Life is good, actually
And not a hellscape of endless pointless suffering.
One of my nerdy interests that prevents me from being a prolific content creator (alongside my job and my family life) is Warhammer 40k. For those unfamiliar, this is a gloriously dumb and over the top edgelordy pastiche of randomness, with space elves and genetically engineered super-soldiers and an extremely fascist parody of the Anglican church. One of the particularly wicked factions (there aren’t any ‘good’ ones per se) are the Necrons. They are the evil space robots. Setting aside their tragic backstory and the fact that what I am about to say about them has been retconned since I last paid attention to the lore, they don’t like living things. Any living things. In fine terminator/unaligned-superintelligence style, they want to cleanse the galaxy of its pollution by horrible self-replicating chemistry.
Now, I said that the Necrons were evil, but it turns out that maybe they’re just animal rights activists. Turns out some (many?) animal rights activists hold the view that the natural living world is horrible: a net hedonic negative, an endless cycle of pain, predation, disease and paratism. This view is often presented fairly casually, as if it were uncontroversial, or else it is argued for in a hypothetical ‘we can’t rule out the possibility that’ mode but then treated as if it was established. See Tomasik for an influential argument for the view, or Perkele for the post that got me riled up.
Now, there are two aspects of the view I am tempted to discuss. One is how shitty the arguments are for it, of course, because I was trained as a philosopher and that is what we do, god help us. But I will leave that for another day, because frankly it is like shooting fish in a barrel.1 I want to talk more about what the view means. Because while I do not think we can have a great deal of warranted confidence in our opinion as to how pleasant it is to be a butterfly shrimp, I think it ought to be pretty clear what ‘life in nature is extremely bad’ implies for our overall worldview. Some adherents (Dawkins springs to mind) seem fairly untroubled to think that life for wild creatures is just awful.
They shouldn’t be.
If the living world is horrible overall for living things, it follows very directly that coming into existence is a bad thing for the creature (with perhaps a few lucky exceptions vastly outweighed by their miserable compatriots). They would be better never to have spawned. Furthermore, it follows quite inexorably that living ecosystems are bad. To annihilate them is to end their collective misery. The Necron’s sinister hatred for the existence of life, all life, in other words, is morally correct except insofar as we are discussing human beings and their pampered housepets. Exterminate!
Now, Perkule, at least, appreciates that this is pretty terrible to contemplate, and he propounds the idea that in the future we may be able to redeem this fallen world by eventually creating “minds that experience such bliss every moment that the suffering of nature throughout all spacetime is outweighed”. Sounds fun! But in the here and now, there are much more practical and achievable things we can do to make the world a better place. Like exterminating every single wild vertebrate, and then getting to work on the invertebrates, which will be more challenging. THEY CAN’T SUFFER IF THEY DON’T EXIST, is what I will spraypaint on the the Landrover I joyride across the African savannah, riddling herds of wildebeest with .50 calibre rounds from the heavy machine gun in a jury-rigged mount on the roof. It’s for their own good, and the good of their never-to-be-born offspring. I am a good person.
Why has the simple inference from the ubiquitous suffering of wild animals in nature to the moral necessity of exterminating all wildlife never2 been drawn by animal rights activists? One might almost suspect they don’t really believe it’s true. Not as a deep-down in your gut certainty.
If someone did believe that the natural world is a net bad, a horribly net bad, then they believe that the universe we live in is not just empty, unfeeling, inhuman, meaningless. That is penny-ante, amateurish existential despair. They believe that the universe is nightmarishly cruel; hell instantiated in matter. They embrace the view that it would have been better if life had never evolved on earth. Better the earth were hurled into the sun than nature, red in tooth and claw, came to writhe on this bed of pain.
A coral reef, flourishing with multicoloured fish and waving anemones? Horrible. Much better barren rock. A stand of majestic trees towering to the sky, birds chirping in their branches, ants digging underfoot? One weeps at the suffering. Better had it never been at all.
Perhaps this reveals the limits of my rationality3 but I cannot bring myself to believe that this is the world that we live in. Yes, there is suffering in nature. But suffering has an evolutionary function, and it is not distributed so profligately as these arch-pessimists believe.
Most creatures live mostly as their species evolved to do — yes, even the many doomed juveniles — and this is a good thing. When the new-hatched sea turtle makes its mad dash for the ocean, only to be seized by the gull, even then, was it better never to have lived at all? It lived, it breathed, it suffered, it died. All life dies. We can never know what it is like for animals to live as they do. But even that brief instant of existence, as it breaks out of its shell, digs out of the sand and crawls towards the watery eden so tantalizingly close, seems to me to be a very valuable thing. The only valuable thing, set against a universe empty of life. Either we embrace the value of life, of nature, or we do not. Not to do so is monstrous, a philosophy suited to absurd killer sci-fi robots and mad Cthulthoid gods. Any human being living on the fragile biosphere we share ought to consider very carefully before they accept, on such shaky foundations,4 such a dark and empty notion.5
Shooting fish in a barrel is morally required, as we will shortly discuss.
Hey, maybe somebody out there has! But that option certainly hasn’t escaped into the wild, so to speak.
It doesn’t yet, because the arguments are so bad.
Just trust me on the foundation for now, okay? Or read their arguments yourself, because it’s not like the flaws are super subtle. Start your rebuttal with ‘we have no idea what these things actually are feeling’ and add a dash of ‘quite a lot of the time animals are not actually being eaten or indeed suffering at all’ and ‘what seems bad to us probably doesn’t feel as bad to things that evolved to live like that’.
Also the thing where you’re morally obligated to destroy living nature is kinda dark too.
Great piece! I'm a huge fan of tropical fish, and outside of feminist theorizing I spend a good chunk of time reading about fish pain and fish consciousness. I really liked this series by Brian Key and thought he made some really challenging arguments against the idea that fish lives are mostly hellish experiences. He makes a good case for the idea that fish and invertebrates may not experience pain like we do at all. I'm not sure if you'll agree with his conclusions, but the discourse was fascinating! https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol1/iss3/1/
So, I'm one of those people whose deepest desire is to be able to live in some kind of Gaia paradise of trees and plants and animals, yet who is also prone to terribly dark thoughts about how awful and brutal and disgusting nature is. I both love and hate nature documentaries, but can only tolerate the ones that are Disney-fied enough to not show the true horror of a baby animal being disemboweled alive, while the more raw ones will put me in a place where I DO wish the whole planet would get incinerated by the sun, just to stop the perpetual slaughter-house.
I think it's just not that simple. There is a lot of variability in how good or bad it is appears to be, for various creatures.
Being a carefree Westie Terrier is obviously a very enjoyable and good thing, from all appearances. In general just being a DOG seems to be excellent. Better than being a human. Every day is Christmas and every car ride is a thrilling adventure, for dogs, at least based on their behavior. Being an apex predator in general seems pretty damn great. Being a tree seems good, because as far as I can tell, they don't have pain receptors. If trees can somehow experience a form of pain, then being a tree doesn't seem so great. Being a rabbit or mouse or any other creature that has to create 60 babies per generation because 59 of them get eaten within a year, and who lives in what appears to be constant never-ending anxiety of being swooped down upon by a hawk or fox, does not seem like a net positive.
Unfortunately, for the apex predators to enjoy themselves, the prey animals have to suffer. If I was in charge, every creature would run on photosynethesis like a plant, yet we would still have bears and wolves and humans and cats and raccoons, which makes no sense at all, of course.
I have no way to calculate the net suffering/pleasure of every living thing on earth, or even every animal, or even just one specific type of animal. You would have a hard time convincing me that life for a rabbit is a net plus. They don't appear to ever be happy, or ever not anxious. But rabbits certainly do make the coyotes happy.
I don't see any contradiction in the fact that people with this sort of overly-sympathetic view, which ends up resulting in an overall very dark philosophy, don't think it means that everything should die or kill itself. Because it's perfectly obvious that once born, a living creature does not want to die. That doesn't need to be rational, it just is. They don't want to die, so making them die would cause them to suffer. And since that's what you're trying to avoid in the first place, killing them all isn't a great technique.
So if you want to decrease net suffering, you don't want to kill what is already here, but simply not create more suffering creatures in the first place. That's a perfectly rational response, and is in fact precisely how we treat our most beloved animal companions. The first thing a cat or dog lover wants to do is set up a system of neutering them, so that more new ones aren't born, in order to improve the lives of the ones that ARE born, and make sure there's no unnecessary suffering. I think this is generally the ideal strategy of anyone who loves a species...to prevent too many from existing, to improve the lives of those that do. Quality over quantity.
But what can you do for those creatures who seem to just have lives that are always terrible, no matter what? Well, nothing, if you don't want to harm others. Naturally, I'm biased towards mammals, because I am one. I care more for a fox than I do for a mosquito. It makes sense that our favorite companions, dogs and cats, are also apex-predator mammals. A ruminant prey animal will likely never be our best friend. So I suppose I can live with all the mice and rabbits with terrible lives because it helps the cats and foxes I'm biased towards. it's not ideal, but what can you do?
I think we can agree that there are situations in which life is so terrible, with so much suffering, that the morally correct thing to do is to end it. If a wildfire burns an entire farm of animals, just badly enough for them to be in severe pain but not to kill them, it is right to shoot them all in the head and put them out of their misery.
That's an easy question. The harder ones are every day life. I can't judge it, except in the micro. It is a difficult question. We have no idea what it's like to be a fish. Mammals are easier to judge. And we can't do much about any of it, on a macro level, without knock-on effects. All I can do is try try my best so that the limited creatures around me, on whose lives I can have an impact, have the most enjoyable time of it.
But there is no way in hell that you will convince me that it's not better to be a malamute or a Westie than it is to be the bunny that they would so joyfully tear to shreds.