The distinction is that discussions about civil rights, women’s suffrage, gay marriage and trans rights are productive. You can say concrete things, present evidence, and make suggestions for concrete policies that would improve lives.
Nematode welfare is a dead end. We can’t even decide whether nematodes lives are worth living, among various other wide uncertainties, and there’s no way forward to getting any clarity so it’s just reputational damage without any benefit.
I think a few decades ago, many would have similar objections to trans rights stuff. A few more decades ago and the same would be said about gay marriage. A few more ago, the same would be said about civil rights/women’s suffrage.
Even then though, in small corners of society, these ideas were discussed.
It is, of course, hard to disambiguate between the ideas that eventually became moral progress and those that died off. But it was hard to know those at the time.
The strongest arguments in those areas are by analogy. Analogising is much easier with fellow humans or even animals close to us than worms. “If you were X, you probably wouldn’t want to be discriminated against” or “they probably suffer like me, we should avoid that”. This starts to break down around the level of shrimp and then is completely broken by the time you get microscopic.
Nematodes being morally significant is far more disruptive and absurd than any of these ideas. Accepting that the Old Testament can be ignored on yet another moral issue is pretty easy. Accepting that human welfare is a rounding error compared to microscopic worms is society-upending.
If in a few decades there was an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that i) nematodes are sentient, ii) have negative lives in the sense the vast majority of random humans who are the most informed about the lives of nematodes would prefer not existing over existing as a random nematode, and iii) the intensity of the subjective experiences of nematodes is sufficiently high for their welfare to be considered, would you consider overconfident your claim that “the idea that we should focus on the welfare of nematodes is absurd”?
“If in a few decades we do the thing that you don’t think is possible, will you admit that it was possible”
Sure, would also admit I was wrong if researchers find an answer to “why is there something rather than nothing”, which I also believe is unanswerable.
Even if you get a confident answer to these questions, which I’m confident you won’t, the outcome would inevitably be so absurd (nematodes immediately becoming moral priority over everything else) that society would have to discard them anyway or else collapse
Jonathan Birch is a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and is Principal Investigator on the “Foundations of Animal Sentience” project, a European Union-funded project to develop better methods for studying the feelings of animals and new ways of using the science of animal minds to improve animal welfare policies and laws. In 2021, he led a review for the UK government that shaped the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. In 2022-23, he was part of a working group that investigated the question of sentience in AI.
Do you not think more research like that I quoted by from Andrews (2024) would meaningfully decrease the uncertainty about the welfare of nematodes?
What about doing Welfare Footprint-like analysis (e.g. here), but including both positive and negative experiences, and investigating what kinds of behavioural tradeoffs they make between different (intensities of) experiences to weigh intensities?
check for functions (causal roles) that can be reasonably interpreted as generating appearances of stimuli as good/desirable/worth promoting or bad/undesirable/worth avoiding. These are enough for moral status in my view, but pain and pleasure could be more specific. Or, what does it mean for something to be painful or pleasurable in functionalist terms? Develop that, and check for it in nematodes.
It’s unlikely that any of this will be conclusive, but it can inform reasonable ranges of probabilities.
On the question of what they find painful or pleasurable, check what they tend to avoid and approach, respectively, especially through learned behaviour (and especially more general types of learning) or internal simulation of outcomes of actions, rather than in-built reflexive behaviour and very simple forms of learning like habituation.
EDIT: You can also validate with measures of brain activity and nociception. There are probably features common to (apparently) painful experiences in nematodes, and features common to pleasurable ones in nematodes, which could be identified and then checked for across experiences.
The distinction is that discussions about civil rights, women’s suffrage, gay marriage and trans rights are productive. You can say concrete things, present evidence, and make suggestions for concrete policies that would improve lives.
Nematode welfare is a dead end. We can’t even decide whether nematodes lives are worth living, among various other wide uncertainties, and there’s no way forward to getting any clarity so it’s just reputational damage without any benefit.
I think a few decades ago, many would have similar objections to trans rights stuff. A few more decades ago and the same would be said about gay marriage. A few more ago, the same would be said about civil rights/women’s suffrage.
Even then though, in small corners of society, these ideas were discussed.
It is, of course, hard to disambiguate between the ideas that eventually became moral progress and those that died off. But it was hard to know those at the time.
The strongest arguments in those areas are by analogy. Analogising is much easier with fellow humans or even animals close to us than worms. “If you were X, you probably wouldn’t want to be discriminated against” or “they probably suffer like me, we should avoid that”. This starts to break down around the level of shrimp and then is completely broken by the time you get microscopic.
Nematodes being morally significant is far more disruptive and absurd than any of these ideas. Accepting that the Old Testament can be ignored on yet another moral issue is pretty easy. Accepting that human welfare is a rounding error compared to microscopic worms is society-upending.
If in a few decades there was an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that i) nematodes are sentient, ii) have negative lives in the sense the vast majority of random humans who are the most informed about the lives of nematodes would prefer not existing over existing as a random nematode, and iii) the intensity of the subjective experiences of nematodes is sufficiently high for their welfare to be considered, would you consider overconfident your claim that “the idea that we should focus on the welfare of nematodes is absurd”?
“If in a few decades we do the thing that you don’t think is possible, will you admit that it was possible”
Sure, would also admit I was wrong if researchers find an answer to “why is there something rather than nothing”, which I also believe is unanswerable.
Even if you get a confident answer to these questions, which I’m confident you won’t, the outcome would inevitably be so absurd (nematodes immediately becoming moral priority over everything else) that society would have to discard them anyway or else collapse
Nematodes are among the 4 “Investigation Priorities” mentioned in section 13.4 of chapter 13 of the book The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch.
Do you not think more research like that I quoted by from Andrews (2024) would meaningfully decrease the uncertainty about the welfare of nematodes?
I really don’t think so. I cannot conceive of research that would clarify whether a nematode life is net positive or negative
What about doing Welfare Footprint-like analysis (e.g. here), but including both positive and negative experiences, and investigating what kinds of behavioural tradeoffs they make between different (intensities of) experiences to weigh intensities?
How are you going to decide whether a nematode experiences pain or pleasure, and if they do what is painful or pleasurable to a nematode?
I’d follow something like these:
https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/invertebrate-sentience-useful-empirical-resource/
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2022.788289/full
check for functions (causal roles) that can be reasonably interpreted as generating appearances of stimuli as good/desirable/worth promoting or bad/undesirable/worth avoiding. These are enough for moral status in my view, but pain and pleasure could be more specific. Or, what does it mean for something to be painful or pleasurable in functionalist terms? Develop that, and check for it in nematodes.
It’s unlikely that any of this will be conclusive, but it can inform reasonable ranges of probabilities.
On the question of what they find painful or pleasurable, check what they tend to avoid and approach, respectively, especially through learned behaviour (and especially more general types of learning) or internal simulation of outcomes of actions, rather than in-built reflexive behaviour and very simple forms of learning like habituation.
EDIT: You can also validate with measures of brain activity and nociception. There are probably features common to (apparently) painful experiences in nematodes, and features common to pleasurable ones in nematodes, which could be identified and then checked for across experiences.