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Sol Hando's avatar

“If you think there’s a 20% chance that they feel intense pain and that the 19% estimate is too much by a factor of 10, a dollar given to the shrimp welfare project still averts as much agony as giving painless deaths to 76 humans.”

I think this is the most powerful critique of the whole argument for shrimp welfare. Why should I trade welfare that could be going to certainly effective methods of reducing pain in creatures that can certainly experience pain for something so (for lack of a better word) hypothetical?

If someone came up to me asking to donate to a charity that helps starving people across the world and said; “Your $10 donation will help a thousand people! But if you don’t believe us and think we’re overestimating that number, it’ll still help a hundred people, and that’s a lot!” I’d laugh in their faces. Not being able to remotely quantify the benefit, and basing the justification upon a thought experiment makes the whole argument silly in my view.

This critique isn’t a refusal to quantify either. It’s a refusal to acknowledge incredibly imprecise quantification that readily admits it can be off be an order (or orders) of magnitude. I’m not against charity of animals, but the farther we get from the concrete experience of the average person (Family —> Culture —> Race —> All Humanity —> Cute Mammals —> All Mammals —> Vertebrates —> All Animals —> Bacteria?) the less the argument holds any actual meaning as far as human sympathy goes.

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I.M.J. McInnis's avatar

Your writing in the SWP sequence has convinced me to roughly double the SWP allocation to around 1/6 of my annual donation. I have two problems, though.

One is direct. The numbers look *really perverse* if you run them in the other direction. To wit: it's morally good to make one human's death agonizing if you can thereby stop a small trashbag of shrimp being dumped onto ice. Even if it's two or three humans is probably still net good. I find that really hard to swallow! Even if "a small trashbag" is replaced with "a shipping container," boy would I not feel justified murdering someone to stop them from brutalizing all those shrimp. You have to get up to lots and lots of shrimp before I can even entertain this. (A similar objection applies to other measures of animal-suffering-moral-worth, but those numbers feel closer to intuitively workable.)

The second is: in general, if invertebrates have nontrivial moral worth, and if you aren't allergic to population ethics, then it is incredibly morally impactful to increase or decrease the number of invertebrates that will live. Good if invertebrate lives are mostly good, bad if they're mostly bad.

If that's so---if the planet is crawling with a quintillion bundles of mute agony, then this world is a horrid carnival, a concentrated universe of *pain*, the worst thing in the galaxy, a torture chamber, and the kindest thing you could do would be: destroy it. The best thing we've done so far as humans is decimate the biosphere, and the best thing we could do---before we jet off to another planet, or before we wink off ourselves---would be to blow the whole thing up, to prohibit life from miserably teeming ever again.

And I don't buy this! I think the existence of the world is good. I think the existence of the natural world is good. I think blowing up the planet---even if we learned "yep, no more progress, humans go extinct soon but the biosphere rolls on in its way until the sun goes boom, just life as normal for another billion years"---I still think blowing up the planet is, to put it lightly, supervillain shit. But under the view "invertebrate life matters and is mostly bad," it would be the only really big good thing ever done.

This is something I wonder about with Brian Tomasik, in particular. For him, is nature a horrid mistake? Must if be abolished? And if we'll never have the power to David-Pearce-out everything that lives, should we pull the plug?

This is implausible to me. I can *slightly* more believe the view "oh bug lives are good, so we should step back as humans to let more bugs live"----but only slightly. And it seems to me that any view saying "bugs (i got tired at the end of typing 'invertebrates,' so pretend they're synonyms) are significant moral patients, plus population ethics is not forbidden" goes one way or another. (Forbidding population ethics still makes things weird.)

What's the solution? Is there none? Is the secret slogan of Utilitarianism, "abolish nature by any means necessary"?

I don't think so! Even if there's a real "nature bad" view among the tescreal-y (yes i know i know) parts of the blog world, the significant attention given to factory farming (rather than the way more tractable "pave over the amazon" makes me think that isn't the mainstream "most important thing."

Mostly I'm confused. What do you believe? What do y'all believe? Have I erred in these inferences?

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