My guess would be that Greaves and MacAskill focus on the “10 billion humans, lasting a long time” scenario just to make their argument maximally conservative, rather than because they actually think that’s the right scenario to focus on? I haven’t read their paper, but on brief skimming I noticed that the paragraph at the bottom of page 5 talks about ways in which they’re being super conservative with that scenario.
Assuming that the goal is just to be maximally conservative while still arguing for longtermism, adding the animal component makes sense but doesn’t serve the purpose. As an analogy, imagine someone who denies that any non-humans have moral value. You might start by pointing to other primates or maybe dolphins. Someone could come along and say “Actually, chickens are also quite sentient and are far more numerous than non-human primates”, which is true, but it’s slightly harder to convince a skeptic that chickens matter than that chimpanzees matter.
such as human’s high brain to body mass ratio
One might also care about total brain size because in bigger brains, there’s more stuff going on (and sometimes more sophisticated stuff going on). As an example, imagine that you morally value corporations, and you think the most important part of a corporation is its strategic management (rather than the on-the-ground employees). You may indeed care more about corporations that have a greater ratio of strategic managers to total employees. But you may also care about corporations that have just more total strategic managers, especially since larger companies may be able to pull off more complex analyses that smaller ones lack the resources to do.
Yeah I think that is right that it is a conservative scenario—my point was more, the proposed future scenarios don’t come close to imagining as much welfare / mind-stuff as might exist right now.
Hmm, I think my point might be something slightly different—more to pose a challenge to explore how taking animal welfare seriously might change the outcomes of conclusions about the long term future. Right now, there seems to be almost no consideration. I guess I think it is likely that many longtermists thinks animals matter morally already (given the popularity of such a view in EA). But I take your point that for general longtermist outreach, this might be a less appealing discussion topic.
Thanks for this detailed post!
My guess would be that Greaves and MacAskill focus on the “10 billion humans, lasting a long time” scenario just to make their argument maximally conservative, rather than because they actually think that’s the right scenario to focus on? I haven’t read their paper, but on brief skimming I noticed that the paragraph at the bottom of page 5 talks about ways in which they’re being super conservative with that scenario.
Assuming that the goal is just to be maximally conservative while still arguing for longtermism, adding the animal component makes sense but doesn’t serve the purpose. As an analogy, imagine someone who denies that any non-humans have moral value. You might start by pointing to other primates or maybe dolphins. Someone could come along and say “Actually, chickens are also quite sentient and are far more numerous than non-human primates”, which is true, but it’s slightly harder to convince a skeptic that chickens matter than that chimpanzees matter.
One might also care about total brain size because in bigger brains, there’s more stuff going on (and sometimes more sophisticated stuff going on). As an example, imagine that you morally value corporations, and you think the most important part of a corporation is its strategic management (rather than the on-the-ground employees). You may indeed care more about corporations that have a greater ratio of strategic managers to total employees. But you may also care about corporations that have just more total strategic managers, especially since larger companies may be able to pull off more complex analyses that smaller ones lack the resources to do.
Yeah I think that is right that it is a conservative scenario—my point was more, the proposed future scenarios don’t come close to imagining as much welfare / mind-stuff as might exist right now.
Hmm, I think my point might be something slightly different—more to pose a challenge to explore how taking animal welfare seriously might change the outcomes of conclusions about the long term future. Right now, there seems to be almost no consideration. I guess I think it is likely that many longtermists thinks animals matter morally already (given the popularity of such a view in EA). But I take your point that for general longtermist outreach, this might be a less appealing discussion topic.
Thanks for the thoughts Brian!