Yes, “prove” is too strong here, that’s not the term I should have used. And human life is not guaranteed to be net-negative.
But I often see the view that some people assume human action in the future to be net-positive, and I felt like adding a counterpoint to that, given the large uncertainties.
There’s a very general and abstract reason to think it’s more likely to be positive, which is that most people care at least a little bit about promoting good and preventing bad (plus acting like that can be popular even if you personally don’t care), whereas few people wanting to deliberately promote suffering (especially generic suffering, rather than just being able to get vengeance or practice sadism on a small number of victims.)
I mean, factory farming is in itself an obvious counterexample. It’s huge and growing.
I think you are putting too much value on intentions rather than consequences. A lot of harm happening in the world is the result of indifference than cruelty—most people do not actively animals to be harmed, but the most economical way to farm animals is by getting them in crowded conditions, so…
Poor incentives and competition are important here. A lot of suffering is even natural (e.g., a deer dying of hunger or a spider trapping an insect), and sometimes just unwanted (e.g. climate change).
Not sure what is the case? I’m not claiming people don’t do bad things, merely that they don’t do them because they are bad (very often). Factory farming isn’t a counterexample to that: people don’t do it because it causes suffering. Of course it does show people are (collectively) prepared to cause very large amounts of suffering in pursuit of other goals. But there’s no obviousgeneral reason to think that the side effects of people pursuing their goals that they don’t really care about will tend to be bad things more often than good things. Whereas when people do deliberately promote things because of their moral value they (usually) promote the good not the bad. So most of what people do looks just random in terms of whether it promotes the good (for anyone other than their friends and family, and perhaps society as a whole when they participate in trade.)) Whereas people do occasionally attempt to promote the good. Since people pull either at random or in the right direction, the best guess (before you look at the specifics of our track record) is that people will do somewhat more good than harm.
To be clear I’m not saying any of this proves, the future will be good. Just that it provides moderate starting evidence in that direction.
I’m still kind of unconvinced.
If we were talking only about human populations, sure then I’d agree, most efforts seem intended to provoke good things.
But when you look at other species ? I think if you look at the things we do to factory farmed animals or wild animals or animals we just harm because of pollutions or climate change or deep see mining when it starts, we’d label all of that to be bad if it were done to humans.
I’m more interested in actual track record rather than intentions. Our intentions don’t match up super well with ‘overall good in the world increasing’.
One important reason we might do more bad than good in the future is because animals are far more numerous than humans, and most likely dominate from a moral standpoint (besides maybe artificial sentence). Most importantly, our goals are often opposed to theirs : finding more energy, using fossil fuels, using chemicals for making goods, eating meat, making silk, clearing a forest for agriculture and cities… So as we aggregate even more energy, it’s unlikely that our actions are going to be beneficial to animal’s goals given our own objectives.
Yes, “prove” is too strong here, that’s not the term I should have used. And human life is not guaranteed to be net-negative.
But I often see the view that some people assume human action in the future to be net-positive, and I felt like adding a counterpoint to that, given the large uncertainties.
There’s a very general and abstract reason to think it’s more likely to be positive, which is that most people care at least a little bit about promoting good and preventing bad (plus acting like that can be popular even if you personally don’t care), whereas few people wanting to deliberately promote suffering (especially generic suffering, rather than just being able to get vengeance or practice sadism on a small number of victims.)
I am not sure this is the case?
I mean, factory farming is in itself an obvious counterexample. It’s huge and growing.
I think you are putting too much value on intentions rather than consequences. A lot of harm happening in the world is the result of indifference than cruelty—most people do not actively animals to be harmed, but the most economical way to farm animals is by getting them in crowded conditions, so…
Poor incentives and competition are important here. A lot of suffering is even natural (e.g., a deer dying of hunger or a spider trapping an insect), and sometimes just unwanted (e.g. climate change).
Not sure what is the case? I’m not claiming people don’t do bad things, merely that they don’t do them because they are bad (very often). Factory farming isn’t a counterexample to that: people don’t do it because it causes suffering. Of course it does show people are (collectively) prepared to cause very large amounts of suffering in pursuit of other goals. But there’s no obviousgeneral reason to think that the side effects of people pursuing their goals that they don’t really care about will tend to be bad things more often than good things. Whereas when people do deliberately promote things because of their moral value they (usually) promote the good not the bad. So most of what people do looks just random in terms of whether it promotes the good (for anyone other than their friends and family, and perhaps society as a whole when they participate in trade.)) Whereas people do occasionally attempt to promote the good. Since people pull either at random or in the right direction, the best guess (before you look at the specifics of our track record) is that people will do somewhat more good than harm.
To be clear I’m not saying any of this proves, the future will be good. Just that it provides moderate starting evidence in that direction.
I’m still kind of unconvinced. If we were talking only about human populations, sure then I’d agree, most efforts seem intended to provoke good things. But when you look at other species ? I think if you look at the things we do to factory farmed animals or wild animals or animals we just harm because of pollutions or climate change or deep see mining when it starts, we’d label all of that to be bad if it were done to humans.
I’m more interested in actual track record rather than intentions. Our intentions don’t match up super well with ‘overall good in the world increasing’.
One important reason we might do more bad than good in the future is because animals are far more numerous than humans, and most likely dominate from a moral standpoint (besides maybe artificial sentence). Most importantly, our goals are often opposed to theirs : finding more energy, using fossil fuels, using chemicals for making goods, eating meat, making silk, clearing a forest for agriculture and cities… So as we aggregate even more energy, it’s unlikely that our actions are going to be beneficial to animal’s goals given our own objectives.