The whole “wild animals suffer, therefore they should be eradicated for their own good” argument is obviously broken to me. To wit—if an alien civilization reached Earth in antiquity, would they have been right to eradicate humanity to free it from its suffering since everyone was toiling the whole day on the fields and suffering from hunger and disease? What if they reached us now but found our current lifestyle similarly horrible compared to their lofty living standards?
Living beings have some kind of adjustable happiness baseline level. Making someone happy isn’t as simple as triggering their pleasure centres all the time and making someone not unhappy isn’t as simple as preventing their pain centres to ever be triggered (even if this means destroying them).
It’s not clear that Bentham would advocate eradicating those species. There could very well be utilitarian value in keeping a species around, just at reduced population counts. In your alien example, I think you could plausibly argue that it’d be good if the aliens reduced the suffering human population to a lower number, until we were advanced enough to be on-net happy. Or if having a larger suffering population would be good because it would speed up technological progress, that would be an important disanalogy between your thought experiment and the wild animal case.
Living beings have some kind of adjustable happiness baseline level. Making someone happy isn’t as simple as triggering their pleasure centres all the time and making someone not unhappy isn’t as simple as preventing their pain centres to ever be triggered (even if this means destroying them).
The argument also doesn’t rely on any of this? It just relies on it being possible to compare the value of two different world-states.
The argument also doesn’t rely on any of this? It just relies on it being possible to compare the value of two different world-states.
I hold it that in general trying to sum the experiences of a bunch of living beings into a single utility function is nonsense, but in particular I’d say it does matter even without that. My point is that we judge wild animal welfare from the viewpoint of our own baseline. We think “oh, always on the run, half starved, scared of predators/looking for prey, subject to disease and weather of all sorts? What a miserable life that would be!” but that’s just us imagining ourselves in the animal’s shoes, while still holding onto our current baseline. The animals have known nothing else, in fact have evolved in those specific conditions for millions of years, so it would actually be strange if they experienced nothing but pain and fear and stress all the time—what would be the point of evolving different emotional states at all if the dial is always on “everything is awful”? So my guess is, no, that’s not how it works, those animals do have lives with some alternation of bad and good mental states, and may even fall on the net positive end of the utility scale. Factory farming is different because those are deeply unnatural conditions that happen to be all extreme stressors in the wild, meaning the animals, even with some capability to adjust, are thrown into an out-of-distribution end of the scale, just like we have raised ourselves to a different out-of-distribution end (where even the things that were just daily occurrences for us at the inception of our species look like intolerable suffering because we’ve raised our standard of living so high).
I hold it that in general trying to sum the experiences of a bunch of living beings into a single utility function is nonsense,
Nonsense feels too strong to me? That seems like the type of thing we should be pretty uncertain about—it’s not like we have lots of good evidence either way on meta-ethics that we can use to validate or disprove these theories. I’d be curious what your reasoning is here? Something like a person-affecting view?
My point is that we judge wild animal welfare from the viewpoint of our own baseline. We think “oh, always on the run, half starved, scared of predators/looking for prey, subject to disease and weather of all sorts? …
This seems like a different point than the one I responded to (which is fine obviously), but though I share the general intuition that it’d make sense for life in the wild to be roughly neutral on the whole, I think there are also some reasons to be skeptical of that view.
First, I don’t see any strong positive reason why evolution should make sure it isn’t the case that “they experienced nothing but pain and fear and stress all the time”. It’s not like evolution “cares” whether animals feel a lot more pain and stress than they feel pleasure and contentment, or vice versa. And it seems like animals—like humans—could function just as well if their lives were 90% bad experiences and 10% good experiences, as with a 50⁄50 split. They’d be unhappy of course, but they’d still get all the relevant directional feedback from various stimuli.
Second, I think humans generally don’t feel that intense pleasure (e.g., orgasms or early jhanas) is more preferable than intense pain (e.g., from sudden injury or chronic disease) is dispreferable. (Cf. when we are in truly intense pain nothing else matters than making the pain go away.) But if we observe wild animals, they probably experience pain more often than pleasure, just based on the situations they’re in. E.g., disease, predation, and starvation seem pretty common in the animal kingdom, whereas sexual pleasure seems pretty rare (almost always tied to reproduction).
Third and relatedly, from an evolutionary perspective, bad events are typically more bad (for the animal’s reproductive fitness) than good events are good. For example, being eaten alive and suffering severe injury means you’re ~0% likely to carry on your genes, whereas finding food and mating doesn’t make you 100% likely to carry on your genes. So there’s an asymmetry. That would be a reason for evolution to make negative experiences more intense than positive experiences. And many animals are at risk of predation and disease continuously through their lives, whereas they may only have relatively few opportunities for e.g., mating or seeing the births of their offspring.
Fourth, most animals follow r-selection strategies, producing many offspring of which only a few survive. Evolution probably wouldn’t optimize for those non-surviving offspring to have well-tuned valence systems, and so they could plausibly just be living very short lives of deprivation and soon death.
Factory farming is different because those are deeply unnatural conditions that happen to be all extreme stressors in the wild, meaning the animals, even with some capability to adjust, are thrown into an out-of-distribution end of the scale, just like we have raised ourselves to a different out-of-distribution end (where even the things that were just daily occurrences for us at the inception of our species look like intolerable suffering because we’ve raised our standard of living so high).
My own view, sorry for the confusion. But I’d be interested in Bentham’s Bulldog’s position on this is! It’s also always tricky to make ethical statements that are not on the margin.
I tend to think farming decreases wild animal suffering by lowering wild animal populations https://reducing-suffering.org/humanitys-net-impact-on-wild-animal-suffering/
The whole “wild animals suffer, therefore they should be eradicated for their own good” argument is obviously broken to me. To wit—if an alien civilization reached Earth in antiquity, would they have been right to eradicate humanity to free it from its suffering since everyone was toiling the whole day on the fields and suffering from hunger and disease? What if they reached us now but found our current lifestyle similarly horrible compared to their lofty living standards?
Living beings have some kind of adjustable happiness baseline level. Making someone happy isn’t as simple as triggering their pleasure centres all the time and making someone not unhappy isn’t as simple as preventing their pain centres to ever be triggered (even if this means destroying them).
It’s not clear that Bentham would advocate eradicating those species. There could very well be utilitarian value in keeping a species around, just at reduced population counts. In your alien example, I think you could plausibly argue that it’d be good if the aliens reduced the suffering human population to a lower number, until we were advanced enough to be on-net happy. Or if having a larger suffering population would be good because it would speed up technological progress, that would be an important disanalogy between your thought experiment and the wild animal case.
The argument also doesn’t rely on any of this? It just relies on it being possible to compare the value of two different world-states.
I hold it that in general trying to sum the experiences of a bunch of living beings into a single utility function is nonsense, but in particular I’d say it does matter even without that. My point is that we judge wild animal welfare from the viewpoint of our own baseline. We think “oh, always on the run, half starved, scared of predators/looking for prey, subject to disease and weather of all sorts? What a miserable life that would be!” but that’s just us imagining ourselves in the animal’s shoes, while still holding onto our current baseline. The animals have known nothing else, in fact have evolved in those specific conditions for millions of years, so it would actually be strange if they experienced nothing but pain and fear and stress all the time—what would be the point of evolving different emotional states at all if the dial is always on “everything is awful”? So my guess is, no, that’s not how it works, those animals do have lives with some alternation of bad and good mental states, and may even fall on the net positive end of the utility scale. Factory farming is different because those are deeply unnatural conditions that happen to be all extreme stressors in the wild, meaning the animals, even with some capability to adjust, are thrown into an out-of-distribution end of the scale, just like we have raised ourselves to a different out-of-distribution end (where even the things that were just daily occurrences for us at the inception of our species look like intolerable suffering because we’ve raised our standard of living so high).
Nonsense feels too strong to me? That seems like the type of thing we should be pretty uncertain about—it’s not like we have lots of good evidence either way on meta-ethics that we can use to validate or disprove these theories. I’d be curious what your reasoning is here? Something like a person-affecting view?
This seems like a different point than the one I responded to (which is fine obviously), but though I share the general intuition that it’d make sense for life in the wild to be roughly neutral on the whole, I think there are also some reasons to be skeptical of that view.
First, I don’t see any strong positive reason why evolution should make sure it isn’t the case that “they experienced nothing but pain and fear and stress all the time”. It’s not like evolution “cares” whether animals feel a lot more pain and stress than they feel pleasure and contentment, or vice versa. And it seems like animals—like humans—could function just as well if their lives were 90% bad experiences and 10% good experiences, as with a 50⁄50 split. They’d be unhappy of course, but they’d still get all the relevant directional feedback from various stimuli.
Second, I think humans generally don’t feel that intense pleasure (e.g., orgasms or early jhanas) is more preferable than intense pain (e.g., from sudden injury or chronic disease) is dispreferable. (Cf. when we are in truly intense pain nothing else matters than making the pain go away.) But if we observe wild animals, they probably experience pain more often than pleasure, just based on the situations they’re in. E.g., disease, predation, and starvation seem pretty common in the animal kingdom, whereas sexual pleasure seems pretty rare (almost always tied to reproduction).
Third and relatedly, from an evolutionary perspective, bad events are typically more bad (for the animal’s reproductive fitness) than good events are good. For example, being eaten alive and suffering severe injury means you’re ~0% likely to carry on your genes, whereas finding food and mating doesn’t make you 100% likely to carry on your genes. So there’s an asymmetry. That would be a reason for evolution to make negative experiences more intense than positive experiences. And many animals are at risk of predation and disease continuously through their lives, whereas they may only have relatively few opportunities for e.g., mating or seeing the births of their offspring.
Fourth, most animals follow r-selection strategies, producing many offspring of which only a few survive. Evolution probably wouldn’t optimize for those non-surviving offspring to have well-tuned valence systems, and so they could plausibly just be living very short lives of deprivation and soon death.
I agree.
If it is good to lower wild animal populations, what do you think their optimum population would be?
Not OP, but my best guess in unmanaged natural environments is zero70%.
Your best guess about the OP’s view, or your own view?
My own view, sorry for the confusion. But I’d be interested in Bentham’s Bulldog’s position on this is! It’s also always tricky to make ethical statements that are not on the margin.