The World Can't Be Weird Fallacy

More in the anti-Lyman saga

One of Lyman Stone’s arguments against taking seriously the welfare of invertebrates like shrimp and insects is that doing so has lots of weird ethical implications. If insects and shrimp matter so much, then it may be that the primary impacts of our actions are on insects. This might randomly imply that things we think of as good are bad if they have deleterious effects on insects. In other words, it would imply all sorts of weird ethical conclusions that diverge from commonsense.

I think this is a supremely terrible argument for reasons that are articulated extremely well by friend of the blog

Silas Abrahamsen

. The world might turn out to be morally weird—certainly almost everything else about the world has turned out strange upon thorough investigation. Quantum mechanics, the deepest layer of reality, is about as weird as anything could be. Over and over again we’ve discovered that the world is much stranger than we think.

Lyman gets ethical reasoning exactly and totally backwards. You shouldn’t start out certain that some action is right, and then conclude that its effects must not be so bad. Instead, you should first consider the effects it likely has and whether they’re good or bad. You should then use that to determine if the action is right. Silas nails it when he says:

Either way, the only way we can come to a moral judgement about some situation is assuming that the non-moral facts are a certain way (e.g. that shrimp aren’t conscious). If it then turns out upon further empirical investigation that the facts are probably different than first assumed (e.g. that shrimp are conscious), then we should no longer have any confidence in our previous judgement—and we definitely shouldn’t throw out the empirical evidence or moral principles in order to preserve the moral judgements. After all, we already knew that in the possible world where, say, shrimp are conscious and suffer 1/5 as much as humans, and where eating shrimp causes them harm, eating shrimp would be wrong. Merely finding out that that world is the actual world should in no way change our attitude towards this world. So it’s just completely inane to point to the surface level appearance of goodness of social progress, and inferring all sorts of contentious conclusions about the moral worth of certain creatures, as the valence of social progress is epistemically downstream of the facts about the moral worth of creatures.

Let’s term this error in reasoning the “world can’t be weird fallacy.” One commits this fallacy when they assume the world has some feature that we ordinarily assume that it does, without investigating whether it’s other than we suspect. Then, they use the assumption that the world is as we expect to conclude that it can’t have some other feature.

For example, for most of history people have assumed that the world is not full of atoms that are mostly empty space. One would commit this fallacy if they started with this assumption without investigating whether atoms really are full of empty space, and then used it to definitively conclude that atoms couldn’t have empty space. Or to give another example, one might do this by assuming that meat-eating is fine—without looking at its impacts on animals—and then use this to infer that animal suffering must not be salient.

Or, to give a final example, one would commit the fallacy if they started with the assumption that Napoleon was short without carefully analyzing his height. Then, after learning his height, they insisted he must be short and the height records were falsified because everyone knows Napoleon is short!

I think this error is widespread. People hear ethical arguments that sound plausible on their face. But then they think to themselves “wait, if this is right, the world is vey different from how I think.” If Longtermism is right, our actions that affect the present and near future are much less important than our actions that affect the far future. If the claims of vegans are right, factory farming is an unprecedented abomination. If wild animal suffering matters, the world is a bleak and hellish place. They thus assume the conclusions can’t be right because they’d imply the world is different from what they thought.

But as I said before this is an error. You should figure out the features of the world before deciding how the world is, not the other way around. The fact that the world has repeatedly turned out to be much stranger than we thought should lead us to abandon the widespread a priori refusal to recognize that the world is very different from how we thought.