Reductio ad absurdum: If we consider the lives of nematodes and mites meaningful, suddenly all human welfare questions become meaningless compared to the question of how our behaviour affects their welfare. The conclusion will be that we either need to nuke ourselves or completely restructure society around maximising nematode wellbeing. This is impractical, and like many internally consistent but impractical philosophies (nihilism, antinatalism, Kaczynskiism) aren’t conducive to a functioning society.
I think there is actually a reasonable middle ground here. If indeed the vast majority of all meaningful lives are those of soil organisms, I think an EA approach would imply:
Taking the most effective actions to help these beings. Demanding that soil life be included in all existing animal welfare work is analogous to demanding that GiveWell include animal welfare in all its calculations. More targeted interventions directly focused on helping soil life are likely to be far more impactful. Currently, this probably looks like invertebrate welfare research, perhaps with some movement building.
Working for long term solutions, recognizing and avoiding unintended consequences, which could include damage to the movement, biodiversity loss, or even redirecting evolution toward greater suffering.
Balancing “utilon” nematode well-being with “warm fuzzy” human and larger animal well-being. Most people feel little-to-no empathy for beings they can’t even see. It’s wonderful that there’s some who do intuitively care for these tiny beings, but in order to bring the rest of us along they’ll need to understand where we’re starting from.
Taking the most effective actions to help these beings
More targeted interventions directly focused on helping soil life are likely to be far more impactful
Seems like we’re far from a consensus even on whether more or fewer of these organisms is the goal. You suggest that biodiversity loss is bad but Vasco Grilo suggests more monoculture farms is better because that leads to fewer microorganisms and he considers their lives net negative.
Give 1000 researchers 1000 years to study nematodes and demodex mites and I don’t believe they’ll be able to tell you whether their lives are worth living, let alone exactly what interventions would improve them.
I think there is actually a reasonable middle ground here. If indeed the vast majority of all meaningful lives are those of soil organisms, I think an EA approach would imply:
Taking the most effective actions to help these beings. Demanding that soil life be included in all existing animal welfare work is analogous to demanding that GiveWell include animal welfare in all its calculations. More targeted interventions directly focused on helping soil life are likely to be far more impactful. Currently, this probably looks like invertebrate welfare research, perhaps with some movement building.
Working for long term solutions, recognizing and avoiding unintended consequences, which could include damage to the movement, biodiversity loss, or even redirecting evolution toward greater suffering.
Balancing “utilon” nematode well-being with “warm fuzzy” human and larger animal well-being. Most people feel little-to-no empathy for beings they can’t even see. It’s wonderful that there’s some who do intuitively care for these tiny beings, but in order to bring the rest of us along they’ll need to understand where we’re starting from.
Seems like we’re far from a consensus even on whether more or fewer of these organisms is the goal. You suggest that biodiversity loss is bad but Vasco Grilo suggests more monoculture farms is better because that leads to fewer microorganisms and he considers their lives net negative.
Give 1000 researchers 1000 years to study nematodes and demodex mites and I don’t believe they’ll be able to tell you whether their lives are worth living, let alone exactly what interventions would improve them.
A road to nowhere with great reputational cost