Thank you for this... I read enough of your & Glenn’s writing that this starts to feel like common sense to me and I get annoyed at how often you’re pushing it. And then I went to this nominally ethics-focused event recently and everyone completely bristled at any mention I made of wild animal suffering or veganism. Apparently a lot more convincing work to do than I realized, glad you’re doing it!
Little makes me so happy knowing that the AGI hype is a bubble that will lead to little of note.
The natural world naturally has things eating and hurting each other. I can only imagine what kind of absurd cruelties might result from attempting to abolish that. Eradicating all predators to save the prey. This is why freakish moral perfectionists should not be in charge of things.
This is rather like Fourier's fantasy of turning the oceans into lemonade, maybe wild animal suffering as a research area is worth some money, but surely it's a very tiny amount because the odds of success are so low.
My big takeaway from contemplating wild animal suffering in the past is that the ick many liberals have for hunting is rather nonsensical: I have a feeling the death the hunter gives to the animal has less pain in it than the one nature would have given it.
Doesn't this imply life on Earth is certainly net-negative? For the vast majority of animals there's much more pain than happiness, and this state of affairs has been going on for billions of years. So like if a superintelligent AI ended all life tomorrow, it would be a mercy compared to letting the astronomical suffering continue. On this view minimizing x-risk is itself an s-risk.
Serious question: if you could press a button permanently killing all life on Earth, would you do it? Do you think there's at least a significant chance you should? (If you feel self-interest might be biasing you, assume it kills all life except you and enough people to keep you company).
I think he’s an “infinite potential future” believer, firstly, so from that killing all life would be bad. But even if he wasn’t he’s also a theist, and believes in an infinite future of goodness beyond this life. If animals are also conscious, they should be included in that future. Therefore, wiping out all animals would be bad. (I think these are bad arguments fwiw, and he can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is it.
> When you have a really bad headache, that’s not bad because you can do calculus. It’s bad because it hurts!
Pain sucks, but usually the body deals with that. What makes things bad for minds that can do calculus is the emotional anguish, the despair due to loss of control, the anxiety from loss of effective agency (not being able to work with a headache, performance anxiety, fear of getting reprimanded and/or fired), and the eventual depression.
A few years ago I started to have back pain, and the pain part is usually meh, but the fear that it could get worse is ... worse.
So, of course, the tragedy is that we don't know what others are going through, hence it's impossible to really compare value. So we turn to wholly inadequate proxies, like brain size, intelligence, experiments with genetically modified flies and capsaicin, and intricate analogies. We watch animals and note when they have a "death response" and anthropomorphize them when they do things that look like mourning or grieving.
And still, it might be up to blind fucking luck what some species have evolved in terms of life and death expectations and how those translate to quality of life.
Cats for example can meow for hours when they want something (for example let out of their box in a moving car), yet when they are in physical pain they are usually quiet ... and I still don't know which one was worse for that particular grey friend.
> Pain sucks, but usually the body deals with that. What makes things bad for minds that can do calculus is the emotional anguish, the despair due to loss of control, the anxiety from loss of effective agency (not being able to work with a headache, performance anxiety, fear of getting reprimanded and/or fired), and the eventual depression.
I agree that being smart can make pain *worse,* but pain is still pretty bad on its own. I’d imagine that being anxious about the aftermath and recovery period would make a broken femur worse, but I think I would still be almost as miserable if I broke my femur even if I knew it would be magically healed the next day.
> Cats for example can meow for hours when they want something (for example let out of their box in a moving car), yet when they are in physical pain they are usually quiet ... and I still don't know which one was worse for that particular grey friend.
Be careful not to anthropomorphize. Many animals, especially prey animals, avoid showing pain when they’re hurt because it signals to other animals that they’re vulnerable. When she was injured, my family’s cat acted *almost* normal, except she didn’t wave her tail around like she usually did, avoided straining her back, and occasionally made quiet sounds when she accidentally strained it anyway.
Humans are different—for us, showing pain is evolutionarily advantageous because it gets the attention of other humans who want to help.
Yep, that was my intended point. I have zero idea which bad thing is "worse", which one to optimize for while caring for a pet. (And I think philosophically it's probaly unknowable.)
Ie. "physical pain" versus the other kind (no physical pain, but no control, no real agency, locked in a box being carried somewhere).
Because for me it's usually the emotional, but ... I'm (as far as I'm aware) not a cat.
would you say the balance of evidence suggests wild animals live net-negative lives? If so, is deforestation / habitat loss a moral positive? What level of certainty would we need to start encouraging the destruction of habitat as an intervention? I have a strongly negative intuitive reaction to this idea but it's hard to deny the strength of the arguments.
I’m not convinced that animal lives are net negative as I think being alive is generally very good even with quite a bit of pain. So I’m worried that some of the solutions will actually bad as they reduce population size.
As FLWAB mentions I was more referring to your more speculative solution, which certainly would. But I do agree helping wild animals is very important and agree with most of this article. It’s just that the focus on only suffering makes me nervous that people will want to eliminate large swaths of animals, so I wanted to get my opinion down that I disagree with that. Especially, since you do assert in the article that you think animals don’t get enough welfare to offset pain.
>Maybe—and this one is more long-term and speculative—we could give animals contraceptives to keep their population in control. Then perhaps we could also, after making populations small, eliminate predation. Again, this is very speculative and would require a ton of research, but a small population of animals with adequate access to food and without predation would make nature paradise rather than hell.
This was your most speculative idea, but it is certainly in favor of reducing wild animal population size. And the only way to end predation is to end all predators (except maybe a small population in zoos that are fed lab grown meat).
I agree with Michael: I am not in favor of deliberately reducing the population of wild animals for the purpose of reducing overall animal suffering. I put a high weight on the value of life: I would rather live for five years and then get eaten alive then not live at all.
EDIT: I will say that I agree 100% that we should wipe the screwworm from the face of the earth. Though I'm sure a screwworm's life is net positive for itself, it seems net negative overall. I just don't think it's worth wiping out all wolves just because they eat animals alive. A wolf's life seems to be worth the pain experienced by elks, and they seem to have a positive impact on elk populations in terms of preventing overpopulation, followed by overgrazing, followed by starvation.
This is a good argument for hunting. When I kill a deer, it's likely avoiding death by starvation, mauling by wolves or a mt lion, disease, whacking by a vehicle and subsequent prolonged death. Consumption of wild game also means I'm not financing industrial pigs in pens
You ignore the obvious conclusion (probably because it is aesthetically abhorrent and you’ll get a ton of hate for it). But if wild animal suffering is inevitable and really bad, it would be better if there were no wild animals, and the best thing we can do is, as humanely as possible, exterminate all wild animal populations.
This is a really extreme policy obviously, but it does follow from your premises. One thing I wonder is whether - despite the suffering - most animals’ lives are actually still worth living? Naively I’d guess yes, and that’s why I wouldn’t destroy nature. Their deaths may be painful, but if you go to the forest or ocean and pick out a random animal, they’re usually having a pretty good time. In fact their lives seem much less worth living in captivity
The (non-ecological) problem with eliminating predators is that it seems somewhat likely to me that some (mammal) predators are capable of experiencing greater joys than their prey. Obviously I don’t really have any clue - just a possibility.
I just set up a $50 monthly donation to Wild Animal Initiative and cancelled my paid subscription for this substack. I'm not really sure how I can prove it as I can't paste or upload images.
Even if they mostly live good lives we can still do things to reduce their suffering. I also read and majorly disagreed with the paper but that would require a longer discussion.
Sure, but many solutions to wild animal suffering, at least for utilitarians, are probably going to strongly depend on whether they think that suffering pervades over happiness in nature.
As a doomer I agree that Superintelligent AI has great odds of ending wild animal suffering
Based and yudkowksy pilled.
Thank you for this... I read enough of your & Glenn’s writing that this starts to feel like common sense to me and I get annoyed at how often you’re pushing it. And then I went to this nominally ethics-focused event recently and everyone completely bristled at any mention I made of wild animal suffering or veganism. Apparently a lot more convincing work to do than I realized, glad you’re doing it!
I love this article, it reminds me a lot of Jeff McMahan's "The Meat Eaters"
Little makes me so happy knowing that the AGI hype is a bubble that will lead to little of note.
The natural world naturally has things eating and hurting each other. I can only imagine what kind of absurd cruelties might result from attempting to abolish that. Eradicating all predators to save the prey. This is why freakish moral perfectionists should not be in charge of things.
This is rather like Fourier's fantasy of turning the oceans into lemonade, maybe wild animal suffering as a research area is worth some money, but surely it's a very tiny amount because the odds of success are so low.
My big takeaway from contemplating wild animal suffering in the past is that the ick many liberals have for hunting is rather nonsensical: I have a feeling the death the hunter gives to the animal has less pain in it than the one nature would have given it.
Doesn't this imply life on Earth is certainly net-negative? For the vast majority of animals there's much more pain than happiness, and this state of affairs has been going on for billions of years. So like if a superintelligent AI ended all life tomorrow, it would be a mercy compared to letting the astronomical suffering continue. On this view minimizing x-risk is itself an s-risk.
Serious question: if you could press a button permanently killing all life on Earth, would you do it? Do you think there's at least a significant chance you should? (If you feel self-interest might be biasing you, assume it kills all life except you and enough people to keep you company).
I think he’s an “infinite potential future” believer, firstly, so from that killing all life would be bad. But even if he wasn’t he’s also a theist, and believes in an infinite future of goodness beyond this life. If animals are also conscious, they should be included in that future. Therefore, wiping out all animals would be bad. (I think these are bad arguments fwiw, and he can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is it.
> When you have a really bad headache, that’s not bad because you can do calculus. It’s bad because it hurts!
Pain sucks, but usually the body deals with that. What makes things bad for minds that can do calculus is the emotional anguish, the despair due to loss of control, the anxiety from loss of effective agency (not being able to work with a headache, performance anxiety, fear of getting reprimanded and/or fired), and the eventual depression.
A few years ago I started to have back pain, and the pain part is usually meh, but the fear that it could get worse is ... worse.
So, of course, the tragedy is that we don't know what others are going through, hence it's impossible to really compare value. So we turn to wholly inadequate proxies, like brain size, intelligence, experiments with genetically modified flies and capsaicin, and intricate analogies. We watch animals and note when they have a "death response" and anthropomorphize them when they do things that look like mourning or grieving.
And still, it might be up to blind fucking luck what some species have evolved in terms of life and death expectations and how those translate to quality of life.
Cats for example can meow for hours when they want something (for example let out of their box in a moving car), yet when they are in physical pain they are usually quiet ... and I still don't know which one was worse for that particular grey friend.
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/what-is-it-like-for-animals-to-suffer
> Pain sucks, but usually the body deals with that. What makes things bad for minds that can do calculus is the emotional anguish, the despair due to loss of control, the anxiety from loss of effective agency (not being able to work with a headache, performance anxiety, fear of getting reprimanded and/or fired), and the eventual depression.
I agree that being smart can make pain *worse,* but pain is still pretty bad on its own. I’d imagine that being anxious about the aftermath and recovery period would make a broken femur worse, but I think I would still be almost as miserable if I broke my femur even if I knew it would be magically healed the next day.
> Cats for example can meow for hours when they want something (for example let out of their box in a moving car), yet when they are in physical pain they are usually quiet ... and I still don't know which one was worse for that particular grey friend.
Be careful not to anthropomorphize. Many animals, especially prey animals, avoid showing pain when they’re hurt because it signals to other animals that they’re vulnerable. When she was injured, my family’s cat acted *almost* normal, except she didn’t wave her tail around like she usually did, avoided straining her back, and occasionally made quiet sounds when she accidentally strained it anyway.
Humans are different—for us, showing pain is evolutionarily advantageous because it gets the attention of other humans who want to help.
Yep, that was my intended point. I have zero idea which bad thing is "worse", which one to optimize for while caring for a pet. (And I think philosophically it's probaly unknowable.)
Ie. "physical pain" versus the other kind (no physical pain, but no control, no real agency, locked in a box being carried somewhere).
Because for me it's usually the emotional, but ... I'm (as far as I'm aware) not a cat.
would you say the balance of evidence suggests wild animals live net-negative lives? If so, is deforestation / habitat loss a moral positive? What level of certainty would we need to start encouraging the destruction of habitat as an intervention? I have a strongly negative intuitive reaction to this idea but it's hard to deny the strength of the arguments.
Should believers in a good God reduce their credence that the 10^(OH NOOOO) r-strategists live bad lives on net?
I don't think so. We live in a fallen world.
I’m not convinced that animal lives are net negative as I think being alive is generally very good even with quite a bit of pain. So I’m worried that some of the solutions will actually bad as they reduce population size.
None of the solutions I talked about except addressing climate change would really reduce population size.
As FLWAB mentions I was more referring to your more speculative solution, which certainly would. But I do agree helping wild animals is very important and agree with most of this article. It’s just that the focus on only suffering makes me nervous that people will want to eliminate large swaths of animals, so I wanted to get my opinion down that I disagree with that. Especially, since you do assert in the article that you think animals don’t get enough welfare to offset pain.
Oh gotcha.
>Maybe—and this one is more long-term and speculative—we could give animals contraceptives to keep their population in control. Then perhaps we could also, after making populations small, eliminate predation. Again, this is very speculative and would require a ton of research, but a small population of animals with adequate access to food and without predation would make nature paradise rather than hell.
This was your most speculative idea, but it is certainly in favor of reducing wild animal population size. And the only way to end predation is to end all predators (except maybe a small population in zoos that are fed lab grown meat).
I agree with Michael: I am not in favor of deliberately reducing the population of wild animals for the purpose of reducing overall animal suffering. I put a high weight on the value of life: I would rather live for five years and then get eaten alive then not live at all.
EDIT: I will say that I agree 100% that we should wipe the screwworm from the face of the earth. Though I'm sure a screwworm's life is net positive for itself, it seems net negative overall. I just don't think it's worth wiping out all wolves just because they eat animals alive. A wolf's life seems to be worth the pain experienced by elks, and they seem to have a positive impact on elk populations in terms of preventing overpopulation, followed by overgrazing, followed by starvation.
>Maybe—and this one is more long-term and speculative—we could give animals contraceptives to keep their population in control.
Am I misunderstanding something again? No doubt I am. How does keeping “their population in control” not “really reduce population size?”
This is a good argument for hunting. When I kill a deer, it's likely avoiding death by starvation, mauling by wolves or a mt lion, disease, whacking by a vehicle and subsequent prolonged death. Consumption of wild game also means I'm not financing industrial pigs in pens
You ignore the obvious conclusion (probably because it is aesthetically abhorrent and you’ll get a ton of hate for it). But if wild animal suffering is inevitable and really bad, it would be better if there were no wild animals, and the best thing we can do is, as humanely as possible, exterminate all wild animal populations.
This is a really extreme policy obviously, but it does follow from your premises. One thing I wonder is whether - despite the suffering - most animals’ lives are actually still worth living? Naively I’d guess yes, and that’s why I wouldn’t destroy nature. Their deaths may be painful, but if you go to the forest or ocean and pick out a random animal, they’re usually having a pretty good time. In fact their lives seem much less worth living in captivity
I wonder if R strategists have less capacity for suffering / higher pain thresholds, especially early in life.
The (non-ecological) problem with eliminating predators is that it seems somewhat likely to me that some (mammal) predators are capable of experiencing greater joys than their prey. Obviously I don’t really have any clue - just a possibility.
I just set up a $50 monthly donation to Wild Animal Initiative and cancelled my paid subscription for this substack. I'm not really sure how I can prove it as I can't paste or upload images.
I'm not very convinced by most of the wild animal suffering literature out there, particularly r-strategist-based arguments. I've written an article about why in regards to fish: https://link-springer-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/article/10.1007/s10806-024-09937-x
If you're interested in checking it out and blocked by a paywall, let me know and I can send you a PDF.
Even if they mostly live good lives we can still do things to reduce their suffering. I also read and majorly disagreed with the paper but that would require a longer discussion.
Sure, but many solutions to wild animal suffering, at least for utilitarians, are probably going to strongly depend on whether they think that suffering pervades over happiness in nature.
Not for many of them. E.g. getting rid of the kind of parasitic fly I talked about won't depend on that.