Most Arguments For Nature Clearly Prove Too Much

There are obviously conceivable cases where it's good to destroy nature!

(Reminder that there’s an ongoing fundraiser with matching donations for the Shrimp Welfare Project, and there’s a petition to sign to influence the EU’s animal welfare laws. This link even offers pre-filled answers, making it even quicker to fill out—please, please do so, it can improve life for billions of chickens, cows, and pigs).

---

Probably the view of mine that engenders the most internet controversy is that I think we should reduce the amount of high-productivity natural land. I’m in favor of paving over ecosystems and opposed to bringing back ecosystems. This is because I think animals in nature matter morally, and they mostly live bad lives. Most animals live extremely short lives—of just days or weeks—and then die painfully, either from starving, being eaten alive, disease, or thirst. Because their lives are spent in constant struggle and are so short, they don’t have enough welfare to outweigh the badness of a painful death.

Now, there are lots of serious objections one can raise to this. You might think animals in nature mostly live pretty alright lives, despite their lives being very short. I disagree, but this is a serious response, and it merits careful consideration. But what’s been a lot more common than giving specific objections to the argument I gave is people acting incredulous at the premise, as if it is obviously ridiculous that we should reduce the amount of nature because it is full of suffering beings. My critics mostly don’t bother disputing the factual premise, but instead claim that the argument is on its face ridiculous.

But I don’t think this can be right. We should all agree that there are some conceivable ecosystems that are bad enough, in terms of animal suffering, that we should reduce aim to replace them. The only question is whether actual ecosystems are that bad. If you agree that some ecosystems are this way, then at this point we’ve agreed on the core moral premise—we’re just haggling over the price. In other words, there can’t be some fully general argument against ever replacing ecosystems, on grounds that they have too much suffering and too little joy, if we all agree some imaginable ecosystems are worth paving over.

Let’s think through some cases:

Torture Chamber: in this ecosystem, 99.9999999999% of conscious beings, in the minutes after birth, get slowly tortured to death in the most brutal ways imaginable. All the extremely disturbing ways of torture that you read about in history books are routine ways for animals to die, and almost all animals die this way after just a day or two.

I think we can all agree that the Torture Chamber ecosystem would be worth shutting down. If almost every being that gets born gets slowly tortured to death immediately after birth, then even if the ecosystem is pretty, something very bad is happening. If we could replace it with, say, a forest, we should do so. Hell, we should pave it over with concrete if we can.

This illustrates that the position that we should replace ecosystems isn’t automatically crazy. It just depends on how bad the ecosystem is. We all agree that there’s some threshold, where if an ecosystem contains enough misery, it’s not worth preserving.

Next case:

Burn With Fire: this ecosystem has routine random sprays of fire. For some reason, the organisms in this ecosystem haven’t evolved fire resistance. Instead, they just have a bunch of offspring, so that almost all of them die. Roughly 99.999999999% of animals, in the days after they’re born, get burned to death, slowly, over the course of many minutes.

Again, this ecosystem doesn’t seem worth keeping around. If we could replace it with a forest or a desert, we definitely should. Even if we could only replace it with concrete pavement, we should do so. It’s bad enough that it merits replacement. Such is common-sense.

Maybe you reject this premise. If so, I’d recommend actually taking a moment to think about how bad it is to be burned to death. If you’ve ever spilled boiling water on yourself, try to imagine a sensation vastly worse all over your body that you can’t do anything to stop until your skin falls off. Surely a week or two of life can’t outweigh that? Surely ethics demands concern for such horrific experiences?

Okay, now let’s consider a third case:

Brutal Forest: almost every organism born in this forest dies from starvation, being eaten alive, or predation after a few days or weeks of life. Nearly all beings—well above 99%—die painfully after a very short life. Many of them die after going through an experience much worse than the worst experience most humans ever go through, like starving to death or having their limbs ripped off by predators leading to them bleeding out.

Again, I have the intuition that we should replace Brutal Forest. The existence of a forest with so much suffering is a bad thing. Almost every being has more suffering than welfare. Even if there’s more that matters than just suffering and welfare, a forest this horrible isn’t worth keeping around. If we could replace Brutal Forest with a normal forest, surely this would be an improvement?

Here is the bad news: Brutal Forest is basically identical to all actually existing ecosystems.

Almost all animals die after just a few days or weeks. Most are R-strategists, meaning they give birth to many different offspring, most of whom die very quickly (otherwise the population balloons until most offspring start dying off). This means that whatever you’d think about this hypothetical Brutal Forest is what you should think about actual forests, tundras, grasslands, and so on.

People often make rhetorical nods to the brutality of nature, but they don’t really take much time to think about its implications. What nature being brutal means is that there are countless sentient beings who get killed in extremely terrible ways after a few days of life. If you were born as a random wild animal, the odds are about 1/1,000 that you’d live to be a month old. Probably you’d starve or get eaten alive before then.

The difference between Burn With Fire and Brutal Forest strikes me as pretty minor. Both involve almost all beings perishing, the only difference is how they perish. Is being burned to death less pleasant than being eaten alive or starving to death? The answer isn’t obvious. Certainly starvation is a lot slower.

Everyone would agree that if there was an ecosystem that spawned humans in conditions as bad as the ecosystem that spawns wild animals, it would be worth shutting down. If there was a machine that created people, and then left 99.9% of them to starve to death, while keeping the .1% who survived around for a few years at most, we would all support shutting down that machine. There is a machine like that for wild animals: it is called nature. The primary reason we don’t want to shut it down is that people have been biased by its beauty and by watching nature documentaries to think there’s something noble about this incomprehensible carnage.

You can’t say that all lives are worth creating if you think we should destroy the Torture Chamber Ecosystem, the Burn With Fire ecosystem, the Brutal Forest ecosystem, or the human-spawning machine. You must accept that some lives are bad enough that they’re not worth bringing into existence.

Lots of people suggest that I’m assuming some radical utilitarian premise, especially negative utilitarianism. They think that I think a life can’t be worth living if it contains lots of suffering. Not so! I think most people live good lives, even though most lives have some serious suffering. I think it’s plausible that most long-lived animals—elephants, deer, and so on—live good lives. My view is simply that the animals who live very short lives and die painfully don’t have good lives. It is a straightforward matter of fact that nearly all animals are that way.

On this issue, I actually think I’m something of a moderate. I know lots of people who think that no amount of joy can ever outweigh the badness of excruciating suffering—that there are no number of days at the beach that can outweigh the badness of a person being tortured. I don’t agree with that! I have a much more modest view. My view is:

1. If a being dies after just a week or two in some very painful way, probably its life wasn’t good.

2. If an ecosystem is composed almost entirely of beings who have bad lives, then we shouldn’t keep it around in general.

Neither of these strike me as outrageous premises. But because of how bad nature is, these premises jointly imply the desirability of ecosystem destruction. Sensible moral views will imply surprising things when the facts of our world are surprising. In this case, the facts are surprising. It is a surprising fact—not the sort of thing one would have naively guessed—that almost every conscious being dies after just a few days of life.

When reflecting on a morally surprising conclusion, it’s worth thinking about whether its surprisingness comes from the facts about the world being surprising or the moral principle being surprising. If scratching your butt caused 10 quintillion aliens to be tortured to death, scratching your butt would be much worse than murder. That’s a surprising conclusion, but it would be surprising because the facts of the world would be surprising, not because the ethical judgment is counterintuitive.

Similarly, you should reflect on whether the counterintuitiveness of it being moral to pave over ecosystems comes from the moral premise or the factual premise. Which of these is where the surprisingness lies?

1. The moral premise: we should pave over ecosystems if almost every sentient being in them dies painfully after a few days or weeks.

2. The factual premise: actual ecosystems in our world are bottomless pits of suffering—where almost every being dies painfully after a short time.

1 seems perfectly intuitive. It is 2 that is surprising. I wouldn’t have guessed it, but there’s no doubt to be had about it. And you shouldn’t give up a factual judgment because it has surprising moral implications.

Now, maybe you disagree with me about whether ecosystems are bad enough to be worth replacing. Fair enough! But I would encourage you to think seriously about the welfare of wild animals. It would be an almost limitless tragedy if even after the point when we can reduce the suffering in nature without destroying ecosystems, we instead preserve them in their state of natural suffering due to ill-conceived sentimentality. Hideous, incomprehensible quantities of misery lie outside of civilizations—countless quintillions starve and bleed out in forests, oceans, and fields—and we have failed as a morally sensitive species if we neglect their fates.