Philosopher Jeff McMahan has published a most interesting article on intervention in predation in the NY Times. The paper can be read here:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... eaters/?hp

The comments on the paper in the Times are terribly poor and simplistic. However, there's a very interesting discussion on it going on here:

http://onthehuman.org/2010/09/the-meat-eaters/

Many blogs and sites have started to discuss the paper. Many of them are rather stupid. But in others one can find serious opinions and discussions. For instance, here:

http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/prac ... .html#more

http://philosophersanon.blogspot.com/20 ... mahan.html

http://the-brooks-blog.blogspot.com/201 ... eat-eaters.

http://deconstructioninc.wordpress.com/ ... han-again/

I encourage all of you concerned with wild-animal suffering to engage in these discussions

I was extremely displeased with the quality of the NYT comments.

Yes, one would expect hotility, but not that people would raise points the article explicitly responds to as if they were fatal unanswered objections.

McMahan responds to commentators here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... -response/
Actually, the comments this time surprised me in a good way, perhaps 20% were somewhat positive.

Some commentators mentions the idea of engineering pain-free predators, which is an interesting thought, similar to David Pearce's paradise engineering ideas.

One problem regarding dealing with predators using contemporary technology, it seems to be an open question if death from predators involves more suffering than the alternative death from starvating/disease. What do you guys think?

Well I'm not surprised at all that you would recieve dismissive replies from NYT posters. I've argued that the concept of preventing predation is FAR removed from popular morals. I think that there is no chance that even 5% of the general population are convinced to prevent predation any time in the next 20 years. To common people, intervention in nature for the welfare of animals is not only immoral, it is absurd.

I was depressed by the complete and total failure to engage with Jeff's arguments on anything resembling a rational level, not by that fact that people were dismissive.

Utilitymonster, I agree that intellectual level of response was generally poor.
But set in a wider context, the publication of Jeff McMahan's NYT piece is encouraging. "The Meat Eaters" is a landmark: the first essay in a mainstream print publication openly calling for predation to be phased out. Print-publication makes it easier for other sympathetic people to "come out" and do the same without being branded lone cranks.
[ Any researcher worth his or her salt enjoys occasionally being controversial. Few enjoy being laughed at
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology ... re_bad.php ]

What's needed now, I think, is a book-length scholarly treatment of the future of carnivorous predators - and the issue of wild animal suffering in general.

Dave

I think Ryan's right that focusing too much on issues we can't realistically hope to influence is counterproductive. It's easy to accuse those saying 'it's impossible' of ignoring McMahan's caveat, but I'm not sure they're the ones missing the point. Is it really worth putting work-hours into saying 'if x weren't false, it would imply y'? That's a typical philosophers' stereotype, and one that utilitarians should abhor succumbing to.

Given that so many of the knee-jerk responses are variations on the 'it's impossible' theme, it seems like the main requirement for public acceptance of the idea is simply proof-of-concept, so why enrol for a Sisyphean struggle until then?

The worst source of severe and avoidable suffering in the world today is factory farming. Its abolition should presumably be an overriding priority. But I still think utilitarians should articulate our long-term goal of reducing / abolishing predation - and wild animal suffering in general - even if the timescale is many decades and even centuries distant. Not least, some of the issues are topical right now. Thus should we support captive breeding programs for predators, "rewilding" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewilding_ ... on_biology) ] and similar initiatives in so-called conservation biology?

Clearly I'd say no; but this needs to be argued. More generally, the greater our perceived complicity in suffering, the more readily an audience is prepared to question its necessity - and our perceived complicity in "wild" animal suffering is steadily going to increase over the next few decades.

Something that just occurred to me - maybe it's a mistake to treat this as an umbrella topic. Some predators seem obviously more harmful than others, generally because they're parasitic or just less quick to kill their victims, for whatever reason. Some charming examples that spring to mind:

Ichneumonid Wasps: 'When the wasp hatches from the egg it starts to eat the body of the caddis fly larva. However, it does no eat the nervous system, as it does not want to kill the caddis larva. Only once the caddis larva has fixed its case to a stone to prepare for pupation will the wasp kill it by eating all the caddis larva.'

Sacculina Carcini: 'The female Sacculina punches numerous holes in the neutered crab's body so that male barnacles can get in and fertilize its eggs. Once that's accomplished, the tendrils take over the crab's nervous system, making it autonomously guard, care for and clean the parasitic egg sac as if it were its own. And once they hatch, a repeat performance is in order.'

Killer Whales: 'As much as six hours may pass from initial attack to kill with ramming, biting, pulling on the pectoral fins, and attempts to separate the mother from the calf.'

(this one might be a less popular, but it meets the criteria) Domestic cats: 'We admire their magnificent beauty, strength and agility. But we would regard their notional human counterparts as wanton psychopaths of the worst kind.'

Why not discuss eradicating/vegetarianising some or all of these species as a priority? That would postpone or at least mitigate the question of serious ecological damage, other predatory species that just got on with killing relatively quickly would still be around to pick up the shortfall.

Arepo:
Interesting suggestion. These deaths would plausibly be more painful than alternative predators, but still I don't know how they compare with starvation and disease. Before we know that I'm not sure it would be justified even in those extreme cases.

Now to refine my position a little,
1. Predation is mostly a cruel and terrible thing. If predation can be reduced, it should be
2. We are not able to efficiently reduce predation today. The goal of an article like McMahon's is to convince us that could predation be reduced, we should to it.
3. At a later date, it may be possible to reduce predation efficiently. There are few benefits to convincing the public about predation before action becomes possible*.
4. However, it is reasonable to write literature in favour of the predation of animals and to distribute it among particularly interested groups.

focusing too much on issues we can't realistically hope to influence is counterproductive

This is the key concern.
My concern is that trying to persuade others of things that they regard to be crazy is not only inefficient use of one's time, but it reduces one's credibility. If you succeed in this act of persuasion, you may recover esteem by becoming seen as ahead of your time. But on a topic such as wild animal predation where you cannot expect results for many decades, this is little consolation.

*benefits will not directly improve the lives of wild animals. Benefits may arise indirectly out of conveying the impression that we are acting: "the greater our perceived complicity in suffering, the more readily an audience is prepared to question its necessity"

Perhaps compare in vitro meat.
The horrors of factory farming and industrialized killing are going on right now. Should activists and researchers run the risk of wasting time and credibility by promoting a technological solution that is decades away? Just what rate of time-discounting is a utilitarian supposed to use? For what it's worth, I think an organization like New Harvest
http://www.new-harvest.org/
can potentially play a critical role in the global transition to a cruelty-free diet - even though its immediate impact may be negligible.

Clearly, phasing out the cruelties of Nature is a more ambitious goal than replacing meat from intact animals with its cruelty-free counterpart. But if the ethical consensus existed, then technically such a project could probably be carried though to completion in a century or so. IMO Jeff McMahan's NYT article is just the start.

Jesper Östman wrote:Arepo:
Interesting suggestion. These deaths would plausibly be more painful than alternative predators, but still I don't know how they compare with starvation and disease. Before we know that I'm not sure it would be justified even in those extreme cases.

Jesper, it's not that I think the deaths would be replaced by disease and starvation (which intuitively seem possibly the worst way to die to me), but that rather that if there are other predators who just get on with killing and eating their prey, they would expand to take over the predation. Inevitably it would still have a profound effect on the ecosystem, but it should be a less drastic one than just removing all predators, and with the benefit that the grazers wouldn't expand recklessly until they'd consumed the local flora.

I think it will be impossible to reduce suffering in the world without:
1. Scientific knowledge
2. Technology
3. Moral acceptation


IMO it's very important to promote a moral acceptation for ethical interventions in the wild for two reasons:

1. It's very possible that there will be scientific knowledge and technology that make possible those interventions in a future, but not the moral acceptation. So interventions in the wild there will be done later, and a lot of suffering won't be avoided.

2. A promotion of ethical interventions in the wild, with articles like McMahan's, makes easier the development of useful scientific knowledge and technology. If more people speak about this issue, it's easier that scientifics research about it.

On a related note, a friend passed along this interesting piece by Mark Bekoff: "Conservation and compassion: First do no harm." While probably not a utilitarian, Bekoff does at least suggest baby steps in the direction of caring about wild-animal suffering. For instance, I appreciated this statement:

I would argue that we need to focus on solutions that advocate the well-being of individual animals and not allow them to be harmed or killed for the good of their own or other species.

The piece further links to a conference on "Compassionate Conservation" with a number of interesting talks.

If that's reasonable to expect, then I agree it seems like positive intervention.

As for the simplistic comments at the NYT site, I think they were to be expected. The interesting debates are those taking place in serious blogs and sites, such as the ones linked above.

Regarding the idea that focusing too much on issues we can't realistically hope to influence might be counterproductive, I'd say that the issue of wild-animal suffering is so important that even if we do not seem to make progress we must focus on it 0.000001% success in cause A is much preferable to 100% success in cause B if A produces more than 10^8 times the value B produces.

Another point I'd like to mention, I don't think I agree with focusing in those predators that cause more harm. In fact, I don't even think that our main target should be predation itself, even though addressing the predation issue helps raising the idea of intervening in nature. AFAIK, we have strong reasons to believe that the main way to reduce suffering in nature is by reducing the number of r-selected individuals that come to existence. r-selected animals are those who have huge progenies with extremely low chances of surviving. (Most animals are r-selected).

There are several ways to do this. Killing these animals is not one of them, since they would be substitued by others. Reducing the carrying capacity for them in ecosystems is a key one. This means turning the places in which they live (their biotopes) less able to support them (mainly, by reducing the amount of food available in them).

Thanks for the comments, Oscar! I agree with each of your points.

Can you remind me why you think it is, all-things-considered, bad for these r-selected animals to exist? I understand the case for caring about their well-being, but why think the expectation of their well-being is negative?

Good question, utilitymonster.

The intuition is that death tends to be painful, so that the fewer years (or, for many insects, weeks) of life you get beforehand, the worse is your balance of possibly-happy life against painful death. So in general, one expects longer lifespans to be better.

Of course, this is speaking just in terms of adult lifespans. What's more important with r-vs.-K selection is that r-selected species have vast numbers of offspring that don't even reach adulthood -- almost all the children die (perhaps painfully) soon after birth. So the expected lifespan for a random individual born to an r-selected species could be just a few days.

Yew-Kwang Ng makes a related theoretical argument in his "Toward Welfare Biology" paper. I tried to summarize it in section 4 of this piece.

One central issue in the wild animal suffering question is that of the harm of death vs. the harm of suffering.

If death is a Great Harm, two thousand freshly hatched tadpoles quickly dying (except for one or two of them) means two thousand (minus a few) Great Harms. If death is No Harm At All, as I believe (with a few qualifications), then the issue is whether and how much they suffer.

The plight of wild animals seems hopeless if death is a Great Harm...

David

Alan, that seems like a good reason to think that r-selected animals would have less average well-being than other animals. It seems like much weaker evidence that r-selected animals have negative well-being.

I think McMahan answered his own question by suggesting that if predators became vegetarians, populations of other species would increase until a much larger population was constantly (or frequently) in a state of starvation. The desire to stop some visible forms of suffering should not lead philosophers to overlook the extreme difficulty of micromanaging the behaviors of every predator. Perhaps the focus is on lions and tigers and bears, but remember that most fish in the oceans eat little critters, and converting them via genetic engineering does not sound feasible or responsible.

rehoot, it's true that if just predators became vegetarians, there would be probably *more* suffering. But this is an example of naive intervention. As you say, managing the behaviors of predators is extremely difficult.

I don't know what is the best solution about this problem, but I think we must not give a solution already. I hope than future more-knowledged humans can do something about.

On the other hand, McMahan and other authors (Sapontzis, Fink, Pearce...) wrote interesting essays about this issue, but I think they focus on predation a lot. Predation isn't the only reason of wild-animal suffering, so I prefer the Alan Dawrst's approach: www.utilitarian-essays.com/wild-animals.pdf

Traditionally the issue of a non-speciesist attitude towards wild animals has been framed as being about predation; perhaps as a response to those who use the "saving the rabbit from the fox" reductio against animal liberation and the animal liberation requirement for renouncing meat, that is for humans to end their predation. But I think that Alan Dawrst's approach of speaking about wild animal suffering generally is original and right. Death from disease or starvation is just as bad, and perhaps, often worse, than death from predation.

However, I disagree with the idea put forward by Alan, Peter Singer before him, and here Daniel Dorado and others that any intervention against predation today is unthinkable, because there is such a probability that it will backfire catastrophically. Peter Singer (quoted in Alan's piece) said:

for practical purposes I am fairly sure, judging from man's past record of attempts to mold nature to his own aims, that we would be more likely to increase the net amount of animal suffering if we interfered with wildlife, than to decrease it. Lions play a role in the ecology of their habitat, and we cannot be sure what the long-term consequences would be if we were to prevent them from killing gazelles. [...] So, in practice, I would definitely say that wildlife should be left alone.

This is often repeated, but I have never seen any supporting evidence, except for a few examples, always the same, like that of an island where the deer had no more predators and suffered a population explosion and then famine. I don't think that there is any general biological law that says that a species always needs a predator to control its population. If there was, why doesn't it apply to the predators themselves? Who is the predator of the wolves?

It is probable that in some cases the danger of a population explosion is real, and in others not. Things have to be judged on a case-by-case basis.

More generally, "man's past record of attempts to mold nature to his own aims" does not give good evidence about what could be done if we attempted to intervene for benevolent purposes. I mean, in the past human intervention has generally been done for greed, or at best for purely human aims. The success or failure of those attempts must be judged on their own terms, that is against their own aims. It is not surprising, for instance, that interventions that were not conceived to benefit wild animals didn't benefit them. Generally those interventions were a success on their own terms. Sometimes they went wrong - on their own terms - but certainly that is a minority of the cases.

Of course things any intervention would have to be thought out with due care, but I see no a priori reason to believe, for instance, that we should not encourage the disappearance of some birds of prey that are already on the verge of extinction.

I think we should shed a lot of our preconceptions about the harmonies of nature ("Lions play a role in the ecology of their habitat"). A good read is Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies, which for me was an eye-opener.

Hi David. Thank you for the feedback.

I agree with you about things being judged on a case-by-case basis. And I don't see any harmony of nature. Nature is more a hell.

David Olivier wrote:It is not surprising, for instance, that interventions that were not conceived to benefit wild animals didn't benefit them. Generally those interventions were a success on their own terms. Sometimes they went wrong - on their own terms - but certainly that is a minority of the cases.

I agree. But can we expect that most interventions will be conceived to benefit wild animals in this speciesist society? I don't think so. Most interventions will be done to benefit humans, so they will not improve the interventionist curriculum.

The Peter Singer's quote is very conservative, and I wouldn't say that any intervention in the wild will have negative consequences. I think that neutering predators reduces suffering in some cases, but not in others. We can support some good interventions in the wild now; this shows that interventions in the wild is not a sci-fi thing. But I think the best that we can do isn't this, but to promote anti-speciesism and the "wild-animal suffering meme".

If wild animals lives aren't worth living, it may be possible that an attempt at making them worth living would make it worse still, but if that happens, we could just kill 'em all, in which case it's still better than it is now.

It just occured to me that "reducing carrying capacity" needn't be as brutal and un-intuitive as it might seem prima facie. After all, it is precisely that almost all current vegans and vegetarians advocate when it comes to farm-animals. Also, we needn't exterminate any species, after all, reduction by 99% of a species which overwhelmingly suffers or causes suffering is 99% as good as elimination

Another thing: the otherwise somewhat bleak predictions of Robin Hanson about what an economy with copy-able artificial intelligence labor would look like may be a very good thing for the wild animals (if they are below zero). A humanity of uploads which has no need for the ecosystem for their survival and who live close to subsistence level would likely use all or most of the resources for their own needs, destroying most or all of the ecosystem.

On Hanson's predictions, see:
http://cafehayek.com/2011/01/robin-hans ... arity.html
http://hanson.gmu.edu/