Besides moral pluralism, there's a further question as to whether one accepts any kind of *epistemic priority* of more fundamental moral judgments over less fundamental ones.
Compare: Imagine someone argued, "Utilitarianism is true. Killing Bob is wrong. Therefore, Killing Bob must fail to maximize utility." Despite its logical validity, this seems like bad reasoning. The problem is that a utilitarian isn't in a position to judge whether killing Bob is wrong or not *until* they've determined the more fundamental question of whether it fails to maximize utility.
I think a lot of moral judgments have this feature. We shouldn't be confident of various particular moral judgments *unless* we have good grounds for prior confidence in the underlying empirical facts that ground the moral judgment. The grounding facts have epistemic priority.
Now, a big worry about commonsense judgments about the moral innocuousness of damaging ants (etc.) is that we tend to assume (as Huemer used to) that ants aren't conscious. That seems part of our commonsense view of the world. But then we can't necessarily hold onto the moral judgment if we update our associated empirical beliefs. We need to go back and assess the intrinsic credibility of the competing underlying moral principles -- whether it really seems like the badness of suffering is conditional on high intelligence, and not just the intrinsic aversive feel of the suffering itself. (Imagine yourself getting progressively stupider and see whether there's some point at which you think your pain stops mattering.)
Crucially, the epistemic priority thesis suggests that we cannot, at this step, appeal back to our commonsense moral verdicts about the innocuousness of crushing ants to build swimming pools. The fundamental moral principles need to be assessed for their *intrinsic* credibility, and then the particular moral verdicts simply follow as they may.
In what sense does raising cattle on pasture for meat *cause* suffering? It seems you could make a utilitarian (or utilitarian adjacent) argument for such a practice since the cattle seem to be living pleasant lives and doing what they are meant to do. Sure, they are killed in the end, but everyone dies, and many humans are effectively euthanized. Many also die in their prime from various causes. I don't think many people would claim that the manner of your death cancels out the value of your whole life.
I think even "factory farmed" cattle spend the majority of their lives grazing. They are brought in at the end to be fattened up. Does this make their lives a net negative on balance?
Factory farmed cattle do not spend the majority of their life grazing and are treated extremely poorly for much of their life. Additionally, they are selectively bred and fed with an unhealthy diet that makes them constantly sick and suffering from various health issues.
If a pasture-raised cow (which factory-raised cows are not) has a pleasant life, then killing it before it dies naturally is quite obviously wrong, no? You’re depriving it of some of that pleasant time for your own gustatory pleasure.
By what logic? It wouldn't be alive at all if not for us. If everyone became vegan there'd be a few thousand cows total in the world, in zoos. The options are (a) they never live, (b) they live a decent cow life for a while then die.
Not if my gustatory pleasure is a condition of the existence of pasture-raised cows having pleasant lives. I guess the alternative is killing them all?
Maybe that is why Huemer argues narrowly against factory farming rather than in favor of strict vegetarianism. And even if a good argument could be found against the humane slaughter of domesticated animals, it would not apply to the humane hunting of wild animals.
Actually Adelstein argues elsewhere that wild animals probably have negative-value lives. Seems plausible to me, but with relatively low confidence. But if it’s true, then on his view hunting becomes obligatory!
"Some suffering is morally good. Making Hitler burn in Hell for eternity, for example, would be morally wonderful, even if zero potential wrongdoers were deterred"
I think it would be more accurate to call Adelstein is a welfare consequentialist rather than a utilitarian because he considers welfare to be not just about preference satisfaction or pleasure and suffering (it connects to his belief in theism, otherwise he would have no hope of answering the problem of evil).
"Adelstein begs the question when he says things like “[S]uffering is bad. This isn't because we can do calculus or are smart, the badness of your headaches have nothing to do with how smart you are.” While this is a trivial deduction from utilitarianism, many people think that a random human’s headache is obviously morally worse than the painful death of a random mouse. If such people are right, utilitarianism is wrong"
Severely mentally retarded humans can't do maths either, yet we don't consider their pain vastly less important. Would it be okay for you to torture to death several dozens of very mentally retarded people in order to build a swimming pool in your backyard?
>And young Adelstein has immense potential, though I fear he’s too dogmatic to reach his potential.
Seems weird to call someone dogmatic for embracing unpopular positions, especially when he changed his mind multiple times in the past (about substance dualism, libertarianism, normative hedonism, theism, ethical intuitionism and so on).
Whilst Adelstein claims that intuition tells us insect suffering is deeply morally important. Caplan, argues that intuition tells us insect suffering is trivial compared to, say, the suffering of a child. Both appeal to moral intuition, but they extract opposite conclusions from it, like talking past each other using the same terminology but with different content.
There is a conflict in the prioritisation of intuitions: Adelstein treats the intuitive moral salience of suffering, even at the insect level, as overriding whilst Huemer and Caplan, weigh multiple intuitions, about suffering, agency, and proportionality, and conclude that insect suffering is not a dominant moral concern. So both sides claim to use intuition, care about suffering, and strive to be morally responsible. Yet one ends up with the view that insect suffering is a dominant moral crisis, while the other concludes that treating it as central is at least a little naive. Though they share conceptual language, they fail to resolve their deep disagreements about how to apply or prioritise moral intuitions.
I see this as a case where common language conceals profound divergence. The real debate isn’t just over what we intuit, but how we build from those intuitions into ethical plus ecological reasoning, a crucial dimension that has largely been ignored. I think Huemer and Caplan moral pluralistic approach has greater explanatory power because it better captures real-world trade-offs. It reflects how people actually reason, and allows competing intuitions to coexist without forcing artificial hierarchies. In contrast, Adelstein utilitarianism often compels us to override powerful intuitions simply to preserve theoretical purity.
I just sent this email to Bryan, but I thought it would be worth reposting here to explain why I'm not moved by these arguments.
Hi Bryan--I enjoyed the recent article and appreciated the kind words! Let it be known that I similarly hold your intelligence in quite high regard! I'll probably write a response after you're done with part 2.
Now, it's true, of course, that thinking insects matters has revisionary ethical implications. It implies that which actions are right is very different from what we otherwise expected. But that's what we should conclude when the world is weird! If we discovered that bacteria were conscious--and were even full on agents with the mental abilities of humans--that would be massively inconvenient! It would imply that the actions that are worth performing are very different from what we naively expected. But when you learn the world is weird, then the right ethical view should turn out weird judgments.
Similarly, I'm a pro-natalist. If we discovered, as some Many Worlds proponents have argued, that various random actions vastly increase the number of well-off people in existence, then that might imply that, say, some genocider did a great thing if they increased the amount of universe splitting sufficiently.
But that's not a good reason to reject natalism--it doesn't seem weird when you reflect on it. It just differs from our naive intuitions because those intuitions were formed without being sensitive to the relevant features. If I reflect on which step seems weird, it's the factual premise, not the moral one:
1) Pain and suffering are bad.
2) If something is responsible every week for more suffering than has ever existed in all of human history, then it's extremely bad.
3) Insect suffering is responsible every week for more suffering than has ever existed in all of human history.
The surprising premise isn't 1 or 2, it's 3! And it's not a problem for an ethical view to hold surprising things if the world turns out to be surprising. Would be interested to hear your take on those arguments!
It all strikes me as an intentional mess to avoid having to live with reality. If living is painful and bugs and livestock would be better off dead, so would all life, humanity included.
Since the universe keeps inventing life, that means trying to fight the universe. What a wasted effort.
Solution? I have none. The world is messy. Deal with it on a personal level. But this is angels on pin heads.
"Unfortunately, losing these pollinators [bees] would probably mean mass famine for humans."
I doubt this would be the case unless pollinators were driven extinct super fast, such that there is very little time to adapt. "studies suggest crop production would decline by around 5% in higher income countries, and 8% at low-to-middle incomes if pollinator insects vanished" (https://ourworldindata.org/pollinator-dependence).
Suffering has no moral (dis)value. Causing suffering has. It is not morally bad to suffer, but it is morally bad to cause suffering. Suffering is still bad, but not all values are moral(though all may be morally relevant).
I’m not sure where I come down on this, but I suspect that we’re at least emotionally inclined to discount insect pain because we view those critters as pests. Bryan was all for the eternal torment of Hitler; well, we subconsciously see insects as micro-Hitlers causing aggravation, illness, and death. (Of course they’re not morally culpable, but feeling some degree of repulsion and antipathy towards them is pretty natural.) Just to tweak our intuition pumps: would we think it’s okay to kill a thousand monarch butterflies to build a swimming pool?
Besides moral pluralism, there's a further question as to whether one accepts any kind of *epistemic priority* of more fundamental moral judgments over less fundamental ones.
Compare: Imagine someone argued, "Utilitarianism is true. Killing Bob is wrong. Therefore, Killing Bob must fail to maximize utility." Despite its logical validity, this seems like bad reasoning. The problem is that a utilitarian isn't in a position to judge whether killing Bob is wrong or not *until* they've determined the more fundamental question of whether it fails to maximize utility.
I think a lot of moral judgments have this feature. We shouldn't be confident of various particular moral judgments *unless* we have good grounds for prior confidence in the underlying empirical facts that ground the moral judgment. The grounding facts have epistemic priority.
Now, a big worry about commonsense judgments about the moral innocuousness of damaging ants (etc.) is that we tend to assume (as Huemer used to) that ants aren't conscious. That seems part of our commonsense view of the world. But then we can't necessarily hold onto the moral judgment if we update our associated empirical beliefs. We need to go back and assess the intrinsic credibility of the competing underlying moral principles -- whether it really seems like the badness of suffering is conditional on high intelligence, and not just the intrinsic aversive feel of the suffering itself. (Imagine yourself getting progressively stupider and see whether there's some point at which you think your pain stops mattering.)
Crucially, the epistemic priority thesis suggests that we cannot, at this step, appeal back to our commonsense moral verdicts about the innocuousness of crushing ants to build swimming pools. The fundamental moral principles need to be assessed for their *intrinsic* credibility, and then the particular moral verdicts simply follow as they may.
These arguments are starting to bug me.
The whole argument is fishy.
There are too many lousy implications, I feel.
lol Hanania’s response to the Hitler on a stranded island hypothetical—
“I think I’d appreciate the company, especially from someone who’s so well read and led such an interesting life.”
2023 Hanania was a different beast
In what sense does raising cattle on pasture for meat *cause* suffering? It seems you could make a utilitarian (or utilitarian adjacent) argument for such a practice since the cattle seem to be living pleasant lives and doing what they are meant to do. Sure, they are killed in the end, but everyone dies, and many humans are effectively euthanized. Many also die in their prime from various causes. I don't think many people would claim that the manner of your death cancels out the value of your whole life.
The overwhelming majority of animals aren’t raised on a pasture, so it’s not super relevant.
I think even "factory farmed" cattle spend the majority of their lives grazing. They are brought in at the end to be fattened up. Does this make their lives a net negative on balance?
Factory farmed cattle do not spend the majority of their life grazing and are treated extremely poorly for much of their life. Additionally, they are selectively bred and fed with an unhealthy diet that makes them constantly sick and suffering from various health issues.
If a pasture-raised cow (which factory-raised cows are not) has a pleasant life, then killing it before it dies naturally is quite obviously wrong, no? You’re depriving it of some of that pleasant time for your own gustatory pleasure.
By what logic? It wouldn't be alive at all if not for us. If everyone became vegan there'd be a few thousand cows total in the world, in zoos. The options are (a) they never live, (b) they live a decent cow life for a while then die.
Not if my gustatory pleasure is a condition of the existence of pasture-raised cows having pleasant lives. I guess the alternative is killing them all?
Maybe that is why Huemer argues narrowly against factory farming rather than in favor of strict vegetarianism. And even if a good argument could be found against the humane slaughter of domesticated animals, it would not apply to the humane hunting of wild animals.
Actually Adelstein argues elsewhere that wild animals probably have negative-value lives. Seems plausible to me, but with relatively low confidence. But if it’s true, then on his view hunting becomes obligatory!
"Some suffering is morally good. Making Hitler burn in Hell for eternity, for example, would be morally wonderful, even if zero potential wrongdoers were deterred"
For eternity? No, it seems obviously awful.
this is the least interesting debate I've ever seen you engage in.
I think it would be more accurate to call Adelstein is a welfare consequentialist rather than a utilitarian because he considers welfare to be not just about preference satisfaction or pleasure and suffering (it connects to his belief in theism, otherwise he would have no hope of answering the problem of evil).
"Adelstein begs the question when he says things like “[S]uffering is bad. This isn't because we can do calculus or are smart, the badness of your headaches have nothing to do with how smart you are.” While this is a trivial deduction from utilitarianism, many people think that a random human’s headache is obviously morally worse than the painful death of a random mouse. If such people are right, utilitarianism is wrong"
Severely mentally retarded humans can't do maths either, yet we don't consider their pain vastly less important. Would it be okay for you to torture to death several dozens of very mentally retarded people in order to build a swimming pool in your backyard?
>And young Adelstein has immense potential, though I fear he’s too dogmatic to reach his potential.
Seems weird to call someone dogmatic for embracing unpopular positions, especially when he changed his mind multiple times in the past (about substance dualism, libertarianism, normative hedonism, theism, ethical intuitionism and so on).
>That said, Adelstein rushes to advocate mass extermination of bugs, instead of calling for a massive research project on bug consciousness.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. He unequivocally advocates for the extermination of much of nature over a number of essays.
I raised my concerns over this recently in a post “Why we shouldn’t pave over the world to save it.”
Yes Adelstein reaches some absolutely insane conclusions. I also made that the target of a few essays! Starting with this one. I’ll go read yours! https://open.substack.com/pub/backcountrypsych/p/misspecified-utilitarians-hate-existence?r=1kxn90&utm_medium=ios
Pointless debate...
Whilst Adelstein claims that intuition tells us insect suffering is deeply morally important. Caplan, argues that intuition tells us insect suffering is trivial compared to, say, the suffering of a child. Both appeal to moral intuition, but they extract opposite conclusions from it, like talking past each other using the same terminology but with different content.
There is a conflict in the prioritisation of intuitions: Adelstein treats the intuitive moral salience of suffering, even at the insect level, as overriding whilst Huemer and Caplan, weigh multiple intuitions, about suffering, agency, and proportionality, and conclude that insect suffering is not a dominant moral concern. So both sides claim to use intuition, care about suffering, and strive to be morally responsible. Yet one ends up with the view that insect suffering is a dominant moral crisis, while the other concludes that treating it as central is at least a little naive. Though they share conceptual language, they fail to resolve their deep disagreements about how to apply or prioritise moral intuitions.
I see this as a case where common language conceals profound divergence. The real debate isn’t just over what we intuit, but how we build from those intuitions into ethical plus ecological reasoning, a crucial dimension that has largely been ignored. I think Huemer and Caplan moral pluralistic approach has greater explanatory power because it better captures real-world trade-offs. It reflects how people actually reason, and allows competing intuitions to coexist without forcing artificial hierarchies. In contrast, Adelstein utilitarianism often compels us to override powerful intuitions simply to preserve theoretical purity.
I just sent this email to Bryan, but I thought it would be worth reposting here to explain why I'm not moved by these arguments.
Hi Bryan--I enjoyed the recent article and appreciated the kind words! Let it be known that I similarly hold your intelligence in quite high regard! I'll probably write a response after you're done with part 2.
One brief note: like you and Michael, I am an intuitionist. I think insect suffering's importance is ultimately intuitive! I make this case in more detail here https://benthams.substack.com/p/thinking-insect-suffering-is-the?utm_source=publication-search.
Now, it's true, of course, that thinking insects matters has revisionary ethical implications. It implies that which actions are right is very different from what we otherwise expected. But that's what we should conclude when the world is weird! If we discovered that bacteria were conscious--and were even full on agents with the mental abilities of humans--that would be massively inconvenient! It would imply that the actions that are worth performing are very different from what we naively expected. But when you learn the world is weird, then the right ethical view should turn out weird judgments.
Similarly, I'm a pro-natalist. If we discovered, as some Many Worlds proponents have argued, that various random actions vastly increase the number of well-off people in existence, then that might imply that, say, some genocider did a great thing if they increased the amount of universe splitting sufficiently.
But that's not a good reason to reject natalism--it doesn't seem weird when you reflect on it. It just differs from our naive intuitions because those intuitions were formed without being sensitive to the relevant features. If I reflect on which step seems weird, it's the factual premise, not the moral one:
1) Pain and suffering are bad.
2) If something is responsible every week for more suffering than has ever existed in all of human history, then it's extremely bad.
3) Insect suffering is responsible every week for more suffering than has ever existed in all of human history.
The surprising premise isn't 1 or 2, it's 3! And it's not a problem for an ethical view to hold surprising things if the world turns out to be surprising. Would be interested to hear your take on those arguments!
It all strikes me as an intentional mess to avoid having to live with reality. If living is painful and bugs and livestock would be better off dead, so would all life, humanity included.
Since the universe keeps inventing life, that means trying to fight the universe. What a wasted effort.
Solution? I have none. The world is messy. Deal with it on a personal level. But this is angels on pin heads.
Hi Bryan.
"Unfortunately, losing these pollinators [bees] would probably mean mass famine for humans."
I doubt this would be the case unless pollinators were driven extinct super fast, such that there is very little time to adapt. "studies suggest crop production would decline by around 5% in higher income countries, and 8% at low-to-middle incomes if pollinator insects vanished" (https://ourworldindata.org/pollinator-dependence).
Suffering has no moral (dis)value. Causing suffering has. It is not morally bad to suffer, but it is morally bad to cause suffering. Suffering is still bad, but not all values are moral(though all may be morally relevant).
I’m not sure where I come down on this, but I suspect that we’re at least emotionally inclined to discount insect pain because we view those critters as pests. Bryan was all for the eternal torment of Hitler; well, we subconsciously see insects as micro-Hitlers causing aggravation, illness, and death. (Of course they’re not morally culpable, but feeling some degree of repulsion and antipathy towards them is pretty natural.) Just to tweak our intuition pumps: would we think it’s okay to kill a thousand monarch butterflies to build a swimming pool?
What say you about this moral imperative: do not compel unjustly. Compelling is force, threat of force, and fraud.