As a disclaimer, I came in with the preconception that one should assign near-zero probability of animals being of more moral relevance than humans.
After reading the arguments, I have found little to no convincing arguments contradicting this.
It’s true that we should be uncertain as to how animals experience the world. However, I don’t feel that the uncertainty in moral value should be thought of as ever exceeding human’s moral value.
To illustrate my current understanding of the best way to think about this topic, I think all your probability distributions should probably be modeled as never exceeding 1 for every animal, as the probability of such an outcome is so low it’s not worth considering. I think of it like the probability that you can build a perpetual energy-creating machine violating the laws of physics, or the probability that tomorrow the sun does not rise because the earth stopped rotating.
Perhaps, it could analogized as the same moral probability that causing suffering is a good thing, all things considered. One might argue that the human brain is extremely complicated, and morality is complicated, so we should put some weight on moral views that prefer to cause infinite suffering for eternity. Perhaps one could argue that some people enjoy causing others to suffer, and they might be right, and so suffering might be intrinsically good. I think this argument has about as much supporting evidence as the concept that animals could be more morally relevant than people. However, again, I would say the probability of such an outcome is so low it’s not worth considering.
Although it’s true we do not know the details of how animals experience consciousness, this is not enough to overturn the intuition all humans share about the morality of killing people versus animals—one is simply entirely different than another, and there is no instance in which it is better to kill an animal than a person. This conception has apparently been held constant for many cultures throughout human history. In some cases some animals were revered as gods, but this was less about the animals and more about the gods. In some cases animals and living things were seen as equally valuable as humans. I think this is unlikely, but not impossible, but the key point is that killing was seen as wrong in all cases, and not that animals were seen as more valuable than humans.
Suffering is not the only relevant moral consideration. See “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathon Haidt—humans probably share a few more moral foundations than purely care/harm, including authority, fairness, sanctity, etc. Some may view these as equally morally relevant. My point is here, it’s questionable whether we have equal moral responsibility over nonhuman animals as we have to humans, depending on how you construct your moral frameworks. If you look at how human brains are wired, the foundations of our conceptions of morality are built with in-group vs out-group. So, the moral status of animals based on understanding of human psychology which is our best way to guess at a “correct” moral framework would indicate that as things become less like us, our moral intuitions will guide us as valuing these things less.
I think you may have come to your probability distributions because you are a sequence thinker and are using your intuitions to argue for each part of a sequence which comes to some conclusion, where the proper thing to do when coming to some conclusion about whether to spend on an animal welfare charity or not is to use cluster-style thinking.
I hope that this is seen as a respectful difference in perspective and not at all a personal attack. I think it is useful to question these sort of assumptions to make moral progress, but I also think we need a lot of evidence to overturn the assumption that humans are more or equally morally relevant than animals, in large part due to the pre-existing moral intuitions we all probably share. There don’t appear to be sufficient arguments out there to overturn this position.
Okay, that was enough philosophizing, let me put in a few more points in favor of my position here:
Most people I know that are smarter than me believe humans are more morally significantly than animal. I know of zero people seriously arguing the opposite side
If morality is actually all fake and a human invention with no objective truth to it, then humans and animals will both be worth zero, and I will still be correct.
The actual actions of people who argue animals are more morally relevant than humans is not to kill people to save animals, so there’s probably no-one who sincerely, deep down believes this
People tend to anthropomorphize other things like teddy bears and Roombas and things like that, and mistakenly assign them some moral worth until they think about it more. Therefore, our intuitions can tend to guide us to incorrect conclusions about what is morally worthwhile.
Agreed. Carl Schuman at hour 1:02 at the 80k podcast even notes:
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-common-sense-case-existential-risks/
Rob Wiblin: I see. So because there’s such a clear motivation for even an altruistic person to exaggerate the potential risk from nuclear winter, then people who haven’t looked into it might regard the work as not super credible because it could kind of be a tool for advocacy more than anything.
Carl Shulman: Yeah. And there was some concern of that sort, that people like Carl Sagan, who was both an anti-nuclear and antiwar activist and bringing these things up. So some people, particularly in the military establishment, might have more doubt about when their various choices in the statistical analysis and the projections and assumptions going into the models, are they biased in this way? And so for that reason, I’ve recommended and been supportive of funding, just work to elaborate on this. But then I have additionally especially valued critical work and support for things that would reveal this was wrong if it were, because establishing that kind of credibility seemed very important. And we were talking earlier about how salience and robustness and it being clear in the minds of policymakers and the public is important.
Note earlier in the conversation demonstrating Schulman influenced the funding decision for the Rutgers team from open philanthropy:
”Robert Wiblin: So, a couple years ago you worked at the Gates Foundation and then moved to the kind of GiveWell/Open Phil cluster that you’re helping now.”
Notably, Reisner is part of Los Alamos in the military establishment. They build nuclear weapons there. So both Reisner and Robock from Rutgers have their own biases.
Here’s a peer-reviewed perspective that shows the flaws in both perspectives on nuclear winter as being too extreme:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25751654.2021.1882772
I recommend Lawrence livermore paper on the topic: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1764313
It seems like a much less biased middle ground, and generally shows that nuclear winter is still really bad, on the order of 1⁄2 to 1⁄3 as “bad” as Rutgers tends to say it is.