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/
Yes: if we had excellent evidence animals suffer terribly, I would believe it. Obviously there is some scope for reasonable people to disagree at most levels of evidence, and I will be difficult to persuade, but not utterly intransigent. I would be sad, and I would then want to exterminate wild animals to end their terrible suffering.
I dunno, I think we can perfectly well have overall opinions on very big topics that emerge out of our deep worldviews and personalities. Believing in providence I think is a very basic orientation towards the world. And our credence in facts is influenced by these worldviews. Which is fine: the fiction that we can assign objective probabilities to anything but the most rare and artificial events is indeed a fiction. Logic can’t give us the prior probabilities, so in the end there is a certain unavoidable subjectivity to our logic that is conditioned by our intuitive worldview.
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.
I was deliberately avoiding the practical question of trying to evaluate how much animals suffer in this piece because it is so speculative, but I do think it's worth thinking about. So I'll talk a bit about my thoughts here, but the caveat is that it's not at all decisive. The arguments in favour of animal suffering are bad, but that doesn't mean the arguments against it are great. At least, mine aren't.
Another one of the comments (by Defending Feminism) shared an article that makes a very convincing scientific argument that fish don't feel pain. Animals, especially non-mammals/birds, are very different from us and a lot of our intuitions about what it would be like to be them are, I think, pretty clearly unreliable.
Take the case of mice. Mice live in a dangerous world. They have behaviours that seem anxious to us. Are they often filled with terror such that they suffer? We have no idea, but I suspect not, because it would serve no useful function. Mice are in danger and need to be cautious. Do they suffer while living in this normal way for mice? Why would they?
Suffering has to evolve and maintain itself in an animal population. You need dedicated brain circuits to be able to suffer. Insofar as animals suffer, it is either beneficial for their survival or else an unavoidable byproduct of other advantageous traits. I think it makes the most sense for us to assume, unless we have good reasons to think otherwise, that normal life for an animal is good for that animal, and good from its point of view insofar as it has one.
I also think that suffering is especially and unusually intense in humans. It is evolutionarily useful for humans to suffer because we have, basically, a lot of tools to do something about it. In having the ability to suffer and being motivated to avoid it, we can use our flexible toolkit of intelligent behaviours to do whatever it takes to make the pain stop, which also -- gee whiz-- helps improve our fitness. The fact that we sometimes suffer in unpreventable ways is an unfortunate side-effect of its overall fitness enhancing tendency.
Humans have an incredible and very unusual ability to override/suppress basic instincts. This is one of the unique functions of our overdeveloped frontal cortex. But this ability to restrain our natural tendencies via conscious control has to be reigned in by a conscious motivation that will override our override when it is really important. That's suffering. Running on a bruised foot is one thing, running on a smashed femur is another. Suffering interacts with our conscious control to help calibrate our behaviour.
The less an animal is able to act so as to alleviate its suffering, the less it is adaptive for it to suffer at all. Animals do not need to suffer hunger pains in order to be motivated to eat. Most (in my view) probably don't feel hunger in any comparable way to humans. The control systems are much simpler.
The other thing is that people always focus on the bad stuff. What about the good stuff? Shouldn't animals really enjoy eating and reproduction? Sure, mice have to scurry around being afraid of cats, but they also get to fuck other mice, a lot, and eat food all the time. And cuddle their little mouse babies. These are good things! I think mice spend a lot more time doing the fun stuff than they do being almost caught by predators.
Anyway, I think that nature is a lot more of an eden than a den of pain, and even for living things that aren't conscious at all I think their lives have a value: I think a world with a bunch of trees growing on it is better than barren rock. 'Cuz I'm not a dumb utilitarian. But even from the point of view of counting utils, I think that mice and bats and snakes are stacking plusses, so we can let them live.
I guess the reason I don't really believe that creatures with less advanced cognitive abilities suffer less is because I feel like for myself, I suffered far more as a child than I am even capable of suffering now. When I was afraid or sad or scared or embarrassed in elementary school, those feelings were all-encompassing, they were dramatic and oceanic in size.
Children are much more likely to scream and holler and cry than adults, and I don't think that's merely an adaptive reaction to get their parent's attention, I think they really are feeling something just that dramatic. I do not have emotions any more, as an adult, that are nearly that intense. I just really don't. Do you?
So I agree with everything you're saying for plants. Some people have tried to argue with me that they also have some form of consciousness and can be said to suffer, but it makes no sense to me that that would be the case. Because they can't do anything about bad things happening to them, they can't run away or defend themselves, so why have an experience that's designed to motivate fight or flight?
But with respect to humans, I sort of see things in reverse of what you said. Because we are so capable and have the capacity to reason and think through alternatives, etc., we have LESS reason to suffer or feel strong feelings. I don't need the stove to be so painful in order for me to know not to put my hand on it. Granted, a strong stimulus is going to get a much stronger response, which is why we have no trouble at all avoiding hot stoves but quite a lot of trouble avoiding things that will only cause pain in some very far off and hypothetical future, like drinking or smoking or eating ourselves to death.
But still, I think when I experienced fear as a child, it was far stronger and more unpleasant than it is now. That would make sense, because it is probably the best thing for a child to hide when they're scared, and hide often and be reluctant to come out. I also experienced other feelings in a stronger manner too. I don't know if that's a natural dulling in adulthood, or just the effect of my pre-frontal cortex exercising dominance over and repressing the more primal/animalistic parts of me. I do note that in dreams, I experience incredibly strong emotions again, more like I used to as a kid, of fear or anger or jealousy, in a way that I just never do when I'm awake. So maybe it's the latter, and those feelings are still there, but can't really come fully out when my PFC is awake and cracking the whip.
As for physical pain, I guess I'm not sure about that one. I can see an argument that kids and animals feel a little less, but I don't know. I don't have memories of things hurting terribly bad or worse than they do now, like I do with feeling emotions more strongly. And it's noticeable that kids can play outside in uncomfortable temperatures without seeming to be bothered by it. OTOH, if I accidentally step on a pet's paw and they emit an ear-splitting shriek, I believe it hurts them. And when there's a thunderstorm and my dog hides in the closet shaking inconsolably for hours, I'm certain she's actually terrified in the same way I used to get actually terrified as a child.
Wanting fish or other things we eat to not feel pain seems like wishful thinking. It would be great if it were true -- that would make me very happy! But I don't really believe it. I do expect that when subject to a terrifically violent experience, like being eaten, a creature is probably in so much shock and so flooded with adrenaline that it doesn't hurt as bad as we think. That's based on my having had an obsession and fear of sharks as a child and reading a book where every known shark attack was documented and if the person survived, interviewed. Most said they did not experience pain so much as instant shock and adrenaline. So perhaps being eaten isn't really that terrible. But what of watching your child be eaten? Hard to imagine anything worse.
Despite all this, I do think there are enough positives to outweigh the negatives, and the positives are really very good. I plant trees and grow gardens. But I grant that it might just be easy for me to say when I am THE apex predator of all species on earth. I would hope that other animals enjoy their lives too, that would be great. And the bats absolutely get to live, please bring on the bats, because they eat the mosquitoes. :)
I'm on board with all of this, except the fish stuff. That article is pretty convincing that fish really just have very different brains. The way they react to things that would be painful to us really suggests they don't have a negative experience of it. But dogs, children, mice, other mammals: sure. They feel pain and suffer and love and have lots of rich emotions. But a lot of the 'evil nature' stuff, quantitatively is based around the insects and fish and those kind of things.
It's kind of funny, thinking how to respond to all your different thoughts here: I'm such a philosopher I automatically come in with an approach of like 'where do I disagree with this.' But mostly I just agree, and anyway I enjoyed hearing about your poor scared dog and your shark thing and your vivid dreams. I'm about as sure that my own dog feels pain and anxiety and joy as I am that any human does.
I think it's more than just apex predators that live well: I think just long lived, slow developing species are likely to have a better balance of pleasant normal life to stressed, painful life. It's probably pretty good to be a whale, or an elephant.
A different comment said that in some way this question is kind of too big to ask or answer, and I think that has some truth to it. At least, I think that the kind of model philosophers are trying to apply here is inadequate to the task. Weighing positive and negative 'utils' is already fairly ridiculous applied to just humans. Models are not reality. Experiences are not actually commensurable across people.
Imagining we can somehow evaluate the welfare, the goodness of life itself, of all nature, is pretty crazy. Rationalists tend to dismiss accusations of intellectual hubris, but weighing the suffering and pleasure of the world seems like folly to me. Can we put any substantial credence in our intuitions about how much total suffering there is among say, all the ants on earth, and whether the generally good lives of hippopotami might outweigh that? It seems to spiral into madness. Some questions genuinely do not have answers. Hence my feeling on more solid ground talking about what each worldview means: that, at least, is pretty clear.
I'm a bit confused by your post because you suggest that those who think that life causes net suffering have not embraced the idea idea of the expiation of all life given their estimate of the utility calculus as a net evil. Just going by the abstract Tomask seems like his position would call for such a campaign if they did not judge it infeasible "Because ecology is so complex, we should study carefully how to reduce wild-animal suffering, giving due consideration to unintended long-run consequences." Seems like an inability to achieve sweeping changes to ecosystem would seem to preclude wiping it out also, and if you merely kill some animals, the flies will lay their eggs, the magots hatch, carrion eaters will flourish and you plausibly increase the amount of suffering. Just in terms of your analysis of ends and means I think that's a slight deficiency. I mean whether the infeasibility of total annihilation of life is reasonable or whether the net effects of a partial annihilation are negative seem both disputable, but I think your analysis is detracted from by not recognizing that.
Also your point reminds me of one problem I have with the few anti-natalists (those who believe best of all never to be born, yet as the old joke goes But who is so lucky not 1 in 10) I've heard. My understanding is anti-natalism is another iconoclastic and surprisingly popular for that position.
Some of my problems rest in that in my experience they come to the conclusion that antinatalism only applies to the generation of new human life (reversing the chauvinism of the anti-wild-vitalists) and not new animal life and that they tend to think the net negativity of life is not so great that it implies things are so bad we should just kill ourselves. They deploy arguments how the considerations fit that narrow keyhole, but as with the view that among wild animal life suffering dominates satisfaction this seems implausible. It depends on arguments like future versions of ourselves have actual interests that are more compelling or real compared to merely hypothetical interests of our progeny. And that animals don't suffer as much because they lack our craving of meaning in a meaningless world or some such (that we live in a meaningless world while craving meaning does seem to deal us a psychological blow but it seems dubious it is psychologically crippling or normative decisive in the way required by the sort of anti-natalist argument I've heard).
I think you’re overlooking the rhetorical thrust of the piece. Of course advocating the total annihilation of wildlife is not a reasonable position, and not just because it’s impractical. My target is animal rights activists who deploy or endorse the view without having thought through its implications. Those who have either embraced animal extermination and a universe-as-hell metaphysics, or else have principled arguments already rebutting those consequences will not be troubled. But I think (and perhaps I am wrong) that such people are close to an empty set.
Also, animal rights activists who want to defend this view need to explain why we shouldn’t advocate completely destroying ecosystems, which is a quite effective way of permanently reducing the amount of wild nature.
That is exactly how I understand your argument. I find the rhetorical thrust of what you said does not seem to fully take into account when Tomasik says such as ""Because ecology is so complex, we should study carefully how to reduce wild-animal suffering, giving due consideration to unintended long-run consequences." from his abstract.
Let me try and schematize what I take the argument implicit in Tomask's statement is relative to your point, since I suspect this is the sticking point.
Premise (a conditional version of what you seem to believe): If we can completely destroy all ecosystems then we can make changes to an ecosystem without any risk of long term unintended consequences (all consequences would be foreseeable and intended).
Premise (Tomask premises as I read it): All changes we can actually make to ecosystems with our current capabilities have a high risk of unintended consequences and need to expand our capabilities (including knowledge) to avoid such risks.
Conclusion : We can't completely destroy ecosystems with our current capabilities and need to expand our capabilities in order to do it.
There are also some implicit ideas like Hume's principle "Ought implies can" etc.
I skimmed the actual paper and found these lines of thought that corroborate my interpretation of Tomasik's statement in the abstract.
"We should be cautious about quick-fix intervention. Ecology is extremely
complicated, and humans have a long track record of underestimating
the number of unanticipated consequences they will encounter in trying
to engineer improvements to nature." (Tomasik 2015, 144)
"Caring about wild-animal suffering should not be mistaken as general
support for environmental preservation; indeed, in some or even many
cases, preventing existence may be the most humane option." (Tomasik 2015, 145)
"That said, before we become too enthusiastic about eliminating natural
ecosystems, we should also remember that many other humans value
wilderness, and it is good to avoid making enemies or tarnishing the suffering-
reduction cause by by pitting it in direct opposition to other things
people care about. In addition, many forms of environmental preservation,
especially reducing climate change, may be important to the far future, by
improving prospects for compromise among the major world powers that
develop artificial general intelligence." (Tomasik 2015, 146)
So Tomoasik seems to not only consider but even embrace the Necron principle that the elimination of life (of ecosystems) is a good thing. But his warning about the pitfalls of quick-fixes seems intended to explain why he does not embrace the Necron solution as the immediate response to his argument.
To me to say that Tomasik while considering it a little doesn't take the Necron principle seriously enough and that is telling about its monstrous absurdity, is more accurate and on point than saying he doesn't consider it at all and that is what is telling about its monstrous absurdity. It seems like a small defect in your argument but that rises if only barely to the level of significance warranting comment.
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/
Ooh, thanks for the suggestion, I’ll check it out.
Would you change your position if we did know how animals feel (and it turns out it's living hell)?
I think we haven't evolved to deal with moral questions at this scale. Our intuition simply does not jive with our logic.
Yes: if we had excellent evidence animals suffer terribly, I would believe it. Obviously there is some scope for reasonable people to disagree at most levels of evidence, and I will be difficult to persuade, but not utterly intransigent. I would be sad, and I would then want to exterminate wild animals to end their terrible suffering.
I dunno, I think we can perfectly well have overall opinions on very big topics that emerge out of our deep worldviews and personalities. Believing in providence I think is a very basic orientation towards the world. And our credence in facts is influenced by these worldviews. Which is fine: the fiction that we can assign objective probabilities to anything but the most rare and artificial events is indeed a fiction. Logic can’t give us the prior probabilities, so in the end there is a certain unavoidable subjectivity to our logic that is conditioned by our intuitive worldview.
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.
I was deliberately avoiding the practical question of trying to evaluate how much animals suffer in this piece because it is so speculative, but I do think it's worth thinking about. So I'll talk a bit about my thoughts here, but the caveat is that it's not at all decisive. The arguments in favour of animal suffering are bad, but that doesn't mean the arguments against it are great. At least, mine aren't.
Another one of the comments (by Defending Feminism) shared an article that makes a very convincing scientific argument that fish don't feel pain. Animals, especially non-mammals/birds, are very different from us and a lot of our intuitions about what it would be like to be them are, I think, pretty clearly unreliable.
Take the case of mice. Mice live in a dangerous world. They have behaviours that seem anxious to us. Are they often filled with terror such that they suffer? We have no idea, but I suspect not, because it would serve no useful function. Mice are in danger and need to be cautious. Do they suffer while living in this normal way for mice? Why would they?
Suffering has to evolve and maintain itself in an animal population. You need dedicated brain circuits to be able to suffer. Insofar as animals suffer, it is either beneficial for their survival or else an unavoidable byproduct of other advantageous traits. I think it makes the most sense for us to assume, unless we have good reasons to think otherwise, that normal life for an animal is good for that animal, and good from its point of view insofar as it has one.
I also think that suffering is especially and unusually intense in humans. It is evolutionarily useful for humans to suffer because we have, basically, a lot of tools to do something about it. In having the ability to suffer and being motivated to avoid it, we can use our flexible toolkit of intelligent behaviours to do whatever it takes to make the pain stop, which also -- gee whiz-- helps improve our fitness. The fact that we sometimes suffer in unpreventable ways is an unfortunate side-effect of its overall fitness enhancing tendency.
Humans have an incredible and very unusual ability to override/suppress basic instincts. This is one of the unique functions of our overdeveloped frontal cortex. But this ability to restrain our natural tendencies via conscious control has to be reigned in by a conscious motivation that will override our override when it is really important. That's suffering. Running on a bruised foot is one thing, running on a smashed femur is another. Suffering interacts with our conscious control to help calibrate our behaviour.
The less an animal is able to act so as to alleviate its suffering, the less it is adaptive for it to suffer at all. Animals do not need to suffer hunger pains in order to be motivated to eat. Most (in my view) probably don't feel hunger in any comparable way to humans. The control systems are much simpler.
The other thing is that people always focus on the bad stuff. What about the good stuff? Shouldn't animals really enjoy eating and reproduction? Sure, mice have to scurry around being afraid of cats, but they also get to fuck other mice, a lot, and eat food all the time. And cuddle their little mouse babies. These are good things! I think mice spend a lot more time doing the fun stuff than they do being almost caught by predators.
Anyway, I think that nature is a lot more of an eden than a den of pain, and even for living things that aren't conscious at all I think their lives have a value: I think a world with a bunch of trees growing on it is better than barren rock. 'Cuz I'm not a dumb utilitarian. But even from the point of view of counting utils, I think that mice and bats and snakes are stacking plusses, so we can let them live.
I guess the reason I don't really believe that creatures with less advanced cognitive abilities suffer less is because I feel like for myself, I suffered far more as a child than I am even capable of suffering now. When I was afraid or sad or scared or embarrassed in elementary school, those feelings were all-encompassing, they were dramatic and oceanic in size.
Children are much more likely to scream and holler and cry than adults, and I don't think that's merely an adaptive reaction to get their parent's attention, I think they really are feeling something just that dramatic. I do not have emotions any more, as an adult, that are nearly that intense. I just really don't. Do you?
So I agree with everything you're saying for plants. Some people have tried to argue with me that they also have some form of consciousness and can be said to suffer, but it makes no sense to me that that would be the case. Because they can't do anything about bad things happening to them, they can't run away or defend themselves, so why have an experience that's designed to motivate fight or flight?
But with respect to humans, I sort of see things in reverse of what you said. Because we are so capable and have the capacity to reason and think through alternatives, etc., we have LESS reason to suffer or feel strong feelings. I don't need the stove to be so painful in order for me to know not to put my hand on it. Granted, a strong stimulus is going to get a much stronger response, which is why we have no trouble at all avoiding hot stoves but quite a lot of trouble avoiding things that will only cause pain in some very far off and hypothetical future, like drinking or smoking or eating ourselves to death.
But still, I think when I experienced fear as a child, it was far stronger and more unpleasant than it is now. That would make sense, because it is probably the best thing for a child to hide when they're scared, and hide often and be reluctant to come out. I also experienced other feelings in a stronger manner too. I don't know if that's a natural dulling in adulthood, or just the effect of my pre-frontal cortex exercising dominance over and repressing the more primal/animalistic parts of me. I do note that in dreams, I experience incredibly strong emotions again, more like I used to as a kid, of fear or anger or jealousy, in a way that I just never do when I'm awake. So maybe it's the latter, and those feelings are still there, but can't really come fully out when my PFC is awake and cracking the whip.
As for physical pain, I guess I'm not sure about that one. I can see an argument that kids and animals feel a little less, but I don't know. I don't have memories of things hurting terribly bad or worse than they do now, like I do with feeling emotions more strongly. And it's noticeable that kids can play outside in uncomfortable temperatures without seeming to be bothered by it. OTOH, if I accidentally step on a pet's paw and they emit an ear-splitting shriek, I believe it hurts them. And when there's a thunderstorm and my dog hides in the closet shaking inconsolably for hours, I'm certain she's actually terrified in the same way I used to get actually terrified as a child.
Wanting fish or other things we eat to not feel pain seems like wishful thinking. It would be great if it were true -- that would make me very happy! But I don't really believe it. I do expect that when subject to a terrifically violent experience, like being eaten, a creature is probably in so much shock and so flooded with adrenaline that it doesn't hurt as bad as we think. That's based on my having had an obsession and fear of sharks as a child and reading a book where every known shark attack was documented and if the person survived, interviewed. Most said they did not experience pain so much as instant shock and adrenaline. So perhaps being eaten isn't really that terrible. But what of watching your child be eaten? Hard to imagine anything worse.
Despite all this, I do think there are enough positives to outweigh the negatives, and the positives are really very good. I plant trees and grow gardens. But I grant that it might just be easy for me to say when I am THE apex predator of all species on earth. I would hope that other animals enjoy their lives too, that would be great. And the bats absolutely get to live, please bring on the bats, because they eat the mosquitoes. :)
I'm on board with all of this, except the fish stuff. That article is pretty convincing that fish really just have very different brains. The way they react to things that would be painful to us really suggests they don't have a negative experience of it. But dogs, children, mice, other mammals: sure. They feel pain and suffer and love and have lots of rich emotions. But a lot of the 'evil nature' stuff, quantitatively is based around the insects and fish and those kind of things.
It's kind of funny, thinking how to respond to all your different thoughts here: I'm such a philosopher I automatically come in with an approach of like 'where do I disagree with this.' But mostly I just agree, and anyway I enjoyed hearing about your poor scared dog and your shark thing and your vivid dreams. I'm about as sure that my own dog feels pain and anxiety and joy as I am that any human does.
I think it's more than just apex predators that live well: I think just long lived, slow developing species are likely to have a better balance of pleasant normal life to stressed, painful life. It's probably pretty good to be a whale, or an elephant.
A different comment said that in some way this question is kind of too big to ask or answer, and I think that has some truth to it. At least, I think that the kind of model philosophers are trying to apply here is inadequate to the task. Weighing positive and negative 'utils' is already fairly ridiculous applied to just humans. Models are not reality. Experiences are not actually commensurable across people.
Imagining we can somehow evaluate the welfare, the goodness of life itself, of all nature, is pretty crazy. Rationalists tend to dismiss accusations of intellectual hubris, but weighing the suffering and pleasure of the world seems like folly to me. Can we put any substantial credence in our intuitions about how much total suffering there is among say, all the ants on earth, and whether the generally good lives of hippopotami might outweigh that? It seems to spiral into madness. Some questions genuinely do not have answers. Hence my feeling on more solid ground talking about what each worldview means: that, at least, is pretty clear.
I'm a bit confused by your post because you suggest that those who think that life causes net suffering have not embraced the idea idea of the expiation of all life given their estimate of the utility calculus as a net evil. Just going by the abstract Tomask seems like his position would call for such a campaign if they did not judge it infeasible "Because ecology is so complex, we should study carefully how to reduce wild-animal suffering, giving due consideration to unintended long-run consequences." Seems like an inability to achieve sweeping changes to ecosystem would seem to preclude wiping it out also, and if you merely kill some animals, the flies will lay their eggs, the magots hatch, carrion eaters will flourish and you plausibly increase the amount of suffering. Just in terms of your analysis of ends and means I think that's a slight deficiency. I mean whether the infeasibility of total annihilation of life is reasonable or whether the net effects of a partial annihilation are negative seem both disputable, but I think your analysis is detracted from by not recognizing that.
Also your point reminds me of one problem I have with the few anti-natalists (those who believe best of all never to be born, yet as the old joke goes But who is so lucky not 1 in 10) I've heard. My understanding is anti-natalism is another iconoclastic and surprisingly popular for that position.
Some of my problems rest in that in my experience they come to the conclusion that antinatalism only applies to the generation of new human life (reversing the chauvinism of the anti-wild-vitalists) and not new animal life and that they tend to think the net negativity of life is not so great that it implies things are so bad we should just kill ourselves. They deploy arguments how the considerations fit that narrow keyhole, but as with the view that among wild animal life suffering dominates satisfaction this seems implausible. It depends on arguments like future versions of ourselves have actual interests that are more compelling or real compared to merely hypothetical interests of our progeny. And that animals don't suffer as much because they lack our craving of meaning in a meaningless world or some such (that we live in a meaningless world while craving meaning does seem to deal us a psychological blow but it seems dubious it is psychologically crippling or normative decisive in the way required by the sort of anti-natalist argument I've heard).
I think you’re overlooking the rhetorical thrust of the piece. Of course advocating the total annihilation of wildlife is not a reasonable position, and not just because it’s impractical. My target is animal rights activists who deploy or endorse the view without having thought through its implications. Those who have either embraced animal extermination and a universe-as-hell metaphysics, or else have principled arguments already rebutting those consequences will not be troubled. But I think (and perhaps I am wrong) that such people are close to an empty set.
Also, animal rights activists who want to defend this view need to explain why we shouldn’t advocate completely destroying ecosystems, which is a quite effective way of permanently reducing the amount of wild nature.
That is exactly how I understand your argument. I find the rhetorical thrust of what you said does not seem to fully take into account when Tomasik says such as ""Because ecology is so complex, we should study carefully how to reduce wild-animal suffering, giving due consideration to unintended long-run consequences." from his abstract.
Let me try and schematize what I take the argument implicit in Tomask's statement is relative to your point, since I suspect this is the sticking point.
Premise (a conditional version of what you seem to believe): If we can completely destroy all ecosystems then we can make changes to an ecosystem without any risk of long term unintended consequences (all consequences would be foreseeable and intended).
Premise (Tomask premises as I read it): All changes we can actually make to ecosystems with our current capabilities have a high risk of unintended consequences and need to expand our capabilities (including knowledge) to avoid such risks.
Conclusion : We can't completely destroy ecosystems with our current capabilities and need to expand our capabilities in order to do it.
There are also some implicit ideas like Hume's principle "Ought implies can" etc.
I skimmed the actual paper and found these lines of thought that corroborate my interpretation of Tomasik's statement in the abstract.
"We should be cautious about quick-fix intervention. Ecology is extremely
complicated, and humans have a long track record of underestimating
the number of unanticipated consequences they will encounter in trying
to engineer improvements to nature." (Tomasik 2015, 144)
"Caring about wild-animal suffering should not be mistaken as general
support for environmental preservation; indeed, in some or even many
cases, preventing existence may be the most humane option." (Tomasik 2015, 145)
"That said, before we become too enthusiastic about eliminating natural
ecosystems, we should also remember that many other humans value
wilderness, and it is good to avoid making enemies or tarnishing the suffering-
reduction cause by by pitting it in direct opposition to other things
people care about. In addition, many forms of environmental preservation,
especially reducing climate change, may be important to the far future, by
improving prospects for compromise among the major world powers that
develop artificial general intelligence." (Tomasik 2015, 146)
So Tomoasik seems to not only consider but even embrace the Necron principle that the elimination of life (of ecosystems) is a good thing. But his warning about the pitfalls of quick-fixes seems intended to explain why he does not embrace the Necron solution as the immediate response to his argument.
To me to say that Tomasik while considering it a little doesn't take the Necron principle seriously enough and that is telling about its monstrous absurdity, is more accurate and on point than saying he doesn't consider it at all and that is what is telling about its monstrous absurdity. It seems like a small defect in your argument but that rises if only barely to the level of significance warranting comment.
Fair enough.