The mistake I think you consistently make here is overconfidence in your ability to evaluate the relative well being of organisms very different than yourself. This overconfidence leads you to hastily conclude that humans are doing good by preventing the lives of nearly all future nonhuman animals.
Advocating for the widespread annihilation of irreplaceable living things we poorly understand on very limited evidence does not seem wise.
But the overconfidence cuts both ways. I might be wrong, but so might the rewilders, in which case they are causing hideous suffering to countless trillions of beings.
But it does not cut both ways equally, at least not without forced abstraction, which I think you argue reasonably well against.
Your position also commits a kind of base rate neglect, given that critters of our level of complexity are afforded on a vast "food chain" (more of a crazy ass webs) that is not currently replaceable with the provably unsuffering. Part of the rewilding movement is based on the idea of hedging against possible catastrophic cascades (which include death by scarcity rather than sustainable death by consumption).
It is clear to no one what constitutes "action v inaction" in any meaningful way, at this level of complexity, that would require rewilding to take on some special burden of proof. Unless they are putting beehives in your schoolhouses. Then you might get a bee in your bonnet.
I’ve said before: the destruction of all life on Earth is the only rational response to Bentham’s argument. Kill everything and no more suffering.
By the way, it’s not clear that Bentham should oppose Trump’s cuts to aid to Africa. People eat meat and sometimes even step on insects. Every additional African alive might or might not suffer in life, but such African probably causes untold insect suffering. Some might even eat shrimp!
It's actually worse than that. We currently have a nearly empty universe given the current Drake equation updates. Bentham would preemptively try to erase the possibility of less noetic life forms taking hold on other planets. Trillions of planets would need to be sterilized for their capacity for future suffering.
The argument depends on overconfidence, of whatever arbitrary flavor. Doing math with "suffering" strikes my ear as consequentialist.
To be clear, I support you sharing your opinions freely and widely. I also like your kind disposition, which I failed to reflect in tone. It seems to me, however, that you are not as careful as you are kind.
Suppose there was a way to prevent lots of kittens from suffering intensely for a dollar. Would it be objectionably consequentialist to suggest that was a good use of money because it prevented lots of suffering at low cost?
Consequentialist is a word with a meaning. It means that consequences are the only things that count for or against actions. What I've said here doesn't commit one to consequentialism.
It would not be "objectionably consequentialist," or objectionably anything else. Preventing suffering and taking into account opportunity costs are both pragmatic motivations. That there are elements of proportionality does not imply that the use of mathematical formalism is appropriate, or that the use of mathematical formalism in attempt to capture both suffering and opportunity in a single framework does not itself have opportunity costs. There is no guarantee that the best estimation of moral actions, prescriptions or proscriptions fit well into human working memory, excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides. Perhaps carrying one's dissonance is itself and act of character, rather than burning it all, overfitting to currently available models and methods.
If rewilding is bad, then does it follow that "de-wilding," i.e. deliberately destroying natural environments to decrease wild animal populations, is good? Is it a moral commandment to destroy as much nature as is possible less whatever is necessary to sustain humanity's existence? If we ever reach a point where we can survive without relying on the biosphere, should we destroy it all?
It may not follow as a matter of logic, but it almost does.
The only impediment seem to be potential deontological prohibitions against destroying nature, as you remarked yourself. So I do think anyone who is unsympathetic to deontology and accepts your argument against rewilding is under enormous pressure to promote dewilding as well.
On the other hand, if one accepts deontological prohibitions against destroying nature, I think it's not a long shot to also accept deontological obligations towards restoring nature. (Certainly the latter do not follow necessarily, but they are clearly related.)
I suspect that Bentham's Bulldog recognizes that there is some small chance that he is wrong about this- in this situation, delaying re-wilding until the mistake is noticed and fixed is not symmetrical to attempting to un-dewild after noticing that de-wilding was a mistake.
It comes down to whether animals have indexical values like humans, or just the cumulative weight of suffering / joy.
Imagine three scenarios:
North Carolina is allowed to continue unmolested to the end of the scenario
North Carolina is instantly and painlessly depopulated, then re-populated by new Yorkers after 100 years
North Carolinal is instantly painlessly depopulated, then re-populated by New Yorkers after 200 years.
Human indexicality is why our preference for scenario 1 over scenario 2 is much stronger than our preference for scenario 2 over scenario 3, even though both are seperated by the same amount of (joy - suffering) * years. We can recognize that the North Carolinians in scenario 2 and 3 are not made whole.
If animals have indexical values, and in particular if a large fraction of the net positive value of their lives is indexical (potentially indexical over their descendants, like humans), then the damage from "helping" north carolina by depopulating it is not repairable (say, if the aliens who did this realized that humans are actually net positive.)
However, if aliens are delayed 100 years in their helpful decision to re-populate north carolina (perhaps by a faulty argument against re-wilding), we don't care as much- there is a difference in joy years, but no indexical loss
I intended to ask as much, but you did it well enough that I no longer feel the need to.
However, why not end humans while doing so? If suffering surpasses pleasure, then the best course of action might be to destroy as much as the planet as possible with the aid of hydraulic bombs and such, regardless of human life loss which would be a necessary cost for the suffer prevented.
Based on the calculations in this article, existence of life itself is a calamity.
How do humans reduce wild animal suffering? Everyday I see examples of overfishing, overhunting, and habitat destruction far more than I see people doing something to stop it.
The bombs wouldn't be enough - keep in mind that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had roughly the energy of a 100 million megaton bomb, and life as a whole made it through just fine. I suppose you could try to redirect a much larger asteroid onto a collision course using near-future technology, but there's still the risk that some lifeforms will survive, repopulate the globe, and go on to suffer for billions of years.
Whether you want utopia or complete annihilation, you have to wait until the appropriate technology becomes available.
You’re making huge assumptions about the experience of these animals/insects. These are creatures with radically different life experiences. You have no idea whether a fly’s life (or whatever) is worth living. It seems just as likely to me you are going to cause a massive loss of possible joy (or whatever it is insects and animals feel when they’re feeling good) by *not* rewilding.
In the article you link justifying why you think most animals have bad lives, you say that you think a painful death outweighs a short life. But how do you know that? Your whole argument rests on this, but it’s not at all clear to me. In fact, my intuition is strongly in the other direction-I think even a brief life could be worth suffering 10 minutes of pain before death.
You also are making a large assumption that most animals deaths are “painful.” Probably there’s some pain involved, but it’s also possible lots of deaths from starvation or cold are relatively devoid of pain and are more akin to falling into a coma. You assume predation is awful, and no doubt it often is, but it also is often over quickly. And if you’ve ever been in a life threatening/dangerous situation you also know that adrenaline + etc. often mean you’re not actually “suffering” in the moment. So it seems totally plausible to me that during a chase or whatever the predated animal may not be “suffering” at all.
Woah, slow down there. If you’re going to be building a conclusion this extreme, you better be sure your foundation is rock-solid. We don’t even know if insects are sentient, let alone what it’s like to be one. I mean, if you’ve evolved to produce hundreds of offspring and die after two weeks, there’s probably no evolutionary advantage in evolving the complex systems needed to experience much of anything.
Hey, super interesting article! Was just wondering why you published an article about "rewilding" now of all times, a week before the biggest Lincoln-Douglas Debate tournament on the rewilding topic where several of your colleagues are coaching serious competitors? I also found it interesting how you argued that "Now, the only serious argument for rewilding ... is that doing so can reduce existential threats" which doesn't seem to at all be an argument grounded in current literature but rather a causal chain invented by high school debates. It's entirely possible I'm mistaken here so please let me know if possible which article refers to this in the rewilding literature.
There is a guy in this comment section saying BB is an idiot for not understanding that biodiversity decline will threaten human survival and another guy saying that he appreciates the evidence on biod being a small existential threat because that was his objection to the post. As far as we know neither are debaters yet they were both able to conceive of this argument.
It seems like if high schoolers come up with an argument when they apply longtermism to their topic, actual longtermists will at least consider similar arguments when they look at the same topic.
The reason there are no articles in the rewilding literature that directly make this argument is because rewilding literature is not written from a longtermist point of view.
There are not longtermist articles advocating for rewilding precisely because when EA funded people to consider whether there was a high expected value for biodiversity interventions, they concluded it was not an existential risk.
I've published such an article before https://benthams.substack.com/p/there-should-be-less-nature?utm_source=publication-search as well as discussed very similar themes. I don't have colleagues, and I certainly don't have several colleagues coaching LD competitors. The objection about ex-risk reduction was raised in the comments, repeated by several people here, and is one of the most obvious ones to an EA, because EAs tend to prioritize existential threat reduction.
I don't keep apprised of the LD tournament schedule. I don't think it's that surprising that the article would be published around the time of some tournament as there are a lot of tournaments. And if I was producing propagandistic drivel to benefit some specific LD team I would:
1) Include lots of overconfident extinction scenarios, as is fashionable in debate.
2) Release it right before the tournament so people don't have weeks to prepare.
3) Not make arguments that are broadly continuous with things I've said before and clearly believe.
Bentham, I was joking about the soil nematodes. Fortunately I think your point stands without them
I think this is really interesting and could get the ball rolling on meaningful "reduce wild animal suffering" interventions without the headache of unintended consequences on ecosystems.
"A few fleeting moments of joy aren’t enough to compensate for the intense suffering at their end of life."
This strikes me as not a particularly intuitive or obvious statement, and further it is a judgment which a lot of your argument hinges on (it seems to me). We don't (always) say this about other things in life, I think: say I fall deeply in love and have a few months of happiness with him, and then he dies, so I spend the rest of my long life grief-stricken. Do I think the love was not worth it to me? Or a parent who has a child who dies in the NICU--a few moments of joy, followed by a lifetime of mourning. Would the parent think the child's life was not worth it *to the parent*? And maybe your answer is: yes! But at the very least I think this is controversial and (in my experience) not the assessment people who actually live circumstances like this actually come to very often.
You confidently dismiss it, but based on your writings about FDT, you have failed to consider a key implication of subjunctive dependence and, as a result, are fundamentally mistaken about FDT.
"____is extremely immoral—worse than almost any other thing we do" I feel like this is the introduction to a large number of your articles and I'm getting action paralysis. Like, I need a comparison chart of all the immoral--worse than almost anything actives we routinely do. Is rewilding a factory farm net negative!?
I don't actually think I really do this very much and when I do, I'm talking in different sense/saying things that are consistent. The things I've described this way are:
Donating to effective charities. This is among the most important things for an individual to do, but that's distinct from macro societal-wide priorities.
Factory farming. I now normally say stuff like "this is worse than all human suffering," because I think it's probably dominated by wild animal suffering stuff.
Wild animal suffering stuff: this is my best guest for the most important thing we're doing today.
Ex risks stuff: this is most important *in expectation*. Probably it has no effect, so it's probably not the most important, but it could have such enormous impact that it's best in expectation.
Not sure about rewilding a factory farm. Might depend on what kind.
You don't need to feel action paralysis or to see charts, you can just simply follow your gut / heart / promptings from God on how best to make the world a better place. It may not actually be about reducing suffering. It could be coaching a children's soccer league, which actually might bring more suffering into the world bc of the exercise and time away from screens and game losses outweighing wins potential. But you'd be doing something meaningful for people, who are much more important than bugs.
Excellent, I appreciate the evidence on biodiversity loss being low risk, that was my objection to previous articles you wrote about this. I’ll have to check out Halstead
The mistake I think you consistently make here is overconfidence in your ability to evaluate the relative well being of organisms very different than yourself. This overconfidence leads you to hastily conclude that humans are doing good by preventing the lives of nearly all future nonhuman animals.
Advocating for the widespread annihilation of irreplaceable living things we poorly understand on very limited evidence does not seem wise.
But the overconfidence cuts both ways. I might be wrong, but so might the rewilders, in which case they are causing hideous suffering to countless trillions of beings.
But it does not cut both ways equally, at least not without forced abstraction, which I think you argue reasonably well against.
Your position also commits a kind of base rate neglect, given that critters of our level of complexity are afforded on a vast "food chain" (more of a crazy ass webs) that is not currently replaceable with the provably unsuffering. Part of the rewilding movement is based on the idea of hedging against possible catastrophic cascades (which include death by scarcity rather than sustainable death by consumption).
It is clear to no one what constitutes "action v inaction" in any meaningful way, at this level of complexity, that would require rewilding to take on some special burden of proof. Unless they are putting beehives in your schoolhouses. Then you might get a bee in your bonnet.
I’ve said before: the destruction of all life on Earth is the only rational response to Bentham’s argument. Kill everything and no more suffering.
By the way, it’s not clear that Bentham should oppose Trump’s cuts to aid to Africa. People eat meat and sometimes even step on insects. Every additional African alive might or might not suffer in life, but such African probably causes untold insect suffering. Some might even eat shrimp!
It's actually worse than that. We currently have a nearly empty universe given the current Drake equation updates. Bentham would preemptively try to erase the possibility of less noetic life forms taking hold on other planets. Trillions of planets would need to be sterilized for their capacity for future suffering.
Obviously we should build Berserkers and send them to wipe out all life. It’s the only moral choice.
Thank you for bringing critical attention to how increasingly absurd it is to be an overconfident consequentialist.
Consequentialism in principle is coherent. Consequentialism in common practice is mathematical laundering of all things poorly understood.
The argument doesn’t depend on consequentialism
The argument depends on overconfidence, of whatever arbitrary flavor. Doing math with "suffering" strikes my ear as consequentialist.
To be clear, I support you sharing your opinions freely and widely. I also like your kind disposition, which I failed to reflect in tone. It seems to me, however, that you are not as careful as you are kind.
Suppose there was a way to prevent lots of kittens from suffering intensely for a dollar. Would it be objectionably consequentialist to suggest that was a good use of money because it prevented lots of suffering at low cost?
Consequentialist is a word with a meaning. It means that consequences are the only things that count for or against actions. What I've said here doesn't commit one to consequentialism.
It would not be "objectionably consequentialist," or objectionably anything else. Preventing suffering and taking into account opportunity costs are both pragmatic motivations. That there are elements of proportionality does not imply that the use of mathematical formalism is appropriate, or that the use of mathematical formalism in attempt to capture both suffering and opportunity in a single framework does not itself have opportunity costs. There is no guarantee that the best estimation of moral actions, prescriptions or proscriptions fit well into human working memory, excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides. Perhaps carrying one's dissonance is itself and act of character, rather than burning it all, overfitting to currently available models and methods.
If rewilding is bad, then does it follow that "de-wilding," i.e. deliberately destroying natural environments to decrease wild animal populations, is good? Is it a moral commandment to destroy as much nature as is possible less whatever is necessary to sustain humanity's existence? If we ever reach a point where we can survive without relying on the biosphere, should we destroy it all?
It doesn't follow as a matter of logic, but yes I support dewilding.
It may not follow as a matter of logic, but it almost does.
The only impediment seem to be potential deontological prohibitions against destroying nature, as you remarked yourself. So I do think anyone who is unsympathetic to deontology and accepts your argument against rewilding is under enormous pressure to promote dewilding as well.
On the other hand, if one accepts deontological prohibitions against destroying nature, I think it's not a long shot to also accept deontological obligations towards restoring nature. (Certainly the latter do not follow necessarily, but they are clearly related.)
Agree
I suspect that Bentham's Bulldog recognizes that there is some small chance that he is wrong about this- in this situation, delaying re-wilding until the mistake is noticed and fixed is not symmetrical to attempting to un-dewild after noticing that de-wilding was a mistake.
Could you elaborate a bit? I'm genuinely unsure how to read your hypothetical.
It comes down to whether animals have indexical values like humans, or just the cumulative weight of suffering / joy.
Imagine three scenarios:
North Carolina is allowed to continue unmolested to the end of the scenario
North Carolina is instantly and painlessly depopulated, then re-populated by new Yorkers after 100 years
North Carolinal is instantly painlessly depopulated, then re-populated by New Yorkers after 200 years.
Human indexicality is why our preference for scenario 1 over scenario 2 is much stronger than our preference for scenario 2 over scenario 3, even though both are seperated by the same amount of (joy - suffering) * years. We can recognize that the North Carolinians in scenario 2 and 3 are not made whole.
If animals have indexical values, and in particular if a large fraction of the net positive value of their lives is indexical (potentially indexical over their descendants, like humans), then the damage from "helping" north carolina by depopulating it is not repairable (say, if the aliens who did this realized that humans are actually net positive.)
However, if aliens are delayed 100 years in their helpful decision to re-populate north carolina (perhaps by a faulty argument against re-wilding), we don't care as much- there is a difference in joy years, but no indexical loss
Thanks, this is a good point. I think I broadly agree. (Personally, it strikes me as though animals probably do have indexical values.)
Show me on the doll, where the wild animal hurt you.
I intended to ask as much, but you did it well enough that I no longer feel the need to.
However, why not end humans while doing so? If suffering surpasses pleasure, then the best course of action might be to destroy as much as the planet as possible with the aid of hydraulic bombs and such, regardless of human life loss which would be a necessary cost for the suffer prevented.
Based on the calculations in this article, existence of life itself is a calamity.
Humans reduce wild animal suffering. Humans mostly have good lives. And I think the far future could be enormously amazingly good
How do humans reduce wild animal suffering? Everyday I see examples of overfishing, overhunting, and habitat destruction far more than I see people doing something to stop it.
You seem to make the illogical assumption that humans are not animals and a part of nature themselves.
The bombs wouldn't be enough - keep in mind that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had roughly the energy of a 100 million megaton bomb, and life as a whole made it through just fine. I suppose you could try to redirect a much larger asteroid onto a collision course using near-future technology, but there's still the risk that some lifeforms will survive, repopulate the globe, and go on to suffer for billions of years.
Whether you want utopia or complete annihilation, you have to wait until the appropriate technology becomes available.
You would need an asteroid roughly 500 miles across to sterilize the Earth. Perhaps that is what Bentham's Bulldog is hoping for.
You’re making huge assumptions about the experience of these animals/insects. These are creatures with radically different life experiences. You have no idea whether a fly’s life (or whatever) is worth living. It seems just as likely to me you are going to cause a massive loss of possible joy (or whatever it is insects and animals feel when they’re feeling good) by *not* rewilding.
In the article you link justifying why you think most animals have bad lives, you say that you think a painful death outweighs a short life. But how do you know that? Your whole argument rests on this, but it’s not at all clear to me. In fact, my intuition is strongly in the other direction-I think even a brief life could be worth suffering 10 minutes of pain before death.
You also are making a large assumption that most animals deaths are “painful.” Probably there’s some pain involved, but it’s also possible lots of deaths from starvation or cold are relatively devoid of pain and are more akin to falling into a coma. You assume predation is awful, and no doubt it often is, but it also is often over quickly. And if you’ve ever been in a life threatening/dangerous situation you also know that adrenaline + etc. often mean you’re not actually “suffering” in the moment. So it seems totally plausible to me that during a chase or whatever the predated animal may not be “suffering” at all.
The annoying thing about philosophy is that I can find a conclusion deeply intuitively objectionable and still have to admit that it makes sense.
Woah, slow down there. If you’re going to be building a conclusion this extreme, you better be sure your foundation is rock-solid. We don’t even know if insects are sentient, let alone what it’s like to be one. I mean, if you’ve evolved to produce hundreds of offspring and die after two weeks, there’s probably no evolutionary advantage in evolving the complex systems needed to experience much of anything.
Hey, super interesting article! Was just wondering why you published an article about "rewilding" now of all times, a week before the biggest Lincoln-Douglas Debate tournament on the rewilding topic where several of your colleagues are coaching serious competitors? I also found it interesting how you argued that "Now, the only serious argument for rewilding ... is that doing so can reduce existential threats" which doesn't seem to at all be an argument grounded in current literature but rather a causal chain invented by high school debates. It's entirely possible I'm mistaken here so please let me know if possible which article refers to this in the rewilding literature.
There is a guy in this comment section saying BB is an idiot for not understanding that biodiversity decline will threaten human survival and another guy saying that he appreciates the evidence on biod being a small existential threat because that was his objection to the post. As far as we know neither are debaters yet they were both able to conceive of this argument.
It seems like if high schoolers come up with an argument when they apply longtermism to their topic, actual longtermists will at least consider similar arguments when they look at the same topic.
The reason there are no articles in the rewilding literature that directly make this argument is because rewilding literature is not written from a longtermist point of view.
There are not longtermist articles advocating for rewilding precisely because when EA funded people to consider whether there was a high expected value for biodiversity interventions, they concluded it was not an existential risk.
I've published such an article before https://benthams.substack.com/p/there-should-be-less-nature?utm_source=publication-search as well as discussed very similar themes. I don't have colleagues, and I certainly don't have several colleagues coaching LD competitors. The objection about ex-risk reduction was raised in the comments, repeated by several people here, and is one of the most obvious ones to an EA, because EAs tend to prioritize existential threat reduction.
I don't keep apprised of the LD tournament schedule. I don't think it's that surprising that the article would be published around the time of some tournament as there are a lot of tournaments. And if I was producing propagandistic drivel to benefit some specific LD team I would:
1) Include lots of overconfident extinction scenarios, as is fashionable in debate.
2) Release it right before the tournament so people don't have weeks to prepare.
3) Not make arguments that are broadly continuous with things I've said before and clearly believe.
Glad you found the article interesting!
Go touch grass and read some Wageningen papers on why biodiversity is actually essential for human survival.
Interesting read though, and well-argued.
Bentham, I was joking about the soil nematodes. Fortunately I think your point stands without them
I think this is really interesting and could get the ball rolling on meaningful "reduce wild animal suffering" interventions without the headache of unintended consequences on ecosystems.
"A few fleeting moments of joy aren’t enough to compensate for the intense suffering at their end of life."
This strikes me as not a particularly intuitive or obvious statement, and further it is a judgment which a lot of your argument hinges on (it seems to me). We don't (always) say this about other things in life, I think: say I fall deeply in love and have a few months of happiness with him, and then he dies, so I spend the rest of my long life grief-stricken. Do I think the love was not worth it to me? Or a parent who has a child who dies in the NICU--a few moments of joy, followed by a lifetime of mourning. Would the parent think the child's life was not worth it *to the parent*? And maybe your answer is: yes! But at the very least I think this is controversial and (in my experience) not the assessment people who actually live circumstances like this actually come to very often.
"As Bostrom has argued, we might currently be in a simulation. If we are, then our actions potentially are mirrored across all simulated worlds."
Arguments like this are why I find Functional Decision Theory so important!
I fully agree with your message here btw.
It's important if true. The only problem is that it's false.
You confidently dismiss it, but based on your writings about FDT, you have failed to consider a key implication of subjunctive dependence and, as a result, are fundamentally mistaken about FDT.
"____is extremely immoral—worse than almost any other thing we do" I feel like this is the introduction to a large number of your articles and I'm getting action paralysis. Like, I need a comparison chart of all the immoral--worse than almost anything actives we routinely do. Is rewilding a factory farm net negative!?
I don't actually think I really do this very much and when I do, I'm talking in different sense/saying things that are consistent. The things I've described this way are:
Donating to effective charities. This is among the most important things for an individual to do, but that's distinct from macro societal-wide priorities.
Factory farming. I now normally say stuff like "this is worse than all human suffering," because I think it's probably dominated by wild animal suffering stuff.
Wild animal suffering stuff: this is my best guest for the most important thing we're doing today.
Ex risks stuff: this is most important *in expectation*. Probably it has no effect, so it's probably not the most important, but it could have such enormous impact that it's best in expectation.
Not sure about rewilding a factory farm. Might depend on what kind.
You don't need to feel action paralysis or to see charts, you can just simply follow your gut / heart / promptings from God on how best to make the world a better place. It may not actually be about reducing suffering. It could be coaching a children's soccer league, which actually might bring more suffering into the world bc of the exercise and time away from screens and game losses outweighing wins potential. But you'd be doing something meaningful for people, who are much more important than bugs.
Excellent, I appreciate the evidence on biodiversity loss being low risk, that was my objection to previous articles you wrote about this. I’ll have to check out Halstead
This would be hilarious if it wasn't so long
Ok you’ve lost me 😂
“If you lived just a week, and then starved to death or got eaten alive, your life wouldn’t have been worth living.”
Is this demonstrably true?