0) Prelude - some life affirming poems and songs
When I was a child, I grew up on some very life affirming songs and poems. I'll show some examples:
The first song that comes to mind is Zdravica ("A toast") by a Serbian poet Duško Radović. It goes like this:
A toast
Everything that grows would like to grow
let it grow, indeed it should grow!
Everything that blooms would like to bloom,
Let it bloom, indeed it should bloom!
Let everything that has eyes see,
Let each wing fly high in the sky!
To fly, to fly, it's beautiful to fly!
To live, to live, it's beautiful to live!
Everything that flies would like to fly,
let it fly, indeed it should fly!
Everything that sings, would like to sing
Let it sing, indeed it should sing!
Let everything that has a leg jump
Let everyone who can run!
To jump, to jump, it's beautiful to jump
To live, to live, it's beautiful to live
Everything that runs would love to run
Let it run, indeed it should run
Everything that pecks would love to peck
Let it peck, indeed it should peck
Let everyone who has a voice sing
no one in a more beautiful, joyful manner than us
To sing, to sing, it's beautiful to sing
To live, to live, it' beautiful to live.
Now for negative utilitarians or anyone concerned about animal welfare (both of farm and wild animals), this song is terribly naive and misguided. I agree, but I can't deny powerful life-affirming message of the song, and I also believe, on some level, it's true. At least for the poet himself, it's subjectively true - they have no reason to lie. Even if it's not materially true in all senses in our world, it still functions as a powerful vision, of how beautiful life might be.
But I'll not stop here. There are more songs with pretty much the same message (Don't worry, later in this article, I'll discuss all this in a more cold-headed, rational way. For now I just want to show some more examples, of poems and songs that strongly affirm life, even when it's full of adversity)
Here's another poem by a Serbian poet Jovan Jovanović Zmaj. It's worth noting that his life was full of personal tragedy: his children and his wife all died.
In spite of this, at some point he wrote a poem that goes like this:
How beautiful is this world
Oh how beautiful
Is this world
Here's a brook
There's a flower
Over there a field
Here a fruit grove
Behold the Sun,
Here's a shade.
Over there Danube
full of gold
There's grass
Here a bush
Nightingale sings
I don't know where
Here's my heart
You are there.
Here's another toast by Serbian poet Ljubivoje Ršumović. It goes like this:
A toast to Serbian people
People, let this toast
serve instead of a blessing to you
Whatever you do, may your children be born!
And when you sing, and when you dream
And when you resist the suffering
May your children be born!
And when you go to war, and when you suffer
And when you revenge
May your children be born!
He's not rich who has cattle,
but daughters and sons
He's not mighty who has rifles,
but cradles!
Let love overcome
So there's no crying
Except children's
And when you study, and when you suffer
And when you uncover a holy secret
May you children be born
Let the mighty quarrel among themselves,
let the week negotiate
But to you, may your children be born!
And when you love
And when you grow tough
And when you lose your head from your shoulders
May your children be born
And God will give so that we have enough oats
and wheat ready for harvest
so that there's enough both for horses and for ourselves.
And when you celebrate your saint
And when you build a school
And when you're amazed by wonders
May your children be born
Oh, Serbian people!
Here's another life affirming poem by Branko Radičević who wrote it when he thought he would die (he indeed died young of tuberculosis)
When I thought I would die
Leaves are already becoming yellow on trees,
Yellow leaves are already falling there
I'll never ever see green ones anymore!
My head is sickly, my face darkened
Illness has turned my eyes inside
My arm is injured, my body exhausted
and my weak knee is trembling!
The time has arrived for me to go to grave.
Goodbye life, my wonderful dream,
Goodbye dawn, goodbye white day!
Goodbye world, my former paradise!
Now I have to go to a different place!
If only I hadn't loved you so much
I would still watch your bright Sun,
I would listen to thunder, I would listen to storms
I would be amazed by your nightingale
by your river and your spring
the whirlpool of my life is at its confluence!
Oh my poems, you poor orphans
My children of my young years!
I wanted to bring down the rainbow from the skies
I wanted to dress you all with the colorful rainbow
To decorate you with shiny stars
To illuminate you with sunshine
There was a rainbow, and now there's no more
There were the stars, and now there are no more
And the Sun that always warmed me
Even the Sun, has fallen from the sky!
Everything that I was preparing for you has gone!
Your father leaves you in rags.
Finally here's a famous song from American culture.
What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom, for me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, dark sacred night
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces, of people going by
I see friends shaking hands, sayin', "How do you do?"
They're really sayin', "I love you"
I hear babies cryin', I watch them grow
They'll learn much more, than I'll ever know
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself
What a wonderful world
Oh yeah
1) Introduction
So what should we make of all this? The songs and poems are there to set the mood, and I will refer to them in my discussion. I will try to defend the following points:
- There might be a strong positive value in living and in life itself, regardless of its hedonic tone.
- People seem to be willing to accept nontrivial amounts of suffering, if this is the cost that they need to pay for experiencing the world, life, and positive experiences even when they are fleeting.
- Pleasure is not the only value people care about. They might care more about meaning, and meaning can lead to more contentment and fulfillment even if it takes some suffering to get there.
- It might be risky or unwise to jump to conclusions about net-negative lives of any kind of entities, such as farm animals, or wild animals. Even if their lives are slightly net negative from the perspective of hedonic calculus, they might still be worth living.
- Interfering with natural order of things could be unwise
Finally my intention is NOT to persuade you that you're wrong and that my perspective is correct. My perspective might well be wrong, naive and misguided, and adopting it might lead to complacency in the face of widespread suffering in the world. My intention is simply to make this perspective present and discussed, debated and criticized, and perhaps defended if it has some merits. My intention is to make this perspective taken into consideration, and rejected only if we have robust ways to reject it.
My personal position is somewhere in the middle. I personally don't fully embrace this, perhaps naive, life affirming stance that I will present in this article, but I also can't fully accept certain type of thinking that casually deem certain lives net-negative and therefore potentially suitable for being eliminated.
For example, I can't logically refute Brian Tomasik's idea of turning our lawns into gravel, in order to prevent the existence of millions of net negative insect lives. If all those insects mostly suffer, then it's logically correct conclusion that it would be better for them if they never lived in the first place, so gravel yards are better than grass lawns. But this way of thinking makes me incredibly uncomfortable on many levels, and I take this discomfort seriously, I don't refute it as just "irrational emotions" getting in way of rational reasoning. I think those emotions are trying to tell me something, and shouldn't be dismissed - at least we should try to listen to what they are trying to tell us. And only after we've understood and fully considered their message, we might reject them, if we find Tomasik's arguments more persuasive, even after such deep dialogue with what our emotions are trying to tell us.
2) A strong positive value in living and in life itself
There might be a strong positive value in living and in life itself, regardless of its hedonic tone. Where's the evidence for it?
Well, if we start with the poems that I copied, we can notice that poets intuitively felt that all the living creatures have this drive to live. They want to live. And the poet says, they also should live. ("Everything that grows would like to grow / let it grow, indeed it should grow!"). They don't have a logical proof for it, they simply intuitively feel it. If we observe animals in the wild, indeed they are always striving to survive no matter what.
And people are no different. Most of the people, even with disabilities or serious diseases choose to live and strive to prolong their own life as much as possible.
Yes, euthanasia is a thing, but most of the people choose to live as long as they can. Even if it means low quality of life, disability, or ongoing pain. They accept medicines that would prolong their life, even if it means, observed from the outside, just more years of suffering.
In fact, by simple hedonic calculus, many of their lives might be net negative. They might experience more suffering than pleasure on day-to-day basis, but they still choose to live. Why? Because, it could be that life itself is intrinsically valuable to those people, and they prefer a life filled with suffering, as long as it's tolerable, to death.
Of course, I'm speaking here of tolerable levels of suffering. When suffering becomes intolerable, probably everyone would prefer death.
But I'm arguing that most of the people would prefer mildly hedonically net negative life to death or to not living at all.
What if simply being alive is extraordinarily valuable?
Maybe value of being alive, having consciousness and being able to experience the world is more profoundly valuable than hedonic tone of those experiences?
What would poets says of this? I've noticed that many of them payed a lot of attention to aesthetics and beauty. This is a category that is often undervalued or disregarded by utilitarians. A hedonic utilitarian would probably say that experiencing an orgasm or eating some delicious chocolate is more valuable then experiencing a breathtaking view of the nature, or listening to Beethoven's symphony, or watching a sunset, or stargazing in the night. But poets, and many people would disagree. We forget most of our orgasms even if they were very intense, but we remember breathtaking views from the top of the mountain, and we remember some fantastic movies we watched and novels we read. But objectively speaking, we probably experienced more pleasure during orgasm than during stargazing or taking in the view from the top of the mountain.
This aesthetic pleasure is closely tied to being alive. Only a living person can watch stars, be amazed by nature and its wonders, etc. This is a value that poets recognize:
If only I hadn't loved you so much
I would still watch your bright Sun,
I would listen to thunder, I would listen to storms
I would be amazed by your nightingale
by your river and your spring
the whirlpool of my life is at its confluence!
Or as Louise Armstrong puts it:
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom, for me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, dark sacred night
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
So if we accept simply being alive and able to experience the world and its wonders as a very important value in itself, a hedonically net-negative life could turn out to be positive, when this value of life itself is added to the equation.
Now some might be saying, we cling to life because we're evolutionary programmed to cling to life. As a Christian I have reasons to doubt some aspects of evolution, but that's not a topic now. What I can say is, even if it's true - so what.
The possibility of some preferences being shaped by evolution, doesn't undermine the validity of such preferences.
We could use this same logic to dismiss anything else we do or find valuable.
Our preferences stand by themselves regardless of how they came into being. In the same way, our thoughts and ideas should be judged based on their truth and how much sense they make, and not on what factors influenced them.
Preferences are entities that don't need justification, they exist of themselves and for themselves. We can just respect them or disregard them, but we can't invalidate them based on how they came to be.
And the preference of most people and animals is to live and to stay alive, even if their life isn't very hedonically positive (i.e. pleasurable).
3) People accept some suffering if this is the price to pay for life and positive experiences
People seem to be willing to accept nontrivial amounts of suffering, if this is the cost that they need to pay for experiencing the world, life, and positive experiences even when they are fleeting.
This seems like restating of the previous point, but there is more to it. I'll focus exclusively on people now. Here are examples of people accepting a lot of suffering in order to obtain rewards that are probably not as hedonically positive as the suffering needed to obtain them was negative.
- Having a full time job - we accept to work full time, and this takes a lot of effort, concentration, causes a lot of stress, and might be slightly net negative hedonically. Sometimes it can be more than slightly net negative - in case of some physically demanding or very stressful jobs. We are willing to accept such a deal, even if the reward might not be hedonically pleasurable enough to offset its negativity completely. People get just evenings and weekends to enjoy their hard earned money. Even in evenings they sometimes have to reply to work emails. But people accept it and most don't complain. Perhaps we would be hedonically better off if we chose part time jobs instead? We would get twice as little suffering, and twice as much free time. And lower income probably wouldn't compromise the quality of products we consume so much to make us worse off. But most of the people choose full time jobs, for reasons that often don't have much to do with hedonism. Sometimes we want to support a family, have kids, or make donations, and this requires more money. Sometimes we just want more status and social standing. This all requires more work (therefore more effort, more suffering), and in return, we often don't get as much hedonic utility.
- Many people, even if they aren't professional athletes, decide to run a marathon. Running a marathon requires a lot of effort, and let's be honest, suffering. For people who aren't accustomed to this level of intensity of exercise it might even be harmful for their health. It seems like a bad deal, a lot of suffering, risking health, for a very small reward. At least if we talk about hedonic utilitarianism. But for many people this is incredibly valuable and meaningful experience, a personal victory, a proof of their persistence and ability, etc... And for many people it's worth each drop of the sweat they shed - even if they don't get any reward money, or pleasure.
So this is another argument that questions the narrative of "hedonically net negative = not worth living".
4) Pleasure is not the only value people care about. Meaning matters too.
This has been already mentioned in the previous example of amateur marathon runners. But let's expand it. Marathon running might seem like an exception, but I would argue it perfectly fits in a general pattern of not optimizing for hedonic pleasure in life. There are some people who are big hedonists and who do exactly that, but most of us don't. Instead we seek to make a life that would be meaningful for us, and if we live up to our values, then we feel some sense of serenity and contentment. And this serenity is often more valuable to people than any physical pleasure they might feel.
5) We should be cautious when talking of net negative lives
So the previous points show that amount of pleasure and suffering probably isn't the only thing that matters in life, and that most people would prefer slightly net negative, but bearable and meaningful lives, over death or not having lived at all.
Life itself might be one of the greatest values, and this is a revealed preference of most of the living entities. Preference itself is valid regardless of its origin. So appealing to evolution can't really dismiss the preference.
Or as the poet would say:
Everything that flies / runs / jumps / grows / lives would like to fly / run / jump / grow / live,
let it fly / run / jump / grow / live, indeed it should fly / run / jump / grow / live!
So I think it might be risky or unwise to jump to conclusions about net-negative lives of any kind of entities, such as farm animals, or wild animals or even some people (like those with Down syndrome - in fact they might have more positive lives than most of us due to being more worry free).
Even if their lives are slightly net negative from the perspective of hedonic calculus, they might still very well be worth living. And if asked, if they could decide, most of those creatures would choose life over death, even if it's slightly net negative. This is their revealed preference that we can observe any day by simply interacting with living creatures in this world.
If we take this argument seriously what could it mean in practical terms:
Efforts to improve lives of farm animals should perhaps be more appreciative of "logic of the larder" and focus more on actually IMPROVING lives of farm animals rather then focusing on just reducing meat consumption and striving to eventually turn people into vegans and phase out meat production entirely.
I'm very conflicted about it. On one hand I feel that lives of most farm animals suck, but on the other hand, I truly appreciate the enormous value of even getting a chance to live in this world and experience it, even if briefly. Farm animals still get to taste food, to drink water, to experience certain aesthetic pleasures, etc. Most of them do suffer a lot and have rather boring and not very stimulating lives, but it's not fully clear where should we go from there? Maybe their life is still worth living because the suffering they experience is not so great to overcome the huge value they get from simply getting to live.
Maybe slight (or not so slight) reduction of farm animal numbers (by eating less meat) combined with substantial improvements in their quality of life would be a more life-affirming (and perhaps wiser) course of action rather then insisting on completely minimizing farming, or striving to eliminate it entirely.
EDIT: I would like to add here, that regardless of where we stand philosophically we should by all means try to eat less meat and to support animal charities for 2 very strong reasons:
- Regardless of whether they live lives worth living in absolute sense, animals on factory farms suffer a lot and it might be quite difficult to reduce their suffering substantially while maintaining their numbers. Perhaps we can only support a fewer number of farm animals that would live in truly good conditions.
- Donating to animal charities is one of the most effective ways to do good, often generating much more welfare per dollar spent than human charities.
I personally am not planning to go vegan, but I do plan to eat somewhat less meat, and to include animal charities among where my donation money goes.
2. Efforts to improve lives of wild animals perhaps should be very cautious of the temptation to "help" them, by reducing their numbers
If our goal is to simply reduce suffering, there are some very easy, and for some "tempting" ways to go about it. Like annihilate wildlife entirely. No animals - no suffering. Problem solved.
This often seems like a caricature and strawman argument but isn't Tomasik's argument for converting grass lawns into gravel a movement exactly in this direction? Aren't the arguments that redeem moral value of humans from the fact that we might be reducing suffering by eliminating wild habitats and by causing many insects who would otherwise live, not to live, exactly in that vein?
So by all means, we should strive to help wild animals and reduce their suffering, if it is possible, but I'm not at all sure if destruction of habitats and reduction of wild animal numbers is the correct method.
After all, even now, even in their natural, unimproved condition, the lives of wild animal might very well be worth living, even if they are hedonically net negative. We don't know if they are hedonically net negative or not. But even if they are, they might still be worth living, for the reasons I discussed here.
6) Interfering with natural order of things could be unwise
Theistic belief is a very popular worldview among people. Wild animals, in this worldview are a part of creation and have their place in natural order of things.
Even from some non-theistic perspectives, we could argue that animal species might be important part of the global order of things, and therefore it's not our place to declare their lives net negative or to strive to eliminate them from existence. Each of them has its role in the ecosystem.
Nick Bostrom mentioned "cosmic host" as some hypothetical alliance of civilizations and entities that care about global order and rule at the highest level. Even such "cosmic host", might care about the existence of wildlife and not support its destruction. Or not. I'm just speculating.
But deeming lives of animals that naturally existed for so many years "net negative" and therefore potentially suitable for elimination seems to involve a lot of hubris.
Who are we to judge if their lives are worth living or not?
What if someone more powerful than we are made the same judgement about us?
My personal stance is the following:
Most of the lives are net positive, even hedonically. This includes lives of people, farm animals (they might be an exception), and wild animals. But there is A LOT of room for improvement. We should try to improve lives of all animals, but probably not by eliminating them or their habitats from existence. Even if their lives are somewhat net negative hedonically, they might still be very well worth living, due to enormous value of life itself, regardless of its hedonic tone.
That being said reducing suffering, especially extreme, unbearable suffering should be among our highest moral priorities. It’s hard to imagine something worse than extreme suffering, and this should, indeed be reduced and eliminated by all reasonable means.
But most suffering is not in that category.
My intuition about the value of life is that its value depends a lot on whether it includes positive experiences at all. If it doesn't, it might not be worth living, even if the suffering is just mild. But if it does, a single, small in duration, but significant positive experience can offset and neutralize a lot of suffering. A person who lived in poor conditions and had to work hard their whole life, might still consider their life very meaningful and worth living, if they experienced just once or twice some peak experiences, like a breathtaking view from the top of a mountain, or seeing their child being born, or some other experiences like that.
Another important thing that I want to add is that focus on reducing suffering could disregard the interests of those who suffer. If your goal is just to reduce suffering, you can do it easily by eliminating those who suffer. But this is probably not what they would choose for themselves. And by treating them like that, we're treating them as means towards the end (of reducing suffering), rather then as ends in themselves. And also this disregards value their life might have (hedonic and non hedonic value), in spite of all the suffering.
7) Conclusion
Brian Tomasik and all the negative utilitarians are probably smarter than me and have thought more deeply about all of these topics. My intention is not to convince you that they are wrong and that I'm right. Instead, my intention is to try to preserve a bit of common sense that is sometimes eluding us, to engage in conversation with my emotions that protest against turning lawns into gravel, to engage in conversation with those poets and their worldviews, and to try to elucidate certain blind spots that people in EA circles might have when it comes to this.
I fully support animal charities, both farm animal charities and wild animal charities.
Even though I generally lean towards human charities, I decided to make a donation to an animal charity this time. This is to show, as actions count more than words, that I'm on the same side, and that I fully support reducing suffering and caring about animals, both wild and farm animals. So I donated to Recommended Charity Fund on the website https://animalcharityevaluators.org/
I just needed to outline certain reservations that I have and some things that I perceive as potential blindspots in EA mindset.
Consider my theses as unproven, as a contribution to discussion, and if you see something valuable in what I said feel free to take it while discarding everything else. I think this needed to be said, and included in discussion, even if perspectives that focus more intently on reducing suffering might hold more water?
What holds more water? I don't know. I don't identify what what I said, nor do I endorse it. I just feel it to a large extent - it's a gut feeling, which I tried to articulate the best that I could. It might be worth something, or it might not.
P.S. this article is also available on my blog
https://jovex.substack.com/p/can-we-regain-innocence-and-common
Thank you for this post, Zlatko! Welcome to the forum, and well-done for your transparent criticism of a perspective you find repugnant. Many individuals prefer to call such perspectives "crazy" without justification. So reading this was a good way to start the week.
I think this post is quite valuable, since it defends a point of view (that it's not super cautious to just reduce the amount of net-negative lives) that seems somewhat common in EA, but is also rarely defended as such. Some thoughts (lengthy, but there's a lot of content in your post!):
My crux for why I do not adhere to the argument personally:
Thanks again for this post, and perhaps more importantly, for opening your perspectives and donating outside of your preferred cause area! That's not so common in EA, and I think this can be valuable for making progress in doing good impartially.
Thanks for your reply and feedback.
I will first focus on this paragraph that you wrote:
And I can only respond in somewhat illogical manner. Because, if we follow logic, then you're probably right.
So the first thing: my life-affirming stance isn't necessarily a life-maximizing stance. Especially if this involves deliberately shifting our consumption patterns in such a way that we farm as many animals as possible or deliberately increase the extent of wildlife habitats.
If I were to support veganism, it would not be because it increases the farming of small animals on margin (indirect effect), but because I believe that reducing meat consumption lowers demand for farming animals, lowering their numbers, thus allowing us to keep those who remain in better, more humane conditions (direct effect). So when I'm thinking about deciding whether to eat chicken, I think primarily about chicken welfare. If I decided to donate to a charity that deals with welfare of certain animals, I primarily think about those very animals that the charity deals with.
Second, and very important thing: I really don't know how far is too far when it comes to taking into consideration indirect effects. I'm afraid that taking indirect effects too much into consideration could lead to some situations that are very difficult to resolve. It can lead to strong cluelessness, the situation in which we're never sure if we're doing good at all, or if it is in fact counterproductive. Imagine this process:
First we do action A to help species B, and we're convinced doing A is very good.
Then we realize that helping B indirectly hurts species C to a much greater extent, so doing A is very bad, and we stop.
Then we realize that hurting C, is in fact great, because it indirectly helps species D to even greater extent, so doing A, once again becomes very good.
Then we go back to doing A, but not to help B, but to help D.
We might on some level love B, empathize with them, identify with them somewhat, and when we were doing A to help B, this felt like a genuine care - our actions and our emotions were in harmony.
But D? - we don't really care much about D. Our theory tells us that Ds are very numerous and that helping them might outweigh all our other moral concerns due to their sheer number, even if they aren't conscious at all. But there is still some probability they might be, and due to their sheer number we can't afford to dismiss it.
So now we're doing A, not to help B (direct beneficiaries) whom we love , but to help D (indirect beneficiaries) about whom we don't really care, and this feels emotionally very alienating and weird.
We're just waiting until we learn that helping Ds is in fact terrible, because it harms Es, which are even more numerous, etc...
Since this process can be quite long, at each step of this process we can be quite unsure of whether what we're doing is good at all, and this lack of conviction can make our motivation to help and donate grow much weaker. We can start thinking "If I'm unsure if it helps or hurts (in sense of increasing or decreasing aggregate welfare), maybe I shouldn't do anything at all, and instead mind my own business".
So I'm wondering can we really afford to completely divorce our actions (donations, etc...) from our love, care and emotions? Or alternatively, can we afford to maintain even a modicum of love and genuine care while we're doing good?
I mean if we remove love and use just reasoning, maybe then indeed, the only logical project that we should pursue is eventually turning the Universe into hedonium.
But if we involve love and emotions, then perhaps it makes sense to help chicken because we care about chicken, to help people because we care about people, to help shrimps, because we care about shrimps, etc... In short to do focus our considerations on direct beneficiaries and thus retain this harmony between emotions and actions.
I think this is the way most people became altruists and effective altruists in the first place.
They donated money for malaria nets, in order to help those who receive nets. They donated to chicken charities in order to help chicken, etc... Imagining children dying of malaria or chicken living in terrible conditions was a strong motivating factor to step in and do something about it.
But nowadays, all I see is discussions about 2nd, 3rd, 4th order indirect effects of our actions.
But, logic is on your side, not on mine. Maybe I'm too lazy. Maybe I don't want to make effort to consider those distant indirect effects. Maybe I don't want to follow the logic to its conclusion. Maybe. I don't know.
I probably lack certain virtues needed for such detached thinking.
But maybe such detached thinking too lacks something important that is fails to identify.
I really don't know.
I don't want to butt into your conversation with JoA, but I just want to say that there are good, logical reasons to support your intuitions, e.g., that long chains of indirect causation are far more dubious and should be taken into account much less than the direct effects of actions. You should be more confident in your ability to think logically! Sometimes it takes time to turn intuitions into clear, logical arguments, and in that case what we need is patience with intuitions, not to deny them their voice.
Regarding the rest of what you wrote I agree to a large extent.
I think it matters a lot how long does extreme suffering last. People regularly experience some pretty horrible suffering, but still they don't consider their life not worthy of living.
Take for example childbirth, or kidney colic. Most people go on after such events, without being traumatized for life.
Also, extreme pain might render people unconscious. I don't know how often it happens, if it happens in animals as well, and how good of a protection against extreme pain and suffering it is. But it might be a thing worthy of research.
Experiences such as being eaten, probably last quite short, and being last experiences in life of animals will likely not traumatize them, as they will be dead.
Close encounters with predators, injuries that animals survive, are more problematic and could lead to lasting trauma.
In general extreme suffering should be minimized as much as possible. But when thinking of extreme suffering I often have certain non-trivial duration in mind as well. If the lion kills its pray relatively quickly, the pain they experience, even if extreme, might not be that important in big scheme of things if it last just a couple of seconds.
I do not deny the existence of extreme suffering in nature, but I think it's not so common and when it happens it's often of short duration.
I very well do think that reducing of such extreme suffering should be among the top priorities.
You're right here. Animals on factory farms probably have capacity to feel pleasure, but it's severely reduced and undermined by the conditions in which they live. That's why I think we should eat less meat (at least if we consider direct effects) and donate to charities that help those animals.
If we consider 2nd, 3rd, etc... order effects, I really don't know. If we're talking about these animals their lives should be improved. The way to do it is to eat less meat and to donate to those charities.
This will probably help them.
Whether this will also indirectly hurt someone else, and whether this is more important, I'm really not sure.
Executive summary: The author offers a reflective, tentative defense of a “life-affirming” stance that treats being alive as intrinsically valuable beyond hedonic tone, urges caution about declaring lives—human, farmed, or wild—net negative, and favors improving conditions over eliminating beings or habitats.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
You are right. Do not be moved from this place you are coming from. People will try to move you, but do not be moved.
Could you clarify a bit?
Your instinct is correct, your desire for a more common sense and innocent view of life is correct. Negative utilitarians, anti-natalists, and others with grim ethical views will try to convince you that you are wrong, and they will have a lot of persuasive ammo to use — because the suffering and tragedy in life is very real — but the wisdom of ages and nations is on your side.
Some form of hedonic utilitarianism may in some sense be correct in principle, but, even so, the way hedonic utilitarian calculations are made in practice can easily be oversimplistic. Is my experience of meaning and purpose in life not in some sense part of my pleasure or happiness? Are all forms of suffering inherently bad and undesirable, something we should get rid of if somehow we had the option, or is, in fact, much suffering important to life and part of what makes it good and worth living? There are times I have been grateful for my suffering.
So many of the points you make in this article are right and beautifully articulated. You are absolutely on the right track.
The one specific argument I disagree with is about factory farms. Getting rid of factory farms does not necessarily reduce the net number of lives, human or animal, in the long-term. The resources that go into factory farms can go into supporting other lives, human or animal. Or getting rid of factory farms may reduce the net number of lives, but not to zero, and allow the remaining lives to be better, which is something common moral intuition and revealed preference supports (e.g. people choosing to have fewer children who they can give more resources per capita). We generally don't like the repugnant conclusion — we would prefer to have fewer lives above a certain minimum bar of well-being we think of as the conditions for a good life than more lives that fall below that bar — and rejecting the logic of the larder is based on a similar logic as rejecting the repugnant conclusion.
(There is a separate idea about whether we should try to improve conditions for animals on factory farms in the meantime, which at least in effective altruism there is widespread agreement that we absolutely should, even if our end goal is to get rid of factory farms eventually. Those are compatible goals.)
I don't really know what to do about wild animal suffering because we have so much uncertainty about animal consciousness and, even if we knew much more, it would still be hard to figure out what to do, at least in terms of trying to address the whole global problem. (Maybe some limited interventions are clearer and simpler, and not insurmountably hard.) We may need much more advanced science and technology, as well as much more wealth, to properly address wild animal suffering. So, we may have to wait a while before we can do it. But we have a lot on our plate to solve in the meantime, like factory farms and global poverty.
But your overall life-affirming stance is correct and you eloquently explain some of the reasons for taking this stance and rejecting the life-denying stance of negative utilitarians and anti-natalists.
Part of the problem is we understand very little about human consciousness and even what it would mean for human consciousness to be "net positive" or "net negative". Some people talk as if they can know what that means in practice, but this is highly dubious.
In all of us there is a voice calling out that we want to live.
“By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes." –E.M. Forster
(On a personal note, even though life can feel hard and heavy at times, there are moments when something makes me laugh a lot and that alone seems to be enough to justify life in spite of all the suffering, and make me glad I lived.)
You're probably right about factory farming. I do think that we should eat less meat, and some drop in number of farm animals would probably be good.
But I wanted to say in which direction would life affirming stance take us if fully accepted.
Unfortunately it would also point us towards greater acceptance of repugnant conclusion which is another thing that I dislike and that feels wrong.
But the thing about repugnant conclusion is what it really means "barely worth living". How high this bar is, is very subjective.
If such lives are truly worth living, it might not matter that much if it's barely.
But if the bar is too low, then they might indeed be not worth living, according to most who wouldn't agree with the bar. The bar is subjective, this is the problem.
And it's very hard to talk about lives being or not being worth living when it comes to existing beings.
It's easier when planning for the future. If certain cows and chickens are never to be born / hatched in the first place, we can't really say they were harmed by not being born / hatched.
So reducing number of farm animals is probably not that bad.
It's more that life affirming stance makes reduction of farming less of a priority, but still certainly permissible and probably something to be endorsed, as with current numbers it's very hard to ensure adequate welfare for those animals.
I think the right framing for factory farming is to think of Earth having certain resources and which lives those resources go toward supporting, not whether they go toward supporting those lives at all.
For example, the resources being used to support factory farming are not being used to support some other number and quality of human and animal lives that they could be used to support. So, the trade-off is not between animals in factory farms and nothing, but between animals in factory farms and some number of humans and/or animals not in factory farms.
I think it would be a mistake to confuse the life-affirming attitude with endorsement of the repugnant conclusion. Or that it makes eliminating factory farms less of a priority. I think this is too simple and too binary a way of thinking about it. Animals in cages can't fly, jump, or run. But they would like to, and they should.
(It's not like the debate here is about whether animals in factory farms should be killed or not — they are going to be killed anyway, that's the whole point of factory farms.)
I think the best real life comparison is the one I already raised. People in countries undergoing economic development (either now, for developing countries, or in the past, for developed countries) doing family planning and choosing to have, say, two children instead of five, because they can provide for two children much better than they can for five. It's hard to argue this isn't out of love or an affirmation of life. It's hard to say this is any way life-denying, negative utilitarian, anti-natalist, nihilist, or pessimistic. It's simply parents trying to care best for their children, and affirming the value of having kids and parenthood, while attempting to balance quantity of lives with quality of lives as best they can figure out.
You said in another comment, "my life-affirming stance isn't necessarily a life-maximizing stance", so maybe you already agree.
The most disturbing part of negative utilitarianism is that it implies the optimal thing to do would be to annihilate the whole universe right now. This sounds insane, but I have seen at least one person on the EA Forum who, while cagey about saying such things outright, seemed to believe that it would be better if no life on Earth (or anywhere in the universe) existed at all.
I agree that factory farming should be eventually eliminated entirely.
But I'm not so sure about non-factory less intensive types of farming.
You put it really great here: Animals in cages can't fly, jump, or run. But they would like to, and they should.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Another very strong point. Here's how I look at it. The question is whether the world with some number of farm animals (cows, pigs, chicken, etc) is better than the one without them, even if it means that those animals will be continually grown for the purpose of being killed? That is what is better - to kill them once and for all (or stop reproducing them) - some sort of near extermination, perhaps to keep just a few specimens and keep them in zoos. Or to keep growing them and killing them perpetually. It's very unpleasant to even think about it like this, but this is the only honest way of thinking about it. So thanks for bringing this up. I lean towards it being better to keep them in numbers significantly larger than just a few zoo individuals to preserve the species, but in number significantly lower than their current population. Perhaps the optimal number of those animals is equivalent to maximum number of them that we can support in humane conditions and without industrial farming... Perhaps like they were kept in the before industrial revolution. Maybe we could keep just 10% - 20% of animals in conditions like that. If they could live truly good lives, while providing us with food and agricultural products, and being slaughtered in humane ways. Then I think it's better then near extermination, and also much better then current inhuman conditions in which they are kept. It would be great if we could perhaps keep the number as large as 50% of the current number, while improving their life conditions maximally, but I'm afraid it's very hard to achieve.
Yes I agree, there's no moral obligation, IMO, to have as many children as possible.
I'm also unsure about factory farmed animals vs. animals on hobby farms or smaller-scale farms. I was referring to only, specifically factory farms. ~99% of farmed animals are on factory farms, so what to do about other kinds of farms is a much more minor consideration. It still matters, it just matters ~1% as much.
I think you are on the right track with your discussion of keeping much fewer cows, pigs, chickens, etc. in much more humane conditions. Which is to say, I agree with the track you're on.
The main point I'd add in addition to what you just said is that I'm not picky about the species of the creatures (human or non-human) that replace the factory farmed animals. For example, if it somehow (I don't know how) turned out that the resources we saved by eliminating factory farms (e.g. by replacing them with the stuff the charity New Harvest is working on) meant we can support a lot more pet dogs and cats on the Earth, the large majority of whom were well-loved and well-treated, then I would be happy with that outcome.
Factory farmed animals could be replaced by humans, by other animals, or by animals of the same species (e.g. cows, pigs, and chickens) in smaller numbers, and any of those scenarios would be okay. More than okay, good.
If you think of the limited resources we have, such as energy, land, human labour, money/wealth/capital, etc., those resources can support a certain number of lives of a certain level of quality, and we are always making that trade-off, not a trade-off between lives and no lives.