Picture a knife cutting into your stomach.
Don’t just register the words. Actually take a moment to think about what it would be like. What the first moment it occurred would be like, how the pain would get deeper as the knife cuts more deeply into your flesh, the way the blood would drip down your sides and you would cry out in pain. Intense agony has a way of cutting through idealizations and rationalizations—so that the world is on fire, alight with nothing but pain.
Andy Masley has an article called Animal Suffering Isn’t Pretend. It’s easy to go through the world thinking it is pretend, implicitly if not explicitly. It’s easy to think of animals as meek little animatronic robots who we shouldn’t be overly cruel to, but merit a somewhat second-class ethical status. They merit nice statements about compassion, rather than any kind of deep sympathy—of imagining things from their perspective. It is easy to go through life never thinking about what it’s like to be an animal.
But animal suffering is not pretend. There is something it is like to be an animal going through the myriad horrors we inflict on them. To pick just one, and not near the most disturbing, consider our practice of slicing off the beaks of chickens. Beaks are filled with nerve endings, so this would feel like if someone cut off your finger without painkillers.
It’s easy to mutter lofty platitudes about how “while we all deplore animal cruelty, the animal on account of its inability to speak or grasp morality, matters less.” It is easy to be like Orwell’s imagined English professor, propounding about Soviet atrocities from the comfort of a well-air-conditioned English department:
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
There are distinctions between humans and animals. We can talk and reason at a level that they cannot. But babies and the mentally disabled cannot speak or reason at the level the rest of us can, and yet their suffering is still a big deal. When you realize that we force animals to go through experiences—by the billions—that feel to them like it would feel like to you if someone tore off your fingers with pliers or castrated you without anesthetic, it becomes clear that these lofty propoundings are nothing more than bogus rationalizations of the indefensible belief that animal suffering is pretend—the belief that when the animals scream and cry and quake nothing very important is going on.
Justice has a cry, but it also has a scream. There is no place justice screams as shrilly or as urgently as alongside the animals we castrate, mutilate, and slaughter. Their vocal cords give out from the cruel indignities we inflict on them, for the sake of a pizza topping or a carton of eggs.
Those who discount the cries of the animals are not, as Masley notes, being hard-headed realists. Quite the opposite. They are sticking their head in the sand and refusing to see the world as it is, to see with clarity what it’s like to be a chicken screaming. To look into why they scream and see that when they do, they are like us. We’ve been dulled by our upbringing and by our evolutionary blinders not to see their pain as it is.
I think a lot of the biggest problems in the world come from people not seeing reality how it is, from concrete realities melting into vague and hazy abstractions and their urgent call being neglected. Our assessment of the world comes through the use of words, but the world is made up of things, not of words. If effective altruism has a central idea, it is seeing the world with clear eyes, not slinking away before disturbing truths.
It is a disturbing truth that in nature, animals cry out by the quintillions.
It is a disturbing truth that children are dying—that mothers must hold in their arms the bodies of their children because we in the west were too callous to give our money away.
It is a disturbing truth that everyone on Earth might drop dead from an engineered pandemic.
It is a disturbing truth that nearly every animal we eat went through conditions prior to slaughter that would be uncontroversially called torture if inflicted on a person or dog.
But these truths do not go away when you do not look at them. The cries of the animals are just as loud even if we never hear them. Wherever in the world a person dies or an animal screams, we should treat it like a fire alarm—alerting us that more action is needed, that more needs to be done, that some grisly horror is happening and needs immediate rectification. If we ignore these truths because they are inconvenient and disturbing to think about, we have failed at a deep level to grapple with how the world is.
It’s not pretend. None of it’s pretend. The deer who slowly bleeds out after having her side ripped apart by a lion is not pretend. The child in Malawi who dies of malaria because her mother cannot afford medicine is not pretend. Each one is as real as you or I. In each case, there is some experience that if it was near to us—undergone by us or someone we love—we would regard as the most urgent thing in the world.
Most of all, the future isn’t pretend. The people who might exist in the future, in numbers too enormous to fathom—10^58, according to some estimates, if things go well—will all be real people like you or I or your friends. They will have joys and sorrows and pains, loves and heartbreaks, things they know, and things that make them laugh. They’re not just some vague cloud under the amorphous label “future generations,” and if you could hear their cries or speak with them, hear about just how much they’d want to live, ensuring that a joyous future is preserved would seem obviously like the most important thing in the world.
Every second of every day, in numerous places throughout Earth, there are experiences that we’d do anything to avoid. This is a tragedy beyond comprehension. But it’s also an opportunity because we can do something about it. For a dollar, we can prevent animals from spending years in a cage. For a few thousand dollars, we can save a human’s life. We are in a position to face the world head on, with clarity and moral courage, rather than slink away before the challenge.
We’re not very good at visualizing these things. It’s hard to see things from the perspective of an animal or someone far away. This is why we all too often do nothing about these horrors. We only glimpse their horror through a glass darkly, through a vague mess of abstractions and rationalizations, whereby we tell ourselves that we are justified in doing nothing.
But we’re not, and that fact would be obvious if we were the ones going through these tortures—being waylaid by death and disease and torment—that a distant stranger could prevent. If the stranger never did anything to prevent them, preferring their comfortable life of luxury, we would not forgive them and we’d be right not to forgive them. If it was your child against a stranger’s money, rather than your money against a stranger’s child, favoring donation would be the most obvious thing in the world.
The worst thing that has ever happened to you is not unique. Similar horrors are happening all across Earth. It is trivially easy to do things to prevent it, so you should.