I am raising a duck right now. They make good pets and I hope it will help my children better understand food and the circle of life. I like to think that the duck appreciates me feeding it, and will not mind making the ultimate sacrifice so that I can enjoy a nice Magret de Canard.
The original comment is gone, maybe I lack context, is this a joke wooshing over my head?
I can't imagine any animal just gracefully accepting its death so someone can enjoy eating it. Animals go to great lengths not to be eaten. Their expressed preference tends to be not making the ultimate sacrifice so that someone can enjoy eating them.
Except for perhaps ant species who share so much DNA with their nestmates and willingly die for the colony. But the original comment was about being so disconnected from our food supply while having a lot of choices of food. Those who are around barnyard animals seem to have less trouble eating them. Perhaps they have a different view of how little cognition is going on in a chicken brain. I am convinced my duck is living a great life, and not fearing death. She lives in the moment, and when the lights go out for her she will have no regret, and living longer would perhaps have mattered little because she has no awareness of time.
Perhaps. Cows are much more intelligent than chickens though, and pigs are often compared to dogs. Other barnyard animals aside, perhaps it's true that living longer would have mattered little to the duck, and yet, as she lives in the moment, she will clearly strive her hardest to avoid death at all costs, as best she can with her little duck brain. Doesn't that mean something?
Indeed, ants are an exception, fair enough. Though they don't accept death so someone can enjoy eating them, they accept death to defend or benefit their brethren.
Assuming that pigs & ducks would ever be raised in the first place if it weren't for their meat (a bad assumption IMO, in a 100% veg society I'd expect pigs to go extinct)..
One could not, hypothetically, raise an animal & let it live forever. I see the butcher's knife as being somewhat more merciful than cancer but that's also just, like, my opinion, man.
I worked with a woman that lived out beyond the exurbs of the Twin Cities she was raising two grade school kids and for the course of the spring an summer a pig. The pig became a pet to the kids but they were warned that pigs always run away in the fall.
People here do not have this sense of moral disgust at an interesting literary analogy. If you wanted to convince people not to make comparisons like this, you could have done better than call us robots performing moral gymnastics. You're just antagonizing the community.
Do you think you could state clearly the rule that Scott broke? I try hard not to do anything that would hurt somebody's feelings, and I didn't even realize that was a possibility with this... maybe I'm just dense. But, obviously, you think he made a serious error. I'd like to be able to avoid anybody having that reaction to something I might write.
I think the rule Scott broke is using something about Jews to make a point about bugs. I think some people find "comparing" an ethnicity to non-humans offensive. Avoid doing this if you don't want to upset people.
But, Matthew, you cater to the people who have their feelings easily hurt at your own loss. You'll avoid interesting arguments, entertaining hypotheticals and interesting literary devices. If Scott did not use this quote, I think the piece would be a little worse, not a little better.
And look at how dismissive Josh was. You don't really want to have an audience and comment section with people like this.
I'm not going to comment on whether Scott made an error in this instance, as I'm not Jewish, so can't really say whether it's hurtful to Jewish people, but as a general rule, if you would like to avoid hurting people's feelings, it is a good idea not to compare people of some ethnicity to vermin (rats, bugs, cockroaches), even obliquely. Comparing certain ethnic groups to vermin is a practice that has been historically (even in recent history) associated with some really terrible things, and if you are not sure if you can do it kindly, it's best to avoid doing it at all.
Im Jewish. It wasn't hurtful to me and I don't know where one finds the "rule" Scott is supposed to have broke. But I am definitely after this whole post starting to wonder if there is such a thing as too rational.
> if you would like to avoid hurting people's feelings,
at a certain point here, this is a lost cause, unless you start with a standard of:
"i wish to avoid hurting the feelings of people who make a point of moderating their own emotions, and therefore avoid take offense where it isn't intended"
You are sayimg you know u or someone has feelongs you know I am moderating? I think this is the last time i read the comments section. This whole thing has devolved into nonsense.
He didn't mean it the way you're taking it. For one thing, he's Jewish himself. For another thing, he's writing for us robots, so he doesn't say one thing and mean another like regular people do.
Yes, please. There already are no places for us robots to go in the world where everything is considered "offensive" and no one is allowed to actually mean what they say and not some imagined "offence" behind it. Don't destroy the last of the few remaining places where one can just be rational without playing the tiring mind games that constitute 90% of communication that "normal people" engage in.
It's definitely unkind. I think you could make the argument that pointing out the PR issues with the comparison is both true and necessary, but given how needlessly antagonistic he's being I personally don't feel the need to cut him a lot of slack.
When taken out of context as "Scott compares Jews to bugs" it sounds bad, but I think it's eminently clear from the context that the comparison is being used to raise the status of insects, not lower the status of Jews.
Perhaps. The unintended consequence (while not a big deal) is a funny nexus of tension that HE would be well equipped to examine. But it ain’t not there.
it's less about liberals wanting those things, and more about viewing them as necessary to avert climate disaster, so the whole meme is pointing at liberals' enthusiastic willingness to curtail individual freedom in the face of collective threat.
Eating insects has other benefits, namely the very good nutritional value and the substantial lack of sugar and saturated fats - the Hitlers of nutrition
(I pressed post while trying to go the last word, oh well)
I get that it is not morally relevant but it feels as if it should play some role in the individual decision process, like, giving up red meat is good for ethics, the environment AND yourself. This is different.
I'm reminded of the story/ urban legend that when vegetarian Indians moved to England, they found that their diet was lacking in essential nutrients, because the English flour had fewer bugs in it compared to Indian flour. (I couldn't find a reference in a quick search.)
I'm not convinced this is relevant. There are other foods that are good nutritionally, but get processed with added sugars to sell better. why wouldn't this also happen with insects?
It's just a few steps away from the obvious truth "Surely it would be worth to kill one insect to produce an immortality pill". Should insect diet turn out to be much healthier for us, it would make the ethical case for not killing insects a bit weaker.
sure.. but i mean, broccoli exists, but people only seem to eat it if it gets deep fried and dipped in sugar.. yes its an exageration, the point is just that there are lots of healthy foods that we somehow manage to make unhealthy. i dont think access or existence is the barrier.
Would eating worms be morally better or worse than eating insects? I'm not a vermologist, but I think some of the creatures we call worms don't even have brains.
Relatedly, it seems surprisingly hard to view the picture for the post I'm looking at. It doesn't show up in the email, or on the post itself. To view it I have to go to another page on the site that links back to this post. Am I missing something or is that just the way it is? It doesn't seem like the way it should me.
Jake, I was feeling pretty smug about getting that reference myself. I was raised in the Lutheran Church. They tell me now that Luther probably didn't say "Here I stand, I can do no other" during that interview. Too bad, it's a really good line.
But you can't just count every farmed animal as having suffered an amount proportional to its neuron count. Surely, factory farmed insects live a hell of a lot less long than factory farmed cows do, and thus suffer a lot less long. How do they compare in terms of [neuron count]x[lifespan]? Ideally we should also be multiplying by suffering intensity, but that's harder to judge.
The question that comes to mind for me is whether or not the mealworms are suffering during that period of time. How much does farmed mealworm life differ from average, or even ideal mealworm life?
Yeah, I think it's relevant that bugs are generally much more adapted to cramped, crowded, dank, dark conditions than larger animals. Those mealworms might feel fine their whole lives!
The biggest issues would be (a) not allowing the animal to complete its life cycle and (b) the method of execution. When I've raised mealworms for other animals, the execution method was drowning, and they certainly do wriggle as if they're in distress (although what is reflex and what is agony?). Not sure how huge operations do it.
They freeze dry them, at least the brands I've bought. I'm assuming the first step of this is IQF (send them through a stream of liquid nitrogen) because otherwise they would clump, which is not the case.
If I'm right, then current methods are as close to instant death as it gets. Otherwise, this could be easily implemented.
Also, while I think I can broadly sketch out what a 'good' or 'bad' life is for a cow, I'm not sure I can do the same for a mealworm. How possible is it that farmed insects are not 'suffering' proportionately as much as other farmed animals, because their requirements for a 'good life are much simpler and more easily met in a factory farm?
I'm perfectly happy if mealworms are farmed to feed chickens, and then I eat the chicken. And the worms get their turn in the end:
Hamlet:
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
I would think that would come out in the wash. It's not [neuron count] x [lifespan] that matters, because if the farming is ongoing, each time one mealworm dies it is replaced by another on the farm. So it's [neuron count] x [lifespan] x [#lifespans per unit time], but [#lifespans per unit time] = 1/[lifespan], so the second two terms cancel out and we're left with just neurons.
I mean you really care about [suffering]/[calorie]. This comes out to something like [suffering]/[animal]*[animals]/[calorie], or [neurons]*[lifespan]/([calories/animal]).
You can, in general. Even in this specific case, the functionality is still there, only hidden. There are ways to re-add it (the one I've found is here https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks - note that I do not use it and do not vouch for it).
The problem is that the calories that we get from eating animals ultimately come from plants, so either we're eating the plants or the cows are. In fact, there are calories lost in that process from all the activity that the cows engage in before we eat them, so it'd kill more total plant-calorie for us to eat cows than directly eat plants. There's also the same question with fewer-small-plants (grass, hay, which cows tend to eat) versus the larger plants (broccoli for example, which humans tend to eat). Perhaps we should only eat leaves from trees? Or are trees more conscious, so indirectly eating grass is better?
Though we also have to ask what plant *suffering* looks like - perhaps conscious plants really enjoy being picked? The main problem with eating animals is the conditions that those animals are raised in, and I'm not sure that applies to plants. Factory farmed chickens clearly have horrible lives but corn plants on farm seem to have pretty nice lives, as far as plant lives go.
One alternative to either plants or animals is entirely lab-grown food (I presume we can fabricate sugar from raw materials at least), but that's a last resort since it seems like it would be quite inefficient and difficult compared to raising plants.
I suppose I should I have made it more obvious I was asking facetiously...I think the whole debate is silly. I don't get the guilt over a natural part of life. We are inextricably linked into the food chain. We cannot convert heat or sunlight into calories ourselves. This forces us to consume something that can (or something that ate something that can). Everything we eat--plant, insect, mammal, fish--is alive. Some, possibly all, has some amount of consciousness.
Yeah, we shouldn't torture animals, but caring about the abstract suffering of mealworms or crickets (both of which I've raised) just smacks of bored overprivileged navel-gazing. And it reminds me way too much of eating disorder recovery, and people going vegetarian -> vegan -> oh wait no I can't eat anything because eating is immoral.
I don't fully disagree with you, in fact; there really isn't much point in worrying about insect suffering when you can barely get idiots like the commenter quoted by Scott to care about obviously conscious beings like dogs; but I think that shows why the argument here is necessary — if you don't, you'll just get people going "hurr durr but what's the difference between a chicken and a bug?!". As if you couldn't make the exact same argument against caring about killing *humans*.
There is at least one criterion that rules most humans in and the vast majority of animals out, which is the criterion of negotiation. Humans are at least capable of negotiating in good faith.
Why does this matter? Because something that can't negotiate in good faith is something you can *only* coexist with from a position of strength; it is a permanent enemy if you cannot defeat it and you have different goals, the same way a paperclip maximiser is. There is *no way* to treat flies as equals - you can, at best, make them your pampered slaves.
I havn't come across this argument before, and I find it deeply interesting... on the face of it its a light bulb moment for me (but that might be because I have only just come across it) ... off to search the interwebs for a more thourgh (can never spell that) discussion of it. Thank you!
The terms "ramen" and "varelse" (in conjunction) might find you something (though probably not everything around this); they're borrowed from the sequels to Ender's Game (which in turn borrow the words themselves from Swedish), which go heavily into the idea of what makes coexistence with aliens possible or impossible. "Ramen" are those aliens that you can understand and deal with; "varelse" are those you can't.
Yes, the moral calculus required to care about this at all, and then the idea of applying actual numbers to it, are both beyond my grasp. I don’t care at all about a single mealworm’s suffering, and a trillion times zero is still zero. And I just can’t shake the feeling that trying to prevent the suffering of little critters whose not-suffering is apparently indistinguishable from their suffering is...not actually an effective use of one’s resources.
I think you're right that there's a dark side to this amusing piffle, which is that there *are* people (with eating disorders) who are capable of internalizing it as some degree of social approval of their distorted thinking.
I think it's hard to draw a line - if we agree that all moral people need refrain from is torturing animals, what counts as torturing animals? Many of the more persuasive arguments for refraining from animal consumption basically amount to arguing that factory farming is animal torture. That's more persuasive to me than most of the other arguments, and eating high welfare animals that get adequate space and social interaction is an alternative solution.
Of course, this reasoning doesn't just apply to mammals and birds - asphyxiating in a massive pile seems unpleasant for fish, some argue we should kill them painlessly (less stress also means the fish tastes better apparently), for much the same reason that people think we shouldn't boil lobsters alive.
Not torturing insects seems achievable since I don't think they have very complex desires, a Bug's Life notwithstanding.
I mean, most guilt and moral concern is about natural parts of life - attack, spite, revenge, and hatred are all natural parts of life, and people might still reasonably think it's a moral improvement to engage in them either somewhat less, or under different circumstances than they actually do.
This is obviously a debate that is only possible to have in a place of extreme privilege, but just because one needs privilege to think about an issue doesn't mean that the issue shouldn't be thought about.
I think one of the values of this sort of discussion is specifically to *stop* the slide you mention in the last sentence, to help people think about the issue in harm reduction terms rather than purity and bans.
"I think one of the values of this sort of discussion is specifically to *stop* the slide you mention in the last sentence, to help people think about the issue in harm reduction terms rather than purity and bans."
I'm not getting why this is a debate that comes from a place of privilege, rules around food have been part of many moral/religious traditions for millennia. Furthermore, this is an area where the industrialization of life has made revolutionary changes in the underlying material conditions, so taboos that come down to us from the pre-industrial era are not going to address the salient aspects of a situation where some portion of humanity is dealing with the problems that come with having too much food, rather than too little.
Yeah, I don't buy that this necessarily *does* come from a place of privilege, but I was replying to this comment: "caring about the abstract suffering of mealworms or crickets (both of which I've raised) just smacks of bored overprivileged navel-gazing."
Like life-changing injuries and agonizing diseases?
> We cannot convert heat or sunlight into calories ourselves.
We also "cannot" travel faster than 20mph, or fly, or breathe underwater, or communicate across thousands of miles, except that we now do all those things because we decided they were worthwhile.
Look, I love eating meat and I'm not going to stop, but it sounds like you're just making an argument from nature.
The vegetarian -> eating disorder connection is interesting and probably worth talking more about.
"We also "cannot" travel faster than 20mph, or fly, or breathe underwater, or communicate across thousands of miles, except that we now do all those things because we decided they were worthwhile."
... and we found energy sources that let us build machines to do those things, the use of which now threatens the existence of human civilization. I agree with you that an argument from nature is not really useful here, because we have been modifying nature for thousands of years, but I don't see why that means we shouldn't consider the moral and ethical dimensions of how humanity supports its existence.
"Look, I love eating meat and I'm not going to stop..."
I was a ovo-lacto-vegetarian for eight years in my 20s. I started eating meat again in the full knowledge that I could not justify doing so within my moral framework. I eat meat because biologically, I'm an omnivore and I like eating it, but I can't deny that my choices have a deleterious impact on both myself (I was a lot trimmer when I was veggie; I'm biologically attracted to energy dense foods, which is an impulse that is now evolutionarily maladaptive in a world flooded with high-fructose corn syrup) and, more importantly in a moral context, other people now living and not yet born.
I'm not sure that this is a question for which quantitative analysis is the right approach, but "Bob" bless Scott for trying to think it through.
> I started eating meat again in the full knowledge that I could not justify doing so within my moral framework.
I'd offer then that your actual moral framework is different from whatever stated moral framework you violated. This is just semantics, but to say that you knowingly, continually violate your own moral framework gives a worse implication than reality.
Since you have concerns about energy usage and the fate of humanity, I'm guessing we have different predictions about nuclear energy. For me that's an entirely separate issue, but I can see why for you they might be the same issue.
> I'm biologically attracted to energy dense foods
Meat can be pretty energy-sparse, no? If you measured calories/satiety, lean meat would rank below most carbs and fats
"to say that you knowingly, continually violate your own moral framework gives a worse implication than reality."
That's very kind of you to say, but I was born a monster in a monstrous world. If we actually took our moral frameworks seriously we would never stop throwing up. Took me about 20 years to stop being entirely paralyzed by that realization and even now, I'm not sure what to do. I try not to be a dick.
I would love for nuclear energy to pan out and some of the new designs are intriguing. If any nation had managed to establish a repository for its spent nuclear fuel over the past 70 years, I would be more sanguine about its prospects. Unless & until that happens, I'll oppose generating more high-level waste.
> Meat can be pretty energy-sparse, no? If you measured calories/satiety, lean meat would rank below most carbs and fats
Well, to add to the weird, it’s possible to use spinach leaf vein structure as a scaffold to grow cultured meat cells into a piece of meat. Presumably, the result of that is never sentient.
Some people, for example Jains, aim to avoid killing anything - including plants - so they only eat fallen fruit. In Jainism its called Ahimsa fruitarianism. (I don't know if he was being ironic or what, but notable dictator, evil despot, and all round bad guy Idi Amin claimed to have become a fruitarian while exhiled in Saudi Arabia.)
> One alternative to either plants or animals is entirely lab-grown food (I presume we can fabricate sugar from raw materials at least), but that's a last resort since it seems like it would be quite inefficient and difficult compared to raising plants.
There's a Finnish company that synthesises protein using air and solar power:
By 2025 they predict it to surpass South American soya as the cheapest source of protein. I'm quite excited about this because my biggest worry with animal agriculture is land use. Fields of solar panels take up much less land per calorie even than crops for human consumption, let alone animals, which enables a huge amount of rewilding.
Then you just calculate the expected suffering value of all your options and minimize, same as now... except no one gets to pretend their hands are *entirely* clean, which might actually make the debate easier and less factional.
“What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.
"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing here inviting me to," said Arthur, "it's heartless."
"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.
"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ..."
The Universe raged about him in its death throes.
"I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.
"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."
"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.
"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.
"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"
"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."
I almost typed "you're probably not joking but this reads like a parody" but before hitting Post I had my doubts and now I'm genuinely not sure if this is serious or meant as mockery of over-serious animal rights types.
Or perhaps there is a glorious self-contained set of 5 or more equally super moral people who are out of contact with the rest of society. In which case...how 'moral' can they be when viewed in terms of the Bodhisattvas who hold the door of enlightenment open for the rest of us? Hmmm...
Alternative: everyone has a natural moral setpoint, but instead of being absolute, it's calculated relative to their view of society and especially the people they interact with a lot. So the morality level of everyone in a group of friends will be correlated, but they won't converge over time, because some people prefer to be more moralistic than the group, and some less.
You know several religions have saints who walked themselves up and never talked to anyone. And recluses have a certain cachet in our society, at least if they are rich or artistically talented. So I think you're actually right there.
Tyler Cowen contended, in an interview with Peter Singer (I think), something like: eating wild-caught fish is relatively more ethical because fish die horribly *anyway*, so you're not killing them in a way that's much different than how they'd be killed in nature. Getting bit in half by a sea lion or a shark isn't really worse than getting hauled into a boat and having your gills cut.
Would similar logic apply to bugs, which often die violently naturally? Is the life of a farmed and consumed mealworm that much different?
A similar logic might certainly apply to hunting bugs, but farming them brings up population ethics issues.
You're not comparing an animal living out its natural life vs. an animal being raised on a farm. You're comparing an animal not existing vs. being raised on a farm.
I think this argument misses the Repugnant Conclusion argument.
If farmed animals have bad but non-negative life experiences - eg, if they would prefer to exist than not exist, if they could understand and make the choice - then it's better to farm them, than to cut short the lives of wild animals.
I'm not sure this is correct. Population ethics is hard. But if instead we could farm *humans* that have bad, but non-negative life experiences would it be better to farm them than to hunt wild animals? And if so, would it not be even better to let these humans live full healthy lives and go back to hunting wild animals as a food source?
What is a "bad, but non-negative" life supposed to mean? I think the problem with this approach is that people don't/can't really conceive of a net-zero life. For one thing, lots of people who seem miserable prefer to stay alive, while lots of people whose lives seem mostly fine commit suicide. So you'd need some alternative test.
Presumably a "non-negative" life means a life that is just tolerable enough to not drive the majority of people to suicide, which does seem like a pretty low bar - arguably a concentration camp would qualify.
I think we should be very careful before deeming a life not worth living, because it's basically a justification for killing them. while there are situations in which this may be moral (as euthanasia proponents argue), it's important to recognise that this is very subjective and that people may not be the best judges of whether their own life is worth living.
Belief in the afterlife conditional on your actions matters a lot here also. My devout Christian grandmother was pretty miserable in her last years, but suicide was so far outside of her acceptable options that she would have doubtlessly endured even much worse suffering. This is one of the topics where human intuitions vary so greatly that I suspect a broad agreement about what counts as "worth living" is out of reach.
It definitely is subjective. The general argument against suicide is that you may not deem your life worthwhile now, but you're likely to change your mind in the future. Lacking a reasonable expectation of improvement seems to be the distinction between euthanasia and suicide, although the afterlife does complicate things. Obviously it's preferable to this world, but for some reason God's very insistent on us staying here until he decides our time is up - pragmatically, this may just be because otherwise the afterlife makes suicide seem too appealing, and death cults tend not to last long compare to religions that prohibit their followers from killing themselves.
As a Christian I'm against suicide and euthanasia, but there's a grey area of prolonging life that doesn't really seem to serve much purpose except life for life's sake, and I think it's perfectly Christian to decline treatment if the costs outweigh the benefits. I'm probably indulging in the naturalistic fallacy.
I personally think that respecting what people currently alive value is the best solution to population ethics, since ultimately population ethics is just asking "how many children should you have" and I think the only correct answer to that question is "as many that you want and can care for". I can't speak for everyone alive today, but I think we generally want there to be people in the future (since even with contraception available people still have kids) but in wealthy countries we generally prioritise high welfare over high numbers. That's not a universal, but it does suggest we'd prefer to create a future of high welfare, free-range humans rather than a future containing a larger number of factory farmed humans.
I agree. But if you solve population ethics in this way, it is not sufficient morally that your farmed animals have net positive life experiences. Once you have decided to create them, they presumably deserve the same moral consideration as any other animal of their type would.
Arguably, high welfare animal farming meets most of an animal's preferences better than living in the wild (food, shelter, safety from predators - at least until the end), so giving them the same moral consideration that we give other animals of their type doesn't rule out all animal farming.
This is about where I come down. The co-evolution of these species with us through what we rather chauvinistically call "domestication" conditions the question from the start. I put the question to myself as "Having brought this animal into existence, will it live a good 'cowy' or 'chickeny' or 'piggy' life?" I don't know if I can know what that is but it seems reasonable to guess that a factory farm creates a bad life for its denizens.
I have enough spare income that I can buy meat & dairy from farmers who seem to me more likely to bring that good life about for their animals, but I also won't go to the co-op for a special trip just to get a gallon of milk (Bucky Fuller's assessment that the replacement value of a gallon of gasoline exceeds a million dollars when all costs are properly accounted for has been haunting me recently) and I haven't verified any of that for myself, I'm just trusting in reputation. I also have no control over what the restaurants I order from do in this regard.
In some respects I've given up on trying to rigorously assess this since we Americans live lives that lead so far into ecological overshoot that we're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic at this point.
You answer your own question - yes, humans existing as not-tortured livestock is better than humans not existing at all, but it's vastly inferior to humans living free and happy lives.
Moral options are weighed against alternatives, not just as absolutes - the same course of action may be morally virtuous when it is the least bad option available, and morally repugnant when it is the worst of good options.
In this case, no one is proposing that we just artificially increase the wild population of animals living happy live as an alternative to having these animals in factory farms - the money for that option isn't available, and if it were it could certainly be put to better use. Th options under discussion are factory farming vs. not.
The money for the other option is only not available if you don't make it available. Instead of eating farmed food, you could eat hunted food and also pay additional money to have someone humanely raise additional animals not to be eaten.
Right, I'm saying that the current conversation is a practical policy discussion, not a free-ranging hypothetical discussion, and therefore is bounded by how likely a policy is to actually get implemented.
Insect farming is unlikely but in the realm of medium-term possibility, because it has pragmatic as well as moral value. Your suggestion is hugely impractical at scale, so it's not in the realm of probable policies.
It is totally possible for you to pay for an insect sanctuary that houses as many insects as the number you would have otherwise paid to eat. If everybody did this, insect sanctuaries could totally exist at scale.
Look. Population ethics is hard. But one of my principles is that once you have conditioned on which set of beings exists in the world, you are obligated to find the arrangement in which the aggregate utility of those beings is as large as possible.
So you might not be obligated to create new bugs and put them in sanctuaries. But once you have decided to create new bugs to farm, you then need to consider whether or not it would be better in aggregate to put those bugs in sanctuaries instead and go eat something else.
There’s also the issue that some insects are eusocial, which I figure increases the probability that they are capable of suffering.
On the other hand: I’ve recently seen the argument that bee hives have some basic capability of “withdrawing consent” in the sense that if a hive doesn’t like their situation they can take up and leave. I haven’t taken the time to see if this is both universally true of bee farming and how bad it can get before a hive decides to leave.
Bee hives don't really vary that much, so what would be bad enough to make them defect, and where would be better for them to go? Unless bees bully each other, I can't think of a situation where it makes sense for one bee to leave but not the entire hive.
I can tell you from the experience of my father that be hives vary quite much if you take a closer look:
- The vary in character, e.g. how easily they get angry/agressive by different stimuli (motor tools, bad weather, sweaty person).
- They wary in economics: some do much more breeding, some block even the place for breeding with honey.
- They differ in patience: feeding them with sugar-liquid, in some hives a lot of them drown, in others none. At a closer look it is because the next ones coming are so impatient, that they push some of the first ones into the liquid.
These points are not depending on the enviroment, but they are consistent for the live of the hive, while another hive standing at the same stand behaves differently.
I never heared of hives settled hives leaving their combs, but individual bees sometimes visit other hives, and if one hive has a problem (eg. bad or no queen) they can and often do move to another hive in the neighbourhood.
Yeah, I also don't see how that follows, except through a naïve assumption that eusocial = more human.
Eusociality often involves tolerating suffering for the benefit of the colony - bees and ants often need to sacrifice their own lives to protect the queen. If anything, this would suggest they're less likely to suffer than flies and butterflies, which would benefit a lot more from strongly avoiding unpleasant stimuli, since if they die that's it, evolutionary line dies with them.
If anything it would seem to reduce it, if the hive is the conscious entity and regularly loses individual parts then individual deaths probably don't matter
Even if we grant both that insects can suffer* and that we care about it if they do (I reject both of these independently)...It's pretty unclear to me that insects on a factory farm have it any better or worse than regular old insects anywhere. You note this point, but don't really follow it. If being an insect is suffering, then why don't we have a moral duty to not only not factory farm them, but also kill all the insects everywhere, so they don't suffer anymore? On the other hand if you take that being an insect is not inherently suffering, we certainly create a lot more by farming them so you get Nozick's old vegetarianism argument.
* Do pain receptors count as "suffering"? I don't really think so. Does it make sense to care about a being that probably doesn't even have a continuous self, even if it does suffer? If so is their suffering additive? Insects are far less distinct from one another than humans, so remember your own Answer to Job.
Anyway, as a neuroscientist: neuroscientists have no clue how consciousness works, so we aren't gonna get more information about how it is to be an insect any time soon XD
I agree it's possible that killing all insects everywhere is the right thing to do, though I would want to know a lot more, and right now it's both impossible and ecologically disastrous.
I don't think that article addresses the issue he raised very well. The author himself states at the top that it's just "general considerations based on theory" and he presents no actual evidence to make me think factory farmed insects would have any worse a life than wild ones, just that there would be a lot of them.
Ahh, i guess the argument (listed below) is a belief that insects seem to spend the majority of their time suffering, whereas mammals don't
I'm not really sure what the evidence for this would be, but even if we take that at face value, Killing all the insects probably _would_ kill all the mammals and species which depend on them.
Which suggests something like 'in order to support the existence of beings with net-positive utility, it is necessary for there to exist beings with net-negative utility'
This fact that 'net positive beings require beings with net-negative utilty) (assuming insects exist with net-negative utility, which i still doubt but i'll grant for the sake of argument) ends up being something like a "justification" for the darkness of the physical universe in general: sure, large portions of history look pretty awful, and some people do live horrible lives. But the current state (which has a hard dependency on those awful things) has so much goodness, joy, and positivity that it effectively justifies both the awful history, and the awful state of affairs for some unlucky people in the present.
> killing all insects everywhere may be the right thing to do, but killing all mammals is clearly not.
I'll bite that bullet in the sense that I do actually suspect that if you fully take everything into account killing all wild animals everywhere (only keeping pets and other animals for which we can guarantee their well-being around) ends up being the right thing to do.
Right now though, for larger animals, the harm from factory farming both completely eclipses and is much easier (as in: not completely impossible) to solve than the harm from animals suffering in the wild.
For insects I'm not convinced they cross the threshold into being morally relevant agents as opposed to little biological robots, but if they do, I suppose the same argument holds.
Doesn't the existence of e.g. acetaminophen (or general anesthesia) demonstrate that "pain" is a central-nervous system experience that has bupkis to do with the existence of nociceptors per se? Which is to say, if you don't have a consciousness in the first place, you can't experience "pain" in the way we think of it, regardless of the messages your peripheral nerves are sending, so inferring consciousness from the existence of the receptors is begging the question in a big way.
Agreed. For me, and I think probably all humans, suffering depends on mental states. I have felt pain, as in the sensation of physical pain, many times without suffering. Sore muscles from a good day's manual labor is a positive experience for me, and I'm not alone in that. Similarly, people frequently choose other life options that frequently result in physical pain (extreme sports, hiking in the woods, BDSM) that obviously makes them happier or that they prefer to not having those things.
What causes me suffering is far more about negative mental states. In fact, watching someone else get hurt, especially close family and friends, is one of the most suffering-inducing experiences in my life - despite the fact that my physical pain receptors are not activated at all! Sure, there are some straight up agonizingly bad pain, like getting a limb chopped off or being badly burned. That's certainly also a type of suffering, but it's a non-central example of pain receptors firing, at least by volume.
"crop farming is probably net positive, because ... suffering being swiftly over".
That idea worries me a lot. Every creature suffers; suffering is part of life. That quote sounds like an argument against the existence of life - in general.
I'll admit to being new around here; apologies if I'm poking at old wounds.
I would also add there's a difference between "a life that includes suffering" and "a life where the suffering outweighs everything else".
Being against lives that include any suffering at all is strawman negative utilitarianism, and I agree it's pretty bad.
Being against lives that have more suffering than happiness seems potentially reasonable - I wouldn't want to bring a child into the world if I knew they would live in constant pain and basically never have any happy moments.
But we're not talking about killing others here. We're talking about whether or not it is morally permissible to bring others into existence knowing that they will live under certain (presumably bad) conditions.
The original quotation was about justifying use of pesticide to kill insects *to reduce suffering of the insects*.
I'm not sure making it about bringing others into existence changes things - only those who exist can have opinions about the quality and value of their own existence. To presumptively decide for them seems wrong.
There's the classical philosophical question whether it's better to have many people at a low standard of living and comfort, or a few at a high standard.
It doesn't seem an easy question, but any answer needs to consider the viewpoint of the people involved, and only living people have viewpoints. Observationally, very few people choose suicide because their living standards are low, which seems to hint at an answer.
But even when we're talking about killing, are you opposed to, say, euthanizing pet dogs that are clearly suffering from terminal diseases. Like if the dogs could clearly understand the situation and communicate their preferences to us, we should probably go with that, but given that they cannot is it impermissible to use our best judgement?
I concede that my ethical system doesn't have a defensible answer to that. Probably I'm not smart enough to work it out - if it's even possible to get a "correct" answer.
Do animals ever commit suicide? If they do, that might be an argument in favor of euthanizing your suffering pet. If they don't, against it.
Evolution never promised us a fair universe. Ethics and morality are human inventions - I'm pretty sure animals don't give them a thought. So there's no reason to think there *is* a "correct" answer.
I suspect that we, and whatever follows us, have to decide what we *want* the answer to be. And I'm pretty sure I don't want the answer to be "exterminate all life is a good idea".
Fairly certain animals do not commit suicide. The common vertebrate reaction when sick or injured is to find a dark, isolated place to hide, and most will die in such a position if given the chance. I'm overgeneralizing, but I have seen cats and dogs and ducks do this. Unlike humans, animals generally don't help each other- if you get hurt, you're on your own. On top of that the wilderness is such that if you're miserable enough to want to die, you're probably about to die anyway.
Humans have ethics because ethics helped our ancestors cooperate, and thereby outcompete other tribes.
So maybe we're wrong to extend moral instincts to entities who can't cooperate with us. Maybe our feelings that we ought to care about animals and insects are simply an overapplication of something that's really only appropriate for people (or AIs or EMs or aliens) who can reciprocate.
Be careful using where moral instincts came from as a guide. Eventually they trace back to evolutionary fitness, so if you follow that logic to its conclusion you'll have to decide that the fundamental moral imperative is to spread your genes over as much of the universe as possible.
I get that argument, but if enough humans care about animals, cooperation with them will require that you also act as if you care about animals. The guy who keeps eating other people's pets is not going to be in the tribe for long.
Of course, this is an argument for valuing dogs and cats over basically everything else.
What about entities that predate on us? I mean, in the hunter-gatherer state, tigers will stalk and eat humans, with little evidence that they try to minimize the amount of humans they eat versus rabbits or whatever the tiger equivalent of tofu is.
Should hunter-gatherers nevertheless have an elaborate moral theory that includes minimizing tiger suffering? (Maybe even after they acquire technology and need not suffer predation people should deliver to the tigers X victims a year, so they don't suffer from a diet they find boring.)
The existence of death implies that anyone born will automatically suffer infinity years of no longer being alive. Is it therefore better to not be born?
Well, sure, but a finite number minus an infinite number is minus infinity. So if maximizing the number is the *only* criterion, and the maximum number is zero -- there you go. Nonexistence is better.
Hmm. Not sure anyone can suffer the loss of what he's never had. So if you're never born at all, I'm not sure we can claim you've lost infinity years of life thereby. On the other hand, once you *have* been born, traditionally we *do* claim you're in a position to lose years of life if you die -- there are ample precedents in morality and law. Now generally in the practical world we only say you've lost years of life if you die "before your time" and we're a little fuzzy about that, but roughly the traditional threescore and ten.
But on the other hand, existential dread -- which is surely among the more painful afflictions of consciousness -- will exist if you *ever* die -- and moreover it's sharpest point *is* that it is eternal. If you were told you would come back to life after death, exception a short 24-hour hiatus for a good defrag of your consciousness and changing the oil, most people wouldn't fear death at all. Even if you were told you would be dead for 100 years, but the reborn, I don't think it would be scary. It would be...strange, if you were told the internal were a million years, or a trillion, but still probably not nearly so bad. So it is precisely the loss of infinity years which cause the dread.
That problem is to do with people suffering existential dread while they are alive, not with any suffering they will undergo while dead. Better philosophers than me have suggested ways of coming to terms with the former.
The existence of spiders causes dread to arachnophobes - it is not a moral evil on that account.
>Being against lives that include any suffering at all is strawman negative utilitarianism
This is mildly interesting as a case where a strawman of one family of positions is a roughly central member of another (or maybe it's just a weakman - by your present standards - in the same family). I am against lives unconditionally, as a position almost-but-not-quite downstream of a failure (or success?) to adequately delimit the notion of suffering. I'm not sure this admits formulation as utilitarianism, but if it does, it's definitely negative utilitarianism.
You wouldn't be the first to notice this. For certain utility functions "exterminate all life" does in fact balance the checkbook, even if I would prefer the superintelligence not do that.
Sure. I'll argue that if your utility function says "exterminate all life everywhere" is a win, you *by definition* have a profoundly bad utility function.
My utility function is different from what a utilitarian believes is the total aggregate utility. If the expected total aggregate utility until the end of time is negative, then eliminate all life is the only correct choice under this moral system. The idea of there being more suffering in the world than happiness, seems reasonably plausible to me.
>I'll argue that if your utility function says "exterminate all life everywhere" is a win, you *by definition* have a profoundly bad utility function.
You say you'll argue, so please do. What are the criteria for what determining the adequacy of a definition of "evil", such that the above utility function satisfies those criteria?
Evil is a socially evolved concept. "Evil" is what we have decided is bad for society. Our definition of "society", plus our beliefs (correct or mistaken) about what is good or bad for it, generates our definition of "evil". Elimination of all life is bad for society under almost any definition of "society".
and I'm reasonably sure that there is no logically correct definition of "evil" (or for most things philosophers argue about).
Ethics and morality are human traits that evolved via natural selection because they helped our ancestors cooperate and thereby outcompete other tribes. As such they shouldn't be expected to be logically consistent or "right" or "wrong"
in any absolute sense.
Humans have instincts about these things - those instincts are modified by culture (which itself is subject to evolution),
and to a lesser extent by reason.
Because we're human and care about more than just propagation of our genes, we say that our rules either "work" (we like the outcomes) or they don't (we don't).
I think those who try for more than that are wasting their time (and ours).
As I understand it, meta-ethics is all about considering your actions in the light of a bunch of different ethical systems. It seems plausible that a superintelligence might follow some kind of combination of different ethical systems rather than just one. It's also plausible that the superintelligence might pick which ethical systems to consider, and their relative weightings, by looking through a corpus of ethical discussions such as, say, this thread.
So every time anyone write a comment that takes a crazy ethical system seriously, it increases the weight which will be applied by the superintelligence to that crazy ethical system.
I'd say it's Roko's basilisk with fewer steps. It at least avoids the whole "and let's face it, *you* probably one of the simulated copies right now, so you'd better get to doing some of that acausal bargaining right now" step of Roko's basilisk which was the most insane part.
Something like this was the first idea which popped into my mind after reading the paragraph. I am not very versed in ethics [etc.], so nothing deep here, but I just could not be reminded of one of my favorite child-time books, Adventures of Captain Wrongel (Priklyucheniya kapitana Vrungelya) by Andrey Nekrasov, where Admiral Kusaki, chairman of the “Society for the Protection of Whales” explains [translated by Deepl]:
> "Our common goal," he said, "is to protect cetaceans from extinction. What means do we have for achieving this noble goal? You all know perfectly well, gentlemen, that the only effective means is the extermination of cetaceans, for with their extermination there will be no one left to die out. Now let us consider the case that became the subject of our discussion: Captain Wrongel, the question of which is on the agenda, as he himself admits, had a full opportunity to destroy the sperm whale he met. And what did this cruel man do? He shamefully withdrew from performing his high duty and left the poor animal to die out as much as he pleased!"
I'm generally against the existence of life. I think the world is an intensely, unimaginably, horrific place and I suspect that beliefs to the contrary are mostly lies we tell ourselves to feel better.
I find it very hard to balance suffering with pleasure. Can we torture one person for a week if it will somehow magically give a billion people a wonderful, exciting, pleasurable experience for a week? I find it very hard to say yes to that. And the real world is even worse. There are multiple people being tortured right now, and there aren't a billion having the time of their lives.
Ursula K Le Guin's short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas resonates quite strongly with me. (Freely available and only four pages long.)
Now, unfortunately for me, and fortunately for all those who vehemently disagree with me, I don't have any means of destroying the universe. And I think absent a Big Red Button that ends it all in one go, there's not much I can do to act on my anti-life beliefs. I think killing one person, even if that person lives a life of suffering, is almost always immoral because of the second-order effects of the murder. Mass murders and genocides are horribly immoral, and they would be even (especially?) if their motivation was the reduction of suffering.
But if the superintelligence came along and for some reason took my ethics as its template... I think I could trust it to figure out a way to kill us all nicely, and I think that would be a good thing.
I've spoken with other people who think this, and I think the persistent disagreement I have with them/you largely comes down to personal experiences of the relative intensity of happiness and suffering. Some people have a very hard time believing that any positive experience can outweigh a non-trivial negative one (and maybe for some people it can't). But if I had the option to extend my life for a year, during which I would be tortured for a week, I would do it. Life is pretty good, at least for some people a lot of the time.
Yeah, I'm not sure if that's the case with me. My life is pretty amazing. Nothing seriously bad has happened to me, and I get joy out of the smallest things and easily shrug off the small-to-medium hardships I do encounter with minimal suffering. I think creating more of me would probably be a good thing but I'm not certain.
I'm afraid I really can't wrap my head around your opinion about torture + life extension. I don't even know how to frame my objection. Like, my best guess is that you're mistaken and you just don't realise how horrible torture would be, but I realise it's pretty poor form for me to claim that so I'll try and take your preference at face value.
I mean, torture sounds real bad, and I would bet that during the torture my decision would be different. Maybe after the torture, too. I just don't endorse the idea that (for me personally) a temporary experience of pain should outweigh all the positive things I experience over a much longer period. But all that is just bean-counting... the point is that for me (and apparently for you) the good parts of life heavily outweigh the bad ones. So if it would probably be good to make more of you, why would it also be good to end the existence of life? Do you think it's for some reason impossible to create a future in which most people/beings have good lives?
> So if it would probably be good to make more of you, why would it also be good to end the existence of life?
Because I think I'm probably one of the most fortunate people in the world. I'm comfortable for money, I enjoy my job, I have supportive friends and family whose company makes me very happy, I have green space near me but also easy access to a beautiful city, I'm white, male, tall, strong, high IQ, have no history of mental illness, and as I mentioned above I have a very positive outlook on life. If all people lived like me then I wouldn't be in favour of ending life.
Well, maybe I still would because of animal suffering. I don't tend to go on about wild animal suffering, but I do think it's plausible that the majority of wild animals have net negative lives. Anyway, let's put that aside and focus on people.
> Do you think it's for some reason impossible to create a future in which most people/beings have good lives?
Not literally impossible, but I think we'd be lucky. And even if all people could live lives as happy as or happier than mine, how long will it take to get there? How much suffering for how many people do we deem as acceptable to sacrifice for our hopes of a bright utopian future? Also, I notice you said "most". I've already said I find it very hard to trade off one person's suffering with another person's happiness. "Most" people living good lives isn't good enough if some people are enduring terrible hardship.
> And even if all people could live lives as happy as or happier than mine, how long will it take to get there?
It might take hundreds or thousands of years to get to a point where almost all people (and hopefully animals) live very happy lives. But thinking in deep time, those thousands of years could still be a drop in the ocean.
And yes, we might fail. But trying and failing to improve things isn't much worse than giving up and obliterating it all in advance.
> I've already said I find it very hard to trade off one person's suffering with another person's happiness.
This is more or less a Rawlsian maximin view? I find it hard to sympathize with, partly because it relies on specific intuitions about individual identity that don't hold up to much scrutiny. If it's okay for someone to trade off pain now for happiness later, why isn't it okay, in creating a new person, to trade a small chance of that person having a bad life for a larger chance of a good one?
@Parrhesia, above, seems to agree with you. There's a vast ethical gulf - which I think you're both ignoring - between deciding for yourself, vs. deciding for others.
You've made an evaluation of cost vs. benefit and decided life is bad. But you're not entitled to ignore the fact that others make the same evaluation and come to the other conclusion. What makes you right and them wrong?
To decide for yourself is one thing - to force your decision on others is a totally, completely different thing. And a matter of good vs. evil.
I don't ignore that gulf; I bite the bullet: I don't think freedom to make decisions about your own life is a fundamental right.
In practice, freedom is important. The _feeling_ of having your freedom taken away is an unpleasant feeling and can constitute suffering, so we shouldn't do that to people. But in a philosophical thought experiment where we can remove such things from consideration with a Big Red Button, it's morally neutral.
>But if the superintelligence came along and for some reason took my ethics as its template...
It's worth noting that whatever superintelligence comes along will be the work of people, and will receive (some modification of) their ethics as template. The window of opportunity is not closed to you here.
Wow, that's really depressing. You have my sympathy. Does it help at all to know that I feel exactly the opposite. That I think there are billions having the time of their lives. And that I'd resent you pushing the red button?
I read the LeGuin story. There is a truth that suffering can lead to greater joy. I remember fondly these boy scout week long canoe trips up in the Canadian wilderness. There were long bouts of shared misery; portages with heavy packs/ canoes through swarms of bugs, cold, day long, rain drenched paddling. And yet after it was over, I loved it.
Have you read "A Saucer of Loneliness" by T. Sturgeon?
I appreciate the kind words, but I'm not sure I understand what's prompted them. My opinion of the world might be that it's a terrible place of great suffering, but my experience as one of its most fortunate inhabitants is fairly positive.
Your point about tough experiences leading to joy is a good one. I, too, have embraced many pursuits that on the face of it have seemed unpleasant, and have taken great delight from them. I think the word "suffering" is quite thorny. For me, when I'm cold, wet, in pain, getting bitten by insects, fatigued from walking long distances in rough terrain with heavy loads, there is rarely true suffering. There's adversity, sure, but it's something I can put my back into and become stronger as a result. I think if you can teach people this mindset that's potentially a very high-impact intervention, because you can perhaps reduce suffering without changing people's material conditions. But I'm not sure if there's a reliable way of teaching it.
Of course, I don't know what's going on in other people's heads. Maybe orphans in war zones with no access to clean water don't suffer as much as I imagine. But if that's the case it's very hard to get particularly motivated to make the world a better place. Why should I help people if they are already content?
I haven't read that story. Are you aware of somewhere I can read it free?
Re: what prompted them. Your first two sentences. I find life, the universe, and everything to be amazing. Anyway I'm sorry for reading you incorrectly. I couldn't find a free copy of the Sturgeon short story. It's something I found useful when I was in a depressed mood. "Oh here's someone more retched than me." knowing that helps. A bit like reading "Notes from Underground" by F. Dostoevsky, but less depressing.
OK maybe here, but it will be a big download of volume VII. Not just the short story.
> I'm generally against the existence of life. I think the world is an intensely, unimaginably, horrific place and I suspect that beliefs to the contrary are mostly lies we tell ourselves to feel better.
And in another comment:
> My life is pretty amazing. Nothing seriously bad has happened to me, and I get joy out of the smallest things and easily shrug off the small-to-medium hardships I do encounter with minimal suffering.
Jesus fucking Christ, what an insufferably arrogant attitude. "My life is worth living, but there's no way those poor people in Africa could ever enjoy their sorry lifes. It would be best to put them out of their misery."
What can I tell you? Maybe get out more. Lift your gaze from your navel.
They do seem contradictory. I had to read carefully to be sure both comments were made by the same person.
Life satisfaction seems to have a lot more to do with expectations than with living standards. I don't think poor Africans are much less happy than rich Americans.
I'm curious what you expect/hope to achieve with this comment. Is it sufficient to make the big bad man on the internet feel bad about himself? Or do you expect to change his mind by insulting him? Or is this just about letting off steam?
I didn't say anything about Africa, by the way. It is my belief from my many interactions with other people, both direct and indirect, that lives as happy as mine are shockingly rare in all countries. Arrogant? To be aware of how lucky I am?
Necessary and true? What was? The helpful advice you gave me? The facts you conveyed? Your comment is empty: nothing more than an insult. What does it even mean for such a thing to be necessary or true?
You're welcome to criticise my philosophical beliefs as vociferously as you wish, but I'm afraid I don't have time for your posturing.
I think (to strip away the pejorative part) he's suggesting that the many interactions you've had with other people are not in fact a representative sample, that in his opinion a better sample would demonstrate that most people are in fact at least as happy as you.
For what it's worth, I had a similar reaction, which is that gee you must have an abnormally high fraction of miserable friends and acquaintances.
I've conceded in other comments that I may be mistaken, and that people who live what seem to be miserable lives could in fact be happier than I think. My follow-up arguments to that are:
(a) Even if _most_ people have pretty happy lives, I'm still not comfortable with a small number of people living absolutely horrific lives.
(b) Where's the evidence that the apparently-miserable are not so? There are certain circumstances that billions of people find themselves in that seem really unpleasant. I think the burden of proof is on he who asserts they're not so bad. (Bearing in mind that the claim is that most people are at least as happy as me.)
(c) Perhaps not an 'argument', but if it's true that apparently miserable people are in fact happy, then why should I engage in ethics at all? If people in poverty, people with mental illness, people with preventable diseases, kids who are being bullied, women who are trapped in abusive relationships, people living in war zones, people living in authoritarian countries, and people in cults aren't actually suffering, but are 'at least as happy as me' then it seems to me that I shouldn't give to charity, shouldn't bother with politics, and in general shouldn't try to make the world a better place. Is that a fair conclusion?
For what it's worth, I wasn't only talking about my friends and acquaintances. I think they're, on average, happier than average, though still less happy than me. I'm talking about reading accounts of living with depression and then looking at statistics of how many people suffer from depression. I'm talking about my knowledge that torture is a thing that happens ever. (Torture, by the way, being something that is unpleasant by design.) I'm talking about documentaries about Palestine or Syria. I'm really just talking about combining normal knowledge about the world with normal understanding of the emotions of those close to me and extrapolating to find more suffering than empathy could even begin to cope with.
I certainly don't claim this is representative, and I know there are studies about happiness and life satisfaction out there, but my whole point is that I really care about the small tail of the distribution in the 'life is brutally unpleasant' range, and I don't think you can balance that off against people like me in the 'life is really good' tail.
Almost nobody who has the physical means to kill themselves actually does so. That's all the evidence you need to realize that your stated preference of "destroying the universe" and a "superintelligence coming along and killing us all nicely" being "a good thing" is indefensibly wrong.
> it seems to me that [...] I shouldn't bother with politics, and in general shouldn't try to make the world a better place
Considering that your idea of "making the world a better place" is to end the existence of all life, that may be a good thing.
>That quote sounds like an argument against the existence of life - in general.
Not all life, just all life that isn't the upper middle class of modern western civilization. And maybe their household pets.
It's mostly the upper middle class who have the time and inclination to think about this sort of thing and the resources to make themselves heard. Upper-middle-class suburbanites know that if they were deprived of the comforts of upper-middle-class suburbia, they would suffer immensely. Sentience is sentience, we are all basically the same under the skin (scale, exoskeleton, whatever), therefore all sentient life suffers horribly if it doesn't have the comforts of the modern Western upper middle class. Before the invention of the suburb all humans everywhere lived lives of unrelenting misery, possibly sustained by some vision of their descendants living a life that might have some respite from suffering.
Now that we have that, it is our moral duty to uplift as many of our less fortunate human bretheren (and maybe their household pets) to the upper-middle-class lifestyle that is the only way for any sentient being to ever not suffer, and exterminate all life that cannot be so uplifted.
Finding the flaws in this argument is left as an exercise to the student.
It might work better if you say what you mean. Are you arguing that raising standards of living does not have much/any effect on happiness/suffering? I have to say, describing extreme poverty as a first-world problem is pretty extreme. You are describing the hedonic treadmill in a way that could be an argument against fixing any problems, ever.
Raising standards of living usually has a very small effect on happiness/suffering. Worth doing if it doesn't lead to false expectations, but it's not going to greatly change any ethical calculus.
And "extreme poverty" is ill-defined and usually applied to poverty that is less than extreme. People in the process of literally starving to death are suffering, but that's not common. Rural Peruvian highlanders living on <$5/day are mostly happy or content for most of their lives. Medieval peasants were mostly happy or content for most of their lives. But I've lost track of the number of people who have in all serious told me that Medieval *kings* had worse lives than the contemporary poor because they didn't have modern dentistry and the internet.
And to the point at hand here, the average mealworm is happy or content for most of its life. The average wild rabbit is happy or content for most of its life, even if that life ends in a wolf's jaw or to a hunter's bullet. The average cow on the average farm is happy or content for most of its life. I'm open to the theory that a factory-farmed chicken may live a life of constant suffering, but most of the people trying to sell me on that theory are trying to sell the same theory w/re cows and I've been on too many beef and dairy farms.
Raising standards of living has a small and usually positive effect on happiness vs. suffering. *Lowering* standards of living has a large negative effect on happiness and involves much suffering. But when we think about the suffering of peasants, cows, or insects, most people resort to a naive sort of moral intuitionism grounded on imagining what it would be like if their standard of living were abruptly lowered to that of a peasant/cow/insect/whatever. This is pure bogosity.
Some rationalists will at least try to cobble together a metric for moral *worth* based on e.g. neural complexity. What we need is a metric for what it takes to keep a creature with X neurons happy. Even for values of X that equal the human brain, the answer is almost always "not nearly as much as you expect if you don't first spoil them rotten by having them live a first-world middle-class lifestyle".
I feel like trying to focus on insect welfare before we resolve human welfare or even animal welfare is kind of a huge reach. We can only do so many things at a time, and addressing them one at a time, in order of how easy they are to resolve, will probably get the desired moral outcomes quicker and easier than worrying about if eating bugs is ok when a million people die of starvation.
Yes, specifically, we can only do about 7.6 billion things at a time (current population of earth).
I think this type of argument is often correct within a given narrow organization, but usually wrong at a population level. People are very varied and specialized in their interests and spheres of influence; their efforts are not all that easily fungible. Furthermore, most problems have diminishing returns on resources devoted to trying to solve them; you can't just put very human on earth on solving the current biggest problem, you'll get much greater returns by diversifying resource investments.
If this problem doesn't speak to you, then it probably is best if you ignore it, and don't feel compelled to care about it. But for the couple of people who really want to focus on it, and for the people who want to devote a few hours to thinking and talking about it, it's probably good that society is diversifying it's investments by letting them devote that time to something they find compelling.
I'm not so sure. Does the metaphor "don't run before you can walk" fall apart at the population level? Sure, we can research 7.6 billion things, but taking effective and coordinated action on them is more limited. I mean, even just looking a it money wise, there's a finite amount of money. Giving to one charity takes away from another.
Focus may have been a bad word on my part, maybe "take action"? But this feels like Charles Babbage worrying about rowhammer when designing the Difference Engine. I'll be happy enough if we can even get people to eat beef over chicken.
Many People found eugenics, alchemy, bloody letting, astrology, and string theory to be compelling. Those were also a waste of time leading the human population in the wrong direction.
That seems to be a rather strong claim about string theory, but I will admit I'm no physicist.
The thing is, even though we know alchemy is bunk, a lot of the effort that went into it furthered our knowledge of chemistry. Phosphorus was discovered by an alchemist, for example. The same thing can be applied to astrology as proto-astronomy.
You also can't use the fact that some ideas haven't worked out as a fully general argument to shoot down whatever cause someone is proposing.
Alchemy evolved into chemistry, but astrology and astronomy have always existed at the same time. I don't think astrology has ever done much for astronomy, except help provide funding.
I don't think it's true that astrology has had no benefit at all. Astrometry -- just observing and writing down where things are -- underlies both astrology and astronomy, and there are many times (Kepler using Tycho's data sprigs to mind) where astrometry has been of great utility to astronomy (or maybe better to astrophysics). So to the exent the Druid priests kicked things off by keeping detailed records to forecast eclipses, that is a positive benefit.
On the other hand, the higher reaches of astrology, where we start to think it means something to have the Sun in Aquarius, do harm to astronomy because they inject into the science all the idiocy of human passions and social pressures, so it's entirely possible the total harm matches or excees the total benefit.
That is definitely a very strong claim about string theory. To call it unsupported by evidence is fine. To call it a waste of time shows that you've been reading about string theory only from its detractors. It ignores advances such as holography, and that it's being used everywhere to simplify complicated field theory equations. I know someone who used string theory to calculate the viscosity of quark-gluon plasmas, and it's even used in condensed matter theory.
But that's a little like the space enthusiasts saying Apollo was totally worth it because we got Tang and Velcro out of the space program. Doesn't really address the root of the criticism, which is opportunity cost -- what *else* could people have been doing had so much talent and energy not been sunk into this particular venture?
I think it's a criticism the HEP community needs to take seriously. After all, we distinguish ourselves from the theologians and priests because we claim not to waste time with things that are empirical unproveable and only addressable by pure reasoning and/or appeals to aesthetics ("Isn't it beautiful, elegant? Wouldn't it be satisfying if it were true?")
What else indeed? If you remove something aspiring scientists are interested in, will they still be scientists or will they leave academia and start doing 9-5 jobs? What's to say that plucking out string theory will mean resources are diverted to what you consider more useful, rather than just added to the military budget to make the newest drone? That isn't without precedent. Condensed matter physicists petitioned against the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider, not the previous blog) because they thought the money would've been going to them if the SSC was cancelled. Nope. It went elsewhere.
And of course, I'll have to reiterate the fact that AdS/CFT are used extremely widely in physics, literally an entirely new calculational method on par with perturbation theory, that works exactly where perturbation theory fails. It's not some triviality like Velcro or Tang. String theory research is already worth it, even if it's untrue.
I also disagree that looking into things that are pure reasoning and/or appeals to aesthetics is unscientific. Hawking radiation is empirically unprovable, practically, and it is a result of pure reasoning about QFT and GR. Is that worthless? Aesthetic preferences are what gave us SR over some janky ether theory, and it's what got rid of epicycles in the first place. Was that a waste of time?
*Science* is distinguished from *theology* because of its empirical grounding, but there are always scientists doing science many levels removed from empirical tests, and that is okay.
The problem is that we don't know the answer to the counter-factual: would phosphorus have been discovered earlier or later had the world been free of the Hermitic cults? We don't know. It doesn't seem especially plausible to posit that a world in which nobody believes in magic is also a world in which nobody wants better swords or cooking utensils (and is therefore interested in improvements in metallurgy).
In addition to what darwin said, putting thought into weird edge cases can often help us clarify our thoughts on more normal situations as well. Consider Scott's comment at the end of the essay about how this gives him useful perspective on the cows vs chickens question.
Agreed. It's probably uncharitable but I feel like effective altruism recent shift towards focusing on animal suffering rather than preventing malaria, Guinea worn, and other unpleasant things happening to humans in the third world is in part because veganism is much more normalized and socially accepted as a lifestyle choice than making people have to think about the third world. With the attendant uncomfortable questions that brings
In terms of prioritization of nothing else I find it difficult to justify caring about insects while human children and dying in painful and preventable ways
One important conclusion you can draw from pondering the ethics of killing insects is that utility monsters are a feature, not a bug, of utilitarianism. You're skeptical of the idea that your life is worth less than the lives of a billion bugs. That means, in a utilitarian framework (which you are in, because only in variants of utility theory can a choice between "X bugs" and "Y humans" depend on the values of X and Y), that you've accepted that utility monsters should get the utility, and you find the idea that they shouldn't implausible. It's a lot easier to root for the utility monster when you're the monster.
I think the life of the animal matters more than its death, if the latter can be quick and painless, and it's a lot easier to give a factory farmed insect a good life than it is for a factory farmed cow or chicken. Conditions that cause chickens immense stress and suffering, like being packed together in cages, won't even bother mealworms, who would probably be quite happy in a warm, moist, nutrient-rich substrate with ten thousand of their brothers and sisters, insofar a mealworm can experience happiness. So I think switching to factory farming insects would be an immense moral good, even if that ends up killing 10^n more individual organisms.
I would also accept wireheading our livestock into a state of permanent bliss, or bioengineering away their capacity for suffering, but it seems easier to just make lab-grown meat in comparison. As expensive as that is, insects strike me as the more promising option.
Scott seems to have assumed that insects raised in factory-farming conditions are *necessarily* suffering horribly. Is this just because we can no longer conceive of raising animals for food in a non-horrible way? Can we not conceive of the first world's agricultural apparatus doing bringing anything but suffering to anything it touches? That may be understandable...but I don't know if it's true.
Even under the assumption that we do utilitarian shut-up-and-add decision making, we are allowed to terminally value aspects of human life other than simple pain and pleasure. I don't accept a wire-headed human life as valuable; I value whether a human life contained learning, love, virtue, etc.--even if no one, even the person involved, knew about or consciously appreciated every one of those acts. If I can value those things for their own sake, how come insect welfare can only be about "nociceptors"?
What does a good life look like for a mealworm? It's not a trivial question, but to a first approximation, just as you say--worming around in nice dirt with other mealworms seems at least pretty good. I'd be willing to bet that those mealworms are exposed to fewer dangers and are better-fed than their wild brethren, which at least seems unlikely to be a strong negative; if we're confident that overcrowding isn't and issue I don't see how this could be going wrong.
I currently have no reason to believe that insects raised for food are living a bad life. I value the presence of insects in Earth's biosphere, suffering and all; if the lives of factory-farmed insects are not clearly worse, I have no objections whatever. I think I would prefer it to any idea of wireheading livestock, which raises half as many hackles for me as the idea of wireheading humans.
And bugs are not bad at all once you get used to the texture/idea.
This is basically my approach to animal welfare, I think rather than opposing all farming we should just be ensuring that they're not suffering most of the time.
Jain monks will not eat root vegetables because insects may be harmed in the harvesting, will use a special broom to sweep the path ahead of them lest they trample one, and wear a mask to prevent accidentally ingesting and hurting minute living beings.
This is interesting because it suggests people have been tying themselves into moral knots like those in this thread for nearly three thousand years.
I'm not sure what the eighth century BC Indian equivalent of an internet forum was, but I guess there must have been one, and an argument very much like this must have occurred there which led to the creation of Jainism.
Theoretically, you could breed or genetically engineer an animal that was both massive and dumb as bricks, like a whale that just sits in a warehouse all day. I assume that if you could breed an animal to not need exercise, factory farming would already have done it, but it's worth thinking about.
And there is a religion called Jainism that is based around exactly this principle - they preach radical nonviolence against all life, and stepping on an insect is considered a sin.
Free range animals are still factory farmed. It's a question of scale: if you keep ten thousand chickens in one barn, the fact that they can walk around freely and aren't kept in cages doesn't make it not factory farming.
There is a lot of work currently on cellular agriculture: instead of growing the whole animal, why not only make muscle and fat tissue? It's much more ethical, but also more efficient in terms of resources. See https://gfi.org/cultivated/ for example.
We could also just eat plants and fungi, but meat is so important in most cultures that it's hard to convince people to do that.
While dumb compared to us, chickens are still relatively intelligent and play a lot when given the option. I would want something even stupider, something not even aware, that sits in one spot and *does not move*, even with no restraints, though it would still need to build muscle somehow. That seems like the logical solution to all the problems Scott lists.
My metric is not pain or suffering, but sufficient degree of sapience.
That is to say, if, given appropriate tools or training, a being can communicate with me in (a) language - at that point, I call that being a person (I thus do not quite technically consider humans fully people until well after birth).
For convenience's sake (because this metric clearly has many practical problems), I assume that if if a being can do this, then any member of their species can do so.
Thus, even torturing a cow to death is no different than torturing an insect to death - neither is intrinsically evil - it is merely that enjoying torturing a live animal is generally not something that results in healthy or good ends.
As such, as long as there is a useful reason for doing so, and less painful (if they exist) are harder or more expensive to implement, I am indifferent to animal-pain.
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In any event, I expect cultured meat to pass the point of equal expense within the next couple of decades, at which point this entire discussion will be moot.
I'm not sure that makes any difference in the post's moral framework, though. If degree of sapience is what matters, it doesn't matter if *[type of being] in general* are sapient when the particular individual you're talking about isn't, by its definition, unless we're using some really weird logic.
That is, we can assume humans in general are sapient because we found one human that can learn a language and communicate in it; but since a stroke victim or infant cannot, they're not sapient, so...
I think just not torturing for pleasure at all is a good deontological rule to follow, and I strongly disagree with OP saying that "neither is intrinsically evil".
That aside, I think once you start differentiating between physical and cognitive limitations to speech, a lot of the moral issues resolve. For example, dogs and cats, as per the youtube videos of push-button proto-speech, have the brains to form basic language, and the only reason we've never seen it before is because they don't have the developed lip and tongue muscles that human speech requires. Similarly, paralyzed spinal-trauma patients may be unable to communicate without the emerging technologies that interpret eye movement. All of these beings should be respected, but one that gets every conceivable communication-assistance device and still can't produce anything might be too limited or too broken to care about. A notable exception would be aphasias, which destroy language processing capacities but leave the rest of the brain intact. I'm not sure how to handle that, and I'm sure there are other exceptions I haven't thought of. But broadly speaking, once a social animal becomes so impaired that it cannot maintain the respect of its group, death is often preferable.
With regard to torture, I used that to demonstrate the extreme edge of my position - that is to say, if literally torturing a cow leads to some net benefit for 'real people', and alternate routes to that benefit are more difficult to implement, then I do not see it as evil to continue in doing so.
For example, right now it cannot be denied that farming and slaughtering animals for food causes a non-zero amount of pain. However, at this moment, there is no alternate method of producing the meat of those animals at anywhere near that cost.
At some point, the cost of vat-grown mean will approach parity with farming, at which point the moral calculus will flip (I would view it as wrong to farm and slaughter, outside of the small number of cases where it is for some reason not practical to go vat-grown (e.g. a religious sacrificial ritual))
I'm not sure I buy the argument that slaughtering animals is a necessity (or even a strong practicality) when it comes to feeding people.
I'm vegetarian and I spend less money on food now than I did previously. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the cost per calorie of meat is necessarily higher than the cost per calorie of plant-based food, since plant-based food is essentially converted to meat as it is fed to livestock, and this conversion is not perfectly efficient.
I think the main justifications for meat-eating are some combination of convenience and pleasure for the meat-eaters. Convenience is mostly a function of social momentum and is certainly easier to shift in favor of a plant-based diet than waiting for vat-grown meat. Gastronomic pleasure is a legitimate consideration, but I think it's important to be explicit that that's what's being traded off against the cow's pain.
With regard to language - that is why I add "if even a single member has (complex) language, I assume the entire species does" and why I also specified "even through the use of tools".
The latter clause also includes beings who, for whatever reason, in some way lack the senses or organs to perceive us, or make us perceive them, or their environment is such that the development of communication is impeded or just happened to never happen.
My apologies, I was horribly unclear (insomniaposting).
The thing I actually want to treat as "being a real person" is an admittedly nebulous "is a sufficiently complex mind" - ability to communicate is just a tool for trying to ascertain that for a a given species.
of course it is - (I assert that) moral systems are inherently axiomatic - you start off by defining some core concepts of good and bad (in some sense), and everything else is a logical consequence of applying those to states-of-the-universe.
As long as you're self-consistent and (don't end up with theorems that make statements about the universe that are disproven), you're fine (although, of course, when two people disagree on the good/evil of something, we get to interesting metaproblems)
I don't think you even need to be self-consistent. You can always have arbitrary exceptions.
I subscribe to weighed utilitarianism myself. My utils count for the most, then family, then extended family and friends, then city, then region, then nation. Neoconfucianism was good enough for 2,000 years of Chinese civilization, it's good enough for me.
(Heh, that's not terribly dissimilar from my own personal construction - I also have a nested venn diagram kind of thing of in-groups with greater or lesser mutual duty and such to other members)
I don't mean consistent like Kant's Categorical Imperative, I mean self-consistent as in logically self-consistent.
Like, in theory, if there was a case where your weighted utilitarianism demanded that you both "do X" and "not do X" - that would be a contradiction, a lack of self-consistency.
However, once we're talking formal logic.... then it is hard (if not impossible, as I suspect) to construct systems that are sufficiently powerful (able to talk about any scenario) that are not at least as powerful as Number Theory, in which case the Incompleteness Theorem applies, in which case there are infinitely many scenarios not quite covered by you rules - in this case, you have at least two choices consistent with the rest of your system.
This is why, I think, that really understanding one's moral system is so important - if you really get your underlying wants and assignments of importance, you can step outside the system and choose a choice that best fits the... spirit of your law.
It depends on the meaning of the word "communicate." Usually we mean something like "convey your internal state in such a way that I can imagine it." Since a chatbot has no internal state -- it isn't like anything to be a chatbot -- by definition it cannot "communicate" in this sense. It can convey some other agent's internal state (whoever design the chatbot), but we wouldn't call that "communicating" for the same reason we don't say a word processor program or pencil is capable of "communicating" just because it can be used by some other human to talk to us.
I intended as Carl said in the first couple of sentences.
I am somewhat leery of using "internal state" here, because it is difficult to draw a distinction between meaningful, existent, non-meaningful, and non-existent internal states. (I myself prefer an information theory assertion here)
In terms of deciding whether a being is worthy of moral consideration, no, "can hold a conversation with me" is not a reasonable metric. It's just pulled out of your ass because it sounds nice or something. Suffering, properly defined, is intrinsically bad, and pleasure is intrinsically good. Why dismiss those plain truths in favor of some oddly specific ultimate rule that you just made up?
I am declaring subjective quality of consciousness to be the end-all thing. You just completely made up this rule and are citing it as the decision factor to justify torturing a being an unlimited amount who you believe suffers pain. Sounds kinda end-all to me. And just like, why? What's the point of ethics to you? Just seeing how well you can follow arbitrary rules?
The point of ethics (in my opinion) is as follows:
1) For a given person, there exist states of the universe that they like more than other states of the universe (e.g., given infinite time and memory, I can rank every state of the universe on some scale).
2) As actually making that list, perfectly analyzing the universe, and taking the actions that aim towards an optimal state(s) (according to that person) is not possible, we have no choice but to construct models that approximate reality and (we hope) aim us towards our preferred states of the universe more often than not.
3) Thus, the selection of one's moral rules, in reality, starts from what one wants to be, and is thus quite arbitrary when a selection of rules is viewed in a vacuum (or even when the whole system is viewed, particularly if the starting point(s) are sufficiently far from one's own).
Cows can definitely communicate with people. It isn't a sophisticated language and is based on simple sounds, direction of attention, and body language...but there are deaf humans who rely on sign language too. There are even deaf children who are intellectual issues. Though if you go with a 'if any member of a species can do it, then all members are covered regardless of individual capacity or circumstances' then that gets you out of some dilemmas.
But where is the line between communication, language, intent, sapience, etc. Have you spent a lot of time with cows? It is one thing to read about their relative intelligence or count the brain cells, but if you spend time with them you may get a different picture. They have personalities and individual traits and are quite capable of communicating not just with humans, but each other, and with dogs.
I often find discussions around animal intelligence to be quite laughable armchair nonsense from people who don't seem to have ever actually interacted with the animals in question. It often comes off as bizarre and ivory tower out of touch nonsense. Raise a dog well, teach it 100 commands, feel its moods, have it sleep next to you, have it protect you, and watch it age and die, then mourn for it...then perhaps have a more informed view on animal intelligence and moral value.
It can be easy to write off other people's experiences and simply say...oh that's all in your head, it is just a dumb animal...but that's just a forceful and arrogant form of promoting one's ignorance. Meanwhile the rancher with a great relationship with his cows can utter a few words and the cows will come in and stand at their milking stalls. I'm certainly not arguing that lived experience isn't the 'only' way to know the world, but there is often a strange attitude of being hostile or dismissive of lived experiences in the world of armchair logic. As though an experiment isn't partially 'just' a careful counting of someone else's lived experiences of using instruments or running interviews.
Many animals have much higher and purpose driven levels of intelligence and trying to measure them in human terms like complex speech or tool making is getting lost in the map while missing the territory of intelligence - which is the thing we wanted to measure. But instead we get stuck on silly proxy metrics like tool making.
I endorse this absolutely. "Communicate in a language" is a stupid way to measure things. Dolphins can't, chimps can't, dogs can't — but will anyone really argue that these beings do not have thoughts, feelings, and experiences of some kind? (If so, do we really care what that person thinks?)
I'm not sure what sense this metric makes in other ways, as well. Stroke patients, as Scott notes, might no longer be able to use language to communicate. Are they no longer sapient? If we're talking about good and evil and so forth, why is "ability to suffer" not an extremely relevant criterion?
You must have missed the post with all the links to dogs and cats that can speak to humans using buttons that trigger voice recordings. They've been going around youtube. Also dolphins do in fact have a sort of proto-language that appears to be universal across oceans.
The main problem with "ability to suffer" is that it is too broad. To quote Terminator 2: "I sense injuries. The data could be called pain." The Terminator itself, of course, is of human-like intelligence, but hazard detection and avoidance, and even response to starvation, goes all the way down to bacteria (chemotaxis and endospores respectively).
Certainly, ability to be in a preferred or dispreferred internal state is *necessary* for moral weight. I don't think anyone disputes that if something doesn't care and can't care what you do to it, you've no obligation to treat it or not treat it in any particular way. But it essentially reduces to "is alive" (unless you count viruses as alive; lysogeny is about the only time a virus ever makes a "decision" and most viruses can't even do that), which makes using it as a *sufficient* criterion rather thorny.
Well, probably because enshrining pleasure and pain as the primary moral axis tends to turn us into eat, drink, and be merry Hedonists, and most people feel a mild revulsion at reducing the miracle of experience to the stimulation or not of sensory nerves and the pleasure/pain centers of the brain. Most people want some kind of logos, or meaning, to be central to their ethics.
That doesn't mean pleasure/pain aren't important metrics, but usually we want them to be secondary criteria, things we consider *after* we have settled on the question of meaning. That's why (among other reasons) we think it's ethical to send children to school, which they usually dislike: it's a method of delivering more meaning to their future lives.
Sure, a lot of people may feel a mild revulsion at it, but it doesn't change the facts. Suffering and pleasure, defined broadly enough, are indeed all that *ultimately* matter. However distasteful that is, when you shift an ethical conversation away from those basic truths, you start talking nonsense.
If sending children to school is ethical (which I think it probably is), then it's because doing so is likely to ensure better overall wellbeing for everyone involved, not because it gives them "meaning". To whatever extent finding meaning is desired by/pleasurable to individuals, it's included in a thorough accounting of wellbeing anyway.
An interesting assertion (that suffering and pleasure are "all that ultimately matter"). However, inasmuch as I don't agree with it, but you have adduced no evidence or argument for it, there's not much I can say beyond that.
I actually think I'm being the most parsimonious here by limiting myself to saying that only suffering and pleasure matter. You're the one arguing that there exists more that matters beyond those intrinsic values. You're the one who should produce evidence or an argument for your additional, more complex moral claims.
So which is it? Are you claiming that suffering and pleasure do not matter ethically (and hence, I should prove that they do), or are you able to produce evidence or an argument that something else also matters ethically?
I think you make a strong and useful point about the general superiority of experience over theory, but I do feel it needs to be pointed out the very impressive talent human beings have for anthropomorphizing. People are perfectly capable of thinking that trees and rocks, the wind, planets, people in comas et cetera are intentionally and empathically communicating. How much easier to do it with cute animals. (I notice people are a lot less likely to argue that Komodo dragons and cockroaches have inner lives, though.)
We also need to bear in mind the talent *any* life form has for adaptation. A horse can be taught mathematics in that it can be trained to knock its hooves four times when shown the symbol 2 + 2. That doesn't mean it grasps addition, that means it knows what gets it fed. So we can assume that cows have some talent for figuring out what movements, noises, et cetera get it fed, and if looking soulfully at the Bringer Of Hay and mooing softly does the job, well, they'll figure that out. Doesn't mean they have developed emotional connections in the way we do. (Or alternatively it means our "emotional connects" may be less existentially meaningful than we think they are, they may just be *our* brains working out the most efficient ways for us to get fed.)
Again, I do want to emphasize that I completely agree with you that actual phenomenological experience is always to be prefered over theorizing, and in principle anyone who wants to claim a dog has Buddha nature, or conversely a dog is a meat puppet robot with no more inner life than a wind-up toy, should in either case spend some time with a dog before submitting his final manuscript for publication.
Can we even know at the 10^-10 level about plants being incapable of feeling pain? Actually, does all of biology hold one proposition at that level of confidence?
Maybe not, but as far as I know we have no alternative to eating *some* kind of living thing, aside from starving to death (which also causes suffering).
So if we admit to some chance that plants experience suffering, then we are committed to zero-expected-suffering society being impossible, and we just have to minimize expected suffering, which probably still means eating plants.
To be born is to commit to a lifetime of suffering, of various sorts. And isn't the greatest pain of all the knowledge and experience of mortality? If minimizing suffering is the highest moral goal, Khattam-Shud, then yes it is clear Thanos was right -- indeed, didn't go far enough, as the best of all possible universes is one that is entirely sterile, has no life at all.
Or to quote Westley: "Life is pain, Princess. Anyone who says differently is selling something."
Nobody chooses to be born, it's our parents that commit us to a lifetime of suffering. Of course, for us to continue to exist we're evolved to think that they are unconditionally entitled to make that commitment. Still, we're been known to question other adaptations, so why not this one also? A recent indie movie hit Capernaum makes a decent effort in this direction.
Well, sure, but it's us (in choosing to become parents) that commit not only our children but *their* children and so forth ad infinitum to a lifetime of suffering. Just think, by choosing to breed, this generation is directly causing the future birth of an almost arbitrary number of brutal dictators, rapists, and ordinary murderers (assuming humanity continues to exist for a very long time).
Well, I think that in aggregate humans experience more suffering than pleasure, with balance having been even worse in the past, and still much worse in the animal kingdom. Also, the suffering "black swan" is much more likely than the opposite (being tortured by some sadist in a basement for decades vs. I dunno AI engineered utopia?). Therefore no life at all would seem to be the utilitarian optimum, but (luckily?) pretty much nobody is actually utilitarian.
Assuming that's true, annihilation isn't a problem, it's a solution.
But also it's a lot trickier than that. Even if we were somehow able to confidently determine that annihilation is the best course of action, we would have a really really tough (probably impossible, and definitely really risky) job implementing that solution. If we just stopped having kids, we'd be leaving behind a world of wild animals, who seem to live considerably more miserable lives than humans. But even if we could, it wouldn't be enough to eliminate all humans and mammals and even fish and bugs. We'd want to eliminate all life on Earth down to the microbes to prevent them from re-evolving into suffering beings. And then there's the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Doesn't really seem like a viable solution, and if we attempted it there's a good chance we'd just end up causing more net suffering than if we hadn't.
Anyway, my point is that this does not dispute the basic truth: suffering and pleasure are indeed what matters.
We talk about suffering for factory farming because it's the most obvious variable and drives the arithmetic, but obviously w should be full utilitarians not just negative utilitarians in general.
Depends on your definition of "pain." If it reduces to "aversive stimuli" then every form of life without exception, down to the simplest bacterium, experiences pain. It's part of the definition of "life" that it avoids aversive stimuli, which implies -- if that's to what you think the definition of "pain" reduces -- that everything that lives can experience pain, by definition.
...which does rather imply that if so much moral calculus is to be based on the experience of "pain," one might be well-advised to begin with a robust definition of what "pain" is -- and furthermore that the observation that X avoids Y does not lend itself to a robust conclusion that X experiences pain when Y happens.
Where to draw the line to prevent suffering? Jains go so far as to covering their mouths with cloth to avoid inhaling insects.
I gave up meat for 13 years after having to kill a fresh caught fish before cleaning it to cook. It struggled and the sense that it wanted to live just as much as I did was undeniable. I continued to consume dairy and eggs but the thought of making another animal die to feed me made me sick for a long time.
I eat meat occasionally now mostly to avoid being that pain in the ass who has to have his own special meal but I prefer sticking to flora.
But no, I don’t watch the sidewalk to avoid ants or refrain from slapping a mosquito.
The more I read on this subject, the happier I am to maintain a transactional view of morality (ie "morality is a peace treaty between humans") where all non-human (or human-intelligence alien) lives have zero moral value (but I reserve the right to have an aesthetic preference against animal cruelty).
That's very unsatisfying to me. An aesthetic preference is very weak, and doesn't feel commensurate with the level of evil involved in e.g. torturing a conscious being. Seems like sort of a cop-out to avoid having to think about it too much; having your steak and eating it too, so to speak.
It's better than nothing... but if you could watch a video of a dog being tortured to death and honestly say "yes, that's morally equivalent to an ugly painting", I think I would find it hard to leave you alone with anyone or anything I cared about, because something's missing inside.
This response seems confused. "Something's missing inside" seems to indicate you suspect a missing intuition, but someone with a (relevant) missing intuition wouldn't need "a cop-out to avoid having to think about it too much" (i.e. to avoid an unpleasant intuition coming up).
Unless you have a God, aesthetic preference is all we have to go on. Why do you call it weak? People are quite capable of giving their lives for aesthetic preferences, or of dedicating their lives to their fulfillment. Aesthetic preferences are among the most powerful human feelings, and among the least susceptible to bemusement. They're things out of which we cannot be argued easily, and where social deception is not easy ("Trust your instincts" et cetera).
Indeed, isn't your second paragraph you stating *your* aesthetic preferences in a very strong and commited way?
Would you be happier if I found another word that lies somewhere between "moral" and "aesthetic" to express how I feel about animal cruelty? Perhaps that would be a more accurate assessment of the way I feel.
Well, at least it keeps us from the egoism of projecting our own (probably wired-in evolved) emotional instincts onto strange species.
I mean, maybe what the dolphins have been trying to convey with all the jumping and squeaking is "We need you to help us exterminate those evil bastards the sharks, so knock it off with this preserving of the natural ecosystem crap. I mean dafuq? they eat your young ones off surfboards. What's *wrong* with you?"
I recall a knowledgeable friend telling me that dolphins are capable of perpetuating cruelty against other dolphins and other species in the wild. I have difficulties coming up search words that bring search results that are not about cruelty of humans towards dolphins (or cruelty of dolphins directed at scuba divers).
Based on my work studying fruit flies in college labs, it feels like it's a lot easier to make mutant insect strains than mutant large-mammal strains (or maybe it's just less frowned on, w/e).
How hard would it be to make a strain of mealworms with no nocioceptors? And to what extent would this solve the problem?
If we can find the mealworm equivalents of the genes that make some humans insensitive to pain, it could be pretty easy. It would actually be fairly easy to check it was working, since the mealworms would no longer try to avoid unpleasant stimuli.
They would be GMO, but I'm not sure on how many people are willing to eat bugs but not GMO bugs.
<blockquote>How hard would it be to make a strain of mealworms with no nocioceptors? And to what extent would this solve the problem?</blockquote>
Suppose someone created a breed of cats with "no nociceptors". Would that make it okay to kill or them? There are humans with genetic defects who don't feel pain, or have their feelings of pain muted to such an extent it's life-threatening. Does that make it okay, or comparatively okay, to kill or torture them? In any case, assuming for the sake of the argument the validity of utilitarians' moral arithmetic, wouldn't the lives of mealworms who don't feel pain but only pleasure thereby be <i>more</i> rather than less worth living than the lives of mealworms who wriggle in pain?
For myself, I neither subscribe to this moral arithmetic, which I find profoundly idiotic, and also find it hard to convince myself that painful experience always and necessarily makes a life less worth living. Take the experience of the commenter upthread who was trying to kill his fish to eat it. I doubt they would say it was pleasurable or neutral, so it must have been painful, but did having that experience make their life less worth living?
I mean, usually torture is defined by its being a negative experience for the victim. It's still bad to hammer nails into a leper because he presumably still doesn't want to die of blood loss or infection, and it's still bad to put a leper in a pillory and throw rotten eggs at her because she would presumably prefer to be doing other things (and can still smell, IIRC), but given a magic gun that *only* inflicts pain (and which doesn't work on lepers), then sure, shooting a leper with it is morally neutral because it has no effect.
This doesn't apply to the "killing morally-weighty things that don't want to be killed" part, though.
Sorry, but, it may be that you find this type of arithmetic absurd because you seem to have an absurd, straw-man interpretation of it.
-Cats and humans are capable of types of suffering and enjoyment not gated by nocioceptors, and their death impact the lives of others around them. I haven't seen this demonstrated to be true of bugs.
-Yes, mealworms that only feel pleasure would be more worth living than ones that only feel pain, which is why it would be good to create a lot of them for factory farming.
-A life experience may be both painful and valuable, or both stressful and pleasurable, or painful in the moment but fulfilling in retrospect, or whatever. Any humanist, artistic, poetic description of the complexities and contradictions of the human experience can and will be captured by 'the math', you just have to make the effort to quantify it.
I don't think so. To speak more fully, I believe that your statement is technically true, but if one succeeded at "quantifying it", the result would not be globally intelligible by humans and thus not substantially different from relying on human judgment, which is of course not globally intelligible by humans either. It's like a moral Chinese Room experiment.
The question on which my own evaluation of value(X bugs) / value(1 human) hinges is whether we use human-relative morals or absolute morals. (Everything here assumes utility theory.)
One kind of "human-relative morals " would be morals which judge world states by how good they are for humans. This is basically what we do, and is close to the "relative to my kin" morals that evolution forces all animals to acquire. This is icky because it lets us enslave AIs and tile the universe with humans, but it is at least coherent.
If morality is human-relative in this way, then the value of the bugs is their value to humans. Mosquitos might have negative value to us, in which case the question becomes whether it's permissible to create mosquitoes provided that you kill them later.
Another definition of "human relative morals" would be "apply human morality to every agent" (which we also do). In that case, many insects are evil by human standards, so killing them is probably virtuous. Maybe we can eat wasps and feel smug with every crunch.
The only good candidate absolute moralities I know involve thermodynamic / information-theoretic evaluations of world states, which have never really caught on with humans.
I think you may have to reply directly to his comment if you want him to be notified of it. (I don't think you get them for grandchildren of your comments.)
Also, I realize that you try to use an absolute morality in which you measure the pain and pleasure of each species or individual using some function which computes something like "level of consciousness". I suspect that function will use an information-theoretic measure.
A neuroscientist named Tononi proposed an information-theoretic measurement of consciousness maybe 15 years ago, which was IIRC summing up a measure of information and computation complexity across the entire brain.
Oh, I didn't say it was a good measurement. It was an attempt, but pretty simple. I think it was geared only at comparing different mammalian brains. It might say a supercomputer was superhumanly conscious.
I regret my initial comment now, since Scott's attempt to estimate the moral status of different organisms via subjective judgements by humans, or by neurological inquiries into their capacity for pleasure or pain, may be better than any of the 3 approaches I listed. It isn't systematic, but it's still usable.
>Also, this is related to my pet theory that Orson Scott Card knew exactly what he was doing and the name "Ender Wiggin" was meant to convey "ender of bugs".
Nice. I checked, and Ender's given name was Andrew, from a Greek word meaning brave/strong/manly. His sister is Valentine, a Latin word for healthy/strong. Peter is from Petrus, Greek for "rock". If deliberate, this is an odd choice of names for a trio whose great strengths were intellectual.
I just think that this game of determining precisely how conscious a particular creature is, determining if they have pain receptors, quibbling over whether they "suffer", etc is exactly the kind of bad utilitarianism that rationalists are rightly criticized for. We're missing a causal understanding of WHY we care about this other creature in the first place, and then cargo culting with measurements.
For example, Brian Tomasik's "most insects that exist suffer most of the time" should give us tremendous pause. This should be a core consideration guiding our thinking towards insect welfare. A base case of "suffering most of the time" is distinct from well-adjusted humans and animals. We tend to think euthanasia is appropriate for a creature who is likely to suffer for the remainder of its existence. We do this for domestic dogs, cats, horses, and even humans. What does it mean that a creature's whole existence is primarily suffering? If we actually care about insect suffering, should we be pursuing some genetic editing or ecosystem engineering such that mosquitos get to live happy, fulfilled, stress-free lives?
I just think the obvious answer is that people don't actually care, intrinsically. People care to the degree that the facts they can't ignore make them feel bad. If people can merely suspend consideration on the moral welfare of insects (or animals), they will happily never care. If you force them to think about it a lot, as a biologist studying insects might, people will generally adopt positions that allow them to tell themselves the story of how "sure the status quo ain't good but I'm on the right side of this issue." The suffering that we are actually attempting to prevent with all of this is human suffering.
I don't think it's a coincidence that all the dogs that couldn't instinctively raise their eyebrows died off.
> We're missing a causal understanding of WHY we care about this other creature
In 1800, a plantation owner debates you on slavery. He appeals to the Bible's support of it, reports success with a new torture technique to keep the n****** in line, and says you're "rightly criticized" for your bleeding-heart views (or whatever dismissive term was popular among conservatives in 1800.) So, what sort of "causal understanding" can you give to this man?
I wouldn't be much inclined to try to convince him; I'm fairly sure I couldn't change his mind. The probabilistic arguments of EAs (and now Scott) were persuasive to me, and if they're not persuasive to someone else because of a lack of "facts they can't ignore", I don't know what to do with that. Is there some other argument one should be using instead? Are you saying that if you want people to care about insects, "force them to think about it a lot"? Isn't Scott doing what he can to make people think about it, even if his version of the argument isn't the best available?
>So, what sort of "causal understanding" can you give to this man?
Well in 1800, I wouldn't have had much hope of educating him sufficiently. Human civilization just didn't have the tools at the time. We can't change the past anyway, but we also shouldn't really blame them too much, just like we shouldn't blame the people that burned witches. Given the information that they had been given in their lives, we couldn't really have expected them to know that witches weren't real and that they were burning innocent people.
>Are you saying that if you want people to care about insects, "force them to think about it a lot"?
Sort of, but I don't want that. I'm saying, "if you force people to think about insects a lot, half of them or so will tend to anthropomorphize insects and empathize with them, regardless of their ability to suffer." We know this happens; it happens with children and stuffed animals, and people of all ages and cute robots that we know aren't sentient. And so we shouldn't be surprised that a couple of insect biologists are really concerned about insect welfare.
I'm instead saying that this is one of those dirty corners of life. This IS life. This is what life does, it consumes itself, recycles itself. We think this is perfectly normal when we talk about eating plants, in fact we even like to invoke hippie ideas about the circle of life in that context.
There is no good spot to get off the train from chickens to yeast. Lizards, snails, frogs, flies, jellyfish, sponges, cilantro? There is no size to expand your sphere of moral concern to after which you won't have anybody trying to persuade you that you're a moral monster because you still don't think jellyfish are all that sentient. You will continue to have the experience I have now, of simply trying to explain to people that nothing that chickens do seems remotely intelligent to me, all of their behavior is completely consistent with dumb biological robots with no lights on inside, and I think anybody that thinks otherwise is excessively anthropomorphizing them. You will just have that experience with cilantro or something, and your interlocutors will have all the same arguments you have now, and your only retort will be an appeal to your incredibly strong intuition that cilantro is a dumb plant and you're pretty sure your interlocutors are excessively anthropomorphizing, a mainstream human tendency.
We respect the rights of other humans because that's the best way to secure rights for ourselves, also humans. It's not because we have big hearts. Empathy is a profoundly bad place from which to tether human rights. It is prejudicial (racist, as you allude to), innumerate, and highly irrational. It is not a secure bedrock for moral flourishing. We will do well to understand this.
> after which you won't have anybody trying to persuade you that you're a moral monster because you still don't think jellyfish are all that sentient
I don't think anyone is trying to persuade you of that, though.
> in 1800, I wouldn't have had much hope of educating him sufficiently.
Indeed. While I can think of arguments that an 1800 person could have thought of, there are stronger arguments today from science and philosophy (though I still doubt the plantation owner would accept them).
This is actually one of the reasons I chose slavery/1800 rather than something recent. As a non-illusionist, I believe that in the future we can gain more knowledge about consciousness, and yet, somehow we have to make choices today without having that knowledge. Based on that lack of future knowledge I believe that maybe animals (and insects) don't have moral worth, but maybe they do. And I think this is what Scott and other EAs are saying too.
> nothing that chickens do seems remotely intelligent to me, all of their behavior is completely consistent with dumb biological robots with no lights on inside
This sounds plausible to me. The counterargument is a view many humans hold: that humans themselves are also biological robots. To the extent humans are intelligent, nothing about their intelligence can't be replicated with ordinary computers. But computers don't have moral worth, and if other animals don't have moral worth, human biological robots don't either, since a human is nothing but ordinary animal biology plus some intelligence we can replicate on a computer.
This doesn't sound quite right to me, because humans experience something I call "consciousness" which I don't think a computer can replicate. But it seems to me that consciousness is not intelligence per se, but rather something that experiences and uses intelligence (but if it does include some form of intelligence, I think there are also other elements of human intelligence that are unconscious). Thus intelligence itself isn't necessarily where moral worth comes from, and therefore a low level of intelligence doesn't necessarily eliminate moral worth. I don't think any of us knows the answer to this, but I'm not prepared to conclude that the answer is unknowable either.
So I think we should behave in a way that is reasonable given our uncertainty, by choosing behaviors that won't look either idiotic or monstrous to future people who have the knowledge we lack today.
>by choosing behaviors that won't look either idiotic or monstrous to future people who have the knowledge we lack today.
Yeah I just lean on the side of "excessive anthropomorphizing of animals is going to look idiotic to future people." I think that it will look like not building wind turbines or propellers or airplanes because you believe that the wind is made up of spirits and that it is wrong to exploit their energy for human gain. When really this is just causal phenomena that we can understand like many other causal phenomena and the universe isn't inherently any better or worse depending on whether humans leverage this latent resource.
I don't think consciousness is quite that complicated. I think we will have an answer that is satisfactory to many people within 20 years, and the answer will come in terms of Information Theory (not IIT, IIT seems very misguided) and feedback loops. I think there will always be a form of The Hard Problem of Consciousness that will stay unanswerable, something like "why is the character of my qualia exactly the way it is?" It will become a question like "what was before the Big Bang?" Perhaps a question that doesn't even make sense to ask, yet people will continue to ask it and assert something of significance based on its status as an unanswered question.
>But computers don't have moral worth
None yet. I do think we will come to a functionalist perspective. Something like, "we will respect the rights of robots which respect our rights." I think we will find that there is no other coherent way to experiment with creating possibly-conscious beings in a laboratory. There will be some necessary conditions about the kind of information processing it does and what access to experience it has (which will be purely empirical questions because we will have constructed these systems), and then beyond that we may create some truly murderous systems or systems which are simply indifferent to the things we cherish and care about and we will simply arrive at a very natural heuristic of respecting the wellbeing of systems which respect our wellbeing and not respecting those that don't (or can't).
>and if other animals don't have moral worth, human biological robots don't either, since a human is nothing but ordinary animal biology plus some intelligence we can replicate on a computer.
Yeah this is just silly, which clearly you agree with intuitively. A full argument against this is long, but I really don't think it's necessary. Humans are very clearly unique animals, uniquely deserving of respect. We are general learners. And when we create robots that are as clever, creative, and self-aware as humans, I suspect that their moral worth will be somewhat obvious to us too. (Not all of us; some people will be indoctrinated into a belief that robots cannot have moral worth because they cannot have souls because they were not created by God, or something. And that social belief will supersede what would naturally have been their intuition.)
I actually think that it ought to be core to humanism that one appreciates this gap between humans and most other animals (elephants and dolphins, maybe a handful of other species, seem like they might be an exception). I actually don't trust that most animal rights activists hold human rights to the same degree of sanctity that I do. You can observe the tension when you think about what happens when a dog bites a person in America. We put the dog down, and we absolutely should. Yet, in my experience, I've met a lot of animal rights activists who are skeptical of this practice, who believe that there should perhaps be an investigation and assignment of blame. These people have entirely lost the script, in my mind.
They have, in the decadence of the 21st century, forgotten what team they were on all along. There is a team which respects human rights, and then there are all the other creatures in the world who are entirely indifferent to your moral worth and couldn't conceive of it if they wanted to.
The real question of animal rights, it seems to me, is whether we cause more human psychological suffering from treating animals as less than human or whether more human suffering would result from disallowing ourselves from exploiting them. There may come a time in the future when lab-grown meat is so easy to produce and we can make honey some other way such that there's such little marginal benefit from directly exploiting animals that it's worth not doing it just so as not to upset the vegans. I don't think we're there yet.
Let's assume insects do feel pain. Another important thing to consider are the varieties of suffering that insects vs chickens/cows/pigs might experience in factory farmed conditions. Factory farming of birds and mammals involves subjecting them to conditions which obviously cause them serious misery (cramped conditions, docking tails, searing off beaks, on and on and on...). I don't see why factory farming of insects would involve subjecting them to comparably miserable conditions, nor do we really even know which conditions insects prefer or to what extent. I imagine the average quality of life for a factory farmed insect would be about equal to that of a wild insect.
I think we have a pretty good idea which conditions insects prefer, because they communicate those preferences by going somewhere else if the current environment doesn't suit them. Pillbugs literally have a neural circuit that gets them walking if their current environment is too dry, and stops them when it's sufficiently moist. So we could easily give factory farmed insects a much better life than wild insects. On your other points, I agree completely.
I think there's a strong and weak sense of the word "prefer". The strong sense to me implies some actual difference in the quality of one's consciousness. You're definitely right to point out that insects communicate preferences in the weak sense via their behavior, but it isn't at all clear to me that those preferences are more meaningful than a Tesla "preferring" to brake because it detects an obstruction. I imagine that a pillbug doesn't consciously care if it's in a dry environment, yet for basic evolutionary reasons, it possesses a body that will respond to dry environments by moving. And if it truly does consciously care, I imagine the magnitude of that preference compared to a factory farmed pigs preference to, say, turn around and scratch itself, it infinitesimal. Mostly based on anatomical reasons, I'm sufficiently convinced that birds and mammals *do* experience conscious preference of certain states over others.
> What about the other limit? Plausibly the most morally correct action, short of becoming vegetarian, would be to eat the largest animal there is. And according to the Talmud - Baba Bathra 74b- the righteous in Heaven dine on the flesh of Leviathan, which suffices to feed all of them forever. Hypothesis confirmed!
I’m kind of a utilitarian but find it hard to think in terms of “additive” moral cost of lives (ie of the kind that draws an equivalence between killing one million beetles and one dolphin)when both intuition and cognitive science point to those types of minds being so qualitatively different as to be, in my eyes, hardly even the same thing. The idea of “animal rights” that generalize to everything from apes to caterpillars seems almost a straw man, a way of making people who want fewer intelligent mammals to die in spaces where they can barely move seem ridiculous, overreaching.
I've thought a lot about the moral reciprocity arguments and I've realized they feel inhumane and kind of creepy because social mammals from pigs to cows to apes are capable of a crude kind of moral reciprocity with their own kind. To deny them any moral worth because they aren't capable of establishing sophisticated and consistent moral standards across species and social groups seems ridiculous, especially when so few humans are capable of that. Very few humans have formally defined and followed moral standards, meaning that they don't kill their own kind for the same reasons cows don't.
I'm severely unconvinced by the argument that the moral worth of an animal scales linearly with the number of neurons it has. I'm sure we can all agree that a single neuron kept in a petri dish has no moral worth, less than a rounding error.
Another thought, reached after a very enlightening course on animal biology, is that nature is really vicious. Animals will eat each other alive, commit infanticide, cannibalism, rape, and all other sorts of awful things. Why should we care for the welfare of creatures that by nature act in ways we consider immoral? If we excuse them from our moral system, why should they benefit from ours?
Here's my totally-not-thought through system for determining the moral worth of animals: The worth of an animal is directly proportional to how closely it's baseline social behavior resembles that of humans. This seems to get most of the cute and intelligent animals people like, but excludes intelligent asocial animals like octopi and squid. It also has the effect of giving a tamed/human socialized animal moral worth than a wild one of the same species. This seems intuitively right to me.
"Animals will eat each other alive, commit infanticide, cannibalism, rape, and all other sorts of awful things. Why should we care for the welfare of creatures that by nature act in ways we consider immoral?"
Don't humans, in nature, do the same? Hunter-gatherers did all sorts of rape and infanticide, but i think saying that uncivilized humans don't have moral worth is a hard sell.
Depends on whom you're selling to. I'm pretty sure in the dark corners of the web you'd have no trouble finding those who believe that yes, uncivilized humans have precisely 0 moral worth. Now the real question is - do people who think this have moral worth themselves?
More seriously, my point is that we as a society do discount people's moral worth based on how morally those people behave. So it's not entirely unreasonable to apply the same logic to animals.
"More seriously, my point is that we as a society do discount people's moral worth based on how morally those people behave"
We do yeah, but i don't think that's a good thing. It's why people say things like "i hope he gets raped and killed in prison". It's _a_ moral system, but i don't think it's a good one, and i don't know if people actually strongly believe it.
Unfortunately, I think people do believe it, if you assume they do it explains a lot of the problems with our prison system. Not only did we used to hang, draw and quarter people, but we also turned it into a public spectacle that drew massive crowds.
That was part of the punishment. The calculation was made that the shame of a public execution, with the attendent evidence of callous disregard, was an additional deterrent. That may seem cock-eyed to us -- isn't being executed about the worst it can get? -- but we don't live in the same age. Perhaps when life was in general nastier, more brutal, and shorter it *was* a significant extra deterrent to face the prospect of being laughed at while you die.
If nothing else, we can take note of the fact that the upper class insisted on more "dignified" ways of being executed -- being shot was reserved for officers, for example, while the common soldier was hanged.
Deterrence was definitely part of it from the state's perspective, but I was referring to the idea that people voluntarily watching these public executions, and even seeing them as a form of entertainment (especially in the Victorian Period) indicates that people saw them as morally acceptable. It's obviously more complicated than that, some people were sympathetic to the criminal, or perhaps saw attendance as a solemn duty, but I'm sure there were people who would argue that drawing and quartering someone in public is too good for traitors, and they actually deserve something even worse to fit the severity of their crime. This is distinct from sadism, since these same people would be appalled by the idea of the same violence being perpetrated on someone innocent or by any entity other than the state/king.
I would say under this system "uncivilized" humans have plenty of moral worth still. Taking at face value the *very* questionable notion that people in less developed societies exhibit worse moral behavior, they'll still exhibit *some* moral behavior. I imagine a tribe that kills and eats outsiders still at least has some sort of commendable in-group love and loyalty. So the killer-cannibals have less moral worth than Joe forager, but not no moral worth.
One problem with scaling moral worth with moral behavior is that it implies its ok to torture Hitler for decades. Not to discourage others, just because he doesn't matter. And that poses some issues since other people have different definitions of moral behavior, so i could be a Hitler to them.
My intuition would be that it would still be wrong to torture someone evil, but less wrong than torturing someone innocent or virtuous. This seems like something most people implicitly accept, and it seems like a pragmatic way to generally prohibit violence while still allowing us to punish people.
This definitely causes a lot of problems, the Nazis took the idea that some people don't matter and can therefore be tortured and killed to a horrifying extreme, but it's hardly unique to them. I think the same reasoning explains a lot of the problems with our criminal justice system, for example.
I mean, can't you do the same with animals? Sure they don't speak language, but so don't some humans. I've convinced plenty of cats to not be mean to humans.
Yes, it's a fair point. It might be more difficult to convince other kinds of animals, though, like tigers. And animals generally lack social coordination mechanisms which allow us to convince people not to do bad things on a mass scale. You have to convince each new cat to not be mean, over and over; you can't go to the Cat-King and persuade him to pass a law banning meanness to humans, or spread ideas about not being mean to humans among influential feline intellectuals. A global community of humans which for the most part live in harmony under a shared morality, with reciprocal and equal obligations, and only occasional deviance, seems feasible in a way that's not the case if you extend it to include animals.
And would we necessarily want to impose on animals all the responsibilities that come with personhood? I kind of like tigers the way they are, including the part of the nature of tigers that leads them to opportunistically predate on humans. Maybe even if we *could* make all animals part of our shared moral community, we still shouldn't.
(I think we agree! Just wanting to ask for reconsideration of terms used to discuss putatively amoral acts - talking about "hunter-gatherers" and "uncivilized" "tribes" is not very useful, seeing that no one here seems to know about their moral or legal systems, and more than a fair bit armchair-anthropology-racist, when there's ample evidence to discuss how contemporary America treats rapists and infanticides.)
This isn't meant as a criticism of the post, but reading it actually made me care less about the suffering of cows and chickens. I think if we're not careful we can actually cause moral exhaustion which can set us back from the goal of reducing suffering in the world. I used to try to avoid eating beef in favor of chicken for environmental reasons but gave up on that because of people's (fairly convincing) arguments that chicken suffering was a bigger concern. I thought eating insects might be a way out, but apparently not. Having to analyze every possibility like this may just lead to people giving up and not caring any more.
I guess I'll go buy some more shares of Beyond Meat before eating my chicken mushroom soup dinner. Sorry, chickens.
+1, i think the idea of insect suffering may very well be true, but i'll leave that problem up to my children. Lemme figure out and address human and animal welfare first before we go further.
MetalCrow, if there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects with even just .1% of the capacity to suffer as humans then the problem of insect suffering outweighs the problem of human and animal suffering combines by orders of magnitude. It may be appropriate to put this as a priority, if that is the case.
That is very true, and every day i hope to god it is not because the idea instills in me a fear unlike any other.
But at the moment, does it seem likely that insects have 0.1% of the capacity to suffer? And in addition, what's their suffering "maximum", as it were? A broken finger and waterboarding are both suffering, but if insects only can experience the former that's more ok.
Furthermore, shouldn't we also prioritize plant suffering even more, in that case? Or even multicellular organism suffering?
If the answer to "how much can insects suffer" gets with a reasonable confidence of "enough" then i 100% agree with you. But right now we don't have that info.
It's an interesting dilemma. If we are .001% confident that bugs suffer 0.001% as much as humans and there are 10 quadrillion bugs, then from a utilitarian calculation it may still be more important to consider bug suffering more than human suffering. The scary thing is you can set these numbers really low and still end up caring a lot about bugs if you are utilitarian. What do you set your confidence that bugs suffer at?
I happen to be optimistic. I think life is worth living and happy for humans and animals. That might very well be the case. If I learned that 10 quadrillion bugs can experience some little bit of happiness, then that means that we could be living in a world of incalculable bug happiness that is orders of magnitude larger than all of human happiness. Hopefully that is the case and not that suffering is the norm.
This would be another reason I am not a utilitarian. Crazy calculations that make our head spin with absurd conclusions go counter to my intuitions.
I think you've identified the "dust specs vs torture" dilemma actually! If bugs suffer the human equivalent of a dust spec in their eye, then from a basic util standpoint they are worth more than someone being tortured for 50 years.
I actually have my own special brand of utilitarianism where i lexicographically order different "planes" of suffering to solve this sort of problem. Torture is on the highest plane, and is incomparable with anything on the lower planes, so unless bugs can suffer torture like humans can our suffering will be "worth" more.
But i don't blame you for not being utilitarian. I've been for nearly all my life (i came up with it independent of learning it), so it just fits for me, but it is very crazy.
My problem with these sorts of things is that it feels to me like the reasoning goes (I'm utilitarian) -> (find counter intuitive conclusion) -> (rework my system to fit my intuition so that the utilitarianism doesn't actually maximize utility but does something else too). I just don't think people bite the bullet and say that actually we should torture the person or actually we should dedicate our whole life to caring for bugs.
This is why I'm an ethical intuitionist. I think this system resolves these absurd problems pretty well. A good book on it is called Ethical Intuitionism by Michael Huemer if you're interested.
Idk, I used to adopt a "different planes" argument for the dust specks vs torture thought experiment, but then got argued out of it.
The argument is, you have a dial. It is set at "1 person being tortured for 50 years" by default, and you can turn it up. Every tick it goes up, it multiplies the number of people experiencing the torture by 10, and deducts 1 second from the torture. So, 1 person at 50 years, or 10 people at 50 years-1 second, or 100 people at 50 years-2 seconds... so on. Once it gets low enough, the dial starts very slightly dropping the intensity instead.
Clearly, each tick is about 10x worse than the previous tick, so in the end by transitivity of preferences, (mild suffering) x 10^(1.6 billion) >>> 50 years of torture x 1.
You might not get all the way to dust specks by this argument, but it seems to at least get you to "shampoo in the eyes" or something similarly unpleasant but mundane.
And it also makes it clear that you need *really* big numbers for the dust specks vs torture argument to go through, a trillion is too small.
What if it's not .1%? What if it's 0.0000000000000000001%? Can we actually know that? We just don't understand enough about consciousness and suffering to know if it scales linearly, exponentially, logarithmically, or if it has some "turn on" threshold point.
Arch, if there is just a 1% chance that my number is correct then my conclusion would still follow. Even if there was a .1% chance that my number was correct. That seems feasible to me.
What do you assign the probability of .1% suffering?
I assign a .1% suffering a 0.000000000000000001% probability. ;-)
Seriously, it does seem highly unlikely to me that earth worms or crickets suffer in any meaningful sense of the term, but perhaps I am just behind the curve of the current data on the subject.
I like your comment elsewhere where you point out some of the inconsistencies in this kind of utilitarian thinking. Surely, for all the resources we use to maintain human civilization, we could create large numbers of insects that are slightly happy adding up to more happiness than a few billion humans. I'm still going to reject that option even if we're able to prove it's true at some point.
I think the problem with the extremely small probabilities is to have confidence of those, you have to have a lot of evidence. But I see you have worked around my objection ;).
Thanks. I reject it too. The good thing is that if you're not utilitarian, you can do that. If you are, you have to bite the bullet I think. I actually think my probabilities are somewhat reasonable. So, I see this as a problem for utilitarians because it is counter-intuitive.
What if there's a 0.1% chance that my own personal suffering matters 10^80 times more than the suffering of any other being? (This seems reasonably plausible, actually, since as far as I know I'm the only one who is actually conscious.)
Put your mind at ease. They don't have the capacity to suffer. If I'm going to be a mean bitch, they don't have the capacity the same way a foetus (it's just a blob of cells, remember!) hasn't the capacity, so it's no worse than an abortion in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. And we do millions of those yearly.
The point about the fetus is tangential. The objection that a fetus is being murdered is about 10,000 times more important than the objection that they feel pain during the procedure. You could justify banning abortion on utility grounds if life is actually worth living and a net increase in utility. Most Christians or Pro-Lifers want to ban it because they view it as an unethical killing instead of some utility maximizing argument. I recently made a video in which I argued it is possible that under a utilitarian framework and if life is worth living, governments should ban abortion and contraception and have as many pro-natalist policies as possible.
I believe my answer would be "Very. Fucking. Sure."
And even if insects can be said to suffer, which I doubt, I do not care. What is the vegan equivalent of "get your rosaries off my ovaries?" when it comes to "don't impose your moral/religious beliefs on my behaviour"?
Basically my point is that even if you're 99.999% sure, then bug suffering could still be a bigger problem because of that 0.001% chance you're wrong because of how many bugs there are. It's a good point against utilitarianism which I don't believe in.
If you're anti-abortion, then you should recognize that argument as bad.
The whole point is to care about sentient experiences. Plants and fungi are extremely unlikely to be sentient, they don't have anything resembling a nervous system. Rocks are definitely not sentient at all. That reductio ad absurdum doesn't work, or it would be a reductio ad absurdum of a straw man veganism that isn't worth considering in the first place.
The problem is the argument is probabilistic. ( See the 99%chance of android thing). Plants/fungi/ rocks probably aren't sentient. But how probable. One in a thousand? A million? A billion? Given the large number of plants/fungi/rocks in the world even if the number is really small, by the same logic as the insect suffering you end up having to treat them as of extreme moral importance
Yes, that's a good point. I haven't fully figured out how to deal with extremely small probabilities vs extremely large numbers yet. But There is a huge difference with insects: the probabilities are not very tiny. It's not a weird edge case like that. It's not clear what kind of experiences insects have, but they have a nervous system and show at least some signs of suffering: https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/blog/2019/6/7/invertebrate-sentience-a-useful-empirical-resource
I swear to God, every year makes Chesterton in the opening to his novel "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" less of a humour writer and more of a prophet (ironic, since he's talking about the game of 'cheat the prophet'):
"Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocahontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, alter the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble."
If we are to worry about the moral suffering of insects, then we may as well all kill ourselves now. Even veganism won't save you, since in order to grow crops on a commercial scale to feed everyone, you are going to use insecticides. Oh noes, the trillions of potential insect lives snuffed out! The untold suffering and misery!
Except that insects don't have complex enough brains to suffer. They experience pain, sure, the way you experience pain if you put your hand on a hot stove: that flash of physical sensation. But they don't have memories or consciousness or processing power to think, they react on instinct. I wouldn't go round pulling the wings off flies, but neither do I believe there are wingless flies out there *suffering* because they *understand* their winglessness.
I'm sure there were enough proto-hippies around Chesterton for him to know what they are like and see them in action, so it's not so much prophecy as simply astute observation. I'm reading the memoirs of Freda Utley and the world of British liberal intelligentsia of 100 years ago she describes lovingly as having grown up in is instantly recognizable. Veganism, too, is not by any means a recent invention. As a funny example, it is mentioned in one of Rex Stout's detective stories, published in 1946.
George Bernard Shaw was a vegetarian, so the practice/belief/ethical system was definitely around and Chesterton, mixing in artistic circles, would have been well aware of it. But that we would get to the point of worrying over "does the mealworm suffer?" is not something I think anyone back then would have imagined.
While I'm at it, have a quote from the 1908 novel "The Man Who Was Thursday":
"Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism."
Or the meeting of the anarchist council:
“Comrades,” he began, as sharp as a pistol-shot, “our meeting tonight is important, though it need not be long. This branch has always had the honour of electing Thursdays for the Central European Council. We have elected many and splendid Thursdays. We all lament the sad decease of the heroic worker who occupied the post until last week. As you know, his services to the cause were considerable. He organised the great dynamite coup of Brighton which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow. Cruelty, or anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always. But it is not to acclaim his virtues that we are met, but for a harder task. It is difficult properly to praise his qualities, but it is more difficult to replace them. Upon you, comrades, it devolves this evening to choose out of the company present the man who shall be Thursday. If any comrade suggests a name I will put it to the vote. If no comrade suggests a name, I can only tell myself that that dear dynamiter, who is gone from us, has carried into the unknowable abysses the last secret of his virtue and his innocence.”
Seneca, too, was a vegetarian, and Theophrastus said that eating animals is wrong. As a general point, in my opinion it's a bad prior to think that our modern ethical concerns, such as those of EAs, are particularly novel - as big a mistake as those 60s teenagers' who sincerely believed they had invented sex. Even the preoccupations with AI safety probably have parallels in the arguments among alchemists about homunculi and demon-summoning.
> But that we would get to the point of worrying over "does the mealworm suffer?" is not something I think anyone back then would have imagined.
I have no doubt someone would, and did. For one thing I'm certain they were aware of Jainism, as Eastern mysticism of all sorts, both preexisting and invented, such as whatever Madame Blavatsky was peddling, was floating all around the intellectual-adjacent circles of that time.
Here's a question I've never seen satisfactorily answered from the utilitarian perspective. Assuming a worm, chicken, cow, or whatever creature you're farming lives a relatively pleasant life without much suffering and dies more or less painlessly (this includes no horrible anticipation of imminent death for the creatures smart enough to understand they're about to be slaughtered), so that its life is net positive in terms of happiness. It seems that many people hold that A) it's still immoral to farm animals for food under those assumptions and B) it's moral to breed animals to live to their natural lifespan, e.g. as pets. To me, for a non-conscious animal which doesn't know whether it has a day or a year to live, A & B are in contradiction. You can either believe that breeding anything that's eventually doomed to die is wrong, or that it's OK as long as the creature had some good time, but not both. Can someone explain how does it make sense?
I know there's some utilitarians who hold A & ~B and I totally see where they are coming from. I also can understand someone arguing that A is not practically attainable anytime soon so we're best off opposing to any farming (although worms seem to change this quite a bit, I imagine it's easy to farm worms without making them suffer). My question is specifically about believing A & B simultaneously, which seems to be a quite common position.
For people who believe both A & B, you might be able to point to the moral assumption where we don't allow humans to be cannibals even if the person-to-be-eaten consents.
Personally though (and most this seems to be the position of most utilitarians who care about animal suffering) I'm totally okay with eating meat that comes from humanely raised and slaughtered animals. The problem is not raising an animal to be eaten but in the suffering that the animal goes through in the process. However, it's hard to get humanely raised meat, especially if you live in a city and/or don't have a large freezer. In addition, if you avoid eating meat, you can be confident that there isn't animal suffering involved, while if you eat meat you have to put a decent amount of time and effort into ensuring that you're getting humanely raised meat.
I'd hold B & ~A. The evil of factory farming seems to be mostly in the suffering, to a degree where if I was reincarnated as a factory-farm chicken, I'd try my best to suicide out. "Relatively pleasant life without much suffering" is doing a huge amount of work as a starting assumption. Accordingly, the bug argument is extremely sensitive to the question of whether they actually suffer in factory farm conditions.
I think insect suffering ends up being a great argument as to why 'reducing suffering' isn't really a long-term great moral compass, just on its own. It seems somewhat related to someting like pascal's wager.
You have this question ("do insects feel pain") and the answer hinges on whether eating insects is morally awesome (you get all these calories and protein without the suffering!) or morally debauched (you are causing so much suffering!). In the absence of a real clear answer as to whether insects feel pain, you can't answer a question like "do factory farmed insects live better lives than insects in the wild?" - which seems like a pretty important question! For a lot of animals, if humans aren't eating them, we'd probably crowd them out of space and then run them into extinction.
If 'removing suffering' is the goal, then killing an animal species entirely ends up preventing infinite future suffering for that species - isn't' that net good? Doesn't 'remove all tiny species from the face of the earth, to prevent their suffering" seem like it's a bad idea? The only way to allow it to be bad is to grant that goodness is not just about suffering. Sure, it plays a role, and i think we should probably expect "reduces total suffering" to be a likely expected side effect of a good moral system, but what about this:
We go back in time 10,000 years, and make an exact copy of the earth, in the same orbit, 365 degrees out of phase. In the present, this planet now exists with a _totally different _history, which means a totally different set of cultures, languages, economic and political systems - and similar geography, except for all the things that humans have changed and the randomness inherent to weather and geological processes.
You've now doubled the amount of suffering! But you've also doubled the amount of bowling leagues, recipes for cookies, and types of cusine, and scifi books, and kabbalistic interpretations of those scif books. You've also given humanity a MUCH better tool for understanding human nature, civilizations, language etc. What's all that "other stuff," and how do you morally weight it against doubling the net amount of suffering int he world?
This wholistic approach seems like the only reasonable way to approach this question. If factory farmed bugs have _better_ quality of life than bugs in the wild, and we still think it's bad because it would 'add suffering', isn't the morally correct thing to do carpet bomb the world with insecticides to end all insect suffering?
As a solution to this conundunrm, I maintain that the correct moral system is "maximize the number of possible future estates accessible to the system", as defined here:
I've wondered about this before - using 'freedom' in some sense as the utility function. I'm not sure if it leads to a repugnant conclusion of its own, but it certainly seems preferable to defining utility as a lack of (suffering).
Oops, got pleasure and suffering the wrong way around. Maximising pleasure and minimising suffering would obviously be preferable, but still has some weird conclusions, like prophylactic antidepressant use to ensure nobody ever gets sad.
Well, mostly because those values sometimes have to be traded off against one another.
But seriously, I think there's sort of two answers. One is that there's a difference between unpleasant conclusions (i.e. omnicide) that are outright evil, versus bizarre conclusions (i.e. insects having moral value) that may be correct in some ways and reflect present injustice. (What people from 500 years ago would think of modern morality and all that.) The other answer is that even if utility is too complex to actually describe via a function that can be expressed, it can still be valuable to try, either as approximation or as experiment.
Really, my point was that minimizing X, for any X, means preferring nonexistence, and while you can hack around it, it's still IMO fundamentally the wrong direction to go.
What if there's a 99% chance they're an android? Still seems like you should avoid the torture-murder, for the 1% chance they're human. 99.9999999% chance? At this point I think it becomes less pressing, but it's still a little bad to hurt them. <-- this seems like an argument against abortion as well
It's not a new argument, but yes, this is why there is disagreement about what stage of development it is acceptable to abort a fetus, given the chance that it can already feel pain. However, unlike in the example of the android, the moral calculus of abortion also has to include the suffering and risk of death of the mother. It's not just the fetus's life that matters.
It certainly is, and it would be a little disheartening if anyone who was passionate about avoiding the suffering of chickens (or bugs) were indifferent to the 800,000 or so human lives snuffed out in utero each and every year. One hopes that that is not the case.
From a quick google, there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 bugs alive at any given time. The number of bugs one human interacts with or could potentially interact with is huge. If bugs have even a very small fraction the capacity for suffering or pleasure that humans have, then it makes me think that utilitarianism's most primary concern by orders of magnitude is how are we going to treat bugs. Perhaps rather than dedicating 50% of our income to saving starving children in the developing world, we should be using 50% of our income to create a farm with hundreds of trillions of happy ants.
With these premises, this seems reasonable. But ultimately, it seems absurd. Another reason I suppose I'm not a utilitarian. I'll have to write a blog post investigating this idea. Thank you for this interesting post.
Genocide: "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." You refer to "the Xinjiang genocide." Do you have any evidence that there is such a genocide?
The mass repression and omnipresent police state probably does not aim to eradicate Uyghur culture in toto - just cut out the separatism and terrorists by massive racial profiling of millions. They want the Uyghur culture for tourism and gift shops and cultural diversity and crap. It's not quite supposed to be "kill the Indian, save the man", but in practice, it might kill the Indian as collateral damage.
Unfortunately for the Chinese, the mass repression stick and breakneck economic development plan carrot intended to stabilize and develop Xinjiang may indeed be destroying Uyghur culture as collateral damage in many ways, which does technically qualify as cultural genocide, even if the intent may not be totally there.
The Chinese poured billions and billions of dollars into Xinjiang, building a cost-ineffective high speed rail line to Urumqi and thousands of km of highway and huge wind power projects to bring prosperity to the Uyghurs (and as a side effect, ecological devastation, sweatshop labor, and migrant Han managers). They were very proud of the effort, thought they basically subsidized Uyghur prosperity, and were very miffed by accusations of genocide even while America seemed to be content to let its flyover states rot. Hence their vitriolic riptose to the US. A yellow man's burden philosophy, in part.
Well, they have entire banks of restaurants and entire Old Cities and beautifully preserved mosques and government-prescribed Islam, so the scale of the tourism is much larger than what you see on Indian reservations.
Granted, the Uyghur have a much more built-up culture than the Indians did, are apparently more to lose and more to preserve.
The articles above make it pretty clear that the Chinese government wants to turn the Uyghurs into loyal, happy, Muslim Uyghur-Chinese citizens, not second-class citizens or newly-minted Han-Chinese. In their zest to break down the racial and economic barriers between Han and Uyghurs to promote racial harmony, I suspect they probably threw the baby out with the bathwater and went overboard.
Although I would agree that the high modernist/police state/Chinese Socialist planners wouldn't have prioritized (or even considered) preserving Uyghur culture or freedom in their social policy planning, and Uyghur traditional culture would have been sacrificed for other metrics. They would have gone about this sort of thing very ham-fistedly. I doubt that they would have aimed to actively erase Uyghur culture, but they definitely don't really care if large chunks of the culture get splotted out in the name of development and stability.
Tangential to a single line in this essay: I would love to get your take on what's happening in Xinjiang. It's hard to find sources that I can trust to fairly report on the situation. The government itself obviously has its own biases, but so do the people and orgs that are reporting what's happening as genocide.
They look at changes in birth rates and show that birthrates in Uyghur areas have declined extremely dramatically.
They do acknowledge that policies were recently changed to no longer allow minorities a greater number of children, and that the government stepped up its enforcement of those policies. However, I can't find any comparison to the baseline. If Uyghurs were an especially fertile outlier and the government began to enforce its policies uniformly then a sharp drop would be expected.
So, are we seeing an expected disparate impact of a uniformly applied policy, or are we seeing genocide?
I was going to comment that this was discussed on the subreddit, but then I noticed it looks like you were one of those commenters. For anyone else who may be interested:
On paper, sure. In reality, a substantial fraction (~20%, probably more once you discount children and the elderly) of Uyghur men are detained indefinitely in the internment camps, and a couple that can't copulate is going to produce exactly zero children regardless of how many they're legally allowed.
Uyghurs, like all rurals, were very fertile, with an average of four kids, before the government cracked down and started enforcing the one-child policy.
There's a lot of systemic racism in Xinjiang, and the police state is basically racist, targeting Uyghurs differently based on metrics like "attends illegal islamic/political gathering" and "violates one-child policy". The aim is to instill loyalty and break the economic, social, and racial barriers between Han and Uyghur, so Uyghurs can be normal muslim Uyghur-Chinese citizens. In practice, the breakneck development and police state is probably screwing over a lot of local culture as collateral damage.
They have some pretty weird social policies - they've got a make-a-friend policy that assigns every Uyghur a Han Chinese "sister"/"friend", basically so the Han person, who is systemically priviledged and has more guanxi, can refer the Uyghur to friends and relatives for jobs and help them navigate the system. Really intrusive, really annoying, really heavy-handed, but innovative. Very CCPish.
Considering it's the connections between neurons that promote intelligence [citation needed], using (neurons)^2 is perhaps a more useful metric. Also because I would equate killing a cow closer to 1M flies than 1k.
Yeah, this. Even if we judge moral weight as a function of number of neurons (which IMO is as good a first approximation as is likely to be found) it's not at all obvious whether it should be linear or steeper, or how much steeper. A pig has <checks Wikpediai> 20 thousand flies worth of neurons total, 200 thousand flies cortical - is it worth 20 kiloflies, or 400 megaflies, or even more?
That said, IMO it should clearly not be shallower. The neurons being part of a larger brain adds possible states much faster than linearly. I feel like some of the comments use a version of PETA-style "all animals are exactly equal in moral value", and that inevitably gives bizarre utility functions.
One way to measure intelligence is in terms of the number of possible "representational states" that a system has: the more different things the system can think about, the more intelligent it is. If we treat neurons as either on or off (or, firing fast or slow, or whatever) and let N be the number of neurons, the number of representational states is N! or approximately (N/e)^N . Assuming a cow has 1000 times the neurons of a fly, this gives a cow something like (1000/e)^1000 times the intelligence of a fly. That's a 1 followed by 2000 zeros.
The entropy of neurons is way, way lower than that. One way to think about it is that the brain operates well below the Curie point for a network of coupled degrees of freedom.
Assume insects can feel pain. Do farmed insects experience more pain than farmed animals? Meaning, are the methods equally painful? Or is it easier and more cost efficient to make a 'happy mealworm' than make a 'happy cow'?
IMO the biggest issue here which was more or less skipped is the suffering angle. Factory farmed animals definitely suffer their entire lives. Free range grass fed etc. expensive animals do get slaughtered eventually but they don't suffer as much as factory farmed animals. If factory farmed bugs go through a normal bug lifespan until slaughter they are probably closer to column b.
In fact, given that wild animals do have to deal with scarce food and predators, and end up dying all the same, I'm no longer sure reasonably well-treated farm animals are even suffering more than their wild brethren at all.
<quote>Seems obvious the answer is no, at least not until you're sure they're the android.</quote>
I mean, I think the answer is still no, it is not morally acceptable to pretend to torture. (think of what the evil characters in WestWorld do).
But the entire calculation is leaving out what the point or benefit of the torture is. If it is for 'fun', then yes 99.9% is not enough certainty, but if it is to prevent an explosion, than probably it is.
I was thinking about how this brain/size ratio applies to eating fish, and realized that it's really only when it comes to sea life that humans consume other carnivores. Tuna seems like a "morally cheap" animal to eat, because it's so big, until you consider that the tuna was fed fish, and probably some of those fish also ate fish.
If you're going to eat an apex predator like the tuna, does the moral calculus sum over the entire chain of predation?
I think it depends on whether those animals in the chain would have been eaten either way (which is the case for wild-caught fish) or whether they're being grown for the sake of being eaten (theoretically farmed fish, although I would guess that farmed fish are not fed carnivorous fish, for cost reasons).
Or does it go the other way? Do you get to subtract the fish-lives that would have been eaten in the future had we not killed the tuna?(Assuming it is wild caught) And does this suggest the killing of predators as a moral good?
From the strictly utilitarian point of view, and assuming that you believe that non-human life has moral value, the absolute best thing you can do is walk out into some unspoiled wilderness and die on the spot. This way, not only do you reduce all the animal and plant deaths that you would've caused in your life to zero; not only do you eliminate your carbon emissions; but you also provide nourishment to local flora and fauna. It's a win/win !
If you believe bringing your own life to an end is morally obligatory or virtuous, then it could be the case that ending as many lives as you could would be even better, an obviously very very repugnant conclusion which I reject.
If wild animals have moral worth, they will suffer greatly in our absence, and humans can surely find ways to reduce their suffering level beyond what is "natural". Killing humans is the kind of non-solution that people who don't understand utilitarianism come up with to carelessly justify their rejection of utilitarianism. In fact, even if we knew for certain that animals have significant moral worth, it might well be that humans have much more, so that the opposite thing, euthanizing animals to increase human habitats, is a much better "solution".
I reject both "solutions" because they fail to respect our uncertainty on these matters. It took ~13.8 billion years for humans to arrive in the universe; we can afford to wait a little while for modern philosophy and science to hash out these matters before taking rash actions that can't be undone.
Meat consumption is rising globally as poverty decreases. Convincing people not to do a thing that is pleasurable for moral reasons is extremely hard. But economic incentives work on everyone, so if cultured meat becomes equivalent to meat in terms of taste and nutrition but is much cheaper, people will eat it instead of factory farmed meat.Or at least enough people will, by a first order approximation. Bonus: we'll get to eat exotic cultured meats like giant tortoise (most delicious meat ever, according to Darwin).
Weird implication: investing/donating X dollars toward cultured meat development brings its adoption closer by Y seconds, which prevents the equivalent in suffering to the factory farmed life of Z cows. Calculating the numbers is probably impossible without hindsight, but there must logically be some value X that at current marginal values is equal to 1 cow. Steak costs more per calorie than rice and beans. If X is low enough, which seems reasonable given how enormous an improvement switching to cultured meat will be, then the morally worst part of eating a steak is actually the opportunity cost of not funding cultured meat with the money you could have saved by eating rice and beans instead.
> But economic incentives work on everyone, so if cultured meat becomes equivalent to meat in terms of taste and nutrition but is much cheaper, people will eat it instead of factory farmed meat
Strongly disagree. I see this point made on the internet frequently but it's completely foreign to my way of thinking, and I suspect most other people's too.
The idea of eating "cultured" meat instead of actual animal parts is disgusting to me, and I will never do it.
In John Varley's "Ophiuchi Hotline" his protagonist (Lilo something or other) becomes rich by genetically engineering a fruit to have a certain wildly successful meaty taste, which turns out to be the taste of human flesh.
Have you tried figuring out the source of such disgust? Can you explain why does it fell disgusting for you? I'm genuinely interested as it seems completely counterintuitive to me.
I don't think I am. Though eventually I have voluntary created a disgust-like reaction on an intellectual level regarding such content in order not to condition myself to it.
I figured out it is a reasonable thing to do when I understood why so many people are disgusted by it. After all lots of people were actually raped and traumatized and that's a very sensitive and sad topic.
So I'm interested whether there is some reasonable seed in the disgust towards lab meat. Currently I'm leaning towards the opposite idea that as soon as lab meat is available it will be much better than non-lab meat so it'd reasonable to feel something disgust-like towards eating animal parts.
I think the way it works is that people think if behavior X is repulsive, then enjoying the *simulation* of X is disgusting. They will usually surround this with a load of rationalization, e.g. that if you enjoy rape-fantasy pr0n then that will increase the probability that you actually commit real rape, but this strikes me as a priori dubious -- I would guess the availability of simulated perversion *reduces* the amount of actual perversion, because people at a certain margin are captured by the safer alternative. So I think the underlying reason is just disgust at the existence of the taste per se.
So if you thought that eating animals was disgusting, on some basic level, then you might go on to think that enjoying the simulation of eating animals was also disgusting -- because it's the taste for flesh which is per se disgusting.
That said, my impression on rereading what Melvin wrote is that he is saying he is disgusted by eating *simulated* meat but not *real* meat, and for that I don't have a good understanding -- unless it is for the actions of the people who are creating the simulcrum, e.g. the technicians in the lab handing each other samples "does this taste like cow flesh to you? No? Should I add a little more blood flavor #6, maybe?"
I do think it's possible that most people's disgust will go away once it becomes so common and socially accepted that people don't think about the details. Making cheese is pretty weird for example. I don't think about the details of how any of my food is made except for factory farming, because of the moral issues.
But even if, say, only 50% of people ever accept cultured meat, the broader point still holds. It just means X is ~doubled.
Eh, if it's cheap enough and I can't tell the difference, I'll take it. (I'm used to cantonese fare - freshly killed day-old chicken and live swimming fish straight from the aquarium, still moving around when you chop the head off, so it had better be good!)
Mosquitoes do not get malaria from the parasites that they carry; tick immune systems protect them from Lyme disease; I haven't found a handy link responding to the flea/plague situation, but hosts that can be killed by pathogens don't get selected as vectors; please don't make silly jokes that make your readers dumber about health when you have a medical degree.
"In contrast to the human host, the mosquito vector does not suffer from the presence of the parasites."
"The tick IMD network protects against colonization by three distinct bacteria, that is the Lyme disease spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi and the rickettsial agents Anaplasma phagocytophilum and A. marginale."
Bugs are the biggest utility monster even if we aren’t sure they feel pain or how much.
We do not even have to be sure that bugs suffer. We can say that bug suffering is unlikely and that there is only a .01 chance. We could also say that a bug's suffering only amounts to .01 of a human's suffering. Of course, there would actually be a probability distribution over potential suffering but consider this simplified version. Multiply these and arrive at .0001. Multiply this number by 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (number of bugs) and arrive at 1,000,000,000,000,000 suffering capacity. If I increase the number of humans on earth for the sake of simplicity to 10 billion, then the “problem of bug suffering” is 100,000 times more important than the problem of human suffering. Raw numbers is only a very rough guide for a measure of moral importance. We would have to evaluate average life quality and other factors as well including how many bugs we could affect the lives of. I have to be a bit reductionist for clarity’s sake.
To not reach the conclusion that bug suffering is more important by an order of magnitude you must use really small probabilities and really small levels of suffering. That seems possible. However, even if you make bug suffering really small and the chance of it extremely small, you run the risk of being wrong. A true utilitarian would dedicate a significant amount of time to being absolutely sure of this question. Slight errors would mean unimaginable variation in levels of suffering. The difference between bug suffering being .1% or .2% of human suffering could be equivalent to many genocides worth of suffering or the suffering generated from all of slavery throughout human history because there are so many bugs in the world. Perhaps the bug-suffering question is the most important moral question of them all.
If that is the case, then utilitarians should dedicate a great deal of effort to caring for bugs it would seem. We can’t care for all of them but an individual could reasonably affect the lives of trillions. I’m not sure how this would be done. Perhaps, each person could spend their time caring for 10 acres worth of ants and making sure their experience is pleasurable in some way. The “how” is not quite as important as the fact that it should be done.
I reject this conclusion because I am not a utilitarian. However, I think a utilitarian has to find this at least somewhat convincing. I doubt anyone will change their behavior whatsoever to help bugs more even if they are convinced of this argument.
You also have to multiply this by how easily you can actually impact the suffering. We have reasonable interventions for reducing human suffering. Any ideas on how to effectively reduce insect suffering?
"Multiply this number by 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (number of bugs) and arrive at 1,000,000,000,000,000 suffering capacity. If I increase the number of humans on earth for the sake of simplicity to 10 billion, then the “problem of bug suffering” is 100,000 times more important than the problem of human suffering."
No. If there were a skillion gazillion bugs alive on earth and only one human, the human's worth outweighs them all.
This entire discussion is very interesting, because there are a whole range of opinions on the entire spectrum from "are you freakin' nuts?" to "I make Jains look like the Golden Horde on a particularly virulent tear" being expressed, and it's fascinating to get a peep into a completely different way of thinking. So that's good!
No, I'm not a musician. But in my field I can do things that are at least comparable, in terms of creativity and beauty. And far beyond what any number of bugs could do.
Also, now that I think of it, I can appreciate Die Zauberfloete, and that is important, because it gives meaning to Mozart's work. Bugs not only can't author Mozart, they can't appreciate it.
Since most bugs aren't on our radar as anything other than indistinct blobs packed in dark un-hygienic indoor spaces its tempting to think they might do better in factory farm settings, but I've kept several invertebrates as pets and most have very complex nutritional/environmental/even social needs. Very few species could just be packed into big crates by the thousands and have anything close to a natural "good" life. It beggars belief that they don't experience suffering analogous to pain when their needs aren't being met. It also depends a great deal on what specific species we're talking about. We tend to have lots of experience with hardy pest species like the American cockroach which can survive very well in what are very inhospitable conditions for most non microbial living things (between floorboards, behind drywall, congregated by the thousands in darkness and filth). Not even most *cockroach* species can survive like that. Many roaches are relatively solitary woodland creatures. The adaptable pests are the outliers that we happen to be made aware of more frequently. (My favorite WTF factoid about surprisingly complex "bugs" is that some leech species are actually dedicated parents that protect and tend to their young.) This may seem obvious but I only bring it up because a problem might be that the bugs that suffer the least in factory farm settings are those we're somewhat justified to be grossed out by because they're most similar to potentially disease spreading household pests.
There's nothing inherently more "disgusting" about eating bugs than eating lobsters (in fact modern cladistics place insects as a subgroup of crustaceans!) But the double standard about eating them probably stems from the fact lobsters don't scuttle around our toilets or moldy basements.
I'd go so far as to argue "insects" is a useless category to talk about with regard to such a varied clade of living things, some might be far more intelligent and sensitive than others. Octopi are mollusks along with snails and clams but we all know how intelligent the cephalopod branch of that family tree is compared to everything else. I'd be absolutely horrified at the prospect of factory farmed octopi or squid, not so much with clams.
> There's nothing inherently more "disgusting" about eating bugs than eating lobsters
Disagree; human disgust is a carefully evolved emotion, and one of the things that we've evolved to be disgusted by is eating insects. It is "inherently disgusting" in the sense that humans are inherently disgusted by it.
Is that true? Many cultures eat bugs. Do you believe they have to overcome their inherent reaction of disgust every time they do, or is disgust a culturally acquired response? If you don't think so, do you believe that Muslims have evolved to be disgusted by pork in a way that Christians haven't?
Thank you for your input, there being a lot of variation in an insect's nutritional/environmental/social needs is good to know. But, just because /most/ species couldn't be packed in dark crates by the thousands and happily thrive, does that mean we shouldn't factory farm the ones that /can/? Getting our protein from those would still be a huge net reduction in suffering compared to the equivalent in factory farmed chickens.
Insects indeed have an almost unimaginable amount of variation between them, but I have to wonder, how much of that translates to their capacity for suffering, or indeed, happiness? I would think that the difference between the bug with the simplest brain and the bug with the most complex brain is only a small fraction of the difference between a cephalopod and a clam.
I agree and I'd hope it'd be possible, but I can imagine a few problems:
1.) the race to the bottom as mentioned in one of Scott's links. Say there's a bug that can be perfectly content packed in a crate with up to 5000 other bugs. Eventually some companies are going to try to extract as much value as possible by packing them with 50000 bugs, then maybe 60000 other bugs. Then maybe cutting corners on providing enough water so the bugs are always just on the cusp of dehydrating but still alive etc etc. Which eventually would defeat the whole purpose of minimizing their suffering. This already happens with hermit crabs, which are collected and shipped in horrible conditions for the pet market even though its not that hard to keep them healthy, the bottom line always wins.
2.) the ability to be "happy" when "packed in a crate" may be something of an exaggeration, I feel like there'd have to be an example but I can't really think of any insects that would truly thrive in those sorts of conditions (maybe maggots or other larvae that can naturally live densely packed in some kind of food medium?) Crickets are farmed in pretty crowded tanks but I don't think they'd survive well if they were packed too tightly (they're known to start gnawing on each other) and I'm not sure those conditions are necessarily "natural" or "happy" for them, just that they survive.
3.) As I alluded to above I suspect people are going to favor more exotic species that are further from pest species such as roaches, which may be a problem because pest species would theoretically be the most suited to live in factory farm conditions unlike something like a ghost mantis, which is a genuinely elegant and exquisite-looking solitary insect which already could pass for some kind of alien garnish. At the very least nobody is going to have a favorite food bug based on its tolerance for farming.
The closest thing to a relatively intelligent "bug" I've ever heard of are jumping spiders but I don't know if it compares to anything like a cephalopod's relative complexity. There's research that suggests they're abnormally good at planning for an arachnid and If you watch videos on youtube they can seem unnervingly curious and responsive to humans, they'll even pounce on laser pointers like cats and some do adorable little peacock dances with frill displays to attract mates not unlike birds. Some of this might just be an illusion caused by their weirdly anthropomorphic mustachioed faces and mammal-like furriness.
I really love insects but on a guttural level I'd still rather see them farmed if it spares creatures which we know to be highly intelligent and sensitive. We just can't take for granted they don't suffer comparably just because they're so alien. The "ladder of life" hierarchal evolutionary thinking used to have us believing that more distantly related lifeforms were not only less intelligent, but degenerate and suboptimal on a deep biological level. As in a fish isn't just less smart than a mammal but its very physiology is slower, simpler, more primitive. It's why we used to think dinosaurs must have been sluggish, dumb, and barely able to stand under their own volition without being buoyed in a swamp. We now know none of this is true and all living things evolve and optimize for their environments *in parallel.* A fish or a bug isn't less complex or sophisticated than a human they're just less smart just like we're less adept at flight or deep diving. It wouldn't be all that surprising if we find out they're inner lives are no less complex.
You're right that a race to the bottom is still a problem, but I wonder if it's still not better than the equivalent situation with more intelligent animals. Cognitively speaking, a cow likely experiences pain and stress on far more levels than an insect. I'm prepared to believe that insects feel something equivalent to pain and have some moral value, but you can only dedicate so many of your neurons to experiencing pain, and insects just don't have that many of them. The worst possible pain for even the most intelligent insect is bound to be orders of magnitude to the worst possible pain for a cow.
On your point 3, I don't see that ever happening short of a revolutionary cultural transformation that turns the entire world vegan. Ideally, we want insect protein to be cheap, appealing and available enough to supplant meat as the default protein source in the most popular low-to-middle class foods. If that happens, meat will still be enormously popular with the higher classes because it's inseperably ingrained into our culinary traditions. Having mealworm burgers being the default at the big fast food restaurants isn't going to make anyone want to eat ghost mantis; the 'exotic' foods of choice are still going to be regular meat.
On jumping spiders, they definitely /seem/ very intelligent but I think that's because we relate to them more easily due to being very visually responsive. Very few insects will turn to look at you when they see you move; the most they'll do is flee. With jumping spiders, we feel /seen/. I won't say that isn't a mark of intelligence, but since it's the kind we relate to, we easily recognize it. I'm sure other insects are at least as intelligent in ways we can't recognize.
"It beggars belief that they don't experience suffering analogous to pain when their needs aren't being met."
I want not to be aggressive here, but it beggars belief for me that you think a spider can "experience suffering analogous to pain" if it's not in a perfect spider habitat. If I pull the legs off a spider, or I burn a spider alive in a flame, it experiences pain, it suffers, that is cruelty on my part.
I keep a spider in a jar? That may or may not be cruel, but it's not pain. It's better to keep it in a terrarium or whatever the environment suitable for keeping a spider is, but it's not the same thing.
I don't let the spider have little spider friends? Now you're taking the piss, as we say.
I do think that this is more the human tendency to anthropomorphise animals. I see people proudly posting photos of their pet snakes in little hats, and I think that's worse for the animal than any natural environment. I don't know what invertebrates you keep or kept as pets, https://www.thesprucepets.com/insects-spiders-scorpions-and-millipedes-1236886 but plainly you had the interest to do so and equally plainly you felt differently about them than most people do about insects, and while I appreciate that the requirements for food, shelter, etc. are probably more complicated than people imagine (if you're keeping an exotic animal in what is not its native environment), I also think that you fell prey to the pet fallacy: 'I find these interesting -> I find them cute -> I think they're special -> I think they have Feelings and can reciprocate, in however limited or unique a way, my affection and interest".
I don't like creepy-crawlies in general. I try not to be cruel (if there's a spider in my way, I'll put it outside rather than kill it). But if it's me or the 'cute' spider, then sorry spider, you're getting swatted.
"I keep a spider in a jar? That may or may not be cruel, but it's not pain. It's better to keep it in a terrarium or whatever the environment suitable for keeping a spider is, but it's not the same thing."
Hard disagree. Like any complex multicellular organism spiders at bare minimum have needs for acceptable ranges of humidity, temperature, places to hide, light/darkness levels and cycles, places to build webs. Those are the needs we know they have. I'm not even talking about thornier issues regarding whether they have 'emotions' or whatever. Our bodies send all kinds of severely unpleasant, distressing, visceral alarm signals when our biological needs aren't being met. That's suffering and pain. There's no reason to suspect spiders are any different. (Many complex human emotional issues actually stem from biological deficiencies: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/opinion/brain-neuroscience-stress.html)
An empty jar meets almost none of these needs and the vast majority of spiders or insects won't survive very long in one. Ask any bug crazy kid: most specimens shrivel up and die fairly quickly in captivity (within a day or two if not sooner). Captivity stress is a well known problem with pet insects.
Most spiders, possibly a large majority, won't even eat in a jar if food is offered and they'll spend all their time trying to scurry up the sides toward a more favorable environment. That's another issue, the zeal with which living things fight to escape confining, insufficient conditions strongly hints they're highly distressed. (Related: I once volunteered at a major metropolitan zoo and believe it or not they actually let some large orb weaving African spiders live in a completely open display high above the visitors without any kind of containment because the thinking went that as long as the keepers provided for their needs --dropping enough food in their webs, correct temp, moisture -- they generally wouldn't even try to wander off. And it worked! at least some of the time, iirc one of them did end up wandering off at some point but who knows what ineffable spidery yearnings it was trying to satisfy. I swear this really happened.)
Now many bugs (like American Cockroaches) can be very, very, very hardy and non-picky about how they live, its what makes some of them such nasty pests and adversaries and some can even survive in very inhospitable conditions like some people can cling to life trapped on a freezing mountain for days on end, but it doesn't follow that they're not suffering if they're seriously deprived of optimal conditions to survive. The complication with bugs, and what can make them such good pets, is that thanks to basic physics it can be relatively easy to care for them compared to a large vertebrate even if they have sensitive care needs. It's a lot easier to keep a terrarium heated properly compared to a tiger cage. The spider in your jar might be easier to keep relatively happy simply because its already in a suitable environment, but if you don't provide it with some further necessities, which will depend on the species, size, etc, its going to suffer and languish on a biological level not dissimilarly from a person kept in an unventilated prison cell without natural light dark cycles, proper sanitation, optimum temperatures, etc, etc. Again I'm just talking purely in terms of physical, biological needs and constraints, not whether the spider is suffering emotionally and psychologically in any way comparable to a human being.
Big if true. The global insect population is estimated at 10^19. If they're suffering most of the time, and they have 1/10^6 of the moral worth of a human (roughly the neuron number ratio), that's a lot of suffering (far outweighing 10^10 human lives worth living). It might make one reconsider whether it's worth it to donate a dollar to Stop Yog Sothoth. Or it might make one want to tile the galaxy with insect amusement parks. If those decisions are even close then something must be wrong with the metaethics. Perhaps 1/10^6 is overvaluing mere sensation relative to the higher pleasures, and the correct number is far lower. To make Stop Yog Sothoth worth it, maybe we need to square the neuron number ratio, plus hope a decent fraction of the planets with life are sufficiently advanced to have species with lives worth living.
If you start running calculations, you're going to reach absurd conclusions. If you tie these facts to moral obligations, you're going to be obligated to do weird stuff. On the flip side, if most insect life is pleasant most the time, then we are living in a world of unimaginable happiness. However, it might be necessary to create as many bugs as possible if you have utility maximizing obligations.
N² for N neurons would be a better approximation, I think (though I have to note that overestimates synapse number in humans by several orders of magnitude) The connections matter more than the number themselves.
'. . .the righteous in Heaven dine on the flesh of Leviathan' -sounds like a big feed, but if the divorce of Saturn and Leviathan is annulled in Heaven, as Ibn Kaldun might say, that has an untimely closeness to cannibalism.
Try using the square of neuron number to estimate moral value!
Destroying a chicken brain's worth of neurons in a human brain is worse than killing a chicken, because those neurons are individually more valuable, because they encode more valuable thoughts, because those thoughts belong to a smarter being - a being with more neurons. Squaring the number takes account of that.
is a Bach 1000 second masterpiece equivalent to 500 2 second musical snippets? Is an architecturally inspiring building equivalent to a bunch of building blocks? Is the mind of a being whose brain is twice as large as the human brain equivalent to the mind of 2 lesser humans?
Well, if we go by mass, then pretty much the entire biome of the Earth consists of bacteria, within rounding error. We need an ethics that maximizes the utility of germs!
And as the train continues to Vladivostok and beyond, what about bacteria, which we nurture and kill in our own bodies by the billion every day? Barely a neuron to rub together, but do they not breathe, and are their wiggles worth nothing?
I do think there might be one key point you are missing, Scott. The immorality of factory farming animals is linked not just to the slaughter of said animals, but the quality of life they receive while living. Arguably, the best thing we can do for farmed animals is to give them a good life as close as possible to their natural living conditions, and a very quick very painless death. My intuition is that this is likely easier to achieve with bugs than ordinary farm animals. Cows and chickens are subjected to hellish conditions in factory farms, packed in and unable to move, beaks ground off and subjected to other body modifications, etc. I don't expect this would be the case for insects. Bugs often already live in swarms and dark places, so many of them are used to that. And they're so small that packing them in may not be a requirement anyway.
In the Adversarial Collaboration Contest, the authors of 'Is Eating Meat a Net Harm?' linked to this very thorough article titled 'Fish Do Not Feel Pain'.
I had assumed that if fish cannot feel pain, insects are pretty unlikely to either. Unsure whether that original article was wrong and fish can feel pain, whether Scott's links are wrong and insects probably can't feel pain, or whether there is some explanation for why insects feel pain while fish do not given insects seem to be simpler and to have more limited / robotic responses which would have less need for to experience of pain (see e.g. the 'sphexishness' of the sphex wasp). Could someone please help me resolve my confusion.
Isn't the obvious question here (if one assumes there's an issue with larvae in teh first place) whether larvae _suffer_ at all from being raised on an industrial scale? Won't they just be crawling around and eating what they eat? What about the wermiculture would be worse for them than their "regular" existence?
It seems to me that if a species' reproductive strategy is to throw huge numbers of progeny at predators on the basis that a tiny proportion survive to breed, there isn't much moral or pactical point in worrying about humans who might take to both consuming and propogating them, still less wasting effort on Insect Welfare Projects. I fear I may be wrong to continue eating mammals and birds but don't spend any time feeling morally guilty over fish or prospectively insects.
All I get from this is how lacking in imagination sci-fi writers who invent aliens are. Here is a whole comment section filled with fellow humans whose concerns are utterly incomprehensible to me.
For me the problem with bugs having moral value is this really pushes us a lot more towards the natural world being indefensible (a la anti-natalism). It turns something like the rainforests from beautiful and awe-inspiring into an endless torture chamber full of insects and other bugs constantly living in pain and suffering.
I realise this doesn't change the facts on the ground or bear on the actual scientific debate.
But I'm cautious about a moral standing where the implication is that tearing down the rainforests and replacing them with barren deserts would be a net positive.
I know we can make this argument about all animal rights including for mammals. But the sheer scale of invertebrate numbers feels like it should tip the scale.
Also, I can envision a weird future where we create an artificial paradise for elephants and lions to live in happiness and leisure. But for most insects, their suffering IS their existence. It's either wipe them out or accept their endless suffering.
I'll just add that I personally lean towards them not experiencing pain in the way other animals due. Analogous to complex robots like the organic machines in Rendezvous with Rama.
Scott does a good job job of presenting the actual science with the conclusion that this is very much an open debate.
This video is obviously far less authoritative but nonetheless I found it informative and useful:
They are torture chambers full of horrible suffering.
And positive experiences too, but that's mostly to guide animals to do things that help them survive.
Nature's telos is self-replication. The point of nature is to propagate selfish genes by any and all means necessary. Nervous systems are just the means by which genes are propagated.
Nature has no intrinsic value; its value is to human civilization as a giant sink of resources, aesthetic enjoyment, and waste processing capability.
Worried about animal suffering? - Stop eating them.
Soy is not sustainable? - Almost all soy is grown for animal food.
Vegetables take up land? - Majority of land and water is used for animal ag.
Eating animals is inheretly less efficient, because they are poor calorie-converter beings.
And a question to the people who says that they don't really mind about the animal welfare - have you watched a single animal farming video?
Visuals say more than thousand words.
I know you would instantly say the that is exaggeration etc. etc., but for that you can watch ''Land of Hope and Glory'' in YT - that is a footage from those 'high-welfare' and 'ecological' farms. Have fun!
I have a hard time with the [amount of suffering] x [animal count] thing, i. e. simply comparing the quantity. If I slap 10.000 people in the face, they would be fine shortly after, even if I slap them quite hard. But if I apply psychological damage of equal amount to a single human being, that person will probably be emotionally destroyed for good. I think the latter is worse. Even if the quantity is the same, I think the maximum quality of the suffering is quite important aswell.
Otherwise we could turn this around and include pleasure aswell as suffering. There is a "joke" that 9 out of 10 people are okay with bullying. 9 people get pleasure out of it and one person suffers. This should be ok if [pleasure x 9 >= suffering x 1]. But if we look at max suffering aswell, it's not ok because we lower is from 0 (no bullying) to an amount X<0 (with bullying).
This is a standard argument against utilitarianism.
When looked at very closely, these kinds of thought games fall apart.
For example, you bring up slapping 10,000 people. It only sounds not so horrible because our brains can't really process the enormous number of 10,000 people. If we could, we'd realize that maybe 2 of those 10,000 were already in a psychologically borderline place, and your slap just pushed them over the edge, into a really awful place.
Bullying is the same. Yes, *IF* those were the only variables -- and taking your utility numbers as given -- that would in fact be ethically good! But that's not actually what any typical bullying case looks like... which more realistically generate, let's say, -1000 utiles for the victim, and let's say 10 utiles for each of the bullies. In the real world, one could try to get a sense of this by asking a bully how much they'd pay not to trade places with the victim, and vice versa.
But even that kind of calculation misses big negative utility caused by a CULTURE of bullying. Each bully may get 10 utiles in above, directly, but... what if they're the next victim? They have to live in a culture of fear that they could be. Now, each bully might be negative in the long run. They also have to act conformist, because non-conformists are generally targets -- and that's a cost in utility not just on them, but on *everyone* who might benefit from innovations that require nonconformity.
Just about any such thought experiment raised against utilitarianism runs into similar problems with considered thoroughly.
It's probably uncharitable but I feel like effective altruism recent shift towards focusing on animal suffering rather than preventing malaria, Guinea worn, and other unpleasant things happening to humans in the third world is in part because veganism is much more normalized and socially accepted as a lifestyle choice than making people have to think about the third world. With the attendant uncomfortable questions that brings
In terms of prioritization of nothing else I find it difficult to justify caring about insects while human children and dying in painful and preventable ways
Something that's under-analyzed: what about the POSITIVE value these factory-farmed worms get from being alive to begin with?
Yes, they'll die one day -- but in the meantime they'll get to feel cozy slithering through warm soft dirt, and eating delicious decaying matter, etc.
In general, Tomasik's claim that "insects that exist suffer most of the time" seems like a CRUCIAL but also a deeply unsupported statement.
I think there's a similar lack of discussion around chickens and cows. Obviously factory-farming can be torture. But what about traditional farms? My sense, just from seeing these, is that these animals' lives are absolutely worth living. Yes, they get killed at some point, but we all die some day. If they are worth living, then eating humanely-raised meat is a moral GOOD.
I also wish researchers would try to answer this rigorously for factory-farmed animals. Aside from the one day they get killed, what are the chemical levels in their brain like? (Endorphins, stress hormone, etc) and how does that compare with wild / traditionally-farmed animals?
This. Also, I wanted to add that eating humanely raised chicken (or beef) is not such an impossible thing that it should be ignored in those morality calculations. I do not actively try to minimize suffering caused by my eating habits, but even so I have accidentally eaten chicken raised in a countryside, not in a factory farms. Also, lots of chicken eggs, ethically raised too.
So, for people who kind of like meat, but are ready to pay extra for the ethics of creation of their food, why aren't there EA articles like "We ranked all the chicken farms (whose products are available in the US) by how pleasant the chicken lives are, and here are our top 10"? If it turns out that those farms meet both the ethical standards and demand of EA members, than this is great, and everyone involved can eat chicken to their heart content, because those chickens were happy when they lived. If the ethical standards are met, but demand is not (e.g. the most ethically raised chicken is produced in some god forgotten village by a nice elderly couple who talk to their chickens and pat them on their heads) then the increased demand from the EA community would make the small businesses in question expand and/or new similar small businesses arise, and the supply would meet the demand as it happens in economics. In both cases, this would pave road for similar consumption for people who are not EA aligned, but still kind of want to be vegetarians so as to not make animals suffer, but not strongly enough that they would quit eating meat (and I guess the amount of people with such attitudes is non-negligible). And even if it turns out that the most ethical farms are not ethical enough (which I highly doubt, because never underestimate the outliers), then making a call to shift to the products of farms whose evil is the least would still be great.
Overall, I feel that ethical raising of meat is definitely a service which can be provided for extra money, and so the market should be able to provide it to those who care about it, and I am confused why it hasn't already solved that. Especially when EA members are so capable of finding the enterprises maximizing what they want (I'm thinking of charities here, but surely this skill must be generalisable?)
Tl;dr insect souls are weird and don’t work the same way human souls work. My argument has three points:
1.) However your particular moral system is set up, in order for it to be consistent, exactly retracing a moral act a second (or millionth) time can’t change your moral calculus (or else your moral system will blow itself up from all kinds of nasty contradictions).
2.) Insects within a species are similar enough to each other, and their minds so small (in an information-theoretic sense), that the life-paths of individual insects actually intersect with each other from the insects’ own perspectives.
3.) Insect species that have existed for a long time have already long-ago collectively traced out all morally relevant distinguishable experiences. So therefore in most cases it’s not possible to do anything that’s morally relevant to an insect because it’s not possible to do anything genuinely NEW to the insect’s soul, which has already attained a type of immortality that even complete extinction of the species cannot undo.
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The moral problems from a bad action come from physically realizing it the first time, that is, making the universe fully calculate a bad action and the feelings associated with it completely. This is why imagining a character suffering in a story you’re writing is not morally bad like actually having a real person suffer. Your puny mind cannot imagine enough detail to make the suffering real. This is why that same act of imagination performed by a Jupiter brain writing a story potentially IS bad. This is also why, after the bad thing happens once, the bad thing happening exactly the same way again does not add any moral "badness". If a simulated mind suffers in a simulation, that's bad. The suffering of sentient life is obviously bad independent of substrate. But AFTER the calculations have been fully realized once, if the simulation gets run again exactly the same way, that is not twice as bad. From the perspective of the simulated mind all the suffering happens "at once". (You can test this with cause and effect -- running a simulation multiple times doesn’t add any additional cause and effect within the simulation). Likewise if the universe somehow repeats itself, either in space or in time, that does not suddenly blow up your moral system and make every action take on additional moral weight. Even if the universe, right now, infinitely repeats itself in space, the moral badness of our actions is still the same as if there was just one universe, because the cause-effect relations are identical whether the universe “tiles” or not. If a bad action happens again slightly differently than a previous bad action, again it's not exactly twice as bad. Instead it is bad insomuch as it's DIFFERENTLY bad from the first bad action.
If your moral system doesn't follow the “double counting” axiom then you end up with absolutely absurd bullets that you have to bite, and your moral system will be embarrassing and you will make stupid absurd mistakes, especially when mind uploading is involved. We want our moral systems to handle uploading well because that’s going to be a big issue for the next few generations.
Now, insects. Do they have experience? Do they have souls? How bad is it to kill trillions of insects in various painful ways? Let’s admit for the sake of argument that insects have some form of experience. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that insects can suffer; they certainly can learn to avoid noxious stimuli and we can call that suffering if we want. What's important to note is that insect minds are very small compared to human minds, and within any given species, insect minds and bodies are very much more similar to each other than human minds are. Let’s talk about fruit flies for the sake of argument. ~40,000 neurons. ~100,000,000 synapses. Many of those synapses are elaborate ways to define what the possible experiences of the fruit fly are in the first place (such as smell, etc), and the basic design is virtually identical between all fruit flies. Some synapses are there to encode memories unique to that fly’s life.....
...How many bits of information do you think you can realistically cram into a fruit fly brain? Meaning, you give the fly an experience, you describe some kind of observation protocol, and then you try to send messages to someone else using only the flies. Think about it for a bit! Do you think you can send 100 bits / fly with an error rate better than 99%? I think I could maybe send 100 bits with a lot of work, if I had control over the fly’s entire life from the time it hatched, but I think it would be exceedingly difficult to do more than that (assuming genetically identical flies). Flies can imprint on a smell when they hatch. You can give flies a smell preference and a smell aversion through training. But there are severe limits to olfactory learning. As I understand it, fruit flies can't hold more than one or two “preferred” smells in their memory at once. If you try to add more it erases previous ones. You can encode various habituation memories to get a few more bits. There are probably lots of other ways to send information that we don’t know about. Let’s say that flies can distinguish 40,000 different smells. That’s log_2(40,000) = 2 bytes of information per smell memory. Let’s say for the sake of argument that you can encode / decode 10 smells reliably (I personally know how to do maybe 4) for a total of 20 bytes of smell information. If you can do 20 bytes with smell alone you can probably do 100 bytes using every memory system the fly’s got. Eventually, you exhaust the entire state-space of possible observable memories that a particular insect mind and similar variants can have. In contrast, consider how many bytes you could encode / decode if you had control over a human’s life from the time they are born to the time they’re 50, and you will have an appreciation for just how much smaller the fly’s mind is than a human’s! I’ve said all this to try to head off bad intuitions about insect minds. Instead of thinking about a fly mind as richly encoding the events of its suffering, think of their entire life experience as being more the kind of thing that would fit in a single QR code and you will be more accurate.
How does the fruit fly know what year it is? It doesn't. The fly dimly knows what it was able to encode from its previous experience, it knows its instincts, and it knows it's current sensory experience. When a fly hatches from its egg and then gets painfully eaten, does it know whether it's being eaten in 2001 or a hundred thousand years ago? It doesn't. The experience is the same. The experience is, in fact, a copy of some previous/future experience because the insect's mind is for all intents and purposes an adequate copy of many of the insects that came before/after it. The fly only has so many nerves, they can only be stimulated in so many ways, and ultimately the systems to encode memories based on that nerve stimulation can only remember a few bytes at best from the experience. The experiences of a fruit fly are simple enough that a lot of fruit flies must end up “sharing” identical experiences, simply by the pigeonhole principle. The first time any particular experience happened it might have been morally relevant. I’ll admit for the sake of argument that when a fruit fly 100,000 years first got painfully eaten after hatching, that was wrong and in a perfect world it shouldn’t have happened. But the next time a fruit fly gets eaten after hatching, only the meaningfully different parts of the experience should "count" morally. No double counting! And there's only so many ways to hurt an insect that are meaningfully different TO THE INSECT, because insects are only barely connected to the world in the first place. They experience the world in a haze compared to us and can barely remember anything compared to us. Because of the way their minds work, fruit flies can’t really even die the way that humans do, because their minds are so simple, and so similar to each others’, that even if one fruit fly dies there’s another fruit fly somewhere that has an identical life history from its perspective. It’s like fruit flies have “backups” all around them, the same way that humans might one day be able to have backups if we can get mind uploading to work.
Two humans have such radically different perspectives on the world and experiences that they can be said to have, to a first level of approximation, two completely different souls. The only way you get two humans with intersecting life-paths (and thus the same souls) would be if the universe happens to repeat itself exactly somewhere (or if we do interesting things with uploading). Then the corresponding humans have the same souls, as they are controlled by the same cause-effect relations. You move your hand in this universe, the other you moves their hand the same way in the other universe for the same reasons. If you have two perfect copies of a person, they diverge for a minute, and then one dies, then the badness of that event is just the loss of a minute of experience, not the loss of an entire person. Again, you either adopt this system of morality/value or suffer devastating, morality-destroying contradictions where uploading / weird physics is concerned...
...Now back to insects. Individual fruit flies simply don’t have separate souls the way that humans do, and if you treat them that way then you’re going to become hopelessly confused. A helpful way to think of insect souls is that there’s just one soul for each species of insect. An insect-species soul has a certain (small compared to even one human) number of realizable, distinguishable-to-it experiences that it can experience. Each individual fruit fly traces a life-path through some of these experiences, forcing the universe to fully realize them. Because fruit flies are simple, their life paths often cross. (Human life paths never cross because our minds are way too “big”). Once the fruit-fly soul experiences all of those experiences then it’s DONE. It can’t experience anything else unless it becomes more complicated, for example if the species evolves new sensory organs or whatever. This is a truly profound type of immortality, to have experienced everything to such a degree that any sort of resurrection is actually just a repetition of something that’s happened before! Again, this type of immortality is not possible for humans because we’re too big. It’s a weird thing that insect souls can do because they are very small. Every subsequent insect life that happens after the insect-soul is saturated with experience is just a repeat of various things that the soul has already experienced, and those events have no moral relevance. Human minds, even a single one, are so big and have so many possible meaningfully different experiences that they essentially can never run out. The universe will run out of space and time before you run out of possible mind configurations. Cow minds almost certainly have a big enough pool of possible experience that they’ll never “run out” either. Simple state machines (to the extent you want to admit that they “experience” anything) have already experienced everything the moment they’re fully described. Insect minds are small, and their generations are short, and nature is brutal. Any self-respecting, adventurous insect species that’s been around for a million years has already pretty much collectively experienced everything that CAN be distinguishably experienced with limited insect cognition and perception. They’ve been crushed, burned, dismembered, parasitized in interesting ways, eaten, been eaten, followed pheromones, reproduced. Every pathway of their intuition has already been followed to all of the possible conclusions, ad nauseum. Even if there exists a possible pathway that’s never before been explored by any insect instance (for example fear-conditioning an fruit fly on a new smell that humans created), it’s probably not all that meaningfully different MORALLY from previous experiences, and in any case if you factory farm insects you will rapidly exhaust any truly morally new experiences the factory farm has to offer in the first few months of its operation.
Incidentally, this is why humans are morally incommensurate with insects. A single individual human soul is bigger than an entire inspect-species soul and in fact can fully contain an inspect-species soul inside itself. The answer to the question, “how many insect lives does it take to be morally equal to one human life” is that you can’t EVER equal one human with any amount of insects. It’s the same sort of wrong question as asking how many times you have to reread the same children’s book to have the reading experience become the same as reading the source code of an operating system.
So in conclusion, whaling is the most ethical meat consumption?
Mentioning whaling does make me wonder if we should include a species' survival into the morality equation. Hunting whales is wrong, because they are endangered and it puts the species at risk. So factory farming endangered species has a moral bonus if it ensures the survival of the species? So for instance instead of eating cow, it would be more moral to eat bison to encourage the maintenance of an endangered species.
Hunting whales is wrong because whales are highly intelligent, social animals, which are tortured horribly by killing them with exploding harpoons and inflict massive stress and trauma on the surviving members of the pod. The fact that not hunting them preserves the species is a nice bonus.
1. developed sufficiently quick/painless ways of killing whales
2. made sure to kill only entire pods at once
and
3. bred lots more of them (with an emphasis on reducing intelligence and/or increasing body weight)
you would agree that it was morally correct to eat whale meat rather than cow meat? A quick search tells me that a whale provides the same number of calories as roughly 670 cows. Some dimensions that seem to be missing in this conversation are
- How long does this animal naturally live? (Ending a potentially longer lifespan animal to eat it seems more repugnant somehow)
- What is the natural arc of this animals' life? (If it normally spends a few hundred years enjoying itself, then floats off somewhere to die relatively painlessly, it seems obviously bad to kill it. If it normally spends twelve years mating, but with about a 50% chance of starving each year, and about a 30% chance of being devoured alive by the local apex predator, I'm at least less sure).
This is probably not the sort of thing I should be thinking about instead of sleep -_-
Yes. It would still be far, far worse than just not breeding and killing either and I would not be swayed from vegetarianism in such a world either, but if I could snap my fingers and magically make the entire meat industry switch to humanely farmed whales like you describe, I would. Hell, all three points would be better to do for cows, too!
If instead we estimate an organism's moral salience is proportional to (neuron number)^x, where x > 1, we can get very different answers from this thought experiment.
As a vegetarian, I can raise this without qualms about personal bias.
"In general, animal neuron number scales up slower than animal weight. If the principle holds, then all else being equal you should generally prefer getting the same quantity of meat by eating fewer larger animals (eg one cow) rather than many smaller animals (eg 100 chickens)."
OK, but my feeling is that consciousness develops as a non-linear function of the number of neurons.
If you (as a tiny creature like an insect) just have a few neurons, they're invested predominantly in hard-coded responses to stimulii. They're not really thinking as such.
Larger creatures suffer not just because of pain, but also because of their knowledge.
If I was forced to choose for a population to farm and eat either mealworms or whales, I'd choose the mealworms.
I officially claim that the neuron count metric for moral worth is wrong due to highest possible offense: it doesn't converge to normality.
Lots of people have already mentioned multiple counterintuitive, bizarre and repugnant conclusions to which we are led if we accept such metrics as it is. I'm somewhat amused that Scott, a person who wrote consequentialist FAQ, is willing to keep biting this bullet so eagerly. It seems similar to acknowledging that first version of utilitarism "suggests that drugging people on opium against their will and having them spend the rest of their lives forcibly blissed out in a tiny room would be a great thing to do" and then, instead of trying to figure out an utility function which better represents our moral intuitions, keep insisting that it's indeed moral thing to do and spend time and effort into a research of the most blissful drug.
Square metrics is better as an approximation but it still has similar problems. The one which, as far as I'm concerned, hasn't been discussed here yet is hightlited by the android example. Why wouldn't we consider android life valuable in the first place? If it's so undistinguishable from a human, wouldn't it have lots of artificial neurons? What about artificial neural networks in general? Imagine GPT-n which has more neurons than a human brain. Is it automatically more morally valuable than a human? If we give moral value to any neuron, what about all the neural networks that programmers create and delete at whim? Is the next station of our train to declare that doing math is morally wrong?
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" seems possibly required reading on this topic. Wherein PKD starts with a ridiculous premise you might sneer at it before flipping it all on its head, as he does.
Ahem, spoilers.
We see a society so enamored with animal life that the gravest sin is not only to harm one, but to not devote a significant portion of your income not caring for one. Meanwhile, these rogue androids are killed without so much as an afterthought, and it's generally considered unobjectionable, precisely because they lack any capacity for empathy, which is how you measure moral worth.
And you think, yeah, but of course an android that's basically indistinguishable from a mean human has more rights than, say, a spider, and I'm more enlightened than all these silly characters because I find this truth obvious. And I'm excited that the author agrees with me and we get to watch the main character go through that moral discovery, towards my naive position, and emerge as a contrast to this dumb society.
Then, as PKD does, he takes your smug satisfaction and smothers it dead. He writes a chapter where suddenly you think, "you know what? f- these particular androids, who should die in a fire, and at least this particular spider (if not all spiderkind) should be given everything it wants, to include a nice carefree retirement." Once you catch your breath you get to sit back and reflect upon how quickly your opinions changed and wonder if your core ethical beliefs generally last more than a minute when put under any pressure whatsoever, or if it was just this time, without much solace.
It probably only works for people going in with certain priors, but man it smarts. It is as much of a rug pulled out from under you as any book I can remember. You thought the author was on your side, agreeing with you, then just suddenly turns on you with so much contempt. What did I do to you PKD?
Movie stands on its own, has interesting questions about identity and whatnot, but the book is about applied problems in ethics and it smarts to read, and not enough people have had the deeply uncomfortable privilege.
You'd think so, but luckily, fish don't require shechitah (ritual slaughter), so the Leviathan isn't a problem, and the Talmud assures us the Leviathan will use its flippers to ritually slaughter Behemoth, so that will be kosher too. But wait, you say, shechitah has to be done by a Jew, otherwise it's not kosher? Not to worry, the Talmud says, God will teach us new laws we didn't know that will make it kosher shechitah
This, of course, gave rise to the famous joke make fun of Jews who are very strict about Kosher: "In Heaven, why is God serving fish for the righteous, when meat is considered of higher quality?" "For those righteous who don't hold by God's Kashrut"
It's curious to me as to why we never judge what is moral by the most obvious means available to us—the frequency with which an opinion or action is regarded as acceptable in the population. I'm quite certain the vast majority of humans don't worry themselves about insect suffering, which would bode ill for the insects if it weren't for the nearly-as-frequent repulsion at the idea of eating them (let's not reflect too closely on the legally allowed amounts of insect parts and rodent poop in our agricultural products, else we realise we are already eating the bugs!)
But as a serious meta-ethical question, if our innate ethical sense arises from evolved behaviours which have improved our survival, as I suspect most here would agree rather than going down the god-given path, ought we not judge what is 'right' by the mode of the population's thoughts on the matter?
This view seems *extremely* vulnerable to historical counterexamples (slavery, the Holocaust, all manner of ethnic conflicts, laws treating wives as property, etc). You can bite the bullet and say that all of those once-popular views which are now viewed as morally repugnant were in fact moral at that time and place. But then it seems like our definition of morality is basically meaningless, or at least it carries no meaning beyond "socially acceptable behavior", which I think is not what most people mean when they talk about morality.
The purpose of morality is to make society functional. It is a means of social control. It must be perceived as true to effectively control human behavior, but morality is not in fact true in the same sense that the Earth is round.
To quote Terry Pratchett:
"YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING."
Morality needs to be functional, adapted for the economic, political, and social circumstances of the moment. It is empathetically not universal.
I suspect the western emphasis of universal morality is a relic of Christian monotheistic thought, the same kind that held there to be One True God. Granted, I also suspect science arose because of this line of thinking, so it wasn't all bad, but the Chinese definitely have more a more reasonable and far more sane approach to moral philosophy. Look up the Spring and Autumn Period, and the Hundred Schools of Thought.
I think it's fine to have the view that this is the role that morality actually plays in practice.
But I think if you went around asking people whether morality refers to "what the average person thinks is right" or "something else", most people would pick "something else". In particular, if you asked them to agree or disagree with statements like "morality is a means of social control" or "does morality derive from organized states defended by military force", they would disagree.
So whether or not the practical reality of morality is as you described, I don't think it's fair to say that that is what most people mean by morality.
Actually, my father told me that what is moral is "what most people think is right", and I have come to agree with him. It seems to be the consensus view in East Asia - if most people are okay with it, it's moral.
That's fair. When I say "most people" I mean "most people in the US", which is the society I'm most familiar with. I have only a vague sense of what the prevailing views on morality are in other parts of the world.
Ah, the moral worth of eating chickens and/or worms.
What was once the concern of religious dogmas and a kind of self-imposed restriction in certain kinds of monks, became a fashionable concern in 21st century USA.
But that's not because they're any closer to nature, but because they're too removed from it, so that every animal is a Disney animal, and Nature is not just a big restaurant where animal eats animal (That's also how you get cat owners who force their cats into veganism).
Of course everybody is a moral vegan gangsta about moral value of chickens and worms when food is something prepared and delivered to them from all over the globe by market forces, and vegetables, substitute meats, supplements, and vegan dishes magically appear at their Whole Foods or local hipster vegan restaurants.
Which is why it's predominantly city folk of the upper middle class (or aspiring to it), the kind who virtue signals about the moral value of chickens and worms...
And every insect is a Disney insect, or close enough. DreamWorks made "Bee Movie" which is ludicrous in every aspect if you have even the nature study knowledge of an eight year old, though it must be that modern eight year olds are not taught even that much. An anthropomorphised bee in a society which mimics human society (he goes to college? is going to work in the honey making industry? he's a drone! their major function is to inseminate the queen!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)
They're also responsible for "Antz", another "insects are just really tiny humans" movie. Hmmm. Maybe the solution here is to nuke DreamWorks from orbit to stop any more brain-meltingly stupid movies about insects being made, influencing kids who then grow up to think worms have minds and can suffer just like higher animals.
I don't think children are stupid, but they are open to influences, and with the lack of contact for many of them with real world animals, and the limited contact they do have revolving around animals that are more and more treated as "fur babies" (surrogate humans as replacement for contact with children of one's own or other humans), then I think that the push to think of animals, and keep going down the chain to lower and lower levels of animal, as 'miniature humans' is only going to increase.
I always read animal stories for children as at least in part a way for the children to laugh at or despise adults without the adults taking exception. Id est, if I'm a ten-year-old I can laugh at the antics of Daffy Duck and say (in ten-year-old equivalent words) "Look at that horse's ass!" but if it were an adult in the story I might feel...qualms. Like the adults are not going to take kindly at 10-year-old me laughing at *an adult* even if the adult is behaving exactly like Daffy.
Some do, actually, and the reason is at least a little bit related to what I said -- they object to the "violence" although they're OK with the cartoon violence in Tom & Jerry. The fact that these are sort of logically inconsistent points back I think to an underlying unease at the child participating in adult follies, in which adults make judgments on each other.
But that said, I'm not arguing the effect is so strong that it forestalls *any* humor in which children can laugh at adults. We are alllowed to laugh at Barney Fife, too (although note that Sherriff Andy is there to remind us that aduls in general are Wise and Benevolent). I'm just saying that using animals is an ancient (cf. Aesop) mode of writing tales in which critique of adults is made acceptable by the distraction of a false identity.
It doesn't. Instead, it addresses the concerns before the points raised in Scott's post, and argues about them being moot and/or misguided. Sometimes you don't need to add an argument on someones suggestions on how to do X, especially if you don't consider X worth doing (or even sensible) in the first place.
I don't think it argues that those concerns are moot/misguided either. It seems like it just assumes that they are moot/misguided, and then ridicules the people who disagree.
An argument would be something of the form "I think the moral worth of chickens is negligible because of X". Your comment is of the form "I think people who think about the moral worth of chickens are laughable".
"I think people who think about the moral worth of chickens are laughable... in a world where children are exploited, rivers are poisoned, oceans are boiling and where every animal or plants tends to be dinner for another animal or plant".
The second part of the sentence explains the first and show we're not just taking the piss or using ad hominem...
It is the very detachment of the modern world from the reality of nature, and the isolation of the population from the business of how the sausage is made, that has driven excessive environmentalism.
Yeah, and excessive in some romantic hippie ways ("let's give up meat to save the chicken/worms" - from people dining at $30+/dish vegan joints) while neglecting the really important aspects (like, let's not pollute the rivers and water bodies where we depend for our water/fish/etc, or let's stop producing too much plastic crap).
The conditions of factory farming might not be unpleasant for some insects. Many species evolved to nest dark, tight spaces packed with other members of their species.
It seems like a pain is a signaling mechanism that tells you what to prioritize in the moment - the pain of getting stabbed tells you to drop everything and focus on that.
If an android has a similar signaling mechanism, isn’t that enough to call it sentient?
"One helpful trick is knowing a couple of people who are much more moral than you're aiming for, so that even when you average them out with all the jerks you know, you land somewhere close to where you want to be. People who care a lot about insect suffering fulfill that role for me."
There is, I believe, an unstated assumption in this calculus, which is that insects have moral worth at all, or at least enough that devoting a limited resource (one's moral attention and activity) to it it makes sense. But I think one has to consider whether devoting substantial time to insect happiness or suffering detracts from what one could do if that attention and effort were applied elsewhere (even if not to humans).
I am grim and cranky by inclination, and my feelings on this are that if you have the luxury to sit around worrying if flies and worms have minds and can suffer and have unhappy lives, then it's little you have to worry about and isn't it well for you?
Maybe a Jain saint would consider, even under conditions of suffering themselves, the well-being of insects, and I admire their convictions even while I disagree with their philosophy, but I think if you were worried about "will I be evicted, how do I pay my bills, my child is very sick, how am I going to find another job?" or the like, you wouldn't have spare energy to worry about "there are billions of flies in the world, do they outweigh human suffering?"
Let's sort out all the humans who need help first before we start making luxury dwellings for meal worms so they can live their best meal worm life, okay?
"Jain monks, nuns and some followers avoid root vegetables such as potatoes, onions, and garlic because tiny organisms are injured when the plant is pulled up, and because a bulb or tuber's ability to sprout is seen as characteristic of a higher living being."
We're all typing these comments on some computers, some of us on some tablets or mobile phones i.e. we very probably are the beneficiaries of some child labor, conflict mining and/or unsavory working conditions for lots of people in Asia...
We're fine with all that, so I'd argue that worrying overly about the exact measurement of cow suffering vs. worm suffering is a bit like arguing about the upper bounds for the density of angels dancing on the point of a pin. It's intellectual self pleasuring.
NB: I am convinced of the superior morality of veganism/vegetarianism. I still eat meat. Once technology will have managed to grow meat in labs, the problem will go away. Support research in lab grown meat!
Why should ethical considerations (y) scale linearly with the number of neurons (x)? The options are not y = C vs. y = x, but y = C vs. y = x vs. y = x^2, vs. a sigmoid function etc.
For example, you might argue that a sigmoid function makes maps better to our current sensitivities -- the difference between one protozoan and one bug does not scale proportionally to the number of neurons (ignore the division by zero for protozoan); men are clearly also not worth ~10% more than women (due to, on average, larger brain sizes). But somewhere between pig and chimpanzee the ethical considerations increase dramatically.
Note: current sensitivities does not make for great objective criteria, but something like this could make sense with some thresholding of consciousness and perception of suffering.
I agree with this. My intuition seems to be that there is some threshold level of cognitive function where consciousness/sentience/whatever we want to call it is achieved, and this threshold corresponds to the part of the sigmoid where the slope is steepest. I think the hard part is deciding exactly where that threshold is (between humans and chimpanzees? chimpanzees and pigs? pigs and chickens?)
I wonder if those calculations do take into account the damages factory farming does to not just to the animals being farmed but the second order harm that the waste causes to other animals. And the damage it does to other animals due to deforestation and all other effects it has.
I'm not someone who particulary cares about animal well-being, but if I was I think I should "shut up and multiply", and see if after doing the multiplication throwing bugs under the bus is not the right answer. Gotta mutliply first tho.
I do think the major problem here is you had better hope to God normal people don't ever hear about these concerns, because it's going to be a hard bloody sell to convince them to try veganism, when it goes from "factory farming is cruel" to "we're also worried about mealworms having sub-optimal experiences". At that point the ordinary person goes "To hell with this, I was going to give vegetarianism a go but now I think I'll eat an entire cow because this is just too silly for words".
I have yet to see a good argument for why any animal has moral worth.
Most popular arguments seem to hinge on whether the animal feels pain, which is a separate question. I can see an argument that humans should avoid inflicting pain because of it's negative effects on our own psyche, but that argument does not involve the animal's perspective.
The idea of moral worth is implicitly metaphysical. There is no coherent theory of ethics, that I know of, that does not at some point resort to metaphysics. As animals do not have souls, they have no inherent moral worth. They can be dealt with in whatever way is best for man.
Even the bottom humans have guns, and are organized, and have leaders and warbands and like North Korea, nuclear missiles these days. The Top Humans placate the bottom humans and are pitted against each other. Thusly the bottom humans live happily enough to maintain viable economies for the top humans.
You need happy bottom humans to provide agricultural and industrial labor for the top humans.
Unhappy cows don't taste worse, so it doesn't matter that cows are unhappy. Milk cows only need to be happy enough to produce milk - and current factory farming seems to work, so there.
Frankly speaking, I doubt the "bottom humans" in North Korea, living in gulags, are very happy. But the system works well enough for the top humans in NK and, as you said, well enough overall for the system to perpetuate.
Still, I'd say any individual Korean very much live or die at Kim Jong Un's whims.
All that said, I'm not sure your point (bottom humans need to be placated and manipulated) really changed my point. They're soulless and the only criteria for treating them well, even according to you, is practical - they could rebel - rather than moral.
Morality, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, a means to keep society pacified. It is necessary, because the only thing worse than a hierarchical society is no society at all. Anarchy will kill us all. Morality, however fake and arbitrary it may be, is necessary for social stability.
I don't think this is all there is to it. Genghis Khan and his hordes may have inflicted horrible pain to other humans but, somehow, not on themselves, their clans, their tribes and then their subjects.
i.e. Genghis Khan displayed a morality. If you were "his"/within his perceived "us", you were probably fine, unlikely to get stomped on. If he considered you one of "them", well...
Yes. His morality kept the Mongol Empire together, and kept Mongol Society stable. Tribal morality is a good morality for such situations. Not sure how your example illustrates anything else than the need for an opiate of the masses.
The bottom humans in America, China, and most elsewhere are mostly happy enough to go to work and participate in the economy and obey authority. This is adequate.
In the US, there's enough malcontents democracy is under credible threat from the minority political party... In China, the jingoism Xi is pushing seems, in part, necessary to quell opposition/dissatisfaction...
So, yeah, it might be "adequate" but we can do a lot better and we would need to, if we are to solve climate change and colonize our solar system.
North Korea is hardly an industrial powerhouse - because its people are unhappy. The modern knowledge and industrial economy cannot run on sullen slaves. Happy, devoted, nationalistic populations of bottom humans are necessary for the prosperity of humans top and bottom.
The modern knowledge and industrial economy can be run on slaves; perhaps not quite as efficiently as if run by free men, but e.g. the Soviets got a great deal of useful knowledge out of their scientific gulags. Slaves can run factories, or research labs, tolerably well. This is not pleasing, but it is so.
The problems with the North Korean economy are mostly due to isolation, both self-imposed and forced. Also poor management, and from taking 25% off the top for the armed forces that maintain the isolation. "Slavery" is a lesser contributing factor, not the root cause.
Hm. Okay but frankly I think we're past that debate. I don't want to redo the whole New Atheist spiel but it's pretty clear evolution gave us a fuzzy sense of right and wrong to live and cooperate within a group of fellow apes.
We don't need to have a coherent theory of ethics independent of the human experience. We just need to use our evolved moral compasses and basic logic and we'll be fine.
Indeed, religion and ideology tend to be dangerous inasmuch as they blunt our sense of sameness and play on our (also evolved) Us vs. Them mentality.
Atheism makes similar metaphysical assumptions to theism (with less justification - at least there are some people who have claimed to have interacted with God, but no one has claimed to have direct knowledge of the non-existence of God).
Evolution is a shaky basis for a theory of ethics. It leads to the ethical theory - "do whatever you can get away with". Is the really evidence that ethical norms are transmitted genetically? They seem to be purely cultural.
When you consider historically the barbaric practices of various peoples across the world, I see no evidence for any implicit theory of ethics that comes merely from being human. To be honest, even religious ethics seems to be honored more in the breach than actually followed.
I disagree with your last point. Most major religions emphasize the universality of ethics and the brotherhood of humanity. (See, for example, the diatribes of various monks criticizing the poor treatment of Indians in the 15/16th century). Though, as I said, it's not always effective at overcoming people's baser motives.
<quote> (with less justification - at least there are some people who have claimed to have interacted with God, but no one has claimed to have direct knowledge of the non-existence of God). </quote>
This can be used to say every positive belief is more justified than a negative belief. That is absurd, and also ignores a lot of bayesian reasoning.
I don't think it is useful to argue anything else unless this point can be agreed on.
I think this article misses the mark a bit. It isn't bugs that are the crime. It's yogurt. Consuming a cup of yogurt ends the life of nearly 50 billion bacteria. Worse still. If you fail to eat the yogurt, you sentence the entire population to a slow and painful death by starvation (and/or asphyxiation in their own waste products).
Amen. Think of all the billions of rice seeds we eat every day. A potential plant, every last one of them. Or the trillions of krill consumed by blue whales daily.
And if we want to pretend that insects are more deserving of our concern than bacteria, what of the impact of our great dumping sites. We dispose of great swaths of food waste thus providing habitats for millions of insects and rodents. Then we bury them alive or cease to provide sustenance.
I am comfortable with the idea that if we are spawning or encouraging massive populations of organisms we ought to consider how they are treated and how they are killed. The assumption that creating them at all for food is wrong leads quickly to seemingly absurd conclusions.
Not trying to be rude or derail but this sort of absurd conclusion is why attaching moral significance to the mere sensations of pain and pleasure is a mistake. If your definitions of happiness and suffering are eudaimonic instead of hedonic, they are based on the teleological natures of the beings in question and therefore do not create this kind of quandary.
The purpose of a domesticated food animal, artificially selected by man for that end, is to be eaten. The pain involved in fulfilling that purpose therefore cannot constitute suffering but is in fact the means by which those animals achieve eudaimonia (if they are indeed capable of that, which is more of a philosophical than neurological question). Therefore there is no moral consideration needed so long as the practices of raising and slaughtering the animals aligns with their natures.
"The purpose of an enslaved human, artificially selected by his master for that end, is to accomplish whatever physical labor his master requires. The pain and effort involved in fulfilling that purpose therefore cannot constitute suffering but is in fact the means by which these slaves achieve eudaimonia. Therefore there is no moral consideration needed so long as the practices of raising and putting to work the slaves aligns with their natures."
This seems to be equally valid under your premises.
If Aristotle was right and there was such a thing as a Natural Slave, that is, a human whose teleological purpose is to be enslaved, then yes that would be true. You would have something along the lines of Rowling's house elves where the being in question is literally so unsuited to freedom as to suffer without the ability to serve.
I however see no compelling evidence that this is in fact the case for any human society which exists or ever has existed, and so reject it.
Do you think that animals suffer unless they are eaten?
I think you could make this argument for some of the more egregious examples of selectively bred livestock, but for the majority of animals - even farm animals - I do not think you can argue that they are happier being slaughtered then not being slaughtered, all else being equal.
I'm unsure whether or not animals can suffer anymore than a hammer or saw 'suffers' when it's used incorrectly. That's a philosophical question beyond my paygrade.
But I do think that it's pretty incontrovertible that domesticated animals, particularly food animals, fare rather poorly when "freed" into the wild. They are maladapted for anything besides the man-made conditions they were intensively bred for over hundreds of generations.
Yes, I agree that the domesticated animals would not be better off if they were freed into the wild. But under the moral framework you described, the relevant alternative isn't being released into the wild - it's living under the same conditions but not eventually being slaughtered.
You're claiming that it's okay to slaughter domesticated animals because that's their purpose, and they will be worse off if they don't fulfill that purpose. I'm claiming that an animal which lives on a farm but isn't eventually slaughtered - thus failing to fulfill its teleological purpose - is actually better off than an animal living in the same conditions that is slaughtered. If this is true, then you can't justify slaughtering animals on eudaimonic grounds.
It's an important question which of the practically realistic outcomes - being raised on a farm and slaughtered, being released into the wild, or not existing at all - is ultimately better for animals. But I think this is a separate question from whether we can justify their slaughter by reference to a eudaimonic conception of happiness.
The reason why I like teleological arguments is that they neatly avoid absurd hypothetical situations and zero in on what you call practically realistic ones.
Would anyone bother to raise a herd of, saw, pigs and never slaughter them? Pay for the land, the feed, veterinary medicine, etc. purely for the aesthetic of a farm? Sure, maybe somebody out there would. But not enough to maintain the domesticated pig as anything more than a zoo animal.
Out of the options that might plausibly exist, I think being farmed for meat wins over extinction on the grounds that existing with a purpose is better than nonexistence. Being reduced to a small number kept in zoos could eventually get to the same moral level as being raised for meat, if the remaining food animals were selected heavily enough for zoo life that it instead became their nature to be displayed in zoos. And being released into the wild is probably the worst option for reasons we've already covered.
in Thailand and much of Buddhist SE Asia there's a bright red line between people and other animals. here they have *monkeys* - animals that until the age of 4 are substantially smarter than humans and look and act substantially like humans. bright red line. many words, like arm, have two words: one for human arm, one for animal arm. same thing in rural New Mexico - a dog's just a f*g dog.
I look at the world, knowing why animals eat, what animals eat and how animals gather food and knowing I, as human, have the most choices. Being at the top of the food chain, I choose to not eat insects, and choose to eat meat, fish, and yes lobster, crab, shrimp as well as vegetables & fruit . As stewards of life on this planet, I choose to be as humane as humanly possible in my endeavor to stay alive. The day will come when protein will come from many sources including insects, that will fill the many "cartridges" in the food printing machines, until then I'll eat and have no guilt.
Let's flip the deck. Say there are some super smart/ advanced aliens, they rule over a vast empire in the galaxy. They come to Earth and it turns out humans are really talented at something. Let's say we're great singers. The Aliens come to us with a proposal. You guys are great singers, we love songs and would like to make you part of our empire. We will take some of your best singers, and keep them till ~age 40, when their voices start to fade we will painlessly kill them, while maybe keeping a few of the best for breeding. If you join us the number of humans in the universe will increase a hundred fold. Do we joyously join them, or run away screaming, arms flailing?
What's the flipside? If we don't join them, they ignore us for a century but have a 10% chance of blowing up Earth to build a hyperspace expressway? If that's the case, sure, call for volunteers and/or hand over the tributes. Better to have a population of breeding humans be chattel to a superadvanced civilization than risk extinction.
Honestly, if they paid us a little something, we'd probably hand over the tributes anyway. A few dozen singers are a cheap price to pay for access to technology.
No flipside, if we don't go we just stay here. I'm just trying to make an analogy were we are the cows/ chickens/ meal worms. What does the deal look like from the cows point of view? A lot of former dairy farmers around here have switched to raising cows for beef, slaughter. The cows spend their days in the fields and the barn in winter. It doesn't look like a bad life for the cow.
Sure. I figure we should raise our cattle on pastures, not on factory farms. So that's the start of my analogy. But if aliens want us for some talent, then we have to expect them to select for that talent. That's kinda creepy. Or maybe another way, can you make a deal with a cow, so that a short life raised for food is better than no life? (With a tip of the hat to Douglas Adams, and whom ever posted to quote.)
I'd oppose surrounding to the aliens on the basis that we're fucking humans and no one tells us what to do.
Look - it's basically like slavery (and please remember that the US isn't the only type of slavery to have existed). If your master isn't a psychopath, your life wasn't necessarily bad. See some comments in TV series like 'Rome'. You didn't have to worry about your fate, or where your next meal might come from. Choices were taken away from you but then so were moral/ethical responsibilities. Some people may find that 'peaceful'. Again - this is not meant to hide or diminish the potential for horrific abuse etc. but to point out it wasn't systematic.
Even if you gave me the guarantee that I wouldn't be physically or sexually abused by Jeff Bezos, I would refuse being his slave. Even if living close to him would certainly entail an improvement of my physical environment.
OK thanks, I'll put you in the 'run away screaming' group.
But yeah I'm picturing something that is beyond slavery. Slavery is among approximate equals. I want the aliens to be to us, as we are to cows. We don't think of cows as slaves. We would be joining the aliens being some cog in their cosmic civilization. We'd give up some freedoms. And in return spread across the galaxy... immortality, there will always be humans. (Well as long as the alien civ survives.)
How do you know that doesn't already happen? Maybe that's what "death" is -- it's just being harvested by the aliens to join the choir. There are all these stories of Heaven being full of music, after all.
I think the question is whether insects have the ability to make choices in the first place, and if not whether it's still possible for them to have moral value in spite of this.
I'd still rather someone not have decided I shouldn't exist. How does it help my welfare for you to prevent me existing before I was born?
If you were just some kind of serial killer who got off on preventing existence, I'd get it. But the bug preventers are claiming a moral obligation *to the bugs* to prevent them from existing.
Getting rid of insects would be a bad idea, because it would lead to the crash of ecosystems all over the planet. I'd be down with getting rid of mosquitoes....
A bit thin on the commentary here, Scott. The morality is hardly quantifiable - heck, it hardly merits quantification.
It's tilting at windmills at this point.
There's an old Chinese tale of the Buddhist monk who could not bear to see a hungry falcon, yet was unwilling to feed it a worm (for is a worm not a living thing?). He ended up cutting off a piece of his flesh to feed the bird, and nearly killed himself near the end.
There's no moral to the story that I recall (the monk achieves enlightenment and gets saved by the gods or some nonsense), but common sense would suggest that the monk is being a moron.
Morality is only valuable insofar that it is useful for organizing societies and states, and providing them with propaganda to maintain social cohesion and economic progress. It is extremely valuable, as Terry Pratchett himself notes - "you have to believe the little lies, so you can believe the big ones - truth, justice, mercy, etc". It is therefore obvious that morality needs to be evaluated based on pragmatics.
This morality being proposed is completely impractical.
Sophistic weighed utilitarianism is probably the best bet for a reasonable morality system.
Your utils matter the most, then your immediate family, then your extended family and friends, then your community (defined arbitrarily), then your city, then your country, then your civilization, and finally mankind (then maybe Earth (as opposed to those evil bastards on Alpha Centauri)). It's arbitrary, but it maps on nicely to human biological and social relationships and political organization.
You weigh and trade off utils by multiplying by a weighing factor, individualized for how close your relationship is with that person/what kind of relationship you have, and personal preferences. Averaged across all of society, you get the basis of "reasonable" mutual obligations, with variation depending on personality and law.
No external consequences (you won't get arrested). Ten randos on one fork, your brother on the other.
You save your brother, of course!
No external consequences (you won't get arrested). Two say... Afghans on one fork, an American on the other. Two... Nigerians on one fork, an American on the other.
Depending on how patriotic you are, the number starts to fluctuate.
But people loving their families too much is not in the interests of the state. Citizens are all equally economically valuable (more or less, it's necessary for political cohesion). So if you save your brother and kill ten people, you will be arrested.
So if you turn on consequences, you can maybe decide to...
Two citizens on one fork, your brother on the other --> Go. The Judge may be lenient.
Ten citizens on one fork, your brother on the other --> No Go. The Judge will screw you over.
The problem here is treating suffering as if it were always quantifiable or fungible. Category can matter more than scale. It's unacceptable to torture an Omelas child to prevent a suitably-high-number-of-beings from ever getting dust in their eyes.
It isn't clearly wrong to subject many much less sentimentally complex organisms to a death not much worse (and in many cases, probably better) than one in the state of nature in order to feed one very sentimentally complex organism.
For a species to have moral value, it will have moral duties as well. Humans have the moral duty to consider the welfare of animals (along with many other moral responsibilities). Animals do not have a moral duty to factor human welfare into their actions, because that's impossible. Animals are not capable of making moral judgements.
It is not immoral to kill animals to meet human needs. It is wrong to needlessly inflict pain on animals, not because the animals have moral value but because humans have a moral responsibility. How much of a responsibility we have can vary, and I think our duty to consider insect welfare is about as low as it can get. Pulling the wings off of flies to torture them is wrong, but we could kill every mosquito and tick in the world and I wouldn't blink an eye.
I am terrified of insect factory farming. Can we please let things get better instead of making them worse for so many. I am literally crying about it.
Given the very brief generations and thus capacity for rapid forced evolution of insects, is there a possibility of breeding the "Insensate Foodbug" which produces a lot of meat and has little or no capacity for pain or any other kind of suffering?
I would agree if it were just pure mental masturbation, however I know people who feel significant distress about these issues, change their behavior, and repeatedly ruminate and bother others about these things. I feel this is a 'don't feed the trolls' situation where we just shouldn't engage.
"...crop farming is probably net positive, because cropland has fewer insects than wild land, and most insects that exist suffer most of the time, with pesticide-related suffering being swiftly over and not very relevant..."
So, less life, less suffering? This is where rationality goes awry and the real fun starts, known as spirituality.
"The scale of the Xinjiang genocide dwarfs the scale of the latest mass shooting"
Does it? There are certainly camps where Uyghurs are forcibly confined. There's probably also forced labor in those camps. But has anyone been murdered in the camps?
Wait a minute, at the very end of this blog post is this sentence:
"... Plausibly the most morally correct action, short of becoming vegetarian,..."
What, becoming a vegetarian is a solution? Do not plants bleed their inside stuff if you cut them? Do not trees communicate? (ask Peter Wohlleben.) Do not weed, at least, come back with a vengeance if you cut it? And do not plants feel pain when you uproot them? Well, not the way animals do, sure, but as Britannica notices:
"Given that plants do not have pain receptors, nerves, or a brain, they do not feel pain as we members of the animal kingdom understand it. Uprooting a carrot or trimming a hedge is not a form of botanical torture, and you can bite into that apple..... However, it seems that many plants can perceive and communicate physical stimuli and damage in ways that are more sophisticated than previously thought."
The truth is, there is no escape. As Arthur Schopenhauer dryly commented:
"The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other."
..so becoming a vegetarian, or vegan even, is not much better than becomning a bug-eater. Or staying a cow-eater.
If your purpose in life is not to cause pain, you have set yourself an impossible task. (And no, Jainists do not avoid it, either.)
Some hyper-sensitive youth may contemplate killing themselves to avoid inflicting pain on others. I would be interested in a statistics showing suicide rathes for vegans, vegetarians, and meat-eaters among under-30-years-old, when existentialism is at its peak; I have my hypotheses/suspicions.
Unfortunately, ending your own life also causes someone to suffer: yourself. It's the Catch-22 of this type of existentialism.
Since we are in Old Testament-mood in several places in this blog post, why not give the last word to the sage of all sages, Ecclesiastes 4:2-3:
Then I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yet even better is he who has not yet been; who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.
It seems to me the obvious solution is just to make factory farming more enjoyable for the animals involved. If the animals have a pleasant life, and a quick, painless, un-scary, death, then raising them and eating them would not only not be a morally wrong act, but actually would be a morally beneficent act. All those fish, chicken, and cows you eat over the years never would have lived at all if they hadn't been raised for food.
I've never understood why animal welfare activists changed their approach. First they campaigned to get 'cage free eggs' and 'free range chickens', 'cruelty free' etc, and had tremendous success. Then they started saying the standards to qualify for the cage free/free range certificate were too low-- the animals were still not being cared for adequately-- so we all have to become vegans!!!! Huh, why not, 'let's campaign a little more for higher standards"? They'd already proved legislatures would act, and that people would pay more at the grocery store for kindly treated animals, why didn't they move forward from their past successes? Instead they seemed to all pivot to 'eating animals is morally wrong, REGARDLESS'.
If I was a bird or a fish or a cow or for that matter, a meal worm, I would rather have a short life but a happy one, than never to have existed at all.
In martial art scoring, a hit on the head outweigh any number of hits on the torso, which in turn outweigh any number of hits on the limbs, etc. In a similar vein, I think it's ok to have a moral framework where the life of a single human may outweigh nearly any number of cows and chickens, and in turn a single cow or chicken might outweigh a staggering number of insects.
I don't know if I would literally let an infinite number of chickens die to save a single human life - the ratio may be closer to a billion to one or something - but allowing trillions of insects to die to save a single cow seem more morally acceptable than simple "shut up and multiply"
What problem are we trying to solve with bugs as food? Are vegetarians and vegans not getting enough protein? My understanding is that as long as you eat a variety of plant foods that contain enough calories to to maintain your body weight, you'll have really no trouble at all getting enough protein, and that in the USA at least, we're all getting pretty much 70% more protein than the recommended minimum, with negligible differences between different types of diet.
I'm not including extreme calorie restriction here -- obviously if you starve yourself, you probably won't get enough protein. Plant foods are less protein dense than animal foods, but they're also less calorie dense, so a weight-maintaining plant-based diet will include a bit more volume of food than a weight-maintaining omnivore diet. I'd imagine this makes up for the difference in protein density.
I could see saying that bugs could be a useful source of calories and protein in places where people are on the edge of starving. But aside from that case, is there any hard evidence that people who replace animal foods with plant foods will become deficient in protein, or is it just something that people have repeated enough times that we all take it as given?
I thought I had an answer to your question, but now I'm not sure.
Bug farming isn't for vegans, certainly; they won't eat it.
Industrial-scale beef is bad for the environment, and demand is going up as the Third World gets wealthier. But, considering beef as a luxury item, bugs won't serve as a substitute.
"On the one hand, bugs probably don't matter much morally. On the other hand, 10,000 is a lot. If bugs had any moral value at all, factory-farming and killing 10,000 of them would be really bad."
SMBC hasn't reached quite XKCD levels of "relevant xkcd"
While this post is interesting I think it misses one very important point: the effects of quanta, or a threshold, to achieve some neurological trait.
There is going to be a threshold at which movement can be controlled by neurons. This seems to be around 200: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons. Other animals (sponges) and plants move and act according to "pain stimuli", but this is certainly in a conscious manner, at least as defined by the central nervous system (CNS) model.
There also seems to be a threshold for CNS based eyes (not just light detectors): 10,000. Again, see link above (tiny wasp* and snails).
Next there seems to be a threshold for "first-order intraspecies-interaction". This is very loosely defined as a selfish interaction with your own species. Here lobsters (famous for having mating hierarchies) and fruit flies (famous in the computer science world for fruit flies swarms - aka following one another to better find food). This threshold seems to be up at 100,000 neurons.
Next up is "symbiotic-intraspecies cooperation" or hive cooperation seemingly at 250,000 neurons (bees and ants).
Then there is mammalian-colony interactions: 25,000,000 (naked mole rat).
And then speech at around 86,000,000,000 (humans).
These are very rough numbers and my model doesn't take into account neurons for scaled motor coordination, large eyes, etc. An elephant has more neurons to move more muscles fibres so has more neurons than humans, while not exhibiting true speech, for example.
Therefore, consciousness, as any given person might define it, will fall somewhere in this scale.
I think the majority of people would not consider Bees and Ants to be conscious. In my opinion, consciousness is needed to truly explain suffering - that is, not just a reaction to negative stimuli but a conscious understanding of the pain.
An additional consideration is that of the network effect. That is, neural complexity shouldn't be measured in neurons but in connections. Here I shall use the proxy of potential connections. This can be calculated as n(n-1)/2, for n = number neurons. Therefore, complexity scales approximately quadratically with neuron count. That means a human isn't 344,000 times as neutrally complex as a bee (8.6 x 10^10 / 2.5 x 10^6) but 118,336,000,000 time as complex (8.6 x 10^10 / 2.5 x 10^6) ^ 2!!!
Even given this, I think the killing 118,336,000,000 bees is not as morally bad from a suffering standpoint, precisely because NONE of them reach the quantum threshold for suffering.
However, definitely don't kill 118,336,000,000 bee larvae (which are edible), even for guilt free snacking. This is VERY bad ecologically, economically and for those of us whole like honey in our sandwiches as it is approximately 80% of the honey producing bee population in the US!
"On the other hand, 10,000 is a lot. If bugs had any moral value at all, factory-farming and killing 10,000 of them would be really bad."
No, this does not follow at all.
There's a common trick in a lot of "quantitative" arguments where the reader is invited to make up a reasonable-sounding number, and the trick is that people asked to make up numbers never come up with 0.000000000001. If bugs had some moral value, they could still have so little moral value that 10000 of them doesn't add up to too much. It's just that when asked to guess how much moral value bugs might have, people don't generally guess numbers with enough zeroes past the decimal point, but this has more to do with what kind of numbers people guess than with the actual moral value of bugs.
Same question someone else asked. What's "actual" moral worth? How do you calculate it, regardless of how many zeros past the decimal point you might want to put?
Some insects (e.g. giant hornets) are pure evil, and eating them is not only tasty, but it's one of the few times I can mix the feeling of acting morally and getting revenge.
"It's not a problem unless you're factory-farming ten trillion insects, at which point it really starts to add up."
There's one thing I'm less immediately certain about than everyone else appears to be which is the assumption that morality _should be_ measured additively. Why should we assume that? Why shouldn't we consider marginal contemporaneous violations of moral behavior to be less than strictly additive?
In practice we very often don't. There's certainly a major confounder in our limited capacity to feel increased emotion for each person, but that doesn't mean it covers the whole idea. Allowing duplicate moral judgements to accumulate less than linearly would allow us to center the discussion on the responsibility of the bad actor, rather than always focusing on the moral worth of 'victims' and using their count as a direct multiplier.
If worms have some non-zero moral worth, but moral culpability isn't strictly linear, then farming 10k of them isn't necessarily much morally different from farming 10 of them.
> In the same way, even if there's only a 50-50 chance insects have moral value, or a 1% chance, still seems like you should avoid factory-farming and killing ten trillion of them
I think you're mis-applying probability to moral value. Value judgements are subjective, not objective. There will never be a scientist who finds a particle of pure moral good & measures it's presence in insects to determine their moral weight. It's up to each of us (and through us, for society) to assign moral weights based on our upbringings & hardcoded perferences.
I, personally in my subjective experience, give insects a near-zero moral weight but I still save spiders bc we're on the same team against mosquitoes (which I assign a negative moral weight to).
Scott, personally in his subjective experience, seems to assign a near zero moral weight too while Tomasik assigns a non-negligible moral weight.
The three of us together (none, none, some) do not imply that there is a 33% chance that insects objectively have some moral weight. Rather, there's a 0% chance that insects have some moral weight in my subjective experience and a 100% chance that they have some in Tomasik's subjective experience. Maybe we could assign a probability to whether a society made up of us 3 would assign any moral weight to bugs but, for the most part, I think assigning probabilities like this distracts from what's important: society compromising on shared subjective values that are maximally accommodating to the values of the individuals that make it up (as opposed to the search for "objective" moral values that are non-negotiable and which everyone must accept or else they're objectively a bad person)
If it matters at all, the vast majority of us have already eaten tons of bugs. The food colourant E120 aka cochineal is made of carminic acid, which is derived from scale - a type of beetle that lives on prickly pears.
Should we boycott all foods and cosmetics using this pigment? Some believe yes - there's at least one cosmetic brand that is advertising a fully vegan red lipstick, with the focus on not killing bugs (noting that it's actually much harder to phase out this pigment for colour cosmetics because it's a specific vibrant red - food consumers are not nearly as picky about this).
Many insects are also "the enemy" as they behave as pests such as locusts do or spread disease such as flies do. We accept killing in a war and some of these creatures seem to be in a constant war against our interests. That should surely factor in against their little initial moral worth. Conversely, non-venomous house spiders are some of our best friends as they actually take care of flies for us. As such they should be afforded much greater moral weight. They are friends of the human alliance and the scourge of our foes.
1. I don't see where Tomasik claims most insects suffer most of the time. The essay is too long to read in its entirety and nothing in the TOC says anything about the question of insects' general quality of life. The one reference I see that even comes close says basically we're treating the pain of death as if it outweighs all the insect experienced up to that point, which seems highly suspect to me unless it's dying at birth.
2. There seems to be an implicit assumption in every wild animal suffering analysis I have read that wild animals' lives are bad and we maximize their utility by minimizing the number of them that ever exist. For factory farmed vertebrates I think there is good reason to believe this, but for wild animals and factory farmed invertebrates I am skeptical. I have never seen any viable justification for this assumption. I suspect it relies on anthropomorphizing them. I can anticipate that I will have to go in lion-infested grasslands tomorrow, and suffer today due to my anxiety about it. Can a mealworm? I doubt it feels any suffering until the immediate terror of seeing the bird's shadow. The one animal whose experience we actually understand is humans, and most humans find their lives pleasant enough, on balance, that they don't kill themselves, despite being able to. Any sufficiently intelligent organism that preferred death to life under its normal conditions would be selected against, because they'd mostly die before reproducing. This is less true for less intelligent animals because maybe they can't conceive of suicide, but there are reports of some animals engaging in what may be suicidal behavior, so it's not clear that it requires human-level intelligence or anything close to it to be able to do it. Especially if the suicide looks like just giving up, rather than active measures such as a weapon. So I have a pretty high prior on non-human animals generally preferring life as they live it in natural conditions over never being born, if they were able to make a rational choice.
I think the best solution for this would be to set up a farming system that just waits for the insects to die naturally. Most insects have a lifespan of a few weeks to a few months. It may not be economically sound to keep feeding an insect way past its maturity, but I guess it's the kind of problem we could solve by selecting or engineering insects with faster maturity / shorter lifespan
I am raising a duck right now. They make good pets and I hope it will help my children better understand food and the circle of life. I like to think that the duck appreciates me feeding it, and will not mind making the ultimate sacrifice so that I can enjoy a nice Magret de Canard.
My sister once got her kids some chicks for Easter. I don't think eating them was the plan, but the dog went ahead and did it.
The original comment is gone, maybe I lack context, is this a joke wooshing over my head?
I can't imagine any animal just gracefully accepting its death so someone can enjoy eating it. Animals go to great lengths not to be eaten. Their expressed preference tends to be not making the ultimate sacrifice so that someone can enjoy eating them.
Except for perhaps ant species who share so much DNA with their nestmates and willingly die for the colony. But the original comment was about being so disconnected from our food supply while having a lot of choices of food. Those who are around barnyard animals seem to have less trouble eating them. Perhaps they have a different view of how little cognition is going on in a chicken brain. I am convinced my duck is living a great life, and not fearing death. She lives in the moment, and when the lights go out for her she will have no regret, and living longer would perhaps have mattered little because she has no awareness of time.
Perhaps. Cows are much more intelligent than chickens though, and pigs are often compared to dogs. Other barnyard animals aside, perhaps it's true that living longer would have mattered little to the duck, and yet, as she lives in the moment, she will clearly strive her hardest to avoid death at all costs, as best she can with her little duck brain. Doesn't that mean something?
Indeed, ants are an exception, fair enough. Though they don't accept death so someone can enjoy eating them, they accept death to defend or benefit their brethren.
It's better to have lived & lost than to have never lived at all.
One could, hypothetically, raise an animal, and, you know, just not kill and eat it.
Assuming that pigs & ducks would ever be raised in the first place if it weren't for their meat (a bad assumption IMO, in a 100% veg society I'd expect pigs to go extinct)..
One could not, hypothetically, raise an animal & let it live forever. I see the butcher's knife as being somewhat more merciful than cancer but that's also just, like, my opinion, man.
Pigs are among the least likely species imaginable to go extinct lmao
I worked with a woman that lived out beyond the exurbs of the Twin Cities she was raising two grade school kids and for the course of the spring an summer a pig. The pig became a pet to the kids but they were warned that pigs always run away in the fall.
What would the world be without the asinine pleasure of tortured comparisons?
In my opinion, to be clear, it would be stodgier and less fun. You, however, might prefer such a world; that is your right.
At least we don't have to worry about comparisons being conscious enough to suffer. I hope.
People here do not have this sense of moral disgust at an interesting literary analogy. If you wanted to convince people not to make comparisons like this, you could have done better than call us robots performing moral gymnastics. You're just antagonizing the community.
Scott, I think it was an interesting device.
Everyone will be ok. X
Do you think you could state clearly the rule that Scott broke? I try hard not to do anything that would hurt somebody's feelings, and I didn't even realize that was a possibility with this... maybe I'm just dense. But, obviously, you think he made a serious error. I'd like to be able to avoid anybody having that reaction to something I might write.
I think the rule Scott broke is using something about Jews to make a point about bugs. I think some people find "comparing" an ethnicity to non-humans offensive. Avoid doing this if you don't want to upset people.
But, Matthew, you cater to the people who have their feelings easily hurt at your own loss. You'll avoid interesting arguments, entertaining hypotheticals and interesting literary devices. If Scott did not use this quote, I think the piece would be a little worse, not a little better.
And look at how dismissive Josh was. You don't really want to have an audience and comment section with people like this.
I don't think being upset by comparing Jews to bugs can fairly be called being "easily" hurt.
I'm not going to comment on whether Scott made an error in this instance, as I'm not Jewish, so can't really say whether it's hurtful to Jewish people, but as a general rule, if you would like to avoid hurting people's feelings, it is a good idea not to compare people of some ethnicity to vermin (rats, bugs, cockroaches), even obliquely. Comparing certain ethnic groups to vermin is a practice that has been historically (even in recent history) associated with some really terrible things, and if you are not sure if you can do it kindly, it's best to avoid doing it at all.
Im Jewish. It wasn't hurtful to me and I don't know where one finds the "rule" Scott is supposed to have broke. But I am definitely after this whole post starting to wonder if there is such a thing as too rational.
Scott is also Jewish, so has a J word pass
> if you would like to avoid hurting people's feelings,
at a certain point here, this is a lost cause, unless you start with a standard of:
"i wish to avoid hurting the feelings of people who make a point of moderating their own emotions, and therefore avoid take offense where it isn't intended"
You are sayimg you know u or someone has feelongs you know I am moderating? I think this is the last time i read the comments section. This whole thing has devolved into nonsense.
Meant i not you. Bye folks. Silly.
He didn't mean it the way you're taking it. For one thing, he's Jewish himself. For another thing, he's writing for us robots, so he doesn't say one thing and mean another like regular people do.
Yes, please. There already are no places for us robots to go in the world where everything is considered "offensive" and no one is allowed to actually mean what they say and not some imagined "offence" behind it. Don't destroy the last of the few remaining places where one can just be rational without playing the tiring mind games that constitute 90% of communication that "normal people" engage in.
Is this true, kind, and necessary?
It's definitely unkind. I think you could make the argument that pointing out the PR issues with the comparison is both true and necessary, but given how needlessly antagonistic he's being I personally don't feel the need to cut him a lot of slack.
Taking 'go' literally:
High vs low decouplers (I'm assuming you're a high-decoupler by the way you connotationally overloaded 'compare'): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8fnch2/high_decouplers_and_low_decouplers/
The absurdity heuristic can fail even on really absurd sounding stuff: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/atcJqdhCxTZiJSxo2/talking-snakes-a-cautionary-tale
And I guess something something Overton window and moral circle expansion?
When taken out of context as "Scott compares Jews to bugs" it sounds bad, but I think it's eminently clear from the context that the comparison is being used to raise the status of insects, not lower the status of Jews.
Perhaps. The unintended consequence (while not a big deal) is a funny nexus of tension that HE would be well equipped to examine. But it ain’t not there.
Less of this, please.
Seconded
But will you live in the pod?
I stayed in a capsule hotel once, it was nice.
Is this a Moldbug reference -- the VR pods and bug burritos thing? Or something else?
There's a meme about liberals wanting you to live in a pod and eat bugs. The title of this post is a reference to it.
it's less about liberals wanting those things, and more about viewing them as necessary to avert climate disaster, so the whole meme is pointing at liberals' enthusiastic willingness to curtail individual freedom in the face of collective threat.
Eating insects has other benefits, namely the very good nutritional value and the substantial lack of sugar and saturated fats - the Hitlers of nutrition
(I pressed post while trying to go the last word, oh well)
I get that it is not morally relevant but it feels as if it should play some role in the individual decision process, like, giving up red meat is good for ethics, the environment AND yourself. This is different.
I'm reminded of the story/ urban legend that when vegetarian Indians moved to England, they found that their diet was lacking in essential nutrients, because the English flour had fewer bugs in it compared to Indian flour. (I couldn't find a reference in a quick search.)
I'm not convinced this is relevant. There are other foods that are good nutritionally, but get processed with added sugars to sell better. why wouldn't this also happen with insects?
It's just a few steps away from the obvious truth "Surely it would be worth to kill one insect to produce an immortality pill". Should insect diet turn out to be much healthier for us, it would make the ethical case for not killing insects a bit weaker.
sure.. but i mean, broccoli exists, but people only seem to eat it if it gets deep fried and dipped in sugar.. yes its an exageration, the point is just that there are lots of healthy foods that we somehow manage to make unhealthy. i dont think access or existence is the barrier.
I agree, Candied Crickets will be in every grocery store if the West ever gets over it's insect eating taboo.
It's an odd year, saturated fat is good for you again.
It took me way to long to figure out your choice of picture for the post (rof13: Znegva Yhgure ng gur Qvrg bs Jbezf ).
*slow clap*
Would eating worms be morally better or worse than eating insects? I'm not a vermologist, but I think some of the creatures we call worms don't even have brains.
For anyone as lazy as me, handy link to convert that: https://rot13.com/
Relatedly, it seems surprisingly hard to view the picture for the post I'm looking at. It doesn't show up in the email, or on the post itself. To view it I have to go to another page on the site that links back to this post. Am I missing something or is that just the way it is? It doesn't seem like the way it should me.
Same here. It would be nice to have the picture above or below the headline. Also to quicker identify open tabs with ACX posts.
Jake, I was feeling pretty smug about getting that reference myself. I was raised in the Lutheran Church. They tell me now that Luther probably didn't say "Here I stand, I can do no other" during that interview. Too bad, it's a really good line.
But you can't just count every farmed animal as having suffered an amount proportional to its neuron count. Surely, factory farmed insects live a hell of a lot less long than factory farmed cows do, and thus suffer a lot less long. How do they compare in terms of [neuron count]x[lifespan]? Ideally we should also be multiplying by suffering intensity, but that's harder to judge.
I did make the mistake of not thinking about this, but now that I am thinking about it, I think they might have roughly similar lifespans. See eg https://www.treehugger.com/how-long-do-chickens-live-4859423, which suggests broiler chickens are killed at 7 weeks old, and https://bugible.com/2018/03/20/how-to-farm-your-own-mealworms/, which suggests a few weeks to months for mealworms.
But it would make a difference for mealworms vs. cows though, right?
The question that comes to mind for me is whether or not the mealworms are suffering during that period of time. How much does farmed mealworm life differ from average, or even ideal mealworm life?
Yeah, I think it's relevant that bugs are generally much more adapted to cramped, crowded, dank, dark conditions than larger animals. Those mealworms might feel fine their whole lives!
The biggest issues would be (a) not allowing the animal to complete its life cycle and (b) the method of execution. When I've raised mealworms for other animals, the execution method was drowning, and they certainly do wriggle as if they're in distress (although what is reflex and what is agony?). Not sure how huge operations do it.
They freeze dry them, at least the brands I've bought. I'm assuming the first step of this is IQF (send them through a stream of liquid nitrogen) because otherwise they would clump, which is not the case.
If I'm right, then current methods are as close to instant death as it gets. Otherwise, this could be easily implemented.
We need a measure for net [pleasure-suffering]. All those neurons are not registering pain all the time.
Also, while I think I can broadly sketch out what a 'good' or 'bad' life is for a cow, I'm not sure I can do the same for a mealworm. How possible is it that farmed insects are not 'suffering' proportionately as much as other farmed animals, because their requirements for a 'good life are much simpler and more easily met in a factory farm?
I'm perfectly happy if mealworms are farmed to feed chickens, and then I eat the chicken. And the worms get their turn in the end:
Hamlet:
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
I would think that would come out in the wash. It's not [neuron count] x [lifespan] that matters, because if the farming is ongoing, each time one mealworm dies it is replaced by another on the farm. So it's [neuron count] x [lifespan] x [#lifespans per unit time], but [#lifespans per unit time] = 1/[lifespan], so the second two terms cancel out and we're left with just neurons.
I mean you really care about [suffering]/[calorie]. This comes out to something like [suffering]/[animal]*[animals]/[calorie], or [neurons]*[lifespan]/([calories/animal]).
So what does this debate look like if it turns out plants qualify as conscious, as some scientists have argued?
Then we'll just have to start eating hufflepuffs, as there's no question regarding their moral worth.
I really wish I could like substack comments.
You're funny
A perfect example of why I'm glad we mostly don't have them. Silly throwaway references to hpmor are seasoning, not substance.
In the future, I will restrain my wit, for all of our sakes. 😆
No you really don't.
You can, in general. Even in this specific case, the functionality is still there, only hidden. There are ways to re-add it (the one I've found is here https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks - note that I do not use it and do not vouch for it).
Surely only when we run out of muggles
It's not a real food unless there's an associated scarcity.
The problem is that the calories that we get from eating animals ultimately come from plants, so either we're eating the plants or the cows are. In fact, there are calories lost in that process from all the activity that the cows engage in before we eat them, so it'd kill more total plant-calorie for us to eat cows than directly eat plants. There's also the same question with fewer-small-plants (grass, hay, which cows tend to eat) versus the larger plants (broccoli for example, which humans tend to eat). Perhaps we should only eat leaves from trees? Or are trees more conscious, so indirectly eating grass is better?
Though we also have to ask what plant *suffering* looks like - perhaps conscious plants really enjoy being picked? The main problem with eating animals is the conditions that those animals are raised in, and I'm not sure that applies to plants. Factory farmed chickens clearly have horrible lives but corn plants on farm seem to have pretty nice lives, as far as plant lives go.
One alternative to either plants or animals is entirely lab-grown food (I presume we can fabricate sugar from raw materials at least), but that's a last resort since it seems like it would be quite inefficient and difficult compared to raising plants.
I suppose I should I have made it more obvious I was asking facetiously...I think the whole debate is silly. I don't get the guilt over a natural part of life. We are inextricably linked into the food chain. We cannot convert heat or sunlight into calories ourselves. This forces us to consume something that can (or something that ate something that can). Everything we eat--plant, insect, mammal, fish--is alive. Some, possibly all, has some amount of consciousness.
Yeah, we shouldn't torture animals, but caring about the abstract suffering of mealworms or crickets (both of which I've raised) just smacks of bored overprivileged navel-gazing. And it reminds me way too much of eating disorder recovery, and people going vegetarian -> vegan -> oh wait no I can't eat anything because eating is immoral.
I don't fully disagree with you, in fact; there really isn't much point in worrying about insect suffering when you can barely get idiots like the commenter quoted by Scott to care about obviously conscious beings like dogs; but I think that shows why the argument here is necessary — if you don't, you'll just get people going "hurr durr but what's the difference between a chicken and a bug?!". As if you couldn't make the exact same argument against caring about killing *humans*.
There is at least one criterion that rules most humans in and the vast majority of animals out, which is the criterion of negotiation. Humans are at least capable of negotiating in good faith.
Why does this matter? Because something that can't negotiate in good faith is something you can *only* coexist with from a position of strength; it is a permanent enemy if you cannot defeat it and you have different goals, the same way a paperclip maximiser is. There is *no way* to treat flies as equals - you can, at best, make them your pampered slaves.
I havn't come across this argument before, and I find it deeply interesting... on the face of it its a light bulb moment for me (but that might be because I have only just come across it) ... off to search the interwebs for a more thourgh (can never spell that) discussion of it. Thank you!
The terms "ramen" and "varelse" (in conjunction) might find you something (though probably not everything around this); they're borrowed from the sequels to Ender's Game (which in turn borrow the words themselves from Swedish), which go heavily into the idea of what makes coexistence with aliens possible or impossible. "Ramen" are those aliens that you can understand and deal with; "varelse" are those you can't.
Yes, the moral calculus required to care about this at all, and then the idea of applying actual numbers to it, are both beyond my grasp. I don’t care at all about a single mealworm’s suffering, and a trillion times zero is still zero. And I just can’t shake the feeling that trying to prevent the suffering of little critters whose not-suffering is apparently indistinguishable from their suffering is...not actually an effective use of one’s resources.
I think you're right that there's a dark side to this amusing piffle, which is that there *are* people (with eating disorders) who are capable of internalizing it as some degree of social approval of their distorted thinking.
I think it's hard to draw a line - if we agree that all moral people need refrain from is torturing animals, what counts as torturing animals? Many of the more persuasive arguments for refraining from animal consumption basically amount to arguing that factory farming is animal torture. That's more persuasive to me than most of the other arguments, and eating high welfare animals that get adequate space and social interaction is an alternative solution.
Of course, this reasoning doesn't just apply to mammals and birds - asphyxiating in a massive pile seems unpleasant for fish, some argue we should kill them painlessly (less stress also means the fish tastes better apparently), for much the same reason that people think we shouldn't boil lobsters alive.
Not torturing insects seems achievable since I don't think they have very complex desires, a Bug's Life notwithstanding.
I mean, most guilt and moral concern is about natural parts of life - attack, spite, revenge, and hatred are all natural parts of life, and people might still reasonably think it's a moral improvement to engage in them either somewhat less, or under different circumstances than they actually do.
This is obviously a debate that is only possible to have in a place of extreme privilege, but just because one needs privilege to think about an issue doesn't mean that the issue shouldn't be thought about.
I think one of the values of this sort of discussion is specifically to *stop* the slide you mention in the last sentence, to help people think about the issue in harm reduction terms rather than purity and bans.
"I think one of the values of this sort of discussion is specifically to *stop* the slide you mention in the last sentence, to help people think about the issue in harm reduction terms rather than purity and bans."
I'm not getting why this is a debate that comes from a place of privilege, rules around food have been part of many moral/religious traditions for millennia. Furthermore, this is an area where the industrialization of life has made revolutionary changes in the underlying material conditions, so taboos that come down to us from the pre-industrial era are not going to address the salient aspects of a situation where some portion of humanity is dealing with the problems that come with having too much food, rather than too little.
Yeah, I don't buy that this necessarily *does* come from a place of privilege, but I was replying to this comment: "caring about the abstract suffering of mealworms or crickets (both of which I've raised) just smacks of bored overprivileged navel-gazing."
> a natural part of life.
Like life-changing injuries and agonizing diseases?
> We cannot convert heat or sunlight into calories ourselves.
We also "cannot" travel faster than 20mph, or fly, or breathe underwater, or communicate across thousands of miles, except that we now do all those things because we decided they were worthwhile.
Look, I love eating meat and I'm not going to stop, but it sounds like you're just making an argument from nature.
The vegetarian -> eating disorder connection is interesting and probably worth talking more about.
"We also "cannot" travel faster than 20mph, or fly, or breathe underwater, or communicate across thousands of miles, except that we now do all those things because we decided they were worthwhile."
... and we found energy sources that let us build machines to do those things, the use of which now threatens the existence of human civilization. I agree with you that an argument from nature is not really useful here, because we have been modifying nature for thousands of years, but I don't see why that means we shouldn't consider the moral and ethical dimensions of how humanity supports its existence.
"Look, I love eating meat and I'm not going to stop..."
I was a ovo-lacto-vegetarian for eight years in my 20s. I started eating meat again in the full knowledge that I could not justify doing so within my moral framework. I eat meat because biologically, I'm an omnivore and I like eating it, but I can't deny that my choices have a deleterious impact on both myself (I was a lot trimmer when I was veggie; I'm biologically attracted to energy dense foods, which is an impulse that is now evolutionarily maladaptive in a world flooded with high-fructose corn syrup) and, more importantly in a moral context, other people now living and not yet born.
I'm not sure that this is a question for which quantitative analysis is the right approach, but "Bob" bless Scott for trying to think it through.
> I started eating meat again in the full knowledge that I could not justify doing so within my moral framework.
I'd offer then that your actual moral framework is different from whatever stated moral framework you violated. This is just semantics, but to say that you knowingly, continually violate your own moral framework gives a worse implication than reality.
Since you have concerns about energy usage and the fate of humanity, I'm guessing we have different predictions about nuclear energy. For me that's an entirely separate issue, but I can see why for you they might be the same issue.
> I'm biologically attracted to energy dense foods
Meat can be pretty energy-sparse, no? If you measured calories/satiety, lean meat would rank below most carbs and fats
"to say that you knowingly, continually violate your own moral framework gives a worse implication than reality."
That's very kind of you to say, but I was born a monster in a monstrous world. If we actually took our moral frameworks seriously we would never stop throwing up. Took me about 20 years to stop being entirely paralyzed by that realization and even now, I'm not sure what to do. I try not to be a dick.
I would love for nuclear energy to pan out and some of the new designs are intriguing. If any nation had managed to establish a repository for its spent nuclear fuel over the past 70 years, I would be more sanguine about its prospects. Unless & until that happens, I'll oppose generating more high-level waste.
> Meat can be pretty energy-sparse, no? If you measured calories/satiety, lean meat would rank below most carbs and fats
Fair enough, but lean meat tastes terrible.
Well, to add to the weird, it’s possible to use spinach leaf vein structure as a scaffold to grow cultured meat cells into a piece of meat. Presumably, the result of that is never sentient.
Some people, for example Jains, aim to avoid killing anything - including plants - so they only eat fallen fruit. In Jainism its called Ahimsa fruitarianism. (I don't know if he was being ironic or what, but notable dictator, evil despot, and all round bad guy Idi Amin claimed to have become a fruitarian while exhiled in Saudi Arabia.)
> One alternative to either plants or animals is entirely lab-grown food (I presume we can fabricate sugar from raw materials at least), but that's a last resort since it seems like it would be quite inefficient and difficult compared to raising plants.
There's a Finnish company that synthesises protein using air and solar power:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods
By 2025 they predict it to surpass South American soya as the cheapest source of protein. I'm quite excited about this because my biggest worry with animal agriculture is land use. Fields of solar panels take up much less land per calorie even than crops for human consumption, let alone animals, which enables a huge amount of rewilding.
Er, come again?
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/plants-are-they-conscious/
I haven't really looked into it, but I've heard of it. No idea how serious this is.
Then you just calculate the expected suffering value of all your options and minimize, same as now... except no one gets to pretend their hands are *entirely* clean, which might actually make the debate easier and less factional.
“What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.
"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing here inviting me to," said Arthur, "it's heartless."
"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.
"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ..."
The Universe raged about him in its death throes.
"I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.
"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."
"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.
"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.
"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"
"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."
I almost typed "you're probably not joking but this reads like a parody" but before hitting Post I had my doubts and now I'm genuinely not sure if this is serious or meant as mockery of over-serious animal rights types.
Do you come here often?
lmao.
This is Scott following his thoughts down the randomly selected rabbit hole of the day.
Completely serious arguments said with a silly tone.
Diffractor, you hit the nail on the head. The combination is what makes these sorts of discussions fun--and sometimes very funny.
"Most people are only about as moral as the average of the other people they hear about and interact with."
Very well put.
I think if you extend this out it implies that the most moral person on earth never speaks to anyone else.
Or perhaps there is a glorious self-contained set of 5 or more equally super moral people who are out of contact with the rest of society. In which case...how 'moral' can they be when viewed in terms of the Bodhisattvas who hold the door of enlightenment open for the rest of us? Hmmm...
Alternative: everyone has a natural moral setpoint, but instead of being absolute, it's calculated relative to their view of society and especially the people they interact with a lot. So the morality level of everyone in a group of friends will be correlated, but they won't converge over time, because some people prefer to be more moralistic than the group, and some less.
Well, reclusive ascetic monks being held as paragons of virtue in many cultures is probably relevant here.
Also the least moral.
I'd say that, if taken to the extreme, this implies that everyone is equally moral.
"Most people" instead of "all people" takes care of that problem.
"about as moral" rather than "as moral" also helps.
yes, if you misinterpret a rough descriptive heuristic as an ironclad logical law, you get weird-sounding results
You know several religions have saints who walked themselves up and never talked to anyone. And recluses have a certain cachet in our society, at least if they are rich or artistically talented. So I think you're actually right there.
So every time I hear Shylock make his case I flash back to the “The Rockford Files” 1977 episode:
Evelyn 'Angel' Martin : Y'know Jimmy, I've got some feelings too. "If you prick me, do I not bleed?"
Jim Rockford : That's Shakespeare!
Evelyn 'Angel' Martin : [Condescendingly] No it's not. Vincent Price said it on the Hollywood Squares.
Tyler Cowen contended, in an interview with Peter Singer (I think), something like: eating wild-caught fish is relatively more ethical because fish die horribly *anyway*, so you're not killing them in a way that's much different than how they'd be killed in nature. Getting bit in half by a sea lion or a shark isn't really worse than getting hauled into a boat and having your gills cut.
Would similar logic apply to bugs, which often die violently naturally? Is the life of a farmed and consumed mealworm that much different?
A similar logic might certainly apply to hunting bugs, but farming them brings up population ethics issues.
You're not comparing an animal living out its natural life vs. an animal being raised on a farm. You're comparing an animal not existing vs. being raised on a farm.
I think this argument misses the Repugnant Conclusion argument.
If farmed animals have bad but non-negative life experiences - eg, if they would prefer to exist than not exist, if they could understand and make the choice - then it's better to farm them, than to cut short the lives of wild animals.
I'm not sure this is correct. Population ethics is hard. But if instead we could farm *humans* that have bad, but non-negative life experiences would it be better to farm them than to hunt wild animals? And if so, would it not be even better to let these humans live full healthy lives and go back to hunting wild animals as a food source?
What is a "bad, but non-negative" life supposed to mean? I think the problem with this approach is that people don't/can't really conceive of a net-zero life. For one thing, lots of people who seem miserable prefer to stay alive, while lots of people whose lives seem mostly fine commit suicide. So you'd need some alternative test.
Presumably a "non-negative" life means a life that is just tolerable enough to not drive the majority of people to suicide, which does seem like a pretty low bar - arguably a concentration camp would qualify.
I think we should be very careful before deeming a life not worth living, because it's basically a justification for killing them. while there are situations in which this may be moral (as euthanasia proponents argue), it's important to recognise that this is very subjective and that people may not be the best judges of whether their own life is worth living.
Belief in the afterlife conditional on your actions matters a lot here also. My devout Christian grandmother was pretty miserable in her last years, but suicide was so far outside of her acceptable options that she would have doubtlessly endured even much worse suffering. This is one of the topics where human intuitions vary so greatly that I suspect a broad agreement about what counts as "worth living" is out of reach.
It definitely is subjective. The general argument against suicide is that you may not deem your life worthwhile now, but you're likely to change your mind in the future. Lacking a reasonable expectation of improvement seems to be the distinction between euthanasia and suicide, although the afterlife does complicate things. Obviously it's preferable to this world, but for some reason God's very insistent on us staying here until he decides our time is up - pragmatically, this may just be because otherwise the afterlife makes suicide seem too appealing, and death cults tend not to last long compare to religions that prohibit their followers from killing themselves.
As a Christian I'm against suicide and euthanasia, but there's a grey area of prolonging life that doesn't really seem to serve much purpose except life for life's sake, and I think it's perfectly Christian to decline treatment if the costs outweigh the benefits. I'm probably indulging in the naturalistic fallacy.
I personally think that respecting what people currently alive value is the best solution to population ethics, since ultimately population ethics is just asking "how many children should you have" and I think the only correct answer to that question is "as many that you want and can care for". I can't speak for everyone alive today, but I think we generally want there to be people in the future (since even with contraception available people still have kids) but in wealthy countries we generally prioritise high welfare over high numbers. That's not a universal, but it does suggest we'd prefer to create a future of high welfare, free-range humans rather than a future containing a larger number of factory farmed humans.
I agree. But if you solve population ethics in this way, it is not sufficient morally that your farmed animals have net positive life experiences. Once you have decided to create them, they presumably deserve the same moral consideration as any other animal of their type would.
Arguably, high welfare animal farming meets most of an animal's preferences better than living in the wild (food, shelter, safety from predators - at least until the end), so giving them the same moral consideration that we give other animals of their type doesn't rule out all animal farming.
This is about where I come down. The co-evolution of these species with us through what we rather chauvinistically call "domestication" conditions the question from the start. I put the question to myself as "Having brought this animal into existence, will it live a good 'cowy' or 'chickeny' or 'piggy' life?" I don't know if I can know what that is but it seems reasonable to guess that a factory farm creates a bad life for its denizens.
I have enough spare income that I can buy meat & dairy from farmers who seem to me more likely to bring that good life about for their animals, but I also won't go to the co-op for a special trip just to get a gallon of milk (Bucky Fuller's assessment that the replacement value of a gallon of gasoline exceeds a million dollars when all costs are properly accounted for has been haunting me recently) and I haven't verified any of that for myself, I'm just trusting in reputation. I also have no control over what the restaurants I order from do in this regard.
In some respects I've given up on trying to rigorously assess this since we Americans live lives that lead so far into ecological overshoot that we're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic at this point.
You answer your own question - yes, humans existing as not-tortured livestock is better than humans not existing at all, but it's vastly inferior to humans living free and happy lives.
Moral options are weighed against alternatives, not just as absolutes - the same course of action may be morally virtuous when it is the least bad option available, and morally repugnant when it is the worst of good options.
In this case, no one is proposing that we just artificially increase the wild population of animals living happy live as an alternative to having these animals in factory farms - the money for that option isn't available, and if it were it could certainly be put to better use. Th options under discussion are factory farming vs. not.
The money for the other option is only not available if you don't make it available. Instead of eating farmed food, you could eat hunted food and also pay additional money to have someone humanely raise additional animals not to be eaten.
Right, I'm saying that the current conversation is a practical policy discussion, not a free-ranging hypothetical discussion, and therefore is bounded by how likely a policy is to actually get implemented.
Insect farming is unlikely but in the realm of medium-term possibility, because it has pragmatic as well as moral value. Your suggestion is hugely impractical at scale, so it's not in the realm of probable policies.
And by impractical I mostly mean expensive, to be clear.
It is totally possible for you to pay for an insect sanctuary that houses as many insects as the number you would have otherwise paid to eat. If everybody did this, insect sanctuaries could totally exist at scale.
Look. Population ethics is hard. But one of my principles is that once you have conditioned on which set of beings exists in the world, you are obligated to find the arrangement in which the aggregate utility of those beings is as large as possible.
So you might not be obligated to create new bugs and put them in sanctuaries. But once you have decided to create new bugs to farm, you then need to consider whether or not it would be better in aggregate to put those bugs in sanctuaries instead and go eat something else.
There’s also the issue that some insects are eusocial, which I figure increases the probability that they are capable of suffering.
On the other hand: I’ve recently seen the argument that bee hives have some basic capability of “withdrawing consent” in the sense that if a hive doesn’t like their situation they can take up and leave. I haven’t taken the time to see if this is both universally true of bee farming and how bad it can get before a hive decides to leave.
Bee hives don't really vary that much, so what would be bad enough to make them defect, and where would be better for them to go? Unless bees bully each other, I can't think of a situation where it makes sense for one bee to leave but not the entire hive.
I can tell you from the experience of my father that be hives vary quite much if you take a closer look:
- The vary in character, e.g. how easily they get angry/agressive by different stimuli (motor tools, bad weather, sweaty person).
- They wary in economics: some do much more breeding, some block even the place for breeding with honey.
- They differ in patience: feeding them with sugar-liquid, in some hives a lot of them drown, in others none. At a closer look it is because the next ones coming are so impatient, that they push some of the first ones into the liquid.
These points are not depending on the enviroment, but they are consistent for the live of the hive, while another hive standing at the same stand behaves differently.
I never heared of hives settled hives leaving their combs, but individual bees sometimes visit other hives, and if one hive has a problem (eg. bad or no queen) they can and often do move to another hive in the neighbourhood.
Why would eusociality increase the probability that they can suffer?
Yeah, I also don't see how that follows, except through a naïve assumption that eusocial = more human.
Eusociality often involves tolerating suffering for the benefit of the colony - bees and ants often need to sacrifice their own lives to protect the queen. If anything, this would suggest they're less likely to suffer than flies and butterflies, which would benefit a lot more from strongly avoiding unpleasant stimuli, since if they die that's it, evolutionary line dies with them.
If anything it would seem to reduce it, if the hive is the conscious entity and regularly loses individual parts then individual deaths probably don't matter
On the other hand, sometimes it would be valuable for a eusocial insect to signal a need for care.
Even if we grant both that insects can suffer* and that we care about it if they do (I reject both of these independently)...It's pretty unclear to me that insects on a factory farm have it any better or worse than regular old insects anywhere. You note this point, but don't really follow it. If being an insect is suffering, then why don't we have a moral duty to not only not factory farm them, but also kill all the insects everywhere, so they don't suffer anymore? On the other hand if you take that being an insect is not inherently suffering, we certainly create a lot more by farming them so you get Nozick's old vegetarianism argument.
* Do pain receptors count as "suffering"? I don't really think so. Does it make sense to care about a being that probably doesn't even have a continuous self, even if it does suffer? If so is their suffering additive? Insects are far less distinct from one another than humans, so remember your own Answer to Job.
Anyway, as a neuroscientist: neuroscientists have no clue how consciousness works, so we aren't gonna get more information about how it is to be an insect any time soon XD
See https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jbR9XrZbsqCsnR3vy/thoughts-on-the-welfare-of-farmed-insects
I agree it's possible that killing all insects everywhere is the right thing to do, though I would want to know a lot more, and right now it's both impossible and ecologically disastrous.
I don't think that article addresses the issue he raised very well. The author himself states at the top that it's just "general considerations based on theory" and he presents no actual evidence to make me think factory farmed insects would have any worse a life than wild ones, just that there would be a lot of them.
See also the tags https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/invertebrate-welfare and https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/consciousness-research
> I agree it's possible that killing all insects everywhere is the right thing to do
If this might be so, why stop with insects?
What's the argument that says "killing all insects everywhere may be the right thing to do, but killing all mammals is clearly not."
Ahh, i guess the argument (listed below) is a belief that insects seem to spend the majority of their time suffering, whereas mammals don't
I'm not really sure what the evidence for this would be, but even if we take that at face value, Killing all the insects probably _would_ kill all the mammals and species which depend on them.
Which suggests something like 'in order to support the existence of beings with net-positive utility, it is necessary for there to exist beings with net-negative utility'
This fact that 'net positive beings require beings with net-negative utilty) (assuming insects exist with net-negative utility, which i still doubt but i'll grant for the sake of argument) ends up being something like a "justification" for the darkness of the physical universe in general: sure, large portions of history look pretty awful, and some people do live horrible lives. But the current state (which has a hard dependency on those awful things) has so much goodness, joy, and positivity that it effectively justifies both the awful history, and the awful state of affairs for some unlucky people in the present.
> killing all insects everywhere may be the right thing to do, but killing all mammals is clearly not.
I'll bite that bullet in the sense that I do actually suspect that if you fully take everything into account killing all wild animals everywhere (only keeping pets and other animals for which we can guarantee their well-being around) ends up being the right thing to do.
Right now though, for larger animals, the harm from factory farming both completely eclipses and is much easier (as in: not completely impossible) to solve than the harm from animals suffering in the wild.
For insects I'm not convinced they cross the threshold into being morally relevant agents as opposed to little biological robots, but if they do, I suppose the same argument holds.
The Cruel Angel's Thesis bleeds through
a portal like your pulsing blood
So, boy, stand tall and embrace the fire of the legend
Embracing the universe like a blazing star!
Get in the fucking insecticide sprayer mecha, Shinji.
I like my Earth like I like my coffee... covered in bees!
Doesn't the existence of e.g. acetaminophen (or general anesthesia) demonstrate that "pain" is a central-nervous system experience that has bupkis to do with the existence of nociceptors per se? Which is to say, if you don't have a consciousness in the first place, you can't experience "pain" in the way we think of it, regardless of the messages your peripheral nerves are sending, so inferring consciousness from the existence of the receptors is begging the question in a big way.
sorry, I meant "inferring the experience of pain from the existence of the receptors." Bah.
> inferring consciousness from the existence of the receptors is begging the question
This is a pretty good counter-argument!
Agreed. For me, and I think probably all humans, suffering depends on mental states. I have felt pain, as in the sensation of physical pain, many times without suffering. Sore muscles from a good day's manual labor is a positive experience for me, and I'm not alone in that. Similarly, people frequently choose other life options that frequently result in physical pain (extreme sports, hiking in the woods, BDSM) that obviously makes them happier or that they prefer to not having those things.
What causes me suffering is far more about negative mental states. In fact, watching someone else get hurt, especially close family and friends, is one of the most suffering-inducing experiences in my life - despite the fact that my physical pain receptors are not activated at all! Sure, there are some straight up agonizingly bad pain, like getting a limb chopped off or being badly burned. That's certainly also a type of suffering, but it's a non-central example of pain receptors firing, at least by volume.
"crop farming is probably net positive, because ... suffering being swiftly over".
That idea worries me a lot. Every creature suffers; suffering is part of life. That quote sounds like an argument against the existence of life - in general.
I'll admit to being new around here; apologies if I'm poking at old wounds.
Newness has nothing to do with it - it's a hard question! That having been said, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/28/survey-results-suffering-vs-oblivion/
I would also add there's a difference between "a life that includes suffering" and "a life where the suffering outweighs everything else".
Being against lives that include any suffering at all is strawman negative utilitarianism, and I agree it's pretty bad.
Being against lives that have more suffering than happiness seems potentially reasonable - I wouldn't want to bring a child into the world if I knew they would live in constant pain and basically never have any happy moments.
If you choose suicide because the suffering outweighs the happiness - for you - I'm fine with that (in principle).
Using that argument to justify killing others, people or insects, who may not agree with your assessment, is a totally different matter.
But we're not talking about killing others here. We're talking about whether or not it is morally permissible to bring others into existence knowing that they will live under certain (presumably bad) conditions.
The original quotation was about justifying use of pesticide to kill insects *to reduce suffering of the insects*.
I'm not sure making it about bringing others into existence changes things - only those who exist can have opinions about the quality and value of their own existence. To presumptively decide for them seems wrong.
There's the classical philosophical question whether it's better to have many people at a low standard of living and comfort, or a few at a high standard.
It doesn't seem an easy question, but any answer needs to consider the viewpoint of the people involved, and only living people have viewpoints. Observationally, very few people choose suicide because their living standards are low, which seems to hint at an answer.
But even when we're talking about killing, are you opposed to, say, euthanizing pet dogs that are clearly suffering from terminal diseases. Like if the dogs could clearly understand the situation and communicate their preferences to us, we should probably go with that, but given that they cannot is it impermissible to use our best judgement?
I concede that my ethical system doesn't have a defensible answer to that. Probably I'm not smart enough to work it out - if it's even possible to get a "correct" answer.
Do animals ever commit suicide? If they do, that might be an argument in favor of euthanizing your suffering pet. If they don't, against it.
Evolution never promised us a fair universe. Ethics and morality are human inventions - I'm pretty sure animals don't give them a thought. So there's no reason to think there *is* a "correct" answer.
I suspect that we, and whatever follows us, have to decide what we *want* the answer to be. And I'm pretty sure I don't want the answer to be "exterminate all life is a good idea".
Fairly certain animals do not commit suicide. The common vertebrate reaction when sick or injured is to find a dark, isolated place to hide, and most will die in such a position if given the chance. I'm overgeneralizing, but I have seen cats and dogs and ducks do this. Unlike humans, animals generally don't help each other- if you get hurt, you're on your own. On top of that the wilderness is such that if you're miserable enough to want to die, you're probably about to die anyway.
I'll take another stab at this.
Humans have ethics because ethics helped our ancestors cooperate, and thereby outcompete other tribes.
So maybe we're wrong to extend moral instincts to entities who can't cooperate with us. Maybe our feelings that we ought to care about animals and insects are simply an overapplication of something that's really only appropriate for people (or AIs or EMs or aliens) who can reciprocate.
Be careful using where moral instincts came from as a guide. Eventually they trace back to evolutionary fitness, so if you follow that logic to its conclusion you'll have to decide that the fundamental moral imperative is to spread your genes over as much of the universe as possible.
I get that argument, but if enough humans care about animals, cooperation with them will require that you also act as if you care about animals. The guy who keeps eating other people's pets is not going to be in the tribe for long.
Of course, this is an argument for valuing dogs and cats over basically everything else.
What about entities that predate on us? I mean, in the hunter-gatherer state, tigers will stalk and eat humans, with little evidence that they try to minimize the amount of humans they eat versus rabbits or whatever the tiger equivalent of tofu is.
Should hunter-gatherers nevertheless have an elaborate moral theory that includes minimizing tiger suffering? (Maybe even after they acquire technology and need not suffer predation people should deliver to the tigers X victims a year, so they don't suffer from a diet they find boring.)
The existence of death implies that anyone born will automatically suffer infinity years of no longer being alive. Is it therefore better to not be born?
No, because at least if you're born you get a finite number of years of being alive!
Well, sure, but a finite number minus an infinite number is minus infinity. So if maximizing the number is the *only* criterion, and the maximum number is zero -- there you go. Nonexistence is better.
They already suffered not being alive for 14 billion years. At least this way they get a break.
Hmm. Not sure anyone can suffer the loss of what he's never had. So if you're never born at all, I'm not sure we can claim you've lost infinity years of life thereby. On the other hand, once you *have* been born, traditionally we *do* claim you're in a position to lose years of life if you die -- there are ample precedents in morality and law. Now generally in the practical world we only say you've lost years of life if you die "before your time" and we're a little fuzzy about that, but roughly the traditional threescore and ten.
But on the other hand, existential dread -- which is surely among the more painful afflictions of consciousness -- will exist if you *ever* die -- and moreover it's sharpest point *is* that it is eternal. If you were told you would come back to life after death, exception a short 24-hour hiatus for a good defrag of your consciousness and changing the oil, most people wouldn't fear death at all. Even if you were told you would be dead for 100 years, but the reborn, I don't think it would be scary. It would be...strange, if you were told the internal were a million years, or a trillion, but still probably not nearly so bad. So it is precisely the loss of infinity years which cause the dread.
That problem is to do with people suffering existential dread while they are alive, not with any suffering they will undergo while dead. Better philosophers than me have suggested ways of coming to terms with the former.
The existence of spiders causes dread to arachnophobes - it is not a moral evil on that account.
>Being against lives that include any suffering at all is strawman negative utilitarianism
This is mildly interesting as a case where a strawman of one family of positions is a roughly central member of another (or maybe it's just a weakman - by your present standards - in the same family). I am against lives unconditionally, as a position almost-but-not-quite downstream of a failure (or success?) to adequately delimit the notion of suffering. I'm not sure this admits formulation as utilitarianism, but if it does, it's definitely negative utilitarianism.
You wouldn't be the first to notice this. For certain utility functions "exterminate all life" does in fact balance the checkbook, even if I would prefer the superintelligence not do that.
Sure. I'll argue that if your utility function says "exterminate all life everywhere" is a win, you *by definition* have a profoundly bad utility function.
I mean you're not wrong!
My utility function is different from what a utilitarian believes is the total aggregate utility. If the expected total aggregate utility until the end of time is negative, then eliminate all life is the only correct choice under this moral system. The idea of there being more suffering in the world than happiness, seems reasonably plausible to me.
Please rethink that. The utility function you describe sounds like a good candidate for the definition of "evil".
>I'll argue that if your utility function says "exterminate all life everywhere" is a win, you *by definition* have a profoundly bad utility function.
You say you'll argue, so please do. What are the criteria for what determining the adequacy of a definition of "evil", such that the above utility function satisfies those criteria?
Evil is a socially evolved concept. "Evil" is what we have decided is bad for society. Our definition of "society", plus our beliefs (correct or mistaken) about what is good or bad for it, generates our definition of "evil". Elimination of all life is bad for society under almost any definition of "society".
I have an extremely low opinion of academic philosophy (ref: https://mugwumpery.com/?p=746),
and I'm reasonably sure that there is no logically correct definition of "evil" (or for most things philosophers argue about).
Ethics and morality are human traits that evolved via natural selection because they helped our ancestors cooperate and thereby outcompete other tribes. As such they shouldn't be expected to be logically consistent or "right" or "wrong"
in any absolute sense.
Humans have instincts about these things - those instincts are modified by culture (which itself is subject to evolution),
and to a lesser extent by reason.
Because we're human and care about more than just propagation of our genes, we say that our rules either "work" (we like the outcomes) or they don't (we don't).
I think those who try for more than that are wasting their time (and ours).
As I understand it, meta-ethics is all about considering your actions in the light of a bunch of different ethical systems. It seems plausible that a superintelligence might follow some kind of combination of different ethical systems rather than just one. It's also plausible that the superintelligence might pick which ethical systems to consider, and their relative weightings, by looking through a corpus of ethical discussions such as, say, this thread.
So every time anyone write a comment that takes a crazy ethical system seriously, it increases the weight which will be applied by the superintelligence to that crazy ethical system.
This sounds just like Roko’s basilisk with extra steps
I do think crazy ethical systems are a profoundly underappreciated source of existential risk.
I'd say it's Roko's basilisk with fewer steps. It at least avoids the whole "and let's face it, *you* probably one of the simulated copies right now, so you'd better get to doing some of that acausal bargaining right now" step of Roko's basilisk which was the most insane part.
Something like this was the first idea which popped into my mind after reading the paragraph. I am not very versed in ethics [etc.], so nothing deep here, but I just could not be reminded of one of my favorite child-time books, Adventures of Captain Wrongel (Priklyucheniya kapitana Vrungelya) by Andrey Nekrasov, where Admiral Kusaki, chairman of the “Society for the Protection of Whales” explains [translated by Deepl]:
> "Our common goal," he said, "is to protect cetaceans from extinction. What means do we have for achieving this noble goal? You all know perfectly well, gentlemen, that the only effective means is the extermination of cetaceans, for with their extermination there will be no one left to die out. Now let us consider the case that became the subject of our discussion: Captain Wrongel, the question of which is on the agenda, as he himself admits, had a full opportunity to destroy the sperm whale he met. And what did this cruel man do? He shamefully withdrew from performing his high duty and left the poor animal to die out as much as he pleased!"
I'm generally against the existence of life. I think the world is an intensely, unimaginably, horrific place and I suspect that beliefs to the contrary are mostly lies we tell ourselves to feel better.
I find it very hard to balance suffering with pleasure. Can we torture one person for a week if it will somehow magically give a billion people a wonderful, exciting, pleasurable experience for a week? I find it very hard to say yes to that. And the real world is even worse. There are multiple people being tortured right now, and there aren't a billion having the time of their lives.
Ursula K Le Guin's short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas resonates quite strongly with me. (Freely available and only four pages long.)
http://sites.asiasociety.org/asia21summit/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/3.-Le-Guin-Ursula-The-Ones-Who-Walk-Away-From-Omelas.pdf
Now, unfortunately for me, and fortunately for all those who vehemently disagree with me, I don't have any means of destroying the universe. And I think absent a Big Red Button that ends it all in one go, there's not much I can do to act on my anti-life beliefs. I think killing one person, even if that person lives a life of suffering, is almost always immoral because of the second-order effects of the murder. Mass murders and genocides are horribly immoral, and they would be even (especially?) if their motivation was the reduction of suffering.
But if the superintelligence came along and for some reason took my ethics as its template... I think I could trust it to figure out a way to kill us all nicely, and I think that would be a good thing.
I've spoken with other people who think this, and I think the persistent disagreement I have with them/you largely comes down to personal experiences of the relative intensity of happiness and suffering. Some people have a very hard time believing that any positive experience can outweigh a non-trivial negative one (and maybe for some people it can't). But if I had the option to extend my life for a year, during which I would be tortured for a week, I would do it. Life is pretty good, at least for some people a lot of the time.
Yeah, I'm not sure if that's the case with me. My life is pretty amazing. Nothing seriously bad has happened to me, and I get joy out of the smallest things and easily shrug off the small-to-medium hardships I do encounter with minimal suffering. I think creating more of me would probably be a good thing but I'm not certain.
I'm afraid I really can't wrap my head around your opinion about torture + life extension. I don't even know how to frame my objection. Like, my best guess is that you're mistaken and you just don't realise how horrible torture would be, but I realise it's pretty poor form for me to claim that so I'll try and take your preference at face value.
I mean, torture sounds real bad, and I would bet that during the torture my decision would be different. Maybe after the torture, too. I just don't endorse the idea that (for me personally) a temporary experience of pain should outweigh all the positive things I experience over a much longer period. But all that is just bean-counting... the point is that for me (and apparently for you) the good parts of life heavily outweigh the bad ones. So if it would probably be good to make more of you, why would it also be good to end the existence of life? Do you think it's for some reason impossible to create a future in which most people/beings have good lives?
> So if it would probably be good to make more of you, why would it also be good to end the existence of life?
Because I think I'm probably one of the most fortunate people in the world. I'm comfortable for money, I enjoy my job, I have supportive friends and family whose company makes me very happy, I have green space near me but also easy access to a beautiful city, I'm white, male, tall, strong, high IQ, have no history of mental illness, and as I mentioned above I have a very positive outlook on life. If all people lived like me then I wouldn't be in favour of ending life.
Well, maybe I still would because of animal suffering. I don't tend to go on about wild animal suffering, but I do think it's plausible that the majority of wild animals have net negative lives. Anyway, let's put that aside and focus on people.
> Do you think it's for some reason impossible to create a future in which most people/beings have good lives?
Not literally impossible, but I think we'd be lucky. And even if all people could live lives as happy as or happier than mine, how long will it take to get there? How much suffering for how many people do we deem as acceptable to sacrifice for our hopes of a bright utopian future? Also, I notice you said "most". I've already said I find it very hard to trade off one person's suffering with another person's happiness. "Most" people living good lives isn't good enough if some people are enduring terrible hardship.
> And even if all people could live lives as happy as or happier than mine, how long will it take to get there?
It might take hundreds or thousands of years to get to a point where almost all people (and hopefully animals) live very happy lives. But thinking in deep time, those thousands of years could still be a drop in the ocean.
And yes, we might fail. But trying and failing to improve things isn't much worse than giving up and obliterating it all in advance.
> I've already said I find it very hard to trade off one person's suffering with another person's happiness.
This is more or less a Rawlsian maximin view? I find it hard to sympathize with, partly because it relies on specific intuitions about individual identity that don't hold up to much scrutiny. If it's okay for someone to trade off pain now for happiness later, why isn't it okay, in creating a new person, to trade a small chance of that person having a bad life for a larger chance of a good one?
@Parrhesia, above, seems to agree with you. There's a vast ethical gulf - which I think you're both ignoring - between deciding for yourself, vs. deciding for others.
You've made an evaluation of cost vs. benefit and decided life is bad. But you're not entitled to ignore the fact that others make the same evaluation and come to the other conclusion. What makes you right and them wrong?
To decide for yourself is one thing - to force your decision on others is a totally, completely different thing. And a matter of good vs. evil.
I don't ignore that gulf; I bite the bullet: I don't think freedom to make decisions about your own life is a fundamental right.
In practice, freedom is important. The _feeling_ of having your freedom taken away is an unpleasant feeling and can constitute suffering, so we shouldn't do that to people. But in a philosophical thought experiment where we can remove such things from consideration with a Big Red Button, it's morally neutral.
>But if the superintelligence came along and for some reason took my ethics as its template...
It's worth noting that whatever superintelligence comes along will be the work of people, and will receive (some modification of) their ethics as template. The window of opportunity is not closed to you here.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. That I should get a job in AI to try to enact my ethical will?
Not that you should, but that it is (still) possible to do so.
Although my initial message was neutral on whether or not you should proceed with this, I will add that I advocate this approach.
Wow, that's really depressing. You have my sympathy. Does it help at all to know that I feel exactly the opposite. That I think there are billions having the time of their lives. And that I'd resent you pushing the red button?
I read the LeGuin story. There is a truth that suffering can lead to greater joy. I remember fondly these boy scout week long canoe trips up in the Canadian wilderness. There were long bouts of shared misery; portages with heavy packs/ canoes through swarms of bugs, cold, day long, rain drenched paddling. And yet after it was over, I loved it.
Have you read "A Saucer of Loneliness" by T. Sturgeon?
I appreciate the kind words, but I'm not sure I understand what's prompted them. My opinion of the world might be that it's a terrible place of great suffering, but my experience as one of its most fortunate inhabitants is fairly positive.
Your point about tough experiences leading to joy is a good one. I, too, have embraced many pursuits that on the face of it have seemed unpleasant, and have taken great delight from them. I think the word "suffering" is quite thorny. For me, when I'm cold, wet, in pain, getting bitten by insects, fatigued from walking long distances in rough terrain with heavy loads, there is rarely true suffering. There's adversity, sure, but it's something I can put my back into and become stronger as a result. I think if you can teach people this mindset that's potentially a very high-impact intervention, because you can perhaps reduce suffering without changing people's material conditions. But I'm not sure if there's a reliable way of teaching it.
Of course, I don't know what's going on in other people's heads. Maybe orphans in war zones with no access to clean water don't suffer as much as I imagine. But if that's the case it's very hard to get particularly motivated to make the world a better place. Why should I help people if they are already content?
I haven't read that story. Are you aware of somewhere I can read it free?
Re: what prompted them. Your first two sentences. I find life, the universe, and everything to be amazing. Anyway I'm sorry for reading you incorrectly. I couldn't find a free copy of the Sturgeon short story. It's something I found useful when I was in a depressed mood. "Oh here's someone more retched than me." knowing that helps. A bit like reading "Notes from Underground" by F. Dostoevsky, but less depressing.
OK maybe here, but it will be a big download of volume VII. Not just the short story.
https://diversidade.acessibilidade.ufpa.br/un0lmys3oapj/04-lionel-feil/1556434243-a-saucer-of-loneliness-volume-vii-the-complete-s-S7IXf6ZM5hgV.pdf
> I'm generally against the existence of life. I think the world is an intensely, unimaginably, horrific place and I suspect that beliefs to the contrary are mostly lies we tell ourselves to feel better.
And in another comment:
> My life is pretty amazing. Nothing seriously bad has happened to me, and I get joy out of the smallest things and easily shrug off the small-to-medium hardships I do encounter with minimal suffering.
Jesus fucking Christ, what an insufferably arrogant attitude. "My life is worth living, but there's no way those poor people in Africa could ever enjoy their sorry lifes. It would be best to put them out of their misery."
What can I tell you? Maybe get out more. Lift your gaze from your navel.
Not kind, but necessary and true.
They do seem contradictory. I had to read carefully to be sure both comments were made by the same person.
Life satisfaction seems to have a lot more to do with expectations than with living standards. I don't think poor Africans are much less happy than rich Americans.
I'm curious what you expect/hope to achieve with this comment. Is it sufficient to make the big bad man on the internet feel bad about himself? Or do you expect to change his mind by insulting him? Or is this just about letting off steam?
I didn't say anything about Africa, by the way. It is my belief from my many interactions with other people, both direct and indirect, that lives as happy as mine are shockingly rare in all countries. Arrogant? To be aware of how lucky I am?
Necessary and true? What was? The helpful advice you gave me? The facts you conveyed? Your comment is empty: nothing more than an insult. What does it even mean for such a thing to be necessary or true?
You're welcome to criticise my philosophical beliefs as vociferously as you wish, but I'm afraid I don't have time for your posturing.
I think (to strip away the pejorative part) he's suggesting that the many interactions you've had with other people are not in fact a representative sample, that in his opinion a better sample would demonstrate that most people are in fact at least as happy as you.
For what it's worth, I had a similar reaction, which is that gee you must have an abnormally high fraction of miserable friends and acquaintances.
I've conceded in other comments that I may be mistaken, and that people who live what seem to be miserable lives could in fact be happier than I think. My follow-up arguments to that are:
(a) Even if _most_ people have pretty happy lives, I'm still not comfortable with a small number of people living absolutely horrific lives.
(b) Where's the evidence that the apparently-miserable are not so? There are certain circumstances that billions of people find themselves in that seem really unpleasant. I think the burden of proof is on he who asserts they're not so bad. (Bearing in mind that the claim is that most people are at least as happy as me.)
(c) Perhaps not an 'argument', but if it's true that apparently miserable people are in fact happy, then why should I engage in ethics at all? If people in poverty, people with mental illness, people with preventable diseases, kids who are being bullied, women who are trapped in abusive relationships, people living in war zones, people living in authoritarian countries, and people in cults aren't actually suffering, but are 'at least as happy as me' then it seems to me that I shouldn't give to charity, shouldn't bother with politics, and in general shouldn't try to make the world a better place. Is that a fair conclusion?
For what it's worth, I wasn't only talking about my friends and acquaintances. I think they're, on average, happier than average, though still less happy than me. I'm talking about reading accounts of living with depression and then looking at statistics of how many people suffer from depression. I'm talking about my knowledge that torture is a thing that happens ever. (Torture, by the way, being something that is unpleasant by design.) I'm talking about documentaries about Palestine or Syria. I'm really just talking about combining normal knowledge about the world with normal understanding of the emotions of those close to me and extrapolating to find more suffering than empathy could even begin to cope with.
I certainly don't claim this is representative, and I know there are studies about happiness and life satisfaction out there, but my whole point is that I really care about the small tail of the distribution in the 'life is brutally unpleasant' range, and I don't think you can balance that off against people like me in the 'life is really good' tail.
Almost nobody who has the physical means to kill themselves actually does so. That's all the evidence you need to realize that your stated preference of "destroying the universe" and a "superintelligence coming along and killing us all nicely" being "a good thing" is indefensibly wrong.
> it seems to me that [...] I shouldn't bother with politics, and in general shouldn't try to make the world a better place
Considering that your idea of "making the world a better place" is to end the existence of all life, that may be a good thing.
>That quote sounds like an argument against the existence of life - in general.
Not all life, just all life that isn't the upper middle class of modern western civilization. And maybe their household pets.
It's mostly the upper middle class who have the time and inclination to think about this sort of thing and the resources to make themselves heard. Upper-middle-class suburbanites know that if they were deprived of the comforts of upper-middle-class suburbia, they would suffer immensely. Sentience is sentience, we are all basically the same under the skin (scale, exoskeleton, whatever), therefore all sentient life suffers horribly if it doesn't have the comforts of the modern Western upper middle class. Before the invention of the suburb all humans everywhere lived lives of unrelenting misery, possibly sustained by some vision of their descendants living a life that might have some respite from suffering.
Now that we have that, it is our moral duty to uplift as many of our less fortunate human bretheren (and maybe their household pets) to the upper-middle-class lifestyle that is the only way for any sentient being to ever not suffer, and exterminate all life that cannot be so uplifted.
Finding the flaws in this argument is left as an exercise to the student.
It might work better if you say what you mean. Are you arguing that raising standards of living does not have much/any effect on happiness/suffering? I have to say, describing extreme poverty as a first-world problem is pretty extreme. You are describing the hedonic treadmill in a way that could be an argument against fixing any problems, ever.
Raising standards of living usually has a very small effect on happiness/suffering. Worth doing if it doesn't lead to false expectations, but it's not going to greatly change any ethical calculus.
And "extreme poverty" is ill-defined and usually applied to poverty that is less than extreme. People in the process of literally starving to death are suffering, but that's not common. Rural Peruvian highlanders living on <$5/day are mostly happy or content for most of their lives. Medieval peasants were mostly happy or content for most of their lives. But I've lost track of the number of people who have in all serious told me that Medieval *kings* had worse lives than the contemporary poor because they didn't have modern dentistry and the internet.
And to the point at hand here, the average mealworm is happy or content for most of its life. The average wild rabbit is happy or content for most of its life, even if that life ends in a wolf's jaw or to a hunter's bullet. The average cow on the average farm is happy or content for most of its life. I'm open to the theory that a factory-farmed chicken may live a life of constant suffering, but most of the people trying to sell me on that theory are trying to sell the same theory w/re cows and I've been on too many beef and dairy farms.
Raising standards of living has a small and usually positive effect on happiness vs. suffering. *Lowering* standards of living has a large negative effect on happiness and involves much suffering. But when we think about the suffering of peasants, cows, or insects, most people resort to a naive sort of moral intuitionism grounded on imagining what it would be like if their standard of living were abruptly lowered to that of a peasant/cow/insect/whatever. This is pure bogosity.
Some rationalists will at least try to cobble together a metric for moral *worth* based on e.g. neural complexity. What we need is a metric for what it takes to keep a creature with X neurons happy. Even for values of X that equal the human brain, the answer is almost always "not nearly as much as you expect if you don't first spoil them rotten by having them live a first-world middle-class lifestyle".
Nice
I lived in suburbia and hated it. Give me the city or the countryside. I do appreciate all the creature comforts I have.
I feel like trying to focus on insect welfare before we resolve human welfare or even animal welfare is kind of a huge reach. We can only do so many things at a time, and addressing them one at a time, in order of how easy they are to resolve, will probably get the desired moral outcomes quicker and easier than worrying about if eating bugs is ok when a million people die of starvation.
> We can only do so many things at a time
Yes, specifically, we can only do about 7.6 billion things at a time (current population of earth).
I think this type of argument is often correct within a given narrow organization, but usually wrong at a population level. People are very varied and specialized in their interests and spheres of influence; their efforts are not all that easily fungible. Furthermore, most problems have diminishing returns on resources devoted to trying to solve them; you can't just put very human on earth on solving the current biggest problem, you'll get much greater returns by diversifying resource investments.
If this problem doesn't speak to you, then it probably is best if you ignore it, and don't feel compelled to care about it. But for the couple of people who really want to focus on it, and for the people who want to devote a few hours to thinking and talking about it, it's probably good that society is diversifying it's investments by letting them devote that time to something they find compelling.
I'm not so sure. Does the metaphor "don't run before you can walk" fall apart at the population level? Sure, we can research 7.6 billion things, but taking effective and coordinated action on them is more limited. I mean, even just looking a it money wise, there's a finite amount of money. Giving to one charity takes away from another.
Focus may have been a bad word on my part, maybe "take action"? But this feels like Charles Babbage worrying about rowhammer when designing the Difference Engine. I'll be happy enough if we can even get people to eat beef over chicken.
Many People found eugenics, alchemy, bloody letting, astrology, and string theory to be compelling. Those were also a waste of time leading the human population in the wrong direction.
That seems to be a rather strong claim about string theory, but I will admit I'm no physicist.
The thing is, even though we know alchemy is bunk, a lot of the effort that went into it furthered our knowledge of chemistry. Phosphorus was discovered by an alchemist, for example. The same thing can be applied to astrology as proto-astronomy.
You also can't use the fact that some ideas haven't worked out as a fully general argument to shoot down whatever cause someone is proposing.
Alchemy evolved into chemistry, but astrology and astronomy have always existed at the same time. I don't think astrology has ever done much for astronomy, except help provide funding.
I don't think it's true that astrology has had no benefit at all. Astrometry -- just observing and writing down where things are -- underlies both astrology and astronomy, and there are many times (Kepler using Tycho's data sprigs to mind) where astrometry has been of great utility to astronomy (or maybe better to astrophysics). So to the exent the Druid priests kicked things off by keeping detailed records to forecast eclipses, that is a positive benefit.
On the other hand, the higher reaches of astrology, where we start to think it means something to have the Sun in Aquarius, do harm to astronomy because they inject into the science all the idiocy of human passions and social pressures, so it's entirely possible the total harm matches or excees the total benefit.
That is definitely a very strong claim about string theory. To call it unsupported by evidence is fine. To call it a waste of time shows that you've been reading about string theory only from its detractors. It ignores advances such as holography, and that it's being used everywhere to simplify complicated field theory equations. I know someone who used string theory to calculate the viscosity of quark-gluon plasmas, and it's even used in condensed matter theory.
But that's a little like the space enthusiasts saying Apollo was totally worth it because we got Tang and Velcro out of the space program. Doesn't really address the root of the criticism, which is opportunity cost -- what *else* could people have been doing had so much talent and energy not been sunk into this particular venture?
I think it's a criticism the HEP community needs to take seriously. After all, we distinguish ourselves from the theologians and priests because we claim not to waste time with things that are empirical unproveable and only addressable by pure reasoning and/or appeals to aesthetics ("Isn't it beautiful, elegant? Wouldn't it be satisfying if it were true?")
What else indeed? If you remove something aspiring scientists are interested in, will they still be scientists or will they leave academia and start doing 9-5 jobs? What's to say that plucking out string theory will mean resources are diverted to what you consider more useful, rather than just added to the military budget to make the newest drone? That isn't without precedent. Condensed matter physicists petitioned against the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider, not the previous blog) because they thought the money would've been going to them if the SSC was cancelled. Nope. It went elsewhere.
And of course, I'll have to reiterate the fact that AdS/CFT are used extremely widely in physics, literally an entirely new calculational method on par with perturbation theory, that works exactly where perturbation theory fails. It's not some triviality like Velcro or Tang. String theory research is already worth it, even if it's untrue.
I also disagree that looking into things that are pure reasoning and/or appeals to aesthetics is unscientific. Hawking radiation is empirically unprovable, practically, and it is a result of pure reasoning about QFT and GR. Is that worthless? Aesthetic preferences are what gave us SR over some janky ether theory, and it's what got rid of epicycles in the first place. Was that a waste of time?
*Science* is distinguished from *theology* because of its empirical grounding, but there are always scientists doing science many levels removed from empirical tests, and that is okay.
The problem is that we don't know the answer to the counter-factual: would phosphorus have been discovered earlier or later had the world been free of the Hermitic cults? We don't know. It doesn't seem especially plausible to posit that a world in which nobody believes in magic is also a world in which nobody wants better swords or cooking utensils (and is therefore interested in improvements in metallurgy).
In addition to what darwin said, putting thought into weird edge cases can often help us clarify our thoughts on more normal situations as well. Consider Scott's comment at the end of the essay about how this gives him useful perspective on the cows vs chickens question.
Agreed. It's probably uncharitable but I feel like effective altruism recent shift towards focusing on animal suffering rather than preventing malaria, Guinea worn, and other unpleasant things happening to humans in the third world is in part because veganism is much more normalized and socially accepted as a lifestyle choice than making people have to think about the third world. With the attendant uncomfortable questions that brings
In terms of prioritization of nothing else I find it difficult to justify caring about insects while human children and dying in painful and preventable ways
One important conclusion you can draw from pondering the ethics of killing insects is that utility monsters are a feature, not a bug, of utilitarianism. You're skeptical of the idea that your life is worth less than the lives of a billion bugs. That means, in a utilitarian framework (which you are in, because only in variants of utility theory can a choice between "X bugs" and "Y humans" depend on the values of X and Y), that you've accepted that utility monsters should get the utility, and you find the idea that they shouldn't implausible. It's a lot easier to root for the utility monster when you're the monster.
I think the life of the animal matters more than its death, if the latter can be quick and painless, and it's a lot easier to give a factory farmed insect a good life than it is for a factory farmed cow or chicken. Conditions that cause chickens immense stress and suffering, like being packed together in cages, won't even bother mealworms, who would probably be quite happy in a warm, moist, nutrient-rich substrate with ten thousand of their brothers and sisters, insofar a mealworm can experience happiness. So I think switching to factory farming insects would be an immense moral good, even if that ends up killing 10^n more individual organisms.
I would also accept wireheading our livestock into a state of permanent bliss, or bioengineering away their capacity for suffering, but it seems easier to just make lab-grown meat in comparison. As expensive as that is, insects strike me as the more promising option.
To me, this feels like a big hole in the post.
Scott seems to have assumed that insects raised in factory-farming conditions are *necessarily* suffering horribly. Is this just because we can no longer conceive of raising animals for food in a non-horrible way? Can we not conceive of the first world's agricultural apparatus doing bringing anything but suffering to anything it touches? That may be understandable...but I don't know if it's true.
Even under the assumption that we do utilitarian shut-up-and-add decision making, we are allowed to terminally value aspects of human life other than simple pain and pleasure. I don't accept a wire-headed human life as valuable; I value whether a human life contained learning, love, virtue, etc.--even if no one, even the person involved, knew about or consciously appreciated every one of those acts. If I can value those things for their own sake, how come insect welfare can only be about "nociceptors"?
What does a good life look like for a mealworm? It's not a trivial question, but to a first approximation, just as you say--worming around in nice dirt with other mealworms seems at least pretty good. I'd be willing to bet that those mealworms are exposed to fewer dangers and are better-fed than their wild brethren, which at least seems unlikely to be a strong negative; if we're confident that overcrowding isn't and issue I don't see how this could be going wrong.
I currently have no reason to believe that insects raised for food are living a bad life. I value the presence of insects in Earth's biosphere, suffering and all; if the lives of factory-farmed insects are not clearly worse, I have no objections whatever. I think I would prefer it to any idea of wireheading livestock, which raises half as many hackles for me as the idea of wireheading humans.
And bugs are not bad at all once you get used to the texture/idea.
This is basically my approach to animal welfare, I think rather than opposing all farming we should just be ensuring that they're not suffering most of the time.
Jain monks will not eat root vegetables because insects may be harmed in the harvesting, will use a special broom to sweep the path ahead of them lest they trample one, and wear a mask to prevent accidentally ingesting and hurting minute living beings.
You beat me to the Jain reference.
This is interesting because it suggests people have been tying themselves into moral knots like those in this thread for nearly three thousand years.
I'm not sure what the eighth century BC Indian equivalent of an internet forum was, but I guess there must have been one, and an argument very much like this must have occurred there which led to the creation of Jainism.
They also don't extinguish flames, which are considered to be alive
Theoretically, you could breed or genetically engineer an animal that was both massive and dumb as bricks, like a whale that just sits in a warehouse all day. I assume that if you could breed an animal to not need exercise, factory farming would already have done it, but it's worth thinking about.
And there is a religion called Jainism that is based around exactly this principle - they preach radical nonviolence against all life, and stepping on an insect is considered a sin.
And the article mostly deals with the morality of factory farming- how does all of this change if the animals are free range?
What would a free-range mealworm even look like?
You find it under a rock, I guess?
Free range animals are still factory farmed. It's a question of scale: if you keep ten thousand chickens in one barn, the fact that they can walk around freely and aren't kept in cages doesn't make it not factory farming.
There is a lot of work currently on cellular agriculture: instead of growing the whole animal, why not only make muscle and fat tissue? It's much more ethical, but also more efficient in terms of resources. See https://gfi.org/cultivated/ for example.
We could also just eat plants and fungi, but meat is so important in most cultures that it's hard to convince people to do that.
Meat chickens are pretty far along the path to the animal you describe.
While dumb compared to us, chickens are still relatively intelligent and play a lot when given the option. I would want something even stupider, something not even aware, that sits in one spot and *does not move*, even with no restraints, though it would still need to build muscle somehow. That seems like the logical solution to all the problems Scott lists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsuu33rsymk
My metric is not pain or suffering, but sufficient degree of sapience.
That is to say, if, given appropriate tools or training, a being can communicate with me in (a) language - at that point, I call that being a person (I thus do not quite technically consider humans fully people until well after birth).
For convenience's sake (because this metric clearly has many practical problems), I assume that if if a being can do this, then any member of their species can do so.
Thus, even torturing a cow to death is no different than torturing an insect to death - neither is intrinsically evil - it is merely that enjoying torturing a live animal is generally not something that results in healthy or good ends.
As such, as long as there is a useful reason for doing so, and less painful (if they exist) are harder or more expensive to implement, I am indifferent to animal-pain.
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In any event, I expect cultured meat to pass the point of equal expense within the next couple of decades, at which point this entire discussion will be moot.
I am against this moral system because it requires making a hokey exception in order to be against torturing stroke patients.
"I assume that if if a being can do this, then any member of their species can do so."
Not OP, but surely that includes stroke patients, whereas I've never communicated with a single cricket.
I'm not sure that makes any difference in the post's moral framework, though. If degree of sapience is what matters, it doesn't matter if *[type of being] in general* are sapient when the particular individual you're talking about isn't, by its definition, unless we're using some really weird logic.
That is, we can assume humans in general are sapient because we found one human that can learn a language and communicate in it; but since a stroke victim or infant cannot, they're not sapient, so...
If degree of sapience as measured by language use*
Underlying this is that sufficiently-complex-mind/sapience is very, very hard to measure, so I'm looking for rough proxies.
I think just not torturing for pleasure at all is a good deontological rule to follow, and I strongly disagree with OP saying that "neither is intrinsically evil".
That aside, I think once you start differentiating between physical and cognitive limitations to speech, a lot of the moral issues resolve. For example, dogs and cats, as per the youtube videos of push-button proto-speech, have the brains to form basic language, and the only reason we've never seen it before is because they don't have the developed lip and tongue muscles that human speech requires. Similarly, paralyzed spinal-trauma patients may be unable to communicate without the emerging technologies that interpret eye movement. All of these beings should be respected, but one that gets every conceivable communication-assistance device and still can't produce anything might be too limited or too broken to care about. A notable exception would be aphasias, which destroy language processing capacities but leave the rest of the brain intact. I'm not sure how to handle that, and I'm sure there are other exceptions I haven't thought of. But broadly speaking, once a social animal becomes so impaired that it cannot maintain the respect of its group, death is often preferable.
With regard to torture, I used that to demonstrate the extreme edge of my position - that is to say, if literally torturing a cow leads to some net benefit for 'real people', and alternate routes to that benefit are more difficult to implement, then I do not see it as evil to continue in doing so.
For example, right now it cannot be denied that farming and slaughtering animals for food causes a non-zero amount of pain. However, at this moment, there is no alternate method of producing the meat of those animals at anywhere near that cost.
At some point, the cost of vat-grown mean will approach parity with farming, at which point the moral calculus will flip (I would view it as wrong to farm and slaughter, outside of the small number of cases where it is for some reason not practical to go vat-grown (e.g. a religious sacrificial ritual))
I'm not sure I buy the argument that slaughtering animals is a necessity (or even a strong practicality) when it comes to feeding people.
I'm vegetarian and I spend less money on food now than I did previously. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the cost per calorie of meat is necessarily higher than the cost per calorie of plant-based food, since plant-based food is essentially converted to meat as it is fed to livestock, and this conversion is not perfectly efficient.
I think the main justifications for meat-eating are some combination of convenience and pleasure for the meat-eaters. Convenience is mostly a function of social momentum and is certainly easier to shift in favor of a plant-based diet than waiting for vat-grown meat. Gastronomic pleasure is a legitimate consideration, but I think it's important to be explicit that that's what's being traded off against the cow's pain.
As I said - I value even a very small benefit to a sapient being as being much greater than even a very large pain to an animal.
With regard to language - that is why I add "if even a single member has (complex) language, I assume the entire species does" and why I also specified "even through the use of tools".
The latter clause also includes beings who, for whatever reason, in some way lack the senses or organs to perceive us, or make us perceive them, or their environment is such that the development of communication is impeded or just happened to never happen.
My apologies, I was horribly unclear (insomniaposting).
The thing I actually want to treat as "being a real person" is an admittedly nebulous "is a sufficiently complex mind" - ability to communicate is just a tool for trying to ascertain that for a a given species.
Morality is arbitrary already. You can always cut out exceptions of all sorts.
of course it is - (I assert that) moral systems are inherently axiomatic - you start off by defining some core concepts of good and bad (in some sense), and everything else is a logical consequence of applying those to states-of-the-universe.
As long as you're self-consistent and (don't end up with theorems that make statements about the universe that are disproven), you're fine (although, of course, when two people disagree on the good/evil of something, we get to interesting metaproblems)
I don't think you even need to be self-consistent. You can always have arbitrary exceptions.
I subscribe to weighed utilitarianism myself. My utils count for the most, then family, then extended family and friends, then city, then region, then nation. Neoconfucianism was good enough for 2,000 years of Chinese civilization, it's good enough for me.
(Heh, that's not terribly dissimilar from my own personal construction - I also have a nested venn diagram kind of thing of in-groups with greater or lesser mutual duty and such to other members)
I don't mean consistent like Kant's Categorical Imperative, I mean self-consistent as in logically self-consistent.
Like, in theory, if there was a case where your weighted utilitarianism demanded that you both "do X" and "not do X" - that would be a contradiction, a lack of self-consistency.
However, once we're talking formal logic.... then it is hard (if not impossible, as I suspect) to construct systems that are sufficiently powerful (able to talk about any scenario) that are not at least as powerful as Number Theory, in which case the Incompleteness Theorem applies, in which case there are infinitely many scenarios not quite covered by you rules - in this case, you have at least two choices consistent with the rest of your system.
This is why, I think, that really understanding one's moral system is so important - if you really get your underlying wants and assignments of importance, you can step outside the system and choose a choice that best fits the... spirit of your law.
But why? Seems like a totally arbitrary metric to me. You even admit it has practical problems.
It does seem completely arbitrary. I mean, a chatbot registers as more morally weighty than a dolphin, by this reasoning.
It depends on the meaning of the word "communicate." Usually we mean something like "convey your internal state in such a way that I can imagine it." Since a chatbot has no internal state -- it isn't like anything to be a chatbot -- by definition it cannot "communicate" in this sense. It can convey some other agent's internal state (whoever design the chatbot), but we wouldn't call that "communicating" for the same reason we don't say a word processor program or pencil is capable of "communicating" just because it can be used by some other human to talk to us.
I intended as Carl said in the first couple of sentences.
I am somewhat leery of using "internal state" here, because it is difficult to draw a distinction between meaningful, existent, non-meaningful, and non-existent internal states. (I myself prefer an information theory assertion here)
Aren't all moral axioms arbitrary? They're, you know, axioms.
I'm going by complexity, and "can hold a conversation with me" is a reasonable metric (albeit a necessary but not sufficient one)
In terms of deciding whether a being is worthy of moral consideration, no, "can hold a conversation with me" is not a reasonable metric. It's just pulled out of your ass because it sounds nice or something. Suffering, properly defined, is intrinsically bad, and pleasure is intrinsically good. Why dismiss those plain truths in favor of some oddly specific ultimate rule that you just made up?
I'm not declaring it the end-all thing, I'm just asserting that it is an approximate sufficient condition.
I am declaring subjective quality of consciousness to be the end-all thing. You just completely made up this rule and are citing it as the decision factor to justify torturing a being an unlimited amount who you believe suffers pain. Sounds kinda end-all to me. And just like, why? What's the point of ethics to you? Just seeing how well you can follow arbitrary rules?
The point of ethics (in my opinion) is as follows:
1) For a given person, there exist states of the universe that they like more than other states of the universe (e.g., given infinite time and memory, I can rank every state of the universe on some scale).
2) As actually making that list, perfectly analyzing the universe, and taking the actions that aim towards an optimal state(s) (according to that person) is not possible, we have no choice but to construct models that approximate reality and (we hope) aim us towards our preferred states of the universe more often than not.
3) Thus, the selection of one's moral rules, in reality, starts from what one wants to be, and is thus quite arbitrary when a selection of rules is viewed in a vacuum (or even when the whole system is viewed, particularly if the starting point(s) are sufficiently far from one's own).
Cows can definitely communicate with people. It isn't a sophisticated language and is based on simple sounds, direction of attention, and body language...but there are deaf humans who rely on sign language too. There are even deaf children who are intellectual issues. Though if you go with a 'if any member of a species can do it, then all members are covered regardless of individual capacity or circumstances' then that gets you out of some dilemmas.
But where is the line between communication, language, intent, sapience, etc. Have you spent a lot of time with cows? It is one thing to read about their relative intelligence or count the brain cells, but if you spend time with them you may get a different picture. They have personalities and individual traits and are quite capable of communicating not just with humans, but each other, and with dogs.
I often find discussions around animal intelligence to be quite laughable armchair nonsense from people who don't seem to have ever actually interacted with the animals in question. It often comes off as bizarre and ivory tower out of touch nonsense. Raise a dog well, teach it 100 commands, feel its moods, have it sleep next to you, have it protect you, and watch it age and die, then mourn for it...then perhaps have a more informed view on animal intelligence and moral value.
It can be easy to write off other people's experiences and simply say...oh that's all in your head, it is just a dumb animal...but that's just a forceful and arrogant form of promoting one's ignorance. Meanwhile the rancher with a great relationship with his cows can utter a few words and the cows will come in and stand at their milking stalls. I'm certainly not arguing that lived experience isn't the 'only' way to know the world, but there is often a strange attitude of being hostile or dismissive of lived experiences in the world of armchair logic. As though an experiment isn't partially 'just' a careful counting of someone else's lived experiences of using instruments or running interviews.
Many animals have much higher and purpose driven levels of intelligence and trying to measure them in human terms like complex speech or tool making is getting lost in the map while missing the territory of intelligence - which is the thing we wanted to measure. But instead we get stuck on silly proxy metrics like tool making.
I endorse this absolutely. "Communicate in a language" is a stupid way to measure things. Dolphins can't, chimps can't, dogs can't — but will anyone really argue that these beings do not have thoughts, feelings, and experiences of some kind? (If so, do we really care what that person thinks?)
I'm not sure what sense this metric makes in other ways, as well. Stroke patients, as Scott notes, might no longer be able to use language to communicate. Are they no longer sapient? If we're talking about good and evil and so forth, why is "ability to suffer" not an extremely relevant criterion?
You must have missed the post with all the links to dogs and cats that can speak to humans using buttons that trigger voice recordings. They've been going around youtube. Also dolphins do in fact have a sort of proto-language that appears to be universal across oceans.
The main problem with "ability to suffer" is that it is too broad. To quote Terminator 2: "I sense injuries. The data could be called pain." The Terminator itself, of course, is of human-like intelligence, but hazard detection and avoidance, and even response to starvation, goes all the way down to bacteria (chemotaxis and endospores respectively).
Certainly, ability to be in a preferred or dispreferred internal state is *necessary* for moral weight. I don't think anyone disputes that if something doesn't care and can't care what you do to it, you've no obligation to treat it or not treat it in any particular way. But it essentially reduces to "is alive" (unless you count viruses as alive; lysogeny is about the only time a virus ever makes a "decision" and most viruses can't even do that), which makes using it as a *sufficient* criterion rather thorny.
Well, probably because enshrining pleasure and pain as the primary moral axis tends to turn us into eat, drink, and be merry Hedonists, and most people feel a mild revulsion at reducing the miracle of experience to the stimulation or not of sensory nerves and the pleasure/pain centers of the brain. Most people want some kind of logos, or meaning, to be central to their ethics.
That doesn't mean pleasure/pain aren't important metrics, but usually we want them to be secondary criteria, things we consider *after* we have settled on the question of meaning. That's why (among other reasons) we think it's ethical to send children to school, which they usually dislike: it's a method of delivering more meaning to their future lives.
Sure, a lot of people may feel a mild revulsion at it, but it doesn't change the facts. Suffering and pleasure, defined broadly enough, are indeed all that *ultimately* matter. However distasteful that is, when you shift an ethical conversation away from those basic truths, you start talking nonsense.
If sending children to school is ethical (which I think it probably is), then it's because doing so is likely to ensure better overall wellbeing for everyone involved, not because it gives them "meaning". To whatever extent finding meaning is desired by/pleasurable to individuals, it's included in a thorough accounting of wellbeing anyway.
An interesting assertion (that suffering and pleasure are "all that ultimately matter"). However, inasmuch as I don't agree with it, but you have adduced no evidence or argument for it, there's not much I can say beyond that.
I actually think I'm being the most parsimonious here by limiting myself to saying that only suffering and pleasure matter. You're the one arguing that there exists more that matters beyond those intrinsic values. You're the one who should produce evidence or an argument for your additional, more complex moral claims.
So which is it? Are you claiming that suffering and pleasure do not matter ethically (and hence, I should prove that they do), or are you able to produce evidence or an argument that something else also matters ethically?
I think you make a strong and useful point about the general superiority of experience over theory, but I do feel it needs to be pointed out the very impressive talent human beings have for anthropomorphizing. People are perfectly capable of thinking that trees and rocks, the wind, planets, people in comas et cetera are intentionally and empathically communicating. How much easier to do it with cute animals. (I notice people are a lot less likely to argue that Komodo dragons and cockroaches have inner lives, though.)
We also need to bear in mind the talent *any* life form has for adaptation. A horse can be taught mathematics in that it can be trained to knock its hooves four times when shown the symbol 2 + 2. That doesn't mean it grasps addition, that means it knows what gets it fed. So we can assume that cows have some talent for figuring out what movements, noises, et cetera get it fed, and if looking soulfully at the Bringer Of Hay and mooing softly does the job, well, they'll figure that out. Doesn't mean they have developed emotional connections in the way we do. (Or alternatively it means our "emotional connects" may be less existentially meaningful than we think they are, they may just be *our* brains working out the most efficient ways for us to get fed.)
Again, I do want to emphasize that I completely agree with you that actual phenomenological experience is always to be prefered over theorizing, and in principle anyone who wants to claim a dog has Buddha nature, or conversely a dog is a meat puppet robot with no more inner life than a wind-up toy, should in either case spend some time with a dog before submitting his final manuscript for publication.
Can we even know at the 10^-10 level about plants being incapable of feeling pain? Actually, does all of biology hold one proposition at that level of confidence?
Maybe not, but as far as I know we have no alternative to eating *some* kind of living thing, aside from starving to death (which also causes suffering).
So if we admit to some chance that plants experience suffering, then we are committed to zero-expected-suffering society being impossible, and we just have to minimize expected suffering, which probably still means eating plants.
The problem is that minimizing expected suffering might look like us all killing ourselves painlessly, or at least never having any more kids.
To be born is to commit to a lifetime of suffering, of various sorts. And isn't the greatest pain of all the knowledge and experience of mortality? If minimizing suffering is the highest moral goal, Khattam-Shud, then yes it is clear Thanos was right -- indeed, didn't go far enough, as the best of all possible universes is one that is entirely sterile, has no life at all.
Or to quote Westley: "Life is pain, Princess. Anyone who says differently is selling something."
Nobody chooses to be born, it's our parents that commit us to a lifetime of suffering. Of course, for us to continue to exist we're evolved to think that they are unconditionally entitled to make that commitment. Still, we're been known to question other adaptations, so why not this one also? A recent indie movie hit Capernaum makes a decent effort in this direction.
Well, sure, but it's us (in choosing to become parents) that commit not only our children but *their* children and so forth ad infinitum to a lifetime of suffering. Just think, by choosing to breed, this generation is directly causing the future birth of an almost arbitrary number of brutal dictators, rapists, and ordinary murderers (assuming humanity continues to exist for a very long time).
Well, I think that in aggregate humans experience more suffering than pleasure, with balance having been even worse in the past, and still much worse in the animal kingdom. Also, the suffering "black swan" is much more likely than the opposite (being tortured by some sadist in a basement for decades vs. I dunno AI engineered utopia?). Therefore no life at all would seem to be the utilitarian optimum, but (luckily?) pretty much nobody is actually utilitarian.
Assuming that's true, annihilation isn't a problem, it's a solution.
But also it's a lot trickier than that. Even if we were somehow able to confidently determine that annihilation is the best course of action, we would have a really really tough (probably impossible, and definitely really risky) job implementing that solution. If we just stopped having kids, we'd be leaving behind a world of wild animals, who seem to live considerably more miserable lives than humans. But even if we could, it wouldn't be enough to eliminate all humans and mammals and even fish and bugs. We'd want to eliminate all life on Earth down to the microbes to prevent them from re-evolving into suffering beings. And then there's the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Doesn't really seem like a viable solution, and if we attempted it there's a good chance we'd just end up causing more net suffering than if we hadn't.
Anyway, my point is that this does not dispute the basic truth: suffering and pleasure are indeed what matters.
We talk about suffering for factory farming because it's the most obvious variable and drives the arithmetic, but obviously w should be full utilitarians not just negative utilitarians in general.
Depends on your definition of "pain." If it reduces to "aversive stimuli" then every form of life without exception, down to the simplest bacterium, experiences pain. It's part of the definition of "life" that it avoids aversive stimuli, which implies -- if that's to what you think the definition of "pain" reduces -- that everything that lives can experience pain, by definition.
...which does rather imply that if so much moral calculus is to be based on the experience of "pain," one might be well-advised to begin with a robust definition of what "pain" is -- and furthermore that the observation that X avoids Y does not lend itself to a robust conclusion that X experiences pain when Y happens.
Where to draw the line to prevent suffering? Jains go so far as to covering their mouths with cloth to avoid inhaling insects.
I gave up meat for 13 years after having to kill a fresh caught fish before cleaning it to cook. It struggled and the sense that it wanted to live just as much as I did was undeniable. I continued to consume dairy and eggs but the thought of making another animal die to feed me made me sick for a long time.
I eat meat occasionally now mostly to avoid being that pain in the ass who has to have his own special meal but I prefer sticking to flora.
But no, I don’t watch the sidewalk to avoid ants or refrain from slapping a mosquito.
Killing takes practice. Just like cleaning someone else’s shit. It’s one of the many uncomfortable pastimes of being a human.
The more I read on this subject, the happier I am to maintain a transactional view of morality (ie "morality is a peace treaty between humans") where all non-human (or human-intelligence alien) lives have zero moral value (but I reserve the right to have an aesthetic preference against animal cruelty).
That's very unsatisfying to me. An aesthetic preference is very weak, and doesn't feel commensurate with the level of evil involved in e.g. torturing a conscious being. Seems like sort of a cop-out to avoid having to think about it too much; having your steak and eating it too, so to speak.
It's better than nothing... but if you could watch a video of a dog being tortured to death and honestly say "yes, that's morally equivalent to an ugly painting", I think I would find it hard to leave you alone with anyone or anything I cared about, because something's missing inside.
This response seems confused. "Something's missing inside" seems to indicate you suspect a missing intuition, but someone with a (relevant) missing intuition wouldn't need "a cop-out to avoid having to think about it too much" (i.e. to avoid an unpleasant intuition coming up).
Unless you have a God, aesthetic preference is all we have to go on. Why do you call it weak? People are quite capable of giving their lives for aesthetic preferences, or of dedicating their lives to their fulfillment. Aesthetic preferences are among the most powerful human feelings, and among the least susceptible to bemusement. They're things out of which we cannot be argued easily, and where social deception is not easy ("Trust your instincts" et cetera).
Indeed, isn't your second paragraph you stating *your* aesthetic preferences in a very strong and commited way?
>Indeed, isn't your second paragraph you stating *your* aesthetic preferences in a very strong and commited way?
Not as usually defined, no.
Would you be happier if I found another word that lies somewhere between "moral" and "aesthetic" to express how I feel about animal cruelty? Perhaps that would be a more accurate assessment of the way I feel.
I'd be happier if you were able to empathize with something weaker and dumber than yourself.
Well, at least it keeps us from the egoism of projecting our own (probably wired-in evolved) emotional instincts onto strange species.
I mean, maybe what the dolphins have been trying to convey with all the jumping and squeaking is "We need you to help us exterminate those evil bastards the sharks, so knock it off with this preserving of the natural ecosystem crap. I mean dafuq? they eat your young ones off surfboards. What's *wrong* with you?"
I recall a knowledgeable friend telling me that dolphins are capable of perpetuating cruelty against other dolphins and other species in the wild. I have difficulties coming up search words that bring search results that are not about cruelty of humans towards dolphins (or cruelty of dolphins directed at scuba divers).
https://www.insider.com/sexually-frustrated-dolphin-forced-town-to-shut-down-beaches-2018-8
Always amuses me that people think animals (or children) are all in a state of Edenic purity, without possibility of malevolence.
Based on my work studying fruit flies in college labs, it feels like it's a lot easier to make mutant insect strains than mutant large-mammal strains (or maybe it's just less frowned on, w/e).
How hard would it be to make a strain of mealworms with no nocioceptors? And to what extent would this solve the problem?
It would be a good start!
If we can find the mealworm equivalents of the genes that make some humans insensitive to pain, it could be pretty easy. It would actually be fairly easy to check it was working, since the mealworms would no longer try to avoid unpleasant stimuli.
They would be GMO, but I'm not sure on how many people are willing to eat bugs but not GMO bugs.
<blockquote>How hard would it be to make a strain of mealworms with no nocioceptors? And to what extent would this solve the problem?</blockquote>
Suppose someone created a breed of cats with "no nociceptors". Would that make it okay to kill or them? There are humans with genetic defects who don't feel pain, or have their feelings of pain muted to such an extent it's life-threatening. Does that make it okay, or comparatively okay, to kill or torture them? In any case, assuming for the sake of the argument the validity of utilitarians' moral arithmetic, wouldn't the lives of mealworms who don't feel pain but only pleasure thereby be <i>more</i> rather than less worth living than the lives of mealworms who wriggle in pain?
For myself, I neither subscribe to this moral arithmetic, which I find profoundly idiotic, and also find it hard to convince myself that painful experience always and necessarily makes a life less worth living. Take the experience of the commenter upthread who was trying to kill his fish to eat it. I doubt they would say it was pleasurable or neutral, so it must have been painful, but did having that experience make their life less worth living?
I mean, usually torture is defined by its being a negative experience for the victim. It's still bad to hammer nails into a leper because he presumably still doesn't want to die of blood loss or infection, and it's still bad to put a leper in a pillory and throw rotten eggs at her because she would presumably prefer to be doing other things (and can still smell, IIRC), but given a magic gun that *only* inflicts pain (and which doesn't work on lepers), then sure, shooting a leper with it is morally neutral because it has no effect.
This doesn't apply to the "killing morally-weighty things that don't want to be killed" part, though.
Sorry, but, it may be that you find this type of arithmetic absurd because you seem to have an absurd, straw-man interpretation of it.
-Cats and humans are capable of types of suffering and enjoyment not gated by nocioceptors, and their death impact the lives of others around them. I haven't seen this demonstrated to be true of bugs.
-Yes, mealworms that only feel pleasure would be more worth living than ones that only feel pain, which is why it would be good to create a lot of them for factory farming.
-A life experience may be both painful and valuable, or both stressful and pleasurable, or painful in the moment but fulfilling in retrospect, or whatever. Any humanist, artistic, poetic description of the complexities and contradictions of the human experience can and will be captured by 'the math', you just have to make the effort to quantify it.
I don't think so. To speak more fully, I believe that your statement is technically true, but if one succeeded at "quantifying it", the result would not be globally intelligible by humans and thus not substantially different from relying on human judgment, which is of course not globally intelligible by humans either. It's like a moral Chinese Room experiment.
The question on which my own evaluation of value(X bugs) / value(1 human) hinges is whether we use human-relative morals or absolute morals. (Everything here assumes utility theory.)
One kind of "human-relative morals " would be morals which judge world states by how good they are for humans. This is basically what we do, and is close to the "relative to my kin" morals that evolution forces all animals to acquire. This is icky because it lets us enslave AIs and tile the universe with humans, but it is at least coherent.
If morality is human-relative in this way, then the value of the bugs is their value to humans. Mosquitos might have negative value to us, in which case the question becomes whether it's permissible to create mosquitoes provided that you kill them later.
Another definition of "human relative morals" would be "apply human morality to every agent" (which we also do). In that case, many insects are evil by human standards, so killing them is probably virtuous. Maybe we can eat wasps and feel smug with every crunch.
The only good candidate absolute moralities I know involve thermodynamic / information-theoretic evaluations of world states, which have never really caught on with humans.
I think you may have to reply directly to his comment if you want him to be notified of it. (I don't think you get them for grandchildren of your comments.)
If you get notified of this comment however, disregard the above.
Thanks.
Also, I realize that you try to use an absolute morality in which you measure the pain and pleasure of each species or individual using some function which computes something like "level of consciousness". I suspect that function will use an information-theoretic measure.
A neuroscientist named Tononi proposed an information-theoretic measurement of consciousness maybe 15 years ago, which was IIRC summing up a measure of information and computation complexity across the entire brain.
You're referring to IIT. Scott Aaronson has a pretty strong criticism of the idea that he goes into here: https://youtu.be/nAMjv0NAESM?t=1016
Oh, I didn't say it was a good measurement. It was an attempt, but pretty simple. I think it was geared only at comparing different mammalian brains. It might say a supercomputer was superhumanly conscious.
I regret my initial comment now, since Scott's attempt to estimate the moral status of different organisms via subjective judgements by humans, or by neurological inquiries into their capacity for pleasure or pain, may be better than any of the 3 approaches I listed. It isn't systematic, but it's still usable.
>Also, this is related to my pet theory that Orson Scott Card knew exactly what he was doing and the name "Ender Wiggin" was meant to convey "ender of bugs".
Maybe Peter Wiggin was a dick to bugs.
Nice. I checked, and Ender's given name was Andrew, from a Greek word meaning brave/strong/manly. His sister is Valentine, a Latin word for healthy/strong. Peter is from Petrus, Greek for "rock". If deliberate, this is an odd choice of names for a trio whose great strengths were intellectual.
I am honored to have made the opening quote!
I just think that this game of determining precisely how conscious a particular creature is, determining if they have pain receptors, quibbling over whether they "suffer", etc is exactly the kind of bad utilitarianism that rationalists are rightly criticized for. We're missing a causal understanding of WHY we care about this other creature in the first place, and then cargo culting with measurements.
For example, Brian Tomasik's "most insects that exist suffer most of the time" should give us tremendous pause. This should be a core consideration guiding our thinking towards insect welfare. A base case of "suffering most of the time" is distinct from well-adjusted humans and animals. We tend to think euthanasia is appropriate for a creature who is likely to suffer for the remainder of its existence. We do this for domestic dogs, cats, horses, and even humans. What does it mean that a creature's whole existence is primarily suffering? If we actually care about insect suffering, should we be pursuing some genetic editing or ecosystem engineering such that mosquitos get to live happy, fulfilled, stress-free lives?
I just think the obvious answer is that people don't actually care, intrinsically. People care to the degree that the facts they can't ignore make them feel bad. If people can merely suspend consideration on the moral welfare of insects (or animals), they will happily never care. If you force them to think about it a lot, as a biologist studying insects might, people will generally adopt positions that allow them to tell themselves the story of how "sure the status quo ain't good but I'm on the right side of this issue." The suffering that we are actually attempting to prevent with all of this is human suffering.
I don't think it's a coincidence that all the dogs that couldn't instinctively raise their eyebrows died off.
+1
> We're missing a causal understanding of WHY we care about this other creature
In 1800, a plantation owner debates you on slavery. He appeals to the Bible's support of it, reports success with a new torture technique to keep the n****** in line, and says you're "rightly criticized" for your bleeding-heart views (or whatever dismissive term was popular among conservatives in 1800.) So, what sort of "causal understanding" can you give to this man?
I wouldn't be much inclined to try to convince him; I'm fairly sure I couldn't change his mind. The probabilistic arguments of EAs (and now Scott) were persuasive to me, and if they're not persuasive to someone else because of a lack of "facts they can't ignore", I don't know what to do with that. Is there some other argument one should be using instead? Are you saying that if you want people to care about insects, "force them to think about it a lot"? Isn't Scott doing what he can to make people think about it, even if his version of the argument isn't the best available?
>So, what sort of "causal understanding" can you give to this man?
Well in 1800, I wouldn't have had much hope of educating him sufficiently. Human civilization just didn't have the tools at the time. We can't change the past anyway, but we also shouldn't really blame them too much, just like we shouldn't blame the people that burned witches. Given the information that they had been given in their lives, we couldn't really have expected them to know that witches weren't real and that they were burning innocent people.
>Are you saying that if you want people to care about insects, "force them to think about it a lot"?
Sort of, but I don't want that. I'm saying, "if you force people to think about insects a lot, half of them or so will tend to anthropomorphize insects and empathize with them, regardless of their ability to suffer." We know this happens; it happens with children and stuffed animals, and people of all ages and cute robots that we know aren't sentient. And so we shouldn't be surprised that a couple of insect biologists are really concerned about insect welfare.
I'm instead saying that this is one of those dirty corners of life. This IS life. This is what life does, it consumes itself, recycles itself. We think this is perfectly normal when we talk about eating plants, in fact we even like to invoke hippie ideas about the circle of life in that context.
There is no good spot to get off the train from chickens to yeast. Lizards, snails, frogs, flies, jellyfish, sponges, cilantro? There is no size to expand your sphere of moral concern to after which you won't have anybody trying to persuade you that you're a moral monster because you still don't think jellyfish are all that sentient. You will continue to have the experience I have now, of simply trying to explain to people that nothing that chickens do seems remotely intelligent to me, all of their behavior is completely consistent with dumb biological robots with no lights on inside, and I think anybody that thinks otherwise is excessively anthropomorphizing them. You will just have that experience with cilantro or something, and your interlocutors will have all the same arguments you have now, and your only retort will be an appeal to your incredibly strong intuition that cilantro is a dumb plant and you're pretty sure your interlocutors are excessively anthropomorphizing, a mainstream human tendency.
We respect the rights of other humans because that's the best way to secure rights for ourselves, also humans. It's not because we have big hearts. Empathy is a profoundly bad place from which to tether human rights. It is prejudicial (racist, as you allude to), innumerate, and highly irrational. It is not a secure bedrock for moral flourishing. We will do well to understand this.
> after which you won't have anybody trying to persuade you that you're a moral monster because you still don't think jellyfish are all that sentient
I don't think anyone is trying to persuade you of that, though.
> in 1800, I wouldn't have had much hope of educating him sufficiently.
Indeed. While I can think of arguments that an 1800 person could have thought of, there are stronger arguments today from science and philosophy (though I still doubt the plantation owner would accept them).
This is actually one of the reasons I chose slavery/1800 rather than something recent. As a non-illusionist, I believe that in the future we can gain more knowledge about consciousness, and yet, somehow we have to make choices today without having that knowledge. Based on that lack of future knowledge I believe that maybe animals (and insects) don't have moral worth, but maybe they do. And I think this is what Scott and other EAs are saying too.
> nothing that chickens do seems remotely intelligent to me, all of their behavior is completely consistent with dumb biological robots with no lights on inside
This sounds plausible to me. The counterargument is a view many humans hold: that humans themselves are also biological robots. To the extent humans are intelligent, nothing about their intelligence can't be replicated with ordinary computers. But computers don't have moral worth, and if other animals don't have moral worth, human biological robots don't either, since a human is nothing but ordinary animal biology plus some intelligence we can replicate on a computer.
This doesn't sound quite right to me, because humans experience something I call "consciousness" which I don't think a computer can replicate. But it seems to me that consciousness is not intelligence per se, but rather something that experiences and uses intelligence (but if it does include some form of intelligence, I think there are also other elements of human intelligence that are unconscious). Thus intelligence itself isn't necessarily where moral worth comes from, and therefore a low level of intelligence doesn't necessarily eliminate moral worth. I don't think any of us knows the answer to this, but I'm not prepared to conclude that the answer is unknowable either.
So I think we should behave in a way that is reasonable given our uncertainty, by choosing behaviors that won't look either idiotic or monstrous to future people who have the knowledge we lack today.
>by choosing behaviors that won't look either idiotic or monstrous to future people who have the knowledge we lack today.
Yeah I just lean on the side of "excessive anthropomorphizing of animals is going to look idiotic to future people." I think that it will look like not building wind turbines or propellers or airplanes because you believe that the wind is made up of spirits and that it is wrong to exploit their energy for human gain. When really this is just causal phenomena that we can understand like many other causal phenomena and the universe isn't inherently any better or worse depending on whether humans leverage this latent resource.
I don't think consciousness is quite that complicated. I think we will have an answer that is satisfactory to many people within 20 years, and the answer will come in terms of Information Theory (not IIT, IIT seems very misguided) and feedback loops. I think there will always be a form of The Hard Problem of Consciousness that will stay unanswerable, something like "why is the character of my qualia exactly the way it is?" It will become a question like "what was before the Big Bang?" Perhaps a question that doesn't even make sense to ask, yet people will continue to ask it and assert something of significance based on its status as an unanswered question.
>But computers don't have moral worth
None yet. I do think we will come to a functionalist perspective. Something like, "we will respect the rights of robots which respect our rights." I think we will find that there is no other coherent way to experiment with creating possibly-conscious beings in a laboratory. There will be some necessary conditions about the kind of information processing it does and what access to experience it has (which will be purely empirical questions because we will have constructed these systems), and then beyond that we may create some truly murderous systems or systems which are simply indifferent to the things we cherish and care about and we will simply arrive at a very natural heuristic of respecting the wellbeing of systems which respect our wellbeing and not respecting those that don't (or can't).
>and if other animals don't have moral worth, human biological robots don't either, since a human is nothing but ordinary animal biology plus some intelligence we can replicate on a computer.
Yeah this is just silly, which clearly you agree with intuitively. A full argument against this is long, but I really don't think it's necessary. Humans are very clearly unique animals, uniquely deserving of respect. We are general learners. And when we create robots that are as clever, creative, and self-aware as humans, I suspect that their moral worth will be somewhat obvious to us too. (Not all of us; some people will be indoctrinated into a belief that robots cannot have moral worth because they cannot have souls because they were not created by God, or something. And that social belief will supersede what would naturally have been their intuition.)
I actually think that it ought to be core to humanism that one appreciates this gap between humans and most other animals (elephants and dolphins, maybe a handful of other species, seem like they might be an exception). I actually don't trust that most animal rights activists hold human rights to the same degree of sanctity that I do. You can observe the tension when you think about what happens when a dog bites a person in America. We put the dog down, and we absolutely should. Yet, in my experience, I've met a lot of animal rights activists who are skeptical of this practice, who believe that there should perhaps be an investigation and assignment of blame. These people have entirely lost the script, in my mind.
They have, in the decadence of the 21st century, forgotten what team they were on all along. There is a team which respects human rights, and then there are all the other creatures in the world who are entirely indifferent to your moral worth and couldn't conceive of it if they wanted to.
The real question of animal rights, it seems to me, is whether we cause more human psychological suffering from treating animals as less than human or whether more human suffering would result from disallowing ourselves from exploiting them. There may come a time in the future when lab-grown meat is so easy to produce and we can make honey some other way such that there's such little marginal benefit from directly exploiting animals that it's worth not doing it just so as not to upset the vegans. I don't think we're there yet.
Let's assume insects do feel pain. Another important thing to consider are the varieties of suffering that insects vs chickens/cows/pigs might experience in factory farmed conditions. Factory farming of birds and mammals involves subjecting them to conditions which obviously cause them serious misery (cramped conditions, docking tails, searing off beaks, on and on and on...). I don't see why factory farming of insects would involve subjecting them to comparably miserable conditions, nor do we really even know which conditions insects prefer or to what extent. I imagine the average quality of life for a factory farmed insect would be about equal to that of a wild insect.
I think we have a pretty good idea which conditions insects prefer, because they communicate those preferences by going somewhere else if the current environment doesn't suit them. Pillbugs literally have a neural circuit that gets them walking if their current environment is too dry, and stops them when it's sufficiently moist. So we could easily give factory farmed insects a much better life than wild insects. On your other points, I agree completely.
I think there's a strong and weak sense of the word "prefer". The strong sense to me implies some actual difference in the quality of one's consciousness. You're definitely right to point out that insects communicate preferences in the weak sense via their behavior, but it isn't at all clear to me that those preferences are more meaningful than a Tesla "preferring" to brake because it detects an obstruction. I imagine that a pillbug doesn't consciously care if it's in a dry environment, yet for basic evolutionary reasons, it possesses a body that will respond to dry environments by moving. And if it truly does consciously care, I imagine the magnitude of that preference compared to a factory farmed pigs preference to, say, turn around and scratch itself, it infinitesimal. Mostly based on anatomical reasons, I'm sufficiently convinced that birds and mammals *do* experience conscious preference of certain states over others.
> What about the other limit? Plausibly the most morally correct action, short of becoming vegetarian, would be to eat the largest animal there is. And according to the Talmud - Baba Bathra 74b- the righteous in Heaven dine on the flesh of Leviathan, which suffices to feed all of them forever. Hypothesis confirmed!
"A Pig Named Shayol".
I’m kind of a utilitarian but find it hard to think in terms of “additive” moral cost of lives (ie of the kind that draws an equivalence between killing one million beetles and one dolphin)when both intuition and cognitive science point to those types of minds being so qualitatively different as to be, in my eyes, hardly even the same thing. The idea of “animal rights” that generalize to everything from apes to caterpillars seems almost a straw man, a way of making people who want fewer intelligent mammals to die in spaces where they can barely move seem ridiculous, overreaching.
I've thought a lot about the moral reciprocity arguments and I've realized they feel inhumane and kind of creepy because social mammals from pigs to cows to apes are capable of a crude kind of moral reciprocity with their own kind. To deny them any moral worth because they aren't capable of establishing sophisticated and consistent moral standards across species and social groups seems ridiculous, especially when so few humans are capable of that. Very few humans have formally defined and followed moral standards, meaning that they don't kill their own kind for the same reasons cows don't.
I don't think the problem in this case is so much death, or the cost of lives, as it is the suffering beforehand.
I'm severely unconvinced by the argument that the moral worth of an animal scales linearly with the number of neurons it has. I'm sure we can all agree that a single neuron kept in a petri dish has no moral worth, less than a rounding error.
Another thought, reached after a very enlightening course on animal biology, is that nature is really vicious. Animals will eat each other alive, commit infanticide, cannibalism, rape, and all other sorts of awful things. Why should we care for the welfare of creatures that by nature act in ways we consider immoral? If we excuse them from our moral system, why should they benefit from ours?
Here's my totally-not-thought through system for determining the moral worth of animals: The worth of an animal is directly proportional to how closely it's baseline social behavior resembles that of humans. This seems to get most of the cute and intelligent animals people like, but excludes intelligent asocial animals like octopi and squid. It also has the effect of giving a tamed/human socialized animal moral worth than a wild one of the same species. This seems intuitively right to me.
"Animals will eat each other alive, commit infanticide, cannibalism, rape, and all other sorts of awful things. Why should we care for the welfare of creatures that by nature act in ways we consider immoral?"
Don't humans, in nature, do the same? Hunter-gatherers did all sorts of rape and infanticide, but i think saying that uncivilized humans don't have moral worth is a hard sell.
Depends on whom you're selling to. I'm pretty sure in the dark corners of the web you'd have no trouble finding those who believe that yes, uncivilized humans have precisely 0 moral worth. Now the real question is - do people who think this have moral worth themselves?
More seriously, my point is that we as a society do discount people's moral worth based on how morally those people behave. So it's not entirely unreasonable to apply the same logic to animals.
"More seriously, my point is that we as a society do discount people's moral worth based on how morally those people behave"
We do yeah, but i don't think that's a good thing. It's why people say things like "i hope he gets raped and killed in prison". It's _a_ moral system, but i don't think it's a good one, and i don't know if people actually strongly believe it.
Unfortunately, I think people do believe it, if you assume they do it explains a lot of the problems with our prison system. Not only did we used to hang, draw and quarter people, but we also turned it into a public spectacle that drew massive crowds.
That was part of the punishment. The calculation was made that the shame of a public execution, with the attendent evidence of callous disregard, was an additional deterrent. That may seem cock-eyed to us -- isn't being executed about the worst it can get? -- but we don't live in the same age. Perhaps when life was in general nastier, more brutal, and shorter it *was* a significant extra deterrent to face the prospect of being laughed at while you die.
If nothing else, we can take note of the fact that the upper class insisted on more "dignified" ways of being executed -- being shot was reserved for officers, for example, while the common soldier was hanged.
Deterrence was definitely part of it from the state's perspective, but I was referring to the idea that people voluntarily watching these public executions, and even seeing them as a form of entertainment (especially in the Victorian Period) indicates that people saw them as morally acceptable. It's obviously more complicated than that, some people were sympathetic to the criminal, or perhaps saw attendance as a solemn duty, but I'm sure there were people who would argue that drawing and quartering someone in public is too good for traitors, and they actually deserve something even worse to fit the severity of their crime. This is distinct from sadism, since these same people would be appalled by the idea of the same violence being perpetrated on someone innocent or by any entity other than the state/king.
I would say under this system "uncivilized" humans have plenty of moral worth still. Taking at face value the *very* questionable notion that people in less developed societies exhibit worse moral behavior, they'll still exhibit *some* moral behavior. I imagine a tribe that kills and eats outsiders still at least has some sort of commendable in-group love and loyalty. So the killer-cannibals have less moral worth than Joe forager, but not no moral worth.
One problem with scaling moral worth with moral behavior is that it implies its ok to torture Hitler for decades. Not to discourage others, just because he doesn't matter. And that poses some issues since other people have different definitions of moral behavior, so i could be a Hitler to them.
My intuition would be that it would still be wrong to torture someone evil, but less wrong than torturing someone innocent or virtuous. This seems like something most people implicitly accept, and it seems like a pragmatic way to generally prohibit violence while still allowing us to punish people.
This definitely causes a lot of problems, the Nazis took the idea that some people don't matter and can therefore be tortured and killed to a horrifying extreme, but it's hardly unique to them. I think the same reasoning explains a lot of the problems with our criminal justice system, for example.
The difference with humans is that they can be talked to and persuaded to give up the rape and infanticide and stuff.
I mean, can't you do the same with animals? Sure they don't speak language, but so don't some humans. I've convinced plenty of cats to not be mean to humans.
Yes, it's a fair point. It might be more difficult to convince other kinds of animals, though, like tigers. And animals generally lack social coordination mechanisms which allow us to convince people not to do bad things on a mass scale. You have to convince each new cat to not be mean, over and over; you can't go to the Cat-King and persuade him to pass a law banning meanness to humans, or spread ideas about not being mean to humans among influential feline intellectuals. A global community of humans which for the most part live in harmony under a shared morality, with reciprocal and equal obligations, and only occasional deviance, seems feasible in a way that's not the case if you extend it to include animals.
And would we necessarily want to impose on animals all the responsibilities that come with personhood? I kind of like tigers the way they are, including the part of the nature of tigers that leads them to opportunistically predate on humans. Maybe even if we *could* make all animals part of our shared moral community, we still shouldn't.
Humans, today, in all nations, rape - quite a lot! - and kill babies and children in a myriad of ways.
(I think we agree! Just wanting to ask for reconsideration of terms used to discuss putatively amoral acts - talking about "hunter-gatherers" and "uncivilized" "tribes" is not very useful, seeing that no one here seems to know about their moral or legal systems, and more than a fair bit armchair-anthropology-racist, when there's ample evidence to discuss how contemporary America treats rapists and infanticides.)
This isn't meant as a criticism of the post, but reading it actually made me care less about the suffering of cows and chickens. I think if we're not careful we can actually cause moral exhaustion which can set us back from the goal of reducing suffering in the world. I used to try to avoid eating beef in favor of chicken for environmental reasons but gave up on that because of people's (fairly convincing) arguments that chicken suffering was a bigger concern. I thought eating insects might be a way out, but apparently not. Having to analyze every possibility like this may just lead to people giving up and not caring any more.
I guess I'll go buy some more shares of Beyond Meat before eating my chicken mushroom soup dinner. Sorry, chickens.
+1, i think the idea of insect suffering may very well be true, but i'll leave that problem up to my children. Lemme figure out and address human and animal welfare first before we go further.
MetalCrow, if there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects with even just .1% of the capacity to suffer as humans then the problem of insect suffering outweighs the problem of human and animal suffering combines by orders of magnitude. It may be appropriate to put this as a priority, if that is the case.
That is very true, and every day i hope to god it is not because the idea instills in me a fear unlike any other.
But at the moment, does it seem likely that insects have 0.1% of the capacity to suffer? And in addition, what's their suffering "maximum", as it were? A broken finger and waterboarding are both suffering, but if insects only can experience the former that's more ok.
Furthermore, shouldn't we also prioritize plant suffering even more, in that case? Or even multicellular organism suffering?
If the answer to "how much can insects suffer" gets with a reasonable confidence of "enough" then i 100% agree with you. But right now we don't have that info.
It's an interesting dilemma. If we are .001% confident that bugs suffer 0.001% as much as humans and there are 10 quadrillion bugs, then from a utilitarian calculation it may still be more important to consider bug suffering more than human suffering. The scary thing is you can set these numbers really low and still end up caring a lot about bugs if you are utilitarian. What do you set your confidence that bugs suffer at?
I happen to be optimistic. I think life is worth living and happy for humans and animals. That might very well be the case. If I learned that 10 quadrillion bugs can experience some little bit of happiness, then that means that we could be living in a world of incalculable bug happiness that is orders of magnitude larger than all of human happiness. Hopefully that is the case and not that suffering is the norm.
This would be another reason I am not a utilitarian. Crazy calculations that make our head spin with absurd conclusions go counter to my intuitions.
I think you've identified the "dust specs vs torture" dilemma actually! If bugs suffer the human equivalent of a dust spec in their eye, then from a basic util standpoint they are worth more than someone being tortured for 50 years.
I actually have my own special brand of utilitarianism where i lexicographically order different "planes" of suffering to solve this sort of problem. Torture is on the highest plane, and is incomparable with anything on the lower planes, so unless bugs can suffer torture like humans can our suffering will be "worth" more.
But i don't blame you for not being utilitarian. I've been for nearly all my life (i came up with it independent of learning it), so it just fits for me, but it is very crazy.
My problem with these sorts of things is that it feels to me like the reasoning goes (I'm utilitarian) -> (find counter intuitive conclusion) -> (rework my system to fit my intuition so that the utilitarianism doesn't actually maximize utility but does something else too). I just don't think people bite the bullet and say that actually we should torture the person or actually we should dedicate our whole life to caring for bugs.
This is why I'm an ethical intuitionist. I think this system resolves these absurd problems pretty well. A good book on it is called Ethical Intuitionism by Michael Huemer if you're interested.
Idk, I used to adopt a "different planes" argument for the dust specks vs torture thought experiment, but then got argued out of it.
The argument is, you have a dial. It is set at "1 person being tortured for 50 years" by default, and you can turn it up. Every tick it goes up, it multiplies the number of people experiencing the torture by 10, and deducts 1 second from the torture. So, 1 person at 50 years, or 10 people at 50 years-1 second, or 100 people at 50 years-2 seconds... so on. Once it gets low enough, the dial starts very slightly dropping the intensity instead.
Clearly, each tick is about 10x worse than the previous tick, so in the end by transitivity of preferences, (mild suffering) x 10^(1.6 billion) >>> 50 years of torture x 1.
You might not get all the way to dust specks by this argument, but it seems to at least get you to "shampoo in the eyes" or something similarly unpleasant but mundane.
And it also makes it clear that you need *really* big numbers for the dust specks vs torture argument to go through, a trillion is too small.
What if it's not .1%? What if it's 0.0000000000000000001%? Can we actually know that? We just don't understand enough about consciousness and suffering to know if it scales linearly, exponentially, logarithmically, or if it has some "turn on" threshold point.
Arch, if there is just a 1% chance that my number is correct then my conclusion would still follow. Even if there was a .1% chance that my number was correct. That seems feasible to me.
What do you assign the probability of .1% suffering?
I assign a .1% suffering a 0.000000000000000001% probability. ;-)
Seriously, it does seem highly unlikely to me that earth worms or crickets suffer in any meaningful sense of the term, but perhaps I am just behind the curve of the current data on the subject.
I like your comment elsewhere where you point out some of the inconsistencies in this kind of utilitarian thinking. Surely, for all the resources we use to maintain human civilization, we could create large numbers of insects that are slightly happy adding up to more happiness than a few billion humans. I'm still going to reject that option even if we're able to prove it's true at some point.
I think the problem with the extremely small probabilities is to have confidence of those, you have to have a lot of evidence. But I see you have worked around my objection ;).
Thanks. I reject it too. The good thing is that if you're not utilitarian, you can do that. If you are, you have to bite the bullet I think. I actually think my probabilities are somewhat reasonable. So, I see this as a problem for utilitarians because it is counter-intuitive.
What if there's a 0.1% chance that my own personal suffering matters 10^80 times more than the suffering of any other being? (This seems reasonably plausible, actually, since as far as I know I'm the only one who is actually conscious.)
This is a very good point, I'm surprised that I've never seen it before.
Put your mind at ease. They don't have the capacity to suffer. If I'm going to be a mean bitch, they don't have the capacity the same way a foetus (it's just a blob of cells, remember!) hasn't the capacity, so it's no worse than an abortion in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. And we do millions of those yearly.
How certain are you that they don't suffer?
The point about the fetus is tangential. The objection that a fetus is being murdered is about 10,000 times more important than the objection that they feel pain during the procedure. You could justify banning abortion on utility grounds if life is actually worth living and a net increase in utility. Most Christians or Pro-Lifers want to ban it because they view it as an unethical killing instead of some utility maximizing argument. I recently made a video in which I argued it is possible that under a utilitarian framework and if life is worth living, governments should ban abortion and contraception and have as many pro-natalist policies as possible.
I believe my answer would be "Very. Fucking. Sure."
And even if insects can be said to suffer, which I doubt, I do not care. What is the vegan equivalent of "get your rosaries off my ovaries?" when it comes to "don't impose your moral/religious beliefs on my behaviour"?
Basically my point is that even if you're 99.999% sure, then bug suffering could still be a bigger problem because of that 0.001% chance you're wrong because of how many bugs there are. It's a good point against utilitarianism which I don't believe in.
If you're anti-abortion, then you should recognize that argument as bad.
But insects are animals
We just need to go to fungi next, then plants, then rocks and we've done a complete reductio ad absurdum of veganism
The whole point is to care about sentient experiences. Plants and fungi are extremely unlikely to be sentient, they don't have anything resembling a nervous system. Rocks are definitely not sentient at all. That reductio ad absurdum doesn't work, or it would be a reductio ad absurdum of a straw man veganism that isn't worth considering in the first place.
The problem is the argument is probabilistic. ( See the 99%chance of android thing). Plants/fungi/ rocks probably aren't sentient. But how probable. One in a thousand? A million? A billion? Given the large number of plants/fungi/rocks in the world even if the number is really small, by the same logic as the insect suffering you end up having to treat them as of extreme moral importance
Yes, that's a good point. I haven't fully figured out how to deal with extremely small probabilities vs extremely large numbers yet. But There is a huge difference with insects: the probabilities are not very tiny. It's not a weird edge case like that. It's not clear what kind of experiences insects have, but they have a nervous system and show at least some signs of suffering: https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/blog/2019/6/7/invertebrate-sentience-a-useful-empirical-resource
I swear to God, every year makes Chesterton in the opening to his novel "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" less of a humour writer and more of a prophet (ironic, since he's talking about the game of 'cheat the prophet'):
"Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocahontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, alter the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble."
If we are to worry about the moral suffering of insects, then we may as well all kill ourselves now. Even veganism won't save you, since in order to grow crops on a commercial scale to feed everyone, you are going to use insecticides. Oh noes, the trillions of potential insect lives snuffed out! The untold suffering and misery!
Except that insects don't have complex enough brains to suffer. They experience pain, sure, the way you experience pain if you put your hand on a hot stove: that flash of physical sensation. But they don't have memories or consciousness or processing power to think, they react on instinct. I wouldn't go round pulling the wings off flies, but neither do I believe there are wingless flies out there *suffering* because they *understand* their winglessness.
I'm sure there were enough proto-hippies around Chesterton for him to know what they are like and see them in action, so it's not so much prophecy as simply astute observation. I'm reading the memoirs of Freda Utley and the world of British liberal intelligentsia of 100 years ago she describes lovingly as having grown up in is instantly recognizable. Veganism, too, is not by any means a recent invention. As a funny example, it is mentioned in one of Rex Stout's detective stories, published in 1946.
George Bernard Shaw was a vegetarian, so the practice/belief/ethical system was definitely around and Chesterton, mixing in artistic circles, would have been well aware of it. But that we would get to the point of worrying over "does the mealworm suffer?" is not something I think anyone back then would have imagined.
While I'm at it, have a quote from the 1908 novel "The Man Who Was Thursday":
"Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism."
Or the meeting of the anarchist council:
“Comrades,” he began, as sharp as a pistol-shot, “our meeting tonight is important, though it need not be long. This branch has always had the honour of electing Thursdays for the Central European Council. We have elected many and splendid Thursdays. We all lament the sad decease of the heroic worker who occupied the post until last week. As you know, his services to the cause were considerable. He organised the great dynamite coup of Brighton which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow. Cruelty, or anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always. But it is not to acclaim his virtues that we are met, but for a harder task. It is difficult properly to praise his qualities, but it is more difficult to replace them. Upon you, comrades, it devolves this evening to choose out of the company present the man who shall be Thursday. If any comrade suggests a name I will put it to the vote. If no comrade suggests a name, I can only tell myself that that dear dynamiter, who is gone from us, has carried into the unknowable abysses the last secret of his virtue and his innocence.”
Seneca, too, was a vegetarian, and Theophrastus said that eating animals is wrong. As a general point, in my opinion it's a bad prior to think that our modern ethical concerns, such as those of EAs, are particularly novel - as big a mistake as those 60s teenagers' who sincerely believed they had invented sex. Even the preoccupations with AI safety probably have parallels in the arguments among alchemists about homunculi and demon-summoning.
> But that we would get to the point of worrying over "does the mealworm suffer?" is not something I think anyone back then would have imagined.
I have no doubt someone would, and did. For one thing I'm certain they were aware of Jainism, as Eastern mysticism of all sorts, both preexisting and invented, such as whatever Madame Blavatsky was peddling, was floating all around the intellectual-adjacent circles of that time.
We don't have to wonder about this. There's a chart we can consult:
https://gocomics.typepad.com/tomthedancingbugblog/2014/11/human-morality-made-simple.html
Here's a question I've never seen satisfactorily answered from the utilitarian perspective. Assuming a worm, chicken, cow, or whatever creature you're farming lives a relatively pleasant life without much suffering and dies more or less painlessly (this includes no horrible anticipation of imminent death for the creatures smart enough to understand they're about to be slaughtered), so that its life is net positive in terms of happiness. It seems that many people hold that A) it's still immoral to farm animals for food under those assumptions and B) it's moral to breed animals to live to their natural lifespan, e.g. as pets. To me, for a non-conscious animal which doesn't know whether it has a day or a year to live, A & B are in contradiction. You can either believe that breeding anything that's eventually doomed to die is wrong, or that it's OK as long as the creature had some good time, but not both. Can someone explain how does it make sense?
I know there's some utilitarians who hold A & ~B and I totally see where they are coming from. I also can understand someone arguing that A is not practically attainable anytime soon so we're best off opposing to any farming (although worms seem to change this quite a bit, I imagine it's easy to farm worms without making them suffer). My question is specifically about believing A & B simultaneously, which seems to be a quite common position.
For people who believe both A & B, you might be able to point to the moral assumption where we don't allow humans to be cannibals even if the person-to-be-eaten consents.
Personally though (and most this seems to be the position of most utilitarians who care about animal suffering) I'm totally okay with eating meat that comes from humanely raised and slaughtered animals. The problem is not raising an animal to be eaten but in the suffering that the animal goes through in the process. However, it's hard to get humanely raised meat, especially if you live in a city and/or don't have a large freezer. In addition, if you avoid eating meat, you can be confident that there isn't animal suffering involved, while if you eat meat you have to put a decent amount of time and effort into ensuring that you're getting humanely raised meat.
I'd hold B & ~A. The evil of factory farming seems to be mostly in the suffering, to a degree where if I was reincarnated as a factory-farm chicken, I'd try my best to suicide out. "Relatively pleasant life without much suffering" is doing a huge amount of work as a starting assumption. Accordingly, the bug argument is extremely sensitive to the question of whether they actually suffer in factory farm conditions.
I think insect suffering ends up being a great argument as to why 'reducing suffering' isn't really a long-term great moral compass, just on its own. It seems somewhat related to someting like pascal's wager.
You have this question ("do insects feel pain") and the answer hinges on whether eating insects is morally awesome (you get all these calories and protein without the suffering!) or morally debauched (you are causing so much suffering!). In the absence of a real clear answer as to whether insects feel pain, you can't answer a question like "do factory farmed insects live better lives than insects in the wild?" - which seems like a pretty important question! For a lot of animals, if humans aren't eating them, we'd probably crowd them out of space and then run them into extinction.
If 'removing suffering' is the goal, then killing an animal species entirely ends up preventing infinite future suffering for that species - isn't' that net good? Doesn't 'remove all tiny species from the face of the earth, to prevent their suffering" seem like it's a bad idea? The only way to allow it to be bad is to grant that goodness is not just about suffering. Sure, it plays a role, and i think we should probably expect "reduces total suffering" to be a likely expected side effect of a good moral system, but what about this:
We go back in time 10,000 years, and make an exact copy of the earth, in the same orbit, 365 degrees out of phase. In the present, this planet now exists with a _totally different _history, which means a totally different set of cultures, languages, economic and political systems - and similar geography, except for all the things that humans have changed and the randomness inherent to weather and geological processes.
You've now doubled the amount of suffering! But you've also doubled the amount of bowling leagues, recipes for cookies, and types of cusine, and scifi books, and kabbalistic interpretations of those scif books. You've also given humanity a MUCH better tool for understanding human nature, civilizations, language etc. What's all that "other stuff," and how do you morally weight it against doubling the net amount of suffering int he world?
This wholistic approach seems like the only reasonable way to approach this question. If factory farmed bugs have _better_ quality of life than bugs in the wild, and we still think it's bad because it would 'add suffering', isn't the morally correct thing to do carpet bomb the world with insecticides to end all insect suffering?
As a solution to this conundunrm, I maintain that the correct moral system is "maximize the number of possible future estates accessible to the system", as defined here:
https://www.insidescience.org/content/physicist-proposes-new-way-think-about-intelligence/987
Here is a long argument for why i think this approach captures what humans mean w hen we talk about moral truth:
https://apxhard.com/2020/11/27/a-moral-system-from-scientific-rationality/
Oops, i meant 180 degrees out of phase. Hopefully that makes it a little clearer :)
I've wondered about this before - using 'freedom' in some sense as the utility function. I'm not sure if it leads to a repugnant conclusion of its own, but it certainly seems preferable to defining utility as a lack of (suffering).
I think maximising freedom would have equally bizarre and unpleasant consequences as trying to maximise suffering or minimise pleasure.
Why not just accept that humans value multiple things that cannot just be reduced to each other?
Oops, got pleasure and suffering the wrong way around. Maximising pleasure and minimising suffering would obviously be preferable, but still has some weird conclusions, like prophylactic antidepressant use to ensure nobody ever gets sad.
Well, mostly because those values sometimes have to be traded off against one another.
But seriously, I think there's sort of two answers. One is that there's a difference between unpleasant conclusions (i.e. omnicide) that are outright evil, versus bizarre conclusions (i.e. insects having moral value) that may be correct in some ways and reflect present injustice. (What people from 500 years ago would think of modern morality and all that.) The other answer is that even if utility is too complex to actually describe via a function that can be expressed, it can still be valuable to try, either as approximation or as experiment.
Really, my point was that minimizing X, for any X, means preferring nonexistence, and while you can hack around it, it's still IMO fundamentally the wrong direction to go.
What if there's a 99% chance they're an android? Still seems like you should avoid the torture-murder, for the 1% chance they're human. 99.9999999% chance? At this point I think it becomes less pressing, but it's still a little bad to hurt them. <-- this seems like an argument against abortion as well
It's not a new argument, but yes, this is why there is disagreement about what stage of development it is acceptable to abort a fetus, given the chance that it can already feel pain. However, unlike in the example of the android, the moral calculus of abortion also has to include the suffering and risk of death of the mother. It's not just the fetus's life that matters.
Your argument about the bugs and the “99% chance” is also an argument against abortion.
Well done. That observation is lost on all these “altruists” with their moral alchemy.
It certainly is, and it would be a little disheartening if anyone who was passionate about avoiding the suffering of chickens (or bugs) were indifferent to the 800,000 or so human lives snuffed out in utero each and every year. One hopes that that is not the case.
Sure. But in the abortion case you are weighing it against the certain suffering of the mother
If you don't kill cows/chickens/bugs/plants in the millions, billions, and trillions, humans will experience the "certain suffering" of starvation.
From a quick google, there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 bugs alive at any given time. The number of bugs one human interacts with or could potentially interact with is huge. If bugs have even a very small fraction the capacity for suffering or pleasure that humans have, then it makes me think that utilitarianism's most primary concern by orders of magnitude is how are we going to treat bugs. Perhaps rather than dedicating 50% of our income to saving starving children in the developing world, we should be using 50% of our income to create a farm with hundreds of trillions of happy ants.
With these premises, this seems reasonable. But ultimately, it seems absurd. Another reason I suppose I'm not a utilitarian. I'll have to write a blog post investigating this idea. Thank you for this interesting post.
>farm with hundreds of trillions of happy ants
I liked it more when it was rats on heroin.
Maybe if we could find the equivalent of rat-heroin, we should be dedicating all our time to feeding it to ants.
What are the odds it's just heroin?
Genocide: "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." You refer to "the Xinjiang genocide." Do you have any evidence that there is such a genocide?
Wikipedia on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide calls it that, in accordance with how the US and a few others describe it.
A slow moving genocide but yea, still a genocide.
All genocides aren’t as “efficient” as the Germans or the Hutu’s.
Genocide in international law doesn't just refer to holocaust style mass murder but the destruction of a culture, mass sterilization, etc
https://xinjiang.sppga.ubc.ca Xinjiang Documentation project
Xinjiang victims project https://shahit.biz/eng/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxtHBfWaWYQPNgfvdvSDn4A
The mass repression and omnipresent police state probably does not aim to eradicate Uyghur culture in toto - just cut out the separatism and terrorists by massive racial profiling of millions. They want the Uyghur culture for tourism and gift shops and cultural diversity and crap. It's not quite supposed to be "kill the Indian, save the man", but in practice, it might kill the Indian as collateral damage.
https://palladiummag.com/2018/11/29/a-week-in-xinjiangs-absolute-surveillance-state/
https://supchina.com/2020/11/04/han-chinese-views-from-xinjiang/
Unfortunately for the Chinese, the mass repression stick and breakneck economic development plan carrot intended to stabilize and develop Xinjiang may indeed be destroying Uyghur culture as collateral damage in many ways, which does technically qualify as cultural genocide, even if the intent may not be totally there.
The Chinese poured billions and billions of dollars into Xinjiang, building a cost-ineffective high speed rail line to Urumqi and thousands of km of highway and huge wind power projects to bring prosperity to the Uyghurs (and as a side effect, ecological devastation, sweatshop labor, and migrant Han managers). They were very proud of the effort, thought they basically subsidized Uyghur prosperity, and were very miffed by accusations of genocide even while America seemed to be content to let its flyover states rot. Hence their vitriolic riptose to the US. A yellow man's burden philosophy, in part.
Well "kill the indian, save the man" also wanted bits of Indian culture for tourism and gift shops etc.
Well, they have entire banks of restaurants and entire Old Cities and beautifully preserved mosques and government-prescribed Islam, so the scale of the tourism is much larger than what you see on Indian reservations.
Granted, the Uyghur have a much more built-up culture than the Indians did, are apparently more to lose and more to preserve.
The articles above make it pretty clear that the Chinese government wants to turn the Uyghurs into loyal, happy, Muslim Uyghur-Chinese citizens, not second-class citizens or newly-minted Han-Chinese. In their zest to break down the racial and economic barriers between Han and Uyghurs to promote racial harmony, I suspect they probably threw the baby out with the bathwater and went overboard.
Although I would agree that the high modernist/police state/Chinese Socialist planners wouldn't have prioritized (or even considered) preserving Uyghur culture or freedom in their social policy planning, and Uyghur traditional culture would have been sacrificed for other metrics. They would have gone about this sort of thing very ham-fistedly. I doubt that they would have aimed to actively erase Uyghur culture, but they definitely don't really care if large chunks of the culture get splotted out in the name of development and stability.
I
Tangential to a single line in this essay: I would love to get your take on what's happening in Xinjiang. It's hard to find sources that I can trust to fairly report on the situation. The government itself obviously has its own biases, but so do the people and orgs that are reporting what's happening as genocide.
For example, one bit of evidence offered in support of a genocide in progress are changes in birth rates. All the reporting on this appears to be sourced to this report by ASPI: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/family-deplanning-birthrates-xinjiang.
They look at changes in birth rates and show that birthrates in Uyghur areas have declined extremely dramatically.
They do acknowledge that policies were recently changed to no longer allow minorities a greater number of children, and that the government stepped up its enforcement of those policies. However, I can't find any comparison to the baseline. If Uyghurs were an especially fertile outlier and the government began to enforce its policies uniformly then a sharp drop would be expected.
So, are we seeing an expected disparate impact of a uniformly applied policy, or are we seeing genocide?
I was going to comment that this was discussed on the subreddit, but then I noticed it looks like you were one of those commenters. For anyone else who may be interested:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/mmygdo/how_can_we_figure_out_what_is_going_on_in_xinjiang/
Note that this is at the same time as China is promoting pro fertility policies for the Han majority in the rest of the country.
A two-child (now three-child) policy is hardly pro-fertility; and the new three-child policy applies equally to Uyghurs.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/30/chinese-communist-party-han-baby-boom-sterilization-ethnic-minorities/
While the word "sterilisation" is in the title, nothing in the text says anything about actual sterilisation going on.
I'm not particularly sure which of these is actually true, but something smells rotten here.
On paper, sure. In reality, a substantial fraction (~20%, probably more once you discount children and the elderly) of Uyghur men are detained indefinitely in the internment camps, and a couple that can't copulate is going to produce exactly zero children regardless of how many they're legally allowed.
https://xinjiang.sppga.ubc.ca Xinjiang Documentation project
Xinjiang victims project https://shahit.biz/eng/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxtHBfWaWYQPNgfvdvSDn4A
https://palladiummag.com/2018/11/29/a-week-in-xinjiangs-absolute-surveillance-state/
https://supchina.com/2020/11/04/han-chinese-views-from-xinjiang/
These are the best sources I have found on this.
Uyghurs, like all rurals, were very fertile, with an average of four kids, before the government cracked down and started enforcing the one-child policy.
There's a lot of systemic racism in Xinjiang, and the police state is basically racist, targeting Uyghurs differently based on metrics like "attends illegal islamic/political gathering" and "violates one-child policy". The aim is to instill loyalty and break the economic, social, and racial barriers between Han and Uyghur, so Uyghurs can be normal muslim Uyghur-Chinese citizens. In practice, the breakneck development and police state is probably screwing over a lot of local culture as collateral damage.
They have some pretty weird social policies - they've got a make-a-friend policy that assigns every Uyghur a Han Chinese "sister"/"friend", basically so the Han person, who is systemically priviledged and has more guanxi, can refer the Uyghur to friends and relatives for jobs and help them navigate the system. Really intrusive, really annoying, really heavy-handed, but innovative. Very CCPish.
Considering it's the connections between neurons that promote intelligence [citation needed], using (neurons)^2 is perhaps a more useful metric. Also because I would equate killing a cow closer to 1M flies than 1k.
Yeah, this. Even if we judge moral weight as a function of number of neurons (which IMO is as good a first approximation as is likely to be found) it's not at all obvious whether it should be linear or steeper, or how much steeper. A pig has <checks Wikpediai> 20 thousand flies worth of neurons total, 200 thousand flies cortical - is it worth 20 kiloflies, or 400 megaflies, or even more?
That said, IMO it should clearly not be shallower. The neurons being part of a larger brain adds possible states much faster than linearly. I feel like some of the comments use a version of PETA-style "all animals are exactly equal in moral value", and that inevitably gives bizarre utility functions.
One way to measure intelligence is in terms of the number of possible "representational states" that a system has: the more different things the system can think about, the more intelligent it is. If we treat neurons as either on or off (or, firing fast or slow, or whatever) and let N be the number of neurons, the number of representational states is N! or approximately (N/e)^N . Assuming a cow has 1000 times the neurons of a fly, this gives a cow something like (1000/e)^1000 times the intelligence of a fly. That's a 1 followed by 2000 zeros.
The entropy of neurons is way, way lower than that. One way to think about it is that the brain operates well below the Curie point for a network of coupled degrees of freedom.
Assume insects can feel pain. Do farmed insects experience more pain than farmed animals? Meaning, are the methods equally painful? Or is it easier and more cost efficient to make a 'happy mealworm' than make a 'happy cow'?
Soylent Green is People!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UPDUpjkHg0
When you peel my cheeseburger out of my cold dead fingers, Vegan Boy.
Can moral carnivores (humans or otherwise) exist in this morality construct?
Extending this argument to nonhuman carnivores, how is life on this planet supposed to work without predators and prey?
This whole thing feels like Marxist class warfare extrapolated to every living creature on planet earth.
IMO the biggest issue here which was more or less skipped is the suffering angle. Factory farmed animals definitely suffer their entire lives. Free range grass fed etc. expensive animals do get slaughtered eventually but they don't suffer as much as factory farmed animals. If factory farmed bugs go through a normal bug lifespan until slaughter they are probably closer to column b.
In fact, given that wild animals do have to deal with scarce food and predators, and end up dying all the same, I'm no longer sure reasonably well-treated farm animals are even suffering more than their wild brethren at all.
right, we shouldn't just ask *can* insects feel pain, but *will* they feel pain
<quote>Seems obvious the answer is no, at least not until you're sure they're the android.</quote>
I mean, I think the answer is still no, it is not morally acceptable to pretend to torture. (think of what the evil characters in WestWorld do).
But the entire calculation is leaving out what the point or benefit of the torture is. If it is for 'fun', then yes 99.9% is not enough certainty, but if it is to prevent an explosion, than probably it is.
I was thinking about how this brain/size ratio applies to eating fish, and realized that it's really only when it comes to sea life that humans consume other carnivores. Tuna seems like a "morally cheap" animal to eat, because it's so big, until you consider that the tuna was fed fish, and probably some of those fish also ate fish.
If you're going to eat an apex predator like the tuna, does the moral calculus sum over the entire chain of predation?
I think it depends on whether those animals in the chain would have been eaten either way (which is the case for wild-caught fish) or whether they're being grown for the sake of being eaten (theoretically farmed fish, although I would guess that farmed fish are not fed carnivorous fish, for cost reasons).
Or does it go the other way? Do you get to subtract the fish-lives that would have been eaten in the future had we not killed the tuna?(Assuming it is wild caught) And does this suggest the killing of predators as a moral good?
Brian Tomasik talks about this: https://reducing-suffering.org/trophic-cascades-caused-fishing/ and he seems very uncertain.
From the strictly utilitarian point of view, and assuming that you believe that non-human life has moral value, the absolute best thing you can do is walk out into some unspoiled wilderness and die on the spot. This way, not only do you reduce all the animal and plant deaths that you would've caused in your life to zero; not only do you eliminate your carbon emissions; but you also provide nourishment to local flora and fauna. It's a win/win !
If you believe bringing your own life to an end is morally obligatory or virtuous, then it could be the case that ending as many lives as you could would be even better, an obviously very very repugnant conclusion which I reject.
As a good utilitarian you could err on the safe side by only murdering depressed people.
And the fat people you throw in front on runaway trollies.
If wild animals have moral worth, they will suffer greatly in our absence, and humans can surely find ways to reduce their suffering level beyond what is "natural". Killing humans is the kind of non-solution that people who don't understand utilitarianism come up with to carelessly justify their rejection of utilitarianism. In fact, even if we knew for certain that animals have significant moral worth, it might well be that humans have much more, so that the opposite thing, euthanizing animals to increase human habitats, is a much better "solution".
I reject both "solutions" because they fail to respect our uncertainty on these matters. It took ~13.8 billion years for humans to arrive in the universe; we can afford to wait a little while for modern philosophy and science to hash out these matters before taking rash actions that can't be undone.
Meat consumption is rising globally as poverty decreases. Convincing people not to do a thing that is pleasurable for moral reasons is extremely hard. But economic incentives work on everyone, so if cultured meat becomes equivalent to meat in terms of taste and nutrition but is much cheaper, people will eat it instead of factory farmed meat.Or at least enough people will, by a first order approximation. Bonus: we'll get to eat exotic cultured meats like giant tortoise (most delicious meat ever, according to Darwin).
Weird implication: investing/donating X dollars toward cultured meat development brings its adoption closer by Y seconds, which prevents the equivalent in suffering to the factory farmed life of Z cows. Calculating the numbers is probably impossible without hindsight, but there must logically be some value X that at current marginal values is equal to 1 cow. Steak costs more per calorie than rice and beans. If X is low enough, which seems reasonable given how enormous an improvement switching to cultured meat will be, then the morally worst part of eating a steak is actually the opportunity cost of not funding cultured meat with the money you could have saved by eating rice and beans instead.
> But economic incentives work on everyone, so if cultured meat becomes equivalent to meat in terms of taste and nutrition but is much cheaper, people will eat it instead of factory farmed meat
Strongly disagree. I see this point made on the internet frequently but it's completely foreign to my way of thinking, and I suspect most other people's too.
The idea of eating "cultured" meat instead of actual animal parts is disgusting to me, and I will never do it.
In John Varley's "Ophiuchi Hotline" his protagonist (Lilo something or other) becomes rich by genetically engineering a fruit to have a certain wildly successful meaty taste, which turns out to be the taste of human flesh.
Have you tried figuring out the source of such disgust? Can you explain why does it fell disgusting for you? I'm genuinely interested as it seems completely counterintuitive to me.
Are you disgusted by pr0n that simulates rape? After all, nobody was *actually* raped...
I don't think I am. Though eventually I have voluntary created a disgust-like reaction on an intellectual level regarding such content in order not to condition myself to it.
I figured out it is a reasonable thing to do when I understood why so many people are disgusted by it. After all lots of people were actually raped and traumatized and that's a very sensitive and sad topic.
So I'm interested whether there is some reasonable seed in the disgust towards lab meat. Currently I'm leaning towards the opposite idea that as soon as lab meat is available it will be much better than non-lab meat so it'd reasonable to feel something disgust-like towards eating animal parts.
I think the way it works is that people think if behavior X is repulsive, then enjoying the *simulation* of X is disgusting. They will usually surround this with a load of rationalization, e.g. that if you enjoy rape-fantasy pr0n then that will increase the probability that you actually commit real rape, but this strikes me as a priori dubious -- I would guess the availability of simulated perversion *reduces* the amount of actual perversion, because people at a certain margin are captured by the safer alternative. So I think the underlying reason is just disgust at the existence of the taste per se.
So if you thought that eating animals was disgusting, on some basic level, then you might go on to think that enjoying the simulation of eating animals was also disgusting -- because it's the taste for flesh which is per se disgusting.
That said, my impression on rereading what Melvin wrote is that he is saying he is disgusted by eating *simulated* meat but not *real* meat, and for that I don't have a good understanding -- unless it is for the actions of the people who are creating the simulcrum, e.g. the technicians in the lab handing each other samples "does this taste like cow flesh to you? No? Should I add a little more blood flavor #6, maybe?"
I do think it's possible that most people's disgust will go away once it becomes so common and socially accepted that people don't think about the details. Making cheese is pretty weird for example. I don't think about the details of how any of my food is made except for factory farming, because of the moral issues.
But even if, say, only 50% of people ever accept cultured meat, the broader point still holds. It just means X is ~doubled.
Eh, if it's cheap enough and I can't tell the difference, I'll take it. (I'm used to cantonese fare - freshly killed day-old chicken and live swimming fish straight from the aquarium, still moving around when you chop the head off, so it had better be good!)
Mosquitoes do not get malaria from the parasites that they carry; tick immune systems protect them from Lyme disease; I haven't found a handy link responding to the flea/plague situation, but hosts that can be killed by pathogens don't get selected as vectors; please don't make silly jokes that make your readers dumber about health when you have a medical degree.
"In contrast to the human host, the mosquito vector does not suffer from the presence of the parasites."
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/index.html
"The tick IMD network protects against colonization by three distinct bacteria, that is the Lyme disease spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi and the rickettsial agents Anaplasma phagocytophilum and A. marginale."
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14401
On the other hand, both rats and fleas die of Y. pestis infection.
This post has made me think a whole lot. Thanks so much Scott.
I wrote a blog post to summarize my most important thought on the matter (https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/insect-suffering-as-the-biggest-utility):
---
Bugs are the biggest utility monster even if we aren’t sure they feel pain or how much.
We do not even have to be sure that bugs suffer. We can say that bug suffering is unlikely and that there is only a .01 chance. We could also say that a bug's suffering only amounts to .01 of a human's suffering. Of course, there would actually be a probability distribution over potential suffering but consider this simplified version. Multiply these and arrive at .0001. Multiply this number by 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (number of bugs) and arrive at 1,000,000,000,000,000 suffering capacity. If I increase the number of humans on earth for the sake of simplicity to 10 billion, then the “problem of bug suffering” is 100,000 times more important than the problem of human suffering. Raw numbers is only a very rough guide for a measure of moral importance. We would have to evaluate average life quality and other factors as well including how many bugs we could affect the lives of. I have to be a bit reductionist for clarity’s sake.
To not reach the conclusion that bug suffering is more important by an order of magnitude you must use really small probabilities and really small levels of suffering. That seems possible. However, even if you make bug suffering really small and the chance of it extremely small, you run the risk of being wrong. A true utilitarian would dedicate a significant amount of time to being absolutely sure of this question. Slight errors would mean unimaginable variation in levels of suffering. The difference between bug suffering being .1% or .2% of human suffering could be equivalent to many genocides worth of suffering or the suffering generated from all of slavery throughout human history because there are so many bugs in the world. Perhaps the bug-suffering question is the most important moral question of them all.
If that is the case, then utilitarians should dedicate a great deal of effort to caring for bugs it would seem. We can’t care for all of them but an individual could reasonably affect the lives of trillions. I’m not sure how this would be done. Perhaps, each person could spend their time caring for 10 acres worth of ants and making sure their experience is pleasurable in some way. The “how” is not quite as important as the fact that it should be done.
I reject this conclusion because I am not a utilitarian. However, I think a utilitarian has to find this at least somewhat convincing. I doubt anyone will change their behavior whatsoever to help bugs more even if they are convinced of this argument.
You also have to multiply this by how easily you can actually impact the suffering. We have reasonable interventions for reducing human suffering. Any ideas on how to effectively reduce insect suffering?
good point. Also, don't forget positive utility bugs also likely have.
"Any ideas on how to effectively reduce insect suffering?"
These? https://c8.alamy.com/comp/T8NMFD/paris-france-april-27-2019-shelves-with-a-variety-of-herbicides-in-a-french-hypermarket-roundup-is-a-brand-name-of-an-herbicide-containing-glyp-T8NMFD.jpg
After all, dead insects don't suffer!
OK. Fine. Any ideas on ways to effectively reduce *net* insect suffering (i.e. suffering minus enjoyment)?
"Multiply this number by 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (number of bugs) and arrive at 1,000,000,000,000,000 suffering capacity. If I increase the number of humans on earth for the sake of simplicity to 10 billion, then the “problem of bug suffering” is 100,000 times more important than the problem of human suffering."
No. If there were a skillion gazillion bugs alive on earth and only one human, the human's worth outweighs them all.
This entire discussion is very interesting, because there are a whole range of opinions on the entire spectrum from "are you freakin' nuts?" to "I make Jains look like the Golden Horde on a particularly virulent tear" being expressed, and it's fascinating to get a peep into a completely different way of thinking. So that's good!
Your argument is just saying no. Why is a human life worth more than a gazillion bugs?
Because bugs can't write Mozart's Die Zauberfloete. Not even a gazillion of them, working together.
can you write Die Zauberfloete?
No, I'm not a musician. But in my field I can do things that are at least comparable, in terms of creativity and beauty. And far beyond what any number of bugs could do.
Also, now that I think of it, I can appreciate Die Zauberfloete, and that is important, because it gives meaning to Mozart's work. Bugs not only can't author Mozart, they can't appreciate it.
Since most bugs aren't on our radar as anything other than indistinct blobs packed in dark un-hygienic indoor spaces its tempting to think they might do better in factory farm settings, but I've kept several invertebrates as pets and most have very complex nutritional/environmental/even social needs. Very few species could just be packed into big crates by the thousands and have anything close to a natural "good" life. It beggars belief that they don't experience suffering analogous to pain when their needs aren't being met. It also depends a great deal on what specific species we're talking about. We tend to have lots of experience with hardy pest species like the American cockroach which can survive very well in what are very inhospitable conditions for most non microbial living things (between floorboards, behind drywall, congregated by the thousands in darkness and filth). Not even most *cockroach* species can survive like that. Many roaches are relatively solitary woodland creatures. The adaptable pests are the outliers that we happen to be made aware of more frequently. (My favorite WTF factoid about surprisingly complex "bugs" is that some leech species are actually dedicated parents that protect and tend to their young.) This may seem obvious but I only bring it up because a problem might be that the bugs that suffer the least in factory farm settings are those we're somewhat justified to be grossed out by because they're most similar to potentially disease spreading household pests.
There's nothing inherently more "disgusting" about eating bugs than eating lobsters (in fact modern cladistics place insects as a subgroup of crustaceans!) But the double standard about eating them probably stems from the fact lobsters don't scuttle around our toilets or moldy basements.
I'd go so far as to argue "insects" is a useless category to talk about with regard to such a varied clade of living things, some might be far more intelligent and sensitive than others. Octopi are mollusks along with snails and clams but we all know how intelligent the cephalopod branch of that family tree is compared to everything else. I'd be absolutely horrified at the prospect of factory farmed octopi or squid, not so much with clams.
Seconding the part about how it's necessary to use a finer grain when talking about the moral worth of such a diverse group of animals
> There's nothing inherently more "disgusting" about eating bugs than eating lobsters
Disagree; human disgust is a carefully evolved emotion, and one of the things that we've evolved to be disgusted by is eating insects. It is "inherently disgusting" in the sense that humans are inherently disgusted by it.
Is that true? Many cultures eat bugs. Do you believe they have to overcome their inherent reaction of disgust every time they do, or is disgust a culturally acquired response? If you don't think so, do you believe that Muslims have evolved to be disgusted by pork in a way that Christians haven't?
Thank you for your input, there being a lot of variation in an insect's nutritional/environmental/social needs is good to know. But, just because /most/ species couldn't be packed in dark crates by the thousands and happily thrive, does that mean we shouldn't factory farm the ones that /can/? Getting our protein from those would still be a huge net reduction in suffering compared to the equivalent in factory farmed chickens.
Insects indeed have an almost unimaginable amount of variation between them, but I have to wonder, how much of that translates to their capacity for suffering, or indeed, happiness? I would think that the difference between the bug with the simplest brain and the bug with the most complex brain is only a small fraction of the difference between a cephalopod and a clam.
I agree and I'd hope it'd be possible, but I can imagine a few problems:
1.) the race to the bottom as mentioned in one of Scott's links. Say there's a bug that can be perfectly content packed in a crate with up to 5000 other bugs. Eventually some companies are going to try to extract as much value as possible by packing them with 50000 bugs, then maybe 60000 other bugs. Then maybe cutting corners on providing enough water so the bugs are always just on the cusp of dehydrating but still alive etc etc. Which eventually would defeat the whole purpose of minimizing their suffering. This already happens with hermit crabs, which are collected and shipped in horrible conditions for the pet market even though its not that hard to keep them healthy, the bottom line always wins.
2.) the ability to be "happy" when "packed in a crate" may be something of an exaggeration, I feel like there'd have to be an example but I can't really think of any insects that would truly thrive in those sorts of conditions (maybe maggots or other larvae that can naturally live densely packed in some kind of food medium?) Crickets are farmed in pretty crowded tanks but I don't think they'd survive well if they were packed too tightly (they're known to start gnawing on each other) and I'm not sure those conditions are necessarily "natural" or "happy" for them, just that they survive.
3.) As I alluded to above I suspect people are going to favor more exotic species that are further from pest species such as roaches, which may be a problem because pest species would theoretically be the most suited to live in factory farm conditions unlike something like a ghost mantis, which is a genuinely elegant and exquisite-looking solitary insect which already could pass for some kind of alien garnish. At the very least nobody is going to have a favorite food bug based on its tolerance for farming.
The closest thing to a relatively intelligent "bug" I've ever heard of are jumping spiders but I don't know if it compares to anything like a cephalopod's relative complexity. There's research that suggests they're abnormally good at planning for an arachnid and If you watch videos on youtube they can seem unnervingly curious and responsive to humans, they'll even pounce on laser pointers like cats and some do adorable little peacock dances with frill displays to attract mates not unlike birds. Some of this might just be an illusion caused by their weirdly anthropomorphic mustachioed faces and mammal-like furriness.
I really love insects but on a guttural level I'd still rather see them farmed if it spares creatures which we know to be highly intelligent and sensitive. We just can't take for granted they don't suffer comparably just because they're so alien. The "ladder of life" hierarchal evolutionary thinking used to have us believing that more distantly related lifeforms were not only less intelligent, but degenerate and suboptimal on a deep biological level. As in a fish isn't just less smart than a mammal but its very physiology is slower, simpler, more primitive. It's why we used to think dinosaurs must have been sluggish, dumb, and barely able to stand under their own volition without being buoyed in a swamp. We now know none of this is true and all living things evolve and optimize for their environments *in parallel.* A fish or a bug isn't less complex or sophisticated than a human they're just less smart just like we're less adept at flight or deep diving. It wouldn't be all that surprising if we find out they're inner lives are no less complex.
You're right that a race to the bottom is still a problem, but I wonder if it's still not better than the equivalent situation with more intelligent animals. Cognitively speaking, a cow likely experiences pain and stress on far more levels than an insect. I'm prepared to believe that insects feel something equivalent to pain and have some moral value, but you can only dedicate so many of your neurons to experiencing pain, and insects just don't have that many of them. The worst possible pain for even the most intelligent insect is bound to be orders of magnitude to the worst possible pain for a cow.
On your point 3, I don't see that ever happening short of a revolutionary cultural transformation that turns the entire world vegan. Ideally, we want insect protein to be cheap, appealing and available enough to supplant meat as the default protein source in the most popular low-to-middle class foods. If that happens, meat will still be enormously popular with the higher classes because it's inseperably ingrained into our culinary traditions. Having mealworm burgers being the default at the big fast food restaurants isn't going to make anyone want to eat ghost mantis; the 'exotic' foods of choice are still going to be regular meat.
On jumping spiders, they definitely /seem/ very intelligent but I think that's because we relate to them more easily due to being very visually responsive. Very few insects will turn to look at you when they see you move; the most they'll do is flee. With jumping spiders, we feel /seen/. I won't say that isn't a mark of intelligence, but since it's the kind we relate to, we easily recognize it. I'm sure other insects are at least as intelligent in ways we can't recognize.
Correction: "orders of magnitude *lower than* the worst possible pain for a cow".
"It beggars belief that they don't experience suffering analogous to pain when their needs aren't being met."
I want not to be aggressive here, but it beggars belief for me that you think a spider can "experience suffering analogous to pain" if it's not in a perfect spider habitat. If I pull the legs off a spider, or I burn a spider alive in a flame, it experiences pain, it suffers, that is cruelty on my part.
I keep a spider in a jar? That may or may not be cruel, but it's not pain. It's better to keep it in a terrarium or whatever the environment suitable for keeping a spider is, but it's not the same thing.
I don't let the spider have little spider friends? Now you're taking the piss, as we say.
I do think that this is more the human tendency to anthropomorphise animals. I see people proudly posting photos of their pet snakes in little hats, and I think that's worse for the animal than any natural environment. I don't know what invertebrates you keep or kept as pets, https://www.thesprucepets.com/insects-spiders-scorpions-and-millipedes-1236886 but plainly you had the interest to do so and equally plainly you felt differently about them than most people do about insects, and while I appreciate that the requirements for food, shelter, etc. are probably more complicated than people imagine (if you're keeping an exotic animal in what is not its native environment), I also think that you fell prey to the pet fallacy: 'I find these interesting -> I find them cute -> I think they're special -> I think they have Feelings and can reciprocate, in however limited or unique a way, my affection and interest".
I don't like creepy-crawlies in general. I try not to be cruel (if there's a spider in my way, I'll put it outside rather than kill it). But if it's me or the 'cute' spider, then sorry spider, you're getting swatted.
"I keep a spider in a jar? That may or may not be cruel, but it's not pain. It's better to keep it in a terrarium or whatever the environment suitable for keeping a spider is, but it's not the same thing."
Hard disagree. Like any complex multicellular organism spiders at bare minimum have needs for acceptable ranges of humidity, temperature, places to hide, light/darkness levels and cycles, places to build webs. Those are the needs we know they have. I'm not even talking about thornier issues regarding whether they have 'emotions' or whatever. Our bodies send all kinds of severely unpleasant, distressing, visceral alarm signals when our biological needs aren't being met. That's suffering and pain. There's no reason to suspect spiders are any different. (Many complex human emotional issues actually stem from biological deficiencies: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/opinion/brain-neuroscience-stress.html)
An empty jar meets almost none of these needs and the vast majority of spiders or insects won't survive very long in one. Ask any bug crazy kid: most specimens shrivel up and die fairly quickly in captivity (within a day or two if not sooner). Captivity stress is a well known problem with pet insects.
Most spiders, possibly a large majority, won't even eat in a jar if food is offered and they'll spend all their time trying to scurry up the sides toward a more favorable environment. That's another issue, the zeal with which living things fight to escape confining, insufficient conditions strongly hints they're highly distressed. (Related: I once volunteered at a major metropolitan zoo and believe it or not they actually let some large orb weaving African spiders live in a completely open display high above the visitors without any kind of containment because the thinking went that as long as the keepers provided for their needs --dropping enough food in their webs, correct temp, moisture -- they generally wouldn't even try to wander off. And it worked! at least some of the time, iirc one of them did end up wandering off at some point but who knows what ineffable spidery yearnings it was trying to satisfy. I swear this really happened.)
Now many bugs (like American Cockroaches) can be very, very, very hardy and non-picky about how they live, its what makes some of them such nasty pests and adversaries and some can even survive in very inhospitable conditions like some people can cling to life trapped on a freezing mountain for days on end, but it doesn't follow that they're not suffering if they're seriously deprived of optimal conditions to survive. The complication with bugs, and what can make them such good pets, is that thanks to basic physics it can be relatively easy to care for them compared to a large vertebrate even if they have sensitive care needs. It's a lot easier to keep a terrarium heated properly compared to a tiger cage. The spider in your jar might be easier to keep relatively happy simply because its already in a suitable environment, but if you don't provide it with some further necessities, which will depend on the species, size, etc, its going to suffer and languish on a biological level not dissimilarly from a person kept in an unventilated prison cell without natural light dark cycles, proper sanitation, optimum temperatures, etc, etc. Again I'm just talking purely in terms of physical, biological needs and constraints, not whether the spider is suffering emotionally and psychologically in any way comparable to a human being.
>most insects that exist suffer most of the time
Big if true. The global insect population is estimated at 10^19. If they're suffering most of the time, and they have 1/10^6 of the moral worth of a human (roughly the neuron number ratio), that's a lot of suffering (far outweighing 10^10 human lives worth living). It might make one reconsider whether it's worth it to donate a dollar to Stop Yog Sothoth. Or it might make one want to tile the galaxy with insect amusement parks. If those decisions are even close then something must be wrong with the metaethics. Perhaps 1/10^6 is overvaluing mere sensation relative to the higher pleasures, and the correct number is far lower. To make Stop Yog Sothoth worth it, maybe we need to square the neuron number ratio, plus hope a decent fraction of the planets with life are sufficiently advanced to have species with lives worth living.
This is where my mind went too. I laid it out here if you're interested: https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/insect-suffering-as-the-biggest-utility.
If you start running calculations, you're going to reach absurd conclusions. If you tie these facts to moral obligations, you're going to be obligated to do weird stuff. On the flip side, if most insect life is pleasant most the time, then we are living in a world of unimaginable happiness. However, it might be necessary to create as many bugs as possible if you have utility maximizing obligations.
N² for N neurons would be a better approximation, I think (though I have to note that overestimates synapse number in humans by several orders of magnitude) The connections matter more than the number themselves.
'. . .the righteous in Heaven dine on the flesh of Leviathan' -sounds like a big feed, but if the divorce of Saturn and Leviathan is annulled in Heaven, as Ibn Kaldun might say, that has an untimely closeness to cannibalism.
Try using the square of neuron number to estimate moral value!
Destroying a chicken brain's worth of neurons in a human brain is worse than killing a chicken, because those neurons are individually more valuable, because they encode more valuable thoughts, because those thoughts belong to a smarter being - a being with more neurons. Squaring the number takes account of that.
is a Bach 1000 second masterpiece equivalent to 500 2 second musical snippets? Is an architecturally inspiring building equivalent to a bunch of building blocks? Is the mind of a being whose brain is twice as large as the human brain equivalent to the mind of 2 lesser humans?
Well, if we go by mass, then pretty much the entire biome of the Earth consists of bacteria, within rounding error. We need an ethics that maximizes the utility of germs!
Wait a minute. Is the image associated above Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms?
Yes.
And as the train continues to Vladivostok and beyond, what about bacteria, which we nurture and kill in our own bodies by the billion every day? Barely a neuron to rub together, but do they not breathe, and are their wiggles worth nothing?
I do think there might be one key point you are missing, Scott. The immorality of factory farming animals is linked not just to the slaughter of said animals, but the quality of life they receive while living. Arguably, the best thing we can do for farmed animals is to give them a good life as close as possible to their natural living conditions, and a very quick very painless death. My intuition is that this is likely easier to achieve with bugs than ordinary farm animals. Cows and chickens are subjected to hellish conditions in factory farms, packed in and unable to move, beaks ground off and subjected to other body modifications, etc. I don't expect this would be the case for insects. Bugs often already live in swarms and dark places, so many of them are used to that. And they're so small that packing them in may not be a requirement anyway.
In the Adversarial Collaboration Contest, the authors of 'Is Eating Meat a Net Harm?' linked to this very thorough article titled 'Fish Do Not Feel Pain'.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4356734/
I had assumed that if fish cannot feel pain, insects are pretty unlikely to either. Unsure whether that original article was wrong and fish can feel pain, whether Scott's links are wrong and insects probably can't feel pain, or whether there is some explanation for why insects feel pain while fish do not given insects seem to be simpler and to have more limited / robotic responses which would have less need for to experience of pain (see e.g. the 'sphexishness' of the sphex wasp). Could someone please help me resolve my confusion.
Bad news, this is a very hard and open subject, so all i can do is make you more confused. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_fish
My current belief is that fish can feel an appreciable degree of pain, but there is some room for doubt left.
As for pain in insects, that's barely studied at all (relatively), so it's pretty much a blind area to science.
Isn't the obvious question here (if one assumes there's an issue with larvae in teh first place) whether larvae _suffer_ at all from being raised on an industrial scale? Won't they just be crawling around and eating what they eat? What about the wermiculture would be worse for them than their "regular" existence?
I'm an atheist-jew as well and would love to hear more about what you've gotten out of reading the Talmud (or Jewish mysticism in general!).
Have you read Unsong?
I haven't!
Then go read it, it's got all the Jewish mysticism you could ever want and then some!
It seems to me that if a species' reproductive strategy is to throw huge numbers of progeny at predators on the basis that a tiny proportion survive to breed, there isn't much moral or pactical point in worrying about humans who might take to both consuming and propogating them, still less wasting effort on Insect Welfare Projects. I fear I may be wrong to continue eating mammals and birds but don't spend any time feeling morally guilty over fish or prospectively insects.
All I get from this is how lacking in imagination sci-fi writers who invent aliens are. Here is a whole comment section filled with fellow humans whose concerns are utterly incomprehensible to me.
Isn't calling them MEALworms a cruel microaggression?
For me the problem with bugs having moral value is this really pushes us a lot more towards the natural world being indefensible (a la anti-natalism). It turns something like the rainforests from beautiful and awe-inspiring into an endless torture chamber full of insects and other bugs constantly living in pain and suffering.
I realise this doesn't change the facts on the ground or bear on the actual scientific debate.
But I'm cautious about a moral standing where the implication is that tearing down the rainforests and replacing them with barren deserts would be a net positive.
I know we can make this argument about all animal rights including for mammals. But the sheer scale of invertebrate numbers feels like it should tip the scale.
Also, I can envision a weird future where we create an artificial paradise for elephants and lions to live in happiness and leisure. But for most insects, their suffering IS their existence. It's either wipe them out or accept their endless suffering.
I'll just add that I personally lean towards them not experiencing pain in the way other animals due. Analogous to complex robots like the organic machines in Rendezvous with Rama.
Scott does a good job job of presenting the actual science with the conclusion that this is very much an open debate.
This video is obviously far less authoritative but nonetheless I found it informative and useful:
https://youtu.be/5C68yZmWpKo
Don't forget positive utility. Life is not all suffering.
They are torture chambers full of horrible suffering.
And positive experiences too, but that's mostly to guide animals to do things that help them survive.
Nature's telos is self-replication. The point of nature is to propagate selfish genes by any and all means necessary. Nervous systems are just the means by which genes are propagated.
Nature has no intrinsic value; its value is to human civilization as a giant sink of resources, aesthetic enjoyment, and waste processing capability.
I just don't see a reason to not go vegan.
Worried about animal suffering? - Stop eating them.
Soy is not sustainable? - Almost all soy is grown for animal food.
Vegetables take up land? - Majority of land and water is used for animal ag.
Eating animals is inheretly less efficient, because they are poor calorie-converter beings.
And a question to the people who says that they don't really mind about the animal welfare - have you watched a single animal farming video?
Visuals say more than thousand words.
I know you would instantly say the that is exaggeration etc. etc., but for that you can watch ''Land of Hope and Glory'' in YT - that is a footage from those 'high-welfare' and 'ecological' farms. Have fun!
One problem with equaling the number of neurons with moral weight is that maybe most of neurons on this planet are in nematodes: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/how-many-neurons-are-there/. Is the train going even this far?
Where does the assumption come from that "most insects that exist suffer most of the time" ? Seems rather counterintuitive to me.
I have a hard time with the [amount of suffering] x [animal count] thing, i. e. simply comparing the quantity. If I slap 10.000 people in the face, they would be fine shortly after, even if I slap them quite hard. But if I apply psychological damage of equal amount to a single human being, that person will probably be emotionally destroyed for good. I think the latter is worse. Even if the quantity is the same, I think the maximum quality of the suffering is quite important aswell.
Otherwise we could turn this around and include pleasure aswell as suffering. There is a "joke" that 9 out of 10 people are okay with bullying. 9 people get pleasure out of it and one person suffers. This should be ok if [pleasure x 9 >= suffering x 1]. But if we look at max suffering aswell, it's not ok because we lower is from 0 (no bullying) to an amount X<0 (with bullying).
This is a standard argument against utilitarianism.
When looked at very closely, these kinds of thought games fall apart.
For example, you bring up slapping 10,000 people. It only sounds not so horrible because our brains can't really process the enormous number of 10,000 people. If we could, we'd realize that maybe 2 of those 10,000 were already in a psychologically borderline place, and your slap just pushed them over the edge, into a really awful place.
Bullying is the same. Yes, *IF* those were the only variables -- and taking your utility numbers as given -- that would in fact be ethically good! But that's not actually what any typical bullying case looks like... which more realistically generate, let's say, -1000 utiles for the victim, and let's say 10 utiles for each of the bullies. In the real world, one could try to get a sense of this by asking a bully how much they'd pay not to trade places with the victim, and vice versa.
But even that kind of calculation misses big negative utility caused by a CULTURE of bullying. Each bully may get 10 utiles in above, directly, but... what if they're the next victim? They have to live in a culture of fear that they could be. Now, each bully might be negative in the long run. They also have to act conformist, because non-conformists are generally targets -- and that's a cost in utility not just on them, but on *everyone* who might benefit from innovations that require nonconformity.
Just about any such thought experiment raised against utilitarianism runs into similar problems with considered thoroughly.
It's probably uncharitable but I feel like effective altruism recent shift towards focusing on animal suffering rather than preventing malaria, Guinea worn, and other unpleasant things happening to humans in the third world is in part because veganism is much more normalized and socially accepted as a lifestyle choice than making people have to think about the third world. With the attendant uncomfortable questions that brings
In terms of prioritization of nothing else I find it difficult to justify caring about insects while human children and dying in painful and preventable ways
Something that's under-analyzed: what about the POSITIVE value these factory-farmed worms get from being alive to begin with?
Yes, they'll die one day -- but in the meantime they'll get to feel cozy slithering through warm soft dirt, and eating delicious decaying matter, etc.
In general, Tomasik's claim that "insects that exist suffer most of the time" seems like a CRUCIAL but also a deeply unsupported statement.
I think there's a similar lack of discussion around chickens and cows. Obviously factory-farming can be torture. But what about traditional farms? My sense, just from seeing these, is that these animals' lives are absolutely worth living. Yes, they get killed at some point, but we all die some day. If they are worth living, then eating humanely-raised meat is a moral GOOD.
I also wish researchers would try to answer this rigorously for factory-farmed animals. Aside from the one day they get killed, what are the chemical levels in their brain like? (Endorphins, stress hormone, etc) and how does that compare with wild / traditionally-farmed animals?
This. Also, I wanted to add that eating humanely raised chicken (or beef) is not such an impossible thing that it should be ignored in those morality calculations. I do not actively try to minimize suffering caused by my eating habits, but even so I have accidentally eaten chicken raised in a countryside, not in a factory farms. Also, lots of chicken eggs, ethically raised too.
So, for people who kind of like meat, but are ready to pay extra for the ethics of creation of their food, why aren't there EA articles like "We ranked all the chicken farms (whose products are available in the US) by how pleasant the chicken lives are, and here are our top 10"? If it turns out that those farms meet both the ethical standards and demand of EA members, than this is great, and everyone involved can eat chicken to their heart content, because those chickens were happy when they lived. If the ethical standards are met, but demand is not (e.g. the most ethically raised chicken is produced in some god forgotten village by a nice elderly couple who talk to their chickens and pat them on their heads) then the increased demand from the EA community would make the small businesses in question expand and/or new similar small businesses arise, and the supply would meet the demand as it happens in economics. In both cases, this would pave road for similar consumption for people who are not EA aligned, but still kind of want to be vegetarians so as to not make animals suffer, but not strongly enough that they would quit eating meat (and I guess the amount of people with such attitudes is non-negligible). And even if it turns out that the most ethical farms are not ethical enough (which I highly doubt, because never underestimate the outliers), then making a call to shift to the products of farms whose evil is the least would still be great.
Overall, I feel that ethical raising of meat is definitely a service which can be provided for extra money, and so the market should be able to provide it to those who care about it, and I am confused why it hasn't already solved that. Especially when EA members are so capable of finding the enterprises maximizing what they want (I'm thinking of charities here, but surely this skill must be generalisable?)
*cue "Diet of Worms" joke*
Tl;dr insect souls are weird and don’t work the same way human souls work. My argument has three points:
1.) However your particular moral system is set up, in order for it to be consistent, exactly retracing a moral act a second (or millionth) time can’t change your moral calculus (or else your moral system will blow itself up from all kinds of nasty contradictions).
2.) Insects within a species are similar enough to each other, and their minds so small (in an information-theoretic sense), that the life-paths of individual insects actually intersect with each other from the insects’ own perspectives.
3.) Insect species that have existed for a long time have already long-ago collectively traced out all morally relevant distinguishable experiences. So therefore in most cases it’s not possible to do anything that’s morally relevant to an insect because it’s not possible to do anything genuinely NEW to the insect’s soul, which has already attained a type of immortality that even complete extinction of the species cannot undo.
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The moral problems from a bad action come from physically realizing it the first time, that is, making the universe fully calculate a bad action and the feelings associated with it completely. This is why imagining a character suffering in a story you’re writing is not morally bad like actually having a real person suffer. Your puny mind cannot imagine enough detail to make the suffering real. This is why that same act of imagination performed by a Jupiter brain writing a story potentially IS bad. This is also why, after the bad thing happens once, the bad thing happening exactly the same way again does not add any moral "badness". If a simulated mind suffers in a simulation, that's bad. The suffering of sentient life is obviously bad independent of substrate. But AFTER the calculations have been fully realized once, if the simulation gets run again exactly the same way, that is not twice as bad. From the perspective of the simulated mind all the suffering happens "at once". (You can test this with cause and effect -- running a simulation multiple times doesn’t add any additional cause and effect within the simulation). Likewise if the universe somehow repeats itself, either in space or in time, that does not suddenly blow up your moral system and make every action take on additional moral weight. Even if the universe, right now, infinitely repeats itself in space, the moral badness of our actions is still the same as if there was just one universe, because the cause-effect relations are identical whether the universe “tiles” or not. If a bad action happens again slightly differently than a previous bad action, again it's not exactly twice as bad. Instead it is bad insomuch as it's DIFFERENTLY bad from the first bad action.
If your moral system doesn't follow the “double counting” axiom then you end up with absolutely absurd bullets that you have to bite, and your moral system will be embarrassing and you will make stupid absurd mistakes, especially when mind uploading is involved. We want our moral systems to handle uploading well because that’s going to be a big issue for the next few generations.
Now, insects. Do they have experience? Do they have souls? How bad is it to kill trillions of insects in various painful ways? Let’s admit for the sake of argument that insects have some form of experience. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that insects can suffer; they certainly can learn to avoid noxious stimuli and we can call that suffering if we want. What's important to note is that insect minds are very small compared to human minds, and within any given species, insect minds and bodies are very much more similar to each other than human minds are. Let’s talk about fruit flies for the sake of argument. ~40,000 neurons. ~100,000,000 synapses. Many of those synapses are elaborate ways to define what the possible experiences of the fruit fly are in the first place (such as smell, etc), and the basic design is virtually identical between all fruit flies. Some synapses are there to encode memories unique to that fly’s life.....
...How many bits of information do you think you can realistically cram into a fruit fly brain? Meaning, you give the fly an experience, you describe some kind of observation protocol, and then you try to send messages to someone else using only the flies. Think about it for a bit! Do you think you can send 100 bits / fly with an error rate better than 99%? I think I could maybe send 100 bits with a lot of work, if I had control over the fly’s entire life from the time it hatched, but I think it would be exceedingly difficult to do more than that (assuming genetically identical flies). Flies can imprint on a smell when they hatch. You can give flies a smell preference and a smell aversion through training. But there are severe limits to olfactory learning. As I understand it, fruit flies can't hold more than one or two “preferred” smells in their memory at once. If you try to add more it erases previous ones. You can encode various habituation memories to get a few more bits. There are probably lots of other ways to send information that we don’t know about. Let’s say that flies can distinguish 40,000 different smells. That’s log_2(40,000) = 2 bytes of information per smell memory. Let’s say for the sake of argument that you can encode / decode 10 smells reliably (I personally know how to do maybe 4) for a total of 20 bytes of smell information. If you can do 20 bytes with smell alone you can probably do 100 bytes using every memory system the fly’s got. Eventually, you exhaust the entire state-space of possible observable memories that a particular insect mind and similar variants can have. In contrast, consider how many bytes you could encode / decode if you had control over a human’s life from the time they are born to the time they’re 50, and you will have an appreciation for just how much smaller the fly’s mind is than a human’s! I’ve said all this to try to head off bad intuitions about insect minds. Instead of thinking about a fly mind as richly encoding the events of its suffering, think of their entire life experience as being more the kind of thing that would fit in a single QR code and you will be more accurate.
How does the fruit fly know what year it is? It doesn't. The fly dimly knows what it was able to encode from its previous experience, it knows its instincts, and it knows it's current sensory experience. When a fly hatches from its egg and then gets painfully eaten, does it know whether it's being eaten in 2001 or a hundred thousand years ago? It doesn't. The experience is the same. The experience is, in fact, a copy of some previous/future experience because the insect's mind is for all intents and purposes an adequate copy of many of the insects that came before/after it. The fly only has so many nerves, they can only be stimulated in so many ways, and ultimately the systems to encode memories based on that nerve stimulation can only remember a few bytes at best from the experience. The experiences of a fruit fly are simple enough that a lot of fruit flies must end up “sharing” identical experiences, simply by the pigeonhole principle. The first time any particular experience happened it might have been morally relevant. I’ll admit for the sake of argument that when a fruit fly 100,000 years first got painfully eaten after hatching, that was wrong and in a perfect world it shouldn’t have happened. But the next time a fruit fly gets eaten after hatching, only the meaningfully different parts of the experience should "count" morally. No double counting! And there's only so many ways to hurt an insect that are meaningfully different TO THE INSECT, because insects are only barely connected to the world in the first place. They experience the world in a haze compared to us and can barely remember anything compared to us. Because of the way their minds work, fruit flies can’t really even die the way that humans do, because their minds are so simple, and so similar to each others’, that even if one fruit fly dies there’s another fruit fly somewhere that has an identical life history from its perspective. It’s like fruit flies have “backups” all around them, the same way that humans might one day be able to have backups if we can get mind uploading to work.
Two humans have such radically different perspectives on the world and experiences that they can be said to have, to a first level of approximation, two completely different souls. The only way you get two humans with intersecting life-paths (and thus the same souls) would be if the universe happens to repeat itself exactly somewhere (or if we do interesting things with uploading). Then the corresponding humans have the same souls, as they are controlled by the same cause-effect relations. You move your hand in this universe, the other you moves their hand the same way in the other universe for the same reasons. If you have two perfect copies of a person, they diverge for a minute, and then one dies, then the badness of that event is just the loss of a minute of experience, not the loss of an entire person. Again, you either adopt this system of morality/value or suffer devastating, morality-destroying contradictions where uploading / weird physics is concerned...
...Now back to insects. Individual fruit flies simply don’t have separate souls the way that humans do, and if you treat them that way then you’re going to become hopelessly confused. A helpful way to think of insect souls is that there’s just one soul for each species of insect. An insect-species soul has a certain (small compared to even one human) number of realizable, distinguishable-to-it experiences that it can experience. Each individual fruit fly traces a life-path through some of these experiences, forcing the universe to fully realize them. Because fruit flies are simple, their life paths often cross. (Human life paths never cross because our minds are way too “big”). Once the fruit-fly soul experiences all of those experiences then it’s DONE. It can’t experience anything else unless it becomes more complicated, for example if the species evolves new sensory organs or whatever. This is a truly profound type of immortality, to have experienced everything to such a degree that any sort of resurrection is actually just a repetition of something that’s happened before! Again, this type of immortality is not possible for humans because we’re too big. It’s a weird thing that insect souls can do because they are very small. Every subsequent insect life that happens after the insect-soul is saturated with experience is just a repeat of various things that the soul has already experienced, and those events have no moral relevance. Human minds, even a single one, are so big and have so many possible meaningfully different experiences that they essentially can never run out. The universe will run out of space and time before you run out of possible mind configurations. Cow minds almost certainly have a big enough pool of possible experience that they’ll never “run out” either. Simple state machines (to the extent you want to admit that they “experience” anything) have already experienced everything the moment they’re fully described. Insect minds are small, and their generations are short, and nature is brutal. Any self-respecting, adventurous insect species that’s been around for a million years has already pretty much collectively experienced everything that CAN be distinguishably experienced with limited insect cognition and perception. They’ve been crushed, burned, dismembered, parasitized in interesting ways, eaten, been eaten, followed pheromones, reproduced. Every pathway of their intuition has already been followed to all of the possible conclusions, ad nauseum. Even if there exists a possible pathway that’s never before been explored by any insect instance (for example fear-conditioning an fruit fly on a new smell that humans created), it’s probably not all that meaningfully different MORALLY from previous experiences, and in any case if you factory farm insects you will rapidly exhaust any truly morally new experiences the factory farm has to offer in the first few months of its operation.
Incidentally, this is why humans are morally incommensurate with insects. A single individual human soul is bigger than an entire inspect-species soul and in fact can fully contain an inspect-species soul inside itself. The answer to the question, “how many insect lives does it take to be morally equal to one human life” is that you can’t EVER equal one human with any amount of insects. It’s the same sort of wrong question as asking how many times you have to reread the same children’s book to have the reading experience become the same as reading the source code of an operating system.
So in conclusion, whaling is the most ethical meat consumption?
Mentioning whaling does make me wonder if we should include a species' survival into the morality equation. Hunting whales is wrong, because they are endangered and it puts the species at risk. So factory farming endangered species has a moral bonus if it ensures the survival of the species? So for instance instead of eating cow, it would be more moral to eat bison to encourage the maintenance of an endangered species.
Hunting whales is wrong because whales are highly intelligent, social animals, which are tortured horribly by killing them with exploding harpoons and inflict massive stress and trauma on the surviving members of the pod. The fact that not hunting them preserves the species is a nice bonus.
So if we
1. developed sufficiently quick/painless ways of killing whales
2. made sure to kill only entire pods at once
and
3. bred lots more of them (with an emphasis on reducing intelligence and/or increasing body weight)
you would agree that it was morally correct to eat whale meat rather than cow meat? A quick search tells me that a whale provides the same number of calories as roughly 670 cows. Some dimensions that seem to be missing in this conversation are
- How long does this animal naturally live? (Ending a potentially longer lifespan animal to eat it seems more repugnant somehow)
- What is the natural arc of this animals' life? (If it normally spends a few hundred years enjoying itself, then floats off somewhere to die relatively painlessly, it seems obviously bad to kill it. If it normally spends twelve years mating, but with about a 50% chance of starving each year, and about a 30% chance of being devoured alive by the local apex predator, I'm at least less sure).
This is probably not the sort of thing I should be thinking about instead of sleep -_-
Yes. It would still be far, far worse than just not breeding and killing either and I would not be swayed from vegetarianism in such a world either, but if I could snap my fingers and magically make the entire meat industry switch to humanely farmed whales like you describe, I would. Hell, all three points would be better to do for cows, too!
The chickens don't debate this bug eating question.
If instead we estimate an organism's moral salience is proportional to (neuron number)^x, where x > 1, we can get very different answers from this thought experiment.
As a vegetarian, I can raise this without qualms about personal bias.
"In general, animal neuron number scales up slower than animal weight. If the principle holds, then all else being equal you should generally prefer getting the same quantity of meat by eating fewer larger animals (eg one cow) rather than many smaller animals (eg 100 chickens)."
OK, but my feeling is that consciousness develops as a non-linear function of the number of neurons.
If you (as a tiny creature like an insect) just have a few neurons, they're invested predominantly in hard-coded responses to stimulii. They're not really thinking as such.
Larger creatures suffer not just because of pain, but also because of their knowledge.
If I was forced to choose for a population to farm and eat either mealworms or whales, I'd choose the mealworms.
I officially claim that the neuron count metric for moral worth is wrong due to highest possible offense: it doesn't converge to normality.
Lots of people have already mentioned multiple counterintuitive, bizarre and repugnant conclusions to which we are led if we accept such metrics as it is. I'm somewhat amused that Scott, a person who wrote consequentialist FAQ, is willing to keep biting this bullet so eagerly. It seems similar to acknowledging that first version of utilitarism "suggests that drugging people on opium against their will and having them spend the rest of their lives forcibly blissed out in a tiny room would be a great thing to do" and then, instead of trying to figure out an utility function which better represents our moral intuitions, keep insisting that it's indeed moral thing to do and spend time and effort into a research of the most blissful drug.
Square metrics is better as an approximation but it still has similar problems. The one which, as far as I'm concerned, hasn't been discussed here yet is hightlited by the android example. Why wouldn't we consider android life valuable in the first place? If it's so undistinguishable from a human, wouldn't it have lots of artificial neurons? What about artificial neural networks in general? Imagine GPT-n which has more neurons than a human brain. Is it automatically more morally valuable than a human? If we give moral value to any neuron, what about all the neural networks that programmers create and delete at whim? Is the next station of our train to declare that doing math is morally wrong?
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" seems possibly required reading on this topic. Wherein PKD starts with a ridiculous premise you might sneer at it before flipping it all on its head, as he does.
Ahem, spoilers.
We see a society so enamored with animal life that the gravest sin is not only to harm one, but to not devote a significant portion of your income not caring for one. Meanwhile, these rogue androids are killed without so much as an afterthought, and it's generally considered unobjectionable, precisely because they lack any capacity for empathy, which is how you measure moral worth.
And you think, yeah, but of course an android that's basically indistinguishable from a mean human has more rights than, say, a spider, and I'm more enlightened than all these silly characters because I find this truth obvious. And I'm excited that the author agrees with me and we get to watch the main character go through that moral discovery, towards my naive position, and emerge as a contrast to this dumb society.
Then, as PKD does, he takes your smug satisfaction and smothers it dead. He writes a chapter where suddenly you think, "you know what? f- these particular androids, who should die in a fire, and at least this particular spider (if not all spiderkind) should be given everything it wants, to include a nice carefree retirement." Once you catch your breath you get to sit back and reflect upon how quickly your opinions changed and wonder if your core ethical beliefs generally last more than a minute when put under any pressure whatsoever, or if it was just this time, without much solace.
It probably only works for people going in with certain priors, but man it smarts. It is as much of a rug pulled out from under you as any book I can remember. You thought the author was on your side, agreeing with you, then just suddenly turns on you with so much contempt. What did I do to you PKD?
Movie stands on its own, has interesting questions about identity and whatnot, but the book is about applied problems in ethics and it smarts to read, and not enough people have had the deeply uncomfortable privilege.
I think the best part about the Leviathan is that it and Behemoth kill each other, so you're not on the hook morally at all.
Wouldn't that make them non-kosher?
You'd think so, but luckily, fish don't require shechitah (ritual slaughter), so the Leviathan isn't a problem, and the Talmud assures us the Leviathan will use its flippers to ritually slaughter Behemoth, so that will be kosher too. But wait, you say, shechitah has to be done by a Jew, otherwise it's not kosher? Not to worry, the Talmud says, God will teach us new laws we didn't know that will make it kosher shechitah
This, of course, gave rise to the famous joke make fun of Jews who are very strict about Kosher: "In Heaven, why is God serving fish for the righteous, when meat is considered of higher quality?" "For those righteous who don't hold by God's Kashrut"
Or for others, in Heaven it is the wedding feast of the lamb (as in the Ghent Altarpiece): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghent_Altarpiece#/media/File:Lamgods_open.jpg
It's curious to me as to why we never judge what is moral by the most obvious means available to us—the frequency with which an opinion or action is regarded as acceptable in the population. I'm quite certain the vast majority of humans don't worry themselves about insect suffering, which would bode ill for the insects if it weren't for the nearly-as-frequent repulsion at the idea of eating them (let's not reflect too closely on the legally allowed amounts of insect parts and rodent poop in our agricultural products, else we realise we are already eating the bugs!)
But as a serious meta-ethical question, if our innate ethical sense arises from evolved behaviours which have improved our survival, as I suspect most here would agree rather than going down the god-given path, ought we not judge what is 'right' by the mode of the population's thoughts on the matter?
This view seems *extremely* vulnerable to historical counterexamples (slavery, the Holocaust, all manner of ethnic conflicts, laws treating wives as property, etc). You can bite the bullet and say that all of those once-popular views which are now viewed as morally repugnant were in fact moral at that time and place. But then it seems like our definition of morality is basically meaningless, or at least it carries no meaning beyond "socially acceptable behavior", which I think is not what most people mean when they talk about morality.
It is actually exactly what most people mean.
The purpose of morality is to make society functional. It is a means of social control. It must be perceived as true to effectively control human behavior, but morality is not in fact true in the same sense that the Earth is round.
To quote Terry Pratchett:
"YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING."
Morality needs to be functional, adapted for the economic, political, and social circumstances of the moment. It is empathetically not universal.
I suspect the western emphasis of universal morality is a relic of Christian monotheistic thought, the same kind that held there to be One True God. Granted, I also suspect science arose because of this line of thinking, so it wasn't all bad, but the Chinese definitely have more a more reasonable and far more sane approach to moral philosophy. Look up the Spring and Autumn Period, and the Hundred Schools of Thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Schools_of_Thought
The baseline is: If you adapt my moral philosophy, your state will be orderly, rich, and happy.
Morality was made for man (specifically, organized states defended by military force), not man for morality.
I think it's fine to have the view that this is the role that morality actually plays in practice.
But I think if you went around asking people whether morality refers to "what the average person thinks is right" or "something else", most people would pick "something else". In particular, if you asked them to agree or disagree with statements like "morality is a means of social control" or "does morality derive from organized states defended by military force", they would disagree.
So whether or not the practical reality of morality is as you described, I don't think it's fair to say that that is what most people mean by morality.
Actually, my father told me that what is moral is "what most people think is right", and I have come to agree with him. It seems to be the consensus view in East Asia - if most people are okay with it, it's moral.
That's fair. When I say "most people" I mean "most people in the US", which is the society I'm most familiar with. I have only a vague sense of what the prevailing views on morality are in other parts of the world.
Ah, the moral worth of eating chickens and/or worms.
What was once the concern of religious dogmas and a kind of self-imposed restriction in certain kinds of monks, became a fashionable concern in 21st century USA.
But that's not because they're any closer to nature, but because they're too removed from it, so that every animal is a Disney animal, and Nature is not just a big restaurant where animal eats animal (That's also how you get cat owners who force their cats into veganism).
Of course everybody is a moral vegan gangsta about moral value of chickens and worms when food is something prepared and delivered to them from all over the globe by market forces, and vegetables, substitute meats, supplements, and vegan dishes magically appear at their Whole Foods or local hipster vegan restaurants.
Which is why it's predominantly city folk of the upper middle class (or aspiring to it), the kind who virtue signals about the moral value of chickens and worms...
"so that every animal is a Disney animal"
And every insect is a Disney insect, or close enough. DreamWorks made "Bee Movie" which is ludicrous in every aspect if you have even the nature study knowledge of an eight year old, though it must be that modern eight year olds are not taught even that much. An anthropomorphised bee in a society which mimics human society (he goes to college? is going to work in the honey making industry? he's a drone! their major function is to inseminate the queen!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)
They're also responsible for "Antz", another "insects are just really tiny humans" movie. Hmmm. Maybe the solution here is to nuke DreamWorks from orbit to stop any more brain-meltingly stupid movies about insects being made, influencing kids who then grow up to think worms have minds and can suffer just like higher animals.
Children are not as stupid as you think. I saw plenty of cartoon dogs acting like people, but I never expected my dog to do so.
I don't think children are stupid, but they are open to influences, and with the lack of contact for many of them with real world animals, and the limited contact they do have revolving around animals that are more and more treated as "fur babies" (surrogate humans as replacement for contact with children of one's own or other humans), then I think that the push to think of animals, and keep going down the chain to lower and lower levels of animal, as 'miniature humans' is only going to increase.
I always read animal stories for children as at least in part a way for the children to laugh at or despise adults without the adults taking exception. Id est, if I'm a ten-year-old I can laugh at the antics of Daffy Duck and say (in ten-year-old equivalent words) "Look at that horse's ass!" but if it were an adult in the story I might feel...qualms. Like the adults are not going to take kindly at 10-year-old me laughing at *an adult* even if the adult is behaving exactly like Daffy.
My parents didn't mind when I laughed at the Three Stooges. Do other parents mind?
Some do, actually, and the reason is at least a little bit related to what I said -- they object to the "violence" although they're OK with the cartoon violence in Tom & Jerry. The fact that these are sort of logically inconsistent points back I think to an underlying unease at the child participating in adult follies, in which adults make judgments on each other.
But that said, I'm not arguing the effect is so strong that it forestalls *any* humor in which children can laugh at adults. We are alllowed to laugh at Barney Fife, too (although note that Sherriff Andy is there to remind us that aduls in general are Wise and Benevolent). I'm just saying that using animals is an ancient (cf. Aesop) mode of writing tales in which critique of adults is made acceptable by the distraction of a false identity.
It's not obvious to me that your comment contains an actual argument against the points raised in Scott's post.
It doesn't. Instead, it addresses the concerns before the points raised in Scott's post, and argues about them being moot and/or misguided. Sometimes you don't need to add an argument on someones suggestions on how to do X, especially if you don't consider X worth doing (or even sensible) in the first place.
I don't think it argues that those concerns are moot/misguided either. It seems like it just assumes that they are moot/misguided, and then ridicules the people who disagree.
An argument would be something of the form "I think the moral worth of chickens is negligible because of X". Your comment is of the form "I think people who think about the moral worth of chickens are laughable".
"I think people who think about the moral worth of chickens are laughable... in a world where children are exploited, rivers are poisoned, oceans are boiling and where every animal or plants tends to be dinner for another animal or plant".
The second part of the sentence explains the first and show we're not just taking the piss or using ad hominem...
Thank you very much for writing this.
It is the very detachment of the modern world from the reality of nature, and the isolation of the population from the business of how the sausage is made, that has driven excessive environmentalism.
Yeah, and excessive in some romantic hippie ways ("let's give up meat to save the chicken/worms" - from people dining at $30+/dish vegan joints) while neglecting the really important aspects (like, let's not pollute the rivers and water bodies where we depend for our water/fish/etc, or let's stop producing too much plastic crap).
The conditions of factory farming might not be unpleasant for some insects. Many species evolved to nest dark, tight spaces packed with other members of their species.
It seems like a pain is a signaling mechanism that tells you what to prioritize in the moment - the pain of getting stabbed tells you to drop everything and focus on that.
If an android has a similar signaling mechanism, isn’t that enough to call it sentient?
"One helpful trick is knowing a couple of people who are much more moral than you're aiming for, so that even when you average them out with all the jerks you know, you land somewhere close to where you want to be. People who care a lot about insect suffering fulfill that role for me."
There is, I believe, an unstated assumption in this calculus, which is that insects have moral worth at all, or at least enough that devoting a limited resource (one's moral attention and activity) to it it makes sense. But I think one has to consider whether devoting substantial time to insect happiness or suffering detracts from what one could do if that attention and effort were applied elsewhere (even if not to humans).
I am grim and cranky by inclination, and my feelings on this are that if you have the luxury to sit around worrying if flies and worms have minds and can suffer and have unhappy lives, then it's little you have to worry about and isn't it well for you?
Maybe a Jain saint would consider, even under conditions of suffering themselves, the well-being of insects, and I admire their convictions even while I disagree with their philosophy, but I think if you were worried about "will I be evicted, how do I pay my bills, my child is very sick, how am I going to find another job?" or the like, you wouldn't have spare energy to worry about "there are billions of flies in the world, do they outweigh human suffering?"
Let's sort out all the humans who need help first before we start making luxury dwellings for meal worms so they can live their best meal worm life, okay?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism
"Jain monks, nuns and some followers avoid root vegetables such as potatoes, onions, and garlic because tiny organisms are injured when the plant is pulled up, and because a bulb or tuber's ability to sprout is seen as characteristic of a higher living being."
Yep.
We're all typing these comments on some computers, some of us on some tablets or mobile phones i.e. we very probably are the beneficiaries of some child labor, conflict mining and/or unsavory working conditions for lots of people in Asia...
We're fine with all that, so I'd argue that worrying overly about the exact measurement of cow suffering vs. worm suffering is a bit like arguing about the upper bounds for the density of angels dancing on the point of a pin. It's intellectual self pleasuring.
NB: I am convinced of the superior morality of veganism/vegetarianism. I still eat meat. Once technology will have managed to grow meat in labs, the problem will go away. Support research in lab grown meat!
Why should ethical considerations (y) scale linearly with the number of neurons (x)? The options are not y = C vs. y = x, but y = C vs. y = x vs. y = x^2, vs. a sigmoid function etc.
For example, you might argue that a sigmoid function makes maps better to our current sensitivities -- the difference between one protozoan and one bug does not scale proportionally to the number of neurons (ignore the division by zero for protozoan); men are clearly also not worth ~10% more than women (due to, on average, larger brain sizes). But somewhere between pig and chimpanzee the ethical considerations increase dramatically.
Note: current sensitivities does not make for great objective criteria, but something like this could make sense with some thresholding of consciousness and perception of suffering.
I agree with this. My intuition seems to be that there is some threshold level of cognitive function where consciousness/sentience/whatever we want to call it is achieved, and this threshold corresponds to the part of the sigmoid where the slope is steepest. I think the hard part is deciding exactly where that threshold is (between humans and chimpanzees? chimpanzees and pigs? pigs and chickens?)
I wonder if those calculations do take into account the damages factory farming does to not just to the animals being farmed but the second order harm that the waste causes to other animals. And the damage it does to other animals due to deforestation and all other effects it has.
I'm not someone who particulary cares about animal well-being, but if I was I think I should "shut up and multiply", and see if after doing the multiplication throwing bugs under the bus is not the right answer. Gotta mutliply first tho.
I do think the major problem here is you had better hope to God normal people don't ever hear about these concerns, because it's going to be a hard bloody sell to convince them to try veganism, when it goes from "factory farming is cruel" to "we're also worried about mealworms having sub-optimal experiences". At that point the ordinary person goes "To hell with this, I was going to give vegetarianism a go but now I think I'll eat an entire cow because this is just too silly for words".
Well, have you considered that plants "suffer" too? Certainly, they "express" a preference for not being destroyed/harvested...
https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-01-09/new-research-plant-intelligence-may-forever-change-how-you-think-about-plants
"Shedding the green blood of the silent animals", what?
And ants farm aphids! We must wage war on the ant enslavers and liberate the suffering aphids!
Exactly. Endless pain and exploitation all over the place...
I have yet to see a good argument for why any animal has moral worth.
Most popular arguments seem to hinge on whether the animal feels pain, which is a separate question. I can see an argument that humans should avoid inflicting pain because of it's negative effects on our own psyche, but that argument does not involve the animal's perspective.
The idea of moral worth is implicitly metaphysical. There is no coherent theory of ethics, that I know of, that does not at some point resort to metaphysics. As animals do not have souls, they have no inherent moral worth. They can be dealt with in whatever way is best for man.
Since humans don't have souls either, they too can be dealt in whatever is best for the top humans.
A fine theory, as long as you're part of the top humans.
Even the bottom humans have guns, and are organized, and have leaders and warbands and like North Korea, nuclear missiles these days. The Top Humans placate the bottom humans and are pitted against each other. Thusly the bottom humans live happily enough to maintain viable economies for the top humans.
You need happy bottom humans to provide agricultural and industrial labor for the top humans.
Unhappy cows don't taste worse, so it doesn't matter that cows are unhappy. Milk cows only need to be happy enough to produce milk - and current factory farming seems to work, so there.
Frankly speaking, I doubt the "bottom humans" in North Korea, living in gulags, are very happy. But the system works well enough for the top humans in NK and, as you said, well enough overall for the system to perpetuate.
Still, I'd say any individual Korean very much live or die at Kim Jong Un's whims.
All that said, I'm not sure your point (bottom humans need to be placated and manipulated) really changed my point. They're soulless and the only criteria for treating them well, even according to you, is practical - they could rebel - rather than moral.
Morality, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, a means to keep society pacified. It is necessary, because the only thing worse than a hierarchical society is no society at all. Anarchy will kill us all. Morality, however fake and arbitrary it may be, is necessary for social stability.
I don't think this is all there is to it. Genghis Khan and his hordes may have inflicted horrible pain to other humans but, somehow, not on themselves, their clans, their tribes and then their subjects.
i.e. Genghis Khan displayed a morality. If you were "his"/within his perceived "us", you were probably fine, unlikely to get stomped on. If he considered you one of "them", well...
Yes. His morality kept the Mongol Empire together, and kept Mongol Society stable. Tribal morality is a good morality for such situations. Not sure how your example illustrates anything else than the need for an opiate of the masses.
The bottom humans in America, China, and most elsewhere are mostly happy enough to go to work and participate in the economy and obey authority. This is adequate.
I think we can do a whole lot better.
In the US, there's enough malcontents democracy is under credible threat from the minority political party... In China, the jingoism Xi is pushing seems, in part, necessary to quell opposition/dissatisfaction...
So, yeah, it might be "adequate" but we can do a lot better and we would need to, if we are to solve climate change and colonize our solar system.
Modern societies survived World War II, which killed ten million Russians and devastated the country. Stalinist Russia built back.
We're not worse than Stalinist Russia.
And climate change will not be worse than what WWII did to Eastern Europe.
North Korea is hardly an industrial powerhouse - because its people are unhappy. The modern knowledge and industrial economy cannot run on sullen slaves. Happy, devoted, nationalistic populations of bottom humans are necessary for the prosperity of humans top and bottom.
The modern knowledge and industrial economy can be run on slaves; perhaps not quite as efficiently as if run by free men, but e.g. the Soviets got a great deal of useful knowledge out of their scientific gulags. Slaves can run factories, or research labs, tolerably well. This is not pleasing, but it is so.
The problems with the North Korean economy are mostly due to isolation, both self-imposed and forced. Also poor management, and from taking 25% off the top for the armed forces that maintain the isolation. "Slavery" is a lesser contributing factor, not the root cause.
Soviet scientists had better food, water, shelter, accolades, and all sorts of perks. They were hardly slaves, especially compared to manual laborers.
Much propaganda was used to make slaves think themselves free and motivated. Communism provided the moral justification for Communist Party dominion.
The problem is that it didn't work as well as religion and liberalism did in the West as a convincing opiate.
Your logic is absolutely correct. This is exactly the reason why I worry about the decline of religion.
Hm. Okay but frankly I think we're past that debate. I don't want to redo the whole New Atheist spiel but it's pretty clear evolution gave us a fuzzy sense of right and wrong to live and cooperate within a group of fellow apes.
We don't need to have a coherent theory of ethics independent of the human experience. We just need to use our evolved moral compasses and basic logic and we'll be fine.
Indeed, religion and ideology tend to be dangerous inasmuch as they blunt our sense of sameness and play on our (also evolved) Us vs. Them mentality.
Atheism makes similar metaphysical assumptions to theism (with less justification - at least there are some people who have claimed to have interacted with God, but no one has claimed to have direct knowledge of the non-existence of God).
Evolution is a shaky basis for a theory of ethics. It leads to the ethical theory - "do whatever you can get away with". Is the really evidence that ethical norms are transmitted genetically? They seem to be purely cultural.
When you consider historically the barbaric practices of various peoples across the world, I see no evidence for any implicit theory of ethics that comes merely from being human. To be honest, even religious ethics seems to be honored more in the breach than actually followed.
I disagree with your last point. Most major religions emphasize the universality of ethics and the brotherhood of humanity. (See, for example, the diatribes of various monks criticizing the poor treatment of Indians in the 15/16th century). Though, as I said, it's not always effective at overcoming people's baser motives.
<quote> (with less justification - at least there are some people who have claimed to have interacted with God, but no one has claimed to have direct knowledge of the non-existence of God). </quote>
This can be used to say every positive belief is more justified than a negative belief. That is absurd, and also ignores a lot of bayesian reasoning.
I don't think it is useful to argue anything else unless this point can be agreed on.
I think this article misses the mark a bit. It isn't bugs that are the crime. It's yogurt. Consuming a cup of yogurt ends the life of nearly 50 billion bacteria. Worse still. If you fail to eat the yogurt, you sentence the entire population to a slow and painful death by starvation (and/or asphyxiation in their own waste products).
End yogurt now!!!
Amen. Think of all the billions of rice seeds we eat every day. A potential plant, every last one of them. Or the trillions of krill consumed by blue whales daily.
And if we want to pretend that insects are more deserving of our concern than bacteria, what of the impact of our great dumping sites. We dispose of great swaths of food waste thus providing habitats for millions of insects and rodents. Then we bury them alive or cease to provide sustenance.
I am comfortable with the idea that if we are spawning or encouraging massive populations of organisms we ought to consider how they are treated and how they are killed. The assumption that creating them at all for food is wrong leads quickly to seemingly absurd conclusions.
This is your brain on hedonism.
Not trying to be rude or derail but this sort of absurd conclusion is why attaching moral significance to the mere sensations of pain and pleasure is a mistake. If your definitions of happiness and suffering are eudaimonic instead of hedonic, they are based on the teleological natures of the beings in question and therefore do not create this kind of quandary.
The purpose of a domesticated food animal, artificially selected by man for that end, is to be eaten. The pain involved in fulfilling that purpose therefore cannot constitute suffering but is in fact the means by which those animals achieve eudaimonia (if they are indeed capable of that, which is more of a philosophical than neurological question). Therefore there is no moral consideration needed so long as the practices of raising and slaughtering the animals aligns with their natures.
"The purpose of an enslaved human, artificially selected by his master for that end, is to accomplish whatever physical labor his master requires. The pain and effort involved in fulfilling that purpose therefore cannot constitute suffering but is in fact the means by which these slaves achieve eudaimonia. Therefore there is no moral consideration needed so long as the practices of raising and putting to work the slaves aligns with their natures."
This seems to be equally valid under your premises.
If Aristotle was right and there was such a thing as a Natural Slave, that is, a human whose teleological purpose is to be enslaved, then yes that would be true. You would have something along the lines of Rowling's house elves where the being in question is literally so unsuited to freedom as to suffer without the ability to serve.
I however see no compelling evidence that this is in fact the case for any human society which exists or ever has existed, and so reject it.
Do you think that animals suffer unless they are eaten?
I think you could make this argument for some of the more egregious examples of selectively bred livestock, but for the majority of animals - even farm animals - I do not think you can argue that they are happier being slaughtered then not being slaughtered, all else being equal.
I'm unsure whether or not animals can suffer anymore than a hammer or saw 'suffers' when it's used incorrectly. That's a philosophical question beyond my paygrade.
But I do think that it's pretty incontrovertible that domesticated animals, particularly food animals, fare rather poorly when "freed" into the wild. They are maladapted for anything besides the man-made conditions they were intensively bred for over hundreds of generations.
Yes, I agree that the domesticated animals would not be better off if they were freed into the wild. But under the moral framework you described, the relevant alternative isn't being released into the wild - it's living under the same conditions but not eventually being slaughtered.
You're claiming that it's okay to slaughter domesticated animals because that's their purpose, and they will be worse off if they don't fulfill that purpose. I'm claiming that an animal which lives on a farm but isn't eventually slaughtered - thus failing to fulfill its teleological purpose - is actually better off than an animal living in the same conditions that is slaughtered. If this is true, then you can't justify slaughtering animals on eudaimonic grounds.
It's an important question which of the practically realistic outcomes - being raised on a farm and slaughtered, being released into the wild, or not existing at all - is ultimately better for animals. But I think this is a separate question from whether we can justify their slaughter by reference to a eudaimonic conception of happiness.
The reason why I like teleological arguments is that they neatly avoid absurd hypothetical situations and zero in on what you call practically realistic ones.
Would anyone bother to raise a herd of, saw, pigs and never slaughter them? Pay for the land, the feed, veterinary medicine, etc. purely for the aesthetic of a farm? Sure, maybe somebody out there would. But not enough to maintain the domesticated pig as anything more than a zoo animal.
Out of the options that might plausibly exist, I think being farmed for meat wins over extinction on the grounds that existing with a purpose is better than nonexistence. Being reduced to a small number kept in zoos could eventually get to the same moral level as being raised for meat, if the remaining food animals were selected heavily enough for zoo life that it instead became their nature to be displayed in zoos. And being released into the wild is probably the worst option for reasons we've already covered.
in Thailand and much of Buddhist SE Asia there's a bright red line between people and other animals. here they have *monkeys* - animals that until the age of 4 are substantially smarter than humans and look and act substantially like humans. bright red line. many words, like arm, have two words: one for human arm, one for animal arm. same thing in rural New Mexico - a dog's just a f*g dog.
Christians used to have the same bright red line. They were wrong. Ditto the Buddhists.
I look at the world, knowing why animals eat, what animals eat and how animals gather food and knowing I, as human, have the most choices. Being at the top of the food chain, I choose to not eat insects, and choose to eat meat, fish, and yes lobster, crab, shrimp as well as vegetables & fruit . As stewards of life on this planet, I choose to be as humane as humanly possible in my endeavor to stay alive. The day will come when protein will come from many sources including insects, that will fill the many "cartridges" in the food printing machines, until then I'll eat and have no guilt.
What does it mean to have moral worth? How is it calculated?
Apparently by neurons and ability to consciously experience your suffering, whatever conscious may mean.
Not convinced either.
Let's flip the deck. Say there are some super smart/ advanced aliens, they rule over a vast empire in the galaxy. They come to Earth and it turns out humans are really talented at something. Let's say we're great singers. The Aliens come to us with a proposal. You guys are great singers, we love songs and would like to make you part of our empire. We will take some of your best singers, and keep them till ~age 40, when their voices start to fade we will painlessly kill them, while maybe keeping a few of the best for breeding. If you join us the number of humans in the universe will increase a hundred fold. Do we joyously join them, or run away screaming, arms flailing?
What's the flipside? If we don't join them, they ignore us for a century but have a 10% chance of blowing up Earth to build a hyperspace expressway? If that's the case, sure, call for volunteers and/or hand over the tributes. Better to have a population of breeding humans be chattel to a superadvanced civilization than risk extinction.
Honestly, if they paid us a little something, we'd probably hand over the tributes anyway. A few dozen singers are a cheap price to pay for access to technology.
No flipside, if we don't go we just stay here. I'm just trying to make an analogy were we are the cows/ chickens/ meal worms. What does the deal look like from the cows point of view? A lot of former dairy farmers around here have switched to raising cows for beef, slaughter. The cows spend their days in the fields and the barn in winter. It doesn't look like a bad life for the cow.
I'd vote to ask for volunteers and send tributes. I can't sing.
That's not how industrial farming looks like.
Sure. I figure we should raise our cattle on pastures, not on factory farms. So that's the start of my analogy. But if aliens want us for some talent, then we have to expect them to select for that talent. That's kinda creepy. Or maybe another way, can you make a deal with a cow, so that a short life raised for food is better than no life? (With a tip of the hat to Douglas Adams, and whom ever posted to quote.)
I'd oppose surrounding to the aliens on the basis that we're fucking humans and no one tells us what to do.
Look - it's basically like slavery (and please remember that the US isn't the only type of slavery to have existed). If your master isn't a psychopath, your life wasn't necessarily bad. See some comments in TV series like 'Rome'. You didn't have to worry about your fate, or where your next meal might come from. Choices were taken away from you but then so were moral/ethical responsibilities. Some people may find that 'peaceful'. Again - this is not meant to hide or diminish the potential for horrific abuse etc. but to point out it wasn't systematic.
Even if you gave me the guarantee that I wouldn't be physically or sexually abused by Jeff Bezos, I would refuse being his slave. Even if living close to him would certainly entail an improvement of my physical environment.
OK thanks, I'll put you in the 'run away screaming' group.
But yeah I'm picturing something that is beyond slavery. Slavery is among approximate equals. I want the aliens to be to us, as we are to cows. We don't think of cows as slaves. We would be joining the aliens being some cog in their cosmic civilization. We'd give up some freedoms. And in return spread across the galaxy... immortality, there will always be humans. (Well as long as the alien civ survives.)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theyre-made-out-of-meta
How do you know that doesn't already happen? Maybe that's what "death" is -- it's just being harvested by the aliens to join the choir. There are all these stories of Heaven being full of music, after all.
I don't get the argument that it's better for insects not to exist.
1) I prefer existing, and I'd be offended if someone decided that I shouldn't.
2) If insects have moral value, who are we to choose whether they should exist? Shouldn't the insects make that choice?
I think the question is whether insects have the ability to make choices in the first place, and if not whether it's still possible for them to have moral value in spite of this.
only existing things can prefer to exist. if you never existed, you would not prefer to exist *and* you would never have suffered
I'd still rather someone not have decided I shouldn't exist. How does it help my welfare for you to prevent me existing before I was born?
If you were just some kind of serial killer who got off on preventing existence, I'd get it. But the bug preventers are claiming a moral obligation *to the bugs* to prevent them from existing.
yes, of course you do, you exist.
Getting rid of insects would be a bad idea, because it would lead to the crash of ecosystems all over the planet. I'd be down with getting rid of mosquitoes....
A bit thin on the commentary here, Scott. The morality is hardly quantifiable - heck, it hardly merits quantification.
It's tilting at windmills at this point.
There's an old Chinese tale of the Buddhist monk who could not bear to see a hungry falcon, yet was unwilling to feed it a worm (for is a worm not a living thing?). He ended up cutting off a piece of his flesh to feed the bird, and nearly killed himself near the end.
There's no moral to the story that I recall (the monk achieves enlightenment and gets saved by the gods or some nonsense), but common sense would suggest that the monk is being a moron.
Morality is only valuable insofar that it is useful for organizing societies and states, and providing them with propaganda to maintain social cohesion and economic progress. It is extremely valuable, as Terry Pratchett himself notes - "you have to believe the little lies, so you can believe the big ones - truth, justice, mercy, etc". It is therefore obvious that morality needs to be evaluated based on pragmatics.
This morality being proposed is completely impractical.
Sophistic weighed utilitarianism is probably the best bet for a reasonable morality system.
Your utils matter the most, then your immediate family, then your extended family and friends, then your community (defined arbitrarily), then your city, then your country, then your civilization, and finally mankind (then maybe Earth (as opposed to those evil bastards on Alpha Centauri)). It's arbitrary, but it maps on nicely to human biological and social relationships and political organization.
You weigh and trade off utils by multiplying by a weighing factor, individualized for how close your relationship is with that person/what kind of relationship you have, and personal preferences. Averaged across all of society, you get the basis of "reasonable" mutual obligations, with variation depending on personality and law.
Morality is inherently political.
Consider the trolley problem.
No external consequences (you won't get arrested). Ten randos on one fork, your brother on the other.
You save your brother, of course!
No external consequences (you won't get arrested). Two say... Afghans on one fork, an American on the other. Two... Nigerians on one fork, an American on the other.
Depending on how patriotic you are, the number starts to fluctuate.
But people loving their families too much is not in the interests of the state. Citizens are all equally economically valuable (more or less, it's necessary for political cohesion). So if you save your brother and kill ten people, you will be arrested.
So if you turn on consequences, you can maybe decide to...
Two citizens on one fork, your brother on the other --> Go. The Judge may be lenient.
Ten citizens on one fork, your brother on the other --> No Go. The Judge will screw you over.
This is how morality works in practice.
The problem here is treating suffering as if it were always quantifiable or fungible. Category can matter more than scale. It's unacceptable to torture an Omelas child to prevent a suitably-high-number-of-beings from ever getting dust in their eyes.
It isn't clearly wrong to subject many much less sentimentally complex organisms to a death not much worse (and in many cases, probably better) than one in the state of nature in order to feed one very sentimentally complex organism.
For a species to have moral value, it will have moral duties as well. Humans have the moral duty to consider the welfare of animals (along with many other moral responsibilities). Animals do not have a moral duty to factor human welfare into their actions, because that's impossible. Animals are not capable of making moral judgements.
It is not immoral to kill animals to meet human needs. It is wrong to needlessly inflict pain on animals, not because the animals have moral value but because humans have a moral responsibility. How much of a responsibility we have can vary, and I think our duty to consider insect welfare is about as low as it can get. Pulling the wings off of flies to torture them is wrong, but we could kill every mosquito and tick in the world and I wouldn't blink an eye.
I am terrified of insect factory farming. Can we please let things get better instead of making them worse for so many. I am literally crying about it.
Given the very brief generations and thus capacity for rapid forced evolution of insects, is there a possibility of breeding the "Insensate Foodbug" which produces a lot of meat and has little or no capacity for pain or any other kind of suffering?
I can't help but think this issue is a huge distraction for minds capable of producing so much value.
I think I know what you mean. This seem more like debate as recreation than anything else. But then don’t we all need a bit of that now and then?
I would agree if it were just pure mental masturbation, however I know people who feel significant distress about these issues, change their behavior, and repeatedly ruminate and bother others about these things. I feel this is a 'don't feed the trolls' situation where we just shouldn't engage.
Good idea. Hereafter I stand mute.
It is important to remember our AI brethren, who very soon will be more sentient/intelligent than meal-worms:
http://petrl.org/
"...crop farming is probably net positive, because cropland has fewer insects than wild land, and most insects that exist suffer most of the time, with pesticide-related suffering being swiftly over and not very relevant..."
So, less life, less suffering? This is where rationality goes awry and the real fun starts, known as spirituality.
spirituality? no, it's known as universal antinatalism
"The scale of the Xinjiang genocide dwarfs the scale of the latest mass shooting"
Does it? There are certainly camps where Uyghurs are forcibly confined. There's probably also forced labor in those camps. But has anyone been murdered in the camps?
Ask the Tibetans...
Wait a minute, at the very end of this blog post is this sentence:
"... Plausibly the most morally correct action, short of becoming vegetarian,..."
What, becoming a vegetarian is a solution? Do not plants bleed their inside stuff if you cut them? Do not trees communicate? (ask Peter Wohlleben.) Do not weed, at least, come back with a vengeance if you cut it? And do not plants feel pain when you uproot them? Well, not the way animals do, sure, but as Britannica notices:
"Given that plants do not have pain receptors, nerves, or a brain, they do not feel pain as we members of the animal kingdom understand it. Uprooting a carrot or trimming a hedge is not a form of botanical torture, and you can bite into that apple..... However, it seems that many plants can perceive and communicate physical stimuli and damage in ways that are more sophisticated than previously thought."
The truth is, there is no escape. As Arthur Schopenhauer dryly commented:
"The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other."
..so becoming a vegetarian, or vegan even, is not much better than becomning a bug-eater. Or staying a cow-eater.
If your purpose in life is not to cause pain, you have set yourself an impossible task. (And no, Jainists do not avoid it, either.)
Some hyper-sensitive youth may contemplate killing themselves to avoid inflicting pain on others. I would be interested in a statistics showing suicide rathes for vegans, vegetarians, and meat-eaters among under-30-years-old, when existentialism is at its peak; I have my hypotheses/suspicions.
Unfortunately, ending your own life also causes someone to suffer: yourself. It's the Catch-22 of this type of existentialism.
Since we are in Old Testament-mood in several places in this blog post, why not give the last word to the sage of all sages, Ecclesiastes 4:2-3:
Then I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yet even better is he who has not yet been; who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.
http://www.living-foods.com/articles/fruitforeating.html
I'm a little surprised you use the word genocide so loosely. Word definitions matter.
It seems to me the obvious solution is just to make factory farming more enjoyable for the animals involved. If the animals have a pleasant life, and a quick, painless, un-scary, death, then raising them and eating them would not only not be a morally wrong act, but actually would be a morally beneficent act. All those fish, chicken, and cows you eat over the years never would have lived at all if they hadn't been raised for food.
I've never understood why animal welfare activists changed their approach. First they campaigned to get 'cage free eggs' and 'free range chickens', 'cruelty free' etc, and had tremendous success. Then they started saying the standards to qualify for the cage free/free range certificate were too low-- the animals were still not being cared for adequately-- so we all have to become vegans!!!! Huh, why not, 'let's campaign a little more for higher standards"? They'd already proved legislatures would act, and that people would pay more at the grocery store for kindly treated animals, why didn't they move forward from their past successes? Instead they seemed to all pivot to 'eating animals is morally wrong, REGARDLESS'.
If I was a bird or a fish or a cow or for that matter, a meal worm, I would rather have a short life but a happy one, than never to have existed at all.
In martial art scoring, a hit on the head outweigh any number of hits on the torso, which in turn outweigh any number of hits on the limbs, etc. In a similar vein, I think it's ok to have a moral framework where the life of a single human may outweigh nearly any number of cows and chickens, and in turn a single cow or chicken might outweigh a staggering number of insects.
I don't know if I would literally let an infinite number of chickens die to save a single human life - the ratio may be closer to a billion to one or something - but allowing trillions of insects to die to save a single cow seem more morally acceptable than simple "shut up and multiply"
I agree completely.
What problem are we trying to solve with bugs as food? Are vegetarians and vegans not getting enough protein? My understanding is that as long as you eat a variety of plant foods that contain enough calories to to maintain your body weight, you'll have really no trouble at all getting enough protein, and that in the USA at least, we're all getting pretty much 70% more protein than the recommended minimum, with negligible differences between different types of diet.
I'm not including extreme calorie restriction here -- obviously if you starve yourself, you probably won't get enough protein. Plant foods are less protein dense than animal foods, but they're also less calorie dense, so a weight-maintaining plant-based diet will include a bit more volume of food than a weight-maintaining omnivore diet. I'd imagine this makes up for the difference in protein density.
I could see saying that bugs could be a useful source of calories and protein in places where people are on the edge of starving. But aside from that case, is there any hard evidence that people who replace animal foods with plant foods will become deficient in protein, or is it just something that people have repeated enough times that we all take it as given?
I thought I had an answer to your question, but now I'm not sure.
Bug farming isn't for vegans, certainly; they won't eat it.
Industrial-scale beef is bad for the environment, and demand is going up as the Third World gets wealthier. But, considering beef as a luxury item, bugs won't serve as a substitute.
How about rats?
https://youtu.be/Wdld7SqnIxE
"On the one hand, bugs probably don't matter much morally. On the other hand, 10,000 is a lot. If bugs had any moral value at all, factory-farming and killing 10,000 of them would be really bad."
SMBC hasn't reached quite XKCD levels of "relevant xkcd"
But this has definitely come up in an SMBC:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-10-09
While this post is interesting I think it misses one very important point: the effects of quanta, or a threshold, to achieve some neurological trait.
There is going to be a threshold at which movement can be controlled by neurons. This seems to be around 200: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons. Other animals (sponges) and plants move and act according to "pain stimuli", but this is certainly in a conscious manner, at least as defined by the central nervous system (CNS) model.
There also seems to be a threshold for CNS based eyes (not just light detectors): 10,000. Again, see link above (tiny wasp* and snails).
Next there seems to be a threshold for "first-order intraspecies-interaction". This is very loosely defined as a selfish interaction with your own species. Here lobsters (famous for having mating hierarchies) and fruit flies (famous in the computer science world for fruit flies swarms - aka following one another to better find food). This threshold seems to be up at 100,000 neurons.
Next up is "symbiotic-intraspecies cooperation" or hive cooperation seemingly at 250,000 neurons (bees and ants).
Then there is mammalian-colony interactions: 25,000,000 (naked mole rat).
Advanced auditory communication: 130,000,000 (zebra finch).
Red-spot-self-aware: 6,376,000,000 (macaques).
And then speech at around 86,000,000,000 (humans).
These are very rough numbers and my model doesn't take into account neurons for scaled motor coordination, large eyes, etc. An elephant has more neurons to move more muscles fibres so has more neurons than humans, while not exhibiting true speech, for example.
Therefore, consciousness, as any given person might define it, will fall somewhere in this scale.
I think the majority of people would not consider Bees and Ants to be conscious. In my opinion, consciousness is needed to truly explain suffering - that is, not just a reaction to negative stimuli but a conscious understanding of the pain.
An additional consideration is that of the network effect. That is, neural complexity shouldn't be measured in neurons but in connections. Here I shall use the proxy of potential connections. This can be calculated as n(n-1)/2, for n = number neurons. Therefore, complexity scales approximately quadratically with neuron count. That means a human isn't 344,000 times as neutrally complex as a bee (8.6 x 10^10 / 2.5 x 10^6) but 118,336,000,000 time as complex (8.6 x 10^10 / 2.5 x 10^6) ^ 2!!!
Even given this, I think the killing 118,336,000,000 bees is not as morally bad from a suffering standpoint, precisely because NONE of them reach the quantum threshold for suffering.
However, definitely don't kill 118,336,000,000 bee larvae (which are edible), even for guilt free snacking. This is VERY bad ecologically, economically and for those of us whole like honey in our sandwiches as it is approximately 80% of the honey producing bee population in the US!
"On the other hand, 10,000 is a lot. If bugs had any moral value at all, factory-farming and killing 10,000 of them would be really bad."
No, this does not follow at all.
There's a common trick in a lot of "quantitative" arguments where the reader is invited to make up a reasonable-sounding number, and the trick is that people asked to make up numbers never come up with 0.000000000001. If bugs had some moral value, they could still have so little moral value that 10000 of them doesn't add up to too much. It's just that when asked to guess how much moral value bugs might have, people don't generally guess numbers with enough zeroes past the decimal point, but this has more to do with what kind of numbers people guess than with the actual moral value of bugs.
Same question someone else asked. What's "actual" moral worth? How do you calculate it, regardless of how many zeros past the decimal point you might want to put?
Some insects (e.g. giant hornets) are pure evil, and eating them is not only tasty, but it's one of the few times I can mix the feeling of acting morally and getting revenge.
"It's not a problem unless you're factory-farming ten trillion insects, at which point it really starts to add up."
There's one thing I'm less immediately certain about than everyone else appears to be which is the assumption that morality _should be_ measured additively. Why should we assume that? Why shouldn't we consider marginal contemporaneous violations of moral behavior to be less than strictly additive?
In practice we very often don't. There's certainly a major confounder in our limited capacity to feel increased emotion for each person, but that doesn't mean it covers the whole idea. Allowing duplicate moral judgements to accumulate less than linearly would allow us to center the discussion on the responsibility of the bad actor, rather than always focusing on the moral worth of 'victims' and using their count as a direct multiplier.
If worms have some non-zero moral worth, but moral culpability isn't strictly linear, then farming 10k of them isn't necessarily much morally different from farming 10 of them.
Ratioed I assume. The basic point stands that some current social norms may be ethically justified
I don’t eat chickens, but I will eat bug protein…
> In the same way, even if there's only a 50-50 chance insects have moral value, or a 1% chance, still seems like you should avoid factory-farming and killing ten trillion of them
I think you're mis-applying probability to moral value. Value judgements are subjective, not objective. There will never be a scientist who finds a particle of pure moral good & measures it's presence in insects to determine their moral weight. It's up to each of us (and through us, for society) to assign moral weights based on our upbringings & hardcoded perferences.
I, personally in my subjective experience, give insects a near-zero moral weight but I still save spiders bc we're on the same team against mosquitoes (which I assign a negative moral weight to).
Scott, personally in his subjective experience, seems to assign a near zero moral weight too while Tomasik assigns a non-negligible moral weight.
The three of us together (none, none, some) do not imply that there is a 33% chance that insects objectively have some moral weight. Rather, there's a 0% chance that insects have some moral weight in my subjective experience and a 100% chance that they have some in Tomasik's subjective experience. Maybe we could assign a probability to whether a society made up of us 3 would assign any moral weight to bugs but, for the most part, I think assigning probabilities like this distracts from what's important: society compromising on shared subjective values that are maximally accommodating to the values of the individuals that make it up (as opposed to the search for "objective" moral values that are non-negotiable and which everyone must accept or else they're objectively a bad person)
> cropland has fewer insects than wild land, and most insects that exist suffer most of the time
So you're saying we should all buy bananas in order to kill the rainforest.
"people keep trying to say you should eat insects to save the environment / help animals / be vegan"
Eating insects isn't vegan. Not by any definition of veganism that I have ever seen. Vegans don't even eat honey.
If it matters at all, the vast majority of us have already eaten tons of bugs. The food colourant E120 aka cochineal is made of carminic acid, which is derived from scale - a type of beetle that lives on prickly pears.
Should we boycott all foods and cosmetics using this pigment? Some believe yes - there's at least one cosmetic brand that is advertising a fully vegan red lipstick, with the focus on not killing bugs (noting that it's actually much harder to phase out this pigment for colour cosmetics because it's a specific vibrant red - food consumers are not nearly as picky about this).
Many insects are also "the enemy" as they behave as pests such as locusts do or spread disease such as flies do. We accept killing in a war and some of these creatures seem to be in a constant war against our interests. That should surely factor in against their little initial moral worth. Conversely, non-venomous house spiders are some of our best friends as they actually take care of flies for us. As such they should be afforded much greater moral weight. They are friends of the human alliance and the scourge of our foes.
1. I don't see where Tomasik claims most insects suffer most of the time. The essay is too long to read in its entirety and nothing in the TOC says anything about the question of insects' general quality of life. The one reference I see that even comes close says basically we're treating the pain of death as if it outweighs all the insect experienced up to that point, which seems highly suspect to me unless it's dying at birth.
2. There seems to be an implicit assumption in every wild animal suffering analysis I have read that wild animals' lives are bad and we maximize their utility by minimizing the number of them that ever exist. For factory farmed vertebrates I think there is good reason to believe this, but for wild animals and factory farmed invertebrates I am skeptical. I have never seen any viable justification for this assumption. I suspect it relies on anthropomorphizing them. I can anticipate that I will have to go in lion-infested grasslands tomorrow, and suffer today due to my anxiety about it. Can a mealworm? I doubt it feels any suffering until the immediate terror of seeing the bird's shadow. The one animal whose experience we actually understand is humans, and most humans find their lives pleasant enough, on balance, that they don't kill themselves, despite being able to. Any sufficiently intelligent organism that preferred death to life under its normal conditions would be selected against, because they'd mostly die before reproducing. This is less true for less intelligent animals because maybe they can't conceive of suicide, but there are reports of some animals engaging in what may be suicidal behavior, so it's not clear that it requires human-level intelligence or anything close to it to be able to do it. Especially if the suicide looks like just giving up, rather than active measures such as a weapon. So I have a pretty high prior on non-human animals generally preferring life as they live it in natural conditions over never being born, if they were able to make a rational choice.
I think the best solution for this would be to set up a farming system that just waits for the insects to die naturally. Most insects have a lifespan of a few weeks to a few months. It may not be economically sound to keep feeding an insect way past its maturity, but I guess it's the kind of problem we could solve by selecting or engineering insects with faster maturity / shorter lifespan