by After reading about how pessimism about wild animal welfare could lead to the strange argument that we should actually be increasing farmland to decrease wild animal suffering, I have spent some time thinking about the logical conclusions generally of the belief that wild animals lives are not worth living.
It seems to me, that if it is in fact true that most wild animal lives are not worth living, then the logical conclusion of this argument would be that we should nuke or bomb the rainforest to exterminate as many species who's lives are not worth living as quickly and as minimally painful as possible. Or if you don't like the idea of complications from nuclear fallout, imagine for a moment that we have some kind of magical supereuthanasia bomb that can painlessly exterminate only the particular species and lifeforms that we view as having lives not worth living.
Please do not immediately consider this a reductio ad absurdum argument. Rather, consider its implications generally. If the lives of the vast majority of species are not worth living, then it is possible to argue that the extermination of all animal life can be justified as a necessary evil to prevent the greater evil of the enormous amounts of suffering that occur in wild animal ecologies.
This seems, at first glance, to be a very problematic argument in the sense that it makes a nuclear holocaust a viable option for the minimization of suffering. However, I believe that the flaws of this argument hinge not on the conclusions but on the premises.
The first premise that this argument assumes is that the lives of a vast majority of wild animals are not worth living, and that therefore there is more suffering than happiness in the lives of all wild animals.
The second premise that this argument assumes is that we should equally weigh very small insects and invertebrates with larger mammals, that is to say, it assumes that all sentient creatures are moral equals.
To challenge the first premise, I call upon the importance of the Hedonic Treadmill. While this concept is normally applied to humans, there is no real reason why it shouldn't also apply to conscious animals. What the Hedonic Treadmill basically means, is that no matter what chronic situation or circumstance a sentient creature is in, they will adapt to it and return to their normal levels of happiness. We all have a hedonic set point that we tend towards. Even if you win the Nobel Prize tomorrow, after a while, you'll get used to this fact and return to your original hedonic set point. Conversely, if you suffer a horrible accident that causes paralysis from the neck down, quite surprisingly, after a while you will actually return to your normal hedonic set point or baseline in terms of how you feel.
So what does this mean for wild animal suffering? It means that a lot of what we might consider to be very bad circumstances are actually not that negative to the wild animal. Similarly to how very poor humans have surprisingly high self-reported happiness levels, we should expect that the average animal probably doesn't feel that unhappy about their circumstances. Animals in general have evolved to be able to adapt.
Thus, in reality, most of the suffering that happens in wild animal populations is probably not from chronic hunger or fear, but from acute situations like being killed or severely wounded by a predator. And in that case, those forms of suffering are very much a matter of luck. For every fly that gets stuck in a spider's web, there may well be a fly who manages to live a full and interesting life (to a fly anyway) before eventually dying of old age.
This then is the difference between saying that the lives of factory farmed animals are not worth living, and that the lives of wild animals are not worth living. We know exactly what happens on factory farms. We know exactly how much suffering that is involved. We cannot really make the same claims about wild animals with the same degree of certainty.
Brian for instance, compares the life of a young wild buffalo with a farmed cow and says they are both equally not worth living. But the difference is that the average wild buffalo lives for 18-20 years, whereas all the cows in the factory farming system are guaranteed to die at 20 months. So when asked, what animal you would rather be, you shouldn't be looking at particular cases, but the general, the average case.
One way to think about this is to borrow from Rawls and Harsanyi, the notion of a Veil of Ignorance, and apply it to all animals generally. If in some state before birth, you had no idea what animal you might become, what kind of world what you want to exist? A world where all animals were factory farmed? Or a world where all animals were wild? In one, you are guaranteed to live a minimally pleasant existence where you are fed and taken care of, but you must endure torturous procedures and eventually be slaughtered. In the other, you are basically rolling the dice of a lottery in which you might end up a larva that promptly gets eaten by a bird, or you might end up a dolphin swimming around in freedom and having a generally happy life.
It is true that the vast majority of births are of insects or amphibians who don't make it into adulthood, but it also appears that these creatures tend to suffer less by virtue of not being as neurally developed as their adult siblings. So if we actually weigh the suffering of these creatures against the years of happiness that a potential adult could have. I think it's actually not as clear that this is a totally negative thing. Even if only 1% of sea turtles manage to reach the sea and survive to adulthood, each adult that does usually lives for many decades.
Thus, at the sacrifice of many short lives of suffering, there are a few much more long and happy lives that do exist. So the question is, would you roll the dice? Or would you rather live a life that was certain to be fairly miserable and end badly, but perhaps not as badly as potentially what you could get from rolling the dice?
I don't know that there is a final answer to this question, but I hope that makes you think. We humans are typically risk-averse, but from the perspective of a purely rational agent, it could very well be that the potential happiness of a full life is worth the risk. Regardless, the Veil of Ignorance also suggests what we ought to do morally. We ought to minimize the chances of being born into a life not worth living, and maximize the chance of being born into a life worth living. This actually typically corresponds to maximizing total happiness.
Next let's consider the second premise, that we should be equally weighing tadpoles and elephants. But the tadpole has a much simpler brain than an elephant, and it's not clear that they are equally conscious. As discussed in another thread, sentience does appear to be somewhat correlated with the number of neurons in the brain. We can reduce a human's emotional reaction to pain by destroying neurons and connections in the anterior cingulate cortex. Thus, a tadpole, while feeling the signals for pain, probably has a much less developed emotional response to it than say an elephant.
This arguably means that the happiness of the elephant living a decently good life, can justify significant amounts of suffering in aggregate, if that suffering is required to allow the elephant to thrive. More generally, that ecosystems produce a sizable number of lives that are worth living, to an extent could justify the suffering that exists in those ecosystems, assuming that the net happiness overall outweighs the suffering. This is very difficult to conceive of if we weigh the suffering of an insect as equally bad as the happiness of an elephant is good. But if we weigh the happiness of the elephant approximately so: 23,000,000,000 neurons in an elephant / 250,000 neurons in an ant = 92,000 times as valuable, we can potentially justify a lot more suffering as a necessary evil. For instance, if an elephant lives an average of 70 years, of which say 21 years can be said to be in happiness, with the rest being a mix of happy and sad which cancel out, then that justifies 21 x 92,000 = 1,932,000 years worth of mild ant suffering. Perhaps ant death at the hands of a spider is equivalent to a year of mild suffering for the ant. That would still mean that about 1,932,000 ant deaths could be justified by the existence of a single average elephant.
So basically I'm suggesting that we shouldn't nuke the rainforest, because there could potentially be enough happy animals in the rainforest to offset the suffering ones. Do I know this is actually the case? No. But what I'm suggesting is that we don't know that there isn't enough happiness to offset the suffering.
And one thing we do know based on the various studies on happiness, is that we as humans have evolved to generally feel more happiness than suffering, as shown by the fact that in every country in the world, including the very impoverished ones, self-reports of happiness are always above average, or greater than 5 on a 1 to 10 scale. Humans have an automatic bias to feel happy and to return to a Hedonic baseline or set point, no matter the circumstances. It would not be surprising at all if evolution has built this mechanism into all animals, not just humans.
So before we start considering genocide of the tadpoles, we should consider whether or not their suffering can be justified by their place in the ecology of the world, which enables the potential happiness of adult frogs, and other species.
One further consideration for why to treat the wild case differently from the factory farm case, is parallel worlds. It is quite possible that every single individual tadpole survives in quite a few parallel universes, and becomes a happy adult frog who manages to live a full life. For every universe where it gets eaten, there is probably one where it escapes. Conversely, in nearly every parallel universe, factory farmed animals suffer the same, barring some exceedingly low probability event that they are freed and made pets by radical PETA members or something like that. It is given that the probabilities of happiness for the tadpole are still low, but at the very least they are higher than that of factory farmed animals.
But if you nuke the rainforest, the probabilities of all things for the tadpoles that were there, becomes zero.
So, ultimately, what this all comes down to, is whether or not wild animal suffering outweighs wild animal happiness. I am today, arguing that we do not know that it does, and that there are reasons to believe that it might not.
Someone might now point out that the suffering that occurs in factory farms could similarly be outweighed by the happiness it produces for humans. This is a valid point, and should be taken seriously. The main argument against factory farms is not that it produces suffering per se, but rather that the suffering is unnecessary. Humans could easily eat meat substitutes that taste as pleasant, and the small amount of happiness that comes from eating meat, no more justifies factory farming than would the happiness of a sadist justify torturing a little child. The important difference between suffering in the wild and suffering on factory farms is that much of the suffering in the wild appears to be a necessary evil to support the happiness of organisms. If at any point it becomes unnecessary, for instance, we develop the technology to feed carnivores synthetic meats, then we should take action to rearrange the natural order to be more moral.
Remember that Utilitarianism can justify some amount of suffering if it produces more happiness in the long run. This is the rational basis for exercising, delaying gratification, and a wide variety of other things that we do. However, Utilitarianism places strict constraints on what can justify suffering. Only more long term happiness can justify suffering, and only when that suffering is actually necessary to achieve that happiness.
So at the end of the day, nuking the rainforest can only be justified if it produces a net increase in happiness or reduction in suffering. And right now, I don't think we know enough about wild animal suffering and happiness to be able to press that button with confidence. Until we do know, I think it's safer to adopt a position where wild animal suffering and happiness neutralize each other in the grand moral calculus. Yes, animals are probably somewhat more likely to be unlucky than lucky, but this is somewhat offset by the fact that animals are psychologically naturally happier than not.
Given all this assumes a positive utilitarianism that equally values happiness and suffering (or at least suggests a reasonable trade off is possible). If you are a negative utilitarian who believes that suffering always significantly outweighs happiness, then my argument will be unlikely to convince you otherwise. Regardless, I hope to at least make you think.
It seems to me, that if it is in fact true that most wild animal lives are not worth living, then the logical conclusion of this argument would be that we should nuke or bomb the rainforest to exterminate as many species who's lives are not worth living as quickly and as minimally painful as possible. Or if you don't like the idea of complications from nuclear fallout, imagine for a moment that we have some kind of magical supereuthanasia bomb that can painlessly exterminate only the particular species and lifeforms that we view as having lives not worth living.
Please do not immediately consider this a reductio ad absurdum argument. Rather, consider its implications generally. If the lives of the vast majority of species are not worth living, then it is possible to argue that the extermination of all animal life can be justified as a necessary evil to prevent the greater evil of the enormous amounts of suffering that occur in wild animal ecologies.
This seems, at first glance, to be a very problematic argument in the sense that it makes a nuclear holocaust a viable option for the minimization of suffering. However, I believe that the flaws of this argument hinge not on the conclusions but on the premises.
The first premise that this argument assumes is that the lives of a vast majority of wild animals are not worth living, and that therefore there is more suffering than happiness in the lives of all wild animals.
The second premise that this argument assumes is that we should equally weigh very small insects and invertebrates with larger mammals, that is to say, it assumes that all sentient creatures are moral equals.
To challenge the first premise, I call upon the importance of the Hedonic Treadmill. While this concept is normally applied to humans, there is no real reason why it shouldn't also apply to conscious animals. What the Hedonic Treadmill basically means, is that no matter what chronic situation or circumstance a sentient creature is in, they will adapt to it and return to their normal levels of happiness. We all have a hedonic set point that we tend towards. Even if you win the Nobel Prize tomorrow, after a while, you'll get used to this fact and return to your original hedonic set point. Conversely, if you suffer a horrible accident that causes paralysis from the neck down, quite surprisingly, after a while you will actually return to your normal hedonic set point or baseline in terms of how you feel.
So what does this mean for wild animal suffering? It means that a lot of what we might consider to be very bad circumstances are actually not that negative to the wild animal. Similarly to how very poor humans have surprisingly high self-reported happiness levels, we should expect that the average animal probably doesn't feel that unhappy about their circumstances. Animals in general have evolved to be able to adapt.
Thus, in reality, most of the suffering that happens in wild animal populations is probably not from chronic hunger or fear, but from acute situations like being killed or severely wounded by a predator. And in that case, those forms of suffering are very much a matter of luck. For every fly that gets stuck in a spider's web, there may well be a fly who manages to live a full and interesting life (to a fly anyway) before eventually dying of old age.
This then is the difference between saying that the lives of factory farmed animals are not worth living, and that the lives of wild animals are not worth living. We know exactly what happens on factory farms. We know exactly how much suffering that is involved. We cannot really make the same claims about wild animals with the same degree of certainty.
Brian for instance, compares the life of a young wild buffalo with a farmed cow and says they are both equally not worth living. But the difference is that the average wild buffalo lives for 18-20 years, whereas all the cows in the factory farming system are guaranteed to die at 20 months. So when asked, what animal you would rather be, you shouldn't be looking at particular cases, but the general, the average case.
One way to think about this is to borrow from Rawls and Harsanyi, the notion of a Veil of Ignorance, and apply it to all animals generally. If in some state before birth, you had no idea what animal you might become, what kind of world what you want to exist? A world where all animals were factory farmed? Or a world where all animals were wild? In one, you are guaranteed to live a minimally pleasant existence where you are fed and taken care of, but you must endure torturous procedures and eventually be slaughtered. In the other, you are basically rolling the dice of a lottery in which you might end up a larva that promptly gets eaten by a bird, or you might end up a dolphin swimming around in freedom and having a generally happy life.
It is true that the vast majority of births are of insects or amphibians who don't make it into adulthood, but it also appears that these creatures tend to suffer less by virtue of not being as neurally developed as their adult siblings. So if we actually weigh the suffering of these creatures against the years of happiness that a potential adult could have. I think it's actually not as clear that this is a totally negative thing. Even if only 1% of sea turtles manage to reach the sea and survive to adulthood, each adult that does usually lives for many decades.
Thus, at the sacrifice of many short lives of suffering, there are a few much more long and happy lives that do exist. So the question is, would you roll the dice? Or would you rather live a life that was certain to be fairly miserable and end badly, but perhaps not as badly as potentially what you could get from rolling the dice?
I don't know that there is a final answer to this question, but I hope that makes you think. We humans are typically risk-averse, but from the perspective of a purely rational agent, it could very well be that the potential happiness of a full life is worth the risk. Regardless, the Veil of Ignorance also suggests what we ought to do morally. We ought to minimize the chances of being born into a life not worth living, and maximize the chance of being born into a life worth living. This actually typically corresponds to maximizing total happiness.
Next let's consider the second premise, that we should be equally weighing tadpoles and elephants. But the tadpole has a much simpler brain than an elephant, and it's not clear that they are equally conscious. As discussed in another thread, sentience does appear to be somewhat correlated with the number of neurons in the brain. We can reduce a human's emotional reaction to pain by destroying neurons and connections in the anterior cingulate cortex. Thus, a tadpole, while feeling the signals for pain, probably has a much less developed emotional response to it than say an elephant.
This arguably means that the happiness of the elephant living a decently good life, can justify significant amounts of suffering in aggregate, if that suffering is required to allow the elephant to thrive. More generally, that ecosystems produce a sizable number of lives that are worth living, to an extent could justify the suffering that exists in those ecosystems, assuming that the net happiness overall outweighs the suffering. This is very difficult to conceive of if we weigh the suffering of an insect as equally bad as the happiness of an elephant is good. But if we weigh the happiness of the elephant approximately so: 23,000,000,000 neurons in an elephant / 250,000 neurons in an ant = 92,000 times as valuable, we can potentially justify a lot more suffering as a necessary evil. For instance, if an elephant lives an average of 70 years, of which say 21 years can be said to be in happiness, with the rest being a mix of happy and sad which cancel out, then that justifies 21 x 92,000 = 1,932,000 years worth of mild ant suffering. Perhaps ant death at the hands of a spider is equivalent to a year of mild suffering for the ant. That would still mean that about 1,932,000 ant deaths could be justified by the existence of a single average elephant.
So basically I'm suggesting that we shouldn't nuke the rainforest, because there could potentially be enough happy animals in the rainforest to offset the suffering ones. Do I know this is actually the case? No. But what I'm suggesting is that we don't know that there isn't enough happiness to offset the suffering.
And one thing we do know based on the various studies on happiness, is that we as humans have evolved to generally feel more happiness than suffering, as shown by the fact that in every country in the world, including the very impoverished ones, self-reports of happiness are always above average, or greater than 5 on a 1 to 10 scale. Humans have an automatic bias to feel happy and to return to a Hedonic baseline or set point, no matter the circumstances. It would not be surprising at all if evolution has built this mechanism into all animals, not just humans.
So before we start considering genocide of the tadpoles, we should consider whether or not their suffering can be justified by their place in the ecology of the world, which enables the potential happiness of adult frogs, and other species.
One further consideration for why to treat the wild case differently from the factory farm case, is parallel worlds. It is quite possible that every single individual tadpole survives in quite a few parallel universes, and becomes a happy adult frog who manages to live a full life. For every universe where it gets eaten, there is probably one where it escapes. Conversely, in nearly every parallel universe, factory farmed animals suffer the same, barring some exceedingly low probability event that they are freed and made pets by radical PETA members or something like that. It is given that the probabilities of happiness for the tadpole are still low, but at the very least they are higher than that of factory farmed animals.
But if you nuke the rainforest, the probabilities of all things for the tadpoles that were there, becomes zero.
So, ultimately, what this all comes down to, is whether or not wild animal suffering outweighs wild animal happiness. I am today, arguing that we do not know that it does, and that there are reasons to believe that it might not.
Someone might now point out that the suffering that occurs in factory farms could similarly be outweighed by the happiness it produces for humans. This is a valid point, and should be taken seriously. The main argument against factory farms is not that it produces suffering per se, but rather that the suffering is unnecessary. Humans could easily eat meat substitutes that taste as pleasant, and the small amount of happiness that comes from eating meat, no more justifies factory farming than would the happiness of a sadist justify torturing a little child. The important difference between suffering in the wild and suffering on factory farms is that much of the suffering in the wild appears to be a necessary evil to support the happiness of organisms. If at any point it becomes unnecessary, for instance, we develop the technology to feed carnivores synthetic meats, then we should take action to rearrange the natural order to be more moral.
Remember that Utilitarianism can justify some amount of suffering if it produces more happiness in the long run. This is the rational basis for exercising, delaying gratification, and a wide variety of other things that we do. However, Utilitarianism places strict constraints on what can justify suffering. Only more long term happiness can justify suffering, and only when that suffering is actually necessary to achieve that happiness.
So at the end of the day, nuking the rainforest can only be justified if it produces a net increase in happiness or reduction in suffering. And right now, I don't think we know enough about wild animal suffering and happiness to be able to press that button with confidence. Until we do know, I think it's safer to adopt a position where wild animal suffering and happiness neutralize each other in the grand moral calculus. Yes, animals are probably somewhat more likely to be unlucky than lucky, but this is somewhat offset by the fact that animals are psychologically naturally happier than not.
Given all this assumes a positive utilitarianism that equally values happiness and suffering (or at least suggests a reasonable trade off is possible). If you are a negative utilitarian who believes that suffering always significantly outweighs happiness, then my argument will be unlikely to convince you otherwise. Regardless, I hope to at least make you think.
