Reading your article, I got the impression that you assume soil animals lead lives not worth living, and build your recommendations on that premise. To my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence for such a bold claim and your post doesn’t provide any either. Could you elaborate on this? As written, I found the article quite unsettling.
Hiii! Did you read the article in isolation, or did you start with the first one in the sequence? It’s written such that each builds on the previous ones.
I’ve read both posts and I found the first part a bit one-sided. In your definition of welfare biology, for instance, you only cited authors who believe soil animals have net-negative lives, while omitting those who argue the opposite.
While the quiz in that first post gave those opposing ideas some moral weight, this second part seems to start with the assumption that soil animals live net-negative lives. I noticed the robustness section doesn’t really consider the possibility that this premise could be wrong.
How would your recommendations change if we assumed net-positive lives instead? Would we then have to oppose GiveWell’s top charities, biofuel mandates, or wind turbines by that same logic?
Ultimately, do you think an assumption that can neither be proven nor unproven is a good basis for recommending where people should donate?
I’m very much writing this sequence for antifrustrationists. I didn’t set out to write a sequence that collects all the major moral views out there and then pivots the recommendations for each, but I noticed that while Brian started with a suffering-focused view, later researchers didn’t continue that line of thinking while making progress on other fronts, and I wanted to plug that hole. The alternative would’ve been a much bigger undertaking. I wouldn’t want to privilege just (say) antifrustrationism and hedonic act utilitarianism, but then my goal would’ve been to also pivot the recommendations for dominant systems like deontology (religious or Rawlsian), contractualism, and various more. (I do actually have an April Fools joke here that goes in that direction.)
Cf., when AMF provides LLINs to people in some regions in the southern DRC, then they’re doing exactly that, and not, e.g., providing nets to people in Tanzania.
With the first article I hoped to make clear that this is a sequence for antifrustrationists to figure out where they stand on nematode and arthropod welfare (and that perhaps others can also take something away from it, more coincidentally).
I’m very much writing this sequence for antifrustrationists.
This seems to be ad odds with what you wrote in part 1:
Part 1 (this post) starts with a quiz to help you locate yourself on the key axes of disagreement: population ethics, invertebrate sentience, and what metric to use. Your answers determine which conclusions in the later posts follow from your premises.
I must admit that I am still finding it difficult to fully grasp your position. Specifically, regarding the GiveWell top charities, you state:
the soil-animal benefit is a large addition if (probably when) the welfare sign comes out negative.
If I interpret this correctly, it suggests that your recommendations depend, at least to some degree, on the unproven assumption that soil animals live net-negative lives. Would your recommendations change if their welfare signs were found to be positive, or is your view that preventing harm always takes precedence over any amount of positive experience?
Furthermore, would you apply this same logic to humans? For instance, if an advanced Super Intelligence created a weapon that could instantaneously end all life on Earth, would you recommend its use to ensure that no preference could ever be frustrated again?
What I’m doing is very much transfer my intuitions from humans, where I think they are well tested, to other species. I don’t want special pleading for humans. The question you propose seems crazy high stakes. I’m glad I’ll never face a decision like that. I’d probably start a think tank or something to figure it out. The actual decisions we face every day are more like: should we have as many children as possible (1) through sperm donations, (2) by banning contraception, (3) by impregnating women and vanishing, (4) by getting as rich as possible and then have so many children that each have a life barely worth living, etc. My answer is always no. Not everyone shares those moral intuitons, which is fine for me as antirealist, but I transfer those intuitions to other species, and so what’s going on with r strategist species is horrifying to me!
While I share your moral intuitions, it seems like a bit of a stretch to transfer them directly to other species. Many of your intuitions involve reproductive contexts, such as sperm donation, banning contraception, or financial resources that simply aren’t available to them.
Furthermore, r-strategists follow a vastly different evolutionary path. For a human woman, being impregnated and then abandoned clearly frustrates a preference for a partner’s support; however, if a female of another species lacks that preference to begin with, the situation seems less problematic. There is also the matter of dependency: a human mother must care for a vulnerable infant, whereas r-strategists are typically self-sufficient from the moment they hatch.
I’d like to offer a different thought experiment: Suppose an alien species observes all the suffering humans on Earth and concludes they could help us by significantly reducing NPP to ensure less humans, and thus less suffering, exists in the future. Most of us would view this as a catastrophic mistake on their part. Do you believe they could “help” us that way?
You adapt them to the other species. We can do the same with much better information with our friends: One friend enjoys tomato sauce; another friend doesn’t enjoy it. You want to get pizza for all three of you, and it’s supposed to be a surprise, so instead of being like, “Pizza has tomato sauce on it, and my friend doesn’t like it, so I can’t make any inference about whether they want pizza and should [get pizza for them anyway, get pizza only for myself and the other friend],” you can make adjustments like, “Pizza has tomato sauce on it, and my friend doesn’t like it, so let’s ask whether they can make pizza without tomato sauce.”
E.g., I give this example of eusocial vs. solitary insects. So when I wonder whether it’s stressful for an insect to be caught in my flat and not finding the way out (despite some nutritious stuff I have lying around), my guess is that it’s more likely stressful for the eusocial one who wants to get back to their hive than for the solitary one. When I had a fly over for a week or so in 2021, I gave her a name, enjoyed her company, and didn’t worry much about her feeling trapped (I did leave a window open when I was awake), but when I had a bee over a few days ago, I was more concerned and helped the bee find their way out.
Likewise, humans can have some 0–3 children, cows some 5–10, and cats some 60–100 over their lifetimes. They all parent and alloparent. Turtles more like 1–2k, and no (allo-) parenting. So (just based on this data) I imagine that the loss of a child is almost as bad for a cow as it is for a human, that cats grieve somewhat less, and turtles not at all.
Or when it comes to pain, I mention in my last article that it probably doesn’t make sense to have very strong pain signals, when an animal cannot react to them. So for nematodes it’s not very useful to experience pain strongly; for a fly it may be very useful.
In your thought experiment there is a disconnect there that is crucial for my work: Antifrustrationism, as a form of preference utilitarianism, is all about the preferences of the individuals. If someone can fulfill their own preferences, there’s nothing for me to do. If someone can tell me how I can help them fulfill their preferences, I’ll happily do things for them that strike me as odd, like unusual kinks, because even though I don’t share them, I trust their ability to know and communicate their preferences.
I only run into problems in cases where there is a power differential but the beings cannot communicate their preferences, e.g., because they are in the future, far away in the universe, or it’s hard/impossible to build the sorts of experiments where one could elicit revealed preferences. Those are the cases where it gets uncomfortable because I need to make guesses and inferences.
It’s like with a caring mother of an infant who can’t talk yet: The infant can’t help themselves (yet), so she has to do it, but to do that well, she has to infer the preferences rather than asking what they are.
With the aliens, the situation is reversed. They are powerful but really dumb and could just ask how they can really help us, and NPP is not an obvious lever for a K-strategist species. But we have this problem with aging. Maybe they’ll stop by Earth 100k years ago, largely fail to communicate with us, but study our biology and notice that this aging thing really sucks, especially in the last couple of decades of an animal’s life. So just leave a time capsule with information on how to reverse aging that’s designed in such a way that they hope we can decypher it once we have the necessary foundational technologies.
Reading your article, I got the impression that you assume soil animals lead lives not worth living, and build your recommendations on that premise. To my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence for such a bold claim and your post doesn’t provide any either. Could you elaborate on this? As written, I found the article quite unsettling.
Hiii! Did you read the article in isolation, or did you start with the first one in the sequence? It’s written such that each builds on the previous ones.
I’ve read both posts and I found the first part a bit one-sided. In your definition of welfare biology, for instance, you only cited authors who believe soil animals have net-negative lives, while omitting those who argue the opposite.
While the quiz in that first post gave those opposing ideas some moral weight, this second part seems to start with the assumption that soil animals live net-negative lives. I noticed the robustness section doesn’t really consider the possibility that this premise could be wrong.
How would your recommendations change if we assumed net-positive lives instead? Would we then have to oppose GiveWell’s top charities, biofuel mandates, or wind turbines by that same logic?
Ultimately, do you think an assumption that can neither be proven nor unproven is a good basis for recommending where people should donate?
I’m very much writing this sequence for antifrustrationists. I didn’t set out to write a sequence that collects all the major moral views out there and then pivots the recommendations for each, but I noticed that while Brian started with a suffering-focused view, later researchers didn’t continue that line of thinking while making progress on other fronts, and I wanted to plug that hole. The alternative would’ve been a much bigger undertaking. I wouldn’t want to privilege just (say) antifrustrationism and hedonic act utilitarianism, but then my goal would’ve been to also pivot the recommendations for dominant systems like deontology (religious or Rawlsian), contractualism, and various more. (I do actually have an April Fools joke here that goes in that direction.)
Cf., when AMF provides LLINs to people in some regions in the southern DRC, then they’re doing exactly that, and not, e.g., providing nets to people in Tanzania.
With the first article I hoped to make clear that this is a sequence for antifrustrationists to figure out where they stand on nematode and arthropod welfare (and that perhaps others can also take something away from it, more coincidentally).
This seems to be ad odds with what you wrote in part 1:
I must admit that I am still finding it difficult to fully grasp your position. Specifically, regarding the GiveWell top charities, you state:
If I interpret this correctly, it suggests that your recommendations depend, at least to some degree, on the unproven assumption that soil animals live net-negative lives. Would your recommendations change if their welfare signs were found to be positive, or is your view that preventing harm always takes precedence over any amount of positive experience?
Furthermore, would you apply this same logic to humans? For instance, if an advanced Super Intelligence created a weapon that could instantaneously end all life on Earth, would you recommend its use to ensure that no preference could ever be frustrated again?
What I’m doing is very much transfer my intuitions from humans, where I think they are well tested, to other species. I don’t want special pleading for humans. The question you propose seems crazy high stakes. I’m glad I’ll never face a decision like that. I’d probably start a think tank or something to figure it out. The actual decisions we face every day are more like: should we have as many children as possible (1) through sperm donations, (2) by banning contraception, (3) by impregnating women and vanishing, (4) by getting as rich as possible and then have so many children that each have a life barely worth living, etc. My answer is always no. Not everyone shares those moral intuitons, which is fine for me as antirealist, but I transfer those intuitions to other species, and so what’s going on with r strategist species is horrifying to me!
While I share your moral intuitions, it seems like a bit of a stretch to transfer them directly to other species. Many of your intuitions involve reproductive contexts, such as sperm donation, banning contraception, or financial resources that simply aren’t available to them.
Furthermore, r-strategists follow a vastly different evolutionary path. For a human woman, being impregnated and then abandoned clearly frustrates a preference for a partner’s support; however, if a female of another species lacks that preference to begin with, the situation seems less problematic. There is also the matter of dependency: a human mother must care for a vulnerable infant, whereas r-strategists are typically self-sufficient from the moment they hatch.
I’d like to offer a different thought experiment: Suppose an alien species observes all the suffering humans on Earth and concludes they could help us by significantly reducing NPP to ensure less humans, and thus less suffering, exists in the future. Most of us would view this as a catastrophic mistake on their part. Do you believe they could “help” us that way?
You adapt them to the other species. We can do the same with much better information with our friends: One friend enjoys tomato sauce; another friend doesn’t enjoy it. You want to get pizza for all three of you, and it’s supposed to be a surprise, so instead of being like, “Pizza has tomato sauce on it, and my friend doesn’t like it, so I can’t make any inference about whether they want pizza and should [get pizza for them anyway, get pizza only for myself and the other friend],” you can make adjustments like, “Pizza has tomato sauce on it, and my friend doesn’t like it, so let’s ask whether they can make pizza without tomato sauce.”
E.g., I give this example of eusocial vs. solitary insects. So when I wonder whether it’s stressful for an insect to be caught in my flat and not finding the way out (despite some nutritious stuff I have lying around), my guess is that it’s more likely stressful for the eusocial one who wants to get back to their hive than for the solitary one. When I had a fly over for a week or so in 2021, I gave her a name, enjoyed her company, and didn’t worry much about her feeling trapped (I did leave a window open when I was awake), but when I had a bee over a few days ago, I was more concerned and helped the bee find their way out.
Likewise, humans can have some 0–3 children, cows some 5–10, and cats some 60–100 over their lifetimes. They all parent and alloparent. Turtles more like 1–2k, and no (allo-) parenting. So (just based on this data) I imagine that the loss of a child is almost as bad for a cow as it is for a human, that cats grieve somewhat less, and turtles not at all.
Or when it comes to pain, I mention in my last article that it probably doesn’t make sense to have very strong pain signals, when an animal cannot react to them. So for nematodes it’s not very useful to experience pain strongly; for a fly it may be very useful.
In your thought experiment there is a disconnect there that is crucial for my work: Antifrustrationism, as a form of preference utilitarianism, is all about the preferences of the individuals. If someone can fulfill their own preferences, there’s nothing for me to do. If someone can tell me how I can help them fulfill their preferences, I’ll happily do things for them that strike me as odd, like unusual kinks, because even though I don’t share them, I trust their ability to know and communicate their preferences.
I only run into problems in cases where there is a power differential but the beings cannot communicate their preferences, e.g., because they are in the future, far away in the universe, or it’s hard/impossible to build the sorts of experiments where one could elicit revealed preferences. Those are the cases where it gets uncomfortable because I need to make guesses and inferences.
It’s like with a caring mother of an infant who can’t talk yet: The infant can’t help themselves (yet), so she has to do it, but to do that well, she has to infer the preferences rather than asking what they are.
With the aliens, the situation is reversed. They are powerful but really dumb and could just ask how they can really help us, and NPP is not an obvious lever for a K-strategist species. But we have this problem with aging. Maybe they’ll stop by Earth 100k years ago, largely fail to communicate with us, but study our biology and notice that this aging thing really sucks, especially in the last couple of decades of an animal’s life. So just leave a time capsule with information on how to reverse aging that’s designed in such a way that they hope we can decypher it once we have the necessary foundational technologies.