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| “Hello, human? Anyone home?” |
The below is not the biggest problem in ethics / effective altruism. The biggest problem is the solipsistic illusion that suffering (or utility) sums across individuals.
Humans see minds everywhere.
Evolutionarily, this wasn’t a bug – it was a feature. Our ancestors were able to successfully reproduce because of their ability to see minds in others. Theory of mind allows for both successful cooperation (non-zero sum gains) and competition (for mates and resources). By allowing for prediction, projecting minds onto other animals – prey and predators – also increasing reproductive success.
So it is understandable that we humans see minds in anything animated – it served our evolutionary success.
Projecting minds onto beings in motion (e-motion) is also well documented. We see sensing and cybernetics and inevitably assign consciousness and suffering. Humans attribute conscious intention even to shapes moving on a computer screen.
While understandable and almost inevitable, this factual error (“anything animated is conscious”) leads to significant moral mistakes.
What makes our motion=mind even worse is our inability to imagine a mind unlike our own.
We not only simply assume anything with “behavior” is conscious, we project our particular level of consciousness onto every animated being (ani-mals).
You can see this everywhere, even in our dealings with other humans – from a parent trying to reason with a screaming toddler to adults trying to reason with an autistic child.
This behavior=consciousness category error can be particularly pronounced in individuals with great empathy. Years ago, a long-time fellow animal advocate read about a “jailbreak” by a robot, and wrote to me that he couldn’t help but “root” for the robot to get “free.”
A light doesn’t go on.
But even where there is consciousness – the ability to have the subjective experiences of pleasure and pain – the type and level of consciousness is not and cannot be uniform.
The philosophical consequences of this reality are, at best, exceedingly difficult (as I discuss in the chapter “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” in Losing My Religions). However, reality itself is simple and straightforward:
Consciousness isn’t binary. It can’t be.
From When we believe absurdities, we commit atrocities:
A fertilized human egg does not have a mind, nor the capacity to have a Day-30-level “torturous” experience (p. 521).
At some point, the fertilized egg can become a conscious being capable of experiencing a Day 30 torturous experience.
Does this developing blastocyst (embryo, fetus, baby, toddler) go from having zero subjective experience directly to the capacity for full horrific experience? Would this happen with the development of the first neuron? The 1,000th? The 100,000th? The 10,000,000th? The 86 billionth?
The ability to have subjective experiences – specifically the ability to experience intense suffering – is not binary. It can’t be. It goes from nothing to torturous gradually over the course of the development of a human.
This also happened over the course of evolution. The ability to suffer increases with the development of more complex brains.
There’s simply no other way it could be.
It is absurd to think that a rock or a plant or a fertilized egg or an embryo or a fetus or even a newborn or dog has the exact same capacity to suffer that a normal human adult has.**
Sure, some people believe things like this, just as some believe the earth is flat, god likes certain people best, nature is good, we have the ability to change the course of the cosmos, etc.
But I also think that many people who say everything with nerves can experience “torture” make these claims as a way to be provocative and / or to show how “smart” and “open minded” they are. [An idea expanded in A Mind So Open, It Contains Nothing.] Others think in binary in order to have a simple view of the world. [Understandable for many reasons.]
** This is not to say that other animals are just dimmed versions of normal adult humans. We don't even understand the diversity of human consciousness (e.g., try to imagine what it was like to be Rainman) let alone what it is like to be a bat or a dolphin. Many people have explored this in thoughtful ways, such as Ed Yong's magisterial An Immense World.
And yes, there very well could be entities capable of much worse suffering than a neuro-typical adult human.
All suffering matters.
But only actual suffering.
And the priority is severe suffering.
To be clear: Suffering less than Day-30-level torture is not morally irrelevant.
And I’m not claiming to have all the answers. I don’t know how to ethically think about differing capacities for suffering. But to basically project adult human capacity for suffering onto every creature with any possibility of any level of consciousness is just factually wrong and morally atrocious. (see: Walter Veit)
If we take suffering seriously, we need to do the hard thing, leave the binary world, and admit uncertainty and shades of grey.
The Precautionary Principle
“But Creature X (bees, shrimps, nematodes, face mites, oysters) might suffer. So we need to work for Creature X’s welfare.”
At first glance, this seems reasonable. If I had to bet, I’d say this is probably why some shrimpers overtly lie. (Others, though, when called out on the lies, just continue on – it is good for business (e.g., clicks and subscriptions). I think most shrimpers, though, just believe what the liars say.)
However, the real-world consequences of the precautionary principle are significant and cruel.
Giving every animal equal moral weight (or, worse, expected-valuing the sum of possible suffering) leads directly and inevitably towards more actual severe suffering. Example: one advocate has argued against welfare reforms for chickens. In a world where chickens are not as severely tortured on factory farms, more nematodes “suffer.”
That is the simple mathematical “truth” that comes from assuming consciousness is binary, projecting our mind on everything animated, and then giving all motion equal moral weight (and/or expected valuing morality).
More importantly and more subtly sinister: There is a finite pool of resources and attention committed to addressing the severe suffering in the world. Every minute and every dollar spent on, say, The Shrimp Bet (to use Rob’s phrase) is a minute and dollar not spent alleviating actual, unquestioned, unnecessary severe suffering.
Turning our back on torture.
In our world, we can’t truly take suffering seriously and also throw time and money at creatures that science says probably don’t suffer (again: Rob), and, even if conscious, are physiologically incapable of anything resembling 86-billion-neuron suffering.
(We also insult those who are suffering when we believe and/ or promote provocateurs who knowingly lie and “morally” bully others; footnote here.)
Despite our various disagreements, I’ll give Rob the last word:
A final friction is practical: shrimp welfare is, unavoidably, a bet. If penaeid shrimp turn out not to be sentient, which I think is a plausible read given current evidence, the direct welfare impact collapses to near zero (leaving only indirect spillovers like better standards). That’s a different kind of intervention from high-certainty cases, where the same dollars almost certainly reduce felt suffering, and such funding is desperately needed. That trade-off matters.
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