For sentient animals? I don’t even know what the argument would be for a net positive. Wild animals are at the mercy of food and water insecurity, parasites, predators, injuries, and disease with no analgesics or anesthesia. Biology provides some mitigation in extreme circumstances, but those do not last long and do nothing for chronic suffering. Just think about typical interventions pet owners make to keep them well-fed and parasite/disease/injury free, along with euthanasia. Wild animals have none of that.
I haven’t looked into it too much, but, generally, I would guess that a hunter gatherer human had a net positive life since their life involved lots of positive things (eating food, seeing the beautiful world, having time for relaxation, making music, spending time with loved ones, etc.) This would make me think that it’s plausible that there’s lots of positive aspects of other animal’s lives. They may enjoy eating food, being around animals of the same species, or engaging in play.
When I go out into nature, it also seems like animals are having a good time. I don’t feel like I almost ever see animals that look underfed, diseased, or injured. And, I would expect that their deaths at the hands of predators are relatively short.
That said, I completely understand your perspective. If I learned that most animals are constantly hungry or suffering from serious disease or parasites, that would change my perspective a bit.
Overall, it seems like we need just a lot more data to have any strong conclusions.
“I would guess that a hunter gatherer human had a net positive life since their life involved lots of positive things”
Maybe I’m just a glass-half-empty kinda guy, but when I think about pre-industrial societies, I think of all the things I mentioned with non-human animals (lack of medical intervention, food insecurity, etc), but I also think of infant mortality rates, which were outrageously high. It’s difficult to imagine a happy life where something like half the children you had didn’t make it past the age of 5, and many of those died horrible deaths. I suppose you could say I’m viewing this through a modern lens and these people were mentally tougher or whatever, but good god, that just seems like a rationalization of an enormous amount of grief (or of a life where because of those stats children’s lives were heavily devalued). Neither of those sound particularly pleasant to me.
That seems like something worth recalibrating, since people in that position (extant hunter-gatherers) have generally described their lives as worth living.
Who needs to do the recalibrating? Am I mischaracterizing the facts? Are you disputing extremely high mortality rates, food insecurity, and large amounts of suffering due to lack of basic medicinal intervention for things like broken bones, dental issues, parasites, etc.?
Humans, like all organisms, are essentially replication aids for genes. They’re built and programmed for gene reproduction. Is it possible at all that they find ways to rationalize their own suffering due to their biases?
What does “rationalize their own suffering” mean? If you prioritize an abstract idea of “lives worth living” over individuals’ own desire to continue living, you open up many dangerous possibilities (eg justified euthanasia).
I mean use cognitive or cultural tools to convince themselves that conditions are not as bad as they actually are. Possibly they’re using religion to justify bad conditions (god has a plan). Or maybe they’re saying there’s nothing they can do about it, so it’s not worth complaining about (even though it is actually very bad).
We see some weird disconnects between self-reported life satisfaction and do-not-resuscitate orders:
168 were invited 91 responded
47⁄91 (52%) reported they were happy 18⁄91 (20%) reported they were unhappy
Here’s the weird part: Roughly half of those who reported they were happy also indicated they did not want to be resuscitated in the case of cardiac arrest.
How are we explaining that?
Robert Trivers as a lot of work on deception and self-deception. I’m making at least two points here:
1. We can often delude ourselves about our own welfare. 2. We can often lie to others about what we really think about our own welfare.
It’s easy to imagine a human from a world where suffering was entirely eliminated to use your argument to say that my life must currently be net negative. I would disagree.
I would imagine people of earlier ages taking deaths/suffering as a fact of life in the same way I for example see the death of my grandparents to Alzheimers or any other pain I must endure.
That doesn’t follow. Someone from a world that has eliminated suffering could justifiably say my life has more suffering, but where are you getting net negative? We’d need some sense of measurement of positive and negative, along with weighting, in my life to make a net negative judgment.
But yeah, let’s look at objective standards in those situations to see what’s going on:
1. world with no suffering 2. our current first-world society with lots of medical interventions, dental care, and low infant mortality 3. pre-industrial societies with high infant mortality, and very few interventions for physical suffering
Let’s say all three of these sets of people have roughly the same life satisfaction scores. How are we reconciling that? There really is no difference in their quality of life? Or the people in worse worlds are rationalizing/justifying clearly worse lives (which is pretty close to what your last point was, which actually seems to be in agreement with what I’m saying)?
For sentient animals? I don’t even know what the argument would be for a net positive. Wild animals are at the mercy of food and water insecurity, parasites, predators, injuries, and disease with no analgesics or anesthesia. Biology provides some mitigation in extreme circumstances, but those do not last long and do nothing for chronic suffering. Just think about typical interventions pet owners make to keep them well-fed and parasite/disease/injury free, along with euthanasia. Wild animals have none of that.
I haven’t looked into it too much, but, generally, I would guess that a hunter gatherer human had a net positive life since their life involved lots of positive things (eating food, seeing the beautiful world, having time for relaxation, making music, spending time with loved ones, etc.) This would make me think that it’s plausible that there’s lots of positive aspects of other animal’s lives. They may enjoy eating food, being around animals of the same species, or engaging in play.
When I go out into nature, it also seems like animals are having a good time. I don’t feel like I almost ever see animals that look underfed, diseased, or injured. And, I would expect that their deaths at the hands of predators are relatively short.
That said, I completely understand your perspective. If I learned that most animals are constantly hungry or suffering from serious disease or parasites, that would change my perspective a bit.
Overall, it seems like we need just a lot more data to have any strong conclusions.
“I would guess that a hunter gatherer human had a net positive life since their life involved lots of positive things”
Maybe I’m just a glass-half-empty kinda guy, but when I think about pre-industrial societies, I think of all the things I mentioned with non-human animals (lack of medical intervention, food insecurity, etc), but I also think of infant mortality rates, which were outrageously high. It’s difficult to imagine a happy life where something like half the children you had didn’t make it past the age of 5, and many of those died horrible deaths. I suppose you could say I’m viewing this through a modern lens and these people were mentally tougher or whatever, but good god, that just seems like a rationalization of an enormous amount of grief (or of a life where because of those stats children’s lives were heavily devalued). Neither of those sound particularly pleasant to me.
That seems like something worth recalibrating, since people in that position (extant hunter-gatherers) have generally described their lives as worth living.
Who needs to do the recalibrating? Am I mischaracterizing the facts? Are you disputing extremely high mortality rates, food insecurity, and large amounts of suffering due to lack of basic medicinal intervention for things like broken bones, dental issues, parasites, etc.?
Humans, like all organisms, are essentially replication aids for genes. They’re built and programmed for gene reproduction. Is it possible at all that they find ways to rationalize their own suffering due to their biases?
What does “rationalize their own suffering” mean? If you prioritize an abstract idea of “lives worth living” over individuals’ own desire to continue living, you open up many dangerous possibilities (eg justified euthanasia).
I mean use cognitive or cultural tools to convince themselves that conditions are not as bad as they actually are. Possibly they’re using religion to justify bad conditions (god has a plan). Or maybe they’re saying there’s nothing they can do about it, so it’s not worth complaining about (even though it is actually very bad).
There are studies such as this one on LIS (Locked-In Syndrome): https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/1/1/e000039.full.pdf
We see some weird disconnects between self-reported life satisfaction and do-not-resuscitate orders:
168 were invited
91 responded
47⁄91 (52%) reported they were happy
18⁄91 (20%) reported they were unhappy
Here’s the weird part: Roughly half of those who reported they were happy also indicated they did not want to be resuscitated in the case of cardiac arrest.
How are we explaining that?
Robert Trivers as a lot of work on deception and self-deception. I’m making at least two points here:
1. We can often delude ourselves about our own welfare.
2. We can often lie to others about what we really think about our own welfare.
It’s easy to imagine a human from a world where suffering was entirely eliminated to use your argument to say that my life must currently be net negative. I would disagree.
I would imagine people of earlier ages taking deaths/suffering as a fact of life in the same way I for example see the death of my grandparents to Alzheimers or any other pain I must endure.
That doesn’t follow. Someone from a world that has eliminated suffering could justifiably say my life has more suffering, but where are you getting net negative? We’d need some sense of measurement of positive and negative, along with weighting, in my life to make a net negative judgment.
But yeah, let’s look at objective standards in those situations to see what’s going on:
1. world with no suffering
2. our current first-world society with lots of medical interventions, dental care, and low infant mortality
3. pre-industrial societies with high infant mortality, and very few interventions for physical suffering
Let’s say all three of these sets of people have roughly the same life satisfaction scores. How are we reconciling that? There really is no difference in their quality of life? Or the people in worse worlds are rationalizing/justifying clearly worse lives (which is pretty close to what your last point was, which actually seems to be in agreement with what I’m saying)?
I find it pretty funny that I’m optimist here, when my post is literally arguing that our world contains hell.
I totally get your perspective though. I’d have to look into this a lot more.