One ambiguity in utilitarianism, the philosophical claim that one should act in ways that maximize utility, is the question of whether what should be maximized is the average utility of the population of the world or its total utility.
Reading the comments, 31 so far, I am struck by the way tribalism inserts itself into a philosophical discussion. Multiple people identify effective altruists and/or utilitarianism with blue tribe/central planning socialism/the enemy.
As someone who grew up around farm animals, I have been making this argument about vegetarianism for 20 years. Cows are generally living their best life and it's good they exist
So far, 100% of people who have heard this argument are unconvinced. Normal people value the counterfactual life at zero generally
I just used my sous vide device to make shredded beef with BBQ sauce for my son. I have done it before with pork but he decided he would rather have beef because cows have a happier life than factory farmed pigs. He thinks the pork tasted a little better, wants me to make him more of the beef.
The Dalai Lama is supposed to have said, it's better to eat elephants rather than cows because elephants are bigger. But I would rather not eat meat than eat elephant or whale. It is best to eat fish because they suffer the least being not very intelligent.
What if the concepts of "total utility" and "average utility" simply aren't valid to begin with, because it's not valid to add together utilities of different people (or other beings)? What if the best we can do is to try to make individual interactions positive sum--which would mean making them voluntary, so they only occur if both parties judge that the interaction makes them better off?
"we not only can make interpersonal utility comparisons we routinely do make them, even if not very well."
I agree with this with one further specification: we do it in cases where we know the other people involved reasonably well, so we can make reasonable guesses about what the benefits and costs to them are of various possible actions. Your examples were a parent making decisions that affect multiple children, deciding which friend to give a gift to, and signaling our preferences with cues like tone of voice and facial expressions.
But the general theory of utilitarianism does not restrict itself to such cases. It claims to provide a framework by which a person can make such utility comparisons across an entire society, involving large numbers of people (hundreds of millions or billions), the vast majority of which they have no personal knowledge of and hence can't apply the sorts of heuristics you describe. So the basis you give for making interpersonal utility comparisons is no longer there.
We can do it pretty well for people we know well. But other people are similar enough to people we know well, including ourselves, so that we can do it, although less well, for people we don't know. I don't have to know someone well to be pretty sure he would rather be fed than hungry, that he would rather not be burnt alive, and even that he would rather be hungry for a day and not burnt alive than be fed for that day then burnt alive.
> other people are similar enough to people we know well, including ourselves
I disagree with this as a general claim. There are particular aspects in which there is enough similarity--for example, preferring stubbing one's toe to being tortured, to use your example--but those are easy cases. I don't think the "similar enough" claim holds for all cases. I don't think the range of human variation is narrow enough in all respects to support such a claim.
I'm not sure I understand. If your basis for claiming that we can do it (not perfectly, but "can") is "other people are similar enough", then if other people are *not* similar enough, then you can't do it, correct?
Suppose you have two pets. One has a potentially-fatal illness; the other has developed immunity. The first could be saved by extracting antibodies from the second; this would do no lasting harm to the second, but the needle-prick to draw blood would cause a moment of slight pain. Do you really think there's no fact of the matter as to whether the benefit to the first individual (of saving their life) outweighs the cost to the second (of a pin-prick)?
If the second pet had the intelligence to choose, would they voluntarily donate the antibodies? People undergo short term pain all the time to help others. In such cases there's no third party adding utilities and computing a net gain or loss. The party who has the choice of undergoing the short term pain or not makes the choice, based on whether they believe it's worth it. I'm certainly not saying that can't be done. But it's very different from someone who has no skin in the game themselves presuming to balance the utilities of others.
Suppose the animal is selfish, and doesn't care at all for the other. It may still be *true* (obvious, even) that the gain to the other would be more than the cost to them.
I think there are good practical reasons to give people liberal rights to bodily integrity, so no-one else has a *right* to, say, take my kidney and give it to a dialysis patient who needs it more. (Ideally, we'd have organ markets so we weren't so reliant on extreme altruism to make such exchanges happen.) But it may still be quite plainly *true* that the dialysis patient would benefit more from my kidney. What sorts of rights and powers we're willing to give people is a separate question from whether concepts like "average utility" are "valid", or have meaningful application.
> Suppose the animal is selfish, and doesn't care at all for the other. It may still be *true* (obvious, even) that the gain to the other would be more than the cost to them.
On what basis?
> What sorts of rights and powers we're willing to give people is a separate question from whether concepts like "average utility" are "valid", or have meaningful application
I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is, it's still not an argument that concepts like "average utility" actually *are* valid.
Basically, your argument is that it's "just obvious" that, for example, the gain to the first pet in your example is greater than the loss to the second. But that's not an argument. It' s just an assertion of the conclusion you want.
Basing such claims on the actual choices made by people in appropriate situations avoids that problem, because what people actually do can be observed independently of any claims about "utility". But trying to extend this to hypothetical situations, particularly hypothetical situations that involve very difficult tradeoffs (much more difficult than the tradeoff in your pet example) is fraught with problems, to which I don't think anyone has good solutions.
I'm suggesting a counterexample to the "interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible in the absence of voluntary agreement" view.
Here's another (from Derek Parfit): if one (otherwise happy and healthy) person is threated with decapitation, and another with a papercut, the papercut is the lesser of the two harms.
Death robs one of much future pleasure (in the cases under discussion - not euthanasia candidates); a pinprick or papercut are trivial pains that are objectively less significant by comparison.
Any view that insists that there's *no fact of the matter* as to which person was harmed more (whenever neither would voluntarily, altruistically sacrifice for the other) has thereby been reduced to absurdity.
You're certainly free to deny this, just like you're free to deny that the external world exists (maybe you're just a brain in a vat). The two views strike me as roughly comparable in absurdity. Here's a third: maybe you're the only conscious person, and everybody else are automata. After all, all you can observe are people's bodies and related physical phenomena (maybe neurons firing, etc., from certain brain scans). You can't *prove* that there are any "lights on inside". Still, I suggest, it would be plainly absurd to accept such solipsism. Rational thought in philosophy requires some sensitivity to (and attempt to minimize commitment to) absurdity.
> if one (otherwise happy and healthy) person is threated with decapitation, and another with a papercut, the papercut is the lesser of the two harms.
I'm not disputing that this claim works fine for that particular case, and other easy cases. But those cases aren't a problem, precisely because they're the easy cases. It's the hard cases that cause the problem, and they're hard *because* it's no longer "obvious" which of the two harms is worse. And those hard cases are what the concepts of "total utility" and "average utility" claim to be able to handle on the same basis as the easy ones. That is the claim I'm disputing. I don't think the "obvious" assignments of utility that cover the easy cases extend to the hard cases; in the hard cases, there simply is *no* good objective rule for deciding which harm is worse. The best we can do is to leave it up to the people who are actually stuck in those situations and have to live with the consequences to decide as best they can.
He has addressed this in other writings. It is clear that it is valid to add or quantitatively compare utilities of different people. If it weren't valid then any form of justice would fail to work and be completely arbitrary. The fact of the matter is that while our systems of justice over the ages have been varying degrees of unjust and imperfect, they have for the most part been effective to some degree on reducing crime in society.
Many austrian school folks seem to have been convinced that since value is subjective, its also secret and incomparable. That simply isn't the case. We humans are enormously similar in almost every way. We have similar genetics, similar upbringing, and similar behavior. It would be irrational to assume anything but that we also have similar internal feelings and values. In fact, we can even get more information about this because can ASK people about their feelings and values. It seems to me that this belief that we cannot compare utility between people is invented solely to justify preconceived beliefs that are threatened by utilitarian thought, and have no logical or empirical justification whatsoever.
In the vast majority of cases, limiting interaction to the voluntary kind is almost surely the most likely to maximize total utility. However, the mere possibility of being able to increase utility further through non-voluntary means shouldn't be religiously fought against. Its a truth that should be recognized for what it is. And just because the possibility exists doesn't mean we have a good method to execute on it. Market behavior is exceptionally well understood at a microeconomic level. Methods of executing on things like welfare are far less well understood and therefore attempts to that effect are much less likely to be beneficial. That's the fact you should be talking about, rather than some imaginary idea that we have no information about other humans.
I agree. More generally, I think it is a mistake to use bad arguments to defend libertarian conclusions. Either there are good arguments we could use instead or we shouldn't be defending the conclusions.
One obvious conclusion from utilitarianism is redistribution from rich to poor. That is a motive for libertarians to claim that utility is not interpersonally comparable. A better argument is that institutions to redistribute income do not reliably transfer from rich to poor, are costly for both incentive and rent seeking reasons, and to point out that the enormous reduction in the world population of very poor people over the past century was due not to redistribution bit to the increased productivity due in part to the shift towards private property rules, with China after Mao the most striking example.
That is the approach I took in my first book and have tried to take since.
I agree with what you say here as far as the practical consequences of different approaches is concerned.
What those practical consequences amount to, in terms of this discussion, is that even if there is some abstract sense in which "total utility" or "average utility" can be meaningfully defined over an entire society, based on some concept of interpersonal utliity comparisons, no human beings can be trusted to actually use such concepts and make such comparisons on the scale of an entire society. So libertarians have good practical grounds for not allowing any human beings to have the power to do such things.
On the contrary, every human being has the power to decide what he will do on the basis of his best estimate of the effect of his actions.
Why do you, and other commenters, insist on reading a discussion of what people ought to do as an argument for using the state to make them do it? You might as well interpret a discussion of how individuals should choose what job to take as an argument for having the government assign people to jobs.
I agree that utilitarianism can be used by individuals to make decisions about how to use their own resources, not just by people in power to make decisions about how to use the resources of others that they commandeer.
My misgivings about the underlying concepts of "total utility" and "average utility" apply to the former case as well as the latter.
That said, the "libertarian conclusions" that you say bad arguments should not be used to defend (and I agree with that) include conclusions about institutions like governments, not just individual action (or individual actions grouped collectively, such as a charity that is funded with voluntary contributions). Both types of institutions do redistribution of resources, for example.
Indeed, the post by Governology that you responded to explicitly brought out "the mere possibility of being able to increase utility further through non-voluntary means" as an alternative to be considered, and that should be argued against on practical grounds. So it seems reasonable to interpret your statement that bad arguments should not be used to defend libertarian conclusions as responding to that possibility. And that possibility *is* using the state to make people do things they wouldn't do voluntarily.
> the mere possibility of being able to increase utility further through non-voluntary means shouldn't be religiously fought against
This is a much weaker claim than the claim utilitarians make using the concepts of "total utility" and "average utility".
However, even in this form, I'm not sure I agree with it as a practical matter, though of course it is possible in principle. The problem as I see it is one of trust. Suppose there is a "mere possibility" that harvesting a healthy person's organs without their consent will increase total utility. Who can we trust to make that judgment? If I'm one of the people whose organs might be harvested without my consent, I don't trust ahy human being to make that judgment. And I suspect most people in a country like the US would agree with me (a country like China is another matter, but that just underscores the point I've made elsewhere in this discussion, that the range of human values is too wide to support a claim that everyone is similar enough for interpersonal utility comparisons to work in the general case). I would rather live in a society in which I have an absolute right not to have my organs harvested without my consent, even if there's a tiny in principle chance that it might increase utility.
Trust is a problem. But I don't think its one that's unique to distribution of welfare or any other application of force. Any application of force has this trust problem. I would imagine one of the least contentious thing I could suggest to you is that a nation should defend itself from the attacks of other nations, and that a government military is likely the most reliable battle-tested method of doing so. However, a military requires taxes and taxes require redistribution of wealth (from the people to the military). Who can we trust to do that?
The answer is that our methods are poor, but they work well enough for most nations to be able to defend themselves over long periods of time. The efficiency might be low, but it works better than any other method we have tried.
So when you ask who to trust, the question I would prefer be asked is: is the best system you can think of for trusting someone to do the thing in question better or worse than not doing it at all? It depends on the thing in question and depends what you think is the best system of trust.
> Any application of force has this trust problem.
I agree. And I think that is one argument for the libertarian non-aggression principle.
> I would imagine one of the least contentious thing I could suggest to you is that a nation should defend itself from the attacks of other nations, and that a government military is likely the most reliable battle-tested method of doing so. However, a military requires taxes and taxes require redistribution of wealth (from the people to the military). Who can we trust to do that?
In a fully libertarian country, people would voluntarily pay for national defense as a service because it benefits them. So it's not strictly true that a military requires taxes--it's at least possible to fund it through voluntary payments. Historically, it's not unknown to have privately owned military forces that were at least comparable to those possessed by nation states; for example, in both the American Revolution and the War of 1812, privateers (privately owned warships given licenses by the US government to attack British merchant ships) were a significant contribution to the US war effort.
David Friedman has pointed out that funding national defense with voluntary payments faces a large public good problem, which might be enough of a reason to justify some kind of coercive taxation.
As for the trust issue, the US addresses it by placing limits on how the government can use the military. Such limits aren't perfect, but they are a recognition of the trust problem and an attempt to address it. Note that a military that is strictly for the purpose of national defense is already limited in purpose and scope, which in itself limits the scope of the trust issue. National defense means using force against people attacking the country, not the country's citizens. That's a fairly easy bright line to judge by.
> In a fully libertarian country, people would voluntarily pay for national defense as a service because it benefits them.
Yes, but as you mentioned in a later paragraph, there is a public good problem: the free rider problem. You should expect something like national defense to be underfunded because of the free rider problem.
> privateers (privately owned warships given licenses by the US government to attack British merchant ships)
This is not national defense, but piracy. I don't know if you could find anyone who thinks the industry of theft is under-invested in.
> a military that is strictly for the purpose of national defense is already limited in purpose and scope
Yes, that is a wise limitation, and seems to have worked quite well.
In any case, I certainly agree that well-structured limitations can go a long way to mitigate trust problems. I think this is true in many areas.
In the US case, the initial constraint was a small professional army and an enormous militia. The theory, as I interpret it, was that the militia made up in size for its low amateur quality and if the army tried to take over they would be outnumbered a hundred to one by the militia.
No, it isn't. The privateers had the same legal status as US warships owned and operated by the US government; that was the whole point of getting licenses (actually they were called letters of marque) from the US government. Having your country's warships attack an enemy country's merchant shipping is not piracy under any legal system I'm aware of.
TBH I'm forever lost at people trying to extend rights to non-humans. Regardless how you feel about objects, utilitarians should care about people more hence anything that makes meat cost more or deprives people liberty over an object they own would be immoral. If I want to light my gold fish on fire, that's my business, they aren't people. There is no utilitarian function, beyond taste which I assume isn't counted, where utility goes up jailing me for said BBQ
Utilitarianism isn't a theory of rights but of how one should act. Suppose you have an opportunity to do something that will prevent a hundred dogs from dying in pain at the cost of making one human a dollar poorer, no rights involved — it wasn't a dollar he had a right to. Do you do it? Do you think better of someone who does than of someone who doesn't, view him as a better person?
Do I, no. You are anthropomorphizing dogs rather than treating them as objects. I wouldn't make that guy a dollar poorer to save a billion bacteria, millions of blades of grass, thousands of cockroaches, nor sand on the beach I compact stepping on it. People love their cars to, that does not mean we should defer to cars over people.
That is not a critique of utilitarianism unto itself, it's a critique of denying humans their dignity and subordinating them to non-humans.
I have no place for utilitarianism even among people but expanding it's morality to caring about screwdrivers is ludicrous.
I am treating them as non-humans which is exactly what they are and believe it's intrinsically immoral to deny humans their dignity subordinating their rights to non-humans.
I get this is just a value call but likewise "dogs aren't objects" isn't defensible sans the most ardent Buddhist or vegan. At best you could make an argument "it's a living being, screwdrivers aren't" but so are plants, plants responds to negative physical stimuli (i.e. "pain"), and adjust their behavior to prevent (i.e. memory) yet no one is going to prison for neglectfully killing their houseplant. Likewise putting earthworms on fishing hooks (though some people are now attempting to grant lobsters human rights and no I'm not joking) or poisoning rats. The word "humane" implies humanity hence there is no way to humanely kill dogs, they are simply killed or butchered.
I remember something once Russ Roberts said, and Arnold Klink echoed recently, that always stuck in my craw, "There is no greater crime that denying a fellow human their dignity and moral equivalence as an equal", anthropomorphizing and then subsuming humans to it is that crime. Once again there is no moral utility maximizing function that should account for the untold trillions of bacteria we intentionally harm just because "they are alive".
This reminds me of antinatalism, a term I'd never heard of until last night when I read Mr. Bartkus's manifesto (it's a hobby of mine to always read manifestos and watch source videos) whose utilitarian rational for blowing up the IFV clinic was that it was utility net positive because it prevented the nonconsensual, hence immoral, creation of millions of people. And I'd argue even that was more moral as non existent future potential people, while likewise shouldn't have any rights, def should have more than a dog.
You keep putting it in terms of rights instead of in terms of how one ought to act. Suppose I have a choice between giving a dollar to a beggar and spending it buying food for local feral cats. If I spend it on the cats am I "denying a fellow human their dignity and moral equivalence as an equal"?
I think you are in a utilitarian, not individual liberty, sense as, at least my understanding of utilitarianism which I admit might be wrong, is "rights" and "ought to act" are equivalent in practice since each person ought to act in a way to increase universal utility and that would be within a framework of a right to act a certain way hence the appropriate act would be identical regardless of taste as it's not about preference but calculations, even if back of the napkin / informal.
You are basically saying "I find you worth less than the wellbeing a cat" which is dehumanizing. Given you are supposed to be increasing universal utility, that is wrong as that beggar, hence all of humanity in the aggregate, will be infinitesimal small, maybe unmeasurably so, better off with that dollar whereas nothing you do for a non-human, whether it be a cat or a pet rock or your favorite chair will increase universal utility by any amount. I am conceding that YOUR utility doesn't count here (I forget the name for it, the utilitarian flaw where the belief anything you do is good because it makes YOU happier and your happiness increases the aggregate more than that of your victim decreases it as you are part of that pool; that's a cop out in my mind hence I disregard that line of argument; the Christian Gospel of Wealth equiv) nor the line of thought "well maybe five other people will be happier the fact I helped the cat" as likewise that makes utilitarianism simply a popularity contest as it's basically just an expansion of previous concession to some of your friends to justify harming others for your entertainment.
Property rights are the right of humans to own property, and not rights that property has.
Should not animal rights be treated the same, the right to own animals, not the rights animals have?
Just a thought. I said my main piece earlier, and it comes out to about the same -- what should humans put up with regarding what humans do to animals? Since humans can never know what animals think of their treatment by humans or other animals, it seems like a lot of argy bargy over something unknowable.
If I'm not mistaken, torturing animals for no reason has been either illegal or considered immortal in most societies, ancient and modern. That isn't an argument against your position, but it is worth noting that yours is an extremely unusual one.
The same reasons you would give rights to powerless people are the reasons you would want to give rights to animals. If you become powerless, you will want those rights. The vast majority of people care more about other humans than animals, and perhaps that is what is right. But if you enjoy lighting gold fishes on fire, I would advocate running you out of town on a rail.
One argument for your position, one I think I got from James Donald, is that there is a pattern to human moral sentiments, that the sort of person who enjoys lighting goldfish on fire is also the sort of person who cannot be trusted not to cheat or rob his human neighbors, given the opportunity. We take the former as evidence for the latter.
I don't disagree but that's a different discussion that utilitarianism and it's duty towards certain actions.
People who enjoy lighting their video game villagers on fire are in that same spectrum but I don't think we should be jailing people for making suboptimal video games character designs and then "harming" them for fun. Popular mods for the Sims include creating natural disasters to hurt them and watch them all "suffer". And this slippery slope (anthropomorphizing of animals) is already start to slide towards "AI" and will continue to do do if we don't quit denying humans their dignity and supremacy.
There are pro social mechanisms that should be used to deal with that such a shame, peer pressure, and social.exclusion, not the law (at least in a libertarian world) nor any moral framework.
Some people are just reprehensible people to our own personal sense of taste but that does been jail them sans any actual harm.
Where in the post we are discussing did I argue for (or against) jailing people? Why do commenters assume that any argument about what people should do must be an argument for forcing them to do it?
A discussion of rights always implies jail or some sort of state sanctioned punishment because that's what a violation of rights does. If animals have rights, then you should (and do) jail people for violating those rights.
When people talk about animal rights they don't mean how they treat their own animals, i.e. "ought or preference", they mean as a framework for forcing others to treat their animals in a way contrary to how they might wish via force of law.
Discussions of "ought" don't involve rights, i.e. you shouldn't run your engine without oil but that doesn't mean cars have rights. And to circle back to the beginning that is important because for a utilitarian to justify harming people by helping animals, because said help decreasing aggregate utility, they have to do some mental gymnastics which result in anthropomorphizing animals (to give animals a balancing utility) but in doing so it naturally creates a prima facie legal duty to protect those imaginary rights so "other people ought not leave their dog unattended in a car for five seconds" becomes "felony animal endangerment, five years in prison with a mandatory three" but running into the gas station to grab a soda all because you feel humans should subsume themselves to a dog.
And get that and I don't even disagree on a personal taste matter but that's different than a utilitarian duty or denying people, up until state sanctioned death, the use of their property as they see fit sans harming their neighbor.
Just because I'd advocate using social mechanisms (i.e. peer pressure, disassociation, boycotts, etc) to run people who like kpop out of town doesn't mean that's a utilitarian duty nor should be make kpop, or listening to it, illegal and as such, a capital offense.
Animals aren't human and are my property, what I do with them, no matter how much you find it distasteful, doesn't make me nor my rights, subordinate to them nor on the utilitarian side do they factor in at all outside negatively. TBH if I was a utilitarian, and I'm not, I don't think I could even morally justify owning pets.
Property rights don't exist in a vacuum. Something must define and defend them.
Why can humans not be property along with animals? The answer is they can and they have been property. But should they be? That is the question to answer. "Property" is also one extreme end of a continuum. For example, if you have a child, is that child your property? According to current law, the answer is neither yes nor no. The child has rights, but not as many as an adult, and the parent has rights over the child that they wouldn't have over an adult. But you are not allowed to light your children on fire.
The same is true for animals, animal cruelty and abuse are not currently your legal right. So animals, in current law, are not 100% your property but do have rights. Should they? I believe so for reasons I've already mentioned. Why do you think they should not?
The actual practical problem with EA is that it's fundamentally an attempt to centrally calculate utility and thus suffers from the same lack of local knowledge, and perverse incentives, problems as all forms of central planning.
Do you ever make donations to charity? Doing so faces the same problem, as do lots of other decision problems we face. Effective altruism is an attempt to do it in a more organized fashion.
The most obvious way I see to satisfy the goal of organizing charity to enjoy its coordination benefits, and the goal of minimizing corruption due to highly centralized coordination, is to have multiple organizations with the same goal as EA. Each employs the calculation it thinks is best; individuals can subscribe (donate) to the organization whose formula they most agree with.
This seems pretty similar to your sketch of rights enforcement agencies in TMoF, if I'm not mistaken.
EA is a movement not an organization. Within that movement there is a good deal of disagreement. Give Well is an organization within that movement. I am not sure if it has any equally prominent competitors — perhaps the people who argue that controlling AI is the highest priority — but I agree it should.
Bonus! In ONE article I get the TWO things that IRRITATE ME the most: Altruism and Utilitarianism.
Who could be so lucky, Leo Rosten?
• Altruism, effective flavor: Who's to say that these "effective" donations don't go into the hands of the picayune warlords in Africa who confiscate them to feed their armies, to hold them over their miserable citizens like a Pavlovian chunk of meat? Those countries are PERPETUATED in their abysmal wretchedness by these donations, which exist PRIMARILY to assuage the guilty conscience of the givers, not to fix root causes. Ahhh, don't it feel GOOD to be righteous!
• Utilitarianism: First, its pair of obvious (supposedly, since unmentioned) showstoppers. That is, the IMPOSSIBILITY of interpersonal comparisons, and the IMPOSSIBILITY of evaluating a "utility" until it is realized in the future. But more irritatingly: The game theorists take a flying leap into the mud hole of utilitarianism and just squeal and wallow all day long. Problem? Just like all universalist theorists, they assume the WHOLE WORLD wants to play the game. Well, BANG! THEY DON'T. As Nozick (not that I defend his AS&U) proved in his experiment in having his students randomly assign their own grades, the VERY SETUP of the game guarantees a "freely chosen" egalitarian distribution by these constitutionally constrained "rational players."
I believe that whether the expenditure is something that can be appropriated by kleptocrats is one of the things the effective altruism people try to look at. How much attention have you given to their efforts?
• Giving Rule #1: The GREATER the distance between giver & recipient, the LESS the communal bond created by the exchange (e.g., giving to Africans).
• Giving Rule #2: The GREATER the inequality between giver & recipient, the GREATER the communal bond created by the exchange (e.g., the gift from a skilled surgeon).
But notice: "altruism" is the WRONG term; my observations are inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre's _Dependent Rational Animals_. We DO depend on each other, but NOT in an altruistic way, which makes universalist egalitarian assumptions.
As for utilitarianism: Your claim that economists CAN make interpersonal comparisons cuts no ice and holds no water, mainly as it's reckoned from what someone WOULD give for a more valuable utility. No market pricing magic can measure SATISFACTION, which is the kernel of the problem.
But the REAL problem with utilitarianism (AND game theory as well) is the "Urlagerfeuer" problem; that is, the "original campfire," whether in some real distant mythical land or in some lame-gamey "heuristic" these supposedly "rational players" gathered in a ring and yakked their way to a Pareto optimum. The problem is that if you take even ONE STEP into this fantasy, you are committed to finding an agency to enforce UNIVERSAL RULES.
**Understand this one thing: NO GOVERNMENT CAN ENFORCE UNIVERSAL RULES.**
Good god, has Hume's is/ought distinction been flushed down the commode? -- By (HAW HAW gulp HA HOOT) Sam Harris, I suppose? Yes, universal rules of conflict deterrence DO exist, but only a small community -- no larger than about 250K citizens -- can do a workable pretense of it.
> I believe that whether the expenditure is something that can be appropriated by kleptocrats is one of the things the effective altruism people try to look at.
Supposedly. From rumors I've heard, there's a lot of sex for positive reviews of one's charity going on under cover of "polyamory".
Every person who has insisted on the impossibility of comparing utility between people has provided no logical or empirical support support. This seems to be a premise, not a conclusion. Do you have any logical or empirical support for what your assertion?
You tell me how ONE PERSON's subjective, emotional, whimsical feeling of SATISFACTION can be quantified against that of someone else, even before getting to the fantasy of doing that for groups.
One might not believe in god because they have never seen god, and have never seen evidence of anything where god is the most likely explanation. So I'm to assume that you don't believe utility can be compared between people because you personally have not thought of a plausible way one might do it, is that what you're saying? If true, it is only reasonable to believe it unlikely that we can compare utility between people, but it is unreasonable to assert that it is impossible. Impossibility must be proven, only agnosticism can be assumed without logical or empirical backing.
To your question, there are many things we can know about peoples' utility. We can know for certain between two options which a person value more or less (by asking them and also by viewing their behavior). We also can also know what someone's baseline is, and we can ask them what they "like" or "dislike" (ie which things they value more or less than their baseline). We can compare peoples' baselines, and we can compare people's likes and dislikes. We can compare peoples' rankings of which options they prefer over which other options.
Do you dispute any of this? None of this so far is comparing the magnitude of two peoples' utilities.
There are also ways of measuring people's experience. We can measure pain and pleasure as experienced in the brain. We can observe what chemicals and electrical signals happen in various circumstances across people. We can and do observe that the way these things happen between most people (ie healthy people) is incredibly similar. Dopamine responses, serotonin responses, norepinephrine responses, etc are all quite comparable between people. And these physical brain behaviors correlate to people's actual behavior. Whether someone is energized, enthused, experiencing pleasure or pain, we can see that on people's faces and in their behavior.
You can say: "Well but we can't know that someone is experiencing 100 times the pleasure of someone else just because their behavior is very similar. They may simply have a different scale for their responses."
And that's true enough. The one thing we don't know how to observe is people's lived experience. The qualia of life. The hard question of consciousness and the phenomenal experience are well known to be impenetrable mysteries that seem out of reach of empirical science.
However, there is a logical reason to believe that these experiences are similar: our similar construction. If you had a pool ball factory pumping out pool balls, you would predict that the vast majority of those pool balls had nearly identical responses when hit with a cue ball on table. Right? Well, humans are simply complex machines. And while two humans aren't as similar as two identically produced pool balls, there are many many similarities between people, far more similarities than differences. So the logical assumption to make is that the unobservable qualia we experience is more similar than not. Without additional information or logical backing, that is the only assumption that seems reasonable to make.
You are instead assuming the opposite, that qualia between people is likely to be so different between people that an assumption of similarity is likely to result in more harmful conclusions than helpful ones. This is the assumption I am challenging you to give support for.
You: " 'Well but we can't know that someone is experiencing 100 times the pleasure of someone else just because their behavior is very similar. They may simply have a different scale for their responses.' And that's true enough. The one thing we don't know how to observe is people's lived experience."
I'm glad you posted this. I've been trying to bring up these ideas (about animals) with my normal conversation partners and they all look at me like I speaking a foreign language. On what grounds is a cow's life not worth living? Is it just because they are killed in the end? We all die, and many humans are basically killed from the interventions used on them in the end. Few would say their lives were not worth living, even if they died at a relatively young age. Or consider wild animals, most of whom die a violent or otherwise very unpleasant death. Surely we wouldn't say their lives were not worth living or have zero (or negative) value.
The end game for vegans, if achieved, would result in some 99% (guessing) drop in the number of lives lived for cattle, chicken and pigs among others. Is this really the goal? Maybe not explicitly, but then what is? If it's all about animal suffering, then say so. The solution to that is not necessarily veganism. Many of us who can afford it buy pasture raised, grass fed, and/or regenerative meat when we can. This is probably more sensible in light of these ideas than cutting out meat altogether, unless you can't afford it *and* you think life on a factory farm is worse than not living at all. Plus you won't end up ill from nutrient deficiency.
I spent many years wondering what animal cruelty is, and finally concluded the only objective and simple definition is anything worse than life in their natural state -- which includes being eaten alive, or starving or freezing to death from an injury, or being captured and tormented by a mama to teach her cubs how to hunt. Rub out a cigaret on your dog? Animal cruelty. Rub its nose in its pea or poop, or slap it, for training? Not cruel.
Ants have aphid slaves; is that animal cruelty? If slaughtering meat animals is cruelty, so is predators chasing down and eating prey. Does that make a rancher a hero for killing wolves which attack his herds, and then a zero for slaughtering those same animals six months later?
My main conclusion was that animal rights is a dicey subject, and PETA is full of idiots who think animals should have the vote and be able to own property, all with PETA as their guardians and interpreters, of course.
I think a more sensible system (than the vegans') is one in which animals don't have inherent rights, but we forbid gratuitous (not serving a purpose) animal cruelty, because of what it says about the person performing it, not because of some inherent care for the animal.
Additionally, animals which are adopted into families, "pets", should be afforded greater care/rights, not because they're inherently better in some way, but because they have become family members to their owners. The affect on the family members is the focus, not the pets themselves.
Personally, I would be fine with folks slaughtering all the coyotes and deer that are roaming loose in suburbia. They are no one's pets, and I don't consider killing to be cruelty. I'm tired of deeding the outside to the coyotes that would eat our pets, to the deer that make it impossible to share beautiful flowers with the neighbors (what changed around 2000?) and the mosquitos. Give me some good old fashioned neighborhood bug spraying and stop telling me to wear long sleeves in Summer in Texas and to stay in doors during the periods when I'm actually home.
Many factory farmed cows undergo painful processes like disbudding, castration, and branding without anesthetic. They also spend the majority (EDIT: about 1/4, not the majority) of their lives in feedlots, where they are packed into small, barren, crowded pens and forced to stand in their own excrement until they are killed. Humanely raised meat is a much harder topic, but it is mostly a distraction because 99% of animal products come from factory farms. Life on a factory farm is much worse than no life at all, so these animals are not benefited by getting to live on a factory farm. Annually, we kill something like ~83 billion animals for food per year, and the overwhelming majority of them are on factory farms. For reference, there have only ever been around 110 billion humans throughout history. The suffering we’re causing is probably thousands or even millions of times greater than the benefit we enjoy. If there is ever a case of suffering that one should oppose, this is it.
Suffering is, in general, bad. Through factory farming, we are causing, every few years, a quantity of suffering that is comparable to all the human suffering in all of history. So this is extremely bad, bad enough to vastly outweigh the benefits to us. So we as a society ought to stop doing this. Also, in general, one ought not to pay people for doing extremely bad things. Therefore, each of us should stop buying these products.
You say "Surely we wouldn't say [wild animals'] lives were not worth living or have zero (or negative) value." as if it were obvious, but it absolutely seems plausible that wild animal lives are negative utility. Per Richard Dawkins "The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease."
As you ask for the end goal: Yes, a massive reduction in the population of factory farmed animals would be an extreme reduction is pain and suffering, and thus a moral good. These objections do not apply to humanely raised meat, so if you care about reducing suffering without going vegan, look for "the Certified Humane" logo on products. Standards for things like "Free range" or "Cage Free" products are set by industry and still allow the cruelty mentioned above.
Also, a vegan diet doesn't make you ill from nutrient deficiency. If you're worried about your nutrients, any vitamin b12 supplement will fix you, and they are extremely cheap. You could also eat bivalves (oysters, clams, scallops, etc.). They are insentient, so the arguments about suffering don't apply to them.
If you are open to hearing convincing arguments from an ethical philosopher on the topic, I'd highly recommend Michael Huemer's Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism. The first edition is available online for free, and the second edition is coming out on amazon shortly.
I think that Huemer, you, and many other reasonable critics of factory farming tend to make overly sweeping and definitive statements that lead to a greater emphasis on vegetarianism than is warranted. A few points:
1. To simply say "cows spend half their lives on feedlots" is incorrect. For one thing, for many conventionally raised cattle, they spend more like a quarter of their lives on feedlots (cf: https://extension.psu.edu/grass-fed-beef-production-video, read the transcript). For another, there are a multitude of different raising techniques. In the part of the US I'm in, it is not remotely difficult to find "grass-finished" beef which has spent very little time in a feedlot, if any. Why do you need to jump straight past that to vegetarianism?
2. Echoing Huemer, you say that "humanely raised meat is a much harder topic, but it is mostly a distraction because 99% of animal products come from factory farms." This is a bizarre claim. If I say that we should support ethical farming as the solution to unethical farming, your response is that we should not support ethical farming because it's rare? Isn't that just begging the question? If you support it, it will be more common.
3. Castration and disbudding, while painful, are only so for a brief period of the animal's life. Claiming that these procedures make the entire life of the animal net negative further undermines your claim that ethical meat is a canard because it's only 1% of the market - castration and disbudding, if done early in the animal's life, will only cause pain for perhaps 1% of their life. EDIT: I would add that cattle branding is mostly practiced in the American west, and is unusual in the wetter part of the country (i.e. east of the Mississippi). Where I am, it's unnecessary, because your cattle are well contained on relatively small, highly productive pastures (see this old but probably still relevant report: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/chapa_is_branding.pdf)
4. I'm sure EA folks have tried to address this quantitatively, but it is not obvious to me how you would determine the point at which an animal's life was a net negative. Some people have chronic pain such that they are, in some sense, suffering every minute they're awake. And yet their lives can obviously be valuable. Admittedly, animals don't have inner lives nearly as rich as humans, but you have to conclude that intelligent mammals at least get some inherent satisfaction from being well fed and alive. How much pain offsets that seems hard to determine. My point being that simply observing that an animal is often uncomfortable (e.g. from being in crowded conditions) is insufficient to show that they'd be better off dead.
5. I cannot speak to "factory farms in general," but I live in a rural agricultural area, and I am surrounded by small and medium-sized dairies and beef ranches where, in my estimation, the animals have fairly pleasant lives. They have regular access to large pastures, plenty of food, water, and minerals, and are only rarely subjected to pain (I don't think that being milked is a painful experience for them). It's hard for me to see the problem with this.
EDIT: 6. Another thought occurs to me, related to #4 above. It is tempting but flawed to assume that we know how much something bothers animals. Even if we can show that some observable brain state is correlated to pain in humans, and then show that a homologous brain state occurs in cattle, I don't think this proves they're in the same kind of pain the human is. I'm sure that cattle which spend 20 hours a day in a milking stall would prefer to have more freedom, and their brain state reflects that irritation, but I'm not at all sure how to assign a moral quantitative weight to it. I do think it's morally bad, and for that reason I raise my cattle under the open sky, but I'm skeptical of anyone who says it's definitely bad enough to offset the value of being alive.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think you're right that I'm overstating my case. Some responses to your points, in order:
(1) You're correct. I was looking at the wrong information, and various other sources seem to back up what your Penn State video says about grain-fed cattle spending about a quarter of their lives on feedlots. Grass finished beef seems like a good improvement over conventional cattle, and it's more widely available than Certified Humane products, at least where I'm at in the US. While grass fed beef is better the conventional beef, I would still argue that vegetarianism is the morally better option. Beef being grass fed does not prevent the owners from deliberately causing significant suffering to the cattle during disbudding, etc. Also, it may be immoral to kill the animals, even humanely, but more on that in (2) and (3).
(2) Sorry for the By saying that humane products are a distraction, I was trying to say something like this: "Certified humane animal products are a small minority of the market and thus not representative of the status quo. Therefore, we should not say that supporting the status quo is permissible simply because outlier products exist." In my view, the most obvious moral problem with modern animal agriculture is the suffering it causes. Humane/ethical farming practices significantly reduce the animals' suffering, so they are a significant moral improvement. The case for vegetarianism is admittedly weaker when applied to humane animal products than conventional products, I think it is still correct:
The reason why I still think vegetarianism is the better choice is moral uncertainty about the existence of animal rights. If animals lack rights, then buying/producing humane meat is fine because the animals presumably live pleasurable lives. Per Huemer, I don't know the reason why humans have rights, so I can't take those reasons and apply them to animals. Animals obviously lack certain rights (voting, free speech, owning a firearm), but whether they have others is much less clear (right to life, not to be raped, etc.). If animals have any rights at all, it would seem that the right to life would be among them. I think someone would be very overconfident if they said they are sure animals lack the right to life/right not to be killed. Thus, we should be uncertain whether the act of killing an animal is no big deal or a serious rights violation. In general, if you can't tell whether an action is no big deal or seriously immoral, you should refrain from doing that action. Thus, we should probably refrain from killing animals and paying other people to kill animals.
(3) That's true, and something like disbudding presumably isn't enough to make the whole life of the cow negative utility. However, something like disbudding via hot iron without anesthetic seems close to a paradigm example of animal cruelty. Even if it's not enough to make the whole life not worth living, it definitely seems wrong to cause a significant amount of pain/suffering to avoid the cost of effective local anesthetic or sedation. If it's wrong to disbud like that, then it's wrong to pay others (by buying the meat) to do the disbudding. Note that a "Certified Humane" approved product allows various methods of disbudding/horn removal that all require pain control. Thus, this objection applies to conventional (even grass-fed) products, but not to fully humane products. Also, it's good to hear that branding is not as widespread as I previously thought.
(4) You're right that determining whether an animal's life is worth living can be extremely challenging, but there are certainly some paradigm cases that are clear. For example, factory farmed egg laying hens live in battery cages, have their beaks cut off (which has pain receptors) without anesthetic, they suffer bone fractures and osteoporosis from egg overproduction, and periodic starving to increase egg production (forced molting). There are also cases in which the animals clearly seem worth living. I'm now thinking that cows may be closer to the good end of that range, with the case stronger for grass fed cows and strongest for certified humane ones.
(5) That's good to hear, and I also doubt that milking hurts the cows, but you probably know better than I do. Dairy cows are plausibly worse off than beef cattle due to the repeated impregnation and forced separation from the calf and the housing conditions. This report from the sentience institute estimates that 74.9% of US cattle live on factory farms (https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates). I think the small/medium ranches you're talking about are more common in number of ranches, but the bigger factory farms/Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations have so many cattle that their populations outnumber the more numerous smaller ranches.
(6) You're right that we don't know how much things hurt animals, but again there are definitely some uncontroversial cases of things that are harmful, like the chicken debeaking or unanesthetized disbudding. I now think you're right to be skeptical that cows' lives in particular are negative utility.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I do feel less compunction about eating beef of unknown source (in a restaurant or at a friend's house) than any other mammal, so I think we agree there. I am inclined to think that commercial hogs and chicken, which often spend their entire lives in crowded indoor spaces, have pretty unpleasant lives, possibly net negative.
The rights argument is quite different to the utilitarian one, and harder to immediately evaluate unless one has an existing theory for why people have rights. For religious people, such theories are pretty straightforward (e.g. teleological ones). From a non-religious perspective, it seems like there are possible theories of rights that would explain why animals don't have as many as people, but it's hard to say how persuasive they are. Something for me to think about!
I'm skeptical that even conventional cattle suffer that much. They spend most of their lives on pasture. I'm also skeptical that enough people could be found to work in an industry that is as blatantly cruel as you suggest here. I grant you pigs and chickens typically have worse conditions in conventional farming. Pigs probably have it worst of all due to their relatively high intelligence. I buy pastured pork when I can, but it's not widely available outside of mail order. But it's a small part of my diet.
While animals absolutely can suffer, I think it is misguided to simply imagine how you would feel in their place. Their brains are quite different from ours. Historically, humans have lived in all kinds of horrific conditions (read Pinker's Better Angels), yet somehow most people didn't kill themselves.
Health on a vegan diet is another matter. I believe strongly that humans are not intended to eat a high carb, grain based diet. Go ahead and try but I will fight for my right to eat nutrient dense meat.
Cows spend about (a quarter) of their lives grazing in pastures, during that time they will have their horns burned off their skull to prevent future horn growth and/or be branded and castrated without anesthetic. They are prematurely separated from their mothers, which causes substantial stress to both the calf and mother. They spend the other half of their lives confined to overcrowded feedlots, where limited space and rapid weight-gain diets frequently cause painful digestive problems and chronic pain. Transportation to slaughterhouses often involves long periods without food/water/rest, causing stress, injury, and/or exhaustion.
You are almost certainly right that pigs and chickens have it even worse, but that doesn't mean that conventionally raised cattle are treated humanely. While animal brains are different from human brains, animal suffering doesn't need to be qualitatively identical to human suffering to be bad. If you are unwilling to give up meat altogether, you should at minimum only buy humanely raised products. If you're in the USA, you can look for the "Certified Humane" logo on animal products. That (or a comparable animal welfare certification) ensures they aren't engaging in cruel practices. Standards like "Free range" or "Cage Free" are set by industry, so they don't mean a whole lot.
EDIT: Changed "half" to "quarter" per @Akrasiac's point (1) above
I'm not simply projecting human ideas of comfort to the cows. The crowded conditions on feedlots are objectively harmful to the cows. The rapid weight gain and confinement cause lameness/chronic pain, overcrowding causes respiratory diseases, and grain-based diets cause frequent digestive/health problems. "Cows sensibilities" express clear preferences for grazing, resting, social interaction, and space to roam which are all prevented on commercial feedlots. While it would be great if cows were living in nirvana, that's simply not true.
If interpersonal evaluation of "utility" is hard for humans, sweet Jesus, it is infinitely so for animals, who do NOT experience pain in the same way that humans do, because their experience of pain is remembered differently.
Haven't you seen the videos of "rescue dogs" on YouTube? Some have been cruelly tortured by humans, and yet they -- thanks to the infinite patience and love of their rescuers -- become happy, loving pets. Their memory of human abuse is erased by the newer images of human kindness; the animal LACKS INTEGRITY which in the human CANNOT be erased. In effect, it becomes a NEW animal by that kind treatment, and the old animal identity ceases.
NOT SO FOR HUMANS, for whom it is impossible to forget. That childhood beating, that childhood sexual abuse WILL find its way to some deformed vengeful expression.
> Haven't you seen the videos of "rescue dogs" on YouTube?
YouTube videos are a much weaker source of information than actual experience. My wife and I have taken in three rescue dogs now, and while it's quite true that they have bonded with us and trust us, it's also true that we have not erased all traces of their previous experiences.
I’m not sure about a dog’s memory versus learned behavior. Dogs definitely have memories. Dogs abused by a man or by a woman are often visibly uncomfortable with people of their abuser’s sex even though they have learned new behaviors of trust, etc. That doesn’t always change over time. Those dogs are not placed with people of the abuser’s sex. Dogs definitely have long term memory of past owners they have been separated from and are reunited with.
Interesting remark about a dog's ability to immediately distinguish gender. I think that's likely true. I'm also willing to concede that a dog may have some weak long-term memory. But do dogs have a sense of IDENTITY? I don't think so. The point is that humans have PERMANENT long-term memory; that's what constitutes a sense of integrity over a lifetime -- the root of our very identity. That inability to forget -- indeed the astonishing ability to nurse some imagined slight for a lifetime -- is what inspired Dostoyevsky in _Notes from Underground_ to call man "the ungrateful biped."
I suppose this is the major reason I reject all these definitions and just go with "Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff", and if people want to help others, let them figure out who to help. I help some people some time, and darned if I know why I make the decisions.
One minor example: I parked at the grocery store and heard an accordion being played well, some kind of dixieland / zydeco music. Made me smile. Two people there, apparently a couple, him playing, her holding up a sign with way too much writing begging for money. I gave her $5. The sign was a turn off, the music was the opposite, and I do not know how I would have reacted an hour or day later, or if I had been coming out of the grocery instead of on my way in.
That may be so, and it may help some people. I think the very concept is too wishy washy and ill-defined to be objective. I suspect that those who claim it was useful was because it forced them to think about what they wanted to do, but it did not provide any objective guidance.
There are obviously philosophical problems to doing it perfectly, which is what my post is about. But if I want to feed starving children, data on how much of my donation gets through to them is useful in deciding what charity to donate to.
I look for that too, but I don’t need effective altrusim to tell me that. Most of the effective altruism hoorah I’ve seen acts like it’s the best thing since sliced bread, like it’s going to organize charity and altruism and kindness and goodhearted jocularity all under one all-encompassing warm comfy blanket. One stop shopping to satisfy all your altruism needs from here to eternity.
Or something like that. It feels like someone trying to sell snake oil.
I think it's actually quite hard to evaluate the effectiveness of a charity. Doing so rigorously requires knowledge and effort. You don't need EA specifically to do that, but don't assume you can get the right answer by going with your gut.
I don't have enough money that putting a ton of effort into it makes any sense, and I also suspect that those with that much money hire others to do the work, and then we're off into third parties and who do you trust, and that puts me right back into thinking there's a lot of snake oil at hand. But if people want help parting with their money, I suppose charity takes a lot of different forms.
Aren't there other measures of utility that could be maximized? For example, you could maximize some combination of the mean and total utility. This combination has been tried out and I think has been referred to as variable value theory (see https://philpapers.org/rec/HURVAP). You still get issues if you only combine total and average utility, but might it be the case that a combination of total, average, and variance of utility would give a function to optimize that also satisfied our moral intuitions? If not, you could try a combination of total, average, variance, and skewness or some other higher moments of utility. Since there are infinitely many moments, I would guess that there must be some combination of them that would satisfy our moral intuitions. (Wikipedia has a nice article on moments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_(mathematics).)
Great article! However, I disagree with defining zero utility as the suicide point. People often live for others, are afraid of suicide, forget experiences that would make them more likely to commit suicide etc.
There are always people who seem to have a real knack for getting a kick out of life. They toil not, neither do they spin; but brother, I kid thee not, can ever they par-tay! They love them too some sex, drugs, and whatever music is "rebellious" in their era. Let us call them the young wastrels.
There are always too some people who, having long labored with their various gifts, have laid their burdens down, aged, infirm, ill, no longer even able much to enjoy the comforts and honors with which a grateful nation has garlanded them. Let us call them the old worthies.
And utilitarianism is, is it not? the moral philosophy that tells us it is good to take from the old worthies to give to the young wastrels.
Related to the thread started by Peter Sonia: all the problems in this post go away if we replace the idea that we're maximizing society's utility with the idea that I'm maximizing my utility, which includes caring for others, and you are maximizing your utility, which also includes caring for others. Often my utility function will line up nicely with yours because we're both people.
Take the paradox that we could increase society's average utility by killing all the unhappy people. That goes away: I don't want to kill unhappy people, you don't want to kill unhappy people, so that loses utility for both of us. And similarly for almost everyone we know. So killing unhappy people is a bad idea.
The problem with putting math to philosophy is that very small differences tend to grow out to huge numbers easily, and we have no systematic and justifiable way to determine what numbers to attribute to which stances.
I've seen this come up a lot with insects and other small animals. If trillions of bacteria die daily (quick Google), then that overwhelms every other calculation if we care about the utility of bacteria at even an extremely small amount. Farming kills quadrillions of insects yearly, and millions of small cute mammals if that's more your thing. If a small insect's life is worth 0.01 of a human, that means farming is net negative on utils even if all humans die for lack of it. Even if an insect's life is worth 0.000001 of a human's life, insects will still be more important than humans. You would have to put individual insect life at some extreme low level of utils to not overwhelm every other calculation involving humans.
At that point you might as well say that insects don't have utility. Or, as I suspect is what actually happens, people use an internal intuitive sense of how much insects (or whatever non-human life) matters and fudges the numbers to match. If you can rate all insect life against all human life and it comes to a nice relatively close fraction in the direction you want, you can make any moral argument you want with it.
I also read recently someone talking about dust mites. That to create the most positive utility, you should actively farm billions of dust mites who live their happy little short lives and produce utility. Even at very very small amounts of utility per mite, any human can farm enough of them to outweigh their own costs against utility as a human. So even someone who would otherwise be a vegetarian can eat lots of meat and grow lots of dust mites and be a good person! Similarly, any talk of future beings, including humans, overwhelms the possible number of current humans. All the humans that live over the next 200 years is a much larger number than the number of humans alive today, and if it isn't, that just means preventing whatever catastrophe that stopped humans from being born is worth millions of years of generations of humans (which is going to calculate out to a whole lot of utils in any system). That's repugnant conclusion territory.
So I end up rejecting utilitarianism itself. It's unworkable in any systematic fashion. It's barely workable in discreet situations due to unknown inputs and the problems of assigning numbers/utils to moral problems. How could you even approach the question "How many utils was the election of Donald Trump in 2024 worth?" There are so many known and unknown inputs that it would be one of the hardest math problems already, even if the amount of utils for specific people and situations within that question were known. We don't even know if the total is positive or negative!
But that's a big difficult question with lots of inputs. Can utilitarianism answer a much smaller question? What's the result in utils of a college professor giving a higher grade to a student who has sex with them? Deontology has an easy, predictable, and consistent answer to that question. We again don't know whether the sum of the utilitarian equation is even positive or negative, and can fudge the numbers on any of the inputs to get it the direction we want.
I am an anti-natalist a la David Benatar. That it is better "never to have been." Meaning, the utility summed over every individual life (human or non-human) is negative. Therefore to maximize utility, means no life should be brought into being.
Zero living things guarantees max utility (total or average.) Sounds crazy but the logic is unassailable.
If you accept the premise. The clearest evidence you have of what other people believe the value of their lives to be is how few people kill themselves.
I observe that you, for example, have not acted on your unassailable logic.
> The clearest evidence you have of what other people believe the value of their lives to be is how few people kill themselves.
Are you saying that you can't see the distinction between not being born at all vs killing oneself after being born ?
"No parent should have to bury their child." - Theoden King in Lord of The Rings
But I think most fathers don't even think about the extra 5 children they could have had but did not.
But it does raise a good question about how can we make anti-natalist walk the talk.
One way I think is when humanity invents some technology that can bring a dead person back to life at some time in future. Will an anti-natalist be willing to pay even a modest sum to participate in this program ?
People who think being alive is better than being dead be willing to pay a fortune for participation in such a program ?
On a side note, I think life is a bit like a Blackjack table where your probability of winning is very high the longer you play, the more you win, but also with probability 1, the dealer at some unexpected point takes out a gun and shoots you in the head. You also have the option of doing this to yourself.
As a by stander, if you are asked if you want to sit at this table you are likely going to say no. But once you are at the table you would rather take your chances and play as long as you can until the dealer shoots you.
"No parent should have to bury their child." - Theoden King in Lord of The Rings
A quote from the movie, not Tolkien's book. A distinction work making.
The decision of whether to have a kid depends on the net value to the parent, only part of which is the parent's value for the potential kid's happiness. The decision of whether to live is made by the person whose life is being evaluated.
"Will an anti-natalist be willing to pay even a modest sum to participate in this program ?"
As it happens, I have paid a more than modest sum to Alcor for a slim probability of being brought back to life.
I live a fairly good life, way above global average in nearly all relevant dimensions. Yet I wish I had not been born. But now that I exist, I have an interest in my continued existence. I could choose to stop existing but I find the prospect of not existing worse than continuing to live — for now. If and when my existence becomes too painful, I would then choose to stop existing.
I am persuaded by Benatar’s argument that even though lives are not worth creating, most are worth continuing. He distinguishes between judging whether a life is worth starting (from an impersonal, pre-existence perspective) versus judging if it's worth continuing (from the perspective of someone already alive with interests).
It can simultaneously be true that it would have been better never to have existed and yet also be true that, once existing, it's better to continue existing. The harm of coming into existence is distinct from the harm of ceasing to exist once one is already here.
I am pro-natalist (go Bryan Caplan!), but I don't think the appeal to suicide works well against the anti-natalist position because suicidality is heavily selected against evolutionarily. Hypothetically, if it were true that human life is not worth living, then the humans rational enough to realize/act on that would kill themselves and leave only the humans with an irrational attachment to their own life. Thus, shouldn't we expect that most humans will not kill themselves irrespective of an objective evaluation of their lives? To be clear, the evolutionary appeal merely undercuts the evidential value of the lack of suicide.
Which just proves that utility is not 100% the result of rationality. I believe Dr Friedman is asserting that because Atanu Dey does not *act* like it's better not to have been, we must therefore assume that life does provide them with positive utility.
That our choices are affected by natural selection merely means that our utility is too. That may itself be a mild argument against effective altruism, though not an argument there is any way to refute. I give to malaria nets but I give way more to the arts, what can I say?
Yes, life has provided me with net positive utility -- so far. If I were to die painlessly in sleep one of these day without any foreknowledge of that event, I wouldn't mind.
How could I mind? Death and life are disjoint sets with no common elements. As Epicurious noted, "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not."
However, I can well imagine developing metastatic prostate cancer and living in agony for a few months before the end. If I had never come into existence, I would not have missed the net positive utility that I have had so far. But I fear that at the final analysis, it will net utility may be hugely negative.
My claim was not that utility is the result of rationality or that utility is unrelated to natural selection. My claim was that natural selection would make it so that normal humans would choose not to kill themselves even if doing so would maximize their utility. Therefore, we would expect most humans (or basically all animals for that matter) to have low levels of suicidality irrespective of how enjoyable their lives were. Since low suicidality is compatible with human lives being negative utility, it is perhaps only weak evidence against the hypothesis of negative utility lives.
Could you also clarify how any of this is a mild argument against effective altruism? I don't see how you got there.
The only practical way to define utility is via behavior. It makes no sense to say I “value” my death more than I do my life if I am not willing to end my life (neglecting transaction costs, as Dr Friedman says, though even without that proviso all you can say is that apparently I value those costs plus my life more than I value my death).
Regarding the mild argument I just meant that apparently my own utility calculus values some non-EA-approved donations more than EA-approved ones, and no amount of logical argument is likely to sway me.
I’m more attracted by average utility than by total utility, but I doubt that either of them represents The Answer (which is of course 42). I see life as a game, to be played as long as you enjoy playing, and I’d rather be dead than have a life of constant suffering. But that’s just my preference, and other people have different preferences. If you’re in the position of making decisions for other people, you don’t know what their preferences are, but you can bet that they all have somewhat different preferences. As for cows, you can’t even ask them what their preferences are.
Reading the comments, 31 so far, I am struck by the way tribalism inserts itself into a philosophical discussion. Multiple people identify effective altruists and/or utilitarianism with blue tribe/central planning socialism/the enemy.
I did not make this conflation (though you didn't name names, David).
Red, blue, or tutti-frutti, I say that all altruists and utilitarians are an infarction in the bowels of nescience.
By the by, as a public service, I release all my rhetorical flourishes unto all -- CC0.
As someone who grew up around farm animals, I have been making this argument about vegetarianism for 20 years. Cows are generally living their best life and it's good they exist
So far, 100% of people who have heard this argument are unconvinced. Normal people value the counterfactual life at zero generally
I just used my sous vide device to make shredded beef with BBQ sauce for my son. I have done it before with pork but he decided he would rather have beef because cows have a happier life than factory farmed pigs. He thinks the pork tasted a little better, wants me to make him more of the beef.
So not 100%.
The Dalai Lama is supposed to have said, it's better to eat elephants rather than cows because elephants are bigger. But I would rather not eat meat than eat elephant or whale. It is best to eat fish because they suffer the least being not very intelligent.
What if the concepts of "total utility" and "average utility" simply aren't valid to begin with, because it's not valid to add together utilities of different people (or other beings)? What if the best we can do is to try to make individual interactions positive sum--which would mean making them voluntary, so they only occur if both parties judge that the interaction makes them better off?
I discuss some of this in https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/utility-part-ii
In that article, you say:
"we not only can make interpersonal utility comparisons we routinely do make them, even if not very well."
I agree with this with one further specification: we do it in cases where we know the other people involved reasonably well, so we can make reasonable guesses about what the benefits and costs to them are of various possible actions. Your examples were a parent making decisions that affect multiple children, deciding which friend to give a gift to, and signaling our preferences with cues like tone of voice and facial expressions.
But the general theory of utilitarianism does not restrict itself to such cases. It claims to provide a framework by which a person can make such utility comparisons across an entire society, involving large numbers of people (hundreds of millions or billions), the vast majority of which they have no personal knowledge of and hence can't apply the sorts of heuristics you describe. So the basis you give for making interpersonal utility comparisons is no longer there.
We can do it pretty well for people we know well. But other people are similar enough to people we know well, including ourselves, so that we can do it, although less well, for people we don't know. I don't have to know someone well to be pretty sure he would rather be fed than hungry, that he would rather not be burnt alive, and even that he would rather be hungry for a day and not burnt alive than be fed for that day then burnt alive.
> other people are similar enough to people we know well, including ourselves
I disagree with this as a general claim. There are particular aspects in which there is enough similarity--for example, preferring stubbing one's toe to being tortured, to use your example--but those are easy cases. I don't think the "similar enough" claim holds for all cases. I don't think the range of human variation is narrow enough in all respects to support such a claim.
From which it follows that we cannot do it perfectly, not that we cannot do it.
I'm not sure I understand. If your basis for claiming that we can do it (not perfectly, but "can") is "other people are similar enough", then if other people are *not* similar enough, then you can't do it, correct?
Suppose you have two pets. One has a potentially-fatal illness; the other has developed immunity. The first could be saved by extracting antibodies from the second; this would do no lasting harm to the second, but the needle-prick to draw blood would cause a moment of slight pain. Do you really think there's no fact of the matter as to whether the benefit to the first individual (of saving their life) outweighs the cost to the second (of a pin-prick)?
If the second pet had the intelligence to choose, would they voluntarily donate the antibodies? People undergo short term pain all the time to help others. In such cases there's no third party adding utilities and computing a net gain or loss. The party who has the choice of undergoing the short term pain or not makes the choice, based on whether they believe it's worth it. I'm certainly not saying that can't be done. But it's very different from someone who has no skin in the game themselves presuming to balance the utilities of others.
Suppose the animal is selfish, and doesn't care at all for the other. It may still be *true* (obvious, even) that the gain to the other would be more than the cost to them.
I think there are good practical reasons to give people liberal rights to bodily integrity, so no-one else has a *right* to, say, take my kidney and give it to a dialysis patient who needs it more. (Ideally, we'd have organ markets so we weren't so reliant on extreme altruism to make such exchanges happen.) But it may still be quite plainly *true* that the dialysis patient would benefit more from my kidney. What sorts of rights and powers we're willing to give people is a separate question from whether concepts like "average utility" are "valid", or have meaningful application.
> Suppose the animal is selfish, and doesn't care at all for the other. It may still be *true* (obvious, even) that the gain to the other would be more than the cost to them.
On what basis?
> What sorts of rights and powers we're willing to give people is a separate question from whether concepts like "average utility" are "valid", or have meaningful application
I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is, it's still not an argument that concepts like "average utility" actually *are* valid.
Basically, your argument is that it's "just obvious" that, for example, the gain to the first pet in your example is greater than the loss to the second. But that's not an argument. It' s just an assertion of the conclusion you want.
Basing such claims on the actual choices made by people in appropriate situations avoids that problem, because what people actually do can be observed independently of any claims about "utility". But trying to extend this to hypothetical situations, particularly hypothetical situations that involve very difficult tradeoffs (much more difficult than the tradeoff in your pet example) is fraught with problems, to which I don't think anyone has good solutions.
I'm suggesting a counterexample to the "interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible in the absence of voluntary agreement" view.
Here's another (from Derek Parfit): if one (otherwise happy and healthy) person is threated with decapitation, and another with a papercut, the papercut is the lesser of the two harms.
These claims follow from any sensible theory of well-being, which includes pleasure and pain as parts. See: https://www.utilitarianism.net/theories-of-well-being/
Death robs one of much future pleasure (in the cases under discussion - not euthanasia candidates); a pinprick or papercut are trivial pains that are objectively less significant by comparison.
Any view that insists that there's *no fact of the matter* as to which person was harmed more (whenever neither would voluntarily, altruistically sacrifice for the other) has thereby been reduced to absurdity.
You're certainly free to deny this, just like you're free to deny that the external world exists (maybe you're just a brain in a vat). The two views strike me as roughly comparable in absurdity. Here's a third: maybe you're the only conscious person, and everybody else are automata. After all, all you can observe are people's bodies and related physical phenomena (maybe neurons firing, etc., from certain brain scans). You can't *prove* that there are any "lights on inside". Still, I suggest, it would be plainly absurd to accept such solipsism. Rational thought in philosophy requires some sensitivity to (and attempt to minimize commitment to) absurdity.
> if one (otherwise happy and healthy) person is threated with decapitation, and another with a papercut, the papercut is the lesser of the two harms.
I'm not disputing that this claim works fine for that particular case, and other easy cases. But those cases aren't a problem, precisely because they're the easy cases. It's the hard cases that cause the problem, and they're hard *because* it's no longer "obvious" which of the two harms is worse. And those hard cases are what the concepts of "total utility" and "average utility" claim to be able to handle on the same basis as the easy ones. That is the claim I'm disputing. I don't think the "obvious" assignments of utility that cover the easy cases extend to the hard cases; in the hard cases, there simply is *no* good objective rule for deciding which harm is worse. The best we can do is to leave it up to the people who are actually stuck in those situations and have to live with the consequences to decide as best they can.
He has addressed this in other writings. It is clear that it is valid to add or quantitatively compare utilities of different people. If it weren't valid then any form of justice would fail to work and be completely arbitrary. The fact of the matter is that while our systems of justice over the ages have been varying degrees of unjust and imperfect, they have for the most part been effective to some degree on reducing crime in society.
Many austrian school folks seem to have been convinced that since value is subjective, its also secret and incomparable. That simply isn't the case. We humans are enormously similar in almost every way. We have similar genetics, similar upbringing, and similar behavior. It would be irrational to assume anything but that we also have similar internal feelings and values. In fact, we can even get more information about this because can ASK people about their feelings and values. It seems to me that this belief that we cannot compare utility between people is invented solely to justify preconceived beliefs that are threatened by utilitarian thought, and have no logical or empirical justification whatsoever.
In the vast majority of cases, limiting interaction to the voluntary kind is almost surely the most likely to maximize total utility. However, the mere possibility of being able to increase utility further through non-voluntary means shouldn't be religiously fought against. Its a truth that should be recognized for what it is. And just because the possibility exists doesn't mean we have a good method to execute on it. Market behavior is exceptionally well understood at a microeconomic level. Methods of executing on things like welfare are far less well understood and therefore attempts to that effect are much less likely to be beneficial. That's the fact you should be talking about, rather than some imaginary idea that we have no information about other humans.
I agree. More generally, I think it is a mistake to use bad arguments to defend libertarian conclusions. Either there are good arguments we could use instead or we shouldn't be defending the conclusions.
One obvious conclusion from utilitarianism is redistribution from rich to poor. That is a motive for libertarians to claim that utility is not interpersonally comparable. A better argument is that institutions to redistribute income do not reliably transfer from rich to poor, are costly for both incentive and rent seeking reasons, and to point out that the enormous reduction in the world population of very poor people over the past century was due not to redistribution bit to the increased productivity due in part to the shift towards private property rules, with China after Mao the most striking example.
That is the approach I took in my first book and have tried to take since.
I agree with what you say here as far as the practical consequences of different approaches is concerned.
What those practical consequences amount to, in terms of this discussion, is that even if there is some abstract sense in which "total utility" or "average utility" can be meaningfully defined over an entire society, based on some concept of interpersonal utliity comparisons, no human beings can be trusted to actually use such concepts and make such comparisons on the scale of an entire society. So libertarians have good practical grounds for not allowing any human beings to have the power to do such things.
On the contrary, every human being has the power to decide what he will do on the basis of his best estimate of the effect of his actions.
Why do you, and other commenters, insist on reading a discussion of what people ought to do as an argument for using the state to make them do it? You might as well interpret a discussion of how individuals should choose what job to take as an argument for having the government assign people to jobs.
I agree that utilitarianism can be used by individuals to make decisions about how to use their own resources, not just by people in power to make decisions about how to use the resources of others that they commandeer.
My misgivings about the underlying concepts of "total utility" and "average utility" apply to the former case as well as the latter.
That said, the "libertarian conclusions" that you say bad arguments should not be used to defend (and I agree with that) include conclusions about institutions like governments, not just individual action (or individual actions grouped collectively, such as a charity that is funded with voluntary contributions). Both types of institutions do redistribution of resources, for example.
Indeed, the post by Governology that you responded to explicitly brought out "the mere possibility of being able to increase utility further through non-voluntary means" as an alternative to be considered, and that should be argued against on practical grounds. So it seems reasonable to interpret your statement that bad arguments should not be used to defend libertarian conclusions as responding to that possibility. And that possibility *is* using the state to make people do things they wouldn't do voluntarily.
> the mere possibility of being able to increase utility further through non-voluntary means shouldn't be religiously fought against
This is a much weaker claim than the claim utilitarians make using the concepts of "total utility" and "average utility".
However, even in this form, I'm not sure I agree with it as a practical matter, though of course it is possible in principle. The problem as I see it is one of trust. Suppose there is a "mere possibility" that harvesting a healthy person's organs without their consent will increase total utility. Who can we trust to make that judgment? If I'm one of the people whose organs might be harvested without my consent, I don't trust ahy human being to make that judgment. And I suspect most people in a country like the US would agree with me (a country like China is another matter, but that just underscores the point I've made elsewhere in this discussion, that the range of human values is too wide to support a claim that everyone is similar enough for interpersonal utility comparisons to work in the general case). I would rather live in a society in which I have an absolute right not to have my organs harvested without my consent, even if there's a tiny in principle chance that it might increase utility.
Trust is a problem. But I don't think its one that's unique to distribution of welfare or any other application of force. Any application of force has this trust problem. I would imagine one of the least contentious thing I could suggest to you is that a nation should defend itself from the attacks of other nations, and that a government military is likely the most reliable battle-tested method of doing so. However, a military requires taxes and taxes require redistribution of wealth (from the people to the military). Who can we trust to do that?
The answer is that our methods are poor, but they work well enough for most nations to be able to defend themselves over long periods of time. The efficiency might be low, but it works better than any other method we have tried.
So when you ask who to trust, the question I would prefer be asked is: is the best system you can think of for trusting someone to do the thing in question better or worse than not doing it at all? It depends on the thing in question and depends what you think is the best system of trust.
> Any application of force has this trust problem.
I agree. And I think that is one argument for the libertarian non-aggression principle.
> I would imagine one of the least contentious thing I could suggest to you is that a nation should defend itself from the attacks of other nations, and that a government military is likely the most reliable battle-tested method of doing so. However, a military requires taxes and taxes require redistribution of wealth (from the people to the military). Who can we trust to do that?
In a fully libertarian country, people would voluntarily pay for national defense as a service because it benefits them. So it's not strictly true that a military requires taxes--it's at least possible to fund it through voluntary payments. Historically, it's not unknown to have privately owned military forces that were at least comparable to those possessed by nation states; for example, in both the American Revolution and the War of 1812, privateers (privately owned warships given licenses by the US government to attack British merchant ships) were a significant contribution to the US war effort.
David Friedman has pointed out that funding national defense with voluntary payments faces a large public good problem, which might be enough of a reason to justify some kind of coercive taxation.
As for the trust issue, the US addresses it by placing limits on how the government can use the military. Such limits aren't perfect, but they are a recognition of the trust problem and an attempt to address it. Note that a military that is strictly for the purpose of national defense is already limited in purpose and scope, which in itself limits the scope of the trust issue. National defense means using force against people attacking the country, not the country's citizens. That's a fairly easy bright line to judge by.
> In a fully libertarian country, people would voluntarily pay for national defense as a service because it benefits them.
Yes, but as you mentioned in a later paragraph, there is a public good problem: the free rider problem. You should expect something like national defense to be underfunded because of the free rider problem.
> privateers (privately owned warships given licenses by the US government to attack British merchant ships)
This is not national defense, but piracy. I don't know if you could find anyone who thinks the industry of theft is under-invested in.
> a military that is strictly for the purpose of national defense is already limited in purpose and scope
Yes, that is a wise limitation, and seems to have worked quite well.
In any case, I certainly agree that well-structured limitations can go a long way to mitigate trust problems. I think this is true in many areas.
In the US case, the initial constraint was a small professional army and an enormous militia. The theory, as I interpret it, was that the militia made up in size for its low amateur quality and if the army tried to take over they would be outnumbered a hundred to one by the militia.
> This is not national defense, but piracy.
No, it isn't. The privateers had the same legal status as US warships owned and operated by the US government; that was the whole point of getting licenses (actually they were called letters of marque) from the US government. Having your country's warships attack an enemy country's merchant shipping is not piracy under any legal system I'm aware of.
TBH I'm forever lost at people trying to extend rights to non-humans. Regardless how you feel about objects, utilitarians should care about people more hence anything that makes meat cost more or deprives people liberty over an object they own would be immoral. If I want to light my gold fish on fire, that's my business, they aren't people. There is no utilitarian function, beyond taste which I assume isn't counted, where utility goes up jailing me for said BBQ
Utilitarianism isn't a theory of rights but of how one should act. Suppose you have an opportunity to do something that will prevent a hundred dogs from dying in pain at the cost of making one human a dollar poorer, no rights involved — it wasn't a dollar he had a right to. Do you do it? Do you think better of someone who does than of someone who doesn't, view him as a better person?
Do I, no. You are anthropomorphizing dogs rather than treating them as objects. I wouldn't make that guy a dollar poorer to save a billion bacteria, millions of blades of grass, thousands of cockroaches, nor sand on the beach I compact stepping on it. People love their cars to, that does not mean we should defer to cars over people.
That is not a critique of utilitarianism unto itself, it's a critique of denying humans their dignity and subordinating them to non-humans.
I have no place for utilitarianism even among people but expanding it's morality to caring about screwdrivers is ludicrous.
I am treating dogs as what they are, neither humans nor objects. You are treating dogs as screwdrivers, which they are not.
I am treating them as non-humans which is exactly what they are and believe it's intrinsically immoral to deny humans their dignity subordinating their rights to non-humans.
I get this is just a value call but likewise "dogs aren't objects" isn't defensible sans the most ardent Buddhist or vegan. At best you could make an argument "it's a living being, screwdrivers aren't" but so are plants, plants responds to negative physical stimuli (i.e. "pain"), and adjust their behavior to prevent (i.e. memory) yet no one is going to prison for neglectfully killing their houseplant. Likewise putting earthworms on fishing hooks (though some people are now attempting to grant lobsters human rights and no I'm not joking) or poisoning rats. The word "humane" implies humanity hence there is no way to humanely kill dogs, they are simply killed or butchered.
I remember something once Russ Roberts said, and Arnold Klink echoed recently, that always stuck in my craw, "There is no greater crime that denying a fellow human their dignity and moral equivalence as an equal", anthropomorphizing and then subsuming humans to it is that crime. Once again there is no moral utility maximizing function that should account for the untold trillions of bacteria we intentionally harm just because "they are alive".
This reminds me of antinatalism, a term I'd never heard of until last night when I read Mr. Bartkus's manifesto (it's a hobby of mine to always read manifestos and watch source videos) whose utilitarian rational for blowing up the IFV clinic was that it was utility net positive because it prevented the nonconsensual, hence immoral, creation of millions of people. And I'd argue even that was more moral as non existent future potential people, while likewise shouldn't have any rights, def should have more than a dog.
You keep putting it in terms of rights instead of in terms of how one ought to act. Suppose I have a choice between giving a dollar to a beggar and spending it buying food for local feral cats. If I spend it on the cats am I "denying a fellow human their dignity and moral equivalence as an equal"?
I think you are in a utilitarian, not individual liberty, sense as, at least my understanding of utilitarianism which I admit might be wrong, is "rights" and "ought to act" are equivalent in practice since each person ought to act in a way to increase universal utility and that would be within a framework of a right to act a certain way hence the appropriate act would be identical regardless of taste as it's not about preference but calculations, even if back of the napkin / informal.
You are basically saying "I find you worth less than the wellbeing a cat" which is dehumanizing. Given you are supposed to be increasing universal utility, that is wrong as that beggar, hence all of humanity in the aggregate, will be infinitesimal small, maybe unmeasurably so, better off with that dollar whereas nothing you do for a non-human, whether it be a cat or a pet rock or your favorite chair will increase universal utility by any amount. I am conceding that YOUR utility doesn't count here (I forget the name for it, the utilitarian flaw where the belief anything you do is good because it makes YOU happier and your happiness increases the aggregate more than that of your victim decreases it as you are part of that pool; that's a cop out in my mind hence I disregard that line of argument; the Christian Gospel of Wealth equiv) nor the line of thought "well maybe five other people will be happier the fact I helped the cat" as likewise that makes utilitarianism simply a popularity contest as it's basically just an expansion of previous concession to some of your friends to justify harming others for your entertainment.
Property rights are the right of humans to own property, and not rights that property has.
Should not animal rights be treated the same, the right to own animals, not the rights animals have?
Just a thought. I said my main piece earlier, and it comes out to about the same -- what should humans put up with regarding what humans do to animals? Since humans can never know what animals think of their treatment by humans or other animals, it seems like a lot of argy bargy over something unknowable.
If I'm not mistaken, torturing animals for no reason has been either illegal or considered immortal in most societies, ancient and modern. That isn't an argument against your position, but it is worth noting that yours is an extremely unusual one.
*immoral, not immortal, obviously
Substack has edit function, just hit edit
As far as I can tell, it is not an option on the mobile application, which is where I left this comment. Not sure why that is!
Ahh, I just use a browser on mobile device, never even knew an app existed lol
The same reasons you would give rights to powerless people are the reasons you would want to give rights to animals. If you become powerless, you will want those rights. The vast majority of people care more about other humans than animals, and perhaps that is what is right. But if you enjoy lighting gold fishes on fire, I would advocate running you out of town on a rail.
One argument for your position, one I think I got from James Donald, is that there is a pattern to human moral sentiments, that the sort of person who enjoys lighting goldfish on fire is also the sort of person who cannot be trusted not to cheat or rob his human neighbors, given the opportunity. We take the former as evidence for the latter.
I don't disagree but that's a different discussion that utilitarianism and it's duty towards certain actions.
People who enjoy lighting their video game villagers on fire are in that same spectrum but I don't think we should be jailing people for making suboptimal video games character designs and then "harming" them for fun. Popular mods for the Sims include creating natural disasters to hurt them and watch them all "suffer". And this slippery slope (anthropomorphizing of animals) is already start to slide towards "AI" and will continue to do do if we don't quit denying humans their dignity and supremacy.
There are pro social mechanisms that should be used to deal with that such a shame, peer pressure, and social.exclusion, not the law (at least in a libertarian world) nor any moral framework.
Some people are just reprehensible people to our own personal sense of taste but that does been jail them sans any actual harm.
Where in the post we are discussing did I argue for (or against) jailing people? Why do commenters assume that any argument about what people should do must be an argument for forcing them to do it?
A discussion of rights always implies jail or some sort of state sanctioned punishment because that's what a violation of rights does. If animals have rights, then you should (and do) jail people for violating those rights.
When people talk about animal rights they don't mean how they treat their own animals, i.e. "ought or preference", they mean as a framework for forcing others to treat their animals in a way contrary to how they might wish via force of law.
Discussions of "ought" don't involve rights, i.e. you shouldn't run your engine without oil but that doesn't mean cars have rights. And to circle back to the beginning that is important because for a utilitarian to justify harming people by helping animals, because said help decreasing aggregate utility, they have to do some mental gymnastics which result in anthropomorphizing animals (to give animals a balancing utility) but in doing so it naturally creates a prima facie legal duty to protect those imaginary rights so "other people ought not leave their dog unattended in a car for five seconds" becomes "felony animal endangerment, five years in prison with a mandatory three" but running into the gas station to grab a soda all because you feel humans should subsume themselves to a dog.
Where in the post you are commenting on did I say anything about animal rights?
No, because invalids and their like are people. I don't cry for rocks or dead little COVID-19 virii either.
Read David's response to me and you'll understand my position better.
And get that and I don't even disagree on a personal taste matter but that's different than a utilitarian duty or denying people, up until state sanctioned death, the use of their property as they see fit sans harming their neighbor.
Just because I'd advocate using social mechanisms (i.e. peer pressure, disassociation, boycotts, etc) to run people who like kpop out of town doesn't mean that's a utilitarian duty nor should be make kpop, or listening to it, illegal and as such, a capital offense.
Animals aren't human and are my property, what I do with them, no matter how much you find it distasteful, doesn't make me nor my rights, subordinate to them nor on the utilitarian side do they factor in at all outside negatively. TBH if I was a utilitarian, and I'm not, I don't think I could even morally justify owning pets.
Property rights don't exist in a vacuum. Something must define and defend them.
Why can humans not be property along with animals? The answer is they can and they have been property. But should they be? That is the question to answer. "Property" is also one extreme end of a continuum. For example, if you have a child, is that child your property? According to current law, the answer is neither yes nor no. The child has rights, but not as many as an adult, and the parent has rights over the child that they wouldn't have over an adult. But you are not allowed to light your children on fire.
The same is true for animals, animal cruelty and abuse are not currently your legal right. So animals, in current law, are not 100% your property but do have rights. Should they? I believe so for reasons I've already mentioned. Why do you think they should not?
The actual practical problem with EA is that it's fundamentally an attempt to centrally calculate utility and thus suffers from the same lack of local knowledge, and perverse incentives, problems as all forms of central planning.
Do you ever make donations to charity? Doing so faces the same problem, as do lots of other decision problems we face. Effective altruism is an attempt to do it in a more organized fashion.
The whole *raison d'être* of EA is that most charities are incredibly ineffective.
Unfortunately, EA fails to address the underlying reason for this:
https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/organizational-metabolism-and-the-for-profit-advantage
The most obvious way I see to satisfy the goal of organizing charity to enjoy its coordination benefits, and the goal of minimizing corruption due to highly centralized coordination, is to have multiple organizations with the same goal as EA. Each employs the calculation it thinks is best; individuals can subscribe (donate) to the organization whose formula they most agree with.
This seems pretty similar to your sketch of rights enforcement agencies in TMoF, if I'm not mistaken.
EA is a movement not an organization. Within that movement there is a good deal of disagreement. Give Well is an organization within that movement. I am not sure if it has any equally prominent competitors — perhaps the people who argue that controlling AI is the highest priority — but I agree it should.
My mistake - I confused GW with EA. (Although I think other people confuse them as well.)
Bonus! In ONE article I get the TWO things that IRRITATE ME the most: Altruism and Utilitarianism.
Who could be so lucky, Leo Rosten?
• Altruism, effective flavor: Who's to say that these "effective" donations don't go into the hands of the picayune warlords in Africa who confiscate them to feed their armies, to hold them over their miserable citizens like a Pavlovian chunk of meat? Those countries are PERPETUATED in their abysmal wretchedness by these donations, which exist PRIMARILY to assuage the guilty conscience of the givers, not to fix root causes. Ahhh, don't it feel GOOD to be righteous!
• Utilitarianism: First, its pair of obvious (supposedly, since unmentioned) showstoppers. That is, the IMPOSSIBILITY of interpersonal comparisons, and the IMPOSSIBILITY of evaluating a "utility" until it is realized in the future. But more irritatingly: The game theorists take a flying leap into the mud hole of utilitarianism and just squeal and wallow all day long. Problem? Just like all universalist theorists, they assume the WHOLE WORLD wants to play the game. Well, BANG! THEY DON'T. As Nozick (not that I defend his AS&U) proved in his experiment in having his students randomly assign their own grades, the VERY SETUP of the game guarantees a "freely chosen" egalitarian distribution by these constitutionally constrained "rational players."
I believe that whether the expenditure is something that can be appropriated by kleptocrats is one of the things the effective altruism people try to look at. How much attention have you given to their efforts?
My response to your point about utilitarianism is in https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/utility-part-ii
Thanks, David, BUT...
• Giving Rule #1: The GREATER the distance between giver & recipient, the LESS the communal bond created by the exchange (e.g., giving to Africans).
• Giving Rule #2: The GREATER the inequality between giver & recipient, the GREATER the communal bond created by the exchange (e.g., the gift from a skilled surgeon).
But notice: "altruism" is the WRONG term; my observations are inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre's _Dependent Rational Animals_. We DO depend on each other, but NOT in an altruistic way, which makes universalist egalitarian assumptions.
As for utilitarianism: Your claim that economists CAN make interpersonal comparisons cuts no ice and holds no water, mainly as it's reckoned from what someone WOULD give for a more valuable utility. No market pricing magic can measure SATISFACTION, which is the kernel of the problem.
But the REAL problem with utilitarianism (AND game theory as well) is the "Urlagerfeuer" problem; that is, the "original campfire," whether in some real distant mythical land or in some lame-gamey "heuristic" these supposedly "rational players" gathered in a ring and yakked their way to a Pareto optimum. The problem is that if you take even ONE STEP into this fantasy, you are committed to finding an agency to enforce UNIVERSAL RULES.
**Understand this one thing: NO GOVERNMENT CAN ENFORCE UNIVERSAL RULES.**
Good god, has Hume's is/ought distinction been flushed down the commode? -- By (HAW HAW gulp HA HOOT) Sam Harris, I suppose? Yes, universal rules of conflict deterrence DO exist, but only a small community -- no larger than about 250K citizens -- can do a workable pretense of it.
https://store.mises.org/Constitution-of-Non-state-Government-Field-Guide-to-Texas-Secession-P11264.aspx
> I believe that whether the expenditure is something that can be appropriated by kleptocrats is one of the things the effective altruism people try to look at.
Supposedly. From rumors I've heard, there's a lot of sex for positive reviews of one's charity going on under cover of "polyamory".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2TZluZDtQI
> IMPOSSIBILITY of interpersonal comparisons
Every person who has insisted on the impossibility of comparing utility between people has provided no logical or empirical support support. This seems to be a premise, not a conclusion. Do you have any logical or empirical support for what your assertion?
You tell me how ONE PERSON's subjective, emotional, whimsical feeling of SATISFACTION can be quantified against that of someone else, even before getting to the fantasy of doing that for groups.
Asking me to prove my position is not proof of yours. I'm happy to answer your question after you answer mine.
Get happy, because there's no proving a negative, let alone an IMPOSSIBILITY.
There are many proofs of impossibility, look at the discipline of math and physics. An example is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem
One might not believe in god because they have never seen god, and have never seen evidence of anything where god is the most likely explanation. So I'm to assume that you don't believe utility can be compared between people because you personally have not thought of a plausible way one might do it, is that what you're saying? If true, it is only reasonable to believe it unlikely that we can compare utility between people, but it is unreasonable to assert that it is impossible. Impossibility must be proven, only agnosticism can be assumed without logical or empirical backing.
To your question, there are many things we can know about peoples' utility. We can know for certain between two options which a person value more or less (by asking them and also by viewing their behavior). We also can also know what someone's baseline is, and we can ask them what they "like" or "dislike" (ie which things they value more or less than their baseline). We can compare peoples' baselines, and we can compare people's likes and dislikes. We can compare peoples' rankings of which options they prefer over which other options.
Do you dispute any of this? None of this so far is comparing the magnitude of two peoples' utilities.
There are also ways of measuring people's experience. We can measure pain and pleasure as experienced in the brain. We can observe what chemicals and electrical signals happen in various circumstances across people. We can and do observe that the way these things happen between most people (ie healthy people) is incredibly similar. Dopamine responses, serotonin responses, norepinephrine responses, etc are all quite comparable between people. And these physical brain behaviors correlate to people's actual behavior. Whether someone is energized, enthused, experiencing pleasure or pain, we can see that on people's faces and in their behavior.
You can say: "Well but we can't know that someone is experiencing 100 times the pleasure of someone else just because their behavior is very similar. They may simply have a different scale for their responses."
And that's true enough. The one thing we don't know how to observe is people's lived experience. The qualia of life. The hard question of consciousness and the phenomenal experience are well known to be impenetrable mysteries that seem out of reach of empirical science.
However, there is a logical reason to believe that these experiences are similar: our similar construction. If you had a pool ball factory pumping out pool balls, you would predict that the vast majority of those pool balls had nearly identical responses when hit with a cue ball on table. Right? Well, humans are simply complex machines. And while two humans aren't as similar as two identically produced pool balls, there are many many similarities between people, far more similarities than differences. So the logical assumption to make is that the unobservable qualia we experience is more similar than not. Without additional information or logical backing, that is the only assumption that seems reasonable to make.
You are instead assuming the opposite, that qualia between people is likely to be so different between people that an assumption of similarity is likely to result in more harmful conclusions than helpful ones. This is the assumption I am challenging you to give support for.
You: " 'Well but we can't know that someone is experiencing 100 times the pleasure of someone else just because their behavior is very similar. They may simply have a different scale for their responses.' And that's true enough. The one thing we don't know how to observe is people's lived experience."
THANKS FOR THE Q.E.D.
I'm glad you posted this. I've been trying to bring up these ideas (about animals) with my normal conversation partners and they all look at me like I speaking a foreign language. On what grounds is a cow's life not worth living? Is it just because they are killed in the end? We all die, and many humans are basically killed from the interventions used on them in the end. Few would say their lives were not worth living, even if they died at a relatively young age. Or consider wild animals, most of whom die a violent or otherwise very unpleasant death. Surely we wouldn't say their lives were not worth living or have zero (or negative) value.
The end game for vegans, if achieved, would result in some 99% (guessing) drop in the number of lives lived for cattle, chicken and pigs among others. Is this really the goal? Maybe not explicitly, but then what is? If it's all about animal suffering, then say so. The solution to that is not necessarily veganism. Many of us who can afford it buy pasture raised, grass fed, and/or regenerative meat when we can. This is probably more sensible in light of these ideas than cutting out meat altogether, unless you can't afford it *and* you think life on a factory farm is worse than not living at all. Plus you won't end up ill from nutrient deficiency.
I spent many years wondering what animal cruelty is, and finally concluded the only objective and simple definition is anything worse than life in their natural state -- which includes being eaten alive, or starving or freezing to death from an injury, or being captured and tormented by a mama to teach her cubs how to hunt. Rub out a cigaret on your dog? Animal cruelty. Rub its nose in its pea or poop, or slap it, for training? Not cruel.
Ants have aphid slaves; is that animal cruelty? If slaughtering meat animals is cruelty, so is predators chasing down and eating prey. Does that make a rancher a hero for killing wolves which attack his herds, and then a zero for slaughtering those same animals six months later?
My main conclusion was that animal rights is a dicey subject, and PETA is full of idiots who think animals should have the vote and be able to own property, all with PETA as their guardians and interpreters, of course.
I think a more sensible system (than the vegans') is one in which animals don't have inherent rights, but we forbid gratuitous (not serving a purpose) animal cruelty, because of what it says about the person performing it, not because of some inherent care for the animal.
Additionally, animals which are adopted into families, "pets", should be afforded greater care/rights, not because they're inherently better in some way, but because they have become family members to their owners. The affect on the family members is the focus, not the pets themselves.
Personally, I would be fine with folks slaughtering all the coyotes and deer that are roaming loose in suburbia. They are no one's pets, and I don't consider killing to be cruelty. I'm tired of deeding the outside to the coyotes that would eat our pets, to the deer that make it impossible to share beautiful flowers with the neighbors (what changed around 2000?) and the mosquitos. Give me some good old fashioned neighborhood bug spraying and stop telling me to wear long sleeves in Summer in Texas and to stay in doors during the periods when I'm actually home.
Same here Chuck. Cow life on a farm is much less violent and brutal (and just as natural) as wildlife
Per Michael Huemer, the strongest argument against meat consumption is the suffering it causes, not the fact that the animals are eventually killed. Huemer's blog post on the topic: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/dialogues-on-ethical-vegetarianism-5e6
Many factory farmed cows undergo painful processes like disbudding, castration, and branding without anesthetic. They also spend the majority (EDIT: about 1/4, not the majority) of their lives in feedlots, where they are packed into small, barren, crowded pens and forced to stand in their own excrement until they are killed. Humanely raised meat is a much harder topic, but it is mostly a distraction because 99% of animal products come from factory farms. Life on a factory farm is much worse than no life at all, so these animals are not benefited by getting to live on a factory farm. Annually, we kill something like ~83 billion animals for food per year, and the overwhelming majority of them are on factory farms. For reference, there have only ever been around 110 billion humans throughout history. The suffering we’re causing is probably thousands or even millions of times greater than the benefit we enjoy. If there is ever a case of suffering that one should oppose, this is it.
Suffering is, in general, bad. Through factory farming, we are causing, every few years, a quantity of suffering that is comparable to all the human suffering in all of history. So this is extremely bad, bad enough to vastly outweigh the benefits to us. So we as a society ought to stop doing this. Also, in general, one ought not to pay people for doing extremely bad things. Therefore, each of us should stop buying these products.
You say "Surely we wouldn't say [wild animals'] lives were not worth living or have zero (or negative) value." as if it were obvious, but it absolutely seems plausible that wild animal lives are negative utility. Per Richard Dawkins "The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease."
As you ask for the end goal: Yes, a massive reduction in the population of factory farmed animals would be an extreme reduction is pain and suffering, and thus a moral good. These objections do not apply to humanely raised meat, so if you care about reducing suffering without going vegan, look for "the Certified Humane" logo on products. Standards for things like "Free range" or "Cage Free" products are set by industry and still allow the cruelty mentioned above.
Also, a vegan diet doesn't make you ill from nutrient deficiency. If you're worried about your nutrients, any vitamin b12 supplement will fix you, and they are extremely cheap. You could also eat bivalves (oysters, clams, scallops, etc.). They are insentient, so the arguments about suffering don't apply to them.
If you are open to hearing convincing arguments from an ethical philosopher on the topic, I'd highly recommend Michael Huemer's Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism. The first edition is available online for free, and the second edition is coming out on amazon shortly.
I think that Huemer, you, and many other reasonable critics of factory farming tend to make overly sweeping and definitive statements that lead to a greater emphasis on vegetarianism than is warranted. A few points:
1. To simply say "cows spend half their lives on feedlots" is incorrect. For one thing, for many conventionally raised cattle, they spend more like a quarter of their lives on feedlots (cf: https://extension.psu.edu/grass-fed-beef-production-video, read the transcript). For another, there are a multitude of different raising techniques. In the part of the US I'm in, it is not remotely difficult to find "grass-finished" beef which has spent very little time in a feedlot, if any. Why do you need to jump straight past that to vegetarianism?
2. Echoing Huemer, you say that "humanely raised meat is a much harder topic, but it is mostly a distraction because 99% of animal products come from factory farms." This is a bizarre claim. If I say that we should support ethical farming as the solution to unethical farming, your response is that we should not support ethical farming because it's rare? Isn't that just begging the question? If you support it, it will be more common.
3. Castration and disbudding, while painful, are only so for a brief period of the animal's life. Claiming that these procedures make the entire life of the animal net negative further undermines your claim that ethical meat is a canard because it's only 1% of the market - castration and disbudding, if done early in the animal's life, will only cause pain for perhaps 1% of their life. EDIT: I would add that cattle branding is mostly practiced in the American west, and is unusual in the wetter part of the country (i.e. east of the Mississippi). Where I am, it's unnecessary, because your cattle are well contained on relatively small, highly productive pastures (see this old but probably still relevant report: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/chapa_is_branding.pdf)
4. I'm sure EA folks have tried to address this quantitatively, but it is not obvious to me how you would determine the point at which an animal's life was a net negative. Some people have chronic pain such that they are, in some sense, suffering every minute they're awake. And yet their lives can obviously be valuable. Admittedly, animals don't have inner lives nearly as rich as humans, but you have to conclude that intelligent mammals at least get some inherent satisfaction from being well fed and alive. How much pain offsets that seems hard to determine. My point being that simply observing that an animal is often uncomfortable (e.g. from being in crowded conditions) is insufficient to show that they'd be better off dead.
5. I cannot speak to "factory farms in general," but I live in a rural agricultural area, and I am surrounded by small and medium-sized dairies and beef ranches where, in my estimation, the animals have fairly pleasant lives. They have regular access to large pastures, plenty of food, water, and minerals, and are only rarely subjected to pain (I don't think that being milked is a painful experience for them). It's hard for me to see the problem with this.
EDIT: 6. Another thought occurs to me, related to #4 above. It is tempting but flawed to assume that we know how much something bothers animals. Even if we can show that some observable brain state is correlated to pain in humans, and then show that a homologous brain state occurs in cattle, I don't think this proves they're in the same kind of pain the human is. I'm sure that cattle which spend 20 hours a day in a milking stall would prefer to have more freedom, and their brain state reflects that irritation, but I'm not at all sure how to assign a moral quantitative weight to it. I do think it's morally bad, and for that reason I raise my cattle under the open sky, but I'm skeptical of anyone who says it's definitely bad enough to offset the value of being alive.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think you're right that I'm overstating my case. Some responses to your points, in order:
(1) You're correct. I was looking at the wrong information, and various other sources seem to back up what your Penn State video says about grain-fed cattle spending about a quarter of their lives on feedlots. Grass finished beef seems like a good improvement over conventional cattle, and it's more widely available than Certified Humane products, at least where I'm at in the US. While grass fed beef is better the conventional beef, I would still argue that vegetarianism is the morally better option. Beef being grass fed does not prevent the owners from deliberately causing significant suffering to the cattle during disbudding, etc. Also, it may be immoral to kill the animals, even humanely, but more on that in (2) and (3).
(2) Sorry for the By saying that humane products are a distraction, I was trying to say something like this: "Certified humane animal products are a small minority of the market and thus not representative of the status quo. Therefore, we should not say that supporting the status quo is permissible simply because outlier products exist." In my view, the most obvious moral problem with modern animal agriculture is the suffering it causes. Humane/ethical farming practices significantly reduce the animals' suffering, so they are a significant moral improvement. The case for vegetarianism is admittedly weaker when applied to humane animal products than conventional products, I think it is still correct:
The reason why I still think vegetarianism is the better choice is moral uncertainty about the existence of animal rights. If animals lack rights, then buying/producing humane meat is fine because the animals presumably live pleasurable lives. Per Huemer, I don't know the reason why humans have rights, so I can't take those reasons and apply them to animals. Animals obviously lack certain rights (voting, free speech, owning a firearm), but whether they have others is much less clear (right to life, not to be raped, etc.). If animals have any rights at all, it would seem that the right to life would be among them. I think someone would be very overconfident if they said they are sure animals lack the right to life/right not to be killed. Thus, we should be uncertain whether the act of killing an animal is no big deal or a serious rights violation. In general, if you can't tell whether an action is no big deal or seriously immoral, you should refrain from doing that action. Thus, we should probably refrain from killing animals and paying other people to kill animals.
(3) That's true, and something like disbudding presumably isn't enough to make the whole life of the cow negative utility. However, something like disbudding via hot iron without anesthetic seems close to a paradigm example of animal cruelty. Even if it's not enough to make the whole life not worth living, it definitely seems wrong to cause a significant amount of pain/suffering to avoid the cost of effective local anesthetic or sedation. If it's wrong to disbud like that, then it's wrong to pay others (by buying the meat) to do the disbudding. Note that a "Certified Humane" approved product allows various methods of disbudding/horn removal that all require pain control. Thus, this objection applies to conventional (even grass-fed) products, but not to fully humane products. Also, it's good to hear that branding is not as widespread as I previously thought.
(4) You're right that determining whether an animal's life is worth living can be extremely challenging, but there are certainly some paradigm cases that are clear. For example, factory farmed egg laying hens live in battery cages, have their beaks cut off (which has pain receptors) without anesthetic, they suffer bone fractures and osteoporosis from egg overproduction, and periodic starving to increase egg production (forced molting). There are also cases in which the animals clearly seem worth living. I'm now thinking that cows may be closer to the good end of that range, with the case stronger for grass fed cows and strongest for certified humane ones.
(5) That's good to hear, and I also doubt that milking hurts the cows, but you probably know better than I do. Dairy cows are plausibly worse off than beef cattle due to the repeated impregnation and forced separation from the calf and the housing conditions. This report from the sentience institute estimates that 74.9% of US cattle live on factory farms (https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates). I think the small/medium ranches you're talking about are more common in number of ranches, but the bigger factory farms/Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations have so many cattle that their populations outnumber the more numerous smaller ranches.
(6) You're right that we don't know how much things hurt animals, but again there are definitely some uncontroversial cases of things that are harmful, like the chicken debeaking or unanesthetized disbudding. I now think you're right to be skeptical that cows' lives in particular are negative utility.
Again, thanks for the reasonable response.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I do feel less compunction about eating beef of unknown source (in a restaurant or at a friend's house) than any other mammal, so I think we agree there. I am inclined to think that commercial hogs and chicken, which often spend their entire lives in crowded indoor spaces, have pretty unpleasant lives, possibly net negative.
The rights argument is quite different to the utilitarian one, and harder to immediately evaluate unless one has an existing theory for why people have rights. For religious people, such theories are pretty straightforward (e.g. teleological ones). From a non-religious perspective, it seems like there are possible theories of rights that would explain why animals don't have as many as people, but it's hard to say how persuasive they are. Something for me to think about!
I'm skeptical that even conventional cattle suffer that much. They spend most of their lives on pasture. I'm also skeptical that enough people could be found to work in an industry that is as blatantly cruel as you suggest here. I grant you pigs and chickens typically have worse conditions in conventional farming. Pigs probably have it worst of all due to their relatively high intelligence. I buy pastured pork when I can, but it's not widely available outside of mail order. But it's a small part of my diet.
While animals absolutely can suffer, I think it is misguided to simply imagine how you would feel in their place. Their brains are quite different from ours. Historically, humans have lived in all kinds of horrific conditions (read Pinker's Better Angels), yet somehow most people didn't kill themselves.
Health on a vegan diet is another matter. I believe strongly that humans are not intended to eat a high carb, grain based diet. Go ahead and try but I will fight for my right to eat nutrient dense meat.
Cows spend about (a quarter) of their lives grazing in pastures, during that time they will have their horns burned off their skull to prevent future horn growth and/or be branded and castrated without anesthetic. They are prematurely separated from their mothers, which causes substantial stress to both the calf and mother. They spend the other half of their lives confined to overcrowded feedlots, where limited space and rapid weight-gain diets frequently cause painful digestive problems and chronic pain. Transportation to slaughterhouses often involves long periods without food/water/rest, causing stress, injury, and/or exhaustion.
You are almost certainly right that pigs and chickens have it even worse, but that doesn't mean that conventionally raised cattle are treated humanely. While animal brains are different from human brains, animal suffering doesn't need to be qualitatively identical to human suffering to be bad. If you are unwilling to give up meat altogether, you should at minimum only buy humanely raised products. If you're in the USA, you can look for the "Certified Humane" logo on animal products. That (or a comparable animal welfare certification) ensures they aren't engaging in cruel practices. Standards like "Free range" or "Cage Free" are set by industry, so they don't mean a whole lot.
EDIT: Changed "half" to "quarter" per @Akrasiac's point (1) above
Yet, another study points out that standing in a feed lot with plenty of food nearby is actually just about nirvana to a cow's sensibilities.
Kind of specist, to apply human ideas of comfort to a cow.
Claiming that they definitely like feed lots strikes me as the same mistake as claiming they definitely don't.
I'm not simply projecting human ideas of comfort to the cows. The crowded conditions on feedlots are objectively harmful to the cows. The rapid weight gain and confinement cause lameness/chronic pain, overcrowding causes respiratory diseases, and grain-based diets cause frequent digestive/health problems. "Cows sensibilities" express clear preferences for grazing, resting, social interaction, and space to roam which are all prevented on commercial feedlots. While it would be great if cows were living in nirvana, that's simply not true.
If interpersonal evaluation of "utility" is hard for humans, sweet Jesus, it is infinitely so for animals, who do NOT experience pain in the same way that humans do, because their experience of pain is remembered differently.
Haven't you seen the videos of "rescue dogs" on YouTube? Some have been cruelly tortured by humans, and yet they -- thanks to the infinite patience and love of their rescuers -- become happy, loving pets. Their memory of human abuse is erased by the newer images of human kindness; the animal LACKS INTEGRITY which in the human CANNOT be erased. In effect, it becomes a NEW animal by that kind treatment, and the old animal identity ceases.
NOT SO FOR HUMANS, for whom it is impossible to forget. That childhood beating, that childhood sexual abuse WILL find its way to some deformed vengeful expression.
> Haven't you seen the videos of "rescue dogs" on YouTube?
YouTube videos are a much weaker source of information than actual experience. My wife and I have taken in three rescue dogs now, and while it's quite true that they have bonded with us and trust us, it's also true that we have not erased all traces of their previous experiences.
I’m not sure about a dog’s memory versus learned behavior. Dogs definitely have memories. Dogs abused by a man or by a woman are often visibly uncomfortable with people of their abuser’s sex even though they have learned new behaviors of trust, etc. That doesn’t always change over time. Those dogs are not placed with people of the abuser’s sex. Dogs definitely have long term memory of past owners they have been separated from and are reunited with.
Interesting remark about a dog's ability to immediately distinguish gender. I think that's likely true. I'm also willing to concede that a dog may have some weak long-term memory. But do dogs have a sense of IDENTITY? I don't think so. The point is that humans have PERMANENT long-term memory; that's what constitutes a sense of integrity over a lifetime -- the root of our very identity. That inability to forget -- indeed the astonishing ability to nurse some imagined slight for a lifetime -- is what inspired Dostoyevsky in _Notes from Underground_ to call man "the ungrateful biped."
I agree that identity is a different issue than memory or learned behavior. Not sure that anyone has “researched” this.
I suppose this is the major reason I reject all these definitions and just go with "Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff", and if people want to help others, let them figure out who to help. I help some people some time, and darned if I know why I make the decisions.
One minor example: I parked at the grocery store and heard an accordion being played well, some kind of dixieland / zydeco music. Made me smile. Two people there, apparently a couple, him playing, her holding up a sign with way too much writing begging for money. I gave her $5. The sign was a turn off, the music was the opposite, and I do not know how I would have reacted an hour or day later, or if I had been coming out of the grocery instead of on my way in.
Effective Altruism is an attempt to help people figure out who to help via both thought and data.
That may be so, and it may help some people. I think the very concept is too wishy washy and ill-defined to be objective. I suspect that those who claim it was useful was because it forced them to think about what they wanted to do, but it did not provide any objective guidance.
There are obviously philosophical problems to doing it perfectly, which is what my post is about. But if I want to feed starving children, data on how much of my donation gets through to them is useful in deciding what charity to donate to.
I look for that too, but I don’t need effective altrusim to tell me that. Most of the effective altruism hoorah I’ve seen acts like it’s the best thing since sliced bread, like it’s going to organize charity and altruism and kindness and goodhearted jocularity all under one all-encompassing warm comfy blanket. One stop shopping to satisfy all your altruism needs from here to eternity.
Or something like that. It feels like someone trying to sell snake oil.
I think it's actually quite hard to evaluate the effectiveness of a charity. Doing so rigorously requires knowledge and effort. You don't need EA specifically to do that, but don't assume you can get the right answer by going with your gut.
I don't have enough money that putting a ton of effort into it makes any sense, and I also suspect that those with that much money hire others to do the work, and then we're off into third parties and who do you trust, and that puts me right back into thinking there's a lot of snake oil at hand. But if people want help parting with their money, I suppose charity takes a lot of different forms.
Aren't there other measures of utility that could be maximized? For example, you could maximize some combination of the mean and total utility. This combination has been tried out and I think has been referred to as variable value theory (see https://philpapers.org/rec/HURVAP). You still get issues if you only combine total and average utility, but might it be the case that a combination of total, average, and variance of utility would give a function to optimize that also satisfied our moral intuitions? If not, you could try a combination of total, average, variance, and skewness or some other higher moments of utility. Since there are infinitely many moments, I would guess that there must be some combination of them that would satisfy our moral intuitions. (Wikipedia has a nice article on moments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_(mathematics).)
Great article! However, I disagree with defining zero utility as the suicide point. People often live for others, are afraid of suicide, forget experiences that would make them more likely to commit suicide etc.
There are always people who seem to have a real knack for getting a kick out of life. They toil not, neither do they spin; but brother, I kid thee not, can ever they par-tay! They love them too some sex, drugs, and whatever music is "rebellious" in their era. Let us call them the young wastrels.
There are always too some people who, having long labored with their various gifts, have laid their burdens down, aged, infirm, ill, no longer even able much to enjoy the comforts and honors with which a grateful nation has garlanded them. Let us call them the old worthies.
And utilitarianism is, is it not? the moral philosophy that tells us it is good to take from the old worthies to give to the young wastrels.
Related to the thread started by Peter Sonia: all the problems in this post go away if we replace the idea that we're maximizing society's utility with the idea that I'm maximizing my utility, which includes caring for others, and you are maximizing your utility, which also includes caring for others. Often my utility function will line up nicely with yours because we're both people.
Take the paradox that we could increase society's average utility by killing all the unhappy people. That goes away: I don't want to kill unhappy people, you don't want to kill unhappy people, so that loses utility for both of us. And similarly for almost everyone we know. So killing unhappy people is a bad idea.
The problem with putting math to philosophy is that very small differences tend to grow out to huge numbers easily, and we have no systematic and justifiable way to determine what numbers to attribute to which stances.
I've seen this come up a lot with insects and other small animals. If trillions of bacteria die daily (quick Google), then that overwhelms every other calculation if we care about the utility of bacteria at even an extremely small amount. Farming kills quadrillions of insects yearly, and millions of small cute mammals if that's more your thing. If a small insect's life is worth 0.01 of a human, that means farming is net negative on utils even if all humans die for lack of it. Even if an insect's life is worth 0.000001 of a human's life, insects will still be more important than humans. You would have to put individual insect life at some extreme low level of utils to not overwhelm every other calculation involving humans.
At that point you might as well say that insects don't have utility. Or, as I suspect is what actually happens, people use an internal intuitive sense of how much insects (or whatever non-human life) matters and fudges the numbers to match. If you can rate all insect life against all human life and it comes to a nice relatively close fraction in the direction you want, you can make any moral argument you want with it.
I also read recently someone talking about dust mites. That to create the most positive utility, you should actively farm billions of dust mites who live their happy little short lives and produce utility. Even at very very small amounts of utility per mite, any human can farm enough of them to outweigh their own costs against utility as a human. So even someone who would otherwise be a vegetarian can eat lots of meat and grow lots of dust mites and be a good person! Similarly, any talk of future beings, including humans, overwhelms the possible number of current humans. All the humans that live over the next 200 years is a much larger number than the number of humans alive today, and if it isn't, that just means preventing whatever catastrophe that stopped humans from being born is worth millions of years of generations of humans (which is going to calculate out to a whole lot of utils in any system). That's repugnant conclusion territory.
So I end up rejecting utilitarianism itself. It's unworkable in any systematic fashion. It's barely workable in discreet situations due to unknown inputs and the problems of assigning numbers/utils to moral problems. How could you even approach the question "How many utils was the election of Donald Trump in 2024 worth?" There are so many known and unknown inputs that it would be one of the hardest math problems already, even if the amount of utils for specific people and situations within that question were known. We don't even know if the total is positive or negative!
But that's a big difficult question with lots of inputs. Can utilitarianism answer a much smaller question? What's the result in utils of a college professor giving a higher grade to a student who has sex with them? Deontology has an easy, predictable, and consistent answer to that question. We again don't know whether the sum of the utilitarian equation is even positive or negative, and can fudge the numbers on any of the inputs to get it the direction we want.
Total utility but limited to the set of individuals at time T0.
I am an anti-natalist a la David Benatar. That it is better "never to have been." Meaning, the utility summed over every individual life (human or non-human) is negative. Therefore to maximize utility, means no life should be brought into being.
Zero living things guarantees max utility (total or average.) Sounds crazy but the logic is unassailable.
If you accept the premise. The clearest evidence you have of what other people believe the value of their lives to be is how few people kill themselves.
I observe that you, for example, have not acted on your unassailable logic.
> The clearest evidence you have of what other people believe the value of their lives to be is how few people kill themselves.
Are you saying that you can't see the distinction between not being born at all vs killing oneself after being born ?
"No parent should have to bury their child." - Theoden King in Lord of The Rings
But I think most fathers don't even think about the extra 5 children they could have had but did not.
But it does raise a good question about how can we make anti-natalist walk the talk.
One way I think is when humanity invents some technology that can bring a dead person back to life at some time in future. Will an anti-natalist be willing to pay even a modest sum to participate in this program ?
People who think being alive is better than being dead be willing to pay a fortune for participation in such a program ?
On a side note, I think life is a bit like a Blackjack table where your probability of winning is very high the longer you play, the more you win, but also with probability 1, the dealer at some unexpected point takes out a gun and shoots you in the head. You also have the option of doing this to yourself.
As a by stander, if you are asked if you want to sit at this table you are likely going to say no. But once you are at the table you would rather take your chances and play as long as you can until the dealer shoots you.
"No parent should have to bury their child." - Theoden King in Lord of The Rings
A quote from the movie, not Tolkien's book. A distinction work making.
The decision of whether to have a kid depends on the net value to the parent, only part of which is the parent's value for the potential kid's happiness. The decision of whether to live is made by the person whose life is being evaluated.
"Will an anti-natalist be willing to pay even a modest sum to participate in this program ?"
As it happens, I have paid a more than modest sum to Alcor for a slim probability of being brought back to life.
Another test of course if the person choses to have kids or fewer kids than they can afford. (Often it is a decision made by 2 people )
I live a fairly good life, way above global average in nearly all relevant dimensions. Yet I wish I had not been born. But now that I exist, I have an interest in my continued existence. I could choose to stop existing but I find the prospect of not existing worse than continuing to live — for now. If and when my existence becomes too painful, I would then choose to stop existing.
I am persuaded by Benatar’s argument that even though lives are not worth creating, most are worth continuing. He distinguishes between judging whether a life is worth starting (from an impersonal, pre-existence perspective) versus judging if it's worth continuing (from the perspective of someone already alive with interests).
It can simultaneously be true that it would have been better never to have existed and yet also be true that, once existing, it's better to continue existing. The harm of coming into existence is distinct from the harm of ceasing to exist once one is already here.
I am pro-natalist (go Bryan Caplan!), but I don't think the appeal to suicide works well against the anti-natalist position because suicidality is heavily selected against evolutionarily. Hypothetically, if it were true that human life is not worth living, then the humans rational enough to realize/act on that would kill themselves and leave only the humans with an irrational attachment to their own life. Thus, shouldn't we expect that most humans will not kill themselves irrespective of an objective evaluation of their lives? To be clear, the evolutionary appeal merely undercuts the evidential value of the lack of suicide.
Which just proves that utility is not 100% the result of rationality. I believe Dr Friedman is asserting that because Atanu Dey does not *act* like it's better not to have been, we must therefore assume that life does provide them with positive utility.
That our choices are affected by natural selection merely means that our utility is too. That may itself be a mild argument against effective altruism, though not an argument there is any way to refute. I give to malaria nets but I give way more to the arts, what can I say?
Yes, life has provided me with net positive utility -- so far. If I were to die painlessly in sleep one of these day without any foreknowledge of that event, I wouldn't mind.
How could I mind? Death and life are disjoint sets with no common elements. As Epicurious noted, "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not."
However, I can well imagine developing metastatic prostate cancer and living in agony for a few months before the end. If I had never come into existence, I would not have missed the net positive utility that I have had so far. But I fear that at the final analysis, it will net utility may be hugely negative.
My claim was not that utility is the result of rationality or that utility is unrelated to natural selection. My claim was that natural selection would make it so that normal humans would choose not to kill themselves even if doing so would maximize their utility. Therefore, we would expect most humans (or basically all animals for that matter) to have low levels of suicidality irrespective of how enjoyable their lives were. Since low suicidality is compatible with human lives being negative utility, it is perhaps only weak evidence against the hypothesis of negative utility lives.
Could you also clarify how any of this is a mild argument against effective altruism? I don't see how you got there.
The only practical way to define utility is via behavior. It makes no sense to say I “value” my death more than I do my life if I am not willing to end my life (neglecting transaction costs, as Dr Friedman says, though even without that proviso all you can say is that apparently I value those costs plus my life more than I value my death).
Regarding the mild argument I just meant that apparently my own utility calculus values some non-EA-approved donations more than EA-approved ones, and no amount of logical argument is likely to sway me.
I’m more attracted by average utility than by total utility, but I doubt that either of them represents The Answer (which is of course 42). I see life as a game, to be played as long as you enjoy playing, and I’d rather be dead than have a life of constant suffering. But that’s just my preference, and other people have different preferences. If you’re in the position of making decisions for other people, you don’t know what their preferences are, but you can bet that they all have somewhat different preferences. As for cows, you can’t even ask them what their preferences are.