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!

One of the few living creatures that do not benefit from extermination

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

Lucky fuck

1. Shooting fish in a barrel is morally required, as we will shortly discuss.

2. Hey, maybe somebody out there has! But that option certainly hasn’t escaped into the wild, so to speak.

3. It doesn’t yet, because the arguments are so bad.

4. 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’.

5. Also the thing where you’re morally obligated to destroy living nature is kinda dark too.