Probably our disagreements are too vast to settle much in a comment.
Bentham's Bulldog
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I mean, that might help with a few problems, but doesn’t help with a lot of the problems. Also, it just seems so crazy. Giving up axiology to hold on to a not even very widely shared intuition? Giving up the idea that the world would be better if it had lots of extra happy people and every existing person was a million times better?
It’s Good To Create Happy People: A Comprehensive Case
Amazing stuff!
A Life That Cannot Be A Failure
The apples being unbounded thing was just a brief intuition pump. It wasn’t really connected to the other stuff.
I don’t think the argument actually requires that different value systems can be compared in fungible units. You can just compare stuff that is, in one value system, clearly better than something in another value system. So, assume you have a credence of .5 in fanaticism and of .5 in bounded views. Well, creating 10,000 happy people given bounded views is less good than creating 10 trillion suffering people given unbounded views. But that’s less good than a one in googol chance of creating infinite people given unbounded views. So by transitivity, a 1/googol chance of infinite people given unbounded views wins out.
Inhuman
Fanaticism Dominates Given Moral Uncertainty
The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe
Awesome post!
Contra Thorstad on the Mathematics of Existential Risks
The Next Decades Will Plausibly Be Completely Insane
For A Short Period Of Time, You Can Save 21,000 Shrimp Per Dollar
The Most Important Thing We’ll Ever Do
Would be curious why people are downvoting.
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?
I’m pretty worried about this because I think most wild animals have bad lives, and so increasing their numbers is very bad https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-biodiversity?utm_source=publication-search
Growing Effective Altruism
I don’t think the case for Vasco’s argument depends really on sentience in non-arthropods. There are like a billion soil arthropods for every person, so funding research on soil animals looks similarly important. And a lot of these are ants who are more likely to be sentient than black soldier flies.
I do find the comment “I also want robustness in the case for sentience,” a bit puzzling in context. As I understood it, Vasco’s argument was that it’s not very unlikely that animals even simpler than arthropods are sentient (mites, springtails, etc). That there’s not a robust case that they are analogous isn’t a strong argument for them not being analogous (and will, in fact, be a reason for uncertainty and research).
Broadly agree with a lot of the document though, especially the funding stuff! I think funding Arthropoda is great!
Want to come on the podcast and argue about the person-affecting view?