Hi, thank you for voicing this concern. I read your recent post, “Rewilding Is Extremely Bad.”
Personally, I doubt that most wild animals have negative lives. (informed by analogy to most of our own history of subsistence-level survival, and my doubt that they would consider their lives to have not been worth living). I also don’t believe that total hedonic utilitarianism is a complete frame for thinking about this. I think it is important to factor in people’s and animals’ preferences for continued existence. Mostly I think we just don’t know much about this question overall. I do think we should care about this fundamental question and certainly do what is in our power to improve the lives of other beings.
I think you may have gotten the wrong impression from my use of “biodiversity.” It would be understandable to assume that I want to maximize Earth’s total biomass / total natural land area / number of wild animals, or something like that. I’m actually mostly interested in preserving the diversity of life that has evolved on Earth, such as by avoiding species extinctions. I think there are several good reasons to do this, such as to provide the far future with valuable information that would otherwise be lost, potentially fulfill uplift-style moral obligations we may have towards nonhuman animals, and generally keep our options open.
Preserving natural land tends to be a tractable, robust, large scale way to prevent species extinctions. But there are other biodiversity interventions that work with very small numbers of individuals, like seed banks or analogous “insect zoo”, or even zero individuals, like biobanking tissue samples with the aim of de-extinction in a utopian future world.
Perhaps we could both celebrate something like a well-designed insect zoo—where we care for many small populations of insects, work toward better understanding their many different desires, elevate the value of their lives for more to see, and preserve a wide variety of life forms into the future. There are probably also a variety of biodiversity-enhancing measures that would simultaneously boost animal welfare. Unfortunately which interventions are good depend a lot on figuring out the proper value of complex vs simple animals and how far into positive or net-negative territory different animals are. I hope to write up a list of these types of mutually beneficial interventions.
I don’t think the analogy with subsistence humans is a good one because the basic argument for net negative animal welfare doesn’t apply to them. The basic argument is: most animals have very short lives that culminate in a painful death, and a few days of life isn’t enough to recoup the harms of a painful death. This doesn’t apply to long-lived hunter-gatherers. Fwiw, I don’t think it applies to animals either—it seems plausible that elephants mostly live good lives, for example. But the most numerous animals are worms, then insects, then fish, then amphibians, then reptiles—nearly all the most numerous animals have bad lives.
I don’t think hedonic utilitarianism is a complete frame either—I’m an objective list theorist fwiw, but I don’t think that it has huge implications because animals don’t have many significant non-hedonic goods. I don’t think nature has intrinsic value, but even if I did, this would be outweighed by the staggeringly large amount of suffering that exists even in small plots of lands (hundreds of bugs per square feet). As I said in that piece, I think even pretty small chunks of land could contain extreme suffering, so this probably swamps whatever intrinsic value nature might have.
I agree that biodiversity isn’t automatically the same as increasing ecosystem productivity. In fact, I’d generally tend to support preserving herbivores, as they lower plant populations—so we could find common ground there. I’m skeptical about carnivores generally, though depends on the detail. I’d also be skeptical of insect zoos because those might be used to argue for preserving nature. I saw your recent post where you describe precision agriculture which would prevent conversion of nature into farmland. I find this very alarming! I think farmland has fewer arthropods!
Hi, thank you for voicing this concern. I read your recent post, “Rewilding Is Extremely Bad.”
Personally, I doubt that most wild animals have negative lives. (informed by analogy to most of our own history of subsistence-level survival, and my doubt that they would consider their lives to have not been worth living). I also don’t believe that total hedonic utilitarianism is a complete frame for thinking about this. I think it is important to factor in people’s and animals’ preferences for continued existence. Mostly I think we just don’t know much about this question overall. I do think we should care about this fundamental question and certainly do what is in our power to improve the lives of other beings.
I think you may have gotten the wrong impression from my use of “biodiversity.” It would be understandable to assume that I want to maximize Earth’s total biomass / total natural land area / number of wild animals, or something like that. I’m actually mostly interested in preserving the diversity of life that has evolved on Earth, such as by avoiding species extinctions. I think there are several good reasons to do this, such as to provide the far future with valuable information that would otherwise be lost, potentially fulfill uplift-style moral obligations we may have towards nonhuman animals, and generally keep our options open.
Preserving natural land tends to be a tractable, robust, large scale way to prevent species extinctions. But there are other biodiversity interventions that work with very small numbers of individuals, like seed banks or analogous “insect zoo”, or even zero individuals, like biobanking tissue samples with the aim of de-extinction in a utopian future world.
Perhaps we could both celebrate something like a well-designed insect zoo—where we care for many small populations of insects, work toward better understanding their many different desires, elevate the value of their lives for more to see, and preserve a wide variety of life forms into the future. There are probably also a variety of biodiversity-enhancing measures that would simultaneously boost animal welfare. Unfortunately which interventions are good depend a lot on figuring out the proper value of complex vs simple animals and how far into positive or net-negative territory different animals are. I hope to write up a list of these types of mutually beneficial interventions.
Thanks!
I don’t think the analogy with subsistence humans is a good one because the basic argument for net negative animal welfare doesn’t apply to them. The basic argument is: most animals have very short lives that culminate in a painful death, and a few days of life isn’t enough to recoup the harms of a painful death. This doesn’t apply to long-lived hunter-gatherers. Fwiw, I don’t think it applies to animals either—it seems plausible that elephants mostly live good lives, for example. But the most numerous animals are worms, then insects, then fish, then amphibians, then reptiles—nearly all the most numerous animals have bad lives.
I don’t think hedonic utilitarianism is a complete frame either—I’m an objective list theorist fwiw, but I don’t think that it has huge implications because animals don’t have many significant non-hedonic goods. I don’t think nature has intrinsic value, but even if I did, this would be outweighed by the staggeringly large amount of suffering that exists even in small plots of lands (hundreds of bugs per square feet). As I said in that piece, I think even pretty small chunks of land could contain extreme suffering, so this probably swamps whatever intrinsic value nature might have.
I agree that biodiversity isn’t automatically the same as increasing ecosystem productivity. In fact, I’d generally tend to support preserving herbivores, as they lower plant populations—so we could find common ground there. I’m skeptical about carnivores generally, though depends on the detail. I’d also be skeptical of insect zoos because those might be used to argue for preserving nature. I saw your recent post where you describe precision agriculture which would prevent conversion of nature into farmland. I find this very alarming! I think farmland has fewer arthropods!
Want to come on the podcast to discuss more?