[1] Chicken extinction would make life worse for many other people, so I wouldn’t actually do that, but not because of the effect on the chickens.
Question: If a person is concerned about the existential risks of species, and a person is concerned with lessening suffering of common species of animals, and a person is concerned with human lives, how does that person make tradeoffs among those?
I was thinking about this, and I realized I had no idea how to resolve the following problem:
Omega says “Hi. I can institute anyone one of these three policies, but only one at a time. Other than locking out the other policies, for each year the policy is in place, none has a downside… except that I will mercilessly dutch book you with policy offers if you’re inconsistent with your judgement of the ratios.”
Policy A: Save X Common Non-Human Animals capable of feeling pain per year from painful, pointless, executions that will not overall affect the viability of the that Species of Common Non-Human Animals.
Policy B: Save Y rarer species per year from extinction. These can be anything from Monkeys, to Mites, to Moss (So they may not have a nervous system).
Policy C: Save Z Humans capable of feeling pain per year from painful, pointless, executions that will not overall affect the viability of the Human Species.
Every time I attempt to construct some acceptable ratio of X:Y:Z, I seem to think “This doesn’t seem correct.” Thoughts?
I would need to know (or have some prior for) which species, or animals of which species, are affected by policies A and B. I would give very different odds for monkeys, cats, mites, and moss.
Also, individuals (whether human or animal) are a natural sort of thing to assign moral value to. But “species” are not. Species are defined as “groups of individuals, all of whom are capable of interbreeding”. (Even then there are exceptions like ring species, and also things like parthenogenic clans; it’s not a definition that cuts reality at its joints.)
There is no particular reason for me (or, I think, most people) to care about an animal in inverse proportion to its number of potential mates (= size of breeding group = size of species). I do care about variety, but the 5500 or so known mammal species are far more diverse than many sets of 5500 different insect species, for instance. And the set of all rodents (almost 2300 species) is far less diverse than the relatively tiny set of (Chimpanzee, African elephant, Great white shark). Being separate species is incidental to the things we really care about.
Ultimately, it seems as hard to come up with a ratio of X:Y:Z as it would be to come up with a personal valuation ratio of Apples:Oranges:Education:747s:Laptops.
You are taking morality, which is some inborn urges you have when confronted with certain types of information, urges which started evolving in you long before your ancestors had anything approaching a modern neocortex, and which absolutely evolved in you without any kind of reference to the moral problem you are looking at in this comment. And you are trying to come up with a fixed-in-time, transitive, quantitative description of it.
In the case of Apples:Oranges, the COST of these to you in a store may be close to constant, but their VALUE to you are all over the map: sometimes the Apple wins, sometimes the Orange wins, often the Laptop wins, and when the 747 wins it wins big time.
It seems likely enough that your moral urges would be all over the map, variable in time. And that your effort to summarize them completely with fixed static numbers makes less sense than describing nature using the four elements of earth, air, fire and water.
Question: If a person is concerned about the existential risks of species, and a person is concerned with lessening suffering of common species of animals, and a person is concerned with human lives, how does that person make tradeoffs among those?
I was thinking about this, and I realized I had no idea how to resolve the following problem:
Omega says “Hi. I can institute anyone one of these three policies, but only one at a time. Other than locking out the other policies, for each year the policy is in place, none has a downside… except that I will mercilessly dutch book you with policy offers if you’re inconsistent with your judgement of the ratios.”
Policy A: Save X Common Non-Human Animals capable of feeling pain per year from painful, pointless, executions that will not overall affect the viability of the that Species of Common Non-Human Animals.
Policy B: Save Y rarer species per year from extinction. These can be anything from Monkeys, to Mites, to Moss (So they may not have a nervous system).
Policy C: Save Z Humans capable of feeling pain per year from painful, pointless, executions that will not overall affect the viability of the Human Species.
Every time I attempt to construct some acceptable ratio of X:Y:Z, I seem to think “This doesn’t seem correct.” Thoughts?
I would need to know (or have some prior for) which species, or animals of which species, are affected by policies A and B. I would give very different odds for monkeys, cats, mites, and moss.
Also, individuals (whether human or animal) are a natural sort of thing to assign moral value to. But “species” are not. Species are defined as “groups of individuals, all of whom are capable of interbreeding”. (Even then there are exceptions like ring species, and also things like parthenogenic clans; it’s not a definition that cuts reality at its joints.)
There is no particular reason for me (or, I think, most people) to care about an animal in inverse proportion to its number of potential mates (= size of breeding group = size of species). I do care about variety, but the 5500 or so known mammal species are far more diverse than many sets of 5500 different insect species, for instance. And the set of all rodents (almost 2300 species) is far less diverse than the relatively tiny set of (Chimpanzee, African elephant, Great white shark). Being separate species is incidental to the things we really care about.
Ultimately, it seems as hard to come up with a ratio of X:Y:Z as it would be to come up with a personal valuation ratio of Apples:Oranges:Education:747s:Laptops.
You are taking morality, which is some inborn urges you have when confronted with certain types of information, urges which started evolving in you long before your ancestors had anything approaching a modern neocortex, and which absolutely evolved in you without any kind of reference to the moral problem you are looking at in this comment. And you are trying to come up with a fixed-in-time, transitive, quantitative description of it.
In the case of Apples:Oranges, the COST of these to you in a store may be close to constant, but their VALUE to you are all over the map: sometimes the Apple wins, sometimes the Orange wins, often the Laptop wins, and when the 747 wins it wins big time.
It seems likely enough that your moral urges would be all over the map, variable in time. And that your effort to summarize them completely with fixed static numbers makes less sense than describing nature using the four elements of earth, air, fire and water.