It’s maybe worth noting that there’s an asymmetry: For people who think wild-animal lives are net positive, there are many things that contain even more sentient value than rainforest. By contrast, if you think wild-animal lives are net negative, only few things contain more sentient disvalue than rainforest. (Of course, in comparison to expected future sentience, biological life only makes up a tiny portion, so rainforest is unlikely to be a priority from a longtermist perspective.)
I understand the worries described in the OP (apart from the “let’s better not find out” part). I think it’s important for EAs in the WAS reduction movement to proactively counter simplistic memes and advocate interventions that don’t cause great harm from the perspective of some very popular moral perspectives. I think that’s a moral responsibility for animal advocates with suffering-focused views. (And as we see in other replies here, this sounds like it’s already common practice!)
At the same time, I feel like the discourse on this topic can be a bit disingenuous sometimes, where people whose actions otherwise don’t indicate much concern for the moral importance of the action-omission distinction (esp. when it comes to non-persons) suddenly employ rhetorical tactics that make it sound like “wrongly thinking animal lives are negative” is a worse mistake than “wrongly thinking they are positive”.
I also think this issue is thorny because, IMO, there’s no clear answer. There are moral judgment calls to make that count for at least as much as empirical discoveries.
For people who think wild-animal lives are net positive, there are many things that contain even more sentient value than rainforest.
Doesn’t this lead to replacement anyway for welfarists/consequentialists, like discussed here? I.e. we should replace rainforest with things that produce more value.
At the same time, I feel like the discourse on this topic can be a bit disingenuous sometimes, where people whose actions otherwise don’t indicate much concern for the moral importance of the action-omission distinction (esp. when it comes to non-persons) suddenly employ rhetorical tactics that make it sound like “wrongly thinking animal lives are negative” is a worse mistake than “wrongly thinking they are positive”.
It may be intuitions about reversibility. It’s harder to bring a species back than it is to eliminate it. Or, not only welfare matters to them. Or, maybe they really shouldn’t consider themselves consequentialists.
I believe we’re already replacing the rainforest with many things of more (economic) value, like palm oil and cows. I guess in future we’ll just have the palm oil, at least until we discover plants can suffer and they have to go too.
If being a consequentialist implies I should, under certain circumstances, destroy the world, I think I’m going to prioritise the world over consequentialism.
I don’t think the first one actually tells us much, because I don’t think many of the wild-animal-welfare EAs I know were significantly influenced by the original result.
I’d never heard of it until I saw the talk debunking it.
FWIW, I remember that result (i.e. the paper by Ng) being moderately prominent among (mostly negative-leaning) people I discussed wild animal welfare with in 2016. However, I think they treated it as one of several lines of evidence pointing in the same direction, and so I doubt that learning about this result being wrong would have by itself have changed anyone’s bottom line in an immediately action-guiding way. (I do think it would have made people somewhat less confident that many wild animals’ lives are net bad.)
That being said, there are some other useful insights from that work and surrounding discussion besides correcting the error, e.g. “when the probability of suffering increases, the severity of suffering should decrease”, and this can be applied to animals who are likely to die shortly after being born, which have been part of the focus of wild animal welfare in EA.
I agree. I’m not sure when I first heard about it; it might actually have been Zach pointing out that it was wrong on Facebook, but even if the proof had been correct, it still seemed like it was proving too much, so I think I’d have assumed the assumptions were too strong.
I think that Toward Welfare Biology was, until maybe 2016 or so, the default thing people pointed to (along with Brian Tomasik’s website), as the introductory text to wild animal welfare. I saw it referenced a lot, especially when I started working in the space.
Weren’t that paper and Brian’s work pretty much the only EA-aligned (welfarist/consequentialist) writings on the topic until recently? And Towards Welfare Biology also covers more than just that one result.
I think there were a few other philosophy papers that were sort of EA aligned I think, but yeah, basically just those 2. So maybe it was the default by default.
Matheny and Chan’s (2005) attempted rebuttal of the ‘logic of the larder’ objection to veg*ism also is based on impacts on wild animals, though if I remember correctly they’re mostly using an unexamined premise that their lives are usually worth living in an argument about human diets rather than discussing wild animal welfare in any detail.
There probably are other classics I don’t remember off the top of my head. I’m sure Brian Tomasik or one of the orgs working on wild animal welfare has a bibliography somewhere.
Some work pushing back on the view that net welfare in the wild is negative:
How Much Do Wild Animals Suffer? A Foundational Result on the Question is Wrong. by Zach Freitas-Groff
Life History Classification and Insect herbivores, life history and wild animal welfare by Kim Cuddington (Rethink Priorities)
The Unproven (And Unprovable) Case For Net Wild Animal Suffering. A Reply To Tomasik by Michael Plant
It’s maybe worth noting that there’s an asymmetry: For people who think wild-animal lives are net positive, there are many things that contain even more sentient value than rainforest. By contrast, if you think wild-animal lives are net negative, only few things contain more sentient disvalue than rainforest. (Of course, in comparison to expected future sentience, biological life only makes up a tiny portion, so rainforest is unlikely to be a priority from a longtermist perspective.)
I understand the worries described in the OP (apart from the “let’s better not find out” part). I
think it’s important for EAs in the WAS reduction movement to proactively counter simplistic memes and advocate interventions that don’t cause great harm from the perspective of some very popular moral perspectives. I think that’s a moral responsibility for animal advocates with suffering-focused views. (And as we see in other replies here, this sounds like it’s already common practice!)
At the same time, I feel like the discourse on this topic can be a bit disingenuous sometimes, where people whose actions otherwise don’t indicate much concern for the moral importance of the action-omission distinction (esp. when it comes to non-persons) suddenly employ rhetorical tactics that make it sound like “wrongly thinking animal lives are negative” is a worse mistake than “wrongly thinking they are positive”.
I also think this issue is thorny because, IMO, there’s no clear answer. There are moral judgment calls to make that count for at least as much as empirical discoveries.
Doesn’t this lead to replacement anyway for welfarists/consequentialists, like discussed here? I.e. we should replace rainforest with things that produce more value.
It may be intuitions about reversibility. It’s harder to bring a species back than it is to eliminate it. Or, not only welfare matters to them. Or, maybe they really shouldn’t consider themselves consequentialists.
I believe we’re already replacing the rainforest with many things of more (economic) value, like palm oil and cows. I guess in future we’ll just have the palm oil, at least until we discover plants can suffer and they have to go too.
If being a consequentialist implies I should, under certain circumstances, destroy the world, I think I’m going to prioritise the world over consequentialism.
Also Simon from Wild Animal Initiative has written about the importance of reversibility (and persistence) in wild animal interventions. Talk here. Wiping out animals is not very reversible.
I don’t think the first one actually tells us much, because I don’t think many of the wild-animal-welfare EAs I know were significantly influenced by the original result.
I’d never heard of it until I saw the talk debunking it.
FWIW, I remember that result (i.e. the paper by Ng) being moderately prominent among (mostly negative-leaning) people I discussed wild animal welfare with in 2016. However, I think they treated it as one of several lines of evidence pointing in the same direction, and so I doubt that learning about this result being wrong would have by itself have changed anyone’s bottom line in an immediately action-guiding way. (I do think it would have made people somewhat less confident that many wild animals’ lives are net bad.)
That being said, there are some other useful insights from that work and surrounding discussion besides correcting the error, e.g. “when the probability of suffering increases, the severity of suffering should decrease”, and this can be applied to animals who are likely to die shortly after being born, which have been part of the focus of wild animal welfare in EA.
I agree. I’m not sure when I first heard about it; it might actually have been Zach pointing out that it was wrong on Facebook, but even if the proof had been correct, it still seemed like it was proving too much, so I think I’d have assumed the assumptions were too strong.
Then again, this might be hindsight bias.
I think that Toward Welfare Biology was, until maybe 2016 or so, the default thing people pointed to (along with Brian Tomasik’s website), as the introductory text to wild animal welfare. I saw it referenced a lot, especially when I started working in the space.
Weren’t that paper and Brian’s work pretty much the only EA-aligned (welfarist/consequentialist) writings on the topic until recently? And Towards Welfare Biology also covers more than just that one result.
I think there were a few other philosophy papers that were sort of EA aligned I think, but yeah, basically just those 2. So maybe it was the default by default.
Some of Oscar Horta’s papers also mostly predate EA discourse on wild animals, e.g. his 2010 Debunking the idyllic view of natural processes. And even earlier, in 2003, there was Tyler Cowen’s Policing nature.
Matheny and Chan’s (2005) attempted rebuttal of the ‘logic of the larder’ objection to veg*ism also is based on impacts on wild animals, though if I remember correctly they’re mostly using an unexamined premise that their lives are usually worth living in an argument about human diets rather than discussing wild animal welfare in any detail.
There probably are other classics I don’t remember off the top of my head. I’m sure Brian Tomasik or one of the orgs working on wild animal welfare has a bibliography somewhere.
Pablo Stafforini has a great bibliography of articles on wild animal welfare that includes some earlier work coming from outside the EA space.