they can surely suffer via negative experiences including pain, fear and hunger; and those negative states can persist and prolong into something pretty miserable, if not "existential".
I find it implausible that animal experience is totally incomprehensible to us, and so do our labs, who use animals as models of human experience precisely because those animals experience states analogous to ours.
I'm effectively talking about consciousness, or an animal's actual self-awareness of their own existence. And while most animals are not self-aware, I would argue that the more intelligent ones (dolphins, chimpanzees, orangutans) live very nuanced lives full of joy and play, balanced with some suffering and pain. Just like humans do. Is that cause to broadly dismiss their existence and claim we know that what's best for them is the extinction of their species? Try claiming that about a group of people, and you'll look like a genocidal maniac.
In regard to animal experience, I think you are conflating animal models in a lab for experimentation purposes with an animal's actual conscious experience, or lack thereof. A human will never truly understand what it would be like to be born, live, and die as a different organism from their own point of view, no matter how many studies of neuronal networks we map in model animals.
The purpose of many experiments is to elicit particular experiences in lab animals: e.g. in pain research, or depression research.
A self/other distinction is probably one of the primordial functions & features of sentience. An animal need not linguistically conceptualize their existence to be self-aware. Proprioception, for example, is a kind of self-awareness.
The thing is, we've reduced wild animal populations by mainly doing the thing that makes natural predation so bad: by self-asserting at the expense of others. We've converted free animal biomass into trapped animal biomass [e.g. animal farms], and simply obliterated, intentionally or as a side-effect of our expansionism, lifeforms that are of no use to us.
Even if one agrees that non-human nature should be replaced - and I don't feel confident about that - it should be done euthanistically, not as we're now doing it.
One can be pessimistic about humans not because we're specially bad [we have indeed angelic capacities] but because humans tend to act like self-interested consumers, just like beavers and rabbits and fruit flies do, but human action has apocalypse-scale effects.
Interesting story, I never quite thought of nature in those terms. Love it or hate it, there is one thing that is very evident. Humans will not survive without nature. The further we cut ourselves off from it, the less likely we will survive, both personally and as a cohesive collectivist society.
Not entirely sure of your conclusion regarding human impact on wild animal suffering. Habitat destruction and global warming seem like the kind of things which would favour R selection over K selection. And unless this effect is really small, you would expect it to overwhelm any other impact. Humans have on wild animals. Honestly, I’m not really sure that given how much research into wild animal suffering is a field in its infancy i’m not sure we can have any great confidence in any conclusions about humans impact on wild animals yet. Also, I think part of the reason people are optimistic about nature is simply that they don’t care about wild animal suffering that much. I know this is classic pessimism about people, but they legitimately have not shown much interest in this area. Even if industrialisation has been good for wild animals, this is a pure coincidence, not intentional in any way, so we should be careful not to assume that it will necessarily continue to have the same effects, because there’s nobody trying to make sure it continues to have positive effects on wild animals. Also on something of a tangent given how much of the time wild animals spend trying to survive I think we should probably be a bit more hesitant about, assuming that killing them is necessarily doing them a favour, even if they are miserable right now. Of course realistically the impact on wild animals in the present from any intervention is probably a rounding error compare to its impact on future wild animals, so causing a lot of habitat destruction in the present could still be a great thing if it has positive impacts on future wild animals populations. Although I’m pretty uncertain of whether it actually has any beneficial effects, especially given the selection pressures it introduces. Obviously, none of this suggests that we should leave nature alone, but it does suggest that our impact on it so far may not hapve been all that positive.
https://youtu.be/dvbxh2rLcdo?si=1AzHevgIysHhjtoZ