Reducing populations of likely-suffering organisms through NPP reduction remains the cleanest intervention regardless of whether their suffering is “full human-like” or “attenuated no-self.”
In the comment section of Part 3, you mentioned that you were “writing this sequence for antifrustrationists.” This raises the question: why is this not explicitly stated in the posts themselves? To me, the text reads as a set of general recommendations, when in fact they only seem relevant if one holds a very specific set of beliefs.
From a utilitarian perspective, bringing net primary productivity down is a potential moral catastrophe if the animals living there have reasonably good lives. Not only due to the inevitable zoocide but also because the new equilibrium would contain less overall happiness. However, wouldn’t this also be problematic under antifrustrationist terms? By ending their lives, wouldn’t you be frustrating their inherent preference to live?
I’ll end on a more personal note: I found the first part of the article to be a truly insightful and interesting read.
The purpose of the whole first article is to lay out all these perspectives and make mine transparent. Originally I wanted to just write the sequence, but Claude suggested to add a whole ’nother post in front to introduce people to the ethical foundations.
We’ve had the discussion of ethical systems on this article. One of my core values is cooperativeness, and while I intuitively started out as classic utilitarian, I found it at odds with many common and widely held value systems and not in ways where I would’ve been ready to bite the bullet. E.g., it maps to Quiverfull, which is a rather extreme outlier. I also don’t bite the bullet on the Repugnant Conclusion.
But most people don’t even think in terms of unbounded maximization or minimization, and certainly not in terms of classic utilitarianism. It’s such a niche view out there. Even if I talk about implications that I actually like, like tiling the universe with blazingly fast, happy computations, people look at me weird. If I want to engage in moral trades with them, I have to adjust to a wholly different viewpoint. So it was probably around 2013–14 or so that I felt compelled to abandon classic utilitarianism as extreme, niche, and untenable.
I never settled on anything new after that but rather tried to figure out what the smallest common denominator is of the largest possible subset of all ethical preferences that I could think of.
The smallest common demoninator that is widely shared is that suffering is bad. Lots of people care about lots of other stuff on top, and sometimes it’s not the most important thing for them, but most people seem to be in agreement that suffering is bad. That’s also why I got so interested in sadism, an important exception from the rule.
So I think by focusing just on “suffering is bad, let’s reduce it” (and the particular framing around preferences that I find more intuitive), I can make my articles relevant to the widest audience possible. The Quiverfulls will have quibbles with it, the sadists will hate it, but maybe some 90+% of the world will benefit from them.
The smallest common demoninator that is widely shared is that suffering is bad.
It is just as widely accepted that making someone happy is good. Otherwise nice surprises and birthday gifts wouldn’t make sense. If you take only one part of the equation, you will always arrive at strange conclusions. That is like running a business and saying: “It is widely accepted that costs are bad, so we will cut costs without regard for revenues.”
it maps to Quiverfull
I don’t see how this would be the case. Since it’s quite obvious that humans bring more suffering than joy to animals, both farmed and wild, and there are orders of magnitude more non-human than human animals, why would we want to increase the human population applying utilitarian logic? In fact, prominent utilitarians like Peter Singer regularly stress the importance of the right to birth control.
You are right, it’s quite an overstatement to call anything obvious in ethics. However, for Quiverfull to be a good thing in utilitarian terms, we would need to think that it is more likely for non-human animals to be worse off without us than the opposite, and that’s a difficult position to defend. As far as I know, biomass has stayed the same. Populations by individuals might have decreased slightly, but not by orders of magnitude. And the animals that are living seem to be worse off. Animals in factory farming experience intense suffering and are denied almost anything that makes for a good life, and when we control “pests”, the preferred method seems to be poisoning, which makes for a slow and painful death. Also, I’ve never heard anyone, expert or layperson alike, claiming that humans are on average good for animals, but many think the opposite is true. That doesn’t mean that there are no such experts and the fact that many believe in it doesn’t make a view right, but we may want to consider this fact in an utilitarian calculation. Do you hold the view that humans are on average good for animals in utalitarian terms, or did you just want to point out that I made too far-reaching a claim?
I think it’s too overreaching a claim. I actually agree with you as an overall statement but many here would not. Many on the forum here though think that because humans drastically reduce wild animal populations, that may well help animals through reducint overall suffering.
Also it depends how general you are trying to be. I would personally argue that in New Zealand, humans have brought sheep more joy than suffering, through treating their diseases well and ensuring good nutrition. Because most animals are factory farmed and so overall humans bring more suffering than joy to farmed animals. But in places where they are well looked after and not family farmed, the inverse could be troo.
In the comment section of Part 3, you mentioned that you were “writing this sequence for antifrustrationists.” This raises the question: why is this not explicitly stated in the posts themselves? To me, the text reads as a set of general recommendations, when in fact they only seem relevant if one holds a very specific set of beliefs.
From a utilitarian perspective, bringing net primary productivity down is a potential moral catastrophe if the animals living there have reasonably good lives. Not only due to the inevitable zoocide but also because the new equilibrium would contain less overall happiness. However, wouldn’t this also be problematic under antifrustrationist terms? By ending their lives, wouldn’t you be frustrating their inherent preference to live?
I’ll end on a more personal note: I found the first part of the article to be a truly insightful and interesting read.
The purpose of the whole first article is to lay out all these perspectives and make mine transparent. Originally I wanted to just write the sequence, but Claude suggested to add a whole ’nother post in front to introduce people to the ethical foundations.
We’ve had the discussion of ethical systems on this article. One of my core values is cooperativeness, and while I intuitively started out as classic utilitarian, I found it at odds with many common and widely held value systems and not in ways where I would’ve been ready to bite the bullet. E.g., it maps to Quiverfull, which is a rather extreme outlier. I also don’t bite the bullet on the Repugnant Conclusion.
But most people don’t even think in terms of unbounded maximization or minimization, and certainly not in terms of classic utilitarianism. It’s such a niche view out there. Even if I talk about implications that I actually like, like tiling the universe with blazingly fast, happy computations, people look at me weird. If I want to engage in moral trades with them, I have to adjust to a wholly different viewpoint. So it was probably around 2013–14 or so that I felt compelled to abandon classic utilitarianism as extreme, niche, and untenable.
I never settled on anything new after that but rather tried to figure out what the smallest common denominator is of the largest possible subset of all ethical preferences that I could think of.
The smallest common demoninator that is widely shared is that suffering is bad. Lots of people care about lots of other stuff on top, and sometimes it’s not the most important thing for them, but most people seem to be in agreement that suffering is bad. That’s also why I got so interested in sadism, an important exception from the rule.
So I think by focusing just on “suffering is bad, let’s reduce it” (and the particular framing around preferences that I find more intuitive), I can make my articles relevant to the widest audience possible. The Quiverfulls will have quibbles with it, the sadists will hate it, but maybe some 90+% of the world will benefit from them.
It is just as widely accepted that making someone happy is good. Otherwise nice surprises and birthday gifts wouldn’t make sense. If you take only one part of the equation, you will always arrive at strange conclusions. That is like running a business and saying: “It is widely accepted that costs are bad, so we will cut costs without regard for revenues.”
I don’t see how this would be the case. Since it’s quite obvious that humans bring more suffering than joy to animals, both farmed and wild, and there are orders of magnitude more non-human than human animals, why would we want to increase the human population applying utilitarian logic? In fact, prominent utilitarians like Peter Singer regularly stress the importance of the right to birth control.
“Since it’s quite obvious that humans bring more suffering than joy to animals” I don’t think this is quite obvious.
You are right, it’s quite an overstatement to call anything obvious in ethics. However, for Quiverfull to be a good thing in utilitarian terms, we would need to think that it is more likely for non-human animals to be worse off without us than the opposite, and that’s a difficult position to defend. As far as I know, biomass has stayed the same. Populations by individuals might have decreased slightly, but not by orders of magnitude. And the animals that are living seem to be worse off. Animals in factory farming experience intense suffering and are denied almost anything that makes for a good life, and when we control “pests”, the preferred method seems to be poisoning, which makes for a slow and painful death. Also, I’ve never heard anyone, expert or layperson alike, claiming that humans are on average good for animals, but many think the opposite is true. That doesn’t mean that there are no such experts and the fact that many believe in it doesn’t make a view right, but we may want to consider this fact in an utilitarian calculation. Do you hold the view that humans are on average good for animals in utalitarian terms, or did you just want to point out that I made too far-reaching a claim?
I think it’s too overreaching a claim. I actually agree with you as an overall statement but many here would not. Many on the forum here though think that because humans drastically reduce wild animal populations, that may well help animals through reducint overall suffering.
Also it depends how general you are trying to be. I would personally argue that in New Zealand, humans have brought sheep more joy than suffering, through treating their diseases well and ensuring good nutrition. Because most animals are factory farmed and so overall humans bring more suffering than joy to farmed animals. But in places where they are well looked after and not family farmed, the inverse could be troo.