Humans have successfully developed laws and social institutions that allow us to gradually improve our welfare over time. These include wealth redistribution among families, close friends and countries coupled with self-ownership and free exchange among billions of humans through markets. Other apparent keys are the incentive to innovate and the ability to accumulate new knowledge in journals and communities of experts.
Unfortunately animals don’t fit into this system. Animals are not able to use property, language, technology, trade and so on to achieve high states of wellbeing on their own. This is not going to change. The lot of animals is therefore up to humans; they will never be able to save themselves from poverty as we are doing for ourselves.
Currently, with a few exceptions, humans do not treat animals as worthy of concern. Farm animals through most of the world have few or no protections and are often treated very badly in order to minimise the resources humans need to sacrifice to raise them. Even the minority of people who care about the welfare of farm animals are generally unconcerned with the suffering of wild animals, no matter how bad life may be for them. Animals we have personal relationships with, like pets, get the best deal, but they are only a small share of all the animals that exist.
What might we hope that humans will do for animals?
One option would be increased regulation of the treatment animals in the same way that we now regulate the upbringing of children. While parents have a great deal of freedom in how they treat their children, they do not have free reign. They don’t ‘own’ children in the way that people currently own animals – rather they are considered to be ‘stewards’ of children. Greater wealth and education in the future might lead people to be willing to make the sacrifices to treat animals this way, just as increased wealth has made many parts of the world willing to dedicate a lot of resources to ensuring children are not mistreated.
A second approach, obvious only to an economist, would be for the government or another group to set financial incentives for treating animals well. People and businesses would be allowed to treat animals badly but they would have to pay a price if they wanted to do so, just as your employer would have to pay you to make you tolerate things you didn’t enjoy. Animal owners could also be rewarded for treating animals well. This would leave it up to the market to determine how animals should be treated once the appropriate incentives had been provided – incentives reflecting the importance society placed on the welfare of animals. One way of looking at this would be as the animal welfare equivalent of a ‘carbon tax’, where the suffering of animals was a social ill like pollution. An alternative perspective would be that the regulator was standing in as a negotiator on behalf of the animals who were themselves unable to negotiate ‘work’ contracts with their owners. These pseudo-contracts would replace the current system of slavery.
A third approach would be to take animals out of the picture altogether. If humans are able to continuously improve their lot in life with technology while non-human animals are not, then eventually human welfare will far exceed animal welfare. At that point it may just be best for humans to replace animals altogether. There are already plans to make farm animals obsolete by growing artificial meat in labs rather than on farms. Humans are also progressively displacing animals from the wilderness by clearing land for human settlement and farming. Humans might find that eventually the only animals they want to keep around are pets, which they enjoy treating well. This scenario would require humans or their descendants to continue to flourish and expand, which is possible but far from certain.
In the short run a greater appetite for direct regulation of animal welfare is the the most I really see happening. In the long term though I am hopeful that humans will end up living much better lives than they currently do, and find that they have nothing to gain by having suffering animals living on Earth.
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May 20, 2012 at 6:25 pm
Brian Tomasik
Animal-suffering taxes are elegant in theory, but I’m doubtful that they would work in practice because (1) there’s no momentum behind them, and by the time such momentum might be created, other reforms will probably be enacted (welfare improvements and then in vitro meat), and (2) it’s harder to quantify suffering than carbon emissions. Also (3) if the taxes were set at a threshold where the cost paid equaled the cost to the animals, meat would be so expensive that only millionaires could buy it, unless it was raised in very good conditions.
As we’ve discussed, the biggest challenge in the long term will be to make sure that future humans don’t multiply wild-animal suffering by spreading wildlife into the galaxy, creating lab universes, running sentient simulations, etc. These are mainly questions at the scale of a government/civilization rather than an individual company, so it’s not clear that Pigovian taxes would do much here.
May 20, 2012 at 6:26 pm
Brian Tomasik
The kitten-and-duck picture is very cute, BTW.
May 20, 2012 at 8:21 pm
What can be done about animals? « Robert Wiblin | petlover
[...] What can be done about animals? « Robert Wiblin [...]
May 23, 2012 at 9:08 pm
David Pearce
From an ethical utilitarian perspective, today’s nonhuman animals are a suboptimal arrangement of matter and energy. Presumably the same is true of humans vis-à-vis our posthuman successors. So the question is whether it’s ethically acceptable to keep genetically and behaviorally tweaked versions of human and nonhuman animals in tomorrow’s compassionately run “wildlife parks”? Or from an ethical point of view, should the long-term goal be to phase out Darwinian life altogether?
June 20, 2012 at 12:05 am
mwengler
Animals are not suboptimal from an ethical utilitarian perspective, they are suboptimal from a human perspective. Optimality presumes a goal, we’re better off stating that goal.
From an animal’s perspective, its ownn arrangement of matter and energy are probably close enough to optimal to be worth preserving. They certainly act as if they believe that, just as we (humans) act as if we believe that about our selves.
Do I have a moral responsibility to group myself with humans in determining the “optimality” of animals? Why wouldn’t I group myself with mammals, or with chordata, or taking a different tack, group myself with concentrations of calculation?
June 19, 2012 at 11:57 pm
mwengler
Do you consider better treatment of animals to be a moral prescription, a moral intuition, or an aesthetic issue? It seems the “suffering” of wild animals is usually due to a Malthusian rough-equilibrium, and that absent fixing the drivers of that, only very minimal improvements can be made in the lives of wild animals.
There also seems to be a paternalistic arrogance to most suggestions to improve the lot of animals like the paternalism that drove the more empathetic Europeans 100 years ago when dealing with brown people in their colonies. Is the consideration of the “dignity” of a poverty-stricken tiger more or less sensible than the consideration of the “dignity” of poverty-stricken Indians or Africans? Wild animals don’t appear to WANT our help, should we consider this when setting out to help them?
June 20, 2012 at 1:12 am
David Pearce
Mark, the point I was making was slightly different. Does negative utilitarianism or classical utilitarianism represent the greater threat to intelligent life in the cosmos? IMO we have our existential risk-assessment back-to-front. A negative utilitarian believes that once intelligent agents have phased out the biology of suffering, all our ethical duties have been discharged. But the classical utilitarian seems ethically committed to converting all accessible matter and energy - not least human and nonhuman animals – into relatively homogeneous matter optimised for maximum bliss: “utilitronium”.
Paternalism? All sentient beings have an interest in not being harmed – whether not starving to death, dying of disease, or being disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive by predators. So it’s not a case of humans paternalistically imposing our wishes on a human or nonhuman animal to protect him or her from such a fate. Rather intervention involves using our greater cognitive competence to fulfil his or her clearly behaviourally expressed wishes.
June 20, 2012 at 2:13 am
mwengler
Negative vs classical utilitarians, are these strawmen? Is there a mainstream of classical utilitarianism that favors grinding up the chronically depressed and feeding them to the gentically happy?
There are many individuals both animal and human who will choose dying of disease or being disemboweled over other options Mother Theresa worked with lepers, soldiers throw themselves on grenades, animals face predators to protect their children or others in their herd. Coming in from the outside and interfering with these choices on the grounds of knowing better what will make chordates happy IS paternalism, even if you are right in your calculations.
June 20, 2012 at 6:15 am
David Pearce
Strict negative utilitarianism is rare. Smart’s reply (cf. http://www.utilitarianism.com/rnsmart-negutil.html )to Popper, namely that negative utilitarianism would mandate destroying the world, is often considered decisive – wrongly so IMO. A classical utilitarian ethic is more common. Classical utilitarianism is usually accounted less dangerous than NU. I was just pointing out that a disguised implication of a classical utilitarian ethic is that we should be working to create a utilitronium shockwave – not as a weapon but as an ethical tool. A notional AGI that went FOOM
(cf. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_Debate ) might ignite such a shockwave if programmed with a classical utilitarian ethic. I’m a sceptic about the I. J. Good / SIAI conception of an Intelligence Explosion. But such a scenario opens up a can of worms we needn’t unpack here.
There is indeed a sense in which helping members of other ethnic groups or species is “paternalistic”. I just don’t see paternalism in such a sense as ethically problematic. If you stumbled across, say, a small white child, a small black child, a dog, a pig, or a baby elephant (etc) drowning in a shallow pond, you would ( I trust) seek to rescue them. All I’d argue is that our benevolence should be systematic. Death, harm and suffering doesn’t somehow matter less because we don’t happen to see it.
June 21, 2012 at 10:49 pm
Brian Tomasik
Thanks, David.
Parenting is rather ‘paternalistic’ as well (and maternalistic).
June 21, 2012 at 1:59 am
Brian Tomasik
Thanks for the comments, mwengler. I think we (Rob, Dave, and I) mainly disagree with you about what we value: We are utilitarians who explicitly care only about increasing happiness (of various flavors) and reducing suffering (of various flavors). It doesn’t matter whether our views are ‘paternalistic’ or ‘arrogant’ — unless those facts lead us to do things that actually hurt our end-goals.
In case you’re interested, there was some discussion of why animals don’t kill themselves on Felicifia:
http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?p=4549#p4564
http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?p=5624
I think wild animals would want our help if we could translate their emotional states into meaningful wishes. Babies seem not to “want” vaccinations, but if we abstract their desires, we can see that their apparent dislike of getting shots is misleading.
June 22, 2012 at 12:32 am
mwengler
@David, @Brian,
This is actually great stuff. At least tentatively, it seems to bring utilitarianism into enough of a focus that I realize I am probably NOT a utilitarian.
I do believe that morality can do nothing more useful than improving human life. That is, I rule out any ideas that morality comes from god or magic rocks or anything I could ever credit that is outside of humanity. Since at best it can be used by humans to optimize something for humans, I always figured this was some form of utilitarianism on my part.
But maximizing the happiness of people or other intelligences even when what you do to do this is against the will of the intelligence? I could try to claim that in the long run, this actually works against happiness, or that somehow, if you think you can make something happier by forcing a solution on it against its will then you are wrong. But I realize this is BS on my part: even if you can make some race or ethnicity happier by capturing them and while you control them, indoctrinating them into your beliefs, I don’t think that is a morally positive action.
Wireheading. Please google it if you haven’t heard of it already. Would utilitarians as you describe them be in favor of forced wireheading for people and animals? If you distinguish between happiness and constant pleasure, HOW do you do it without being too contrived?
June 22, 2012 at 7:57 am
Hedonic Treader
mwengler, you don’t have to distinguish between happiness and constant pleasure in order to reject forced wireheading, very simple political and practical objections suffice.
But remember that there are a good number of laws and legal practices that aim at protecting people from themselves today, and except for libertarians, many people agree with these laws. Think drug prohibitions, anti-suicide laws or even the obligation to wear a seatbelt.
I’m a utilitarian, and I mostly object to such laws because of their indirect effects. I think power relationships, while somewhat inevitable, are an inherently untrustworthy phenomenon.
In the least convenient hypothetical world possible, yes, utilitarians would force people to be happy. But practically, how many people have you met whose happiness you can increase by using force against them? In this sense, I think it’s a bit of a strawman. As for animals, we’re still systematically torturing them without consent, so I don’t think there’s much of a case against utilitarianism from a deontological value perspective. As far as I am concerned, that ship has sailed a long time ago.
June 23, 2012 at 1:10 am
Brian Tomasik
Thanks, Hedonic Treader! It’s also not clear if wireheads are actually happy (http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lb/are_wireheads_happy/), or if they just *want* the stimulation without liking it. There’s a lot of discussion about wanting vs. liking in the psychology literature, e.g., http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/research/affectiveneuroscience.html
December 10, 2012 at 9:20 pm
TruthHive (@TruthHive)
It’s interesting to consider the protection of animals and what they deserve, but I think your analysis puts the buggy before the horse. Firstly, we have to begin with whether animals deserve protection in the first place, thus this is a moral/philosophical question before the policy. And, if we do value animal feelings, then the policy implication would naturally arrive to one of your proposed solutions. But we can find analogy in the difficulty in valuing life with the issue of abortion. Some people feel its ethical and others not, and so we have laws where abortion is legal at one point and not at others. I think your issue really is what is a foolproof way to get people to respect all life, then you could transform your hope into a certainty.
December 10, 2012 at 9:26 pm
Comment: What is to be done about animals? | Truth Hive
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