This is only somewhat related but I would be keen to get your thoughts Brian on this talk and related paper on positive wild animal welfare? They argue that wild animal welfare isn’t necessarily so clear cut to be negative and there are some positive elements as well that we often don’t discuss. I’m no expert and you’ve probably thought about wild animal suffering more than most people so I would be very curious to hear what you think.
There’s a lot in the talk but I found the slides below particularly interesting to think about (timestamp: 30:13) as it implies that even with heavily r-selected species, the deaths and suffering of juveniles may not dominate overall suffering.
Your question is fairly relevant to the discussion because if I thought there was net positive value in the lives of wild animals, then I would have a lot fewer concerns about non-welfare-reform animal charities.
I’ve had it on my todo list to check out that video and paper, but I probably won’t get to it any time soon, so for now I’ll just reply to the slides you asked about. :)
Personally I would not want to live even as the two surviving adult fish, because they probably experience a number of moments of extreme suffering, at least during death if not earlier. They may be fearful of predators, they face unpleasant temperatures or other bad environmental conditions without being able to control them the way humans do with air conditioning and heating, they may face long periods of low food, there might be intraspecific aggression and sexual harassment (I don’t know if those behaviors apply to Atlantic cod, but they are common in some fish species), and there would be many other hardships. Most of these moments of suffering probably wouldn’t feel that bad, but a few of them might be unbearably awful.
I said that I “personally” wouldn’t want to live as one of these surviving fish, but you might say that the real question is whether they would want to have these lives rather than not existing. We can’t ask fish that question, but if we imagine humans having similar lives as these fish, we could ask such humans that question. Maybe many of those humans would say during many moments of their lives that they were on balance glad to exist. However, I suspect that during some moments, such as the peak pain of dying, they would often change their minds and wish they hadn’t existed. Therefore, there’s no single individual whom we can ask whether his/her life was net positive; there are multiple “individuals” within the animal’s life, some of whom are glad to exist and some of whom are horrified to exist. How we weigh up these conflicting opinions is ultimately a judgment call, and no amount of further empirical data on wild-animal welfare will resolve it. I take a suffering-focused approach to this dilemma and say that it’s not acceptable for the happier moments of the animal’s life to impose unbearable suffering on some other moments of the animal’s life. So for any animal that has moments of unmitigated, unbearable agony (as most animals do, if only when dying), its life is net negative in my view.
But most people don’t take this suffering-focused approach. Many people think enough happy moments of life can outweigh something as awful as being eaten alive. So next I’ll discuss the specific numbers in those slides.
If a baby fish is only enduring 10 seconds of agony when dying, as the first slide suggests, then it’s presumably dying from predation (or maybe a severe physical injury like being crushed or something). The next slide suggests that maybe the pain of predation is 100⁄100, compared against a presumed positive welfare of 0.1/100 for ordinary life. So getting eaten alive is only 1000 times worse than the goodness of a typical moment of life. That might seem plausible if we only glance at the numbers, but it’s not at all plausible if we actually think about what it implies. Imagine that you endure getting eaten alive for 1 minute. These numbers say that a mere 1000 minutes of ordinary life could compensate for that. 1000 minutes is 16.7 hours, slightly more than the amount of time a typical person is awake in a day. So this ratio says that even if you spend a minute every day experiencing what it’s like to be eaten alive, then your life can still be welfare-neutral. I wonder if anyone would actually sign up for that. One of the least suffering-averse trade ratios I’ve heard someone endorse was that he’d be willing to experience being eaten alive for an extra week of life (IIRC; that conversation was a long time ago). (I guess there are also a few people who say even more extreme things like “I’d rather be alive and tortured forever than not exist”, though I expect they’d change their minds pretty quickly when the torture started.)
One possible argument is that it’s illegitimate to rely on our human intuitions about this tradeoff, because r-strategists may have evolved different pain-pleasure trade ratios based on the situation they face. For example, almost all fish babies will die by default, so if there’s an opportunity to take a dangerous risk in order to gain some slight advantage, they should probably take it, since they have almost no chance of winning otherwise. Therefore, maybe they need to be less averse to suffering (or at least less afraid of suffering) than we would be. This might be the case, but it’s a very theoretical argument, so I’m wary of putting too much stock in it. Of course, any estimate we have of how much suffering and pleasure exist in nature will be very speculative, so if I were a classical utilitarian who thought a minute of extreme suffering might be outweighable by a few days, weeks, or months of ordinary life in the wild, then I would have some uncertainty about the net hedonic balance of nature. But in my own case, I don’t think it’s ok to force extreme suffering on one for the pleasure of another—much less imposing extreme suffering on 1,999,998 for the pleasure of 2. (If we assume a 10% hatch rate and a 10% chance of sentience, then this comparison is actually 19,999.98 vs 2. And if we look at individual organism-moments of experience, the 2 surviving fish have a lot of organism-moments.)
As I mentioned, the slides seem to be assuming deaths by predation given how short the duration of suffering is. Death by almost anything else would probably take hours, days, weeks, etc, although the intensity of pain during that time would usually be a lot lower than the intensity of pain during predation. This article says:
A new study has uncovered the reason why 90 percent of fish larvae are biologically doomed to die mere days after hatching. This understanding of the mechanism that kills off the majority of the world’s fish larvae may help find a solution to the looming fish crisis in the world. The research suggests that “hydrodynamic starvation,” or the physical inability to feed due to environmental incompatibility, is the reason so many fish larvae perish.
So maybe rather than 10 seconds, the period of pain while dying should be measured in hours or days? 1 day = 86,400 seconds. Of course, the badness of most of those seconds would be a lot less than 100⁄100.
This is only somewhat related but I would be keen to get your thoughts Brian on this talk and related paper on positive wild animal welfare? They argue that wild animal welfare isn’t necessarily so clear cut to be negative and there are some positive elements as well that we often don’t discuss. I’m no expert and you’ve probably thought about wild animal suffering more than most people so I would be very curious to hear what you think.
There’s a lot in the talk but I found the slides below particularly interesting to think about (timestamp: 30:13) as it implies that even with heavily r-selected species, the deaths and suffering of juveniles may not dominate overall suffering.
Your question is fairly relevant to the discussion because if I thought there was net positive value in the lives of wild animals, then I would have a lot fewer concerns about non-welfare-reform animal charities.
I’ve had it on my todo list to check out that video and paper, but I probably won’t get to it any time soon, so for now I’ll just reply to the slides you asked about. :)
Personally I would not want to live even as the two surviving adult fish, because they probably experience a number of moments of extreme suffering, at least during death if not earlier. They may be fearful of predators, they face unpleasant temperatures or other bad environmental conditions without being able to control them the way humans do with air conditioning and heating, they may face long periods of low food, there might be intraspecific aggression and sexual harassment (I don’t know if those behaviors apply to Atlantic cod, but they are common in some fish species), and there would be many other hardships. Most of these moments of suffering probably wouldn’t feel that bad, but a few of them might be unbearably awful.
I said that I “personally” wouldn’t want to live as one of these surviving fish, but you might say that the real question is whether they would want to have these lives rather than not existing. We can’t ask fish that question, but if we imagine humans having similar lives as these fish, we could ask such humans that question. Maybe many of those humans would say during many moments of their lives that they were on balance glad to exist. However, I suspect that during some moments, such as the peak pain of dying, they would often change their minds and wish they hadn’t existed. Therefore, there’s no single individual whom we can ask whether his/her life was net positive; there are multiple “individuals” within the animal’s life, some of whom are glad to exist and some of whom are horrified to exist. How we weigh up these conflicting opinions is ultimately a judgment call, and no amount of further empirical data on wild-animal welfare will resolve it. I take a suffering-focused approach to this dilemma and say that it’s not acceptable for the happier moments of the animal’s life to impose unbearable suffering on some other moments of the animal’s life. So for any animal that has moments of unmitigated, unbearable agony (as most animals do, if only when dying), its life is net negative in my view.
But most people don’t take this suffering-focused approach. Many people think enough happy moments of life can outweigh something as awful as being eaten alive. So next I’ll discuss the specific numbers in those slides.
If a baby fish is only enduring 10 seconds of agony when dying, as the first slide suggests, then it’s presumably dying from predation (or maybe a severe physical injury like being crushed or something). The next slide suggests that maybe the pain of predation is 100⁄100, compared against a presumed positive welfare of 0.1/100 for ordinary life. So getting eaten alive is only 1000 times worse than the goodness of a typical moment of life. That might seem plausible if we only glance at the numbers, but it’s not at all plausible if we actually think about what it implies. Imagine that you endure getting eaten alive for 1 minute. These numbers say that a mere 1000 minutes of ordinary life could compensate for that. 1000 minutes is 16.7 hours, slightly more than the amount of time a typical person is awake in a day. So this ratio says that even if you spend a minute every day experiencing what it’s like to be eaten alive, then your life can still be welfare-neutral. I wonder if anyone would actually sign up for that. One of the least suffering-averse trade ratios I’ve heard someone endorse was that he’d be willing to experience being eaten alive for an extra week of life (IIRC; that conversation was a long time ago). (I guess there are also a few people who say even more extreme things like “I’d rather be alive and tortured forever than not exist”, though I expect they’d change their minds pretty quickly when the torture started.)
One possible argument is that it’s illegitimate to rely on our human intuitions about this tradeoff, because r-strategists may have evolved different pain-pleasure trade ratios based on the situation they face. For example, almost all fish babies will die by default, so if there’s an opportunity to take a dangerous risk in order to gain some slight advantage, they should probably take it, since they have almost no chance of winning otherwise. Therefore, maybe they need to be less averse to suffering (or at least less afraid of suffering) than we would be. This might be the case, but it’s a very theoretical argument, so I’m wary of putting too much stock in it. Of course, any estimate we have of how much suffering and pleasure exist in nature will be very speculative, so if I were a classical utilitarian who thought a minute of extreme suffering might be outweighable by a few days, weeks, or months of ordinary life in the wild, then I would have some uncertainty about the net hedonic balance of nature. But in my own case, I don’t think it’s ok to force extreme suffering on one for the pleasure of another—much less imposing extreme suffering on 1,999,998 for the pleasure of 2. (If we assume a 10% hatch rate and a 10% chance of sentience, then this comparison is actually 19,999.98 vs 2. And if we look at individual organism-moments of experience, the 2 surviving fish have a lot of organism-moments.)
As I mentioned, the slides seem to be assuming deaths by predation given how short the duration of suffering is. Death by almost anything else would probably take hours, days, weeks, etc, although the intensity of pain during that time would usually be a lot lower than the intensity of pain during predation. This article says:
So maybe rather than 10 seconds, the period of pain while dying should be measured in hours or days? 1 day = 86,400 seconds. Of course, the badness of most of those seconds would be a lot less than 100⁄100.
See also: “Is There More Suffering Than Happiness in Nature? A Reply to Michael Plant”.