As usual with your posts on “ethical vegetarianism,” you don’t seem to have bothered to find out what ethical vegetarians actually say or think. You briefly mention “suffering,” but you aren’t making any real argument about suffering. As usual, you’re implicitly assuming that all we care about is deaths. But no, not all deaths of nonhuman animals are equally important, and most ethical vegetarians don’t say otherwise. Most of us are focused on the animals’ whole lives in factory farms more than on the exact moment of their deaths. So there’s nothing inconsistent about caring more about the pig kept in cruel conditions throughout his/her life than about an ant living a normal ant life until suddenly being killed by a car — too fast for the ant to feel anything.
Also, even if vegetarians should treat insects better than they do now, that doesn’t invalidate our arguments about other species. At worst, that means we’re imperfect. Would you say the American founders’ writings should be totally dismissed because they were inconsistent and hypocritical on some fundamental issues, such as women’s rights and slavery? No, we should benefit from their best principles while realizing that it took a long time for those principles to be applied to more and more of society. Progress takes a long time, often on the scale of centuries or even millennia. It’s entirely arbitrary to say that the current thinkers or activists need to have gotten every issue right or we won’t take anything they say seriously.
Most of your posts on other topics are excellent, but your posts about vegetarianism and animals consistently suffer from these blatant oversights. What’s the point of repeatedly posting about this topic when you haven’t learned the first thing about it?
I think you misunderstand the point about insects. It is literally impossible to prevent accidental insect deaths. Herbivores kill plenty of insects too, from tail swats to eating them with the grass. This is involuntary, not at all comparable to the voluntary actions of the founders in buying and keeping slaves and denying women's rights.
Adelstein's argument (and Huemer's) is about insect suffering, not just insect deaths. For example, Adelstein argues that bugs have very bad lives, and they have hundreds of offspring, so killing bugs prevents huge numbers of future insect suffering. On that view, giving insects moral consideration doesn't make everyday life wrong because you kill bugs. It makes everyday life really good because you kill bugs.
I don't agree with them - but to my knowledge Adelstein and Tomasik don't advocate just plain killing but preventing births through habitat destruction. Though sometimes something like euthanasia was mentioned (killing insects “humanely” before they die natually, which was assumed to be worse). Tomasik even refrains from driving at night because this may kill more insects in uncontrolled possibly painful ways.
Interesting, habitat destruction vs just plain killing seems like a doing harm vs allowing harm distinction, so I didn't expect utilitarians would see a big difference between the two. Any idea why? Maybe because plain killing does not reduce the carrying capacity so it doesn't end up doing anything on net?
It is too inconsequential for them and they want to maximize utility/ minimize negative utility. And missing individuals make room for others. Thus they want to take the room away. They don't want to cause pointless suffering. Tomasik, who apparently inspired Adelstein, thought that suffering can only be justified if it reduces suffering. He also refined a method to euthanize cetain individual insects.
Death, suffering, leave us not go off into the weeds. My point was that humans and other animals cannot prevent harm to insects. Building any kind of shelter or bedding down for the night disrupts the lives of a whole lot of bugs that lived there. Grazing herbivores disrupt many insect lives just by eating grass. This is involuntary and not comparable to voluntary and unnecessary slavery by the founders.
Yeah, you're right that it's not comparable to the slavery of the founders. I just wanted to emphasize that the more you think insect suffering matters, the more happy you should be about regular human activity. Normal human activity reduces bug population, which reduces bug suffering. Accepting bug suffering makes normal human activity a large moral good rather than a moral bad, like Caplan seemed to suggest.
No, I’m not “misunderstanding the point”; you’re only adding to my point. To the extent insect deaths are unavoidable, vegetarians shouldn’t be blamed for them. But my comment is assuming for the sake of argument that they could be blameworthy.
It's awfully convenient for you that, according to the graph that represents your view, almost every animal besides humans have neglible moral worth, but then it spikes such that even the dumbest humans have moral worth. It'd be very inconvenient for your life if even some very smart animals like golden retrievers or parrots had significant moral weight. It'd also be very inconvenient for your life if the dumbest humans, like those with severe autism or Downs syndrome, had animal-level moral worth, if only because it'd inspire a lot of rage at you. It'd also be very inconvenient for you if you thought the smartest humans/aliens/AI could have more moral worth.
None of that is outright inconsistent as a moral theory. It's just very, very suspiciously convenient.
As bizarre as Bryan's steep climb from cow to dumb human is, the most shocking part of the curve for me is the flatness between human and alien. My consequentialist reasoning is strongly influenced by a belief that we current humans don't begin to scratch the surface of logically possible morally relevant sentience. On a plot with Star Trek nebula aliens, angels and ancient dragons, we look indistinguishable from chickens.
Personally, as elegant as utilitarianism is, I ultimately think the whole framework is bunk. But I have a lot of respect for most utilitarians for the consistency most people don't manage. Bryan Caplan here is very clearly munchkining a framework that's technically consistent but spiritually arbitrary
The marginal cost of reducing the suffering of factory farmed animals is far lower than the marginal cost of reducing the accidental deaths of insects. It would not cost you too much to quit eating meat, nay, to simply /reduce/ your meat consumption, but it would cost you a lot to stop driving cars or living in houses. That's why you should do the former but not the latter. This sort of cost/benefits analysis is standard fare for the sort of consequantialist philosophy that has produced ethical vegetarianism, I find it strange that an economist of all people cannot seem to grasp it.
I don’t know about that. I really like steak and I really like roasted chicken, especially paired with a good wine. If someone told me I’d live to 90 if I gave up meat and live to 70 if I didn’t, I’d probably pick the shorter life.
Well, okay, and some humans don't care about some different sorts of humans. The point is that the economically literate ought to be able to apply cost:benefit reasoning in normative ethics, even if they individually don't care about a large component of the benefit.
You do not care about suffering? You think it does not matter or should not count in your moral decision making? So if I start torturing, say, a dog or a cow in front of you and you could make it stop by simply pushing me away, you would not do it?
So you admit that animal suffering is a relevant variable in your ethical decision making? It does not have a 0 value? It may not have a high value, but still non-null, like 1 or 2 on a scale from 0 to 10?
In which case it is not the case that you 'do not care about benefits to them', is not it?
The view that suffering is bad is one of the most obvious truths in ethics. I don't see how appealing to it is problematic. The idea that the same type of experience matters differently for different creatures strikes me as rather odd, in contrast. Humans matter more because we have a far richer array of valuable experiences than animals do. Our sensations of pain should be equally important, though.
I really doubt that insects feel pain. It would serve no evolutionary purpose, and they exhibit none of the other features of the mind we find in uncontroversial cases. They seem closer to motion-detectors than they do to dogs. Even if they do, though, it's hard to see how that matters.
I was rather surprised by Huemer's sympathy for the concern. The death of the vast majority of insects after incredibly short lives is inevitable. Even if they can experience pain, that experience is inevitable. It's also probably briefer if they're hit by a car. The pain doesn't last long, after all. Meanwhile, they're pleasure is very unlikely to be dramatically increased by living a little longer. Even if they feel pain and pleasure, the quicker death of a billion of them is far less of a decrease in total suffering than the death of one happy cow. Meanwhile, the cost to human happiness is far greater if we seek to avoid that loss. Maybe breeding billions of them is wrong, but hitting them with cars isn't.
I'm among those who stopped buying factory farmed products because of this debate. Despite assurances to the contrary that I would adjust, the absence of meat from my life is a huge and persistent personal cost for me. I really wish I was wrong. Unfortunately, I'm not willing to give money to continuous and widespread acts of massive evil, so I won't buy from factory farms.
I am willing to keep driving, though. Even if they feel pain, which I seriously doubt, insect lives lack any additional features that are ethically relevant, and their deaths are very inconsequential. Their lives are unlikely to produce much pleasure, and very unlikely to produce significantly more pleasure than pain. I would feel less bad killing lots of them than killing a cow, and not because of how much I care. Try as I might, I can't care much for cows. Not eating them would be much easier if I did. But my feelings don't affect morality, so I don't let them guide me in cases where they're likely to be unreliable.
I have every reason to think cows feel pain basically like I do. I also know most of them needlessly feel lots of it before I eat them. I have little reason to think most bugs feel pain. I have far less reason to think their deaths drastically decrease the pain in the universe relative to the pleasure in it. The cases seem very different to me. I still don't really understand why they don't to you.
It seems like you and Huemer have a disagreement on how reflective equilibrium works -- the process by which you come to some ethical theory. I think Huemer’s view might be coming from some version of evolutionary debunking arguments (see an article from him about this here: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/the-smart-debunker) against intuitions in particular cases (like that we should all kill ourselves because it will result in less animal farming) that lead him to rely on abstract principles of ethics (like killing is bad - which he argues tend to be less subject to bias).
Separate point on this article: if you are somewhat utilitarian and think a life that experiences much torture is worse than not living, you might think that insect death is actually quite positive. If this is true, most of those mundane acts you were talking about don’t have massive moral issues.
This does, however, touch on a point that I think is underrated (and will probably write more on soon) -- why should these ethical truths (in this case, having a reductio or not) really be contingent on how the world is if they’re objective (whether insect lives are positive or negative)?
Could you explain the underrated point at the end a bit? The distinction of necessary vs contingent seems quite different from the distinction between objective/subjective. A truth being objective yet contingent seems unproblematic in cases like science.
In ethics, it seems like the broader claim [suffering is prima facie bad] could be a necessary truth, but the applied ethics claim [killing bugs is good] could be contingent facts about bug suffering. Neither claim constitutively depends on the attitudes of observers, so they are objective.
Thanks for the comment and sure (note: I will probably write a post on this at some point, so if you want, you can subscribe to my blog to get an update on when that comes out).
We might want to say that a theory like Utilitarianism is objectively correct or false -- that is, true without depending on contingent facts (like our beliefs, desires, or the state of the world). Presumably, if one believes that, our arguments for believing one way or another should also not depend on contingent facts.
However, certain reductios of Utilitarianism seem to depend on the state of the world -- namely, we are complaining that it seems unintuitive that mundane acts (driving a car, etc) are actually morally tragic. The world could have been such that these acts were neutral (if insects weren’t killed when we drove cars) or very good (if insects lived positive lives). Therefore, this critique of util depends on the contingent state of the world -- the status of bugs in mundane acts.
But this seems to break the quality that I first mentioned -- since we are critiquing a theory (therefore, giving us reason not to believe it) because of something about the world that is contingent.
Yeah the view makes sense. I think I was just interpreting objectivity differently than you were. However, it seems that contingent facts can be used to show that a putative necessary truth is in fact false. For example, in Zeno's paradox, the claim [nothing can complete an infinite series] appears to be an objective/necessary claim, but it entails the false conclusion [motion is impossible]. So we can use the false contingent conclusion to reject the putatively objective truth [nothing can complete an infinite series] by modus tollens. I'll look forward to the article!
Huemer convinced me on ethical veganism, however, I am fine with eating animals that aren’t factory farmed (eg. ethically raised, hunted, etc.)
I really don’t see how being ok with factory farming is defensible unless you are also ok with torturing cats, dogs, and other apes. Even if you value animal suffering at 1/100th of human suffering, factory farming is still probably the most evil thing happening on Earth.
Bryan, I think you made an error in logic here in your initial argument. Your starting point should be “ ALL animal sufferings are morally important”, which, with your car/construction example which I agree with, does imply a contradiction.
But this just says the premise is false, or that NOT ALL animal sufferings is morally important is correct. Unfortunately, you seemed to conclude that no animal suffering is morally important, which is just bad logic reasoning.
I think what JAC said above is at least self consistent, whether one agrees with it or not. And this is why.
Ironically, TGGP endorses Infanticide in his link.
But nevertheless, this argument has always seemed rather facetious to me; I was a baby once, in fact everyone has been, and I would have liked for people to have treated me ethically back then. The same goes, in the other direction, for the seriously disabled: If I were to become disabled, I would like for people to treat me ethically. That leads straightforwardly to the conclusion that I should treat babies, disabled, etc. ethically, and furthermore that a society should judge harshly anyone who doesn't, absent extreme situations such as starvation where it may be the lesser evil to focus on the capable.
I'm sure a convicted murderer would like not to be punished for his crime, and termites would prefer not to be purged from a home they're infesting, but we disregard all that because a mere like for a certain treatment does not "lead straightforwardly to the conclusion" that we should grant that treatment.
I consider morality an evolved capability of specific social animals to facilitate large-scale cooperation for mutual benefit, based on an adaptive social contract. Humans have the best-developed version, but as far I judge the state of the research, it also applies in a limited sense to many other mammals, especially primates, and possibly even some birds. Though you should always be careful that a lot of the researchers in the field seem to have a strong bias towards sympathy and anthropomorphization.
A working morality thus needs to actually appeal to a large number of people, to make them actually want to join the social contract of your group. There is nothing that matters more than the likes of those you want to make a contract with. Almost no one wants to be killed in their sleep based on "haha I made a contract with RenOS the conscious entity, he wasn't conscious at that particular moment, checkmate contractualist", almost no one wants to be killed when sick or disabled, almost everyone wants their kids being taken care of when something happens to them, and so on. As already said, with the caveat that sufficiently bad circumstances may make compromises necessary for basic survival.
Termites, however, very clearly aren't capable of cooperating with us in any way. The convicted murderer, by definition, has already broken the social contract (otherwise, he would be "a great warrior") in a way that is usually considered particularly bad, so he as well is outside of the group of people one wants to make a social contract with.Neither is relevant to my point.
I guess you can always just insinuate any belief into an interlocutor that you dislike.
Both my children were born with open eyes. During the birth of the second, the midwife even shortly, inadvertently, chuckled, which mystified us at the moment, but we had other things to worry about. Afterwards, she explained that he was already curiously looking at her from inside, which is highly unusual. Both also were capable of following objects with their gaze instantly after birth, and would already very clearly watch attentively what people are doing, if possible. Now you may say they were special, but I've always leaned more conservative in this sense, and there is the nagging suspicion that many other babies have an at least similar level of awareness, only not being capable to show it to the same degree.
So there is very little that gets my blood boiling more than stories from countries where very late-term abortions are legal. Babies are babies, whether they happen to be in the womb at the moment, or outside of it. There is not magic happening during birth itself that confers awareness.
At the same time, it's also obvious that in the early weeks of pregnancy, the embryo really is just a bundle of cells. No central nervous system, not even properly developed organs, nothing. Again, using a personal example, my wife and me had to try for months to get pregnant. Every time it would begin, only to fail in the very few first weeks. In my experience, even strict anti-abortion activists did not consider this a tragedy on the level of the death of a human, often even brushing it off as natural, so you could say I find them disingenuous as well. Did you become a medical researcher to fight off this alleged immense tragedy? If not, why?
In the, I decided that I am generally against abortion, but with a moral weighing according to the rough developmental stage of the fetus. Plan B really only works in the embryonic stage so early that I find it hard to care all that much, even if I may advise people against it. Early-term - by which I mean before the central nervous system is finished, so somewhat earlier than the end of the first trimester - abortion is bad, but still low enough on the weighing that I can understand that other concerns will frequently overrule it. Mid-term, these become less and less understandable to me, and late-term I will really only accept threats to the live of the mother and/or a completely nonviable fetus.
I don't think the concept of identity really makes much sense for embryos anymore than that I, in some technical sense, was a particular sperm and egg beforehand, or a particular bunch of atoms before that.
At some point after the embryonic stage in the fetal development, some level of awareness starts to happen. It's very hard to be specific here, so I lean on the careful side, but that's roughly the very first point when I would think it conceptually meaningful to consider that being "me". The older it gets, the more awareness is there, so the more sense it makes. In this way, I consider it very much congruous with that statement.
“Since this conclusion is absurd, we should reject one of the premises.”
Sorry Bryan but this isn’t how logic works. You don’t get to reverse engineer premises based on what conclusions strike you as facially implausible. If we did that we’d have to reject general relativity and quantum mechanics for sure.
It is too inconsequential for them. As dead insects make room for other insects and the ethicists don't want to cause pointless pain. They want to make a lasting and maximized impact and “nachhaltig” exterminate the insects, ideally and in future prospect by destroying the world and all natural animal life in the universe and all universes and prevent any animal mind simulation. Though Tomasik developed methods to euthanize certain individual insects and “redeem” certain individuals from their “net negative lives”.
1. Insects are sentient. Numerous studies have found that they experience sensations—including pain and pleasure: pain responses were noted in the video, but they also have neurotransmitters, like those in the human brain, that play a role in reward and motivation, e.g. a study found that male fruit flies feel pleasure when they ejaculate. Ants and bees demonstrate advanced cognitive skills, including counting, learning by observation, and understanding concepts like sameness and difference. Flying insects navigate in 3-dimensional space using optic flow, landmark recognition, view matching, and many insects orient themselves with respect to the direction of light, especially the sun. Using sentience as a benchmark for ethical consideration would seem to include the pain and pleasure experienced by insects.
Sure, one could pose the argument that insects aren't living "good" lives, but insects experiencing pleasure while eating and mating would seem to suggest that their lives are just as "good" and "bad" as the lives of any other animal.
2. Insect lives are extremely short in comparison to humans. Even immediate pain that subsides a little later would take up a meaningful proportion of their existence.
3. Concluding that more insects need to die to reduce total suffering glosses over the fact that that could (would likely) be an ecological disaster. Many other animals survive by eating insects and they play an important role in agriculture and decomposition, among other environmental contributions. As much as I hate mosquitoes, they do serve a purpose, particularly as a food source for other animals, so complete eradication could end up having some adverse effects.
Also, and more importantly, this formula would apply to people, too, right? So, are we saying that people suffering in a way that would be comparable to the suffering experienced by insects should be "put out of their misery" to reduce the total suffering of the world?
4. Neuron counts alone are an arbitrary standard for deciding whether one animal's suffering is more/less valid for ethical consideration. Magpies have more neurons than Golden Retreivers, but my Golden Retreiver suffers substantially when she doesn't get her morning sniffing tour. Elephants have more neurons than humans. Humans have more cerebral cortex neurons than elephants. Maybe, it's the number of neurons located in sensory-associative sctructures that matter? If that's the case, then what's the magic number?
Sensory-associative structures differ: mammals use the cerebral cortex, birds use the dorsal ventricular ridge of the pallium ("hypopallium"), and insects use the corpora pedunculata ("mushroom bodies"). In recent research, mushroom bodies were discovered in shrimp and certain other crustaceans, proving that their brains are suprisingly similar to insects. Shrimp are estimated to have ~170,000 neurons in their corpora pedunculata, the same as honey bees, and cockroaches have ~200,000.
Based on the opinions of Give Well and several Stubstack authors, shrimp suffering is a major concern. If we care about shrimp suffering, then it would follow that we should also care about insect suffering. If how much we care is based on the number of neurons present in sensory-associative structures, then it would seem that cockroach suffering deserves more attention than shrimp suffering.
To save ourselves from needing to be concerned about the suffering of insects, we could decide that animals processing pain and other sensory information in areas of the brain dissimilar to ours are not suffering in any relevant sense, but that would mean chicken suffering is no longer relevant.
4. Using IQ as a means of scaling individual impact in an equation to calculate global suffering would imply that either someone with a 70 IQ experiences pain and suffering LESS acutely than someone with a 160 IQ or that their pain and suffering is LESS consequential—e.g. the intense suffering of one stupid person would equal 5 while the same intensity of suffering felt by a genius would equal 9. Does that sound ethical?
5. Bryan's argument is valid. Insects are sentient creatures that experience both pain and pleasure. If animal suffering is morally important, then insect suffering is morally important. Making the same effort to reduce insect suffering as is made to reduce the suffering of other animals would necessarily require huge sacrifices for humanity. Taking into consideration all the millions of insects suffering as a result of modern farming methods, how do we determine whether their cumulative pain and deaths are offset by the pleasure felt by a couple thousand people eating? What happens if we determine that human existence is a net negative given our impact on all other living things?
I am receptive to the arguments against inhumane treatment of farm animals and do believe we should make an effort to reduce their suffering, but I'm not convinced by ethical vegetarianism. Going vegan only helps cows, chickens, pigs and fish, while necessarily increasing the pain and suffering of insects due to higher demand for plant based sustenance requiring insecticide. For vegans to be consistent in their moral considerations of animals, they would have to include insects. Arguments to the contrary just sound like motivated reasoning, but who could seriously blame them? Including insect welfare is truly too much to ask and would make eating anything feel like condoning mass murder.
I think making an argument that centers on the nutritional gains from eating less meat and eating more fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and whole grains would be better. Getting adequate nutrition while eating a plant based diet is possible, but it is also far more complicated. Many vegetarians' and vegans' diets are deficient in essential amino acids and nutrients. People, specifically parents, not fully understanding how to get adequate nutrients in their plant based diets can have serious negative consequences for the cognitive development of their children. The same goes for parents that only serve their children chicken nuggets and applesauce.
In the end, I believe food security and ensuring future generations have the cognitive resources necessary to continue having these discussions is more important, but I'm not a cow or a fruit fly, so yeah.
> If animal suffering is morally important, then insect suffering is morally important, which implies that even the most seemingly innocuous activities — driving a car, building a house — are morally monstrous. Since this conclusion is absurd, we should reject one of the premises.
I really, really, do not think this is a good argument. It only works if you believe that morality should accord with intuitive human common sense. But if you believe that, it's pretty pointless trying to reason philosophically about morality at all- you already know what is moral. Either way, the argument has no value.
Or to put it in a completely different way, why shouldn't it be true that all human actions are various levels of immoral?
Another problem I have with the vegetarian types, even when it comes to animals in general, is if all the assumptions of what they believe are true - if truly believed, doesn't it require more from us than simply abstain from eating? Like why shouldn't we be significantly intervening in the animal kingdom, preventing a Lion from killing a Zebra? Shouldn't we also try to find "alternative meats" for the worlds biggest meat eaters?
And if not, if we approve it in nature, why not with the worlds apex predators?
I think Huemer's graph should probably be simplified. It should just be a step function where the badness of pain is zero beneath a certain threshold of minimum mental system requirements and one after that threshold is met. Most, but perhaps not all animals would be to the left of the step, and most, but not all humans would be on the right, most of the time. I think people with this view should bite the bullet and acknowledge that human fetuses, infants, and even toddlers belong to the left of the step. We don't place the step in a conveniently human supremacist way, but in a way that reflects our actual life experiences of when pain counts as bad.
How do we know this? Well even though we have all been fetuses, infants and toddlers, none of us actually remember being those things. The pain experienced by our fetus/infant/toddler forms simply has no relevance to the fully conscious human beings we are today. If the devil offered you a cheeseburger in exchange for letting it go back in time to kidnap you as an infant from your crib, pause your growth, put you in a pocket dimension and torture you for 1000 years, then heal you, resume your growth, and deposit you back in your crib, you should take that deal if you're hungry! No conscious being is going to be home in the infant's psyche to experience the torture.
(1) I do have (a few - 10-15?) memories of being a toddler
(2) As a current parent of toddlers, the idea that toddlers have zero moral worth is, frankly, absurd
(3) The idea that basically any bird or mammal would be to the left of the threshold, if there is some step function, I also find deeply deeply implausible
(4) Step function itself makes no sense, if nothing else moral uncertainty will smooth things to some degree (imo the graph above already implies dramatic overconfidence, even granting that God had told us the true model was a step function, but not what the threshold was). Separately I also find the step function model implausible.
(5) Baby torture scenario - I strongly disagree, as I expect will most, but will just point out that you can't rely on a Caplan-type "intuitions uber alles" approach here. (And also again due to moral uncertainty this would be an insane bet to actually take.)
(1) I should have added a qualifier to say, "probably even toddlers". I certainly don't have any memories of being a toddler (under 36 months old), pinpointed by the fact that my 2 years younger sister was walking in all my earliest memories, but I'm aware that some people claim memories from that age (though I suspect they are false).
(2) The graph is about badness of pain, not moral worth. An infant or even a fetus still has moral worth, though I think it resides entirely with the people who care about it, not within the lifeform itself. Without anyone who cares about it, an infant or fetus has no intrinsic moral worth.
(3) I did say "most, but perhaps not all animals". I for one would worry I was doing wrong if I was hunting dolphins or elephants or great apes. But ultimately yes, we have a legitimate disagreement about when animal suffering is bad. To me, hunting dolphins, elephants and great apes MIGHT be wrong. To you, it's almost certainly wrong, presumably along with hunting even less intelligent species.
(4) A step function is the only function that makes sense to me - what would it even mean to say that the badness of pain for some creature is 1% or 10,000% of what it is for a human? We're not talking about the intensity of pain or expectations of badness; we're talking about the badness itself. The only values that make sense to me are 0% and 100%.
(5) I'm equally confident facing that kind of torture anesthetized or with my cognitive capacity reduced to an infant's (or an animal's). Either way I won't be there to enjoy it. There is no moral uncertainty here - I've been an infant, don't remember it. I've no reason to believe that fact will change if I were temporarily transformed into an infant again.
As for what most people would think, few people bother to think about animal welfare at all. When they are forced to think about it, it's usually prompted by people advocating for animal welfare. If forced to choose between the absurd conclusion that eating meat is wrong or the absurd conclusion that eating meat is fine, but also we don't have to worry about certain kinds of baby torture, I'd bet most will pick the option that doesn't upend their diet.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. First let's take a step back - sometimes people will take an approach to moral questions which is "find the theory that I find most plausible, act as if it is true". But this would clearly be a crazy way to act in other domains. For example, let's say you were 90% sure that no train was coming today. You wouldn't just act as if that were true, ignoring alternatives, and take a nap on the train tracks.
I think this is equally crazy with respect to morality. The correct approach has to take into account uncertainty over the correct moral theory. For example, conceptually maybe you try to have some probability distribution over different possible theories and integrate over them (though this specific thing runs into technical issues). I think it is often quite hard to have high confidence on contested moral theories or judgements, and taking uncertainty into account will tend to significantly alter judgments in such cases. This is what I was calling moral uncertainty.
Some more specific points -
(1) This doesn't matter at all and I'm sure an internet stranger won't sway you much, but just for fun, I'll mention I am indeed quite confident that I've got (memories of) episodic memories from before age 3, and even some from before age 2 - timestamped by where we lived, verifiable information I've been able to check with my parents, etc. I do have a very good memory in general FWIW. File under "memory is weird and people vary a lot."
(2) Fair point, I did word this sloppily. To clarify, I interpreted the graph as "the moral badness of the pain that they feel", which I think is what you mean too. I continue to find the idea that the pain of toddlers (or even infants) has no inherent moral badness absurd, and expect almost all parents (who seem well placed to comment) to agree with me. My point isn't that I'm definitely right, it's that this seems quite self-evident to me. How can you be so sure I'm wrong?
(3) Actually no, I think hunting is basically fine. What I object to is torturing animals for prolonged periods. You're also wrong to think that I have high confidence in judgements of moral badness of pain for various animals. My probability distributions over how much various animals might suffer, and how much it might matter, are in fact quite broad (as as you correctly point out, different than yours). Rather, my point is the opposite - to justify a particular all-or-nothing threshold would (at least implicitly, if you accept the point from my first two paragraphs) require extremely high confidence.
(4) This is also the point I am making here. *Even if* we somehow knew that the true model were a step function, we would have a lot of uncertainty about where the threshold between "matters as much as humans" and "doesn't matter at all" lies. This smooths out the function to a substantial degree, such that the graph as shown implies dramatic overconfidence. How on earth do we think we know so precisely where the threshold is? Our uncertainty needs to be very low for the threshold to be so sharp.
On whether a threshold even makes sense in the first place - okay thanks, I think I see what you are saying now. I guess my view is if there has to be some binary switch thrown into this, then fine, that is always set to ON. All pain matters, but in a way possibly mediated by other mental faculties (intelligence? higher-order consciousness? vividness of qualia? who knows?) leading to various capacities for "suffering". So then we effectively get a continuous graph with no sharp thresholds for the thing we care about, call it "capacity for morally relevant suffering". Presumably this is effectively zero for sufficiently simple organisms (e.g. mussels), but of course it will be hard for us to really know the right shape for this curve.
That said, I don't think much really hinges on this last paragraph. Because as I've argued, even if there is some threshold below which pain doesn't matter at all, I don't see how we could be confident about this or especially where it's located, given dramatically differing intuitions across people.
(5) Same thing - my point is just that people have strongly diverging intuitions here so it seems unjustified to be very confident, especially on the basis of intuition. Seems immoral to torture a baby for a thousand years for a cheeseburger, even if you think it's probably fine, because I doubt you could really be justified in the level of confidence you'd need.
[Edited to add - um, just reread this, sorry for the novel!]
I agree that uncertainty has a role in all of our reasoning, but I guess we disagree on how uncertain we should be on this topic. From my point of view, I’m allowing for a ton of uncertainty. As I stated, I suspect that the badness of pain for toddlers is zero, but I’m not certain of this. A minority of people like you claim to have some memories from their time as toddlers. If true, this would mean that sometimes it is bad for toddlers to suffer. Because of this uncertainty, I want to be cautious and extend legal protections to the entire category of toddler experiences - that’s billions of toddler hours per year, even if morally relevant toddler hours are vanishingly uncommon! How do we determine if my uncertainty induced benevolence is generous or stingy? A bit more uncertainty, and maybe I’d want to extend protections to infants, then animals, then fetuses, then inanimate objects. Even more uncertainty, and it’s no longer clear if suffering is bad - maybe the correct moral theory is that suffering is good! I think I’m handling my uncertainties in a reasonable manner.
(1 and 2) As I said above, I’m not sure you are wrong about the badness of pain in some toddlers, but I definitely disagree that parents have any special insight here. As I’ve said, I have no memory of my time as a toddler. Like you, my parents would insist that my suffering seemed morally relevant, but I’m the one who was supposedly experiencing it, and I’m telling you! I didn’t! It wasn’t! If some factory farmed animal came in contact with the Ooze and became an intelligent mutanimal and told you that it had no memory or trauma from the suffering it endured while being factory farmed before it was cognitively uplifted, you should believe it! Even if its suffering seemed so morally relevant to you just a few months ago! Proof just doesn’t get any stronger than personal experience (or lack of one). Of course, you’d want to corroborate lots of personal experiences before generalizing beyond individuals, but we have that here. Infantile amnesia is a well documented and studied phenomenon.
(3) I do have high confidence in certain things. Personal experience gives me the very highest confidence a person can ever have in anything that my suffering as a toddler and younger was morally irrelevant.
(4) I agree there is a lot of uncertainty in where the threshold lies, there are millions of humans that are borderline and probably at least hundreds of thousands of animals too. I think I admit a lot of uncertainty, just not as broad as you’d have it.
(5) I think I’m mostly relying on a broadly shared personal experience here, not moral intuitions. It does rely on some intuition to justify generalizing that shared experience across other humans and other species, but just a little.
I haven't checked out the correspondence, but I imagine while you find that graph intuitive, Huemer doesn't find it intuitive that humans stop mattering if they're dumb enough. So Huemer's objection doesn't need to be based on an abstaction but a specific moral judgment.
As usual with your posts on “ethical vegetarianism,” you don’t seem to have bothered to find out what ethical vegetarians actually say or think. You briefly mention “suffering,” but you aren’t making any real argument about suffering. As usual, you’re implicitly assuming that all we care about is deaths. But no, not all deaths of nonhuman animals are equally important, and most ethical vegetarians don’t say otherwise. Most of us are focused on the animals’ whole lives in factory farms more than on the exact moment of their deaths. So there’s nothing inconsistent about caring more about the pig kept in cruel conditions throughout his/her life than about an ant living a normal ant life until suddenly being killed by a car — too fast for the ant to feel anything.
Also, even if vegetarians should treat insects better than they do now, that doesn’t invalidate our arguments about other species. At worst, that means we’re imperfect. Would you say the American founders’ writings should be totally dismissed because they were inconsistent and hypocritical on some fundamental issues, such as women’s rights and slavery? No, we should benefit from their best principles while realizing that it took a long time for those principles to be applied to more and more of society. Progress takes a long time, often on the scale of centuries or even millennia. It’s entirely arbitrary to say that the current thinkers or activists need to have gotten every issue right or we won’t take anything they say seriously.
Most of your posts on other topics are excellent, but your posts about vegetarianism and animals consistently suffer from these blatant oversights. What’s the point of repeatedly posting about this topic when you haven’t learned the first thing about it?
I think you misunderstand the point about insects. It is literally impossible to prevent accidental insect deaths. Herbivores kill plenty of insects too, from tail swats to eating them with the grass. This is involuntary, not at all comparable to the voluntary actions of the founders in buying and keeping slaves and denying women's rights.
Adelstein's argument (and Huemer's) is about insect suffering, not just insect deaths. For example, Adelstein argues that bugs have very bad lives, and they have hundreds of offspring, so killing bugs prevents huge numbers of future insect suffering. On that view, giving insects moral consideration doesn't make everyday life wrong because you kill bugs. It makes everyday life really good because you kill bugs.
I don't agree with them - but to my knowledge Adelstein and Tomasik don't advocate just plain killing but preventing births through habitat destruction. Though sometimes something like euthanasia was mentioned (killing insects “humanely” before they die natually, which was assumed to be worse). Tomasik even refrains from driving at night because this may kill more insects in uncontrolled possibly painful ways.
Interesting, habitat destruction vs just plain killing seems like a doing harm vs allowing harm distinction, so I didn't expect utilitarians would see a big difference between the two. Any idea why? Maybe because plain killing does not reduce the carrying capacity so it doesn't end up doing anything on net?
It is too inconsequential for them and they want to maximize utility/ minimize negative utility. And missing individuals make room for others. Thus they want to take the room away. They don't want to cause pointless suffering. Tomasik, who apparently inspired Adelstein, thought that suffering can only be justified if it reduces suffering. He also refined a method to euthanize cetain individual insects.
Death, suffering, leave us not go off into the weeds. My point was that humans and other animals cannot prevent harm to insects. Building any kind of shelter or bedding down for the night disrupts the lives of a whole lot of bugs that lived there. Grazing herbivores disrupt many insect lives just by eating grass. This is involuntary and not comparable to voluntary and unnecessary slavery by the founders.
Yeah, you're right that it's not comparable to the slavery of the founders. I just wanted to emphasize that the more you think insect suffering matters, the more happy you should be about regular human activity. Normal human activity reduces bug population, which reduces bug suffering. Accepting bug suffering makes normal human activity a large moral good rather than a moral bad, like Caplan seemed to suggest.
No, I’m not “misunderstanding the point”; you’re only adding to my point. To the extent insect deaths are unavoidable, vegetarians shouldn’t be blamed for them. But my comment is assuming for the sake of argument that they could be blameworthy.
It's awfully convenient for you that, according to the graph that represents your view, almost every animal besides humans have neglible moral worth, but then it spikes such that even the dumbest humans have moral worth. It'd be very inconvenient for your life if even some very smart animals like golden retrievers or parrots had significant moral weight. It'd also be very inconvenient for your life if the dumbest humans, like those with severe autism or Downs syndrome, had animal-level moral worth, if only because it'd inspire a lot of rage at you. It'd also be very inconvenient for you if you thought the smartest humans/aliens/AI could have more moral worth.
None of that is outright inconsistent as a moral theory. It's just very, very suspiciously convenient.
As bizarre as Bryan's steep climb from cow to dumb human is, the most shocking part of the curve for me is the flatness between human and alien. My consequentialist reasoning is strongly influenced by a belief that we current humans don't begin to scratch the surface of logically possible morally relevant sentience. On a plot with Star Trek nebula aliens, angels and ancient dragons, we look indistinguishable from chickens.
Personally, as elegant as utilitarianism is, I ultimately think the whole framework is bunk. But I have a lot of respect for most utilitarians for the consistency most people don't manage. Bryan Caplan here is very clearly munchkining a framework that's technically consistent but spiritually arbitrary
The animals that I’d guess could have moral worth in a way that matters would be the other Great Apes, dolphins, orcas, and elephants.
I think we should treat dogs well because we have an evolutionary deal with them, and cats because they are cute.
The marginal cost of reducing the suffering of factory farmed animals is far lower than the marginal cost of reducing the accidental deaths of insects. It would not cost you too much to quit eating meat, nay, to simply /reduce/ your meat consumption, but it would cost you a lot to stop driving cars or living in houses. That's why you should do the former but not the latter. This sort of cost/benefits analysis is standard fare for the sort of consequantialist philosophy that has produced ethical vegetarianism, I find it strange that an economist of all people cannot seem to grasp it.
I don’t know about that. I really like steak and I really like roasted chicken, especially paired with a good wine. If someone told me I’d live to 90 if I gave up meat and live to 70 if I didn’t, I’d probably pick the shorter life.
Benefits to the animals, not benefits to you.
I don’t care about benefits to them.
Well, okay, and some humans don't care about some different sorts of humans. The point is that the economically literate ought to be able to apply cost:benefit reasoning in normative ethics, even if they individually don't care about a large component of the benefit.
You do not care about suffering? You think it does not matter or should not count in your moral decision making? So if I start torturing, say, a dog or a cow in front of you and you could make it stop by simply pushing me away, you would not do it?
I would do it. But if I found out my neighbor down the street was mistreating his goats I probably wouldn’t do anything.
So you admit that animal suffering is a relevant variable in your ethical decision making? It does not have a 0 value? It may not have a high value, but still non-null, like 1 or 2 on a scale from 0 to 10?
In which case it is not the case that you 'do not care about benefits to them', is not it?
The view that suffering is bad is one of the most obvious truths in ethics. I don't see how appealing to it is problematic. The idea that the same type of experience matters differently for different creatures strikes me as rather odd, in contrast. Humans matter more because we have a far richer array of valuable experiences than animals do. Our sensations of pain should be equally important, though.
I really doubt that insects feel pain. It would serve no evolutionary purpose, and they exhibit none of the other features of the mind we find in uncontroversial cases. They seem closer to motion-detectors than they do to dogs. Even if they do, though, it's hard to see how that matters.
I was rather surprised by Huemer's sympathy for the concern. The death of the vast majority of insects after incredibly short lives is inevitable. Even if they can experience pain, that experience is inevitable. It's also probably briefer if they're hit by a car. The pain doesn't last long, after all. Meanwhile, they're pleasure is very unlikely to be dramatically increased by living a little longer. Even if they feel pain and pleasure, the quicker death of a billion of them is far less of a decrease in total suffering than the death of one happy cow. Meanwhile, the cost to human happiness is far greater if we seek to avoid that loss. Maybe breeding billions of them is wrong, but hitting them with cars isn't.
I'm among those who stopped buying factory farmed products because of this debate. Despite assurances to the contrary that I would adjust, the absence of meat from my life is a huge and persistent personal cost for me. I really wish I was wrong. Unfortunately, I'm not willing to give money to continuous and widespread acts of massive evil, so I won't buy from factory farms.
I am willing to keep driving, though. Even if they feel pain, which I seriously doubt, insect lives lack any additional features that are ethically relevant, and their deaths are very inconsequential. Their lives are unlikely to produce much pleasure, and very unlikely to produce significantly more pleasure than pain. I would feel less bad killing lots of them than killing a cow, and not because of how much I care. Try as I might, I can't care much for cows. Not eating them would be much easier if I did. But my feelings don't affect morality, so I don't let them guide me in cases where they're likely to be unreliable.
I have every reason to think cows feel pain basically like I do. I also know most of them needlessly feel lots of it before I eat them. I have little reason to think most bugs feel pain. I have far less reason to think their deaths drastically decrease the pain in the universe relative to the pleasure in it. The cases seem very different to me. I still don't really understand why they don't to you.
How is pain related to suffering?
Can cows suffer? Or do they just feel pain?
It seems like you and Huemer have a disagreement on how reflective equilibrium works -- the process by which you come to some ethical theory. I think Huemer’s view might be coming from some version of evolutionary debunking arguments (see an article from him about this here: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/the-smart-debunker) against intuitions in particular cases (like that we should all kill ourselves because it will result in less animal farming) that lead him to rely on abstract principles of ethics (like killing is bad - which he argues tend to be less subject to bias).
I spell out this difference in a little more detail in this article that I wrote, and I think this sort of reasoning is a part of ethics that is quite underrated: https://irrationalitycommunity.substack.com/p/issues-in-meta-normative-ethics?r=1owv24
Separate point on this article: if you are somewhat utilitarian and think a life that experiences much torture is worse than not living, you might think that insect death is actually quite positive. If this is true, most of those mundane acts you were talking about don’t have massive moral issues.
This does, however, touch on a point that I think is underrated (and will probably write more on soon) -- why should these ethical truths (in this case, having a reductio or not) really be contingent on how the world is if they’re objective (whether insect lives are positive or negative)?
Could you explain the underrated point at the end a bit? The distinction of necessary vs contingent seems quite different from the distinction between objective/subjective. A truth being objective yet contingent seems unproblematic in cases like science.
In ethics, it seems like the broader claim [suffering is prima facie bad] could be a necessary truth, but the applied ethics claim [killing bugs is good] could be contingent facts about bug suffering. Neither claim constitutively depends on the attitudes of observers, so they are objective.
Thanks for the comment and sure (note: I will probably write a post on this at some point, so if you want, you can subscribe to my blog to get an update on when that comes out).
We might want to say that a theory like Utilitarianism is objectively correct or false -- that is, true without depending on contingent facts (like our beliefs, desires, or the state of the world). Presumably, if one believes that, our arguments for believing one way or another should also not depend on contingent facts.
However, certain reductios of Utilitarianism seem to depend on the state of the world -- namely, we are complaining that it seems unintuitive that mundane acts (driving a car, etc) are actually morally tragic. The world could have been such that these acts were neutral (if insects weren’t killed when we drove cars) or very good (if insects lived positive lives). Therefore, this critique of util depends on the contingent state of the world -- the status of bugs in mundane acts.
But this seems to break the quality that I first mentioned -- since we are critiquing a theory (therefore, giving us reason not to believe it) because of something about the world that is contingent.
Let me know if that makes more sense.
Yeah the view makes sense. I think I was just interpreting objectivity differently than you were. However, it seems that contingent facts can be used to show that a putative necessary truth is in fact false. For example, in Zeno's paradox, the claim [nothing can complete an infinite series] appears to be an objective/necessary claim, but it entails the false conclusion [motion is impossible]. So we can use the false contingent conclusion to reject the putatively objective truth [nothing can complete an infinite series] by modus tollens. I'll look forward to the article!
Huemer convinced me on ethical veganism, however, I am fine with eating animals that aren’t factory farmed (eg. ethically raised, hunted, etc.)
I really don’t see how being ok with factory farming is defensible unless you are also ok with torturing cats, dogs, and other apes. Even if you value animal suffering at 1/100th of human suffering, factory farming is still probably the most evil thing happening on Earth.
Caplan wrote that he was against “torturing” apes (factory farming them).
Bryan, I think you made an error in logic here in your initial argument. Your starting point should be “ ALL animal sufferings are morally important”, which, with your car/construction example which I agree with, does imply a contradiction.
But this just says the premise is false, or that NOT ALL animal sufferings is morally important is correct. Unfortunately, you seemed to conclude that no animal suffering is morally important, which is just bad logic reasoning.
I think what JAC said above is at least self consistent, whether one agrees with it or not. And this is why.
No need to muck about regarding intelligence. Insects can't do anything about us killing them, and can't enter into contracts in which we save their lives in exchange for some benefit they promise us https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dvc7zrqsdCYy6dCFR/suffering?commentId=pjPbCamDYMNsPf9HB https://worldspiritsockpuppet.com/2023/01/10/we-dont-trade-with-ants.html
Nor can babies
Ironically, TGGP endorses Infanticide in his link.
But nevertheless, this argument has always seemed rather facetious to me; I was a baby once, in fact everyone has been, and I would have liked for people to have treated me ethically back then. The same goes, in the other direction, for the seriously disabled: If I were to become disabled, I would like for people to treat me ethically. That leads straightforwardly to the conclusion that I should treat babies, disabled, etc. ethically, and furthermore that a society should judge harshly anyone who doesn't, absent extreme situations such as starvation where it may be the lesser evil to focus on the capable.
I'm sure a convicted murderer would like not to be punished for his crime, and termites would prefer not to be purged from a home they're infesting, but we disregard all that because a mere like for a certain treatment does not "lead straightforwardly to the conclusion" that we should grant that treatment.
It seems you fundamentally misunderstood me.
I consider morality an evolved capability of specific social animals to facilitate large-scale cooperation for mutual benefit, based on an adaptive social contract. Humans have the best-developed version, but as far I judge the state of the research, it also applies in a limited sense to many other mammals, especially primates, and possibly even some birds. Though you should always be careful that a lot of the researchers in the field seem to have a strong bias towards sympathy and anthropomorphization.
A working morality thus needs to actually appeal to a large number of people, to make them actually want to join the social contract of your group. There is nothing that matters more than the likes of those you want to make a contract with. Almost no one wants to be killed in their sleep based on "haha I made a contract with RenOS the conscious entity, he wasn't conscious at that particular moment, checkmate contractualist", almost no one wants to be killed when sick or disabled, almost everyone wants their kids being taken care of when something happens to them, and so on. As already said, with the caveat that sufficiently bad circumstances may make compromises necessary for basic survival.
Termites, however, very clearly aren't capable of cooperating with us in any way. The convicted murderer, by definition, has already broken the social contract (otherwise, he would be "a great warrior") in a way that is usually considered particularly bad, so he as well is outside of the group of people one wants to make a social contract with.Neither is relevant to my point.
I guess you can always just insinuate any belief into an interlocutor that you dislike.
Both my children were born with open eyes. During the birth of the second, the midwife even shortly, inadvertently, chuckled, which mystified us at the moment, but we had other things to worry about. Afterwards, she explained that he was already curiously looking at her from inside, which is highly unusual. Both also were capable of following objects with their gaze instantly after birth, and would already very clearly watch attentively what people are doing, if possible. Now you may say they were special, but I've always leaned more conservative in this sense, and there is the nagging suspicion that many other babies have an at least similar level of awareness, only not being capable to show it to the same degree.
So there is very little that gets my blood boiling more than stories from countries where very late-term abortions are legal. Babies are babies, whether they happen to be in the womb at the moment, or outside of it. There is not magic happening during birth itself that confers awareness.
At the same time, it's also obvious that in the early weeks of pregnancy, the embryo really is just a bundle of cells. No central nervous system, not even properly developed organs, nothing. Again, using a personal example, my wife and me had to try for months to get pregnant. Every time it would begin, only to fail in the very few first weeks. In my experience, even strict anti-abortion activists did not consider this a tragedy on the level of the death of a human, often even brushing it off as natural, so you could say I find them disingenuous as well. Did you become a medical researcher to fight off this alleged immense tragedy? If not, why?
In the, I decided that I am generally against abortion, but with a moral weighing according to the rough developmental stage of the fetus. Plan B really only works in the embryonic stage so early that I find it hard to care all that much, even if I may advise people against it. Early-term - by which I mean before the central nervous system is finished, so somewhat earlier than the end of the first trimester - abortion is bad, but still low enough on the weighing that I can understand that other concerns will frequently overrule it. Mid-term, these become less and less understandable to me, and late-term I will really only accept threats to the live of the mother and/or a completely nonviable fetus.
I don't think the concept of identity really makes much sense for embryos anymore than that I, in some technical sense, was a particular sperm and egg beforehand, or a particular bunch of atoms before that.
At some point after the embryonic stage in the fetal development, some level of awareness starts to happen. It's very hard to be specific here, so I lean on the careful side, but that's roughly the very first point when I would think it conceptually meaningful to consider that being "me". The older it gets, the more awareness is there, so the more sense it makes. In this way, I consider it very much congruous with that statement.
How many angels can there be on the head of a pin?
“Since this conclusion is absurd, we should reject one of the premises.”
Sorry Bryan but this isn’t how logic works. You don’t get to reverse engineer premises based on what conclusions strike you as facially implausible. If we did that we’d have to reject general relativity and quantum mechanics for sure.
It is too inconsequential for them. As dead insects make room for other insects and the ethicists don't want to cause pointless pain. They want to make a lasting and maximized impact and “nachhaltig” exterminate the insects, ideally and in future prospect by destroying the world and all natural animal life in the universe and all universes and prevent any animal mind simulation. Though Tomasik developed methods to euthanize certain individual insects and “redeem” certain individuals from their “net negative lives”.
1. Insects are sentient. Numerous studies have found that they experience sensations—including pain and pleasure: pain responses were noted in the video, but they also have neurotransmitters, like those in the human brain, that play a role in reward and motivation, e.g. a study found that male fruit flies feel pleasure when they ejaculate. Ants and bees demonstrate advanced cognitive skills, including counting, learning by observation, and understanding concepts like sameness and difference. Flying insects navigate in 3-dimensional space using optic flow, landmark recognition, view matching, and many insects orient themselves with respect to the direction of light, especially the sun. Using sentience as a benchmark for ethical consideration would seem to include the pain and pleasure experienced by insects.
Sure, one could pose the argument that insects aren't living "good" lives, but insects experiencing pleasure while eating and mating would seem to suggest that their lives are just as "good" and "bad" as the lives of any other animal.
2. Insect lives are extremely short in comparison to humans. Even immediate pain that subsides a little later would take up a meaningful proportion of their existence.
3. Concluding that more insects need to die to reduce total suffering glosses over the fact that that could (would likely) be an ecological disaster. Many other animals survive by eating insects and they play an important role in agriculture and decomposition, among other environmental contributions. As much as I hate mosquitoes, they do serve a purpose, particularly as a food source for other animals, so complete eradication could end up having some adverse effects.
Also, and more importantly, this formula would apply to people, too, right? So, are we saying that people suffering in a way that would be comparable to the suffering experienced by insects should be "put out of their misery" to reduce the total suffering of the world?
4. Neuron counts alone are an arbitrary standard for deciding whether one animal's suffering is more/less valid for ethical consideration. Magpies have more neurons than Golden Retreivers, but my Golden Retreiver suffers substantially when she doesn't get her morning sniffing tour. Elephants have more neurons than humans. Humans have more cerebral cortex neurons than elephants. Maybe, it's the number of neurons located in sensory-associative sctructures that matter? If that's the case, then what's the magic number?
Sensory-associative structures differ: mammals use the cerebral cortex, birds use the dorsal ventricular ridge of the pallium ("hypopallium"), and insects use the corpora pedunculata ("mushroom bodies"). In recent research, mushroom bodies were discovered in shrimp and certain other crustaceans, proving that their brains are suprisingly similar to insects. Shrimp are estimated to have ~170,000 neurons in their corpora pedunculata, the same as honey bees, and cockroaches have ~200,000.
Based on the opinions of Give Well and several Stubstack authors, shrimp suffering is a major concern. If we care about shrimp suffering, then it would follow that we should also care about insect suffering. If how much we care is based on the number of neurons present in sensory-associative structures, then it would seem that cockroach suffering deserves more attention than shrimp suffering.
To save ourselves from needing to be concerned about the suffering of insects, we could decide that animals processing pain and other sensory information in areas of the brain dissimilar to ours are not suffering in any relevant sense, but that would mean chicken suffering is no longer relevant.
4. Using IQ as a means of scaling individual impact in an equation to calculate global suffering would imply that either someone with a 70 IQ experiences pain and suffering LESS acutely than someone with a 160 IQ or that their pain and suffering is LESS consequential—e.g. the intense suffering of one stupid person would equal 5 while the same intensity of suffering felt by a genius would equal 9. Does that sound ethical?
5. Bryan's argument is valid. Insects are sentient creatures that experience both pain and pleasure. If animal suffering is morally important, then insect suffering is morally important. Making the same effort to reduce insect suffering as is made to reduce the suffering of other animals would necessarily require huge sacrifices for humanity. Taking into consideration all the millions of insects suffering as a result of modern farming methods, how do we determine whether their cumulative pain and deaths are offset by the pleasure felt by a couple thousand people eating? What happens if we determine that human existence is a net negative given our impact on all other living things?
I am receptive to the arguments against inhumane treatment of farm animals and do believe we should make an effort to reduce their suffering, but I'm not convinced by ethical vegetarianism. Going vegan only helps cows, chickens, pigs and fish, while necessarily increasing the pain and suffering of insects due to higher demand for plant based sustenance requiring insecticide. For vegans to be consistent in their moral considerations of animals, they would have to include insects. Arguments to the contrary just sound like motivated reasoning, but who could seriously blame them? Including insect welfare is truly too much to ask and would make eating anything feel like condoning mass murder.
I think making an argument that centers on the nutritional gains from eating less meat and eating more fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and whole grains would be better. Getting adequate nutrition while eating a plant based diet is possible, but it is also far more complicated. Many vegetarians' and vegans' diets are deficient in essential amino acids and nutrients. People, specifically parents, not fully understanding how to get adequate nutrients in their plant based diets can have serious negative consequences for the cognitive development of their children. The same goes for parents that only serve their children chicken nuggets and applesauce.
In the end, I believe food security and ensuring future generations have the cognitive resources necessary to continue having these discussions is more important, but I'm not a cow or a fruit fly, so yeah.
> If animal suffering is morally important, then insect suffering is morally important, which implies that even the most seemingly innocuous activities — driving a car, building a house — are morally monstrous. Since this conclusion is absurd, we should reject one of the premises.
I really, really, do not think this is a good argument. It only works if you believe that morality should accord with intuitive human common sense. But if you believe that, it's pretty pointless trying to reason philosophically about morality at all- you already know what is moral. Either way, the argument has no value.
Or to put it in a completely different way, why shouldn't it be true that all human actions are various levels of immoral?
Another problem I have with the vegetarian types, even when it comes to animals in general, is if all the assumptions of what they believe are true - if truly believed, doesn't it require more from us than simply abstain from eating? Like why shouldn't we be significantly intervening in the animal kingdom, preventing a Lion from killing a Zebra? Shouldn't we also try to find "alternative meats" for the worlds biggest meat eaters?
And if not, if we approve it in nature, why not with the worlds apex predators?
I think Huemer's graph should probably be simplified. It should just be a step function where the badness of pain is zero beneath a certain threshold of minimum mental system requirements and one after that threshold is met. Most, but perhaps not all animals would be to the left of the step, and most, but not all humans would be on the right, most of the time. I think people with this view should bite the bullet and acknowledge that human fetuses, infants, and even toddlers belong to the left of the step. We don't place the step in a conveniently human supremacist way, but in a way that reflects our actual life experiences of when pain counts as bad.
How do we know this? Well even though we have all been fetuses, infants and toddlers, none of us actually remember being those things. The pain experienced by our fetus/infant/toddler forms simply has no relevance to the fully conscious human beings we are today. If the devil offered you a cheeseburger in exchange for letting it go back in time to kidnap you as an infant from your crib, pause your growth, put you in a pocket dimension and torture you for 1000 years, then heal you, resume your growth, and deposit you back in your crib, you should take that deal if you're hungry! No conscious being is going to be home in the infant's psyche to experience the torture.
(1) I do have (a few - 10-15?) memories of being a toddler
(2) As a current parent of toddlers, the idea that toddlers have zero moral worth is, frankly, absurd
(3) The idea that basically any bird or mammal would be to the left of the threshold, if there is some step function, I also find deeply deeply implausible
(4) Step function itself makes no sense, if nothing else moral uncertainty will smooth things to some degree (imo the graph above already implies dramatic overconfidence, even granting that God had told us the true model was a step function, but not what the threshold was). Separately I also find the step function model implausible.
(5) Baby torture scenario - I strongly disagree, as I expect will most, but will just point out that you can't rely on a Caplan-type "intuitions uber alles" approach here. (And also again due to moral uncertainty this would be an insane bet to actually take.)
(1) I should have added a qualifier to say, "probably even toddlers". I certainly don't have any memories of being a toddler (under 36 months old), pinpointed by the fact that my 2 years younger sister was walking in all my earliest memories, but I'm aware that some people claim memories from that age (though I suspect they are false).
(2) The graph is about badness of pain, not moral worth. An infant or even a fetus still has moral worth, though I think it resides entirely with the people who care about it, not within the lifeform itself. Without anyone who cares about it, an infant or fetus has no intrinsic moral worth.
(3) I did say "most, but perhaps not all animals". I for one would worry I was doing wrong if I was hunting dolphins or elephants or great apes. But ultimately yes, we have a legitimate disagreement about when animal suffering is bad. To me, hunting dolphins, elephants and great apes MIGHT be wrong. To you, it's almost certainly wrong, presumably along with hunting even less intelligent species.
(4) A step function is the only function that makes sense to me - what would it even mean to say that the badness of pain for some creature is 1% or 10,000% of what it is for a human? We're not talking about the intensity of pain or expectations of badness; we're talking about the badness itself. The only values that make sense to me are 0% and 100%.
(5) I'm equally confident facing that kind of torture anesthetized or with my cognitive capacity reduced to an infant's (or an animal's). Either way I won't be there to enjoy it. There is no moral uncertainty here - I've been an infant, don't remember it. I've no reason to believe that fact will change if I were temporarily transformed into an infant again.
As for what most people would think, few people bother to think about animal welfare at all. When they are forced to think about it, it's usually prompted by people advocating for animal welfare. If forced to choose between the absurd conclusion that eating meat is wrong or the absurd conclusion that eating meat is fine, but also we don't have to worry about certain kinds of baby torture, I'd bet most will pick the option that doesn't upend their diet.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. First let's take a step back - sometimes people will take an approach to moral questions which is "find the theory that I find most plausible, act as if it is true". But this would clearly be a crazy way to act in other domains. For example, let's say you were 90% sure that no train was coming today. You wouldn't just act as if that were true, ignoring alternatives, and take a nap on the train tracks.
I think this is equally crazy with respect to morality. The correct approach has to take into account uncertainty over the correct moral theory. For example, conceptually maybe you try to have some probability distribution over different possible theories and integrate over them (though this specific thing runs into technical issues). I think it is often quite hard to have high confidence on contested moral theories or judgements, and taking uncertainty into account will tend to significantly alter judgments in such cases. This is what I was calling moral uncertainty.
Some more specific points -
(1) This doesn't matter at all and I'm sure an internet stranger won't sway you much, but just for fun, I'll mention I am indeed quite confident that I've got (memories of) episodic memories from before age 3, and even some from before age 2 - timestamped by where we lived, verifiable information I've been able to check with my parents, etc. I do have a very good memory in general FWIW. File under "memory is weird and people vary a lot."
(2) Fair point, I did word this sloppily. To clarify, I interpreted the graph as "the moral badness of the pain that they feel", which I think is what you mean too. I continue to find the idea that the pain of toddlers (or even infants) has no inherent moral badness absurd, and expect almost all parents (who seem well placed to comment) to agree with me. My point isn't that I'm definitely right, it's that this seems quite self-evident to me. How can you be so sure I'm wrong?
(3) Actually no, I think hunting is basically fine. What I object to is torturing animals for prolonged periods. You're also wrong to think that I have high confidence in judgements of moral badness of pain for various animals. My probability distributions over how much various animals might suffer, and how much it might matter, are in fact quite broad (as as you correctly point out, different than yours). Rather, my point is the opposite - to justify a particular all-or-nothing threshold would (at least implicitly, if you accept the point from my first two paragraphs) require extremely high confidence.
(4) This is also the point I am making here. *Even if* we somehow knew that the true model were a step function, we would have a lot of uncertainty about where the threshold between "matters as much as humans" and "doesn't matter at all" lies. This smooths out the function to a substantial degree, such that the graph as shown implies dramatic overconfidence. How on earth do we think we know so precisely where the threshold is? Our uncertainty needs to be very low for the threshold to be so sharp.
On whether a threshold even makes sense in the first place - okay thanks, I think I see what you are saying now. I guess my view is if there has to be some binary switch thrown into this, then fine, that is always set to ON. All pain matters, but in a way possibly mediated by other mental faculties (intelligence? higher-order consciousness? vividness of qualia? who knows?) leading to various capacities for "suffering". So then we effectively get a continuous graph with no sharp thresholds for the thing we care about, call it "capacity for morally relevant suffering". Presumably this is effectively zero for sufficiently simple organisms (e.g. mussels), but of course it will be hard for us to really know the right shape for this curve.
That said, I don't think much really hinges on this last paragraph. Because as I've argued, even if there is some threshold below which pain doesn't matter at all, I don't see how we could be confident about this or especially where it's located, given dramatically differing intuitions across people.
(5) Same thing - my point is just that people have strongly diverging intuitions here so it seems unjustified to be very confident, especially on the basis of intuition. Seems immoral to torture a baby for a thousand years for a cheeseburger, even if you think it's probably fine, because I doubt you could really be justified in the level of confidence you'd need.
[Edited to add - um, just reread this, sorry for the novel!]
I agree that uncertainty has a role in all of our reasoning, but I guess we disagree on how uncertain we should be on this topic. From my point of view, I’m allowing for a ton of uncertainty. As I stated, I suspect that the badness of pain for toddlers is zero, but I’m not certain of this. A minority of people like you claim to have some memories from their time as toddlers. If true, this would mean that sometimes it is bad for toddlers to suffer. Because of this uncertainty, I want to be cautious and extend legal protections to the entire category of toddler experiences - that’s billions of toddler hours per year, even if morally relevant toddler hours are vanishingly uncommon! How do we determine if my uncertainty induced benevolence is generous or stingy? A bit more uncertainty, and maybe I’d want to extend protections to infants, then animals, then fetuses, then inanimate objects. Even more uncertainty, and it’s no longer clear if suffering is bad - maybe the correct moral theory is that suffering is good! I think I’m handling my uncertainties in a reasonable manner.
(1 and 2) As I said above, I’m not sure you are wrong about the badness of pain in some toddlers, but I definitely disagree that parents have any special insight here. As I’ve said, I have no memory of my time as a toddler. Like you, my parents would insist that my suffering seemed morally relevant, but I’m the one who was supposedly experiencing it, and I’m telling you! I didn’t! It wasn’t! If some factory farmed animal came in contact with the Ooze and became an intelligent mutanimal and told you that it had no memory or trauma from the suffering it endured while being factory farmed before it was cognitively uplifted, you should believe it! Even if its suffering seemed so morally relevant to you just a few months ago! Proof just doesn’t get any stronger than personal experience (or lack of one). Of course, you’d want to corroborate lots of personal experiences before generalizing beyond individuals, but we have that here. Infantile amnesia is a well documented and studied phenomenon.
(3) I do have high confidence in certain things. Personal experience gives me the very highest confidence a person can ever have in anything that my suffering as a toddler and younger was morally irrelevant.
(4) I agree there is a lot of uncertainty in where the threshold lies, there are millions of humans that are borderline and probably at least hundreds of thousands of animals too. I think I admit a lot of uncertainty, just not as broad as you’d have it.
(5) I think I’m mostly relying on a broadly shared personal experience here, not moral intuitions. It does rely on some intuition to justify generalizing that shared experience across other humans and other species, but just a little.
I haven't checked out the correspondence, but I imagine while you find that graph intuitive, Huemer doesn't find it intuitive that humans stop mattering if they're dumb enough. So Huemer's objection doesn't need to be based on an abstaction but a specific moral judgment.