We're Not The Center of the Moral Universe

And why that fact matters

The Mormons say that God instructed Joseph Smith to have a bunch of hot, underage wives (they don’t usually phrase it that way). I’m skeptical. While it seems rather unlikely that God would be in favor of such an arrangement, it seems quite likely that Joseph Smith would be in favor of such an arrangement, and would wrongly attribute it to God. You should be suspicious when people have judgments that seem suspiciously convenient; where the judgments are a bit arbitrary but you can very easily come to see how they might have come to believe them mistakenly.

Similarly, if the Assyrians declare that they are God’s favorite people and that most of what God cares about is what happens to them, you should be a bit suspicious of that. It’s unlikely that God would pick a people and have it be the Assyrians, but it’s much more likely that the Assyrians would think they were God’s favorite group.

I have bad news: you people are like the Mormons and the hypothetical Assyrians.

There is a view that most modern people have which is suspiciously convenient in a similar way, and it is hugely relevant to how most people live. If people stopped believing it, doing so would radically upend their lives. The belief is that humans, morally, are the center of the universe. In other words, most of what matters morally is what happens to humans. Non-human animals, especially ones different from us biologically, barely matter at all.

That this belief is common should go without saying. People get outraged when you suggest that factory farming is much worse than human atrocities, even though it has about 8 million new victims every hour.¹ Ordinary decision-making is driven entirely by the effects of our actions on other humans, and people get weirded out when you demonstrate any concern for wild animals.

People don’t even really care about slowly poisoning rats to death over the course of days, even though rats are quite smart. If a politician described mainly focusing on the welfare of non-human animals, no one would vote for them, even though that’s a lot more important than human welfare if we’re not the moral center of the universe.

But I think this belief is rather suspicious. It would be a bit too convenient if it turned out correct. It would be a surprise if humans really were nearly all of what mattered, but no surprise at all if humans falsely believed we were nearly all of what mattered.

Animals have been around for roughly 800 million years. On this view, for that entire period, nothing that happened mattered much. Despite animals suffering and dying in incomprehensible numbers—experiencing staggeringly unfathomably massive quantities of aggregate suffering—nothing very important was happening. Things only started to matter when, about 300,000 years ago, humans hit the scene.

(Lo: a graph).

That’s a very suspicious way for the graph to look. Nothing matters until we arrived? It’s not at all surprising that we think that. But it would be surprising if it were true. So there’s some reason for doubt.

Now, to be clear, I don’t think that it’s automatically suspicious that the universe’s value would go up a lot at some specific point. I think that too. Before there was conscious life, nothing very important happened in the universe. But that is because conscious life is a different kind of thing from non-conscious life. It’s quite a bit more suspicious if moral worth spikes around when we begin, despite our capacities being broadly continuous with other life.

This is especially true because humans have a long history of underestimating the moral importance of others. For much of history, people thought that only their own tribe mattered. Lots of people on Twitter with names like VitalismSigma69 still think that! Slavery and repression of women were historical universals. In just the last few hundred years, Americans shipped slaves from Africa to torment, enslave, and beat them. Our track record in taking seriously the moral importance of others leaves much to be desired.

All of this should make us very suspicious. Humans constantly underestimate the moral importance of those different from ourselves. And yet the common view is that:

1. Beings who are biologically different from us don’t really matter.

2. Important stuff started happening in the last few hundred thousand years. Before that, nothing that happened in the world mattered much because we didn’t yet exist.

And there are many more biases that lead us to underestimate the moral importance of wild animals. One bias comes from the fact that there are a lot of them. Literally quintillions. Our brains are bad at grokking large numbers. People will pay the same amount to save 200,000 birds as 2,000. If you threatened to torture someone for a billion years, they’d be just as scared as if you threatened to torture them for a million years, even though the first is 1,000 times worse! So if our brains can’t even grasp the moral importance of 2,000 instances of something, what hope do we have for quintillions of instances.

All of this is to say that we should actively distrust our intuitions about the moral importance of animals. It would be very surprising if those intuitions were correct. Any argument for us being the moral center of the universe that depends on intuitions should be regarded as, to use the technical term, extremely sus. If your argument against animals mattering much depends on the idea that beings who aren’t that smart, for instance, can’t matter that much, then you should take very seriously the possibility that such a hypothesis is rationalized moral error.

You should be suspicious of beliefs if those beliefs are what a third party would expect you to believe even if they weren’t true. If you conclude that the morally best action is whichever action you independently wanted to take, that’s a bit suspicious. So we should all be suspicious of the judgment that we are the moral centers of the universe. It is exactly the sort of thing that we’d be expected to believe even if it was false. You should be suspicious when Big Tobacco tells you that smoking is great for your health. In this case, you are Big Tobacco.

Then there is the further problem that the arguments against us being the center of the moral universe are very strong. For example, here is a judgment I hold: suffering is a bad thing. It is bad to hurt. I believe this because I have hurt before, and when I did, it seemed obvious it was bad. I recently banged my knee and was given a new chance to test the “hurting is bad” hypothesis. And yep, it was.

But if hurting is bad, then we are not the center of the moral universe. Because there are hundreds of thousands more fish than us—and fish can hurt, plausibly very intensely. There are 10,000 times more amphibians than us. If hurting is among the things that matter, the endless cries of the amphibians certainly drown out our own. And don’t even get me started on the insects.

Whenever I make the point that pain is a bad thing, lots of people get very confused. So let me clarify three things I don’t mean.

1. I don’t mean that hurting is the only bad thing in the world. There might be more stuff that’s bad than hurting, like betrayal, ignorance, and so on. I just mean it’s among the things that is bad. If hurting is bad, and the animal kingdom has millions of times more hurting than humanity, then what happens to animals matters a lot.

2. When I say hurting is bad, I don’t mean that it’s a bad thing all things considered that the world has pain. Pain serves a useful role, sending important biological signals. When I say pain is bad, I mean it is bad all else equal. A headache is bad, because it has pain and no compensating benefit. Pain is bad in itself, though it can sometimes be good overall if it leads to something good.

3. I’m not necessarily talking about all pain. Maybe some kinds of pain—e.g. hurting during a workout—are good. That’s totally irrelevant to the argument. Whether some kinds of pain are good, the typical experience of intense pain accompanying being eaten alive, starving to death, and dying of thirst, is clearly a bad thing.

My claim, then, is very modest. It’s simply that barring exceptional circumstances, hurting a lot is a bad thing. It is bad to feel bad. The experience you have when you have a really bad headache, are very hungry, or get punched in the face is intrinsically unfortunate. All else equal, the world is worse if there’s more of it.

The argument, in a nutshell, is this:

1. Intense pain is one of the world’s major bad things.

2. Only a tiny portion of the world’s intense pain is experienced by humans.

3. Therefore, much that is morally important lies outside of what happens to humans.

Pain isn’t the only thing along these lines. I think pleasure is good too, and animals also experience very large quantities of pleasure. If any of this is correct then we are not the center of the moral universe.

Now, the attitude that most people have is that pain doesn’t matter much unless it’s experienced by humans. When rats are poisoned to death, no one cares much. But this seems like a very untenable position.

Pain is bad because of how it feels. When I have a bad headache, and it feels bad, I don’t think “ah, this detracts from the welfare of a member of a sapient species.” No, I think it’s bad because it hurts. So if animals can hurt too—if they, in the aggregate, hurt millions of times more than us—then they matter. And given that there is very compelling scientific evidence that animals feel pain and can hurt like us, what happens to them matters a great deal. Even simple creatures can plausibly feel intense pain.

There are further challenges for the idea that humans matter vastly more in the aggregate than non-humans. One such challenge is the argument from marginal cases. It’s very hard to see what it is about animals that’s supposed to mean they matter vastly less than people. Is it their intelligence? There are people as unintelligent as animals (babies and some severely mentally disabled people).

Is it being biologically human? Well, if we discovered that a certain class of beings believed to be people weren’t biologically human (e.g. Pacific islanders), they’d still matter. Is it being either biologically human or smart? Well this would imply that if we learned some mentally disabled people weren’t biologically human, they’d cease mattering at all. That’s ridiculous. Your moral worth isn’t determined by your biological make-up.

All of this is to say that I think it’s very hard to maintain that we are the center of the moral universe. The arguments in its favor are suspiciously convenient, and rather weak. The arguments against are simple and powerful, appealing to principles that would be taken as obvious in any other setting. When you have to deny that extreme pain is a bad thing, and your only argument for it is that it would imply that your group—who you’re biologically trained to be biased in favor of—is less important than you naturally think, then you should seriously reconsider.

What should we take away from the falsity of the “center of the moral universe” hypothesis? Well, we should start caring a lot about what happens to non-humans animals. We should care about the fish starving and dying. We should care about the insects and shrimp being eaten alive and dying of disease—both on farms and in the wild. And we should be concerned about making sure that the future isn’t just good for people but is good for all of conscious creatures.

Right now, I’m not sure that we’re on track to do that. Most people would be happy spreading wild animal suffering to the stars. When designing a future, few care about making it go well for wild animals, because we don’t count their interests. But almost every conscious creature is a wild animal; to ignore them is to ignore almost everyone.

And the future could have very large numbers of digital minds. Digital minds are potentially much easier to create than biological organisms (if, indeed, they are possible). For this reason, in expectation, almost every conscious being in world history will be digital. If we don’t count their interests, we would err terribly. We would fail to count most of those who matter.

The most important insight—an insight which would make me very optimistic about the future if everyone internalized it—is that every conscious being matters. If you can feel, if there’s something it’s like to be you, then it matters how well your life goes. The possible neglect of that insight could cause hideous suffering on an intergalactic scale. Our prejudice against the non-human could be our most consequential moral blunder.

1. That’s just land animals!