Your text is full of saliently negative things in the lives of wild animals, plus big numbers (since there are so many natural lives), but I don’t see any consideration of balancing goods linked to similarly large numbers.
Fundamentally, you don’t seem to be tracking the possibility that many wild animal lives are “lives worth living”, and that the balance of lives that were not worth living (and surely some of those exist) might still be overbalanced by lives that were worth living.
Maybe this wouldn’t matter very much to not track, but it is the default presumption of most people that life is worth living, and that lives worth living are often very good, and very worth living, such that they might redeem net negative lives on net and make “life in general at all” a net positive.
Pollywogs (the larval form of frogs, after eggs, and before growing legs) are an example where huge numbers of them are produced, and many die before they ever grow into frogs, but from their perspective, they probably have many many minutes of happy growth, having been born into a time and place where quick growth is easy: watery and full of food! The spring! <3
They swim around, they exercise, they eat, they stay near others in a school, they get bigger. Granted, they also hide from predators, but most of the time when they die it is generally very fast and over soon (such as when a camouflaged fish ambushes them as they swim obliviously right past the mouth the of the predator, or a heron’s beak spears out of the sky with no warning). The vast majority of their moments are positive, and in most cases they barely even cognize the sadness at the end.
Even living only a few weeks as a pollywog would grant over a million seconds of happy life, compared to a handful of seconds during which death is imminent, but hasn’t happened yet.
The balance seems clearly positive to me, because the goodness of normal moments of a life (even the life of a mere pollywog) full of growth and development are, in fact, a positive good.
Like it really does seem that the balance here, of bad-life-moments vs good-life-moments, might be on the order of “one per million” even for a pollywog that never grows up to be a frog.
Haven’t you ever seen a vernal pool full of pollywogs, swimming around all lazy-like, enjoying themselves in the sun and the water? Maybe my childhood was unusually good, to have been full of time in nature, but even so, you’ve probably seen some happy animals in nature? Perhaps sea birds at the beach, or fish nibbling water plants near a dock? Perhaps squirrels playing in a back yard, or deer browsing in a field, or vultures doing lazy circles in an updraft?
Most of the animal-life-moments I’ve seen in nature have exhibited a profound “OK-ness”. Just chilling. Just being. Just finding some food. Just happy to exist. Each such moment “the score” was going UP! In any well-contemplated life, such moments should be on the positive side of the ledger!
Certainly when “life itself” becomes questionable for animals in nature, they seem to do everything they can to keep their life… escaping danger, seeking safety, eating food (rather than engaging in a hunger strike or trying to forgo water and thirst to death to bring their own end on faster). Every indication we have is that animals are NOT suicidal, but rather they seem to “net value” their own lives. Presumably because these are good lives according to their own subjectivities.
I feel as though your text is some kind of exhibition of nearly systematic failures to detect and weigh such goodness properly.
Even by your own confused standards it seems that you should surely be speaking against the badness of factory farming, not the badness of wild nature? Maybe factory farmed lives might truly be “not worth living”, and much more clearly subject to choices by consumers, farmers, and policy makers? Nearly every salient feature of factory farming makes it more worth calling attention to try to fix what is bad about it.
I wonder if you’re engaged in some sort of cry for help here? Your advocacy here seems wildly out of balance with almost any coherent theory of justice, reason, or the optimized pursuit of the melioration of badness in the world, such that I wonder if the brokenness of your advocacy is itself the thing you’re hoping to demonstrate in public before a large audience, to get helpful corrective signals regarding whatever is going wrong in the part of you that generated this essay?
It would be consistent with “being unusually unaware of the good parts of normal animal lives” if you were also unaware of such moments in your own life :-(
I wonder if you’re in a depression, perhaps? It is early February and the northern hemisphere is reaching the end of winter and maybe you have SAD? Could you prescribe dancing, and eating homemade desserts with friends, and watching Moanna, and snuggling up in an electric blanket while listening to music to yourself, and practice noticing the texture of all these various good experiences, and remember how easy it would be to spend lots of your time hedonically wallowing in such pleasures, then… uh… recalculate whether “life in general” seems good or bad to you?
First of all, the claim that wild animal suffering is serious doesn’t depend on the claim that animals suffer more than they are happy. I happen to think human suffering is very serious, even though I think humans live positive lives.
Second, I don’t think it’s depressive bias infecting my judgments. I am quite happy—actually to a rather unusual degree. Instead, the reason to think that animals live mostly bad lives is that nearly every animal lives a very short life that culminates in a painful death on account of R-selection—if you live only ~a week, you don’t have enough positive experiences to outweigh the badness of a painful death.
Regarding the claim that I should be speaking out against factory farming, um...I’m not sure if you’ve read the rest of my writing.
Pollywogs (the larval form of frogs, after eggs, and before growing legs) are an example where huge numbers of them are produced, and many die before they ever grow into frogs, but from their perspective, they probably have many many minutes of happy growth, having been born into a time and place where quick growth is easy: watery and full of food
Consider an alien species which requires oxygen, but for whom it was scarce during evolution, and so they were selected to use it very slowly and seek it ruthlessly, and feel happy when they manage to find some. It would be wrong for one of that species to conclude that a species on earth must be happy all the time because there’s so much oxygen; because oxygen is abundant, we are neutral to it.
Most of the animal-life-moments I’ve seen in nature have exhibited a profound “OK-ness”. Just chilling. Just being. Just finding some food. Just happy to exist.
Emotional status must be inferred. There are some cases we can easily infer happiness or suffering in nonhumans, by similarity to how we express emotions: a dog jumping around and excited to go outside, a pig squealing and struggling as they are lowered into a gas chamber. There are others we cannot easily know the experience of: a duck sitting in a lake, a caterpillar crawling across a leaf. To call them happy without an analysis from first-principles of what evolutionary pressures might lead to the experience or not of happiness in such moments is to project happiness onto them.
I think most of the rest of your comment is similarly projective.
I wonder if you have the opposite sort of bias to that which you say the OP might have; maybe you have a very happy outlook which causes you to project happiness-to-exist onto life forms you do not understand.
Certainly when “life itself” becomes questionable for animals in nature, they seem to do everything they can to keep their life… escaping danger, seeking safety, eating food (rather than engaging in a hunger strike or trying to forgo water and thirst to death to bring their own end on faster). Every indication we have is that animals are NOT suicidal, but rather they seem to “net value” their own lives. Presumably because these are good lives according to their own subjectivities.
A human with chronic depression will still flee if under attack. Evolution imbues beings with a drive to survive even when in great pain. It does not care whether we suffer, indeed it uses suffering to motivate us; the counter that we would choose to kill ourselves if we suffered enough does not hold, evolution gets around that by then also selecting for us to not kill ourselves.
(I note these things without implying a side on the question of what kinds of mental states are most common in wild animal lives, which looks difficult to speculate about with confidence.)
Despite finishing your comment in a way that I hope we can all just try to ignore… you make an interesting point. The Pollywog example works well, if accurate. If wild animal suffering is the worst thing in the world, it follows that wild animal pleasure could easily the best thing in the world, and it might be a huge opportunity to do good in the world if we can identify species for which this is true. This seems like one of the only ways to make the world net-positive, if we do choose to maintain biological life.
But, tragically, I think that’s a difficult case to make for most animals. Omnizoid addresses it partly: “If you only live a few weeks and then die painfully, probably you won’t have enough welfare during those few weeks to make up for the extreme badness of your death. This is the situation for almost every animal who has ever lived.” But I think he understates it here.
Most vertebrates are larval fish. 99%+ of fish larvae die within days. For a larval fish, being eaten by predators (about 75%, on average) is invariably the best outcome, because dying ofstarvation, temperature changes, or physiological failure (the other 25%) seems a lot worse.
When they do experiments by starving baby fish to death (your reminder that ethics review boards have a very peculiar definition of ethics), they find that most sardines born in a single spawning don’t even start exogenous feeding, and survive for a few days from existing energy reserves. I would speculate that much of this time is spent in a state of constant hunger stress, driven by an extremely high metabolism and increasing cortisol levels, and for the vast majority who cannot secure food, their few hours-days of existence probably look a lot more like a desperate struggle until they gradually weaken and lose energy before dying. This is partly because they were born too small to ever have a chance of exogenous feeding—like a premature human baby unable to suckle, most don’t have the suction force to consume plankton.
I don’t doubt that there might be some pleasure there to balance out the suffering, but it seems like a hard sell for most K-strategists.
Your text is full of saliently negative things in the lives of wild animals, plus big numbers (since there are so many natural lives), but I don’t see any consideration of balancing goods linked to similarly large numbers.
Fundamentally, you don’t seem to be tracking the possibility that many wild animal lives are “lives worth living”, and that the balance of lives that were not worth living (and surely some of those exist) might still be overbalanced by lives that were worth living.
Maybe this wouldn’t matter very much to not track, but it is the default presumption of most people that life is worth living, and that lives worth living are often very good, and very worth living, such that they might redeem net negative lives on net and make “life in general at all” a net positive.
Pollywogs (the larval form of frogs, after eggs, and before growing legs) are an example where huge numbers of them are produced, and many die before they ever grow into frogs, but from their perspective, they probably have many many minutes of happy growth, having been born into a time and place where quick growth is easy: watery and full of food! The spring! <3
They swim around, they exercise, they eat, they stay near others in a school, they get bigger. Granted, they also hide from predators, but most of the time when they die it is generally very fast and over soon (such as when a camouflaged fish ambushes them as they swim obliviously right past the mouth the of the predator, or a heron’s beak spears out of the sky with no warning). The vast majority of their moments are positive, and in most cases they barely even cognize the sadness at the end.
Even living only a few weeks as a pollywog would grant over a million seconds of happy life, compared to a handful of seconds during which death is imminent, but hasn’t happened yet.
The balance seems clearly positive to me, because the goodness of normal moments of a life (even the life of a mere pollywog) full of growth and development are, in fact, a positive good.
Like it really does seem that the balance here, of bad-life-moments vs good-life-moments, might be on the order of “one per million” even for a pollywog that never grows up to be a frog.
Haven’t you ever seen a vernal pool full of pollywogs, swimming around all lazy-like, enjoying themselves in the sun and the water? Maybe my childhood was unusually good, to have been full of time in nature, but even so, you’ve probably seen some happy animals in nature? Perhaps sea birds at the beach, or fish nibbling water plants near a dock? Perhaps squirrels playing in a back yard, or deer browsing in a field, or vultures doing lazy circles in an updraft?
Most of the animal-life-moments I’ve seen in nature have exhibited a profound “OK-ness”. Just chilling. Just being. Just finding some food. Just happy to exist. Each such moment “the score” was going UP! In any well-contemplated life, such moments should be on the positive side of the ledger!
Certainly when “life itself” becomes questionable for animals in nature, they seem to do everything they can to keep their life… escaping danger, seeking safety, eating food (rather than engaging in a hunger strike or trying to forgo water and thirst to death to bring their own end on faster). Every indication we have is that animals are NOT suicidal, but rather they seem to “net value” their own lives. Presumably because these are good lives according to their own subjectivities.
I feel as though your text is some kind of exhibition of nearly systematic failures to detect and weigh such goodness properly.
Even by your own confused standards it seems that you should surely be speaking against the badness of factory farming, not the badness of wild nature? Maybe factory farmed lives might truly be “not worth living”, and much more clearly subject to choices by consumers, farmers, and policy makers? Nearly every salient feature of factory farming makes it more worth calling attention to try to fix what is bad about it.
I wonder if you’re engaged in some sort of cry for help here? Your advocacy here seems wildly out of balance with almost any coherent theory of justice, reason, or the optimized pursuit of the melioration of badness in the world, such that I wonder if the brokenness of your advocacy is itself the thing you’re hoping to demonstrate in public before a large audience, to get helpful corrective signals regarding whatever is going wrong in the part of you that generated this essay?
It would be consistent with “being unusually unaware of the good parts of normal animal lives” if you were also unaware of such moments in your own life :-(
I wonder if you’re in a depression, perhaps? It is early February and the northern hemisphere is reaching the end of winter and maybe you have SAD? Could you prescribe dancing, and eating homemade desserts with friends, and watching Moanna, and snuggling up in an electric blanket while listening to music to yourself, and practice noticing the texture of all these various good experiences, and remember how easy it would be to spend lots of your time hedonically wallowing in such pleasures, then… uh… recalculate whether “life in general” seems good or bad to you?
First of all, the claim that wild animal suffering is serious doesn’t depend on the claim that animals suffer more than they are happy. I happen to think human suffering is very serious, even though I think humans live positive lives.
Second, I don’t think it’s depressive bias infecting my judgments. I am quite happy—actually to a rather unusual degree. Instead, the reason to think that animals live mostly bad lives is that nearly every animal lives a very short life that culminates in a painful death on account of R-selection—if you live only ~a week, you don’t have enough positive experiences to outweigh the badness of a painful death.
Regarding the claim that I should be speaking out against factory farming, um...I’m not sure if you’ve read the rest of my writing.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/factory-farming-delenda-est
https://benthams.substack.com/p/weve-created-hell-its-called-factory
https://benthams.substack.com/p/factory-farming-is-not-just-bad-its-35e?utm_source=publication-search
Consider an alien species which requires oxygen, but for whom it was scarce during evolution, and so they were selected to use it very slowly and seek it ruthlessly, and feel happy when they manage to find some. It would be wrong for one of that species to conclude that a species on earth must be happy all the time because there’s so much oxygen; because oxygen is abundant, we are neutral to it.
Emotional status must be inferred. There are some cases we can easily infer happiness or suffering in nonhumans, by similarity to how we express emotions: a dog jumping around and excited to go outside, a pig squealing and struggling as they are lowered into a gas chamber. There are others we cannot easily know the experience of: a duck sitting in a lake, a caterpillar crawling across a leaf. To call them happy without an analysis from first-principles of what evolutionary pressures might lead to the experience or not of happiness in such moments is to project happiness onto them.
I think most of the rest of your comment is similarly projective.
I wonder if you have the opposite sort of bias to that which you say the OP might have; maybe you have a very happy outlook which causes you to project happiness-to-exist onto life forms you do not understand.
A human with chronic depression will still flee if under attack. Evolution imbues beings with a drive to survive even when in great pain. It does not care whether we suffer, indeed it uses suffering to motivate us; the counter that we would choose to kill ourselves if we suffered enough does not hold, evolution gets around that by then also selecting for us to not kill ourselves.
(I note these things without implying a side on the question of what kinds of mental states are most common in wild animal lives, which looks difficult to speculate about with confidence.)
I think this comment would be a lot better without the attempts to psychoanalyze OP.
Despite finishing your comment in a way that I hope we can all just try to ignore… you make an interesting point. The Pollywog example works well, if accurate. If wild animal suffering is the worst thing in the world, it follows that wild animal pleasure could easily the best thing in the world, and it might be a huge opportunity to do good in the world if we can identify species for which this is true. This seems like one of the only ways to make the world net-positive, if we do choose to maintain biological life.
But, tragically, I think that’s a difficult case to make for most animals. Omnizoid addresses it partly: “If you only live a few weeks and then die painfully, probably you won’t have enough welfare during those few weeks to make up for the extreme badness of your death. This is the situation for almost every animal who has ever lived.” But I think he understates it here.
Most vertebrates are larval fish. 99%+ of fish larvae die within days. For a larval fish, being eaten by predators (about 75%, on average) is invariably the best outcome, because dying of starvation, temperature changes, or physiological failure (the other 25%) seems a lot worse.
When they do experiments by starving baby fish to death (your reminder that ethics review boards have a very peculiar definition of ethics), they find that most sardines born in a single spawning don’t even start exogenous feeding, and survive for a few days from existing energy reserves. I would speculate that much of this time is spent in a state of constant hunger stress, driven by an extremely high metabolism and increasing cortisol levels, and for the vast majority who cannot secure food, their few hours-days of existence probably look a lot more like a desperate struggle until they gradually weaken and lose energy before dying. This is partly because they were born too small to ever have a chance of exogenous feeding—like a premature human baby unable to suckle, most don’t have the suction force to consume plankton.
I don’t doubt that there might be some pleasure there to balance out the suffering, but it seems like a hard sell for most K-strategists.