This got me thinking a bit about non-human animals. If itās true that (1) speciesism is irrational & thereās no reason to favour one species over another just because you belong to that species; (2) the human species is or could very well be at a very early stage of its lifespan; & (3) we should work very hard to reduce prospects of a future human extinction, then shouldnāt we also work very hard to reduce prospects of animal extinction right now? After all, many non-human animals are at much higher risk of going extinct than humans today.
You suggest that we humans could ā if things go well ā survive for billions or even trillions of years; since we only diverged from the last common ancestor with chimpanzees some four to 13 million years ago, that would put us at a very young age relatively. But if those are the timescales we consider, how about the potential in all the other species? It only took us humans some millions of years to go from apes to what we are today, after all. Who knows where the western black rhinoceros would be in a billion years if we hadnāt killed all of them? Maybe we should worry about orangutan extinction at least half as much as we worry about human extinction?
Put differently, itās my impression ā but I could well be wrong ā that EAs focus on animal suffering & human extinction quite a bit, but not so much on non-human extinction. Is there merit to that question? If so, why? Has it been discussed anywhere? (A cursory search brought up very little, but I didnāt try too hard.)
Thank you for raising non-human animals. I believe that longtermists donāt talk about non-human animals enough. That is one reason I wrote that post that you have linked to.
In the post I actually argue that non-human animal extinction would be good. This is because it isnāt at all clear that non-human animals live good lives. Even if some or many of them do live good lives, if they go extinct we can simply replace them with more humans which seems preferable because humans probably have higher capacity for welfare and are less prone to being exploited (Iām assuming here that there is no/ālittle value of having species diversity). There are realistic possibilities of terrible animal suffering occuring in the future, and possibly even getting locked-in to some extent, so I think non-human animal extinction would be a good thing.
Similarly (from a longtermist point of view) who really cares if orangutans go extinct? The space they inhabit could just be taken over by a different species. The reason why longtermists really care if humans go extinct is not down to speciesism, but because humans really do have the potential to make an amazing future. We could spread to the stars. We could enhance ourselves to experience amazing lives beyond what we can now imagine. We may be able to solve wild animal suffering. Also, to return to my original point, we tend to have good lives (at least this is what most people think). These arguments donāt necessarily hold for other species that are far less intelligent than humans and so are, in my humble opinion, mainly a liability from a longtermistās point of view.
In the post I actually argue that non-human animal extinction would be good. This is because it isnāt at all clear that non-human animals live good lives.
Good for whom? Obviously humansā lives seem good to humans, but it could well be that orangutansā lives are just as good & important to orangutans as our lives are to us. Pigs apparently love to root around in straw; that doesnāt seem too enticing to me, but it is probably orgasmic fun for pigs!
(This is where I ought to point out that Iām not a utilitarian or even a consequentialist, so if we disagree, thatās probably why.)
Obviously animalsā lives in factory farms are brutal & may not be worth living, but that is not a natural or necessary conditionāitās that way only because we make it so. It seems unfair to make a groupās existence miserable & then to make them go extinct because they are so miserable!
Even if some or many of them do live good lives, if they go extinct we can simply replace them with more humans which seems preferable because humans probably have higher capacity for welfare and are less prone to being exploited (Iām assuming here that there is no/ālittle value of having species diversity). There are realistic possibilities of terrible animal suffering occuring in the future, and possibly even getting locked-in to some extent, so I think non-human animal extinction would be a good thing.
That humans have a higher capacity of welfare seems questionable to me, but I guess weād have to define well-being before proceeding. Why do you think so? Is it because we are more intelligent & therefore have access to āhigherā pleasures?
Similarly (from a longtermist point of view) who really cares if orangutans go extinct?
I guess itās important here to distinguish between organgutans as in the orangutan species & orangutans as in the members of that species. Iām not sure we should care about species per se. But we should care about individual orangutans, & it seems plausible to me that they care whether they go extinct. Large parts of their lives are after all centered around finding mates & producing offspring. So to the extent that anything is important to them (& I would argue that things can be just as important to them as they can be to us), surely the continuation of their species/ābloodline is.
The space they inhabit could just be taken over by a different species. The reason why longtermists really care if humans go extinct is not because of speciesism, but because humans really do have the potential to make an amazing future. We could spread to the stars. We could enhance ourselves to experience amazing lives beyond what we can now imagine. We may be able to solve wild animal suffering. Also, to return to my original point, we tend to have good lives (at least this is what most people think). These arguments donāt necessarily hold for other species that are far less intelligent than humans and so are, in my humble opinion, mainly a liability from a longtermistās point of view.
Most of that sounds like a great future for humans. Of course if you optimise for the kind of future that is good for humans, youāll find that human extinction seems much worse than extinction of other species. But maybe thereās an equally great future that we can imagine for orangutans (equally great for the orangutans, that is, although I donāt think they are actually commensurable), full of juicy fruit & sturdy branches. If so, shouldnāt we try to bring that about, too?
We may be able to solve wild animal suffering & thatād be great. I could see an āargument from stewardshipā where humans are the species most likely to be able to realise the good for all species. (Though Iāll note that up until now we seem rather to have made life quite miserable for many of the other animals.)
But we should care about individual orangutans, & it seems plausible to me that they care whether they go extinct. Large parts of their lives are after all centered around finding mates & producing offspring. So to the extent that anything is important to them (& I would argue that things can be just as important to them as they can be to us), surely the continuation of their species/ābloodline is.
Iām pretty skeptical of this claim. Itās not evolutionarily surprising that orangutans (or humans!) would do stuff that decreases their probability of extinction, but this doesnāt mean the individuals ācareā about the continuation of their species per se. Seems we only have sufficient evidence to say they care about doing the sorts of things that tend to promote their own (and relativesā, proportional to strength of relatedness) survival and reproductive success, no?
This is where I ought to point out that Iām not a utilitarian or even a consequentialist, so if we disagree, thatās probably why.
Yes I would say that I am a consequentialist and, more specifically a utilitarian, so that may be doing a lot of work in determining where we disagree.
That humans have a higher capacity of welfare seems questionable to me, but I guess weād have to define well-being before proceeding. Why do you think so? Is it because we are more intelligent & therefore have access to āhigherā pleasures?
I do have a strong intuition that humans are simply more capable of having wonderful lives than other species, and this is probably down to higher intelligence. Therefore, given that I see no intrinsic value and little instrumental value in species diversity, if I could play god I would just make loads of humans (assuming total utilitarianism is true). I could possibly be wrong that humans are more capable of wonderful lives though.
It seems unfair to make a groupās existence miserable & then to make them go extinct because they are so miserable!
Life is not fair. The simple point is that non-human animals are very prone to exploitation (factory farming is case in point). There are risks of astronomical suffering that could be locked in in the future. I just donāt think itās worth the risk so, as a utilitarian, it just makes sense to me to have humans over chickens. You could argue getting rid of all humans gets rid of exploitation too, but ultimately I do think maximising welfare just means having loads of humans so I lean towards being averse to human extinction.
But we should care about individual orangutans, & it seems plausible to me that they care whether they go extinct.
Absolutely I care about orangutans and the death of orangutans that are living good lives is a bad thing. I was just making the point that if one puts their longtermist hat on these deaths are very insignificant compared to other issues (in reality I have some moral uncertainty and so would wear my shortermist cap too, making me want to save an orangutan if it was easy to do so).
Most of that sounds like a great future for humans.
Yes indeed. My utilitarian philosophy doesnāt care that we would have loads of humans and no non-human animals. Again, this is justified due to lower risks of exploitation for humans and (possibly) greater capacities for welfare. I just want to maximise welfare and I donāt care who or what holds that welfare.
I do have a strong intuition that humans are simply more capable of having wonderful lives than other species, and this is probably down to higher intelligence. Therefore, given that I see no intrinsic value and little instrumental value in species diversity, if I could play god I would just make loads of humans (assuming total utilitarianism is true). I could possibly be wrong that humans are more capable of wonderful lives though.
Iād be skeptical of that for a few reasons: (1) I think different things are good for different species due to their different natures/ācapacities (the good here being whatever it is that wonderful lives have a lot of), e.g. contemplation is good for humans but not pigs & rooting around in straw is good for pigs but not humans; (2) I think it doesnāt make sense to compare these goods across species, because it means different species have different standards for goodness; & (3) I think it is almost nonsensical to ask, say, whether it would be better for a pig to be a human, or for a human to be a dog. But I recognise that these arguments arenāt particularly tractable for a utilitarian!
Life is not fair. The simple point is that non-human animals are very prone to exploitation (factory farming is case in point). There are risks of astronomical suffering that could be locked in in the future. I just donāt think itās worth the risk so, as a utilitarian, it just makes sense to me to have humans over chickens. You could argue getting rid of all humans gets rid of exploitation too, but ultimately I do think maximising welfare just means having loads of humans so I lean towards being averse to human extinction.
That life is not fair in the sense that different people (or animals) are dealt different cards, so to put it, is trueāthe cosmos is indifferent. But moral agents can be fair (in the sense of just), & in this case itās not Life making those groupsā existence miserable, itās moral agents who are doing that.
I think I would agree with you on the prone-to-exploitation argument if I were a utility maximiser, with the possible objection that, if humans reach the level of wisdom & technology needed to humanely euthanise a species in order to reduce suffering, possibly they would also be wise & capable enough to implement safeguards against future exploitation of that species instead. But that is still not a good enough reason if one believes that humans have higher capacity as receptacles of utility, though. If I were a utilitarian who believed that, then I think I would agree with you (without having thought about it too much).
Absolutely I care about orangutans and the death of orangutans that are living good lives is a bad thing. I was just making the point that if one puts their longtermist hat on these deaths are very insignificant compared to other issues (in reality I have some moral uncertainty and so would wear my shortermist cap too, making me want to save an orangutan if it was easy to do so).
Got it. I guess my original uncertainty (& this is not something I thought a lot about at all, so bear with me here) was whether longtermist considerations shouldnāt cause us to worry about orangutan extinction risks, too, given that orangutans are not so dissimilar from what we were some few millions of years ago. So that in a very distant future they might have the potential to be something like human, or more? That depends a bit on how rare a thing human evolution was, which I donāt know.
Yes indeed. My utilitarian philosophy doesnāt care that we would have loads of humans and no non-human animals. Again, this is justified due to lower risks of exploitation for humans and (possibly) greater capacities for welfare. I just want to maximise welfare and I donāt care who or what holds that welfare.
By the way, I should mention that I think your argument for species extinction is reasonable & Iām glad thereās someone out there making it (especially given that I expect many people to react negatively towards it, just on an emotional level). If I thought that goodness was not necessarily tethered to beings for whom things can be good or bad, but on the contrary that it was some thing that just resides in sentient beings but can be independently observed, compared & summed up, well, then I might even agree with it.
Iāve only skimmed this thread, but I think you and Jack Malde both might find the following Forum wiki entries and some of the associated tagged posts interesting:
To state my own stance very briefly and with insufficient arguments and caveats:
I think it makes sense to focus on humans for many specific purposes, due to us currently being the only real āactorsā or āmoral agentsā playing
I think it makes sense to think quite seriously about long-term effects on non-humans (including but not limited to nonhuman animals)
I think it might be the case that the best way to optimise those effects is to shepherd humans towards a long reflection
I think Jack is a bit overconfident about (a) the idea that the lives of nonhuman animals are currently net negative and (b) the idea that, if thatās the case or substantially likely to be the case, that would mean the extinction of nonhuman animals would be a good thing
I say more about this in comments on the post of Jackās that you linked to
But Iām not sure this has major implications, since I think in any case the near-term effects we should care about most probably centre on human actions, human values, etc. (partly in order to have good long-term effects on non-humans)
I think it is almost nonsensical to ask, say, whether it would be better for a pig to be a human, or for a human to be a dog
To clarify Iām not asking that question. I class myself as a hedonistic utilitarian which just means that I want to maximise net positive over negative experiences. So Iām not saying that it would be better for a pig to be a human, just that if we were to replace a pig with a human we may increase total welfare (if the human has greater capacity for welfare than the pig). I agree that determining if humans have greater capacity for welfare than pigs isnāt particularly tractable thoughāI too havenāt really read up much on this.
whether longtermist considerations shouldnāt cause us to worry about orangutan extinction risks, too, given that orangutans are not so dissimilar from what we were some few millions of years ago. So that in a very distant future they might have the potential to be something like human, or more?
Thatās an interesting possibility! I donāt know enough biology to comment on the likelihood.
I should mention that I think your argument for species extinction is reasonable & Iām glad thereās someone out there making it
To be honest Iām actually quite unsure if we should be trying to make all non-human animals go extinct. I donāt know how tractable that is or what the indirect effects would be. Iām saying, putting those considerations aside, that it would probably be good from a longtermist point of view.
The exception is of course factory-farmed animals. I do hope they go extinct and I support tangible efforts to achieve this e.g. plant-based and clean meat.
This got me thinking a bit about non-human animals. If itās true that (1) speciesism is irrational & thereās no reason to favour one species over another just because you belong to that species; (2) the human species is or could very well be at a very early stage of its lifespan; & (3) we should work very hard to reduce prospects of a future human extinction, then shouldnāt we also work very hard to reduce prospects of animal extinction right now? After all, many non-human animals are at much higher risk of going extinct than humans today.
You suggest that we humans could ā if things go well ā survive for billions or even trillions of years; since we only diverged from the last common ancestor with chimpanzees some four to 13 million years ago, that would put us at a very young age relatively. But if those are the timescales we consider, how about the potential in all the other species? It only took us humans some millions of years to go from apes to what we are today, after all. Who knows where the western black rhinoceros would be in a billion years if we hadnāt killed all of them? Maybe we should worry about orangutan extinction at least half as much as we worry about human extinction?
Put differently, itās my impression ā but I could well be wrong ā that EAs focus on animal suffering & human extinction quite a bit, but not so much on non-human extinction. Is there merit to that question? If so, why? Has it been discussed anywhere? (A cursory search brought up very little, but I didnāt try too hard.)
I did find this post which sort of touches on the same question.
Thank you for raising non-human animals. I believe that longtermists donāt talk about non-human animals enough. That is one reason I wrote that post that you have linked to.
In the post I actually argue that non-human animal extinction would be good. This is because it isnāt at all clear that non-human animals live good lives. Even if some or many of them do live good lives, if they go extinct we can simply replace them with more humans which seems preferable because humans probably have higher capacity for welfare and are less prone to being exploited (Iām assuming here that there is no/ālittle value of having species diversity). There are realistic possibilities of terrible animal suffering occuring in the future, and possibly even getting locked-in to some extent, so I think non-human animal extinction would be a good thing.
Similarly (from a longtermist point of view) who really cares if orangutans go extinct? The space they inhabit could just be taken over by a different species. The reason why longtermists really care if humans go extinct is not down to speciesism, but because humans really do have the potential to make an amazing future. We could spread to the stars. We could enhance ourselves to experience amazing lives beyond what we can now imagine. We may be able to solve wild animal suffering. Also, to return to my original point, we tend to have good lives (at least this is what most people think). These arguments donāt necessarily hold for other species that are far less intelligent than humans and so are, in my humble opinion, mainly a liability from a longtermistās point of view.
Good for whom? Obviously humansā lives seem good to humans, but it could well be that orangutansā lives are just as good & important to orangutans as our lives are to us. Pigs apparently love to root around in straw; that doesnāt seem too enticing to me, but it is probably orgasmic fun for pigs!
(This is where I ought to point out that Iām not a utilitarian or even a consequentialist, so if we disagree, thatās probably why.)
Obviously animalsā lives in factory farms are brutal & may not be worth living, but that is not a natural or necessary conditionāitās that way only because we make it so. It seems unfair to make a groupās existence miserable & then to make them go extinct because they are so miserable!
That humans have a higher capacity of welfare seems questionable to me, but I guess weād have to define well-being before proceeding. Why do you think so? Is it because we are more intelligent & therefore have access to āhigherā pleasures?
I guess itās important here to distinguish between organgutans as in the orangutan species & orangutans as in the members of that species. Iām not sure we should care about species per se. But we should care about individual orangutans, & it seems plausible to me that they care whether they go extinct. Large parts of their lives are after all centered around finding mates & producing offspring. So to the extent that anything is important to them (& I would argue that things can be just as important to them as they can be to us), surely the continuation of their species/ābloodline is.
Most of that sounds like a great future for humans. Of course if you optimise for the kind of future that is good for humans, youāll find that human extinction seems much worse than extinction of other species. But maybe thereās an equally great future that we can imagine for orangutans (equally great for the orangutans, that is, although I donāt think they are actually commensurable), full of juicy fruit & sturdy branches. If so, shouldnāt we try to bring that about, too?
We may be able to solve wild animal suffering & thatād be great. I could see an āargument from stewardshipā where humans are the species most likely to be able to realise the good for all species. (Though Iāll note that up until now we seem rather to have made life quite miserable for many of the other animals.)
Iām pretty skeptical of this claim. Itās not evolutionarily surprising that orangutans (or humans!) would do stuff that decreases their probability of extinction, but this doesnāt mean the individuals ācareā about the continuation of their species per se. Seems we only have sufficient evidence to say they care about doing the sorts of things that tend to promote their own (and relativesā, proportional to strength of relatedness) survival and reproductive success, no?
Yes I would say that I am a consequentialist and, more specifically a utilitarian, so that may be doing a lot of work in determining where we disagree.
I do have a strong intuition that humans are simply more capable of having wonderful lives than other species, and this is probably down to higher intelligence. Therefore, given that I see no intrinsic value and little instrumental value in species diversity, if I could play god I would just make loads of humans (assuming total utilitarianism is true). I could possibly be wrong that humans are more capable of wonderful lives though.
Life is not fair. The simple point is that non-human animals are very prone to exploitation (factory farming is case in point). There are risks of astronomical suffering that could be locked in in the future. I just donāt think itās worth the risk so, as a utilitarian, it just makes sense to me to have humans over chickens. You could argue getting rid of all humans gets rid of exploitation too, but ultimately I do think maximising welfare just means having loads of humans so I lean towards being averse to human extinction.
Absolutely I care about orangutans and the death of orangutans that are living good lives is a bad thing. I was just making the point that if one puts their longtermist hat on these deaths are very insignificant compared to other issues (in reality I have some moral uncertainty and so would wear my shortermist cap too, making me want to save an orangutan if it was easy to do so).
Yes indeed. My utilitarian philosophy doesnāt care that we would have loads of humans and no non-human animals. Again, this is justified due to lower risks of exploitation for humans and (possibly) greater capacities for welfare. I just want to maximise welfare and I donāt care who or what holds that welfare.
Iād be skeptical of that for a few reasons: (1) I think different things are good for different species due to their different natures/ācapacities (the good here being whatever it is that wonderful lives have a lot of), e.g. contemplation is good for humans but not pigs & rooting around in straw is good for pigs but not humans; (2) I think it doesnāt make sense to compare these goods across species, because it means different species have different standards for goodness; & (3) I think it is almost nonsensical to ask, say, whether it would be better for a pig to be a human, or for a human to be a dog. But I recognise that these arguments arenāt particularly tractable for a utilitarian!
That life is not fair in the sense that different people (or animals) are dealt different cards, so to put it, is trueāthe cosmos is indifferent. But moral agents can be fair (in the sense of just), & in this case itās not Life making those groupsā existence miserable, itās moral agents who are doing that.
I think I would agree with you on the prone-to-exploitation argument if I were a utility maximiser, with the possible objection that, if humans reach the level of wisdom & technology needed to humanely euthanise a species in order to reduce suffering, possibly they would also be wise & capable enough to implement safeguards against future exploitation of that species instead. But that is still not a good enough reason if one believes that humans have higher capacity as receptacles of utility, though. If I were a utilitarian who believed that, then I think I would agree with you (without having thought about it too much).
Got it. I guess my original uncertainty (& this is not something I thought a lot about at all, so bear with me here) was whether longtermist considerations shouldnāt cause us to worry about orangutan extinction risks, too, given that orangutans are not so dissimilar from what we were some few millions of years ago. So that in a very distant future they might have the potential to be something like human, or more? That depends a bit on how rare a thing human evolution was, which I donāt know.
By the way, I should mention that I think your argument for species extinction is reasonable & Iām glad thereās someone out there making it (especially given that I expect many people to react negatively towards it, just on an emotional level). If I thought that goodness was not necessarily tethered to beings for whom things can be good or bad, but on the contrary that it was some thing that just resides in sentient beings but can be independently observed, compared & summed up, well, then I might even agree with it.
Iāve only skimmed this thread, but I think you and Jack Malde both might find the following Forum wiki entries and some of the associated tagged posts interesting:
https://āāforum.effectivealtruism.org/āātag/āānon-humans-and-the-long-term-future
https://āāforum.effectivealtruism.org/āātag/āāmoral-weight
https://āāforum.effectivealtruism.org/āātag/āāmoral-patienthood
To state my own stance very briefly and with insufficient arguments and caveats:
I think it makes sense to focus on humans for many specific purposes, due to us currently being the only real āactorsā or āmoral agentsā playing
I think it makes sense to think quite seriously about long-term effects on non-humans (including but not limited to nonhuman animals)
I think it might be the case that the best way to optimise those effects is to shepherd humans towards a long reflection
I think Jack is a bit overconfident about (a) the idea that the lives of nonhuman animals are currently net negative and (b) the idea that, if thatās the case or substantially likely to be the case, that would mean the extinction of nonhuman animals would be a good thing
I say more about this in comments on the post of Jackās that you linked to
But Iām not sure this has major implications, since I think in any case the near-term effects we should care about most probably centre on human actions, human values, etc. (partly in order to have good long-term effects on non-humans)
Thanks Michael!
To clarify Iām not asking that question. I class myself as a hedonistic utilitarian which just means that I want to maximise net positive over negative experiences. So Iām not saying that it would be better for a pig to be a human, just that if we were to replace a pig with a human we may increase total welfare (if the human has greater capacity for welfare than the pig). I agree that determining if humans have greater capacity for welfare than pigs isnāt particularly tractable thoughāI too havenāt really read up much on this.
Thatās an interesting possibility! I donāt know enough biology to comment on the likelihood.
To be honest Iām actually quite unsure if we should be trying to make all non-human animals go extinct. I donāt know how tractable that is or what the indirect effects would be. Iām saying, putting those considerations aside, that it would probably be good from a longtermist point of view.
The exception is of course factory-farmed animals. I do hope they go extinct and I support tangible efforts to achieve this e.g. plant-based and clean meat.