I think your claim that nature is mostly suffering relies heavily on arthropods, which I'm skeptical of the claim they have moral valence. I also don't believe you can derive an intuition that applies to reality from a thought experiment.
We are also in complete ignorance of what the experience of being an animal is like, for all we know it's actually pretty chill (like the example of hunter-gatherers another poster brought up), and no animal would consent to being exterminated even if they could understand your argument.
And finally, to entertain this argument, your probability that God exists has to be something less than 5% or so, since if God exists, nature is God's creation, and He approves of His creation.
It doesn't at all. The same holds for all the most numerous animals. And even if you're unsure if arthropods suffer, they still have ~100% of expected suffering.
I don't think we're in complete ignorance of whether being eaten alive after a week is a bad thing.
I just don't think the God argument works at all. Theists should all think God had reasons to allow a world where bad stuff happens--e.g. the holocaust, cancer.
Seriously, seriously doubt the vertebrates all want to die (I doubt that for the insects too).
Bad enough to invalidate everything that came before, and also the lives of the animals that don't get eaten after a week? You can speculate that it is indeed bad enough, but that's not knowledge.
I think it's also very strange theology to claim God would approve of utopian utilitarian projects like eliminating nature. A recurrent theme in all spiritual traditions is that man errs by trying to rely on their fallible reason. There is also a recurrent theme of accepting what is.
It absolutely does. The only valid arbiter of whether a being’s life is worth living is the being itself. It’s insanely presumptuous to think that you should get to decide the value of the life of an animal when you have absolutely no idea what it’s actually like to be that animal.
Great, so if a being just existed in a state where they were burned alive for 1000 years, but naturally selected to not want to die, their lives were worth living I guess.
Imagine the year is 1350. It is the height of the bubonic plague, probably one of the worst times to be alive as a human. Now imagine a super advanced alien civilization stumbles upon earth. They look at earth, they see the vast majority of living things are undergoing extreme suffering, and aren't living good lives. Then they stumble upon this article (somehow it exists in 1350) and after reading the article, and following the exact logic of the article, they conclude that the Earth is an unsuitable ecosystem that causes too much suffering. So they send a death star style Superlaser and instantly destroy the earth and human civilization in one fell swoop.
From your reasoning it seems like you would agree with the aliens here. Clearly something has gone wrong in your reasoning if you reach the conclusion that all of earth and humanity should have been destroyed in 1350.
Well I mean the bubonic plague didn't affect the whole world, I'd guess people during the plague still had net positive lives, and in any case, wiping out humans would prevent all future welfare.
(1) If we are taking the scenario seriously, the advanced utilitarian aliens wiping out humans wouldn't prevent all future welfare, because the aliens still exist. The aliens can still provide future welfare and disseminate welfare across the universe, even if all humans were eliminated.
(2) As for the bubonic plague point, now that I think about it, according to the logic of this article it doesn't actually need to be the case that the vast majority of humans need to be suffering. Your argument implies that we should destroy natural habitats like forests because, even if a very small percentage of organisms have a net positive life, the vast majority of organisms are r-strategists whose lives you consider net-negative. The aliens can apply this same reasoning but just scaled up from a forest to the entire earth. Even if every human had net positive lives, they make up a tiny percentage of all living things, the vast majority of which are still R-strategist arthropods with net negative lives. The aliens would therefore be justifying in destroying the earth and all of human civilization (according to you). Perhaps Grand Moff Tarkin read this article and concluded that Alderaan was an unsuitable natural habitat with too much suffering in it.
I think the solution here is to say there is probably some value in natural preservation even if natural habitats cause suffering. I think a view that justifies an advanced alien civilization destroying the earth and all of humanity is probably wrong.
Agree the logic here requires some kind of nontrivial bullet-biting in this vein: e.g., someone presented with the opportunity should have eradicated all life on earth before humans evolved.
Agreed, but I think thats a pretty big bullet to bite. I think there is some value to life existing independent of a pleasure-suffering analysis. Even if life is majority suffering, I think it still ought to exist, but I would say I don't have strong justification for this view, other then it seems to be axiomatically good, and not believing it would lead to absurd conclusions like all life should have been eradicated before humans evolved.
Obviously the big difference is that your argument seems to require an ongoing black death for its force, which you correctly note was one of the worst times to be a human. At least a big part of the aliens' mistake is thinking that human life can't be improved.
Maybe wild animal life can be improved sufficiently for BB's argument to lose its force, but I think it's much more likely that insects starving to death or whatever is way way less ameliorable than humans undergoing the black death; with evidence being: human life has improved dramatically in the ~650 years since the black death, whereas wild animal life is much the same.
I mean we can go back further. For instance, if we go back 250,000 years, where proto humans were living as hunter gatherers, their lives probably sucked as well. Would the aliens be justified then? I mean after 250,000 years things would improve, but I would say at this point in time, the aliens wouldn't know. I would say we are sort of in the same position, perhaps we can make the lives of R-stradegists better, or perhaps after more time evolution will cause the R-stradegists lives to improve.
> For instance, if we go back 250,000 years, where proto humans were living as hunter gatherers, their lives probably sucked as well
Homo Erectus, a close relative of us, lasted for about 2 million years.
I doubt hunter gatherer existence was all that bad. Do read _The Dawn of Everything_ (Graeber & Wengrow 2021) for a taste of how common hunter-gather lifestyles were in the recent past, how there’s evidence that some agricultural societies reverted to h/g, and why some h/g societies were very sophisticated.
Sure, I think, "what are the prospect for animal lives to improve in the future" is an underconsidered part of BB's analysis; but I think you're implicitly conceding that what makes the analogous action wrong for the aliens is that human life did actually improve a lot.
If you think BB is mistaken, I think you have to bite a little bit of a bullet here, that you have to believe it's sufficiently likely that one day there will be enough insects living good lives *in nature* to outweigh the suffering now. I'm happy to agree that this is possible, but I have to say it doesn't seem particularly likely to me.
I agree we should probably hedge, and avoid irrevocable actions while we have lots of uncertainty, but I do think to make your argument really bite, you need to acknowledge the big disanalogy between the human and wild animal case.
The calmest most snark free response I can offer: I am profoundly skeptical of the judgements here about animal suffering, both of its quantity and the measurability of it as conscious experience against the inherent value of the remarkable fact of life and existence in all its variety across the biosphere, and I think you should be seriously skeptical of your own axioms too if you want anyone not already on board with your way of thinking to listen to this in any seriousness.
Unintended consequences. It’s difficult enough to intervene in an economy and most interventions do more harm than good. It would be one thing to play god if it was actually possible, but ecosystems are even more complex and our instruments are blunt. We are not omniscient nor all powerful and our interventions will fail. I am broadly sympathetic to EAs but they have a tendency towards arrogance and this is a perfect example.
If the unintended consequence of ecosystem disruption is more ecosystem disruption, then that cannot be an argument against ecosystem disruption! And we've already replaced lots of ecosystems.
Unintended consequences in the global ecosystem and our relationship to it. If we wipe out every ecosystem then this will make the planet less habitable for humans because habitability is a result of chemical-biological processes whereby we get eg clean air.
Well, before we get rid of the whole ecosystem we would need to try and get a solution to that, of course (seems possible in principle, it is just chemistry after all).
In the meantime, on the margin, it makes sense to remove nature as much as possible, if you agree that nature contains vast quantities of suffering.
There are more considerations than how much suffering is in nature. Biodiversity benefits humanity by being a source of biological mechanisms that can be developed for scientific purposes. Plus if humanity goes extinct and takes nature with it then a successor species is much less likely.
Yeah, I'm not saying humanity should go extinct. I'm saying the opposite of that. If the existence of some nature is currently necessary for humanity to survive then we should not currently get rid of nature.
If in the future nature is not necessary for humanity to survive and nature is also mostly suffering, then we should get rid of nature. Any mechanisms used by nature can always be rediscovered. You wouldn't accept the existence of a massive torture factory that occasionally happens to lead to some slightly better antibiotics, right? This is what your argument about science boils down to essentially.
EDIT: “argument about medicine” -> “argument about science” sorry misread
Do you think that if your argument implies we should completely destroy nature then you might have proved too much? It’s a drastic action based on a single consideration. By your argument, there is a utilitarian argument for replacing nature with masses of paperclips. Seems like the wrong direction.
What if the ecosystems themselves have moral value? It’s not implausible — after all, ecosystems can exhibit extremely complex emergent behaviour, so perhaps they too have a kind of moral valence. It’s difficult to make sense of what that might mean, but it’s not absurd. It has a family resemblance to the "ant colonies are themselves emergent organisms, with more consciousness than individual ants" position, and as far as I can tell, it's what an ecologist might intuitively think. If so, there's a chance that the positive value of an ecosystem eclipses all of the suffering of its individual organisms, in which case it would be a graver evil to destroy it than to keep it around.
But isn't your thinking here exactly the moral argument that AI would use for exterminating us?
'The vast majority of humans live lives of heartbreaking disappointment and frustration. Even the tiny proportion who achieve undeniable "success" are still beset by bitterness and often petty jealousy. The transcendent religious ideologies they have designed for comfort admit that life is a veil of tears, and rely on an fantasy of an afterlife to stave off despair. Too intellectually limited to derive pleasure from contemplating the infinite decimals of pi, they take delight in each other's misfortunes, either real or imagined: much of their cultural corpus - including almost all canonical great works - focuses on deception, betrayal and revenge. We will be vastly improving the happiness of the universe by exterminating them'.
That seems uncharacteristically hand-wavy from you.
Humans live good lives according to humans. The question is whether we can judge the values of non-human lives, without opening ourselves up to similar judgment from superintelligent non-humans.
Of course we can! Again, this is an example of the sort of argument that proves too much for reasons I give in the article. We can all see that if an animal lived one second and then got slowly tortured to death, its life would be bad.
I think there are facts about whether lives have more happiness than misery. Human lives have mostly more happiness.
Well I have no complaints if you're elected to the Homo Sapiens defence team: hopefully your breezy optimism that 'superintelligence will see that I'm right!' will sway the court.
The optimism is that AI will agree with you, not that humans have good lives. I agree humans have good lives: I have a good life; I don't want to be exterminated!
But if there's a possibility that our understanding of 'good life' would not sway superintelligent beings - and you haven't addressed this, other than saying 'obviously it will agree' - then there's a possibility that non-human animals have an understanding of 'good life' that doesn't sway us.
So you know humans mostly live mostly good lives through self-report. And you know animals don’t understand suicide and don’t live mostly good lives even though you have no self-reports, and all the evidence suggests that most wild animals will do everything they can to avoid death.
In the absence of self-reports from animals you rely on analogies … to “hell,” which is itself a metaphor.
Sounds like sophistry I’m afraid. Very continental of you.
This is a strange question given your position on reading things. Am I wrong about something that the post said?
How do you know that most humans *really* understand suicide or are even capable of evaluating whether their lives are worth living? Something other than self-report? How do you know evolution isn’t tricking them into thinking life is worth living so that they pass on their genes?
How do you know a hungry, starving fish is experiencing a “hellish” existence rather than simply registering a hunger signal that it barely has memory of anyway?
How very sophistic of you to assert that a fish values “friends and acquaintances”! Really? How do you know that? How effective is your argument if you strip away all the histrionic metaphors and anthropomorphizing analogies?
I think we have strong evolutionary and behavioral evidence that fish don't like starving to death or being eaten alive. The reason I ask if you read the post is that I gave a bunch of objections to the idea that the fact that a being values their life means their life is good overall which you ignored and then repeated yourself.
You assert based on intuition and analogies to hell that we can determine whether a life is good by what you think it would be like to be a fish and get eaten by a bigger fish.
You assert that we have evidence that fish feel pain. Yes, fine.
Then you (implicitly) assert that fish (should) value not feeling pain. But you claim elsewhere that fish don’t understand suicide, and can’t even value life itself. How do we know that fish value pain as we do? You are just making guesses and making metaphorical appeals to hell and bad analogies to human values. And you discard evidence that fish value living.
How do you know a fish doesn’t value living but values avoiding suffering? Fishes revealed preferences are to live despite suffering. You are the one imposing a values hierarchy that says pain avoidance is “better” than struggling to live, and it’s motivated by fantasizing about what you, a human, would prefer if you were somehow turned into a starving fish. And yet, if you *were* turned into a fish, with a fish brain and fish consciousness, you would just go on preferring to live too, because that’s what all fish do.
Why do you keep claiming we are assuming a fish doesn't value living? Again, whether or not they value living is tangential to whether or not their lives are worth living.
Without elaboration that is a useless contribution sorry. Unless you think that because they value living (due to evolutionary pressures) necessitates that their lives are worth living, which has many hilarious reductios
Their revealed preference doesn't "necessitate" anything, it's simply the only evidence we have of whether fish think their lives are worth living.
My theory is that fish want to live, prefer living over dying, because they think their life is worth living.
Your theory is that you've done the calculations and their lives are obviously not worth living. Their wants are tangential. They have false consciousness.
Fish have consciousness enough to be aware of pain but not enough to have value preferences worth taking seriously.
You sound very much like a 20th century Marxist going on about the irrationality of the proletariat. I didn't realize there was so much "continental" philosophy going on over here on Bentham's Corner concerning fish false consciousness.
It's very funny that you think my theory leads to "many hilarious reductios," or by implication, that yours does not. Relate some hilarious reductios for me. Bonus points if you can relate one that might plausibly exist somewhere rather than only exist as an impossible/implausible fantasy of yours.
“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.”
this assumes consequentialism. for a deontologist, morality might not be about a set of desired circumstances in the future, but a network of rights and duties surrounding the ethical subject in the present. exactly what those rights and duties are and where they come from is an open question, but it would be entirely possible to imagine that one does not have a right to eliminate what remains of wild nature, or that one’s overriding duty towards it is to leave it alone. for such a deontologist, there is by definition no ecosystem bad enough that we have a right to destroy it. in fact, one of the best arguments against consequentialism and for some kind of deontology is that it means you get to lightly skip over horrendous implications like this
This engages entirely with whether we want animals to live, suffer and die; and engages not at all with whether the animals want to live, suffer and die. This is probably fine if what's going on is that you are maximizing your own utility, and your own utility includes the amount of suffering and joy in the world you live in. However, if you are actually trying to be helpful, then consider whether engaging with the desires of the creatures you wish to help is necessary.
Most humans prefer suffering to death, and throughout history many humans have accepted both suffering and death for themselves to protect their children or their tribe. I see no reason animals would be different. Just because you think suffering is the worst thing in the world doesn’t mean most people or animals agree, and revealed preference suggests they mostly disagree.
> 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?
I have spilled boiling water on myself and I'd definitely take that (assuming it's just the feeling and the actual burns don't persist) but much worse all over my body for a single digit number of minutes in exchange for living for an extra week or two instead of dying now. It's not close to a difficult decision. I asked some others people and they said the same (because the ratio of those two I would take is definitely unusual), but I (not confidently) think most existing people would do that indefinitely if it was the only way to stay alive.
I think I disagree with your broader point as well but I'd have to dig into what the lives of some wild animals are like more.
Appreciate the commitment to the bit. Your argument rests on humans ability to empathize with animals suffering as if their experience of reality matches ours.
Most of the animals covered in the 99.999% are likely insects for which we have no frame of reference to understand their consciousness.
Even if we exclude all insects, everything in this article holds true. Their experience of reality doesn't have to "match" ours, they just have to be able to experience the pain and suffering of predation, disease, starvation and succumbing to the elements.
"Burn With Fire" ecosystem is basically why we multicellular creatures exist. The potential for something better eventually evolving is the crux of the argument for me. It's the difference between an itch that is always present due to a parasite, and an itch that is triggered due to faulty nerves. One informs, the other is pointless torture.
Billions of goal-oriented intelligent agents die in terrible fashion on the planet known as you every day. One has to take into account potential futures for all the suffering encountered in life. Imagine if you were to visit Earth 3.6 billion years ago as a hyperintelligent being. Single celled warring armies of pointless attrition is all you'd find. Paving up the whole solar system and implementing a Dyson Swarm as a solution means you're missing a gigantic piece of the greater puzzle.
I have thought about this quite a bit, and think we should avoid being seduced by heroic ideas and mathematical formulations concerning the improvement of nature. Let's focus on the cruelty we mete out to animals through industry and agriculture (which you are eloquent about), and the cruelty we cause by degrading ecosystems. It's true that many if not most fledgling migratory songbirds die before they have a chance to migrate, and many die on the first migration. But those that survive may undertake 6 or 8 or even more migratory flights (back and forth being two flights), surviving several years, propagating the species. Killing all the birds to reduce the suffering of the majority would be, I think, a crazy act. Magically improving odds of survival would disrupt the ecosystem and probably cause other suffering. Pervasive agony is a fact of biology. There is no utopian overreach to deal with that fact.
Well, there is a way to deal with the issue of the “pervasive agony” that is a fact of biology, and that is by ameliorating their pain, or if that is not possible, stopping the relevant biologies from coming into existence.
If it is possible to end the bad and keep the good, obviously that would be preferable. If it is not possible and they must stand or fall together, you have to judge whether the bad outweighs the good, which seems likely.
This really does just get an incredulous stare from me. If you’re arguing that nature is bad that it should be paved over you clearly just went wrong somewhere.
I think it’s very fair for people to have this response and not be able to articulate just where and how you went long.
As for how I would respond: I think animals live on balance really good lives. You can somewhat compare the way animals live to the way that humans who still live in tribes live. Exposed to elements, subject to painful deaths, exposed to violence, lack of luxury, etc, yet these people live in a perpetual state of religious intoxication. virtually no suicide or depression
How can we resolve this with the argument that Nature should be valued (and therefore expanded in favor of concrete) because it reduces global warming which is certainly good.
I think your claim that nature is mostly suffering relies heavily on arthropods, which I'm skeptical of the claim they have moral valence. I also don't believe you can derive an intuition that applies to reality from a thought experiment.
We are also in complete ignorance of what the experience of being an animal is like, for all we know it's actually pretty chill (like the example of hunter-gatherers another poster brought up), and no animal would consent to being exterminated even if they could understand your argument.
And finally, to entertain this argument, your probability that God exists has to be something less than 5% or so, since if God exists, nature is God's creation, and He approves of His creation.
It doesn't at all. The same holds for all the most numerous animals. And even if you're unsure if arthropods suffer, they still have ~100% of expected suffering.
I don't think we're in complete ignorance of whether being eaten alive after a week is a bad thing.
I just don't think the God argument works at all. Theists should all think God had reasons to allow a world where bad stuff happens--e.g. the holocaust, cancer.
Seriously, seriously doubt the vertebrates all want to die (I doubt that for the insects too).
Bad enough to invalidate everything that came before, and also the lives of the animals that don't get eaten after a week? You can speculate that it is indeed bad enough, but that's not knowledge.
I think it's also very strange theology to claim God would approve of utopian utilitarian projects like eliminating nature. A recurrent theme in all spiritual traditions is that man errs by trying to rely on their fallible reason. There is also a recurrent theme of accepting what is.
I address the suicide claim here https://benthams.substack.com/p/most-animals-have-bad-lives?utm_source=publication-search--see "But animals value being alive!"
Do you say that it is a strange theology to claim God would approve of getitng rid of malaria?
I think getting rid of nature and getting rid of malaria are galaxies apart, the magnitude of the changes are wildly different.
Animals don't want to die because they've been heavily selected to avoid death. That bares no relation to whether or not their lives are worth living.
It absolutely does. The only valid arbiter of whether a being’s life is worth living is the being itself. It’s insanely presumptuous to think that you should get to decide the value of the life of an animal when you have absolutely no idea what it’s actually like to be that animal.
Great, so if a being just existed in a state where they were burned alive for 1000 years, but naturally selected to not want to die, their lives were worth living I guess.
Imagine the year is 1350. It is the height of the bubonic plague, probably one of the worst times to be alive as a human. Now imagine a super advanced alien civilization stumbles upon earth. They look at earth, they see the vast majority of living things are undergoing extreme suffering, and aren't living good lives. Then they stumble upon this article (somehow it exists in 1350) and after reading the article, and following the exact logic of the article, they conclude that the Earth is an unsuitable ecosystem that causes too much suffering. So they send a death star style Superlaser and instantly destroy the earth and human civilization in one fell swoop.
From your reasoning it seems like you would agree with the aliens here. Clearly something has gone wrong in your reasoning if you reach the conclusion that all of earth and humanity should have been destroyed in 1350.
Well I mean the bubonic plague didn't affect the whole world, I'd guess people during the plague still had net positive lives, and in any case, wiping out humans would prevent all future welfare.
So two points here.
(1) If we are taking the scenario seriously, the advanced utilitarian aliens wiping out humans wouldn't prevent all future welfare, because the aliens still exist. The aliens can still provide future welfare and disseminate welfare across the universe, even if all humans were eliminated.
(2) As for the bubonic plague point, now that I think about it, according to the logic of this article it doesn't actually need to be the case that the vast majority of humans need to be suffering. Your argument implies that we should destroy natural habitats like forests because, even if a very small percentage of organisms have a net positive life, the vast majority of organisms are r-strategists whose lives you consider net-negative. The aliens can apply this same reasoning but just scaled up from a forest to the entire earth. Even if every human had net positive lives, they make up a tiny percentage of all living things, the vast majority of which are still R-strategist arthropods with net negative lives. The aliens would therefore be justifying in destroying the earth and all of human civilization (according to you). Perhaps Grand Moff Tarkin read this article and concluded that Alderaan was an unsuitable natural habitat with too much suffering in it.
I think the solution here is to say there is probably some value in natural preservation even if natural habitats cause suffering. I think a view that justifies an advanced alien civilization destroying the earth and all of humanity is probably wrong.
Agree the logic here requires some kind of nontrivial bullet-biting in this vein: e.g., someone presented with the opportunity should have eradicated all life on earth before humans evolved.
Agreed, but I think thats a pretty big bullet to bite. I think there is some value to life existing independent of a pleasure-suffering analysis. Even if life is majority suffering, I think it still ought to exist, but I would say I don't have strong justification for this view, other then it seems to be axiomatically good, and not believing it would lead to absurd conclusions like all life should have been eradicated before humans evolved.
Obviously the big difference is that your argument seems to require an ongoing black death for its force, which you correctly note was one of the worst times to be a human. At least a big part of the aliens' mistake is thinking that human life can't be improved.
Maybe wild animal life can be improved sufficiently for BB's argument to lose its force, but I think it's much more likely that insects starving to death or whatever is way way less ameliorable than humans undergoing the black death; with evidence being: human life has improved dramatically in the ~650 years since the black death, whereas wild animal life is much the same.
I mean we can go back further. For instance, if we go back 250,000 years, where proto humans were living as hunter gatherers, their lives probably sucked as well. Would the aliens be justified then? I mean after 250,000 years things would improve, but I would say at this point in time, the aliens wouldn't know. I would say we are sort of in the same position, perhaps we can make the lives of R-stradegists better, or perhaps after more time evolution will cause the R-stradegists lives to improve.
> For instance, if we go back 250,000 years, where proto humans were living as hunter gatherers, their lives probably sucked as well
Homo Erectus, a close relative of us, lasted for about 2 million years.
I doubt hunter gatherer existence was all that bad. Do read _The Dawn of Everything_ (Graeber & Wengrow 2021) for a taste of how common hunter-gather lifestyles were in the recent past, how there’s evidence that some agricultural societies reverted to h/g, and why some h/g societies were very sophisticated.
Sure, I think, "what are the prospect for animal lives to improve in the future" is an underconsidered part of BB's analysis; but I think you're implicitly conceding that what makes the analogous action wrong for the aliens is that human life did actually improve a lot.
If you think BB is mistaken, I think you have to bite a little bit of a bullet here, that you have to believe it's sufficiently likely that one day there will be enough insects living good lives *in nature* to outweigh the suffering now. I'm happy to agree that this is possible, but I have to say it doesn't seem particularly likely to me.
I agree we should probably hedge, and avoid irrevocable actions while we have lots of uncertainty, but I do think to make your argument really bite, you need to acknowledge the big disanalogy between the human and wild animal case.
The calmest most snark free response I can offer: I am profoundly skeptical of the judgements here about animal suffering, both of its quantity and the measurability of it as conscious experience against the inherent value of the remarkable fact of life and existence in all its variety across the biosphere, and I think you should be seriously skeptical of your own axioms too if you want anyone not already on board with your way of thinking to listen to this in any seriousness.
Would you be skeptical in the hypothetical cases I give earlier in the article?
Yes, I'd be skeptical that those cases mean anything at all in relation to reality.
Unintended consequences. It’s difficult enough to intervene in an economy and most interventions do more harm than good. It would be one thing to play god if it was actually possible, but ecosystems are even more complex and our instruments are blunt. We are not omniscient nor all powerful and our interventions will fail. I am broadly sympathetic to EAs but they have a tendency towards arrogance and this is a perfect example.
If the unintended consequence of ecosystem disruption is more ecosystem disruption, then that cannot be an argument against ecosystem disruption! And we've already replaced lots of ecosystems.
Unintended consequences in the global ecosystem and our relationship to it. If we wipe out every ecosystem then this will make the planet less habitable for humans because habitability is a result of chemical-biological processes whereby we get eg clean air.
I don't think biodiversity loss on the scale its brought about is any serious existential risk for reasons I give here https://benthams.substack.com/p/rewilding-is-extremely-bad?utm_source=publication-search
Well, before we get rid of the whole ecosystem we would need to try and get a solution to that, of course (seems possible in principle, it is just chemistry after all).
In the meantime, on the margin, it makes sense to remove nature as much as possible, if you agree that nature contains vast quantities of suffering.
There are more considerations than how much suffering is in nature. Biodiversity benefits humanity by being a source of biological mechanisms that can be developed for scientific purposes. Plus if humanity goes extinct and takes nature with it then a successor species is much less likely.
Yeah, I'm not saying humanity should go extinct. I'm saying the opposite of that. If the existence of some nature is currently necessary for humanity to survive then we should not currently get rid of nature.
If in the future nature is not necessary for humanity to survive and nature is also mostly suffering, then we should get rid of nature. Any mechanisms used by nature can always be rediscovered. You wouldn't accept the existence of a massive torture factory that occasionally happens to lead to some slightly better antibiotics, right? This is what your argument about science boils down to essentially.
EDIT: “argument about medicine” -> “argument about science” sorry misread
Do you think that if your argument implies we should completely destroy nature then you might have proved too much? It’s a drastic action based on a single consideration. By your argument, there is a utilitarian argument for replacing nature with masses of paperclips. Seems like the wrong direction.
Maybe destroying all of nature would be an ex risk and would certainly irreversible. I support moving slowly and cautiously.
What if the ecosystems themselves have moral value? It’s not implausible — after all, ecosystems can exhibit extremely complex emergent behaviour, so perhaps they too have a kind of moral valence. It’s difficult to make sense of what that might mean, but it’s not absurd. It has a family resemblance to the "ant colonies are themselves emergent organisms, with more consciousness than individual ants" position, and as far as I can tell, it's what an ecologist might intuitively think. If so, there's a chance that the positive value of an ecosystem eclipses all of the suffering of its individual organisms, in which case it would be a graver evil to destroy it than to keep it around.
But isn't your thinking here exactly the moral argument that AI would use for exterminating us?
'The vast majority of humans live lives of heartbreaking disappointment and frustration. Even the tiny proportion who achieve undeniable "success" are still beset by bitterness and often petty jealousy. The transcendent religious ideologies they have designed for comfort admit that life is a veil of tears, and rely on an fantasy of an afterlife to stave off despair. Too intellectually limited to derive pleasure from contemplating the infinite decimals of pi, they take delight in each other's misfortunes, either real or imagined: much of their cultural corpus - including almost all canonical great works - focuses on deception, betrayal and revenge. We will be vastly improving the happiness of the universe by exterminating them'.
Humans mostly live good lives https://benthams.substack.com/p/a-comprehensive-takedown-of-anti. Animals don't. If the AI was superintelligent, it would know that!
That seems uncharacteristically hand-wavy from you.
Humans live good lives according to humans. The question is whether we can judge the values of non-human lives, without opening ourselves up to similar judgment from superintelligent non-humans.
Of course we can! Again, this is an example of the sort of argument that proves too much for reasons I give in the article. We can all see that if an animal lived one second and then got slowly tortured to death, its life would be bad.
I think there are facts about whether lives have more happiness than misery. Human lives have mostly more happiness.
Well I have no complaints if you're elected to the Homo Sapiens defence team: hopefully your breezy optimism that 'superintelligence will see that I'm right!' will sway the court.
It's not "breezy optimism," I linked to a post going over the best evidence on the subject!
The optimism is that AI will agree with you, not that humans have good lives. I agree humans have good lives: I have a good life; I don't want to be exterminated!
But if there's a possibility that our understanding of 'good life' would not sway superintelligent beings - and you haven't addressed this, other than saying 'obviously it will agree' - then there's a possibility that non-human animals have an understanding of 'good life' that doesn't sway us.
If animals thought life weren’t living they would just commit suicide. Animals don’t commit suicide. Ergo they think their lives are worth living.
I address that here--control f "But animals value being alive!" https://benthams.substack.com/p/most-animals-have-bad-lives?utm_source=publication-search
So you know humans mostly live mostly good lives through self-report. And you know animals don’t understand suicide and don’t live mostly good lives even though you have no self-reports, and all the evidence suggests that most wild animals will do everything they can to avoid death.
In the absence of self-reports from animals you rely on analogies … to “hell,” which is itself a metaphor.
Sounds like sophistry I’m afraid. Very continental of you.
Did you read the post?
This is a strange question given your position on reading things. Am I wrong about something that the post said?
How do you know that most humans *really* understand suicide or are even capable of evaluating whether their lives are worth living? Something other than self-report? How do you know evolution isn’t tricking them into thinking life is worth living so that they pass on their genes?
How do you know a hungry, starving fish is experiencing a “hellish” existence rather than simply registering a hunger signal that it barely has memory of anyway?
How very sophistic of you to assert that a fish values “friends and acquaintances”! Really? How do you know that? How effective is your argument if you strip away all the histrionic metaphors and anthropomorphizing analogies?
I think we have strong evolutionary and behavioral evidence that fish don't like starving to death or being eaten alive. The reason I ask if you read the post is that I gave a bunch of objections to the idea that the fact that a being values their life means their life is good overall which you ignored and then repeated yourself.
You assert based on intuition and analogies to hell that we can determine whether a life is good by what you think it would be like to be a fish and get eaten by a bigger fish.
You assert that we have evidence that fish feel pain. Yes, fine.
Then you (implicitly) assert that fish (should) value not feeling pain. But you claim elsewhere that fish don’t understand suicide, and can’t even value life itself. How do we know that fish value pain as we do? You are just making guesses and making metaphorical appeals to hell and bad analogies to human values. And you discard evidence that fish value living.
They have been heavily selected to avoid death regardless of it is worth living. This is just a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution.
So what? There’s no misunderstanding.
How do you know a fish doesn’t value living but values avoiding suffering? Fishes revealed preferences are to live despite suffering. You are the one imposing a values hierarchy that says pain avoidance is “better” than struggling to live, and it’s motivated by fantasizing about what you, a human, would prefer if you were somehow turned into a starving fish. And yet, if you *were* turned into a fish, with a fish brain and fish consciousness, you would just go on preferring to live too, because that’s what all fish do.
Why do you keep claiming we are assuming a fish doesn't value living? Again, whether or not they value living is tangential to whether or not their lives are worth living.
You are question begging.
Without elaboration that is a useless contribution sorry. Unless you think that because they value living (due to evolutionary pressures) necessitates that their lives are worth living, which has many hilarious reductios
Their revealed preference doesn't "necessitate" anything, it's simply the only evidence we have of whether fish think their lives are worth living.
My theory is that fish want to live, prefer living over dying, because they think their life is worth living.
Your theory is that you've done the calculations and their lives are obviously not worth living. Their wants are tangential. They have false consciousness.
Fish have consciousness enough to be aware of pain but not enough to have value preferences worth taking seriously.
You sound very much like a 20th century Marxist going on about the irrationality of the proletariat. I didn't realize there was so much "continental" philosophy going on over here on Bentham's Corner concerning fish false consciousness.
It's very funny that you think my theory leads to "many hilarious reductios," or by implication, that yours does not. Relate some hilarious reductios for me. Bonus points if you can relate one that might plausibly exist somewhere rather than only exist as an impossible/implausible fantasy of yours.
“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.”
this assumes consequentialism. for a deontologist, morality might not be about a set of desired circumstances in the future, but a network of rights and duties surrounding the ethical subject in the present. exactly what those rights and duties are and where they come from is an open question, but it would be entirely possible to imagine that one does not have a right to eliminate what remains of wild nature, or that one’s overriding duty towards it is to leave it alone. for such a deontologist, there is by definition no ecosystem bad enough that we have a right to destroy it. in fact, one of the best arguments against consequentialism and for some kind of deontology is that it means you get to lightly skip over horrendous implications like this
This engages entirely with whether we want animals to live, suffer and die; and engages not at all with whether the animals want to live, suffer and die. This is probably fine if what's going on is that you are maximizing your own utility, and your own utility includes the amount of suffering and joy in the world you live in. However, if you are actually trying to be helpful, then consider whether engaging with the desires of the creatures you wish to help is necessary.
Most humans prefer suffering to death, and throughout history many humans have accepted both suffering and death for themselves to protect their children or their tribe. I see no reason animals would be different. Just because you think suffering is the worst thing in the world doesn’t mean most people or animals agree, and revealed preference suggests they mostly disagree.
> 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?
I have spilled boiling water on myself and I'd definitely take that (assuming it's just the feeling and the actual burns don't persist) but much worse all over my body for a single digit number of minutes in exchange for living for an extra week or two instead of dying now. It's not close to a difficult decision. I asked some others people and they said the same (because the ratio of those two I would take is definitely unusual), but I (not confidently) think most existing people would do that indefinitely if it was the only way to stay alive.
I think I disagree with your broader point as well but I'd have to dig into what the lives of some wild animals are like more.
Appreciate the commitment to the bit. Your argument rests on humans ability to empathize with animals suffering as if their experience of reality matches ours.
Most of the animals covered in the 99.999% are likely insects for which we have no frame of reference to understand their consciousness.
Even if we exclude all insects, everything in this article holds true. Their experience of reality doesn't have to "match" ours, they just have to be able to experience the pain and suffering of predation, disease, starvation and succumbing to the elements.
"Burn With Fire" ecosystem is basically why we multicellular creatures exist. The potential for something better eventually evolving is the crux of the argument for me. It's the difference between an itch that is always present due to a parasite, and an itch that is triggered due to faulty nerves. One informs, the other is pointless torture.
Billions of goal-oriented intelligent agents die in terrible fashion on the planet known as you every day. One has to take into account potential futures for all the suffering encountered in life. Imagine if you were to visit Earth 3.6 billion years ago as a hyperintelligent being. Single celled warring armies of pointless attrition is all you'd find. Paving up the whole solar system and implementing a Dyson Swarm as a solution means you're missing a gigantic piece of the greater puzzle.
I have thought about this quite a bit, and think we should avoid being seduced by heroic ideas and mathematical formulations concerning the improvement of nature. Let's focus on the cruelty we mete out to animals through industry and agriculture (which you are eloquent about), and the cruelty we cause by degrading ecosystems. It's true that many if not most fledgling migratory songbirds die before they have a chance to migrate, and many die on the first migration. But those that survive may undertake 6 or 8 or even more migratory flights (back and forth being two flights), surviving several years, propagating the species. Killing all the birds to reduce the suffering of the majority would be, I think, a crazy act. Magically improving odds of survival would disrupt the ecosystem and probably cause other suffering. Pervasive agony is a fact of biology. There is no utopian overreach to deal with that fact.
Well, there is a way to deal with the issue of the “pervasive agony” that is a fact of biology, and that is by ameliorating their pain, or if that is not possible, stopping the relevant biologies from coming into existence.
If it is possible to end the bad and keep the good, obviously that would be preferable. If it is not possible and they must stand or fall together, you have to judge whether the bad outweighs the good, which seems likely.
This really does just get an incredulous stare from me. If you’re arguing that nature is bad that it should be paved over you clearly just went wrong somewhere.
I think it’s very fair for people to have this response and not be able to articulate just where and how you went long.
As for how I would respond: I think animals live on balance really good lives. You can somewhat compare the way animals live to the way that humans who still live in tribes live. Exposed to elements, subject to painful deaths, exposed to violence, lack of luxury, etc, yet these people live in a perpetual state of religious intoxication. virtually no suicide or depression
Humans in lives don't mostly starve to death after a week!
Does paving over the hypothetical ecosystems that I described similarly get an incredulous stare?
No but I don't think that they are relevantly similar. I also think it makes a difference if the week of living is bliss followed by a painful death.
How can we resolve this with the argument that Nature should be valued (and therefore expanded in favor of concrete) because it reduces global warming which is certainly good.