sorry i know i posted before but i dunno who else can point me in the right direction.

so im 17, i love dancing, rescue, adventuring, the wilderness, love, and above all making the most happiness i can and stopping the most suffering i can, in 2 years if i want to go to college ill be filling out the form for which course i want to do.

so whats most imporatant to me is making the most happiness i can and stopping the most suffering i can

so for that i need to know what can suffer and what can be happy

im researching about insects at the moment but ive read people saying they can and others who say they cant and im really kinda confused.

then if insects can suffer theres absolutely loads of them living in the wild who maybe suffer a lot but maybe that suffering is neccesary?

but then what ive been thinking lately whatever i eat and do thsoe resources have to come from somewhere and they wont be available for some other animal, surely whatever i do im taking from something

then once i know what can suffer and what can be happy i think i need to learn and know about all the things causing major suffering and happiness, this course looks cool but doesnt include animals which is a massive part of what i need to learn about http://www.ucc.ie/en/study/undergrad/wh ... oodpolicy/

i think id burn out in a "get rich and give" job and id prefer not to be what id feel is kinda just taking money from people when they could be convinced to donate it instead and also i have very very serious doubts about how possible it actually is to get into one of these jobs.

i think humans are basically good (maybe niavely) and that when they're inspired and educated they'll come to utilitarian conclusions so i think education is vital and i like debating and im good at it and politics has always interested me and because i live in ireland (it seems unlikely i could get elected in a country im not native to) its not too hard to get elected because its small and i could change policy and educate people because i could become a listened to public figure and also theres oppourtunity to make change at a european and global level and to influence the leaders of other countries.

(obviously im not garunteed any job in politics so id work in rescue before or if i didnt get elected)

but i dunno, i imagine myself leading a revolution in a poor country more than as a politician,

but to know if thats whats really needed i need to know first like i was saying:


1: what beings can suffer and what beings can be happy? (insects?, etc)

2: what are all things causing major happiness and suffering (wild animal suffering really possible to stop?, etc)

3: where can i learn about the above

4: however i live am i denying other beings the things i consume? (food, etc)

sorry for rambling completely and any advice on what you think i should do with my life would be great thanks

EDIT: also where is the evidence that more direct benifitters arn't needed also?

I know you've already read the other relevant threads, Ruairi, but for everyone else's sake, here they are: College for a Utilitarian
Utilitarian Careers

> Don't rush! You've still got two years to decide. That's a long time. If you don't know yet, that's ok. I certainly didn't!
> Back then, I did know something though. I knew that eventually, I would decide what I wanted to do. And I wanted to have as many options as possible for that moment. Wanting that freedom was enough to drive me to work hard. In the end, I was so grateful that I had worked hard, because I needed every mark I could find to get into medicine: Good marks keep your options open!

Since you care about happiness and suffering, though, we should get more specific. Lots of people who are smarter than me have looked into this in more detail than me. Noone knows for sure, but so many people believe in getting money and donating it... I can see how you feel reluctant about making lots of money. If I were you, I would think about where that feeling comes from. Analysing your strongly held beliefs is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it's tough. You have to be patient - you may not find the answers straight away - but it's usually helpful in the long run.

Adding to RyanCarey's comments, I think making money can be a good idea because it keeps your options open (just like earning good grades does while you're in school). If you make money and then change your mind about your life course, you haven't wasted your time, but if you spend years training for a subject area that you later decide is inefficient to study, then you have wasted that time. Making money gives you more time to decide. However, this doesn't mean you should necessarily intend to be a professional donor for life unless that approach suits you.

Your questions about animals are dead-on with my own thoughts on the matter. I have a page of references to research articles on the question of insect sentience, although you're right that the topic demands further study. I completely agree that the huge number of insects pushes this issue near the top of the priority list.

That said, because I doubt insects have lives worth living, I don't think it's necessarily bad to kill them (especially if we can do it less painfully than the ways in which they would die naturally). And preventing them from existing is even better. So, if spraying crop fields with pesticides prevents lots of insect lives (due to lower insect densities on sprayed crop fields than in wild grasslands or forests), then pesticides could be net beneficial. And in that case, consuming plant food -- far from "denying other beings" -- could be a good thing. This is all speculative, of course, but it's my best guess at the moment.

As I suggest in the end of this piece, I do think that one of the best actions we can take to help wild animals now is not to intervene directly in the wild but, instead, to promote the moral notion that "The pain endured by a fish afflicted with parasites or a rat swallowed alive by a snake is no more tolerable than the 'natural' suffering of humans due to malaria, cancer, or starvation." The goal here is to increase the chance that future human technology is used to reduce wild-animal suffering rather than to vastly expand it.

There are lots of ways to advance the meme that we have a responsibility to prevent the suffering of wild animals: Blogging, having discussions with friends, posting on forums, writing articles, creating videos, and so on. Beyond that, I donate to Vegan Outreach because I think this is an efficient way to convert money into increased concern for animal suffering in general (if not yet for wild animals specifically). Finally, if you did go into politics, you might consider trying to increase funding for animal-welfare research (a good portion of which is funded by government agencies, including the studies on invertebrate welfare, I think).

Good luck with these decisions, and don't hesitate to keep asking questions on this forum.

Excellent comments from Ryan and Alan about not rushing, working hard and the freedom that the 'get rich and give' path gives you.

Did you watch the youtube videos that utilitymonster linked you to r.e. Giving What We Can on High-Impact Careers? The speakers in that talk are planning to develop a "High Impact Careers" organisation out of it, probably starting in October, in Oxford, then hopefully spreading. The aim would be to not only spread these rather atypical ideas about ethical careers, but to support and advise people who want to pursue a high-impact career, be that professional donorship, politics, research etc. So watch this space!

thanks guys so much!:D!

yup ive watched those videos thanks

very good points about freedom and stuff but apart from school i do a lot of other stuff with my time, 5 hours of first aid and rescue training every week and loads more if we're doing first aid cover for a sporting event or something on the weekend, also when i turn 18 ill hopefully be joining my local cliff rescue team which will be another 2 hours a week probably, also i train physically almost every day which probably takes an average of 45 minutes to an hour and a half and then i love going out my friends so i was trying to work this stuff out while im out of school for the summer because i dont wanna work harder than i have to because if i do other areas of my life will suffer for it :/ also i dont like school or studying for school.

ok so what are your thoughts on this \/\/\/\/\/\/\/

1. all animals can suffer + animal lives in nature have net positive utility

2. all animals can suffer + animal lives in nature have net negative utility

3. some animals (insects, etc) cant suffer + anmal lives in nature have net positive utility

4. some animals (insects, etc) cant suffer + animal lives in nature have net negative utility

but if their lives had net negative utility wouldn't there be loads of animal suicide?

if 3 is true then i think we should not eat animals and just eat plants because were not causing suffering that way

if 1 is true then i think we should try to leave animals alone as much as we can but thats completely impossible because we can either eat animals or plants that the pesticides used to grow will kill animals and the plants will then not be available for other animals to eat. if 1 is true whatever actions i take seem completely irrelevant and pointless (from a utilitarian point of view) , i could try to alleviate poverty but that will ultimately lead to more animal suffering. and i see it as being pretty much the same with whatever i would do. the only really utilitarian path i see is donating to somewhere doing research into future possibilities of dramatically changing nature so there isn't as much suffering, but to be honest id say thats a long way away and also given humanities track record with intervening in nature we better be VERY VERY CAREFUL

ive missed loadsa your questions ill try answer them now thank you very very much again!:D!

I'm inclined to go with 2 but I could very well be wrong.

Animals don't commit suicide because 1) They are evolutionarily programmed not to and (less importantly) 2) The worst pain for a lot of animals is probably while they're dying anyway. Also, do animals really understand the concept of suicide? Can you imagine any of them reasoning that because they're suffering a lot, they should go and jump of a cliff, because this will cause this thing to happen to them that's like sleep but never waking up and thus no more suffering? No, they think, "I've fallen from a height before...and it bloody hurt."

so if you're inclined to go with 2 should we kill as many animals as we can until we have found a way to change nature so that the net utility is positive?

i agree that maybe they cant imagine the idea of suicide (although i just did a quick google search and it seems maybe it is possible). but i was thinking would evolution keep their utility above 0 because if it didnt they'd commit suicide and that wouldn't be good for their reproduction but then like you were saying perhaps they're just programmed to not kill themselves regardless of how happy they are

Well this is they key point. Evolution makes non-human animals want to survive. My suspicion is that they have horrible lives, and evolution makes them terrified of death. So I suspect 2. Evolution makes them want to survive despite their shit lives. But it's also plausible that Evolution could make them enjoy their shit lives, so that they wouldn't suicide.

Having said all of that, it seems possible that philosophy will not inform us at all about this question. Instead, perhaps we ought to try living with these non-human animals, studying their behaviour and so on, until we have a scientific understanding of their consciousness.

Also, if you think about the issue more deeply, 2 doesn't necessarily imply that we should kill wild animals. The killing itself will cause suffering. Afterwards, the animals might repopulate to resume suffering. Going out and killing animals could undermine a wider public relations message of animal welfare. And so on...

Evolution uses a carrot and a stick. If you had little experience of living a life as an evolved being, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that evolution uses both in equal measure. But, for whatever reason, the threat of pain seems a more powerful motivator than the promise of pleasure (perhaps because we can experience more intense pain than we can pleasure, though it's not clear why this is the case). So evolution uses the stick more.

It probably would be a good idea to shoot wild animals in the head (or, even better, make them unconscious painlessly then kill them), without letting any know you're doing it, if you have nothing better to do. Yes, the food web pretty much balances out eventually anyway but the likelihood is that you've done some good because that animal would have probably otherwise experienced a far more painful death.

it seems to me like it is impossible for us to be effective utilitarians until we know which animals can suffer and whether their lives in nature are good or not good. what do you guys think?

how can i help this kind of research take place do you know?

thanks

I think this is an absolutely vital question for utilitarians.

Science!

yea its massive!:D!! is there anywhere they're researching this stuff that i can donate to?:)

Oh I thought you meant in the long run. Hence, study science. Otherwise, keep your money for yourself to fund yourself one day

fund myself as a scientist? sorry im confused :s

Lol I meant more that, if you don't find a research group/charity/whatever that's doing what you want them to be doing, save your money for now. One day you might need it to fund your own research if you do end up becoming some sort of scientist or fund some other utilitarian project that you're doing. Or you'll at least have a better idea of where's a good place to give it when you're a bit older and have found out more.

cool thank you !

LadyMorgana wrote:save your money for now. One day you might need it to fund your own research if you do end up becoming some sort of scientist or fund some other utilitarian project that you're doing.

Yes, exactly.

It's a shame that there isn't an organization with the mission of researching which animals can suffer and whether wild animals have lives worth living. I've considered doing that research myself at some point in the future, once I have enough money to fund myself for a long time. In other words, if you wait 10 years, I might create the type of organization you're looking for.

Another approach is to find professors / graduate students doing research on related topics and encourage them to move in the directions we're interested in. If necessary, offer grants to incentivize the shift of focus. Unfortunately, doing this takes a lot of time, and if you give the money informally, the donations aren't tax-deductible. Ideally, my proposed future organization would fund these grants, so that donors wouldn't need to know the details and could deduct the donations from taxes.

LadyMorgana wrote:I'm inclined to go with 2 but I could very well be wrong.

Animals don't commit suicide because 1) They are evolutionarily programmed not to and (less importantly) 2) The worst pain for a lot of animals is probably while they're dying anyway. Also, do animals really understand the concept of suicide? Can you imagine any of them reasoning that because they're suffering a lot, they should go and jump of a cliff, because this will cause this thing to happen to them that's like sleep but never waking up and thus no more suffering? No, they think, "I've fallen from a height before...and it bloody hurt."

I couldn't have said it better, LadyMorgana. I agree with everything you wrote above!

cool thanks guys so do you think it would be best to get rich and fund this research? or i could become a scientist and research it, but not without funding probably... that doesnt seem as effective. but does it seem likely that we'll ever actually be able to alter nature in this kind of way?

Well, focus on gettin rich. Decide what to do with the money later. The "Get Rich" path to improving the world is wonderfully malleable like that!

I love it when you read a post and agree with everything written. I also love it when someone you look up to reads your post and agrees with everything written

so do you guys think pretty much all wild prey animals live unhappy lives? which animals should we try and stop suffering and which should we just try and prevent from existing?

on another point:

"But it's also plausible that Evolution could make them enjoy their shit lives, so that they wouldn't suicide."

but if they enjoy their lives then they're happy YAY! maybe they just dont look at death the same way modern humans do, i like to read about primitive human tribes and i dunno if they have quite the same view of death, maybe because we're living in times when we have made death so preventable in humans we think of animal lives as terrible, and maybe they are, maybe with future technologies we will do to animal lives what has happened to human lives from primitive times to now.

but have these "advances" really made humans happy?

and would they make animals happy? evolution makes us suited to certain things and when you move outside those things (zoos, unnatural environments, etc) it makes very unhappy animals

I personally would want at least 1-2 years of happy life in order outweigh the pain of a death by typical means in the wild. So even if animals are happy during life (which I find dubious), I suspect that most of them have lives not worth living overall. For many species (esp. fish, insects, etc.), mature animals live less than 1-2 years (see p. 10 here); if you also count the vast numbers of offspring that die shortly after birth, the average is probably on the order of weeks or days.

I expect many big, long-lived animals could have worthwhile lives -- e.g., lions, and tiger, and bears. But compared with 10^18 insects, these are a tiny fraction of all animals on earth....

I don't think an animal's "view of death" makes its life miserable. It's just that, well, being eaten alive or killed by disease hurts.

Yeah, I think naive attempts to improve wild-animal lives (besides preventing them altogether) could backfire. The kinds of technological interventions that I imagine would require superintelligent AI and so won't be ready any time soon.

I do suspect that most humans are better off now than when life was "nasty, brutish, and short," but perhaps not too much better off, because of the hedonic treadmill. David Pearce is right that the only way to achieve much greater happiness is to re-engineer our emotional architecture entirely.

i have very serious doubts that life was "nasty, brutish and short" .

so what do you think we should do? leave big non-prey animals alone and do our best to not make the other ones exist.

to me it all seems increasingly pointless, we dont understand enough and even when we do the nature of evolution doesn't lead to happiness

thats a cool link thanks, i dont have time to read it all now but thats the kinda thing im leaning towards

David Pearce is awesome. Just watch the first minute or so of him here and you'll see why.

Ruairi wrote:i have very serious doubts that life was "nasty, brutish and short" .

Oh, why? Surely it was short (life expectancy of 25-40 years). And it was often brutish, as Steven Pinker observes. I guess the "nasty" part is debatable, but I don't think I'd want to have such a life.

Ruairi wrote:so what do you think we should do? leave big non-prey animals alone and do our best to not make the other ones exist.

In the short term, we can favor ecosystems with a few big animals over lots of smaller animals. We can also favor elimination of animal habitats in ways that prevent future animals from being born. (Indeed, when we destroy natural habitats for our own use, this is a special case of "big animals replacing smaller animals.")

Ruairi wrote:to me it all seems increasingly pointless, we dont understand enough and even when we do the nature of evolution doesn't lead to happiness

Why pointless? We do the best we can with what we know. Given how many animals there are, we should be enspirited to think how much suffering we can prevent for so little effort on our part.

It's exactly right that evolution doesn't lead to happiness, but that's why humans should replace evolution with something more humane. In the words of Princess Leia, humans may be the "only hope" for the billions of billions of animals that would otherwise suffer in quiet misery for the next few billion years.

haha i always try and shepherd the flies out the window

the primitive tribes i read about often have life expectancies of up to 50 or 60 years and it is always remarked upon how happy they are, occasionally one of them will get eaten by a jaguar but i just meant to say that their lives dont seem quite like people think (although i dunno if im being biased here cause im into evolutionary fitness and stuff http://movnat.com/ )

pointless because we dont know yet which animals can suffer and whether or not they have happy lives and i feel like taking action is just flailing in the dark and regardless of which animals can suffer and which animals have happy lives i dont see anything really working except changing the nature of evolution, the nature of nature.

i havn't watched the whole of that video yet but hes deadly thanks very much for the link id be very interested in any other things like that

thanks so much for the help guys !

as i listen to more of David Pearce hes super awesome but im just think "ugh this isnt gonna work, we're messing with nature...this never works"

Yeah, I'm much more pessimistic than Dave. I agree that messing with nature often leads to disaster. It's definitely possible that it could work in principle, and if we develop super-intelligent AI, it might happen. However, I expect that if wild suffering is eliminated, it will likely be just by eliminating nature itself.

so then would you agree the appropriate action for a utilitarian to take would be either to make loadsa money and donate it to research on which beings can suffer and which lives in nature are happy and then with the information that comes as a result of that research will be able to take further action and also i think we must put loadsa resources into the kinda stuff david pearce is talking about because it seems quite possible this may be the only thing that can really stop suffering and make happiness?

because these things simply dwarf other problems would you agree?

also can bacteria suffer?

also can bacteria suffer?

No. And if they do I simply don't care, my mind can't care about things that small and I'd go mad trying to do so. Also, it violates everything I know (or thought I knew) about consciousness and how it and suffering might arise.

Also, to chime in on the "more study is needed to know what suffers thing", actually this may not be optimal. What are we going to do differently if we find out that insects do suffer in the near future? Maybe use nice insecticides, but that seems highly unlikely. It seems like the large scale strategies (most likely destroying nature) would be likely to work whether we knew what suffered or not. If we know that, say, all vertebrates suffer, then we can destroy nature or whatever without knowing if insects do. And the tech we might develop along the way would probably allow us to settle the question much more effectively.

And if they do I simply don't care, my mind can't care about things that small

Seriously? I'm sure you don't mean that your mind can't care about things that small in size, maybe you meant suffering that small in scale? In which case, I'd point out that just because a creature is physically smaller it doesn't necessarily mean that it suffers less (would a giant suffer more than me when it breaks a leg?)

Also, it violates everything I know (or thought I knew) about consciousness and how it and suffering might arise.

It's not too implausible to imagine a very basic creature having the capacity to suffer e.g. a tiny animal who's only senses are detecting when light gets brighter or less bright and feeling pain when it's crushed.

What are we going to do differently if we find out that insects do suffer in the near future?

Favour replacing habitats with lots of insects with habitats with a few big animals (so this affects our decisions about whether a new farm is a good thing); nice insecticides, as you say; blow up the world if we'd previously thought that sentient beings have, on the whole, good lives, and insect suffering tips the balance; squash that spider that your kid's screaming about rather than take it outside; unpredictable decisions that will be the result of considerable advances in technology etc.

It's not too implausible to imagine a very basic creature having the capacity to suffer e.g. a tiny animal who's only senses are detecting when light gets brighter or less bright and feeling pain when it's crushed.

The animal you're describing presumably still has neurons and is multi-cellular. The bacteria has neither of those characteristics.

Favour replacing habitats with lots of insects with habitats with a few big animals (so this affects our decisions about whether a new farm is a good thing); nice insecticides, as you say; blow up the world if we'd previously thought that sentient beings have, on the whole, good lives, and insect suffering tips the balance; squash that spider that your kid's screaming about rather than take it outside; unpredictable decisions that will be the result of considerable advances in technology etc.

Okay, you're right. My idea was a little half-baked. Hereby rescind opinion, thanks for correction.

when you say destroy nature do you mean just evrything? cause although then there'd be no suffering i dont wanna do that cause there be no happiness.

any agree or disagree with my post about the appropriate action for utilitarians to take?:)

i know what you mean about when i think about tiny organisms, its just mind numbing

The animal you're describing presumably still has neurons and is multi-cellular. The bacteria has neither of those characteristics.

Sorry - yes, you're very probably right in the case of bacteria! (For some reason, I don't think I was thinking about bacteria when I last posted, even though that's what we were talking about.)

when you say destroy nature do you mean just evrything? cause although then there'd be no suffering i dont wanna do that cause there be no happiness.

What are you suggesting instead, just eradicating all wild, non-human animals? Personally, I'm not too sure that humans lives are worth living on the whole in today's world. But that's just me, I don't think most utilitarians doubt this as strongly as I do. The difference arises probably because I put the neutral line (neither happy nor suffering, morally equivalent to not existing) at the point where someone couldn't decide between being conscious or unconscious, not at the point where someone couldn't decide between suicide or continuing to live. E.g. if I'm feeling really tired/annoyed/carsick, then I'd rather be unconscious through those periods of time (by unconscious here I mean, imagining that my body could still continue, automa-like, but without me having to go through those experiences), and thus I see my well-being as negative for those periods in utilitarian terms.

any agree or disagree with my post about the appropriate action for utilitarians to take?:)

Yeah I think I agree with you. Other possible things we should support with our time and money above others:
(i) reducing existential risk - even if you're 90% sure that the world should just die out, likelihood is that we'll have a much better idea of whether sentient life should exist on earth or not a few centuries into the future, and it's worth making sure we get this far because the potential cost of the world ending now is so huge...I haven't explained that very well, oh well
(ii) more general things like promoting utilitarian thinking, studying ethics more thoroughly to be more certain about what the correct moral theory is (or to know more about how you act given uncertainty about what the correct moral theory is!)

agree 100% with the other thinhs you think we should support

i agree with your definition of when you consider yourself to be happy/unhappy too , i think i just dont like the idea of there being no life because i invest a lot of time into making me happy and im real good at it

Cool!

i think i just dont like the idea of there being no life because i invest a lot of time into making me happy and im real good at it

You're gonna die one day. So maybe it's easier to think of these issues in terms of how the world should be after you're dead anyway?

I've got really good at making myself happy too (it's called Prozac ) and it definitely makes the idea of there being no life at all seem less appealing!

Ruairi wrote:so then would you agree the appropriate action for a utilitarian to take would be either to make loadsa money and donate it to research on which beings can suffer and which lives in nature are happy and then with the information that comes as a result of that research will be able to take further action

Yep.

Ruairi wrote:because these things simply dwarf other problems would you agree?

Exactly.

Gedusa wrote:If we know that, say, all vertebrates suffer, then we can destroy nature or whatever without knowing if insects do. And the tech we might develop along the way would probably allow us to settle the question much more effectively.

That's not a bad point. It could be that other things are slightly more important, e.g., studying which environmental policies prevent the most suffering in nature, and promoting concern for wild animals as a social value.

On the other hand, studying what it means for something to suffer is extremely valuable not just with respect to insects but also with respect to assessing the likelihood that AIs will create massive amounts of computational suffering (either deliberately or, more worrying, by running instrumentally useful calculations).

LadyMorgana wrote:I'd point out that just because a creature is physically smaller it doesn't necessarily mean that it suffers less (would a giant suffer more than me when it breaks a leg?)

I'm not totally decided on the question, actually; see our discussion on sentience and brain size. Still, I do feel moral concern for suffering worms out of proportion to their number of ganglia.

Isabella in Measure for Measure had something to say about the topic: "And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, / In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies."

LadyMorgana wrote:and it's worth making sure we get this far because the potential cost of the world ending now is so huge

True, but we need to be sure that future humans make responsible decisions when they do acquire more knowledge and technological sophistication. As an extreme example, if the world were inhabited by suffering-maximizers, then we wouldn't want to save the world for a few more centuries in order for its inhabitants to become smarter. This is why I think it's so important to work toward making our descendants care about not multiplying suffering in the wild....

As an extreme example, if the world were inhabited by suffering-maximizers, then we wouldn't want to save the world for a few more centuries in order for its inhabitants to become smarter.

The assumption is that the longer the human race continues, the more intelligent it becomes, including moral intelligence. I've heard an interesting theory that purports to explain the Fermi paradox: once a civilisation becomes advanced enough to travel long distances through space, it's also become intelligent enough to realise that its existence is a bad thing, and so wipes itself out. This doesn't really work though, because surely they'd want to wipe out as many other civilisations as possible first.

I am very very interested in this question of where a utilitarian should focus her time and money. Of course it depends how influential the utilitarian in question is - if she has total political power then she'd probably want to bring about a combination of various meme-spreading, research and action. As a relatively uninfluential individual, she should probably focus on one thing, right?

Which? Promoting utilitarianism/greater concern for animal welfare/attaching proper weight to big numbers? Or funding animal sentience research/x-risk research/research into abolishing suffering/anti-ageing research? Etc.

The sentience and brain size discussion is extremely interesting - as you can probably tell, I was completely unaware of any scientific evidence supporting the idea that smaller animals feel less in virtue of being smaller.

I'm currently leaning towards the idea that I should focus on promoting concern for non-human suffering. More research into the nature of suffering could be a good way to do this, as well as having its own merits.

...but the big problem we face is that the pool of people where we might initially expect to gain our largest support from on this project is actually probably the source of our strongest opponents...because research into non-human suffering is probably going to involve a lot of testing on animals, and animal welfare activists tend to not be too keen on this...

LadyMorgana wrote:The assumption is that the longer the human race continues, the more intelligent it becomes, including moral intelligence.

Got it. However, unlike David Pearce, I don't think that superintelligence implies superempathy. Our particular moral concerns are essentially arbitrary, and there's no a priori reason to think they'll be preserved. (See, e.g., my and Gedusa's discussion with Arepo here.)

It is empirically true that "the arc of history bends toward justice" (where by "justice" I mean an expanded circle of moral concern for the welfare of others), although it's hard to say how much of this is a selection effect. (The current generation always feels that it has made moral progress since generations past because it agrees more with its own values.) It does look as though human society will move toward greater consideration of animal suffering in the future. However, society is also moving toward placing more and more value on pristine wildlife. And who knows if our descendants will start becoming more passionate about panbiotic ethics.

LadyMorgana wrote:The sentience and brain size discussion is extremely interesting - as you can probably tell, I was completely unaware of any scientific evidence supporting the idea that smaller animals feel less in virtue of being smaller.

Well, the question is fundamentally philosophical rather than scientific. It's a judgment call about how to weight different types of brains doing emotional processing at different scales. Bentham said that "each person is to count for one and no one for more than one," but what counts as a "person"? Is it a single, autonomous agent? But in that case, what if we split your brain in half and put each half into separate bodies? Would we thereby have doubled your moral weight? (Maybe. I'm not sure.)

LadyMorgana wrote:I'm currently leaning towards the idea that I should focus on promoting concern for non-human suffering. More research into the nature of suffering could be a good way to do this, as well as having its own merits.

Same here.

LadyMorgana wrote:...but the big problem we face is that the pool of people where we might initially expect to gain our largest support from on this project is actually probably the source of our strongest opponents...because research into non-human suffering is probably going to involve a lot of testing on animals, and animal welfare activists tend to not be too keen on this...

True, although the less radical animal-rights activists aren't too concerned about insects. Also, I think my eventual focus might not be so much on novel research as, instead, on popularizing the abundance of high-quality animal-welfare research already published. There are hundreds of excellent papers in animal-welfare journals that barely anyone has read, and since the value of scientific research from a meme-spreading perspective is roughly proportional to the number of people who know about it, I think the largest unexploited returns could come from producing popular blogs / books / videos about what is already known.

In addition, I think there are many areas where the jigsaw pieces have been cut, but no one has put them together from a cost-effectiveness standpoint. One example is my analysis of humane insecticides. Scientists have known all the relevant data points for decades: Insect densities on crop fields, mortality rates from pesticide application, mechanisms of pesticide action (which suggests roughly how "painful" we think they are), and costs of different pest-control methods. However, I had never before seen a calculation like mine (or, for that matter, even the idea of trying to make pesticides less painful for the target organisms, rather than just less environmentally destructive or safer for humans).

Another low-hanging fruit in terms of deriving important conclusions by just collecting a few pieces of already-known data could come from enumerating which types of environmental changes tend to produce ecosystems with lower total animal populations. For example, if we assume that the amount of animal life is roughly proportional to the amount of biomass in a given area, then we could support activities that reduce biomass. These might include

- Desertification.
- Reducing nutrient availability (e.g., limiting nitrogen and phosphorus).
- Replacing fast-growing high-turnover plants (e.g., grass and field crops) with slow-growing plants (e.g., non-tropical forests?).
- Favoring habitats with big, herbivorous animals (deer? elephants? humans?) that can consume lots of plant matter without producing lots of small creatures.
- Favoring forest and grassland fires (which, unlike animals, are a non-sentient way to convert O2 + C6H1206 -> CO2 + H2O).
- Favoring land-use changes, invasive species, genetic engineering, or geoengineering that have the above consequences.

This is another example where there's enough data to do order-of-magnitude estimates on the back of an envelope, but I don't think anyone has actually done it.

All of this said, I think winning hearts and minds -- even without any new research or analysis -- may be the most important of all, because if enough people become interested in these topics, then they can help with the research. In particular, I suspect that one of the best ways to produce useful academic output may not be to do the work oneself but to become friends with professors and graduate students who study animal welfare, ethology, entomology, neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy, and ethics, and then spark their interest in these questions. This may be better than, say, directly studying insects in a PhD program because (1) you won't have to devote 60 hours a week to detailed lab work unrelated to science popularization and (2) you can instantaneously change focus if you discover a topic that's more important, without spending years to switch fields.

@Ruairi:

it seems to me like it is impossible for us to be effective utilitarians until we know which animals can suffer and whether their lives in nature are good or not good. what do you guys think?

how can i help this kind of research take place do you know?

"I recommend that utilitarians consider contacting SIAI to see if the group can arrange for research that may be of mutual interest." Maybe they'd fund research into which beings, be that AI, insects etc. can suffer? See also: http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/donat ... ation.html

@Alan Dawrst:

there's no a priori reason to think they'll be preserved. (See, e.g., my and Gedusa's discussion with Arepo here.)

It is empirically true that "the arc of history bends toward justice" (where by "justice" I mean an expanded circle of moral concern for the welfare of others), although it's hard to say how much of this is a selection effect. (The current generation always feels that it has made moral progress since generations past because it agrees more with its own values.)

Forgive me, but I'm not going to bother reading through the discussion with Gedusa and Arepo as my Felicifia tabs are reaching a ridiculous number. I think there's good reason to believe that our moral intelligence improves (and will continue to improve) with time, mainly because humanity's been moving in an increasingly utilitarian direction. The extent to which you believe the selection effect is the reason we think this increasingly utilitarian world is a good thing is the extent to which you have no credence in utilitarianism...so what are you worrying about r.e. future humans being non-utilitarian? But the extent to which you believe that improvement in moral intelligence is the reason we think this increasingly utilitarian world is a good thing is (almost) the extent to which you think humans are going to be more morally intelligent in the future.

Well, the question is fundamentally philosophical rather than scientific.

That's not the impression I got from the debate. Observing behaviour tells us that locusts (was it locusts?) can be eaten alive and still get on with eating - this suggests less subjective pain than when a mammal is being eaten alive. Since the amount of pain is what utilitarians are concerned about, a utilitarian doesn't need to do much philosophising as scientific investigation in that case. Same for the neuron evidence - if we can show that less neurons = less pain within one (human) animal (with the relativity to total neuron signals controlled for) then that implies that animals with less neurons aren't capable of feeling as much subjective pain.

I think my eventual focus might not be so much on novel research as, instead, on popularizing the abundance of high-quality animal-welfare research already published...I think there are many areas where the jigsaw pieces have been cut, but no one has put them together from a cost-effectiveness standpoint...All of this said, I think winning hearts and minds -- even without any new research or analysis -- may be the most important of all

Interesting. You're probably right.

Thanks for this continued discussion, LadyMorgana.

LadyMorgana wrote:The extent to which you believe the selection effect is the reason we think this increasingly utilitarian world is a good thing is the extent to which you have no credence in utilitarianism...so what are you worrying about r.e. future humans being non-utilitarian?

This is a tricky anthropic question, actually, so I'm not sure if my reply is right. However, my intuition is that the selection effect matters because it influences the probability that our current observation of a trend toward utilitarianism indicates a continued trend toward utilitarianism in the future. In the model where our judgments about utilitarianism are unaffected by the times in which we live, then our discovery that society now tends toward utilitarianism would be evidence of a continued trend (since the longer the continued trend, the more likely we would find ourselves in one of those times). But if our views are determined by the times in which we live, then we'll *always* see history moving in our direction, which is an observation that holds regardless of how long utilitarianism lasts.

Anyway, my main concern here relates to a different matter: We observe lots of potentially nonutilitarian inclinations in society as well (the "rights" of wild animals not to be interfered with, deep ecology, the desire to spread life throughout the universe, etc.). What if one of these trends wins? That's why I want to help the utilitarian trend (and its position on wild animals specifically) beat the others.

Yeah I think I follow your argument. I also think my point still holds though: If our judgements about utilitarianism are unaffected by the times in which we live, then we can be optimistic about the future; if our views are determined by the times in which we live, then we don't know which moral theory is correct, so our expectations about the future can be roughly neutral and we don't know how to work towards a better future. But of course, you're right, there's still a great need to help the utilitarian trend win!