A “crucial consideration”– a term invented by Nick Bostrom— is a piece of evidence that radically changes the value of pursuing a particular intervention or focus area. For example, if a particular piece of technology is scientifically impossible, it’s not very effective to pursue developing it anyway; if animals are not moral patients, then it doesn’t make sense to advocate against factory farming. Since so little is known about how to best pursue wild-animal welfare, there are a lot of crucial considerations, and having different opinions on them may radically change what interventions you support and how cost-effective the interventions are. This is a summary of some crucial considerations that effective altruists reasonably disagree on, but does not try to advocate for any particular view or resolve them. (That would take a lot more than a single blog post.)
Do we support animal rights, animal welfare, or human responsibility for domestic animals?
Among the animal activism community, there are several different philosophies about how we should treat animals. Animal rights advocates such as Tom Regan argue that animals have a right to live free from exploitation, such as in medical research or agriculture. Animal welfare advocates such as Peter Singer argue that many of the ways we treat animals cause them great suffering and give us relatively trivial benefits. Since it is wrong to cause a being suffering except to prevent a greater suffering, we must stop mistreating animals. Still others argue that we have a specific duty to domestic animals, because we domesticated them, and the way animals are used in animal agriculture is neglecting that responsibility. I will discuss the implications of these views for wild-animal welfare in later blog posts, but suffice it to say that all three views have different implications about how we should treat wild animals.
What population ethics do we subscribe to?
Population ethics is the ethical study of issues related to creating beings and causing beings to stop existing. Population ethics examines issues like:
- Is it better to create a small number of very happy people or a large number of somewhat happy people?
- Is it wrong to fail to create a happy being, or to create a predictably unhappy being?
- Is it possible to hurt people who don’t exist yet (for example, by polluting the Earth)?
- Is not creating a being different from killing a being? If so, why?
Many of the ways human beings affect nature affect the number of animals that exist, not simply the welfare of animals that exist. For example, sometimes humans destroy habitats that support many animals and replace them with habitats that don’t support many animals at all. Sometimes humans try to reduce the populations of certain species, such as rats and deer. Many potential interventions into wild-animal suffering, such as wildlife contraception, prevent animals from existing. Unfortunately for wild-animal welfare advocates, however, there is no philosophical consensus on population ethics, and most systems of population ethics violate some of our moral intuitions.
Are invertebrates moral patients?
There are many orders of magnitude more invertebrates than vertebrates in the world. If invertebrates have even a little moral weight, the effects of our actions on invertebrates are very important. Unfortunately, invertebrates often have thousands of offspring. To maintain a stable population, only two of their offspring can survive to reproduce; the rest can be expected to live short lives potentially filled with terrible pain. Since there are so many invertebrates and many of them are so small, it is difficult to improve their lives in any way other than preventing them from existing.
Does biodiversity matter?
Many people argue that protecting biodiversity improves human well-being. The services provided by intact ecosystems– ranging from timber to climate regulation, soil formation to spiritual benefits– have been valued at tens of trillions of dollars a year. Many people also believe that biodiversity is intrinsically valuable for its own sake. Certain proposed interventions to promote wild-animal welfare, such as habitat destruction, reduce the level of biodiversity. Future research may find that other promising ways to promote wild-animal welfare have an effect on biodiversity, and if we care about biodiversity (either instrumentally or intrinsically) that will affect our decision-making about interventions.
How unpredictable is nature?
Nature is complicated, and many decisions have unexpected consequences. We see that already when we interact with nature for human benefit. After a few years of unexpectedly bad weather, a fishery believed to be sustainably fished can collapse. Fertilizer runoff from farms can cause more algae to grow, which increases the density of snails, which are an intermediate host for a species of frog parasites, which causes higher parasite loads in frogs. If nature is sufficiently unpredictable, it may be very difficult to come up with an intervention that we’re sure has a positive effect. On the other hand, humans do make many accurate predictions about nature: if we couldn’t, it’d be impossible to know that habitat destruction makes species more likely to be endangered or that climate change harms ecosystems. It may be possible to make sufficiently reliable predictions about how our actions affect wild-animal welfare as well.
How common is chronic stress in nature?
Chronic stress happens when an animal experiences a stressor, such as low social status or hunger, for a long period of time; in humans, it is linked not only to anxiety and depression but to physical health conditions like heart disease. Experts disagree wildly about how common chronic stress is in nature. Some experts, like Oscar Horta, argue that predation and other stressors make chronic stress very common. Other experts, like Robert Sapolsky, claim that chronic stress is basically unknown in nature. Still other experts, like Rudy Boonstra, say that chronic stress appears only in certain species in which it is adaptive. If most wild animals experience a great deal of chronic stress, it’s more likely that their lives aren’t worth living. Conversely, if wild animals experience far less chronic stress than humans, their lives may be more pleasant than ours.
How bad is dying?
Many deaths in the wild are fairly gruesome, ranging from animals that are eaten alive by predators to termites that vomit up their guts at predators. But how painful are those deaths? It is possible that death by starvation, for example, is less painful than one would naively believe. Conversely, if death is extraordinarily painful, the death itself may make an animal’s life not worth living, even if otherwise the animal was very happy. That is particularly true for short-lived species, who have fewer positive experiences to outweigh the cost of a horrible death.
How do we account for leverage?
Many charities seek to influence how other charities, private donors, or the government spend money or other resources; the charity evaluator GiveWell calls this leverage. Several of the most promising interventions into wild-animal suffering– including encouraging the use of wildlife contraception, spreading concern about wild animals, and seeding the field of welfare biology– are highly leveraged. Depending on how one accounts for the opportunity cost, these interventions may be very cost-effective or not very cost-effective at all.
gbear605 said:
On population ethics; it’s more than just most systems of population ethics that violate some of our moral intuitions, all welfare based systems of population ethics violate some of our moral intuitions. See Arrhenius 2000 (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/economics-and-philosophy/article/an-impossibility-theorem-for-welfarist-axiologies/94A6C341A39CFA3A314F2B8D8500779E).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Kuyan Judith said:
On biodiversity; personally my opinion is that diversity of all life is instrumentally and aesthetically valuable while the diversity of [i]moral patients[/i] is also inherently valuable (which both a reason to value animal biodiversity and a reason to avoid making humanity more neurologically uniform).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Deiseach said:
I think human responsibility for domestic animals is the easiest step to achieve for people concerned with animal welfare, because arguing for rights based on “equals to humans” is just going to sound ignorant to people who are accustomed to animals. We had a red setter dog when I was younger and he was lovely – good natured, loyal, loving, enthusiastic – and not a brain in his head. Would have gotten himself killed seven times over doing dumb dog stuff. You try to convince me that “that dog is the moral and ethical and every other way equal of [say] a seven year old human child, you have no right to set the limits of how their life is lived”, I’m going to argue right back “If I had a seven year old kid who acted like that, you bet your life I’m going to set every damn limit I can because otherwise they’ll get themselves dead or maimed”.
Convincing people that they should treat animals humanely because cruelty is wrong is a lot easier than trying to convince them that animals are just like humans in every way, only in fur costumes.
Re: invertebrates, I really don’t see much practical difference between “mass spraying of pesticide to kill all the insect species in this area because I am concerned about their suffering” and “mass spraying of pesticide to kill all the insect species in this area because they are infesting my crops and I don’t assign any moral weight to them”. If your compassion causes you to act in the same way as an exploiter, then I’m with whoever it was said that sentimentality leads to cruelty. If you’re going to give moral weight to other beings then maybe you have to step out of the way, say “I am not the boss of you” and let them live their own lives, even short nasty and brutish lives. Otherwise, how is deciding “I am the arbiter of whether your life is worth living or not” any different from being the unenlightened type who assigns no moral weight to animals and says humans have the right to exploit them? Both attitudes make humans the final say in the chain of decision.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Deiseach said:
Then I think that torpedoes the arguments against hunting (food *and* sport), angling, and hell even bear-baiting. If an animal is going to die horribly *anyway* and this horrible death negates an otherwise happy life, does it matter if the death is ‘natural’ or via a human sticking a hook into its mouth and dragging it onto land out of water?
I mean, I’m your average idiot here and I know I’m not smart enough to understand the ethical arguments or have delved deeply enough into them, but when you get yourself by contortions of reasoning to “kill them all to save them”, then I submit you have sawn off the tree branch you are sitting on when it comes to arguing that the way industrialised agriculture mass-produces battery hens is any worse than the state of nature. They will die terribly anyway and by your analysis should not be permitted to live – even short but contented and happy for a chicken lives – so as to spare them this death, so why not make use of them instead of killing them wastefully?
LikeLike
Reginald Reagan said:
Regarding “Does biodiversity matter?” I just made a big comment about this on a blog post you linked to, but I’ll repeat myself somewhat here. I want to write a few paragraphs about an instrumental use of nature, as a supplement to those discussed in the review you linked.
The value of biodiversity that’s at the forefront of my mind is technology. I thought this was on everybody’s minds, because of that meme that goes, “what if there’s a cure for cancer in the rainforest?” And while a cure is unrealistic, many cancer drugs are in fact natural products, and expecting more is reasonable. And pharmaceutical natural products is only the beginning of the ways we can exploit biodiversity. We’ve even domesticated HIV, and use it to genetically modify cells. (google “lentiviral vector” and “transfection” for this use.) We’re only getting better at this, so I think biodiversity has enormous technological value.
Life has solved important problems, such as how to kill bacteria (penicillin etc) and how to modify DNA (HIV, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, crispr). It has taught us a lot, and our descendants will be able to learn far, far more from it than we have, if we don’t destroy it before it gets to them.
I’m not sure how threatened this technological store really is though. A lot of it is the same from species to species.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: ¿Hay más sufrimiento que disfrute en la naturaleza? – Manu Herrán
Pingback: Is there more suffering than enjoyment in nature? – Manu Herrán