I’d guess the most controversial part of this post will be the claim ‘it’s not incredibly obvious that factory-farmed animals (if conscious) have lives that are worse than nonexistence’?
But I don’t see why. It’s hard to be confident of any view on this, when we understand so little about consciousness, animal cognition, or morality. Combining three different mysteries doesn’t tend to create an environment for extreme confidence — rather, you end up even more uncertain in the combination than in each individual component.
And there are obvious (speciesist) reasons people would tend to put too much confidence in ‘factory-farmed animals have net-negative lives’.
E.g., when we imagine the Holocaust, we imagine relatively rich and diverse experiences, rather than reducing concentration camp victims to a very simple thing like ‘pain in the void’.
I would guess that humans’ nightmarish experience in concentration camps was usually better than nonexistence; and even if you suspect this is false, it seems easy to imagine how it could be true, because there’s a lot more to human experience than ‘pain, and beyond that pain, darkness’. It feels like a very open question in the human case.
But just because chickens lack some of the specific faculties humans have, doesn’t mean that (if conscious) chicken minds are ‘simple’, or simple in the particular ways people tend to assume. In particular, it’s far from obvious (and depends on contingent theories about consciousness and cognition) that you need human-style language or abstraction in order to have ‘rich’ experience that just has a lot of morally important stuff going on. A blank map doesn’t correspond to a blank territory; it corresponds to a thing we know very little about.
(For similar reasons, I think EAs in general worry far too little about whether chickens and other animals are utility monsters — this seems like a very live hypothesis to me, whether factory-farmed chickens have net-positive lives or net-negative ones.)
I’d guess the most controversial part of this post will be the claim ‘it’s not incredibly obvious that factory-farmed animals (if conscious) have lives that are worse than nonexistence’?
But I don’t see why. It’s hard to be confident of any view on this, when we understand so little about consciousness, animal cognition, or morality. Combining three different mysteries doesn’t tend to create an environment for extreme confidence — rather, you end up even more uncertain in the combination than in each individual component.
And there are obvious (speciesist) reasons people would tend to put too much confidence in ‘factory-farmed animals have net-negative lives’.
E.g., when we imagine the Holocaust, we imagine relatively rich and diverse experiences, rather than reducing concentration camp victims to a very simple thing like ‘pain in the void’.
I would guess that humans’ nightmarish experience in concentration camps was usually better than nonexistence; and even if you suspect this is false, it seems easy to imagine how it could be true, because there’s a lot more to human experience than ‘pain, and beyond that pain, darkness’. It feels like a very open question in the human case.
But just because chickens lack some of the specific faculties humans have, doesn’t mean that (if conscious) chicken minds are ‘simple’, or simple in the particular ways people tend to assume. In particular, it’s far from obvious (and depends on contingent theories about consciousness and cognition) that you need human-style language or abstraction in order to have ‘rich’ experience that just has a lot of morally important stuff going on. A blank map doesn’t correspond to a blank territory; it corresponds to a thing we know very little about.
(For similar reasons, I think EAs in general worry far too little about whether chickens and other animals are utility monsters — this seems like a very live hypothesis to me, whether factory-farmed chickens have net-positive lives or net-negative ones.)