To clarify, are you asserting that wild rats, fish, and bugs have net negative lives, on the order of half of the suffering of a factory farmed animal? That seems like a fairly controversial point, since it suggests that, e.g., habitat destruction is a good thing wherever the damage to the ecosystem would not be catastrophic.
Although you’ve said that a score of 0 is supposed to represent uncertainty about whether the animal’s life is net positive or net negative, it doesn’t seem to me that the metrics are well-designed for that. Most of them seem best for capturing negative utility, rather than positive. For instance, when a score of “5 to 15” is assigned to a death with “quick or low pain,” I assume that doesn’t mean that the act of dying itself has positive utility, so where does the positive utility come from? It seems you’d have to implicitly weigh the suffering from death with the lifespan of the animal and its welfare over the course of its life, but it seems wrong to include that all in a quality of death metric. For instance, if we had two groups of animals that were had the same scores on all of these metrics, including how painful their death was, but one had a much shorter lifespan than the other, then the shorter-lived group would have much more pain, even though their scores under this system would be equal. (This might be captured by the death rate figure – if so, could you explain what a “10%” or “50%” death rate means?)
I find that discussion about wild animal suffering very quickly gets to “but it would be ludicrous to believe X because then we’d have to do Y.” I think it’s better to focus on “How might we find out if X is true” rather than the drastic consequences that would have.
As a parallel, people in power have often found it convenient to believe that slaves, immigrants, poor people, etc have naturally higher pain tolerance than themselves and thus it’s not a problem for them to do hard labor, have inadequate medical care, etc. The fact that changing this belief would have disruptive consequences doesn’t have anything to do with its accuracy.
Having read much of Brian Tomasik’s work, I think the idea that wild animals have net negative lives is plausible, and I don’t think habitat destruction would be ludicrous. However, that does seem to be a more extreme position than most wild animal welfare organizations are willing to commit to, and I suggest that the framework proposed here is not well-suited for answering those sorts of questions.
Yeah, I think there’s a bad dynamic where people who have read Tomasik either seriously or jokingly propose “pave everything” and other people find that alarming and want nothing to do with any ideas that could lead in that direction. I spent years intentionally not reading Tomasik because I was afraid it would make me into some kind of fanatic.
To clarify, are you asserting that wild rats, fish, and bugs have net negative lives, on the order of half of the suffering of a factory farmed animal? That seems like a fairly controversial point, since it suggests that, e.g., habitat destruction is a good thing wherever the damage to the ecosystem would not be catastrophic.
Although you’ve said that a score of 0 is supposed to represent uncertainty about whether the animal’s life is net positive or net negative, it doesn’t seem to me that the metrics are well-designed for that. Most of them seem best for capturing negative utility, rather than positive. For instance, when a score of “5 to 15” is assigned to a death with “quick or low pain,” I assume that doesn’t mean that the act of dying itself has positive utility, so where does the positive utility come from? It seems you’d have to implicitly weigh the suffering from death with the lifespan of the animal and its welfare over the course of its life, but it seems wrong to include that all in a quality of death metric. For instance, if we had two groups of animals that were had the same scores on all of these metrics, including how painful their death was, but one had a much shorter lifespan than the other, then the shorter-lived group would have much more pain, even though their scores under this system would be equal. (This might be captured by the death rate figure – if so, could you explain what a “10%” or “50%” death rate means?)
I find that discussion about wild animal suffering very quickly gets to “but it would be ludicrous to believe X because then we’d have to do Y.” I think it’s better to focus on “How might we find out if X is true” rather than the drastic consequences that would have.
As a parallel, people in power have often found it convenient to believe that slaves, immigrants, poor people, etc have naturally higher pain tolerance than themselves and thus it’s not a problem for them to do hard labor, have inadequate medical care, etc. The fact that changing this belief would have disruptive consequences doesn’t have anything to do with its accuracy.
Having read much of Brian Tomasik’s work, I think the idea that wild animals have net negative lives is plausible, and I don’t think habitat destruction would be ludicrous. However, that does seem to be a more extreme position than most wild animal welfare organizations are willing to commit to, and I suggest that the framework proposed here is not well-suited for answering those sorts of questions.
Yeah, I think there’s a bad dynamic where people who have read Tomasik either seriously or jokingly propose “pave everything” and other people find that alarming and want nothing to do with any ideas that could lead in that direction. I spent years intentionally not reading Tomasik because I was afraid it would make me into some kind of fanatic.