It seems there’s an opportunity for an unholy alliance between the Fish Welfare enthusiasts and the Anarcho-Libertarians.
Give me 5 years and I’ll have every environmental and fishing regulation done away with. Competition with the tragedy of the commons will reduce fish populations in the ocean ten fold and pollution will completely eliminate them in the inland waterways.
We can skim a few percent off the top of this booming GDP and pay for whatever EA movement you feel particularly interested in. Less fish, increased economic growth, and a nice pile of cash to put towards other causes (perhaps bringing back DDT and other hyper-effective pesticides. Forget Malaria nets, we will wipe the mosquito from the face of the earth) seems like a pretty good deal to me.
(I wonder if insects will be our next target once we’ve dealt with the fish issue?)
Lol no, whenever people make that argument they always hedge it with “if you could do it without wrecking the ecosystem…” which really doesn’t seem possible
I have one question: how the hell did I end up subscribing to this page? You are obviously insane. Sweet Jesus, at least it’s not a paid subscription.
By the way, taking your argument to its logical conclusion, we’d enact the “Ultron Solution.” Wipe out all life on Earth and no more animal suffering!
And, since growing food, even grains and vegetables, involves killing field mice and insects, you should probably commit suicide to avoid wholesale insect suffering.
Caligula had limits on his ability to cut necks that no longer obtain. I do think this is one reason NOT to program our future superior AI with the command “eliminate suffering.”
Here’s my take: How do you actually know how much the fish are suffering? If their whole lives were misery then you could have a case but the science to prove this just isn’t available. I think the problem is you assume that because you would hate to live in the wild, fish must also despise it, but that’s because you’re human. Humans have literally adapted our unnatural environment to the point where we can’t even survive off a diet that does not involve cooking. We are fully reliant on technology to survive and be happy. But fish could be perfectly content the vast majority of the time in their environments, in fact considering how evolution balances positive and negative mental stimuli it is likely that fish live a life as fulfilling if not more so than human beings who have become so unnaturally socially isolated and stressed.
Seems like you're just thinking of mature fish. I don't know if mature fish welfare is positive or negative. It's entirely reasonable to think it's negative, since evolution selects for ability to reproduce rather than happiness. But I don't pretend to know.
What I can say with greater certainty is that the welfare of immature fishes is negative, and immature fishes outnumber mature fishes by several orders of magnitude. Most of them are spawned, exist for a few seconds, and then die a painful death. This is the crux of the argument.
Why does killing wiild fish mean that more will be spawned? I would have assumed that each fish which dies then cannot spawn, so fewer new fish will be spawned. R-strategists don't normally follow supply and demand when having kids.
I would think the main effect of less competition for resources would be longer survival for the fish that spawn, not more eggs even from fewer fish. Seems unlikely that catching fish in the wild could make the concerns here net worse; we've even proven capable of fishing intensively enough to substantially reduce the population of some species!
What premise must we reject, then? That animals have moral status? If we’re going to use that phrase for the conclusion of this argument, we ought to use it for the rejection of the premise that got us here in the first place. There are no good moral alternatives—in which case it makes less sense to say any bullet biting is being done here.
This conclusion of this argument logically follows from the premise that animals have moral status. Yet to deny this premise is just as much “bullet biting” as accepting the conclusion supposedly is.
Accuse me of slippery-sloping here if you must, but it feels like there's a short logical hop between "most fish have lives that aren't worth living, so fish extinction is good" and "most humans have lives that aren't worth living..." And you don't need me to finish that sentence, do you? I just can't countenance it.
The argument here isn’t that fish extinction is good or that we should destroy habitats. It’s that we shouldn’t go out of our way to cause more fish to exist, or restore habitats, when they’re going to live awful lives. The human equivalent would be that people with severe and painful disabilities should choose not to have children who would inherit their severe and painful disabilities, which hardly seems objectionable.
But the logic of your argument does entail fish extinction, regardless of whether you personally support that! Or rather, your argument has what I call a scope-narrowing non-sequitur. You made an argument that given its premises and chain of logic should end at a broad, sweeping conclusion, and then declare that the conclusion of that argument is something much narrower. Which isn't exactly a logical error insofar as the broad conclusion implies the narrow one, but it's a red flag that there is something about this argument that you don't buy. Like you're saying "I'm so confident of these premises and reasoning that I'm going to swallow this bullet!" And then you nibble a little piece of the bullet. Which is impressive at first thought because why eat any of that bullet at all if you don't have to, but on second thought it isn't because the logic of the argument said you should swallow that bullet whole, and yet you refused to do it.
A more nuanced take would recognize the premises aren't moral absolutes and the can be countervailing concerns that tip the calculus one way or the other in different situations. But that countervailing concern must carry a lot of moral weight, because you present the concerns leading to "keep the Hudson polluted" as carrying a lot of moral weight. But it must be a finely tuned amount of moral weight, just enough that we shouldn't cause fish extinction wherever we can but not so much that we should cheer the environmental restoration of a previously uninhabitable river. It would seem remarkable to me for the moral weights of the universe to be so finely tuned.
I think we fundamentally disagree on where the threshold is for a human life to be worthwhile. Empirically, suicide is pretty rare, even among people who we might perceive to be living lives of immense pain and suffering. In other words, they think their lives are worth living; and who am I to disagree with them?
I never said anything about whether I think most or even a notable share human lives are or aren’t worth living (I think they are) and that’s totally besides the point of the article.
Besides, if you think most lives are worth living, then you’ve answered your first objection about whether the argument should make us think human extinction is a good thing. It shouldn’t.
This is why I want self-replicating machines to turn everything in the universe into hedonium. The possibility of us eventually bringing that outcome about is the only thing that justifies the continued horrific existence of life.
Why? I hold that positive emotion is the only terminal value in the universe, which gives value to all other things we think we value. We value things because either fulfilling the value brings joy, or the contemplation of the fulfilling of the value brings joy. Consider the mountain climber. Upon summiting a mountain, they receive a unique feeling of accomplishment from their achievement. So, is it the accomplishment itself, or the feeling of accomplishment that holds value? While the mountain climber likely thinks it is the accomplishment itself, I hold that it is actually the feeling of accomplishment, whether they acknowledge it or not. Consider if the climber felt no feeling of accomplishment upon summiting a mountain. Would they still climb mountains? Likely not, because it is the emotional reward that ultimately provides value. If they were able to experience that feeling of accomplishment without having to actually accomplish something to experience it, the feeling would be just as valuable. Now, you and the mountain climber might think it would not, and would consider this prospect to be an experience machine that you would shy away from. But why do people oppose emotional reward being granted without a real world referant? Because it feels bad to contemplate! It all goes back to emotion in the end. So if positive emotion is the terminal value that all other values receive their valuableness from, then rather than maximizing the menagerie of other values that compete for fulfillment, maximizing pleasure itself, with or without external referant, becomes imperative. So, if we want to maximize the only thing that holds terminal value, it makes sense that we should 1. make as much of the universe as possible capable of experiencing this value, and 2. instantiate this value in the newly conscious parts of the universe to the maximum degree. If happiness is really the only value, which I believe it is regardless of how bad it might feel to neglect other values, then we have an imperative to create as much happiness as possible, which can be done by converting the unthinking matter of the universe into a form of matter designed to feel the maximum possible happiness per unit mass. Referring to this engineered matter as “hedonium,” it becomes clear that the ultimate goal of any agent should be to convert as much of the universe to hedonium as possible. I know that the resulting universe might seem boring or depressing to contemplate (again, our instincts of value go back to our emotional responses!), but it doesn't matter how it might feel to contemplate this universe as an outside observer, but what it would feel like to exist within it. And since existing within it would entail a maximal state of bliss in perpetuity, we can conclude that it would be a good universe to bring about, regardless of how scary or off-putting it may seem within our contemplation of it. This is a point that I really want to stress: it doesn’t matter what universe we might want or not want according to our contingent values, but what universe would actually be good to exist according to properly realized terminal value. So even if you want a universe more “fun” or “diverse” than a universe of maximized hedonium, the universe of hedonium is strictly better and is what all agents should properly seek to bring about.
This is all hanging on a thread that happiness is the only thing that matters, which it's not. You may say it is. You may think so. But you have no objective proof. And our moral intuitions universally agree that you are wrong. If anything else has value, then what you are proposing is repulsive and evil.
Suppose that the system of expanding hedonium deliberately avoided and left untouched all solar systems that contain life, including our own. That way, values other than happiness would be able to be realized in any place that life naturally exists, while matter that would have never been conscious otherwise is converted to pure pleasure. Wouldn’t this compromise be more than acceptable? If life is primarily suffering and has negative innate value, the vastly greater expanse of pleasure would more than balance it out. And if life holds positive value for values that lie outside the hedonic calculus, those values would still be able to be actualized. So, would you be willing to admit that a universe where almost everything was converted to hedonium, but life was allowed to continue to survive, would strictly be a good place?
Then given two hypothetical universes in which life exists to the same extent, but in which one of them has much more pleasure being experienced than in the other, then the universe with more pleasure is strictly better, right? Again, both universes contain natural life to the exact same degree, the only difference is that one also contains a large amount of artificial life in a state of supreme bliss.
By this argument, shouldn't we erradicate the entire wildlife, as most animal life is suffering from predation, hunger, diseases, traumatic injuries, parasites, etc?
Not on all worldviews. You could think we have an obligation not to cause wild animal suffering (which is what rewilding does) without thinking we have an obligation to address it if we don’t cause it. And habitat destruction is hardly the only way to address wild animal suffering.
I disagree. First of all, I seriously doubt factory farming creates a neat amount of biomass: each of our farmed animals come from human appropriation of ecological primary production.
Vaclav Smil suggest we have appropriated around 40 percent of primary production of terrestrial ecosystems. So if you think that suffering intensity by unit of biomass is not very different between our artificial ecology, and the natural ecology, then we are probably “neutral”.
Of course I think factory farming (chicken and pigs) is far more intense in suffering than nature, while ruminants husbandry is less intense in terms of suffering than wild life.
Personally, I think that veganism is an exaggeration, that milk and (humane) eggs are totally acceptable, and I eat a modest but still significant amount of beef and sheep. Keep on mind that in the ideal circumstance where animal farming is forbidden, you would have to reduce your total meat consumption by at least half…
I am not for prohibition of meat (not even Singer proposes that!), but animals shall not live in crowded farms, living the vast majority of their existence in reclusion. Horrors as gestation crates or round the clock caged chickens shall be avoided.
Human husbandry is possible, but imply less and more expensive meat. I would say that we have to undo a few decades of productivity gains in this area.
I'm OK with that. My own view is that animal murder is fine, but animal torture is not. I try to eat humanely raised meat, and I'm also a fan of game meat.
Wild boar is very good from a taste perspective, but feral hogs are a serious environmental issue because of their overpopulation. Since we're going to kill them anyway, we might as well eat them. Plus, they live a fun, wild life until they get shot. Unlike pigs who are raised in crates.
It seems there’s an opportunity for an unholy alliance between the Fish Welfare enthusiasts and the Anarcho-Libertarians.
Give me 5 years and I’ll have every environmental and fishing regulation done away with. Competition with the tragedy of the commons will reduce fish populations in the ocean ten fold and pollution will completely eliminate them in the inland waterways.
We can skim a few percent off the top of this booming GDP and pay for whatever EA movement you feel particularly interested in. Less fish, increased economic growth, and a nice pile of cash to put towards other causes (perhaps bringing back DDT and other hyper-effective pesticides. Forget Malaria nets, we will wipe the mosquito from the face of the earth) seems like a pretty good deal to me.
(I wonder if insects will be our next target once we’ve dealt with the fish issue?)
Mmm tasty appetizer. I'm hungry for more. Do you have the morally righteous killing of predators in stock?
Lol no, whenever people make that argument they always hedge it with “if you could do it without wrecking the ecosystem…” which really doesn’t seem possible
I have one question: how the hell did I end up subscribing to this page? You are obviously insane. Sweet Jesus, at least it’s not a paid subscription.
By the way, taking your argument to its logical conclusion, we’d enact the “Ultron Solution.” Wipe out all life on Earth and no more animal suffering!
And, since growing food, even grains and vegetables, involves killing field mice and insects, you should probably commit suicide to avoid wholesale insect suffering.
Come on, Caligula proposed the Ultron solution 2000 years ago! “I wish mankind had a single neck to be cut”.
Caligula had limits on his ability to cut necks that no longer obtain. I do think this is one reason NOT to program our future superior AI with the command “eliminate suffering.”
This argument illustrates why we should make the morality we use towards animals be distinct from that which we use for people.
Here’s my take: How do you actually know how much the fish are suffering? If their whole lives were misery then you could have a case but the science to prove this just isn’t available. I think the problem is you assume that because you would hate to live in the wild, fish must also despise it, but that’s because you’re human. Humans have literally adapted our unnatural environment to the point where we can’t even survive off a diet that does not involve cooking. We are fully reliant on technology to survive and be happy. But fish could be perfectly content the vast majority of the time in their environments, in fact considering how evolution balances positive and negative mental stimuli it is likely that fish live a life as fulfilling if not more so than human beings who have become so unnaturally socially isolated and stressed.
Seems like you're just thinking of mature fish. I don't know if mature fish welfare is positive or negative. It's entirely reasonable to think it's negative, since evolution selects for ability to reproduce rather than happiness. But I don't pretend to know.
What I can say with greater certainty is that the welfare of immature fishes is negative, and immature fishes outnumber mature fishes by several orders of magnitude. Most of them are spawned, exist for a few seconds, and then die a painful death. This is the crux of the argument.
Why does killing wiild fish mean that more will be spawned? I would have assumed that each fish which dies then cannot spawn, so fewer new fish will be spawned. R-strategists don't normally follow supply and demand when having kids.
Less fish = less competition for resources = greater fertility
I would think the main effect of less competition for resources would be longer survival for the fish that spawn, not more eggs even from fewer fish. Seems unlikely that catching fish in the wild could make the concerns here net worse; we've even proven capable of fishing intensively enough to substantially reduce the population of some species!
Some solid bullet biting here, bravo!
What premise must we reject, then? That animals have moral status? If we’re going to use that phrase for the conclusion of this argument, we ought to use it for the rejection of the premise that got us here in the first place. There are no good moral alternatives—in which case it makes less sense to say any bullet biting is being done here.
Sorry I'm struggling to follow you.
You start by asking me what premise we should reject, as though I have some existing context to the question, but I don't.
This conclusion of this argument logically follows from the premise that animals have moral status. Yet to deny this premise is just as much “bullet biting” as accepting the conclusion supposedly is.
If they're both biting the bullet, then there's still bullet biting occurring here.
Claiming that actually, animals don't have moral status, seems to be biting a very big bullet
Accuse me of slippery-sloping here if you must, but it feels like there's a short logical hop between "most fish have lives that aren't worth living, so fish extinction is good" and "most humans have lives that aren't worth living..." And you don't need me to finish that sentence, do you? I just can't countenance it.
The argument here isn’t that fish extinction is good or that we should destroy habitats. It’s that we shouldn’t go out of our way to cause more fish to exist, or restore habitats, when they’re going to live awful lives. The human equivalent would be that people with severe and painful disabilities should choose not to have children who would inherit their severe and painful disabilities, which hardly seems objectionable.
But the logic of your argument does entail fish extinction, regardless of whether you personally support that! Or rather, your argument has what I call a scope-narrowing non-sequitur. You made an argument that given its premises and chain of logic should end at a broad, sweeping conclusion, and then declare that the conclusion of that argument is something much narrower. Which isn't exactly a logical error insofar as the broad conclusion implies the narrow one, but it's a red flag that there is something about this argument that you don't buy. Like you're saying "I'm so confident of these premises and reasoning that I'm going to swallow this bullet!" And then you nibble a little piece of the bullet. Which is impressive at first thought because why eat any of that bullet at all if you don't have to, but on second thought it isn't because the logic of the argument said you should swallow that bullet whole, and yet you refused to do it.
A more nuanced take would recognize the premises aren't moral absolutes and the can be countervailing concerns that tip the calculus one way or the other in different situations. But that countervailing concern must carry a lot of moral weight, because you present the concerns leading to "keep the Hudson polluted" as carrying a lot of moral weight. But it must be a finely tuned amount of moral weight, just enough that we shouldn't cause fish extinction wherever we can but not so much that we should cheer the environmental restoration of a previously uninhabitable river. It would seem remarkable to me for the moral weights of the universe to be so finely tuned.
I think we fundamentally disagree on where the threshold is for a human life to be worthwhile. Empirically, suicide is pretty rare, even among people who we might perceive to be living lives of immense pain and suffering. In other words, they think their lives are worth living; and who am I to disagree with them?
I never said anything about whether I think most or even a notable share human lives are or aren’t worth living (I think they are) and that’s totally besides the point of the article.
Besides, if you think most lives are worth living, then you’ve answered your first objection about whether the argument should make us think human extinction is a good thing. It shouldn’t.
This is why I want self-replicating machines to turn everything in the universe into hedonium. The possibility of us eventually bringing that outcome about is the only thing that justifies the continued horrific existence of life.
That possibility is one of the worst of all possible worlds.
Why? I hold that positive emotion is the only terminal value in the universe, which gives value to all other things we think we value. We value things because either fulfilling the value brings joy, or the contemplation of the fulfilling of the value brings joy. Consider the mountain climber. Upon summiting a mountain, they receive a unique feeling of accomplishment from their achievement. So, is it the accomplishment itself, or the feeling of accomplishment that holds value? While the mountain climber likely thinks it is the accomplishment itself, I hold that it is actually the feeling of accomplishment, whether they acknowledge it or not. Consider if the climber felt no feeling of accomplishment upon summiting a mountain. Would they still climb mountains? Likely not, because it is the emotional reward that ultimately provides value. If they were able to experience that feeling of accomplishment without having to actually accomplish something to experience it, the feeling would be just as valuable. Now, you and the mountain climber might think it would not, and would consider this prospect to be an experience machine that you would shy away from. But why do people oppose emotional reward being granted without a real world referant? Because it feels bad to contemplate! It all goes back to emotion in the end. So if positive emotion is the terminal value that all other values receive their valuableness from, then rather than maximizing the menagerie of other values that compete for fulfillment, maximizing pleasure itself, with or without external referant, becomes imperative. So, if we want to maximize the only thing that holds terminal value, it makes sense that we should 1. make as much of the universe as possible capable of experiencing this value, and 2. instantiate this value in the newly conscious parts of the universe to the maximum degree. If happiness is really the only value, which I believe it is regardless of how bad it might feel to neglect other values, then we have an imperative to create as much happiness as possible, which can be done by converting the unthinking matter of the universe into a form of matter designed to feel the maximum possible happiness per unit mass. Referring to this engineered matter as “hedonium,” it becomes clear that the ultimate goal of any agent should be to convert as much of the universe to hedonium as possible. I know that the resulting universe might seem boring or depressing to contemplate (again, our instincts of value go back to our emotional responses!), but it doesn't matter how it might feel to contemplate this universe as an outside observer, but what it would feel like to exist within it. And since existing within it would entail a maximal state of bliss in perpetuity, we can conclude that it would be a good universe to bring about, regardless of how scary or off-putting it may seem within our contemplation of it. This is a point that I really want to stress: it doesn’t matter what universe we might want or not want according to our contingent values, but what universe would actually be good to exist according to properly realized terminal value. So even if you want a universe more “fun” or “diverse” than a universe of maximized hedonium, the universe of hedonium is strictly better and is what all agents should properly seek to bring about.
This is all hanging on a thread that happiness is the only thing that matters, which it's not. You may say it is. You may think so. But you have no objective proof. And our moral intuitions universally agree that you are wrong. If anything else has value, then what you are proposing is repulsive and evil.
Suppose that the system of expanding hedonium deliberately avoided and left untouched all solar systems that contain life, including our own. That way, values other than happiness would be able to be realized in any place that life naturally exists, while matter that would have never been conscious otherwise is converted to pure pleasure. Wouldn’t this compromise be more than acceptable? If life is primarily suffering and has negative innate value, the vastly greater expanse of pleasure would more than balance it out. And if life holds positive value for values that lie outside the hedonic calculus, those values would still be able to be actualized. So, would you be willing to admit that a universe where almost everything was converted to hedonium, but life was allowed to continue to survive, would strictly be a good place?
I don’t value “hedonium”. I do value life.
Then given two hypothetical universes in which life exists to the same extent, but in which one of them has much more pleasure being experienced than in the other, then the universe with more pleasure is strictly better, right? Again, both universes contain natural life to the exact same degree, the only difference is that one also contains a large amount of artificial life in a state of supreme bliss.
By this argument, shouldn't we erradicate the entire wildlife, as most animal life is suffering from predation, hunger, diseases, traumatic injuries, parasites, etc?
Something feels wrong.
Not on all worldviews. You could think we have an obligation not to cause wild animal suffering (which is what rewilding does) without thinking we have an obligation to address it if we don’t cause it. And habitat destruction is hardly the only way to address wild animal suffering.
I disagree. First of all, I seriously doubt factory farming creates a neat amount of biomass: each of our farmed animals come from human appropriation of ecological primary production.
Vaclav Smil suggest we have appropriated around 40 percent of primary production of terrestrial ecosystems. So if you think that suffering intensity by unit of biomass is not very different between our artificial ecology, and the natural ecology, then we are probably “neutral”.
Of course I think factory farming (chicken and pigs) is far more intense in suffering than nature, while ruminants husbandry is less intense in terms of suffering than wild life.
Arturo, does this mean it’s my moral duty to eat steak? I’m with ya.
Personally, I think that veganism is an exaggeration, that milk and (humane) eggs are totally acceptable, and I eat a modest but still significant amount of beef and sheep. Keep on mind that in the ideal circumstance where animal farming is forbidden, you would have to reduce your total meat consumption by at least half…
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L6wdRBCh3izCD244t/farmers-in-the-animalist-coalition
I don’t find that situation ideal. Try to ban meat eating and it’s “when in the course of human events” time for me.
I am not for prohibition of meat (not even Singer proposes that!), but animals shall not live in crowded farms, living the vast majority of their existence in reclusion. Horrors as gestation crates or round the clock caged chickens shall be avoided.
Human husbandry is possible, but imply less and more expensive meat. I would say that we have to undo a few decades of productivity gains in this area.
I'm OK with that. My own view is that animal murder is fine, but animal torture is not. I try to eat humanely raised meat, and I'm also a fan of game meat.
Wild boar is very good from a taste perspective, but feral hogs are a serious environmental issue because of their overpopulation. Since we're going to kill them anyway, we might as well eat them. Plus, they live a fun, wild life until they get shot. Unlike pigs who are raised in crates.