I quite annoyed one of the authors of that “Kill All The Predators argument, who butted heads with me on Twitter and told me I had to go read this longer essay by Jeff McMahan which would address all my objections, because philosophers all seem to think that if they can babble long enough, they’ll ultimately be persuasive. Spoiler alert: it just made the problems with their idea wordier.
In particular, I was told to read section 3 and 4, which deal with objections to their argument. So I’ll just address that bit here, because I think their defense is dead with the second sentence.
The challenge to this simple case for intervening against predation is that it must be able to withstand the many objections that have been urged against it, including those that consist of moral reasons not to intervene. The most common of these objections is that the complexity of any major ecosystem so far surpasses our understanding that an attempt to eliminate predators within it, however carefully planned and well intentioned, would have unpredictable and potentially catastrophic ramifications throughout the system, extending, perhaps, into other ecosystems as well. The most obvious scenario is that the elimination or even significant reduction in predation would produce a Malthusian dystopia in which herbivore populations would expand beyond the ability of the environment to sustain them. Instead of being killed quickly by predators, herbivores would then die slowly, painfully, and in greater numbers from starvation and disease. Rather than diminishing the suffering and extending the lives of herbivores, the elimination of predation might increase their suffering overall and even diminish their average longevity. We can call this the counterproductivity objection.
This purely philosophical exercise founders on empirical reality. They claim that an objection is that stripping the predators from an ecosystem would have unpredictable and potentially catastrophic ramifications
— this is incorrect. It would have known, predictable, and definitely catastrophic effects. In case you hadn’t noticed, humans have been busily pauperizing biodiversity in various habitats for a long time, and the changes have been measured and are obvious: knocking out whole species has a devastating series of consequences on the environment. The MacAskills and McMahan are playing a game involving a fantasy universe with very little connection to the real world, which is fine…except when they start making policy recommendations for our universe.
They’re playing magic Jenga. Their proposed strategy is to, for instance, focus on removing all of the pieces from just the third row from the bottom. They know they can remove one piece and the tower won’t fall down, so hey, that implies that removing all of the pieces from that level will be safe, especially since in their philosophical universe gravity is irrelevant, the relationship between the different pieces doesn’t matter, and stability and balance are completely mysterious concepts.
They try to get away with it by casting doubt on known facts: they use “might” a lot. Well, if we remove that entire row, it might fall down. But maybe it wouldn’t! They get to ignore all the facts about the physics of this system because they’re bad philosophers, and all that matters is finding logical and rhetorical loopholes to permit their desired result to exist in their heads.
The way they get around ecological reality is to make the claim that someday Science might find a way to get around these current problems.
Given the state of our knowledge at present, this seems a decisive objection to almost any attempt to reduce predation now. But we should not be dismissive of Isaiah’s gifts as a prophet. Ecological science, like other sciences, is not stagnant. What may now seem forever impossible may yield to the advance of science in a surprisingly short time – as happened with Rutherford the first scientist to split the atom, announced in 1933 that anyone who claimed that atomic fission could be a source of power was talking “moonshine.” Unless we use Rutherford’s discovery or others like it to destroy ourselves first, we will almost certainly be able eventually to eliminate predation while preserving the stability and harmony of ecosystems. It will eventually become possible to gradually convert ecosystems that are now stabilized by predation into ones resembling those island ecosystems, some quite large, that flourished for many millennia without any animals with a developed capacity for consciousness being preyed upon by others. We should therefore begin to think now about whether we ought to exercise the ability to intervene against predation in an effective and discriminating way once we have developed it. If we conclude that we should, that may give us reason now to try to hasten our acquisition of that ability.
Has anyone read the short story, “Poor Superman”, by Fritz Leiber? That. It’s the idea that science is all about wish fulfillment, that we can get whatever we want if we just science the heck out of it, or if we can’t do that, we put up an illusion of sciencing in the expectation that someday reality will align with our desires. Some things are simply not possible, and that other things are does not imply that everything is.
I have to mention the reference to Isaiah. Jarringly, the essay cites a fucking prophecy by a Biblical patriarch as if it somehow adds credibility to their argument. It’s really weird.
This is not an empirical fact about biology.
The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
That they keep bringing it up in the essay is a bit off-putting. I suspect some hidden religious bias in their ideas that they try to keep out of sight, because it’s stupid.
I also have an objection that they don’t address at all, because they don’t have enough awareness of the complexity of biology to even think of it. These are people who divide the biological world into wolves and sheep, and have no knowledge of any animals other than familiar domesticated mammals, and see themselves as readily able to reduce nature to a barnyard. Here, for example, is one simplified diagram of a food web.
Which predator species do you remove? Sharks are always the bad guy, so let’s pull out that Jenga piece. Hey, porpoises are eating the same things the shark does, better get rid of them, too. Seals and sea lions? Definitely big-time carnivores.
Then there are the difficult decisions. A huge number of different species are eating market squid — do they all go, too? All the birds and fish, as well as the mammals? They have one excuse in their essay, that they’ll have an exception for the eating of animals that are arguably nonsentient, such as oysters and clams.
Are squid nonsentient? Where do they draw the line? Who draws the line? Is it OK to kill and eat anchovy or salmon? They do suffer when they’re bitten in half, they bleed and struggle, so the argument for ending pain ought to apply to them, too. And what about the krill? Will no one speak for the krill?
I’m not a fan of simple-minded utilitarian arguments, but I at least expect some consistency and appreciation of the difficulties and trade-offs that we always have to make. These particular philosophers read like people who learned all their biology from the Bible, and think that qualifies them to judge the way the world ought to work. If you need lovely prose to appreciate nature, read Aldo Leopold rather than Isaiah. At least Leopold gets his facts right.
It’s been tried, albeit in the opposite way that the authors thought: people started feeding cows something bears would eat, namely, dead cows. It didn’t work out so well.
Are these philosophers recommending we actually go out and kill all the predators? No. Are they suggesting that we could do so in the next ten or fifty or a hundred years? No. Are they claiming that animals are divided into “predators” and “prey”? No. Are they suggesting that risking huge ecological catastrophe is acceptable because it might all end well? No. So what on earth is the problem?
McMahan’s claim – and the claim of the MacAskills – is that predation is a moral wrong, and that if we’re able to eliminate predation safely then we ought to. It’s true that we won’t be able to do so in the foreseeable future. So what? It’s a philosophy paper, not a policy recommendation!
Also this remark – “philosophers all seem to think that if they can babble long enough, they’ll ultimately be persuasive” – is a cheap shot. You said some ignorant things about a pop-philosophy article, so somebody linked you to an actual philosophy paper, which you seem to have woefully missed the point of. It’s not the philosophers who are at fault here.
These people need to watch a little video on Youtube called ‘How wolves change rivers’…
I think these philosophers need to consider the merits of their argument in light of this counterargument.. Pretty definitive, I’d say.
I have an idea, if predation is a moral wrong those philoophers can come right over here and keep the mosquitos off me.
Sean Goedecke
Pray, please enlighten us of the point
Predation is not the sole source of suffering. I don’t think anyone mentioned that some non-predatory herbivores are absolute psychopaths by our standards: Hippos kill more people (and other animals, like predatory crocodiles) each year than lions, elephants, leopards, buffaloes and rhinos combined — and rhinos, especially the older males, are also vicious, goring each other often. Should we then divide animals into the “meanies” and the “nice”? Do we euthanize meanie herbivores too or are these philosophers OK with them as long as they don’t hunt and eat meat? Is ending suffering their ultimate goal or just stopping all life from the eating of dead flesh?
“They claim that an objection is that stripping the predators from an ecosystem would have ‘unpredictable and potentially catastrophic ramifications’ — this is incorrect.”
I would argue that their statement is more incomplete than incorrect. There would be entirely predictable, catastrophic ramifications — and there would also be, as they mentioned, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic ramifications.
@2 — so what’s the point of the paper? The claim “predation is a moral wrong” makes no sense, if you actually understand biology. Even to get to the point that they do, you have to make assumptions about sentience, for example, and you have to make assumptions about how creatures that you can’t communicate see the world. And then you have to believe that the entire world is founded on a moral wrong — the only animals that aren’t predators are scavengers. We as animals are incapable of fixing carbon, so we have to get our food from elsewhere. Even the herbivores are killing plants. (And if there are any pure herbivores, they’re going to be very small critters. Even cows are eating an awful lot of aphids, caterpillars, etc.) If this claim is the sole point of the paper, I don’t understand why it was even published.
That the MacAskills and McMahan rely on ambiguity and the absence of any real-world implications for their ideas, that they dodge any concerns about the utilitarian outcomes of their beliefs by saying, “Well, it’s a philosophy paper, we don’t really believe in putting any of it into practice,” suggests that their ideas are totally fucking irrelevant.
This is not usually considered an endorsement. Except by some philosophers, it seems.
Sean, #2
Then it’s a worthless paper. If it involves that much magical thinking and imagining a magical world where lions and wolves are no longer eating meat (but still thriving) and their prey species are still somehow having enough food to eat despite not being preyed upon at all, then it’s a stupid useless paper.
Saying “if we’re able to eliminate predation safely then we ought to” is a useless thing to say unless there’s at least a feasible suggestion on how to do it. It’s like saying “if we’re able to eliminate warfare then we ought to”. Of course nobody will disagree. But it’s a pointless thing to say because there’s no realizable solution suggested at all.
Sean, #2
Also, you realize that’s an idiotic claim, right? Because calling predation a moral wrong is the same as saying all lions are evil. What does that even mean? This isn’t like Lord of the Rings where entire races are just plain evil without any nuances or context. Lions aren’t orcs.
That’s exactly what was going through my mind when i was reading that paragraph.
I liked how they threw in “Malthusian dystopia” to give the appearance that they know something about biology.
It should also be pointed out that predation is not the only way one animal can directly harm another. Elephants can trample other animals, they are causing suffering, so they have to go. So does anything with feet, basically. Some species of hervibores can cause serious harm or even kill each other during ritualised fighting. They must go as well, the violent, horrible things… Some species will eliminate competition by killing their siblings. Gone.
This is such a lame debate, PZ. The first paper was dumb, insincere, and irrelevant. I rate the whole affair a 2/10.
Oh, how could i forget. Some species reproduce exclusively through what can only be described as rape. Into forced extinction they go…
And if we are to humanely kill every predator on earth, that includes killing juveniles that haven’t yet harmed anything. In doing so, we become inmoral monsters for harming a harmless animal, so we have to go as well, and then who will kill all the animals that need killing?
You know, if philosophers don’t want their thought experiments to be contrasted with their real world implications, they shouldn’t use the real world for their thought experiments.
If their philosophing doesn’t have anything to do with the real world, what is it good for?
All philosophers who reject real world concerns must submit all their papers psychically, written on metaphysical paper in invisible ink.
Dreaming
Well…
To our knowledge, no animal except of us has a concept of informed consent. Clearly, we don’t think children can give informed consent, so a cow giving informed consent is non-sensical.
If we apply the concept of morality to the lion, who needs meat to survive, why don’t we apply it to the bull who doesn’t need to fuck to survive?
All the leaf-eaters who harm one another during mating season could use species-appropriate dating services.
So I suggest we eat them. That’s poetic justice. Poetry is good, too. Philosophers appreciate poetry, so what can they say?
Not much. We ate them.
It’s pretty darm simple !
Predators are Saddam Hussein.
Preys are an oppressed people.
We have a duty to promote freedom and democracy everywhere.
We have the tool it requires : bomb and guns.
I guess you can fill in the blanks yourselves.
Yup. Auto-deer collisions are way up in my area. So is Lyme disease.
WTF? The Biblical Isaiah? We should be totally dismissive of the “gifts” of any religious prophet.
I would say that, indeed, their philosophizing is mostly irrelevant. But there are some exceptions. From their paper:
Well, I must admit that the proposal to end the Siberian Tiger Project definitely looks like a real world implication. (Although I notice the ‘unless, perhaps’ part.)
@16 Giliell
Oh, i understand your point, but i was thinking of particular cases in which mating is unambiguously forced and is even thought to be painful. The terminology is problematic for the reasons you described, i just meant to emphasize the fact that harm is being done.
@15 – So following your point, because Donald Trump’s “Kick out all Mexican looking people” plan is completely unpractical, discussing the ethical or moral implications of doing so is a complete waste of time, since it’s not a practical real world concern.
Got it.
VP #24
Nothing in this comment ‘follows’ PZ’s #15.
Sean:
Not a policy recommendation.
And yet:
The philosophy does, in fact, propose policies! (Or, at very least, critique policies and provide abstract options while heavily implying which one is morally superior). Apparently we are supposed to just dismiss the relevance of that though, because it is a mere philosophy paper. And that is said in “defense” of Philosophy. Bizarre.
As a vegetarian, I’d like to thank the McAskills for providing this piece of nitwittery so that omnis can have yet another example to point to when they want to talk about how ignorant, impractical, and just plain stupid veg*ns are.
Like I don’t have enough smug omni bullshit to deal with.
@9/10 Saad:
You say that “predation is wrong” is like saying “warfare is wrong” – nobody disagrees, so it’s a banal thing to say. But literally everyone in this thread besides us seems to disagree with “predation is wrong”! We’ve got people saying that animals can’t communicate so they can’t be moral patients, that ethics is just obviously subjective so we shouldn’t impose ours on animals, that if we euthanize a predatory animal we become as bad as the predatory animal and so must then euthanize ourselves… just plain horrible philosophy, in service of the claim that there’s nothing morally suspect about predation.
Confusingly, you go on yourself to say that predation is wrong! You say that the MacAskills’ claim that predation is wrong is equivalent to saying that “lions are evil”, which is obviously silly. But even if animals can’t be morally responsible, they can still be the cause of morally wrong situations. We don’t need to say that lions are morally responsible to say that they’re involved in a practice which we should stop.
I mean, we all agree (I hope) that when an animal is painfully killed by a human being, that’s a moral wrong. Why does that suddenly become less morally wrong when an animal is killing another animal? I’ve seen people in the comments of this blog make the perfectly valid point that when some animal rights group frees a bunch of lab animals who go on to get horribly predated upon in the wild, that’s not doing the right thing by those animals! But apparently that’s only a good point when it’s convenient to beat the radical animal liberation movement with, not when contradicts common wisdom about the “state of nature”.
This is an example of the danger of engaging in extensive thought experiments on topics for which there is considerable empirical evidence has already been accumulated. Torture apologist Sam Harris should take note.
I disagree. Consider the view of the predators. Would lions and T. rexes agree that “predation is wrong”? I think not.
@26 anteprepro:
Yes, I admit that passage has some implications for policy. But it’s hardly the main point of the paper, and McMahan could very easily accept that anti-predation interventions are going to be hopelessly risky in practice while maintaining his point. If we’re going to attack the strongest version of McMahan and the MacAskills’ points, which we should, then we should focus on the main claim (that predation is a moral wrong) rather than the one or two efforts to show how that claim might impact current ecological policy.
@30 Reginald Selkirk,
Dear god man, did you read past my first sentence!
SG #28, there is a literary classification to describe the thought experiment. Fantasy.
No reality need apply. That is the problem with some philosophy. And why some folks who are reality based find it amusing and irrelevant.
VP @24
Fail to see your point, here; the parallel is false.
The removal of all predators from an ecosystem is something from the realm of fantasy – short of irradiating the entire planet enough to sterilize it, it just wouldn’t work.
By contrast, the possibility that a person in a position of power could scapegoat and deport an identifiable human population is a very realistic scenario, indeed (plenty of examples available from history, unfortunately).
So, the ethical issues of this is a legitimate philosophical subject for consideration. (Not sure what there would be to discuss, though.)
Sean, #28
Actually, I didn’t say “predation is wrong” is like saying “warfare is wrong”. I said “if we’re able to eliminate predation safely then we ought to” is like saying “if we’re able to eliminate warfare then we ought to” and I go on to explain that what is analogous about them is that they’re good ideas but are useless to say without a realizable workable plan.
Second, I never went on to say “predation is (morally) wrong”. I’m saying the opposite. Because “predation is immoral” would suggest all lions are being immoral, which of course, they’re not.
We have no justification for using terms like moral or immoral when describing lions. A lion cannot decide to start killing wildebeest humanely, having been moved by the beast’s suffering at the hands of other lions. You can’t judge lions by the standards that we judge ourselves (morality).
Correction to my #35
That’s a mistake. I’m actually not saying the opposite. I’m saying morality doesn’t enter into predation in the wild at all.
@35 Saad:
Oh, sorry. When you said “Of course nobody will disagree. But it’s a pointless thing to say because there’s no realizable solution suggested at all.” I thought you were speaking about both “warfare is wrong” and “predation is wrong”, rather than just the first.
Regardless, whether lions can be morally responsible or not has no bearing on whether they can cause morally bad states of affairs. Nobody’s talking about judging predators for what they do: not McMahan, not the MacAskills, and not me. We’re saying that they – through no fault of their own – cause suffering, and if we can do so safely we should prevent it.
It’s like if I said “we shouldn’t give babies machine guns, because they could kill people, which would be wrong”, and you replied “but a baby can’t be moral or immoral!” You’re right, but it’s not relevant.
No, absolutely policy isn’t the main point of the paper. Here are the main three points, in order of priority:
1. “PREDATION BAAAAAAD!!!”
2. “Silly ecology, so irrelevant to my sophisticated moral principles!”
3. “Ecological science will advance and allow us to know enough to magically prevent predation without causing even more problems, I totally pinky swear you guys!!!!”
I also await for the similar proposals to end parasitism and eliminate any bacteria that could cause any potentially harmful effect in any animal. God knows, maybe we will even get a high-minded philosophy paper about how consuming anything is wrong, and about how we should all be striving for a future in which all creatures big and small are given IV drips of glucose or a genetically altered to photosynthesize. Because morality.
“predation is a moral wrong” sounds like a conclusion.
I’d like to see the argument.
@39 chigau:
I think the argument is reasonably simple:
P1) The suffering of animals is morally significant; that is, a state of affairs with more animal suffering would, all else being equal, be morally worse than a state of affairs with less animal suffering
P2) An action which brings about a morally worse state of affairs is a moral wrong
P3) An instance of predation is an action which, on balance, increases animal suffering
C) Therefore predation is morally wrong
P1 is plausible for most people. P2 is plausible, at least if you’re a utilitarian or a deontologist that allows a duty of beneficence. P3 is plausible once we recognize that the suffering of being eaten is stronger than the pleasure of eating. So the conclusion seems to follow naturally.
Predation in itself is not a moral question no matter by whom it is done on whom. Saying it is morall wrong makes only sense in a deistic/theistic universe where there is some overseeing sentient and self-conscious entity in controll of everything.
Otherwise it makes about as much sense to say “predation is morally wrong” as it makes “hurricanes are morally wrong”.
Causing suffering is a moral issue only when given suffering is caused by a conscious, sentient being who has a choice in given matter and is capable of influencing the process.
That, in a nutshell, is why I do not consider (as much as possible) quick and painless killing of (well-treated) domesticated animals a problem. Some animals would die anyway domesticated or not, we do not have choice over that. But we have a choice in how we treat the domesticated ones when they live and how their death happens – and that is where our moral obligations lie.
The moral goal is not to reduce suffering at all costs, but not to increase suffering when possible.
This might seem as saying the same thing in two ways, but it is not. A not perfect analogy of how I see it is prevention of cancer – it is de facto not possible to actually reduce your risks of getting cancer, because there is certain probability of it no matter what and there are factors that increase this probability. The only thing you can actually do is through your actions and choices to some degree avoid things that increase its probability.
Sean Goedecke, #28:
I think it’s important to understand that should implies can. When you talk about something that “we should stop,” it needs to be something that we can stop. Saying a particular lion (“all lions” is of course much more drastic) ought to be killed, because what’s happening is wrong, is saying something to other people which is supposed to mean we ought to act certain ways about it. But if the proposal is something we can’t actually do, since we can’t monitor all predators everywhere or otherwise deal with the resulting consequences to the environment, it’s not as if that makes it less wrong but that you’re not making a coherent claim about what we ought to do. If the lions aren’t listening to your reasoning, and if people can’t act appropriately and responsibly, then there’s no sense in saying we (or they) should or shouldn’t do anything about it.
Hopefully, it’s clear this is different from claims that thought experiments (or philosophical arguments generally) are unrealistic, fantastical or somehow “magical” — which look like pointless insults to me instead of genuine arguments — because my point is that it is conceptually mistaken (or useless or insincere) to say we should do something we can’t do. That’s just nonsense, because those facts about the real world (that we’re powerless to do anything even if we wanted to) happen to be true. You might say “I would want to do this, if I could…”, but that is not a moral statement that’s informative about our real situation in the real world.
Maybe I’m not radical enough for you, but I don’t see how, with this point of view, you (or the authors) can claim to be speaking for vegans, vegetarians, animal rights or liberation movements, etc. This is not at all a standard point of view for anyone in those groups, in my experience, and I can very well say it’s certainly not mine.
Sean,
What is your definition of morality?
It seems to me that the most common usage bases morality on behaviors by moral actors as they interact with others and their environment. If animals are unable to understand morality, they can’t be moral actors. It seems like you agree on that point, but then you say, “they can cause morally bad states of affairs.” What is “morally bad states of affairs?” Is this another way to say “sad things” or “suffering?” Because sadness or suffering by themselves do not equal morally bad. Otherwise, tornadoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes also cause a lot of “morally bad states of affairs.”
If we’re doing a thought experiment that doesn’t rely on empirical facts, why stop with ecology? Let’s say predation is a moral wrong, and as a result we should just teach every animal out there to stop eating meat. No, I can do better. It is a moral imperative that we use genetic technologies to allow all autotrophs to photosynthesize. If we’re able to do that, there will be no need for any organism to suffer ever again.
That’s not practical? It’s not any less practical than killing all predators to create global harmony. At least in my inane fantasy I’m not killing anything.
Says who?
Judging by animal documentaries of large mammal on mammal predation (the only thing these people seem to care about because fury-cute-squee), the prey seems to get a massive dump of happy juice as they are being eaten and look to zone out on bliss until they die.
If being eaten is the most pleasurable way to die in the wild (vs starvation due to lack of food or injury, disease, or entrapment in a natural hazard), wouldn’t eliminating it increase the balance of suffering?
Sean, #40
The “predation is morally wrong” conclusion still isn’t making sense to me. For something to be “morally wrong” there has to be an agent behind that wrong. Thus that agent can be said to be acting in an immoral way. To act in an immoral way, in turn, means one is deliberately and needlessly (i.e. not self-defense, etc) causing harm (with the intent to cause harm). Otherwise we call it a mistake. Here’s a picture of a giant centipede killing a mouse. Is an immoral act taking place? Who is doing it?
Or is it us humans doing it because we should be saving all these mice, then what’s the alternative? Keeping the centipedes in strict captivity and feeding them soy? Should we do this to bears too? What should we do with male elks so they’ll stop injuring each other in fights for dominance and mating?
“The suffering of animals is morally significant”
“is plausible for most people”
Now I understand you.
@42 consciousness razor:
When I say “we should stop predation”, I mean in context that we should stop predation to the extent that we are able to without sacrificing something morally comparable. Mainly for space reasons, I’m not spelling this out every time I make a moral claim. But I’m happy to rest on the claim that predation constitutes a morally bad state of affairs. Hopefully we agree that this doesn’t entail anything about what we’re capable of doing. By the way, I’m a vegetarian but I don’t claim to be speaking for vegetarians, vegans or animal rights activists – I expect most of them will disagree with the claim that predation is wrong. If I’ve implied otherwise it’s been unintentional.
@43 toska:
I certainly do think that hurricanes produce morally bad states of affairs (e.g. thousands dead or suffering) and that we should stop them if we can do so safely.
@46 Saad:
Maybe it’ll make my view clearer if I explicitly say that natural disasters can produce morally bad states of affairs. Of course a hurricane isn’t a wrong action, and nobody’s morally responsible for it! But it still produces suffering, which is morally bad, and we should prevent it if we can.
(Philosophically speaking, I’m being a bit sloppy with my terminology. I should be saying that predation is bad, not wrong, since wrongness applies to actions and badness applies to states of affairs. But I hope it’s clearer now what I mean and what I think McMahan means.)
@47, chigau:
If you tell me what you think I mean, I could tell you whether you’re right.
Tropical storms/cyclones are necessary to distribute energy away from the equatorial region and are the main source of fresh water for many regions. Eliminating them would seriously fuck up our planet’s energy budget and wipe out ecosystems across the world. You are proposing ecocide.
For something to be a “moral wrong” there has to be a “moral agent” attached to it.
A lion, or a krill-eating blue whale, or any other non-human consumer of animals, are not moral agents.
And if they were, to the lion the moral good is to provide food for its pride. Absent a means to do so without predation (and there isn’t), it’s a fool’s argument at best.
Sean @48,
You didn’t really answer my questions though. What does morally bad states of affairs actually mean? Morally bad is not a synonym for bad or for suffering. Otherwise we wouldn’t even need a term like moral (again, how do you even define morality?). Who is the immoral actor responsible for hurricanes? It’s just nonsense to apply morality to natural disasters or diseases with no human cause.
Sean Goedecke @40:
Thanks for laying out the argument so clearly.
Your phrasing of P1 is interesting to me, and I think suggests an unstated premise. If you will permit me to parse it a little further, I’d like to spit it into:
P1a) “The suffering of animals is morally significant”
P1b) “A state of affairs with more animal suffering would, all else being equal, be morally worse than a state of affairs with less animal suffering”
I accept P1a, and I imagine most others here do as well. However, P1b presumes a consequentialist ethics, under which moral significance is attached to “states of affairs.” Many people attach moral significance not to “states of affairs” but to actions, and for some, to intentions. In that case, P1b is not a simple restating of P1a but a non sequitur.
P2 again requires consequentialism. If one believes there is a moral distinction between an action which causes animal suffering versus an inaction which permits animal suffering, then P2 does not follow.
P3 is a truth claim. How do you know that predation, on balance, increases animal suffering? How do you measure animal suffering? You glibly assert that the suffering of prey being killed and eaten is greater than the pleasure of the predator getting a meal, but how do you know? What about the inevitable suffering of the prey’s later death due to some other cause if not eaten by a predator? Everything dies eventually, is the suffering of being eaten worse than the suffering of slow death due to gradual organ failure?
Basically, I’m with you only as far as P1a. After that I don’t find the arguments relevant.
@51 Christopher:
Obviously if eliminating hurricanes means ecocide then we can’t eliminate hurricanes safely. The fact remains that if we could eliminate hurricanes without causing ecocide (or make sure hurricanes never hit populated areas), we’d be morally obligated to do it.
@52,53
You’re walking down the street and you see a dog trapped under a fallen tree branch and clearly suffering. There’s no moral agent at fault, but you’ve still got a moral obligation to help. Predation could be the same.
Also, I think the ragging on philosophers here is a little unfair. It’s a bit like lumping all evolutionary biologists together with some crappy evo-psych researchers (some of whom hold prestigious posts). Just because these guys suck at it doesn’t mean the field is nonsense; I have several colleagues who are philosophers who I think make genuinely valuable contributions to science.
@54, biogeo
Thanks for the worked-out response. You’re addressing my points squarely and I appreciate it. I don’t think P1b requires consequentialism, though. It just requires a moral theory with a notion of beneficence: the duty to bring about good states of affairs. Most versions of deontology have such a duty, and I think most people agree that it’s good to prevent suffering even if no conscious action caused that suffering. However, it’s true that it would be hard to push P1b on a virtue ethicist or narrative ethicist.
Also, I don’t think my argument needs inaction and action to be morally equivalent. It just needs inaction to have some moral significance. If you think that inaction can ever be morally wrong, then you’ll agree we have some (perhaps weak) duty to prevent suffering.
As for P3, you’re right that it’s going to be an empirical matter. I’m assuming P3 for my argument, so I’m not going to defend it here. I expect most people will agree, though, given that a predatory animal has to continuously kill to survive.
@55:
But does someone who’s not walking down that street and seeing the dog also have the obligation to help? Did they commit a moral wrong out of ignorance of the dog’s plight?
By the way, Jeff McMahan is one of the most influential philosophers of ethics currently working in the field, and his books ‘The Ethics of Killing’ and ‘Killing in War’ are very well-respected. He’s not some crank working out of his basement. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s correct. But it’s pretty unlikely that he’s making an undergraduate error.
@58:
I think it’s fair to say that if you don’t know that the dog’s suffering you can’t be blamed for not helping it. Two points: first, this isn’t the case with animals suffering from predation, since we know about them; second, the dog’s suffering is still a morally bad state of affairs even if nobody knows about it.
Sean @55,
But that does not make tree branches falling a moral bad. Predation is not a moral bad. There’s also a major difference between those two situations. Helping the trapped dog will not cause the tree branch and it’s offspring to possibly starve to death. In the real world, when a human decides to interfere with predation, they are making a choice to favor one animal’s survival over the other, which eliminates no suffering and is morally neutral. To interfere with predation on a massive scale would also collapse the ecosystem and cause much more suffering, and to do so knowing this would be morally bad. If you’re trying to imagine a situation where eliminating predation would not cause massive ecological harm, what’s the point? That’s not real life. We can sit around and imagine suffering-free existences all we want, but it’s silly to pretend that it’s relevant to anything.
@60
No, it isn’t. Not unless you actually define what you mean by morally bad state of affairs. The only moral actor in your scenario is the human. If the human is removed from the scenario, it makes no sense to make any moral judgments about the situation. Yes, it’s sad. It’s unfortunate. It’s not morally wrong.
@57, Sean Goedecke
I agree that the notion of beneficence entails considering how one’s actions can improve the world (increase happiness, alleviate suffering, etc.), but for a deontologist this may be more limited than for the consequentialist. A deontologist might also accept a principle of non-interference, for example, which in the case of predation would trump beneficence. Basically, I think some deontologists would accept your P1b, but not necessarily all.
Eliminating predation and evolution will result in ecocide as well.
People who have no understanding of how the planet and its ecosystems function should not be taken seriously when they say that they should be in charge of micromanaging all life on the planet.
Sean Goedecke:
What is the extent of that? Whatever you mean by that, it would be good to know that there is something that it means. If it’s not anything definite, then how could it be a legimate moral claim? Vague hunches don’t suffice as a justification, and loosening our standards on ethics generally would be a worse consequence than basically any particular thing you could come dream up, certainly more than failing to satisify you by pointing at all the holes in your argument.
The problem for you (one of them) is that I have no idea what it’s supposed to entail. It’s not clear what you think a distinctly moral state of affairs is, as compared to any old state that anybody describes. If it’s a state of affairs we can’t do anything about, like the suffering of a sentient alien on the other side of galaxy for example, I don’t understand what the point is of talking to us about it as if it were a moral state of affairs for us which obliges us to act a certain way. The aliens can (hopefully) handle that themselves, and in the case at hand, I take it the point is obviously to be persuasive to us with these claims and arguments, not to the predators themselves. You may be happy to rest on the claim, but for everyone else it requires support.
That seemed to be the motivation behind your earlier remark, but maybe it would help to say you’re not just surrounded here by a lot of meat eaters, animal abusers, and so forth. Keep in mind that you’re going to get pushback from basically every corner, about the claim that predation is wrong (or bad). As you can see from the points various people have already made here, to begin with, it’s not clear what that even means, and only once that’s fairly well established could we start to think about whether we should believe that’s a true moral claim.
I was watching an educational show called “Wild Kratts” with my three year old granddaughter yesterday evening.
The show was covering what they called “feeding cycles” or something similar. They talked about how animals feed, and looked at herbivores eating grass and leaves as well as predators eating meat.
There was a telling statement that drew my attention. The brothers mentioned that while we may have problems watching it, there is really not a huge difference between an antelope eating a living blade of grass and a lion eating a zebra – it’s simply how nature works.
A three year old can understand this concept!
Since we agree that typical predators can not be held morally responsible for their actions, I think the better phrasing of the argument is that it is wrong for humans to enable predation.
Still, whatever we do based on this argument has to consider dealing with the repercussions for the remaining organisms – there will be need for some other, presumably more humane, mechanism for not only keeping their numbers in line with present and future food sources, but also with keeping population structure conducive for better living (what happens to intra-species competition when the predators are gone?).
@60, Sean Goedecke:
But it is a statistical certainty that right now, somewhere, probably within an hour’s drive of me, there is a dog suffering from some similar plight. I “know” this in the same sense that I know animals are being preyed upon right now. What is the difference between the cases?
Also, what does it mean to say I “can’t be blamed for not helping” the dog? What kind of moral object is blame for a utilitarian?
Again, humans are animals. Humans are predators. The only thing that interests me about this mess of wordiness is the refusal to acknowledged that or touch upon it in any way. Instead, it’s “hey, if we don’t blow up the planet, we can make all other predators be lovey dovey!” Christ.
Vegetarian and Christian? Would they perhaps be Seventh Day Adventists?
Sean Goedecke,
The entire idea that predation increases suffering is wrong, once you take the obvious ecological consequences of predation into account.
All animals die, and for most of them it won’t be fun, even without predation (disease, cold or heat, starvation, parasite etc). Removing predators from an ecosystem will increase the population size by a certain factor. This will lead to an even greater increase in the birth rate of the population, since all populations grow exponentially.
So the net result of removing predation will be a big increase in the birth rate, and hence in the amount of animals dying. It will also lead to a far smaller increase in adult animals, since the amount of available food will stay the same.
The difference between the increased production rate of juveniles and the far smaller increase in number of adults represents a huge increase in suffering as a direct result of removing predation.
Again, show evidence that the prey suffers during predation.
Have none of these ‘deep thinkers’ ever experienced the adrenaline dump from a fight or flight response? Have none of the ever been seriously injured, but fail to notice it until the adrenaline wears off?
Humans routinely risk their lives (youtube gopro hero for evidence) to get the same enjoyment that prey animals experience when dying by predation. What makes people think that removing the most pleasurable way to die will somehow decrease suffering?
@65 consciousness razor:
By “sacrificing something morally comparable” I just mean to say that we shouldn’t eliminate predation if by doing so we bring about more suffering than predation causes in the first place. I hope that clears up some of the vagueness.
Let me try to understand what you’re saying about good and bad states of affairs. As I read you , you’re saying that whether A is a good or bad state of affairs depends on whether the moral agents nearby A are capable of affecting A in the foreseeable future. So right now it would not be a morally bad state of affairs that amputees cannot re-grow their limbs. Does that mean that it wouldn’t be a morally better state of affairs if amputees suddenly could re-grow their limbs, even though it would considerably increase their happiness with no real downside? Would it suddenly become a morally bad state of affairs that amputees cannot re-grow their limbs if we developed the medical technology to re-grow limbs? If I’m reading you right, this isn’t a view I’ve ever seen any philosopher hold. It certainly seems very strange to me. Why not just say that a good state of affairs is a state of affairs with more happiness, justice, kindness, etc, and a bad state of affairs is a state of affairs with less of those things?
Given that, I’m not sure what more support you want for the claim that predation is morally bad. (And when I say “rest on the claim”, I mean “stop there”, not “make the claim without any support”. See my earlier posts for an explicit argument in support of predation being bad.)
I think your attempt to read my motivation has misfired a little. I’ve been reading this blog since long before FtB, and I know that PZ and many of the regulars are sympathetic to vegetarians and vegans. I certainly don’t think I’m holding up the animal rights torch in the face of a carnivorous mob, or anything silly like that.
Sean @ 55:
No, predation couldn’t be the same. I live rural, I see predation on a regular basis. I like watching dinosaurs, so I have a number of feeding stations on my property. The other day, I saw a sharp-shinned hawk tearing one of “my” sparrows apart (got nice photos, too). Now, it makes me feel bad for that little sparrow, but the hawk has to eat too, yes? I feel bad when I see robins ripping the wings off butterflies and dragonflies, too, but I don’t try and stop them. You can’t eliminate predation, it’s an ongoing chain, which we are a part of, and will continue to be so. Yes, it can be distressing to watch predation in action, however, that’s no excuse for anyone to think it’s a brilliant idea to eliminate it. I’d rather see a philosopher spend their time on reducing the human predilection for harming other humans. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re doing a whole lot of that sort of thing these days.
Actually, I think you are both correct on this point: there will be “unpredictable and potentially catastrophic remifications” plus the predictable ones we know about already.
Also, I like the use of marine systems to create a wrinkle in the silly thought experiment. Aren’t almost all fish and other mobile marine animals opportunistic predators? As far as I am aware, the average fish will try to eat anything that looks like it will fit in its mouth. So, time for a mass extinction event to put the P-Tr to shame.
Just to make “all animals die” sound a bit less callous, it would be very bad (infinitely bad?) to be immortal. So, death itself is not a bad thing. Let’s not pretend that it is. So, as counterintuitive as it might sound if you’re assuming living itself (for the longest possible time) is inherently good, you really do have to support the claim that suffering is greater (and is morally something we should act on) merely because of the existence of predatory carnivores. You have a tough job ahead of you supporting that with actual evidence. It’s not just that we would have to cause those predators suffering (or fail to prevent their suffering) in order to cease their existence and thereby decrease suffering for others. Being alive (for any sentient being) consists of a lot of suffering, however it may occur, and there’s no simple or obvious way to measure that in general. Besides, the proposal isn’t to make non-predators immortal, so what exactly are we meant to do which is supposed to make the situation better? How exactly are we supposed to be managing the entire planet’s ecosystems (if that’s something we should do) to get whatever the desired result is supposed to be?
The limit their stupid thought experiment to near-sentient creatures: aka cute things I want to pet.
Since every near-sentient marine creature is a predator, my guess is that their inane solution would be to either eliminate their species (orcas, sharks, sea lions, etc) or declare their prey non-sentient (dolphins, filter feeding whales, octopus, etc).
Sean, #55
And this is precisely why I’m saying this entire topic is pointless.
You know we can’t keep lions from hunting. What is the point of saying something like:
“if we could eliminate hurricanes without causing ecocide, we’d be morally obligated to do it”
Of course! Who in their right mind would argue against that? Things like that get near universal support.
So if we could eliminate predation without having any harmful effects at all on the predator species, the prey species, and the ecosystem, we should. But that’s impossible. You’ll have to invent a new fantasy imaginary world to even begin to lay out a plan to do so, so there’s no point at all in talking about it (and definitely no point in publishing a paper about it).
@76:
Whether predation is a moral bad and what we can do to fix it are two very different questions. In order to show that predation is a moral bad, we can just imagine a world where predation doesn’t occur and all the ecological problems are solved (by Culture Minds, let’s say, or nano-bots). Since that’s morally better than our world, predation is a moral bad. I certainly don’t need to give a feasible way to manage a planet’s ecosystem to show that predation is morally bad, any more than I need to give a meteorological lecture about weather control to show that hurricanes hitting populated cities is morally bad.
Of course, you could say (as many on this thread have said) that absent an ecological solution, it’s useless to say that predation is a moral bad. I’m not really interested in comments like that – they strike me as (a) pretty anti-intellectual, and (b) weirdly mistaking the usefulness of things in general. But I certainly don’t have an ecological solution to predation. My training’s in philosophy, not in biology.
@78 Saad:
So you’re explicitly saying that predation is indeed a moral bad, and that we should eliminate it if we could? Good, then we agree.
You seem to be making some other claim: that we should only point out moral bads when we’re able to rectify them, or that we shouldn’t publish papers that don’t lead to any social or moral improvement in the foreseeable future. No, I disagree with that. I think we should generally point out moral bads when we can, if only because getting clear about this might help us in moral deliberations involving animals that we can actually do something about.
Why would a world where the most pleasurable way to die is eliminated be better than the current situation?
It shows.
Sean Goedecke
Whenever I hear those words, my sceptic-o-meter already swings deep in the red. No, most moral delimmas in the real word are not simple, because the world is complex. A simple argument is probably a wrong one.
And in this case I was not disappointed. Your premises are either overtly broad or are just to be taken at face value, without any reasoning whuy we should accept them as a premise. If your premises are wrong, your argument based upon that falls flat on it’s face. Let me elaborate.
Overly broad premise. If this premise is true, then exterminating every living thing on the planet is a morally better state of affair then doing nothing (or indeed anything else) because it minimizes suffering.
This depend a bit on how you define ‘moral wrong’, but if taken as jargon it is a platitude, if taken more into a real life meaning, I don’t believe this is necessarily the case, because life is too complex and messy, and often as moral agents we lack the insight into every possible outcome of our actions.
This ‘messiness’ increases if you take the reverse (which you do by the way!), namely you seem to think it is a moral wrong to NOT do an action which brings about a better state of affairs! So your premise doesn’t support your own argument.
Which you provide not a single shred of evidence for. The lion seems to enjoy it. The whelps have lots to eat and seem happy. The herd chased are pumped full of endorphines.
You seen, you base your entire argument on some premises which you take for granted, and you just assume we have to do the same because reasons. Sorry buddy, not really making the case that this whole thing is anything more then illogical mental whankery.
Sean Goedecke:
I’ve actually been interested in what you’ve had to say here, but I do think we’ve gotten a little off-topic.
The MacAskills make the following claim in their article:
That seems to me to be, on the face of it, factually incorrect.
Sean:
I think you might be underestimating the probability of error: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
Fact of the matter is that he is a philosopher who is an expert in ethics and morality (though that hardly makes him authority, because one of the key issues in ethics and morality is that there is a lot of disagreement and a lot of different perspectives, which seems to be a fact that this paper glosses over, yet is of paramount importance when discussing “morality” in regards to animal behavior rather than human society). He is well educated in philosophy, in English, in ethics. But his key problem is his glib dismissal of ecological concerns. Of the related scientific principles, facts, details on the matter. The best response he was able to muster is that maintaining an ecosystem is not truly a moral course of action if that ecosystem relies on immoral, painful, and cruel predation. Which is a good point, but it doesn’t change the fact that any attempt to intervene would likely do more harm than good, even if we simply remove the pain we cause to predators from the moral calculus on the pretense that they are evil and deserve whatever they get. “The counterproductivity objection”, as he puts it, is what the actual science actually says about this issue. And he just dismisses it, essentially.
Dismisses the benefits of biodiversity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_effects_of_biodiversity
Dismisses the danger of killing a keystone species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species
Dismisses how extinction of one species can cascade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coextinction
And is doing all of this during an ongoing, human-caused mass extinction event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
This isn’t high level ecology. This is basic stuff. Intro to Bio. And all the expertise in philosophy and ethics doesn’t stop him from making the undergraduate level of mistake of believing that he can just handwave away an entire field because he doesn’t know enough about it to realize that it matters to his argument.
Sean, #80
I’m saying in a world where the eradication of predation would not lead to any harmful effects for any species and the for the environment, not trying to eradicate predation would be a moral bad. This world does not exist. It will require magic. Therefore, it’s idiotic to talk about it at length and publish papers on it.
(Predation still won’t be a moral bad because komodo dragons can’t be immoral.)
Sean Goedecke:
The agents don’t need to be nearby. They need to be capable of doing the things they are claimed to have a moral responsibility to do. Otherwise there’s no possible response and no responsibility.
That’s correct. Saying “amputees should regrow their limbs” is not just idiotic and tactless (are you telling them to just try harder … or who should do what?), but it’s also not a valid moral statement, even though it superficially looks like one (without considering the content) because of the inclusion of “should” or “ought” language.
No, it doesn’t mean that. The only thing a “morally better state of affairs” could mean, as far as I’m concerned, is a state of affairs that we (or someone) should try to enact. If there’s no road from A where we are now to this “better” place B, then that is purely a counterfactual. It does not function like a run of the mill conditional that we might think of terms of an actual set of conditions which lead there, with causes and effects, or how we could or would or should do something about it somehow. It is about some other possible hypothetical universe in which such things happen, not the actual real universe we live in. I cannot act in (and am not responsible for) anything that may or may not happen in some, other alternative kind of reality. It’s hard to imagine a less controversial statement.
Maybe this talk of “moral states of affairs” is not as useful as you think it is. I’m not sure what to say. Yeah, it would be sudden … I guess? Or maybe it would be gradual for some reason. I have no idea, and I don’t actually care. Is that a problem somehow, a bigger problem that purporting to make moral claims, but ones which are totally inert and have nothing to do with any action we could take? Is that what you think morality looks like or should look like?
Come on, you’ve never even heard of the “Serenity prayer”? It’s a common idea, not even something requiring much of a philosophical background to understand. I mean, of course we don’t need a god to grant us serenity to accept the things we cannot change, but I like the part about having the wisdom to know the difference. Prayers usually emphasize so much dogmatism and irrationalism that it really sticks out as fairly nice feature.
Because evidently things aren’t that simple, and it’s not clear what the point is, or what it means to describe them as morally good or bad, when those don’t actually correspond in any way with our actual moral responsibilities in the actual world. It’s sort of like saying you like chocolate better than vanilla, which is a value judgment but not a moral one. But it’s really worse: that a world made entirely of chocolate is good. Okay, whatever you say…. Are we supposed to do something about that or not? It’s a very simple and straightforward question. Do we need to be time-travelers to somehow have made the world (including ourselves) entirely of chocolate? Or become gods? Or Matrix programmers? What are we to do?
In fairness to Jeff McMahan, I agree with almost all of his moral/ethical arguments, at least as far as a little skimming and googling has shown for me. It is just that it doesn’t matter whether the world would be a better place without predation: There is no real way to change that. Not without doing even worse. Nature is not moral, it is amoral. The world is not fair, it is not kind or benevolent. And we have a hard enough time changing all of that for the better in our small, petty, artificial little human societies, where we can exercise far more control and power. And yet we expect to bring Justice and Peace to all of Nature, when we can’t even deliver it ourselves? It is akin to saying that natural selection is a cruel process and if that is the price of evolution, we should stop evolution. It might be “true” that it is horrifying and cruel state of affairs, but we are not going to be able to change it . So what’s the point of talking about it as if it is a political issue we should be rallying over when it is just fantasy all the way down?
If there was such a thing as “Philosophical Pseudoscience” this would be a key example.
Sean Goedecke:
As anteprepro@84 points out there are a lot of consequences from removing a species, whether it is a predator or not, that will cause organisms to suffer and be killed (directly or indirectly).
1) Why is the delineating line sentient beings? This seems to be a egocentric line. All living organisms try to survive and reproduce. Whether they know it or not, they will react to stimuli, biotic and abiotic, to survive (ie. not be killed).
2) There are non-predatory inter-specific interactions that cause suffering and the killing of other organisms. This includes the photosynthetic primary producers. It comes down to the competition for limited resources. Which ones should we keep?
3) I could say the same exact thing in #2 about intra-specific interactions. And again, which ones should we keep?
So essentially if you want to prevent the suffering of organisms and prevent them from being killed until they reach their naturally senescence, then you need to teach them to share, like you do with little kids.
Reposting from the previous thread, since I had not realized that the conversation had moved here:
OK, in light of the Poe’s Law revelation, a not-snarky version of what I said [previously] @26: Many academic philosophers have a really bad habit of oversimplifying a situation in order to examine the logical consequences of an idea and then extrapolating without considering that the simplifications they made may have rendered the entire process absurd. When this is translated into popular media, even by the theorists themselves, the result can be an ridiculous fantasy that sometimes has an appeal to people who have not really thought about the issue. Of course, sometimes — and Peter Singer is a prominent example — these speculations can actually lead to interesting discussions. At others — and Peter Singer is a prominent example — they run to futility. I am also completely serious in suggesting that the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics is a terrible influence on society, mostly for the semi-logical gloss people working there (notably Savulescu and Bostrom) give to transhumanism. Dawkins, I was kidding; he’s just trolling nowadays.
@76 consciousness razor
I think we agree, I will try to be more clear
@ 79 Sean Goedecke
Lets not imagine a world without predation, but lets do some simple math. Let assume the following are accurate numbers of ducks: Each spring, each pair of ducks will have 8 ducklings. During its reproductive life of 5 years, each pair will have 40 ducklings. Since the population size of ducks is stable over time, only 2/40 will live to reproduce. The other 38 will die from various causes without reproducing. So every adult duck will be responsible for 38/2=19 deaths over its lifetime.
So what would happen if we kill off all predators? For the first few generations, it would be grate. A lot more then 2/40 ducklings would survive to adulthood and reproduce, and there would be more ducks then ever. Horray! But then, the duck population hits the limit of what the ecosystem can support, and we are right back at 2/40 survival. This time the deaths will not be due to predation, but to starvation, disease etc. Whatever the cause, the death rate in the duckling population is right back where it was before we killed the predators.
But now for the catch, because the total number of ducks did increase due to the lack of predation, the amount of ducklings that die before adulthood has also increased, and by a lot. In fact, for every additional duck that we saved by killing all predators, we are responsible for the premature death of 19 ducklings.
That is why I do not agree that eliminating predation will decrease suffering.
They handwave that argument away by saying that humans will somehow regulate the reproduction of all animals on the planet and thus limit the number of ducklings produced to a sustainable amount.
Not only have they never taken a biology or ecology course, they also have never watched Jurassic Park.
Christopher @91: Kudzu (many places). Eucalyptus (certainly California, also elsewhere). Rabbits (Australia). Fish in the Great Lakes, I forget the species. Starlings. Etc etc. We sure know how to screw up an ecosystem; fixing it, not so much.
As an ethicist, I’m happy to take on what people here are representing as the “main point” of this philosophy paper. [I haven’t read the original, though I may if I have time.]
The main defender seems to be Sean Goedecke, who says:
And continues in engaging others by saying:
No. We don’t all agree.
The statement “predation is wrong” is the statement of a non-cognitivist bunny rabbit.
Try making a case for predation being wrong. You can’t. The closest you come is
(credit to biogeo for pointing out the non-equivalence of 1a and 1b)
You’ve utterly failed here to include a functional definition that operates similarly to how you operate when challenged. From your #73:
So here it’s all about suffering – no other considerations. But in other places:
But what does “safely” mean?
The original paper asserts “healthy” ecosystems are possible without predation and questions definitions of “health” in an ecosystem context that would be considered improved by the presence of historically active predators.
And yet, we don’t have a definition of “health” in this thread either.
There are some nods towards considerations other than suffering – “the pleasure of eating” – but the proposed “proof” does not actually contemplate these at all.
Ultimately, what is elided is that the actual (near-)universal condemnation that Sean Goedecke would like to invoke is not condemnation of suffering generally, but condemnation of unnecessary suffering.
As long as Sean Goedecke maintains that the main point of the article is
(which he seems later to reframe, “predation is a morally bad state of affairs”) then the article, and Sean Goedecke’s defense of it, are and will remain ridiculous up until the moment that a list of potentially offsetting “goods” is provided and each is considered in turn before also considering them in aggregate, and separately and together they are all found to be insufficient goods to weigh against the suffering of predation.
Most notable is the lack of this consideration: is a universe with moral agents preferable to a universe without moral agents, and if so, is a universe with diverse moral agents preferable to a universe with homogenous moral agents?
Predation was instrumental in creating moral agents on earth. Sean Goedecke has not begun to consider the possible implications of predation that would allow us to determine whether or not predation is a “good” or “bad” state of affairs.
Thus when Sean Goedecke insists:
Sean Goedecke means solely that predation includes animal suffering.
While true, this is far from sufficient to warrant the statement “predation is a moral wrong”.
Sean Goedecke, you’ve claimed that others are doing bad philosophy here, but laughing at your insistence that predation is a moral wrong in the absence of any serious argument that predation is, in fact, the infliction of “unnecessary suffering” isn’t bad philosophy. It’s a recognition that even on your strongest ground other than that of a non-cognitivist bunny rabbit, a consequentialist one, you simply haven’t done your work.
At all.
If there exists in that paper a rationale for concluding predation is a moral wrong that is better than that presented here, I suggest you work to understand it, then present it.
If there is no better rationale in the paper than what you’ve presented here, then the paper is just as laughable as your elision of “suffering” and “unnecessary suffering”.
@Christopher, 91: They handwave that argument away by saying that humans will somehow regulate the reproduction of all animals on the planet
Yep, with nanobots! (Extensively discussed in the previous thread.) Apparently nanotech is the solution to all our problems and risk-free as well.
I recently saw a Night Heron eating a duckling, and it was not pleasant to see– but the prospect of a world overrun with ducks, and the resulting scenario laid out by Captain Decker, would hardly be an improvement.
And that is a claim asserted without evidence. It is a claim that ignores the biochemistry that happens during a fight or flight scenario.
That claim is the foundation of their entire mental masturbation exercise and is factually wrong.
Slowly dying over days or weeks from starvation, disease, or injury is a suffering death.
Dying hopped up on every milligram of endorphins and adrenaline your body can produce is not.
@Crip Dyke, 93: Excellent argument. And “Non-Cognitivist Bunny Rabbits,” by the way, would be an excellent band name.
Also, I’ve noticed that the anti-predator brigade seems to dismiss the fact that carnivores, too, are creatures with feelings– they feel the pains of hunger, at least. They aren’t killing just for kicks (maybe with rare exceptions like orcas killing sharks), nor are they mindless drones set permanently to KILLKILLKILL.
Anteprepro @ 87:
Exactly. What irritates me most about this, er, exercise is that it draws a line which elevates humans above all those other animals. Humans are animals, and right now, human animals are the biggest, baddest, most destructive predators on the planet. It’s more than pointless to expect some sort of cosmic kumbaya over other animals to take place, when we’re still busy killing each other (and every thing else) every fucking day.
parasiteboy:
Because that makes them our moral patients. They are not, in fact, capable of being moral doctors to us like we are to them — claiming that of course would be anthropocentric. (I assume you meant that instead of egocentric.) But we should treat them certain ways because they can be helped or harmed by such treatment. If somebody told you that you’re torturing a tomato plant, you would be right to say that such things cannot happen or they must be speaking metaphorically. On the other hand, if they say you’re torturing a sentient non-human animal, it’s the same basic problem as if you were torturing a human — even torturing humans, or acting immorally toward them in some other way, might introduce more problems or be more problematic. Nevertheless, similar reasoning applies to why it’s a problem, whoever it may be.
Surviving and reproducing is the sort of stuff a biologist cares about, but those are not in any obvious way reasons we should treat other sentient animals well. Indeed, in the long run, none of us survives, so you would at least have to specify how long they’re surviving or for long enough to do what, if that’s going to be a coherent reason for acting one way instead of another.
captaindecker:
Oh, I didn’t mean to sound like I was disagreeing with you. I was just riffing on your comment, and wanted to start with the thought that sometimes “we all die” comes across the wrong way. It’s not like, when (most) people say this sort of thing, they mean murder is therefore okay. But often times, when it’s vegetarianism or other moral issues concerning non-human animals that aren’t utterly ridiculous like this one is, that is basically what people mean by it. So if it’s not clear in context, I guess then it does help to be clear about what’s intended by statements like that. Sean Goedecke does kind of seem like he’s taking some of that for granted, assumptions about death itself being a bad thing or something like that, because there’s no evidence (and I predict there won’t be an attempt to get any) to support the claim that the presence (or hunting activity) of predatory carnivores involves greater suffering than some other nebulous state of existence that I’m not even sure how to imagine.
Don’t LOOK at anything in a physics lab.
Don’t TASTE anything in a chemistry lab.
Don’t SMELL anything in a biology lab.
Don’t TOUCH anything in a medical lab.
and don’t LISTEN to anything in a philosophy department.
Christopher @ 95:
I wish you would stop pushing this notion that being predated by another animal is an okey-dokey way to die. In some cases, yes, it’s very quick, but many times it is not, and it’s quite clear that the animal in question is in terrified pain. I happen to be an animal who almost died when predated on, and I can assure you, I wasn’t stoked on endorphins or adrenaline. Also, if you’ve never seen (or heard) a rabbit taken by a raptor, count yourself lucky, and don’t go looking to have that experience.
It is a better way to die than almost every other way to die in the natural world.
Even a slow death through a persistence hunt looks better than any other way to die in the natural world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o
Details?
Rabbits squeal like dying babies when in fight or flight mode as a defense mechanism. What makes you think that makes that kind of death a higher level of suffering than slowly dying of cancer?
Christopher:
Looks better, to you. That’s where my problem rests with you – you don’t know, you’re assuming, much like Sean was assuming much in this discussion. I’d prefer it it you would stop trying to press this as an actual fact.
Ah. So you don’t know what happens when they are predated on. I do.
Someone get this thread a new microphone, because Crip Dyke @ 93 dropped it.
Yes! This!
(Does happy dance)
I have been trying to get everyone I know to read this story since I read it years ago in an old “Best Of…” anthology. As PZ says, it is a perfect skewering of the wishful-thinking-masquerading-as-science mindset that underlies a lot of modern fringe beliefs like the Singularity. My personal theory is that Leiber must’ve run into prototype libertarian/ atheist/ skeptic types in SF fandom back in the 40s and wrote “Poor Superman” to send up their pretensions.
Martian peace to you, Professor Myers!
Christopher @101: You could ask survivors of shark (bear, croc, cougar, etc) attacks about what a jolly time they had. Or is it only jolly if they don’t survive?
I’ve been attacked by a dog. I won. I didn’t even notice I was hurt until the situation was over and done with.
I watched my father slowly die of MS over eight plus years.
I know which kind of death would result in the least amount of suffering.
Also, seconding Caine @ 100. The idea that death by predation is the best possible death in the natural world is some just-world wishful thinking. Imagining that preyed-upon animals are “blissed out” on endorphines is a comforting thought but isn’t rooted in any real evidence. It’s also not particularly relevant; most ways of dying in the natural world (or not in the natural world) are horrible, and short of genuine euthanasia not much changes that. Unless the goal is to somehow identify every animal in the world that’s approaching death and euthanize it with a drug cocktail, eliminating predation isn’t going to reduce suffering, not because getting predated upon is good, but because dying is bad but happens regardless.
This comment thread is utterly exhausting. I’d feel an obligation to defend philosophy if Sean Goedecke had not made a sterling effort already. Crip Dyke’s response to him was an elegant example of the conversation the idea could have provoked. Instead we get a lot of noise and anti-philosophy animus. The article at Quartz was basically about whether or not it was morally wrong to shoot Cecil the lion… That’s a question we can yell at each other about.
McMahan’s 20 page essay on the subject of predation is way too long for me to read right now. I’m tired just looking at it. It seems unlikely that any rebuttal would be easily contained in a few trite sentences.
There is one question that shines most brightly in my mind after all that. Why exactly do PZ and others in the thread consider themselves any more capable of criticizing an essay on moral philosophy than the average philosopher would be of criticizing a paper on developmental biology?
As for the gross disdain for philosophy common among empirical scientists, I’d like to point out that philosophy sits alongside science as a form of the pursuit of knowledge. To disdain philosophy is to disdain that desire to discover new ideas and insights which scientists so often hold as the greatest attribute of humanity. Empiricism is not the only way to acquire true knowledge.
Yep. Recovering from an injury hurts much more than dying on the spot. Since animals can’t tell us what they felt during an almost predation event, I am basing my conclusion on what humans have reported.
http://www.udap.com/markfullstory.htm
Damn blockquote fail.
Crip Dyke @ 93:
QFT
EG, us: homo sapiens, didn’t we rise through the development of “co-operation” as a method to cope with being preyed upon? Which also roduced that anomaly known as “Pareidolia”? (where even random squiggles can easily be misinterpreted as Elvis).
It would seem, to me, that we owe our dominance over the natural world to predation, where we were the prey. To then claim predation is no longer necessary, and should therefore be eliminated, is arrogance. That is more appropriately eliminated. Rather than “simply eliminate” predation, maybe expand empathy. As in: grow methods to alleviate sufferings and other sorts of damages. Trying to eliminate predation as the first stage of the empathy goal, is a simplistic approach to the problem.
Christopher:
:shrug: That’s pretty meaningless, actually. One time, I was shoved out of a car doing 60mph on a freeway on ramp, at knife point (and no, that’s not the predation I alluded to earlier), and I too was unaware of being hurt for about 2 minutes or so. So fucking what? That has absolutely nothing to do with the absolute fucking fear I felt, and the pain set in pretty fucking quick. Also, dog attacks vary greatly. I know a woman set upon by 6 very large dogs, and she barely survived. Care to tell her that it wouldn’t have been a traumatic way to die? You’re being a right fucking asshole here, Christopher.
I am sorry for that, disease does cause wretched deaths every day. That said, no, it would not be a matter of least amount of suffering. You’re focusing solely on the length of time involved in dying. Myself, being in a situation of chronic, acute pain every day, I’ve long come to terms with plans if things go critical, and yes, I like to think I’d opt for the shortest length of time when it comes to dying, but I know myself well enough to know I’ll probably be a right stubborn &^%$ about it all, so I won’t know what my choice will be until I’m faced with it. Choice would be the operative word, eh? Now, perhaps animals don’t consciously choose, however, I’ve seen all manner of beings, from a guppie on up go for any option which did not include being eaten by something else. We human animals have options, which is good, but even when we find ourselves suffering an intolerable amount, most of us wouldn’t care to be dumped in front of a half starved predator. If you’d go for that, fine, but I wouldn’t, and I expect most other animals wouldn’t either. Just because you know you’re probably going to die wouldn’t erase feeling pain and fear.
I really hate the argument that animals don’t feel pain because of happy juice in their brains. In most cases it’s simply false, and in many others, even if the experience of pain is muffled, they are still experiencing extreme distress. Some humans may find rushes of adrenalin pleasurable, and even seek them… but others feel extremely sick and it’s a very unpleasant experience for them. Likewise, you don’t know how animals are experiencing what they are experiencing, you are just going by external clues that may not be indicative of a psichological state.
I’m willing to accept that death by predator can, in some cases, be a less painful and much faster death than other alternatives. Even so, how could we possibly determine that for what is an entirely subjective experience?
Christopher @ 109:
How exactly is evolution supposed to act on a trait which only comes online in the moments of an animal’s death? How does minimizing suffering at death benefit an animal’s fitness?
Evolution’s goal isn’t to minimize suffering. Suffering is a tool in evolution’s kit.
IANAB, but I don’t think that’s how evolution works. It strikes me that any survival advantage that might be imparted by such a mechanism would be negated by the fact that the individual with that mechanism has probably at that point lost their fertility by virtue of being, you know, dead.
consciousness razor@98
It seems to me from what I have read in the McMahan essay that he believes that we should only be concerned about sentient organisms, where as a biological conservationist would consider it a moral issue to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem structure. Also I should have used anthropocentric, I was a bit annoyed like other people in this thread that feel he is putting humans above animals.
Ian King@108, I think you are confusing people’s annoyance with the philosophers lack of understanding when it comes to basic ecology with a disdain for philosophy. Similar conversations have happened in labs that I have been in when physicist have published papers modeling biological systems without a firm understanding of biology.
Ian King:
These together are baffling. How can you know what conversations “the idea could have provoked” if you haven’t even read the paper? How can you talk about this paper/topic as a single “idea” while simultaneously scoffing at the idea that it could be “refuted” in a small number of sentences?
The mark of a True Philosopher: “You can’t criticize me unless you have a philosophy degree!!!”
(Please note: dangerous levels of sarcasm)
I can’t speak for everyone, but my disdain is for BAD philosophy. I wanted to be a philosopher myself at one point. So I get fucking TIRED when I see stuff like the article in question. When I see people like Sean making inane arguments in the holy name of Philosophy. When I see people like you getting all huffy when philosophy as a field is slighted in the course of mocking bad philosophy. Because, fucking deal with reality: There is a LOT of bad philosophy out there. Amateurs or professionals, Sturgeon’s Law applies. And even good philosophers can fuck up that way. As I mentioned before, McMahan has done some good stuff before. But the reason this particular article is bad is because it ignores the relevant science. Which also cuts into your argument about how we feel “qualified” to talk about moral philosophy: Because the subject isn’t JUST about morality. To say otherwise is simply galling.
If humans don’t feel pain at having their arm or face ripped off during an animal attack, why would you assume the neurobiology of our fellow semi-sentient creatures would be any different?
We all have to die sometime. A prolonged death full of pain and inability to do joyful things you used to love has a greater balance of suffering than a fairly quick death where the pain centers are shut off. Multiply that by all the deaths in the world and the calculus of suffering minimization would favor predation over disease or the euphemistic ‘dying of old age’.
Maybe the mental masturbators would retort that we could install a small explosive or cyanide capsule in every living thing and trigger it whenever it looks like they are too old, sick, or injured to continue living without suffering.
But that is an even more immoral and fucked up situation than the status quo.
Ian King
Sterling effort. From a guy who based his entire argument on 3 false premises. If this is philosophy, then maybe we don’t need it.
By the way, I do think philosophy is important in the pursuit of knowledge. That doesn’t mean we have to take every philosopher serious, especially when they use the same sloppy thinking as the person you are trying to defend.
Not being distracted by pain or suffering during life or death situations increases the chance that they can survive such situations. If animals experienced debilitating pain and suffering as soon as the chase started, they would just curl up and die. Those that don’t feel pain might be able to come out alive and survive to spread their genes.
They are not semi-sentient in the respect of having experiences, they are fully sentient. You either have experiences or you don’t. I don’t accept the sweeping generalization that humans don’t feel pain in such situations. And again, even in the absence of pain, there is distress, there is terror….
Christopher
You haven’t proven at. all. that “humans don’t feel pain at having their arm ripped off”. You have quoted a few very selective examples. Clearly other people have reported different things.
Cite?
Oh, for fuck sake! Elimination of predation does great harm because it eliminates predation!
So is there some universal morality benefits cost calculator that I don’t know about? So we have bad things: suffering, death, unhappiness, stagnation, non-existence, stupidity, oppression what have you. And we have good things: life, happiness, growth, intellect, curiosity, art, freedom, what have you. Is there some measure of converting suffering into the price of benefits? Because (duh!) eliminating predation, akin to eliminating death, involves a radical upheaval and a truly alien nature of reality that *nothing* we take in life as an expectation can remain. It’s utterly impossible to give that a “good” rating because it’s utterly impossible to evaluate it on human terms. It’s akin to asking is it better to have never existed if that would mean never having experienced suffering.
Suffering (like death), although fucking awful, is not the end-all of morality issues.
=======
Christopher, I think we should assume animals suffer when being eaten. It’s one thing to point out the fallacy of an argument. It’s another to stick fingers in our ears and sing “lalalala I can’t hear you”.
Um, use your imagination?
I would assume nearly dying while being predated on is a fairly personal and painful memory. It’s seems a bit impertinent and personal to press for details when not invited to do so. Human predation exists in many, many forms so I can fill in any possibility and Caine’s point that it wasn’t pain and suffering free would still be apparent even with my lack of details.
Short of an aneurysm while fucking, there will always be distress and terror during death. Every human or mammal death I’ve witnessed, no matter how well prepared they were for death or whether it was natural or euthanasia, there was distress and terror in their eyes as they died.
So, shall we install explosives next to every living thing’s brain stem to minimize the suffering of death? Who gets to decide when to set it off? Will knowing that you have an explosive planted next to your brain stem cause even more suffering in the self aware?
Woozy @ 124:
Thank you.
I would assume nearly dying while being predated on is a fairly personal and painful memory. It’s seems a bit impertinent and personal to press for details when not invited to do so. Human predation exists in many, many forms so I can fill in any possibility and Caine’s point that it wasn’t pain and suffering free would still be apparent even with my lack of details.
Did the pain and suffering manifest itself during the event or afterwards?
Christopher:
That’s rather the point, Christopher. Dying while your guts are being torn out and devoured while still conscious is not a blissed out death. Think you can stop being such an asshole now? You have zero evidence for your insistence, and nattering on about it won’t make it different. All animals suffer psychological and emotional trauma, often after an attack in which they nearly die. I’ve certainly dealt with enough animals, human and otherwise, who suffer in this manner, including myself.
On the side subject of painful deaths: Though it sounds intuitive to think of pain and suffering over time as worse than quick pain, there are two notable psychological phenomenon that undermine that perspective.
Habituation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20097005
Habituation to stimuli means that you detect it less as you adjust to it over time. It is when you have a constant buzzing sound in a room and over time you stop noticing it, or when you are sitting with a rock in your shoe and it irritates as you first but you stop noticing it (until you move and it shakes around). The same principle can apply to pain.
Tachypsychia: http://readynutrition.com/resources/the-bizarre-side-effects-of-fight-or-flight-that-you-may-not-be-aware-of_05102014/
Often happens during an “adrenaline rush”, this is a skewed sense of time. During a traumatic event, it is common to have the sensation that time is slowing down. And sometimes after the event, time will seem like it is going by faster. So while someone may only suffer for “only” 30 seconds during a very traumatic event, it will feel like a significantly longer time to them.
These are the two, key things I am aware of that make it so the common sense “more time suffering is worse” position might not necessarily be true. In addition, others have already brought up the issue of fear, and this is also key, because “suffering” is more than just physical pain, it is also involves a heavy psychological, emotional component.
Christopher:
Why are you asking someone else about my experience? Christ, you’re not only an asshole, but a fuckwit on top. For your information, the pain and suffering was present throughout the whole event, which lasted quite a long godsdamn time, along with absolute terror, along with being utterly stripped of my autonomy, along with trying like hell to think, because I wanted to survive. What thinking I did was pointless, as I was physically unable to help myself. I got lucky, I was left for dead.
Adding to mine @ 130:
Also, I had the pleasure* later of facing my predator, and being told that leaving me and 2 others alive was their biggest mistake.
*sarcasm
The average philosopher is capable of criticizing a paper on developmental biology. Anyone is capable of criticizing a a paper on developmental biology … provided i) they are familiar with objective factors involved in the paper and ii) they can reason logically.
I think all of us satisfy both these criteria in terms of the MacAskill essay.
Firstly, I don’t understand the focus in their paper on predation as opposed to other processes that result in death and (as they assume [I do not]) suffering, namely parasitism and competition. I assume that they’d treat parasitism similarly to predation—that is, remove it, if possible—but what about competition? Inter- and intraspecific competition are major processes that drive population/community dynamics. By taking up space myself, I am necessarily reducing space that is available other creatures. Sometimes, my taking resources deprives others of resources and results in their death. Would it be morally good to remove myself?
Secondly, I disagree with their assumption that biodiversity is not inherently valuable and worthy of protection. By their reasoning, how is there no moral cost to eliminating a species’ existence? I just don’t agree that eliminating suffering is somehow better than eliminating entire species.
Christopher, do you legitimately believe that feeling pain during a violent, physical trauma is the exception rather than the rule? Or are you just fucking around?
I woke up this morning and read even more on this subject on the first post and was amazed. Then I read this one and am even more amazed and now appalled as well.
How can we set ourselves up as arbitrators of morality for all of the natural world? By whose authority do we decide what is a morally bad state of affairs for others?
The inability to think in any other way than simplistic black and white choices is amazing and ridiculous also childish and insulting.
Nature has been dealing with these questions for eons and has been pretty successful you must admit in doing so. There are no lack of functioning ecosystems in all the environmental niches on the planet, most with a surprising diversity and density. How did that occur?
Well take a look at hurricanes, they exist and have the ability to really churn things up and inundate vast areas with fresh and salt water but funny thing those areas are often very fertile and have a very diverse population of plants and animals all highly adopted to periodic storms of this nature. The secret is they did not fight against the evil storm but instead changed themselves to survive and even thrive from them, trees bend and branches break but they do not all die where they do die they clear space for their offspring to replace them. We modern man on the other hand continue building in dangerous places inappropriate structures that are ill adopted to the weather and climate they inhabit, it is perfectly within our power to design structures and whole inhabited areas so as to harmonize with the environment they inhabit to minimize any of the effects of the “evil morally bad weather” there is no need to eliminate storms.
By the same reasoning if we wanted to first just try and minimize the morally unacceptable suffering of prey animals we might try breeding them so as to make them more difficult for the evil predators to catch them.
At least until we can turn the planet into a garden of Eden fantasy peaceful kingdom .
uncle frogy
Um, isn’t that the point?
The argument is: Predation causes suffering => therefore we are morally obligated to consider thinking about eliminating it.
Which is
fucking nu..fallacious.You are utterly skirting the issue but insisting predation doesn’t cause suffering. And yet you agree predtion which is one animal bringing another to the point of death, causes distress and terror. We’re really being disingenous if we try to deny that. Of course, predation is suffering! But considering eliminating it as a solution is preposterous.
===
Caine. Um… Ouch!
Christopher, re pain:
(Trigger warning: minor gore/personal injury)
About twenty years ago, I got the end of my middle finger pinched in the mechanism of a platform rocking chair, resulting in a fingernail resembling one of those cars with the hood which hinges at the front. The suddenness of it, and the shock, left me feeling very little pain.
About an hour later, as the doctor tried to, let’s say, remove the hood from the hinges, before the local anaesthetic had time to take effect, that was painful. Screaming painful. Don’t ask me to describe it further, because I don’t recall how it felt beyond knowing it was one of the worst pains I’d ever felt.
Now, because I no longer recall the pain, was I actually in pain, or just screaming like a dumb bunny? Oh, and once the anaesthetic had kicked in, they could have gone in with hedge clippers and I wouldn’t have minded because I couldn’t feel it, so, yeah, I’d say I’d been in actual pain. And that’s just a finger.
parasiteboy, #116:
Well, I agree with you that there are all sorts of considerations which come into play, depending on precisely which moral question it is that we’re asking. The claim that we should get rid of all predators (or stop predatory behavior) fails for all sorts of reasons.
I often fall into talking about “suffering” (or pain, pleasure, etc.) even though there are other kinds of good or bad things, like social or environmental ones, that aren’t quite as easy to describe in individualistic and experiential terms. It’s like saying being happy or rich or powerful is the only thing that really matters — that’s all obviously wrong, coming from someone who doesn’t mean it or doesn’t know what they’re saying.
But someone experiencing the good/bad thing in some way seems to be necessary, because I wouldn’t know how to understand the moral significance of a world that had no sentient beings at all. I could put the words together in a grammatical sentence, but they wouldn’t mean the same thing as when people have something serious to say about morality in the real world. How could anything be good or bad in such a place? To whom is it good or bad? You might tell me about the kinds of diversity or structures that sort of world has, but who cares? You might be interested in that stuff, from your perspective in a world which conveniently does have sentient beings like you and me, but the point is taking that out of the picture doesn’t leave anything else to discuss regarding morality. You could still talk about the physics of that world, or some other topics perhaps, but the morality textbooks on it would be empty.
Christopher:
I don’t get it. Pain and stress are pretty obviously motivations for avoiding danger. You learn very quickly not to touch the hot stove again, once you’ve felt it. Thus, we don’t tend to accidentally kill ourselves by jumping into fires. We haven’t evolved to not feel such burning sensations, which would supposedly help to avoid being “distracted” by them and remind us of our goals — the goal you make for yourself is to reduce or eliminate the bad thing that you really are honest-to-fuck actually feeling already (or that you predict or generalize about, because you’ve had such experiences in the past). Same basic deal with suffocating, drowning, hunger, exhaustion, etc.
Instead, we do feel such things — as a matter of empirical fact, no need to speculate or theorize. And in fact you do feel stressed out if you’re chased by a predator. That’s not something that fails to happen because you want it to or because you’re committed to the idea (as understandable as it is) that prolonged suffering is often worse than short-term suffering. Those are two separate ideas. It’s still suffering, but you’re making the bizarre claim that it doesn’t even happen.
Yeah, that’s part of why this is ludicrous. I think it’s because predation is an action. If humans act to cause suffering it’s immoral. If we cause suffering inadvertently, then it is a grey area. When an animal preys it’s an action. And as animals are sentient it’s a deliberate action. So it’s immoral. And… sorry, my brain just blew a cog.
Hmmm…
Just imagine getting rid of all those predator insects, or are they just concerned about the predators that hurt Thumper and Bambi?
Hyphenman @ 140:
I thought of arachnids right away. I’m blessed with a variety of spiders, who do great things in the pesky insects department.
@hyphenman (#140):
You mean James Bond?
We’d better get rid of flycatchers (it’s right there in the name!), gnatcatchers (ditto), warblers, thrushes, wrens, hummingbirds, swallows, swifts… all those murderous dinosaurs devouring innocent bugs!
Cat Mara @ 104:
Thanks to you & PZ, I just purchased “Poor Superman & Others” on Kindle.
So you even got one person you don’t know to read the story (soon). :-)
Ian King @108 it seems to me that if the article really was simply about the killing of Cecil as you think, then they failed very badly to make their point. If they want to argue that predation *by humans living in western society with all of its privileges* is a moral wrong then they could have made a point with regards to Cecil. That’s not what they argued, and thus they are rightly being taken to task. They are arguing a point of biology without understanding the first thing about it.
The whole “dying by predation” is better than other deaths argument is a just as ridiculous. Since mature bears don’t die of predation unless a human kills them I guess they’re just out of luck in the death department? Orcas too? Death is death. In nature it is rarely pretty, and really it’s not for us either. We just have managed to cut ourselves off from confronting it most of the time.
I sympathize with all this face palm at really, really awful philosophers who think they are the shit but actually are no better than Medieval postulators wholly uninformed about everything actually true.
Just to do due duty, I’ll reiterate the caution given in my Skepticon speech “Is Philosophy Stupid?” that we must always distinguish the fact that a lot of current philosophy is awful because of structural failures in academia, and not confuse that with philosophy being useless. We need good philosophers, not no philosophers.
But that said, I’m reminded of an episode of the old BBC sci-fi show Sapphire and Steel in which philosophers in the future solved the problem of animal suffering in nature…by killing all the animals. You know, for their own good. After all, no animals, no suffering! Easy peasy. Of course, they then went on to build a computer out of disembodied animal parts, which then became sentient and got revenge by trying to destroy the whole universe.
Yep. Gotta look out for those unpredictable consequences. :-)
I was reading PZ’s followup and was wondering if the fact that the authors had gone on to defend their claims would shut up the chuckleheads mindlessly insisting it “must be satire.”
About the science-will-fix-it approach, say the technology does eventually come and we end up with a utopian world without predator-related suffering: How long is an acceptable period of time for things to be very bad beforehand? How many billions of creatures can suffer and die from the “counterproductivity objection” to justify ending up with that earth? Or are such cost-benefit analyses moot when faced with the moral superiority of having done the “right” thing in the present?
Another question. They seem to assume an endless supply of resources to accomplish this predation-free world. In reality, such programs would come with enormous social costs. From which other efforts should we divert resources? What is the moral framework for making such decisions?
@LicoriceAllsort (a fantastic ‘nym, by the way)
They don’t actually assume an endless supply of resources. Not per se.
Really, the paper is an extended, “What if?” episode where Spider-Man is forced into an Oxford debate against Kraven the Hunter on the nature of the most moral state possible for a future earth.
What they’re trying to do is ask, “If predation is immoral, (or, alternatively, if predation leads to a bad state of affairs and the choice by a moral agent to ignore the problems of predation is an immoral choice) what types of actions might be morally recommended or mandated for us as moral agents?”
The question becomes irrelevant if we have no power to affect predation, so for the purpose of exploring this question they don’t spend time on the subset of cases where we have no power to act (for instance, because of limited resources).
I’m reading the main article now, so I’ll get back to y’all with more, but right now it’s looking pretty bad for McMahan.
Christopher @127:
Dude, what the hell? Not okay.
From the
original articlearticle by McMahan which is supposed to be the longer, stronger argument that makes everything about the original article okay:Why pull this out? Because McMahan isn’t using this to respond to objections to killing off predators. McMahan is using this to discuss the possibility of eating meat. He sees “only one” scenario in which it might be moral to eat meat. That scenario is:
But he wants to make it clear he’s not conceding much to the meat-eaters. No, even this scenario is potentially highly immoral, unless, as stated earlier:
Well, McMahan, if you aren’t prepared to answer that question, how the fuck are you going to thoughtfully consider killing predators so that more non-predators might live?
The odds are very high that McMahan will not, in fact, thoughtfully consider that question.
And, the smoking saber-tooth:
And there you go.
McMahan starts off with a discussion of avoidable suffering and then smoothly slides over into a discussion of “suffering” unqualified by modifiers such as “avoidable” or “unnecessary”.
Hackery.
And I particularly enjoy this bit:
…and this is yet more hackery. “We’ll just control the breeding of animals so that they reproduce exactly the correct amount!” McMahan suggests.
McMahan, there’s been something in the news lately you should consider. It’s called, “weather”. Turns out that this weather thing is both
1) strongly correlated with, and possibly even has a causal relationship with, amounts of vegetable matter available to be consumed as food by our nice herbivorous animals
and
2) not entirely predictable.
But determining how many 50-year-life-expectancy elephants should breed this year in order to have the right population sizes 27 years from now near the end of a terrible 5 year drought and 31 years from now in a time of amazing plenty…
…well, now, that’s gotta be a solvable problem, right?
from there it launches into the next paragraph (which we’ve seen earlier in these comments) with this phrase:
But McMahan never seems to actually consider, much less answer that question. We went from “humans acknowledge we shouldn’t cause animal suffering if we can avoid it” to “animals should not cause animal suffering, whether they can avoid it or not” to “humans should prevent animal suffering caused by other animals by causing animal suffering, but not too much, I hope,” to “this is a closed question, right?”
Oy, vey.
So, really, what I’m taking away from this McMahan article is that it’s a long rant on the inconsistency in others’ thinking about animal suffering. The fundamental point is not, as suggested by Sean, that “predation is wrong”. No, McMahan holds that belief I’m sure, but this paper is structured so that this is not the climax, but a premise.
McMahan’s central point appears to be that humans are, in practice, sometimes willing to let an animal species go extinct. We are, in theory, willing to base such decisions on whether or not an endangered species preys upon humans and causes human suffering.
Given this, McMahan says,
And this is where McMahan has gone off-the-rails into the land of ideology blindness.
Almost no one is a professional philosopher practiced in parsing language in the manner of McMahan. But if you gave everyone a chance to make the distinction between,
and
I’m quite certain that many, many people would agree with the second.
So this “almost no one,” to whom McMahan refers – let’s call her Pell – is counted among McMahan’s allies not if she would agree with the statement as McMahan intends it to be understood, but only if she has published in philosophy journals at least one paper agreeing with the statement as written, whether or not the general public understands the difference between “a reason” and “a sufficient reason”.
Almost everyone, then, includes a large portion of supporters of McMahan’s statement whom McMahan pretends does not support the statement because…what? Being a righteous minority feels good? He grew up on rock’n’roll dreams of sticking it to the mahan? I honestly don’t know.
Hopefully McMahan can get this discussion back on track by speaking to the weaknesses of the arguments of those who would, actually, disagree with the above statement:
As someone familiar with the case of Kitty Genovese and the bystander effect research that gained notice because of her murder, may I just heartily say at this point: fuck you, McMahan. We have who knows how many people who are willing to spend $1million/missile to blow up tents half a world away because people chanted “Death to America” but won’t spend $10/person to buy them for people actually dying of exposure in refugee camps.
That many people believe that needless non-human animal suffering is undesirable and that people don’t rush out to kill all predators cannot be used to argue that people value non-human animals less than humans.
=======
This long, sad article is a rant by a guy who believes that people don’t sufficiently embrace his priorities. McMahan goes on to whine about how we cannot and must not take the position that animal suffering “does not matter at all”. Indeed, he believes that not even moral nihilists honestly hold that position.
But for a position that he believes everyone must share, he sure goes on about why it’s important.
Eventually McMahan adds discussion about “going against God” and “going against nature” being insufficient reasons to stop an anti-predator effort to relieve animal suffering.
Fine.
But irrelevant.
McMahan concedes that in the current moment there can be no such movement that would be confidently predicted to reduce suffering.
AND…
…now I reach the conclusion and guess what? He really is making it about priorities. Sort of.
[i]His[/i] priorities:
So, one big concern for McMahan, and one major motivator for this article, it seems, is the fact that McMahan appears to have been the recipient of a few too many [i]Dear Muslima[/i] letters.
Fine. That’s a bad argument for inaction. But how many people are really telling you that you can’t work on this problem and how many people are simply laughing at you for being unable to reliably make the distinction between “suffering” and “unavoidable suffering”?
Shall we sum up?
Oh, good. So now you’re issuing Dear Muslima letters? Why not say, “It’s more feasible” or “We’ll get more suffering-prevention per dollar” or something consistent with your thesis? Are you [i]trying[/i] to give me whiplash?
Only if you actually make the case – not assume the conclusion – that predation is morally bad.
Instead of whinging about how people don’t embrace the priorities that you will turn your back upon in your own conclusion, perhaps you should actually try to contemplate which factors might mitigate against the morality predator removal (or might favor the morality of predator restoration) beyond your limited imaginings that people “must” be hypocritical, be unreasonable, and/or value non-human animal suffering less than human suffering.
Some of these things might even be expressed by moralities other than consequentialist ones.
Urrrgggh.
Okay, I’m out for a bit.
Crip Dyke, that was awesome, thanks.
Sean Goedecke @ 31:
(emphasis added)
…and why exactly is that again?
I didn’t get where that was argued for and agreed upon. Links please?
You can assume spherical cows all you want, but any ideas based on those assumptions can be easily dismissed with “But there is no such thing as a spherical cow, and you seem utterly unable to explain to me how to get one, or how one would live if you somehow got one.”
Or, to put it another way, I think we should ask Princess Celestia if it’s a moral issue or not – she’s very wise, she’ll know the answer.
(My hypothetical premise is no more silly than yours. In granting yours, I’ll ask that you grant mine.)
If one accepts the if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest argument then why not just kill all humans. In the absence of moral beings to observe and/or intervene, there will be no moral problem no matter how much animal suffering occurs.
@Crip Dyke, throughout:
Thanks for the response, I guess. I think your reading of the McMahan article is woefully uncharitable, but I’ve got neither the time nor the inclination to address it point-by-point in this shark pit. I’ll just address your distinction between “avoidable” and “unavoidable” suffering, which on my reading you take to be the main philosophical error me and McMahan have made. Your point is something like this: when I say that allowing animal suffering is bad, I really mean “avoidable” animal suffering, but when we talk about predation we’re talking about “unavoidable” animal suffering. So the fact that we’re obliged to not allow animals to suffer doesn’t entail that we’re obliged to limit predation, if possible.
Putting it mildly, this doesn’t seem like a flaw in my argument. It just seems like a re-iteration of the same tired old point I’ve read a thousand times in this thread: that it’s hopeless to criticize predation because we’re not in a situation to change anything (although you’re going further, aren’t you, and saying that it’s incorrect to criticize predation because we’re not in a position to change it. If we suddenly could change it, would predation suddenly become wrong? Isn’t that a ridiculous consequence of your view?
Look, avoidability and unavoidability have nothing to do with how good or bad a state of affairs is! It does have something to do with how right or wrong an action is, but those are two separate topics. On my view, suffering is bad full stop. Unnecessary suffering is bad. Necessary suffering is also bad. Again, goodness and badness is different from rightness and wrongness. You seem familiar with philosophy, surely you know this!
The argument for “predation is bad” is incredibly straightforward utilitarian (although it need not be exclusively for utilitarians) thinking. It’s the same argument we use for “children being born with horrible diseases is bad”. Whether the suffering is necessary or unnecessary doesn’t come into it.
@86 consciousness razor:
You say that the only thing a “morally good state of affairs” could mean is “a state of affairs that we (or someone) should try to enact”. Well, that’s our point of contention. I disagree. It’s pretty uncharitable though to imply that, because I think states of affairs are good or bad independently of our ability to change them, I’ve got some view of morality that’s entirely disconnected from our capabilities as humans. There’s a great moral property that does exactly that work: rightness/wrongness. I think you’re confusing the two when you attribute to me weird claims like “amputees should regrow their limbs”. That’s a different claim from “the world should be in such a state that amputees would regrow their limbs”. The first is obviously silly; the second is obviously true (except you disagree with it, apparently).
Predation is not bad. I am certainly not going to attempt to put *my* morals onto a wolf, cat, or snake. Those animals get to live just as much as herbivores, and a fair few *need* meet. You don’t get arachadonic acid from plants; you get it from meat. Cats without arachadonic acid die.
Predators frequently take down sick/weak/young/old members of the prey population, helping to curb disease and prevent starvation. They perform a vital role that works to generally prevent suffering. I’ve seen how disease can spread through animals in much higher populations than is ‘natural’, and having kitten after kitten after kitten after goddamn fucking kitten have to be euthanised for panleukopenia has more than shown me the value of a population kept in proper check. Predation, therefore, is often ‘good’ for the population (provided they are not down to just a few individuals, of course) even as it is ‘bad’ for the individual. Overall there is less suffering when predation happens than when it does not.
You think a kitten being eaten by a coyote is horrible? How about a kitten that spends several days with stomach and intestinal pain, vomiting, having bloody diarrhea, anorexic, dehydrated, getting secondary infections before finally, agonizingly, dying?
As a vet tech, I have had MANY people tell me they want their animals to “die peacefully at home”. Unless they have a bloody arrhythmia, ‘dying at home’ is typically far from peaceful. Starving to death is painful. Slowly drowning in your own lungs in painful. Sepsis is painful. Kidney disease is painful. Diabetes is painful. Cancer is painful.
Honestly, if I had the choice between 10 minutes of being predated to death, and a month of slowly dying from cancer, I’d take the damn predator because that would be less suffering for me.
I’m just gonna leave this here…
@Jake Harban, 158: Also relevant is this one: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556
Sean Goedecke @156:
Is it fair to say you’re using two distinct notions of “should” here? Should-1, pertaining to states of affairs, such that “amputees should be able to regrow their limbs” means “amputees possessing the ability to regrow their limbs is an optimal state according to the ‘moral good’ (as you’ve defined it),” and should-2, pertaining to agents and actions, such that “governments should fund biomedical research into limb regeneration” means “governments (or individuals within governments) have a moral duty to act to bring about a state of affairs closer to the one that should-1 exist”? And furthermore, as I understand it, you argue that with respect to any given aspect of the world, we can always, in principle, say how it should-1 be, but human limitations (ability, ignorance, etc.) mean that it is not always true that individuals should-2 act to make the world as it should-1 be, even if they should-1 do so?
Just trying to make sure I’m parsing this correctly.
It feels like we’re not allowed to argue that it’s so impossible that it couldn’t ever work, because the paper included a disclaimer that said “even though this is impossible, we’re right in theory” I’m not sure what would invalidate the argument, since it’s practicality is irrelevant. I’m deeply suspicious of the claim that Predation is inherently immoral, but I don’t have the tools to argue that.
I feel like we have to imagine a world were this is completely practical, and we could do it, because we’re infinitely technologically advanced and can do stuff like that, and then argue that it would be immoral. I think it is, but how do you show that? We’d be changing the way a species lives pretty fundamentally. Is it ethical to disrupt the way an animal lives in nature? We have idealistic goals, we want to reduce the suffering of both it and the animals it interacts with. But even if we grant the premise that allowing predation is immoral, and have the technological means to eliminate it with no unforeseen consequences, is removing predation itself immoral, even if it reduces suffering, because of how much it changes the ecosystem to whatever we imagine it should be?
This also reminds me of a scene from the anime Trigun, in which two characters are arguing over the ethics of killing a spider to save the butterfly. Vash, the protagonist, wants to save both, another character who’s identity is spoilery says this is impossible, because saving the butterfly means the spider dies.
Here’s a link to the clip I’m talking about, it’s late in the show and has characters who’s existance is a big spoiler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7K4bFPm5_k
@Sean
No. That’s not my point at all.
If you are familiar with philosophy at all, you’re familiar with how “avoidable” and “unavoidable” as well as “necessary” & “unnecessary” are critiqued in their historical and traditional pairing with “suffering” for standing in for the biases of the authors. Nonetheless, they are standard terms. What they are meant to convey is that net bad is different from whether something contains any bad at all.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that the Miranda hypothesis has some merit to it. Let’s say that suffering motivates, and that without that motivation prey don’t struggle to get away from predators. Without that, traits that might help prey escape predators, traits that might include intelligence, or at least cunning, are not acted upon by selective processes and thus evolution is a slower process and generates fewer novel traits.
Now instead of merely predation being necessary, predation that causes suffering is necessary if evolution is going to produce moral actors on the time scale of stellar lifetimes.
In this view, by eliminating predation, we virtually guarantee that animals with diverse gene pools that might, someday, have generated traits that would make that animal a moral agent will now fail to produce progeny that trend towards moral agency.
Get it? Suffering can be bad, but not a net bad. Hell, that’s straight up Utilitarianism – the happiness created can balance out the suffering caused.
So. Do the fucking calculus. Don’t say, “Suffering exists, therefore predation bad.” You have to list all the goods to which suffering might contribute on its own. Then you have to list all the goods that predation might contribute on its own. Then you have to list all the goods that predation-that-causes-suffering might contribute together that neither could contribute alone. THEN you have to determine the amount of suffering saved (which might not be a lot, as mentioned, if the primary cause of death in your post-predation world sucks more rocks than being eaten).
Only at that point are you prepared to make a case that predation-that-causes-suffering is bad, and only if Suffering saved >> goods sacrificed.
McMahan is operating in a strictly consequentialist framework. Neither McMahan nor you make an actual consequentialist argument that balances the good of predation against the bad of predation’s increased suffering (however much that suffering actually does increase).
The flaw in your argument is that you never actually prove that predation is bad. The consequentialist argument necessary to do that is quite complex and entirely missing.
Of course we could go the route of deontological ethics, but in that case you’re really screwed:
I am a deontological ethicist and I’m telling you right now that the lives of predators are precious to me and thou shalt never interfere with their numbers or their ability to predate and cause suffering. I have spoken.
@162 Crip Dyke:
Sorry I misread you. Regardless, I think your point’s now clear: you’re arguing that predation causes some morally bad things but overall is morally good, because on balance it prevents more suffering and causes more happiness than the alternative. So you think I haven’t done the utilitarian calculus properly to show that predation is bad.
But I don’t think your picture of the utilitarian calculus required is accurate. Why would I have to list goods that suffering might bring about, or that predation might save us from? We’re not comparing our world with any particular post-predation world here, we’re just pointing out that there’s a horrendous amount of morally significant suffering involved in predation. It may well be that there’s no foreseeable alternative (besides wholly magical ones). But predation would still be bad!. Starving to death is also bad, as is whatever the primary cause of death is in most post-predation worlds (probably).
Here’s the main point. Just because something is good on balance doesn’t mean it’s morally unproblematic. Let’s assume that the bombing of Hiroshima was good on balance (because it saved X number of lives that would have been lost in the war, or something). It still had morally horrendous consequences, and we’d still be obliged to search for alternative methods to save lives. Predation might be good on balance, but it involves enough suffering that we’re obliged to look for something that’s better on balance.
Do you see my point here? To prove that predation is bad, I don’t have to prove that it’s bad on balance. I just have to prove that there’s a better alternative, however magical. (Also if you think deontological ethics boils down to “I have spoken!” then I question your familiarity with moral philosophy).
@160 biogeo
Yes, I think that’s a fair enough reading. One use of “should” is purely evaluative (the world should be X way), and one is at least a little imperative (you should take X actions).
@Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden
I learned some new words! If I’m getting this right, Consequentalism is that the ends can justify the means, but Deontological ethics requires us to examine the means themselves, and determine if they’re consistent with our rules or duties? How do we determine what the rules are? How do we avoid Dogma?
How do we avoid dogma?
I’m not sure but I think if we feel morally obligated to consider destroying the natural world for our ethics we probably didn’t succeed.
@woozy #165
I’d tend to agree with you, there. My question was tangential, though. Crip Dyke has mentioned being a deontological ethicist, which made me curious so I looked it up, as well as consequentialism. I was asking about it, partly because I was curious. Deontological ethics is apparantly about rules, so I was wondering how you know if you have good rules. I think she was saying that our rules say we shouldn’t blow up all life on the planet so all life on the planet doesn’t suffer, and that they were arguing that the consequences of reducing suffering were sufficient that we were morally obligated to do so, had we the means.
Sean Goedecke @163:
Blockquote fail in the second paragraph, sorry about that.
Crip Dyke, can you refer us to some of your professional work? I’d be very interested to read it. Or if that would compromise your pseudonymity, the work of a colleague you respect? I’m not a philosopher, but I’d like to learn more about deontological ethics. When I first encountered it as an undergrad I was a pretty strong utilitarian, and so I didn’t consider it as seriously as I should have. Since strict utilitarianism stopped making sense to me, I’m trying to synthesize from more sources now.
@167
That’s a good question. I’m not a utilitarian, nor is my field of study normative ethics, so I’m not sure what the potted utilitarian reply is to that worry. However, I think it’d be something like this: adding one ecstatic person to the world increases total happiness by some amount, so it’s a way of making the world better (assuming we’re the kind of utilitarian that values the well-being of potential people as well as that of current people). It follows then that all states of affairs (except one) are “bad” in that there’s a better possible state of affairs out there. But the badness of states of affairs isn’t a boolean thing: states of affairs can be better or worse than others. When we say “predation is bad”, we don’t just mean “there exists a better alternative”. We mean “(a) predation involves a horrible amount of suffering, and (b) there exists a better alternative”. That’s why we might prefer a world without predation to a world with predation, even though they’re both “bad” to some degree.
#166 gwen.
I was just being a smartass. I’m actually very interested In Cryp Dyke’s response as well.
I have a weird thought that deontological rules might be like Bayesian priors. If a consequentialist hypothesis runs afoul of our priors, we have cause for suspicion. While they seem to be almost camps philosophers have allegiance too, they really seem like the two methods could compliment each other.
Crip Dyke @162: Does moral calculus always have to include possible (no matter how unlikely) outcomes that might take millions or billions of years?
Is an animal becoming a moral agent automatically a good outcome? Certainly our becoming intelligent moral agents (I’m assuming we did) has been accompanied by rather bad outcomes for a large part of the biosphere. So perhaps we should include that in the calculus as well.
Christopher has decided that the claim ‘other people have reported different things [regarding the sensation of pain at recieving injury]’ is actually in need of a citation. Apparently, Christopher thinks injuries, all of them, are painless until some time after the event. No injury has ever been imediately painful, unless you can cite examples.
Christopher’s utter lack of intellectual honesty is laid bare already, but is exemplified further in his very next post #125 in which he states, in direct contradiction to himself, that all deaths feature suffering in the form of ‘distress and terror’. He even ackowledges in the next sentence that these do qualify as suffering, even in the absence of pain.
(I’m reminded of those gun control debates that erupted here several times in response to mass shootings, in which Christopher frequently advocated that e.g. restricting gun manufacture was pointless, because a few dudes with metal mills / presses / etc. in their back sheds would just make guns to the same or greater volume and precision as a gun factory.)
Richard Carrier @146:
Damn it, Richard, what are you FtB bloggers trying to do to me today?! First, PZ references “Poor Superman”, and now you give a shout-out to “Sapphire and Steel”! Are you trying to induce some kind of nerd-aneurysm?!
That episode you mention is the creepy pinnacle of what is a very creepy show…
I’m a long-time pharyngula fan. I’m also a vegetarian and animal-rights person. I enjoy so much of what you say, but I’ve been a little bit frustrated at the lack of thoughtful debate around here on animal rights.
Yes, this particular philosophical paper on eliminating predators might be stupid to the point of self-parody.
I’m a long-time pharyngular fan, as I say, but I haven’t read your every post, so perhaps this is unfair… but it kinda seems like you’re choosing to focus only upon the fluffiest and stupidest philosophical paper on animal rights you come across. You purposefully avoid the truly, well, meaty stuff. If you only focus on the most ridiculous animal rights argument, you can paint a picture that all animal rights philosophy is ridiculous.
I’d love to read your take, as a biologist and an atheist, on something like Peter Singer’s argument against “speciesism,” which you can find here: http://www.oswego.edu/~delancey/Singer.pdf.
I’m not trying to get anybody to stop eating meat who wants to keep eating it, or anything like that. But personally, I find it hard to understand how any atheist with even a moderate understanding of the nervous system can exempt non-human animals from virtually all moral consideration. I get why religious people do (the Bible says they have dominion over beasts), but atheists…?
And when I ask the question people here get really insulting or just ignore me.
@175 Merrily Dancing Ape
I believe that we all rationalize our morals to suit our ultimately irrational beliefs so it’s no trouble at all.
To clarify:
My point is that you’ve failed to specify what, precisely, you’re choosing to balance.
No, you aren’t responsible for what might happen millions of years from now, but yes, predation is a force that contributes to natural selection and that was instrumental in bringing about the existence of moral agents on earth. Acting to end predation would be acting now to eliminate or vastly reduce certain selective pressures that may bring about the existence of new moral agents. What is that trade worth in your moral calculus?
As anyone can read in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, any form of consequentialism requires specifying the desirable consequences to be maximized as well as the undesirable consequences to be minimized (if any). From the encyclopedia:
Sean, you have failed to specify any “good”. You have specified a negative to be minimized – suffering – but you’ve failed to specify any good. In an attempt to spur you into naming your good(s), I’ve proposed some, including the possibility of life to produce moral agents, which might be a good to be maximized in some consequentialist schemes. I proposed that one in particular not because I believed that you or McMahan must use some estimate of this possibility, but merely because you’ve made no effort and that one seems particularly intriguing and relevant.
I resisted what others have embraced on this thread, the question of planetary biocide. However, a consequentialism that minimizes suffering with no other quality that must be maximized, no good, to restrain it, leads unavoidably to planetary biocide – universal biocide if we could arrange it.
It’s an old criticism, and it’s been the staple critique of consequentialist ethics in sci-fi for generations now. On the one hand, that made me wish to avoid it. On the other, that makes me extremely frustrated that you seem utterly clueless about your own failure to specify a good to be maximized and articulate how elimination of predation would maximize this good – or at least, fail to diminish it as much as suffering is diminished.
Instead of owning up to the fact that you are making a case for a moral proposition, you seem consistently to disown your burden of proof. I quote:
No. I’m arguing that McMahan and you (in defense of McMahan) have argued that predation is an overall moral bad. Consequentialism requiring a good to be maximized to avoid biocidal implications is a known problem. The two of you must be maximizing some good. You must not only have decided that suffering is bad, but that something else is good. In a simplistic one bad/one good consequentialist system (or a more complex system within which one is considering an act which affects only these 2 variables), if you reduce your good, but you reduce your bad more, the act is morally justified. Indeed in some consequentialisms the act is morally required. You must at some point have decided on the “good” in your model. You must at some point have decided that reducing suffering through elimination of predation failed to reduce the good as much as it reduced suffering.
That is entirely necessary in a consequentialist system. I don’t care if you like my proposed goods or not. I care that you haven’t owned up to your burden of proof. McMahan is particularly odd about this. While entitled to choose his ethical frame, when characterizing those who might not choose the same moral priorities he says (as I have quoted previously):
But this isn’t true at all. I earlier conceded (briefly) to the consequentialist frame to make the point that this ignores a shocking amount of research with truly horrifying (though well justified) conclusions into how much human suffering other humans will tolerate.
On the other hand, anyone operating with a consequentialist frame, even one in which “suffering” is a specified bad, might actually conclude that it is unknown whether or not predation is a morally bad state of affairs given that we have no reliable way of measuring suffering and even no good picture of how predation affects opportunities for goods. Think about predation that targets animals in late adulthood. If that animal experiences happiness (or whatever your “good” might be) disproportionately during youth and suffering disproportionately during age, the age at which prey is killed has a real chance of making a distinction between a net positive life and a net negative life. McMahan considers this in terms of a lingering, painful death, but never specifies a good so we can’t know if he’s right that the prey loses some significant opportunity to maximize good. If the highlight of your wildebeest life is suckling your mother’s milk, well, you’re not going to be doing that again in late adulthood. Thus it is reasonable to conclude – even in a consequentialist frame – that we simply don’t know if predation is a morally bad state of affairs.
Consider further the Milgram experiments. These experiments show that a person can care about human suffering and yet choose to inflict it when directed by “an authority figure”. This classic framing focused on authority figures is highly suggestive that many persons are employing deontological ethics (or deontic ethics). However there is a minority view (to which I subscribe) that virtue ethics explains the results equally well given that the virtue attributed to medical researchers is a confound with equal explanatory power. We need not disentangle the two to see that many people might make different moral choices than McMahan without succumbing to the faults McMahan imagines. Personally I find it insulting that McMahan seems to tar everyone except “almost no one” with his peculiarly despised fault given that McMahan must know at least some of this, must know that not all persons operate in a consequentialist frame and that even within consequentialist frames the goods to be maximized are disputed.
in fact, one of the things I find most appalling about the article is that I strongly suspect that cowardice is the reason McMahan has chosen to focus on suffering to the exclusion of specifying a good and making the case that predation is a morally bad state of affairs. It is much easier to get people to agree that suffering is to be minimized than it is to get people to agree that “happiness” is to be maximized. And yet, McMahan has no coherent ethical system unless and until he specifies the good to be maximized. He is content, then, to engage in indiscriminate stereotyping about the failures of others without even taking the time to make the case that their choices constitute failures. And he does this because, I believe, he’s aware that if he attempted to specify a good (like “eating delicious food”) he would have a much harder time getting agreement on the good and that the good would be maximized (how do we know that moose enjoy their food instead of feel a compulsion to eat that is experienced as suffering and then experience a lack of suffering after eating) in the absence of predation. Given consequentialism’s iron-clad requirement of a good to be maximized, the very driving force of his moral theorizing, the conviction that predation is bad, would be accepted by precious few.
McMahan has avoided doing the basic work required of a consequentialist because McMahan doesn’t wish people to consider the question and come to their own conclusions, he wishes them to come to his conclusion.
And there’s nothing morally wrong with trying to convince someone that your position is correct. In this case, however, both you and McMahan are trying to assert that you are correct. You are, each and both, avoiding your burden of proof. McMahan does this in a way that I believe demonstrates intellectual cowardice. I believe that you really don’t actually comprehend – or at least haven’t yet – that some form of calculus must be done to show that good (whatever that is) isn’t reduced as much or more than suffering.
Perhaps now you can finally engage with the actual question – Is predation a morally bad state of affairs? – that must be answered before any of the subsidiary questions McMahan engages become relevant in any way at all.
For utter and final clarity, if you wish to merely prove predation is a morally bad state of affairs in your own frame, you still need one good and you still need to show that it is not reduced more than suffering is reduced. If you wish to convince the other people on this thread that predation is a morally bad state of affairs, that is, if you wish to persuade people as you show some evidence of attempting, then you should also make an effort to prove that predation is a morally bad state of affairs in the various ethical frameworks to which others on this thread subscribe.
I facetiously described myself as a deontologist (I’m very much a consequentialist of rights and rules) not to bar you from any particular action but to point out that you cannot take for granted that suffering is a morally bad state of affairs much less that predation is a morally bad state of affairs. In Christian ethics, suffering might be a morally neutral or even a morally good state of affairs, depending upon the particular way their God is interpreted.
It is therefore presumptuous and arrogant for you to simply assume that your case is made because suffering exists.
If you want to convince anyone, take up your burden of proof and do something with it. Anything with it. Anything at all.
@Rob Grigjanis
Hey, Rob. Good to see you around. I thought I’d respond to you separately since not everyone will want to read the long version I wrote for Sean.
No, our moral calculus doesn’t always have to include possible outcomes. Since we can’t know what will happen that far out, I wouldn’t include them at all. However, I maintain that reducing selective pressures that favor the development of new moral agents is a morally worse state of affairs in the here and now.
That said, Sean doesn’t have to include that in the calculus. I throw it out there because I think that significant engagement between humans and one or more non-human moral agents would be incredibly valuable. To casually take action which diminishes the possibility (even from slim=> none is a diminishment) seems to me a moral loss. But Sean need not consider this to make a case that predation is a morally bad state of affairs.
Sean simply didn’t specify any good at all, whether the production of new moral agents or the feeling of a full belly, that might be maximized. Without a good to be maximized, all consequentialisms fail. They either fail as empty sets, devoid of ethical instruction, or, if they include negatives to be minimized without goods to be maximized they fail morally as they have become rationales for planetary sterilization.
Without knowing what Sean might see as the good to be maximized, I can throw out ideas to stimulate discussion, but Sean is under no obligation in this discussion to consider any of the specifics I use to poke and prod.
However, if Sean wants to convince someone else on this thread, Sean will have to – at some point – determine what ethical system that person uses and then attempt a proof within that frame (which may very well be consequentialist). Sean might get lucky and have the person operate in a familiar manner but with an extra good or two to be maximized or an extra bad or two to be minimized or Sean might have a more difficult time engaging a virtue ethicist who, like so many virtue ethicists do, define right actions as the actions good people take every bit as much as they define good people as the people who take right actions. You can bang your head against the wall for a long time when engaging folk like that.
Again, Sean need not try to convince anyone, and thus has no obligation to step outside his own moral frame, but Sean has made a claim – that predation is a morally bad state of affairs – and hasn’t bothered to actually prove that, even on his home ground.
Sean wishes us to take McMahan seriously. I find McMahan’s paper woefully inadequate because it assumes a morally bad state of affairs and then psychologically analyzes the people who disagree, even though McMahan won’t make a serious defense of predation’s moral badness.
Consequentialism, like it or not, can be compared with a mathematical scheme. I don’t particularly care what the variables are, but if you don’t show your work, how do I trust your answer?
@Merrily Dancing Ape
you are, of course, correct that focusing only on the most ridiculous animal rights arguments does paint a certain picture. PZ, like many of us, has much more to say when he has a coherent critique than when he agrees. There’s some but not much reason for someone to say, “Oh, yeah. What this person said.”
There have been occasions when PZ talked about cutting down on meat and eventually (I think) cutting it out of his diet. I think it’s not particularly an area on which he’s educated himself, and if he’s going to make a post, he likes to know what he’s talking about.
(that doesn’t make him immune to mistakes, of course, but this is a widely read blog, and I think most anyone running a blog with a readership as large would want to keep mistakes to a minimum, to spare the blood vessels in our cheeks, if for no other reason).
I should start by saying that I’m pretty uninterested in engaging further here. Sorry to Crip Dyke if that means you’ve wasted your time typing out a long post. Suffice it to say that I assumed that the good to be maximised was happiness and the bad to be minimised was suffering (I’m certainly not putting a negative utilitarian view). Does that mean I’ve got a burden of proof to show that predation doesn’t actually increase people’s happiness? Maybe. Regardless, I don’t intend to fulfil that burden. My prime intention in de-lurking and commenting here was to try to get people to take McMahan’s paper more seriously, since PZ and many commenters were doing such a monumentally uncharitable job.
I think Crip Dyke’s reading of McMahan is way better than PZ’s. I still think it’s uncharitable, since McMahan’s occasional attempts to psychologize his opponents make up maybe a hundredth of the paper, and the rest is taken up with substantial philosophical arguments. Taking McMahan to task for inaccurate psychology, which Crip Dyke has done in most of their posts, is largely irrelevant.
Despite appearances, I’m not interested in convincing people that predation is bad. I’m interested in convincing people that the case for “predation is bad” is substantial and can be taken seriously – in short, that the work done by professional philosophers is real work, even when it doesn’t lead to obvious policy recommendations regarding ecology.
Anyway, like I said, I probably won’t engage much further. Aside from a few people, my reception here has been pretty appalling, and it’s genuinely stressful to be engaged in arguments with posters I’ve read and respected for literal years. I had assumed that the Horde reserved rude mockery for posters engaging in oppressive discourse – guess I was wrong, hey! Thanks to Crip Dyke and biogeo for being exceptions.
(I mean, of course, that Crip Dyke and biogeo remained kind, not that they engaged in rude mockery.)
@biogeo
Deontic ethics aren’t necessarily unfashionable, but it depends decidedly on the school you attend. In general, I’d say that they get less attention than they should.
Ironically, one can make a very good utilitarian/consequentialist case for adopting deontic ethics. We have quite a bit of psychological research showing how human decision making employs heuristics even when they seem disadvantageous because not employing them is even more disadvantageous. Imagine pondering the real meaning of moving grass until the tiger is on your head and biting your neck.
Likewise, we don’t have time to perform the moral calculus on each individual action we choose during a day. We simply must operate according to short hand rules to get anything done. If our world is more productive (meaning, not least, that fewer people starve) when people use deontic analysis than consequentialist analysis, perhaps deontology was right all along?
Of course, deontic ethics are hard to reform. By design, they are resistant to any pressure to change merely because they lead to bad outcomes. While consequentialisms hold out some hope of maximizing good (whatever good might be), they would be terribly inefficient at getting us there if we actually employed them on a choice-by-choice basis. Deontic systems don’t particularly hold out any hope of maximizing good, though this line can be fuzzy as deontic systems in practice usually do specify a good that the rules are designed to maximize. In any case, they are resistant to change.
However, it is possible to come up with a system of rules to cover many of our daily choices, then subject those rules to after-the-fact analysis to see if they are, in fact, creating net good. If we take into account this evidence and update our rules, we have a consequentialism of rules that has a hope of consistently giving us net good. Even if we stipulate that they don’t maximize good compared with an individual analysis of each decision, if individual analysis of each decision is impossible, the comparison is meaningless for determining “maximized” good.
Sean @ 180:
People did take it seriously, Sean. You just didn’t like their thoughts about it, because you felt they were uncharitable. I’ll point out that your sense of uncharitable is utterly irrelevant when it comes to parsing a philosophical premise. CR, Biogeo, Crip Dyke and others tried, valiantly, to help you understand actual philosophical arguments. You could have saved everyone time if all you wanted, in the end, was to chastise people for not being adequately nice.
@Gwen Sutton
Yay for looking it up!
I’ve been accused of being a deontologist and, frankly, I usually don’t protest when that happens. I’m very much convinced that we shouldn’t stigmatize following rules and the people who think they are insulting me by calling my ethics deontic are exactly the kind of people who don’t need to be reminded of the risks of deontology and do need to be reminded of the humanity of people who operate deontologically.
It’s more accurate to say, however, that I’m a consequentialist of rules and when deontologists accuse me of consequentialism, I’m happy to cop to that as well.
And that’s what a consequentialism of rules is all about. Go you for doing some good questioning.
I hope it’s clear now that I was exaggerating my deontological tendencies to make the point that neither Sean nor McMahan can take for granted agreement that predation constitutes a morally bad state of affairs. However, yes. I believe that that’s a good rule, and I’m happy to constrain my actions according to that rule. ;-)
@Emily, way back in #96:
I kind of liked that phrase myself, though as a band I’m wondering if “Ellie Weasel and the Non-Cognitivist Bunny Rabbits” might not be better.
The MacAskill article comes down to this argument: The death of a single predator like Cecil the Lion is justified by all the prey that will now be spared from that predator, thanks to hunters like Walter Palmer. Kill one to save a few.
But the exact same argument could be used for killing human hunters. Think of all the lions we’d save by shooting Walter Palmer! Kill one to save a few. There’s no difference. That’s a key problem with the MacAskill argument.
Guideline Consequentialism: You care about consequences, not rules for their own sake; but, acknowledging that you can’t always foresee all consequences or accurately tally total “utils” in a choice (especially when you’re stressed out, which you usually are in the midst of ethical dilemmas), you give yourself a few sensible guidelines that tend to result in the best consequences. One of those guidelines should be to not kill.
How does a Guideline Consequentialist solve the Trolley Problem? (The MacAskill argument is a disguised version of the Trolley Problem, where you kill one to save a few.) You don’t push the fat guy onto the track; you either jump in front of the trolley yourself, or, if that’s not an option, yell at the fat guy to jump and then let him decide for himself what to do.
@176 chris61:
I thought our team tried not to do that!
I can’t wrap my head around the idea that animal suffering is bad and we should prevent it if we can, so therefore we should kill lions. Even though more than 8 million sentient animals (animals presumably capable of suffering) are slaughtered in the US each day. (How many sentient animals do lions kill? 30,000 lions… a few dozen animals each year per lion… Well, it’s a drop in the bucket.)
I would love it if more (and more and more!) people went vegan. I wouldn’t actually love it if we started killing predators and forcing their extinction (while somehow jiggering things so all the herbivores didn’t overpopulate and starve to death). The ecological consequences would be unfathomable, the technology will never allow it, far more progress could be made in reducing animal suffering by other means, and (I know this isn’t very sophisticated argumentation) it’s ghastly and stupid.
Sean Goedecke @ 180:
Speaking personally, I’ve noticed that the Horde tends to mock ideas they think are risible, regardless of source or intent.
And for a long time, (if I am recalling correctly) Rule #1 literally began, “This is a rude blog.”
Speaking strictly for myself, I’m with H. L. Mencken on the utility of a horse laugh.
@187
There you go, proving my point.
Merily dancing ape
Um… I was under the impression it was the stupidity we were arguing against and not the animal rights position. I imagine our various opinions on animal rights vary with many, though not all, mostly sympathetic. I believe PZ has reduced his personal meat consumption out of concern for animal suffering. And hurray for him, I guess.
There are far, far, far more and intelligent and more deserving faces to the animal rights cause then MacMahon and the MacAskills (or PETA).
footface
Oops. I misread that as “would” and was about to counterargue. I’d go further and say I find the idea morally repugnant. I’d find it morally repugnant if the predators were not hunted to extinction but genetically modified to eat tofu (and the nitrogen levels in soils were controlled by nanobots). I believe that’d be a horrifying violation to the very existence of animals that goes far beyond individual animal (or human for that matter) suffering.
Woozy @ 191:
PZ is a vegetarian, along with his wife and daughter.
Caine @ 191:
Well, don’t I feel dumb. I didn’t know that bit of info.
Merrily Dancing Ape @ 193:
Oh, don’t. It would have been more than easy to miss the change. https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2013/12/10/im-cured-no-more-meat/
Thanks for the discussion of the philosophical implications and mechanics (if that is the right way to say it) of this argument.
I do not think the argument is really a rational or philosophical argument. There is every indication that it is mostly an emotional one. It portrays the processes of natural selection in negative emotional terms judged from a particular human point of view. Completely reducing nature as much as possible to a simplistic 1+1 =2 abstraction which we have been scolded to take seriously as representing reality.
pain does not equal suffering as I understand it.
very enlightening and entertaining conversation.
uncle frogy
Crip Dyke @182:
Well, my ethics professor was William Fitzpatrick, now at Rochester, who as I understand it is interested in “non-naturalistic” systems of ethics, which at least suggests some deontic sympathies to me, although he never brought it up in the classroom and I’m not particularly familiar with his scholarly work. At least as a student, it felt like he did a pretty good job of covering various ethical systems fairly and addressing the strengths and weaknesses of each. It was certainly helpful in getting me to think more critically about the implications of my simplistic utilitarianism at the time. At any rate, I think any failure to seriously engage with deontic ideas at the time was my failure rather than his.
I’m somewhat familiar with this idea, as something like saying that in most cases, a good consequentialist should behave as if they were a deontologist. As I understand what you’re saying, then, “consequentialism of rights and rules” is the position that there exists a notion of the good which pertains to states of affairs, and the goal of ethical behavior is to maximize the good, leaving the “good” unspecified for now (standard consequentialism). Because of human limitations (finite knowledge, finite effort, psychological biases, etc.), it is impossible for us to determine in most cases what specific actions maximize the good. However, using reason and observation we can identify what effect certain behavioral policies have on the good, on average, and we can identify a behavioral policy which will tend to maximize the good (or engage in a process of gradual refinement to that policy which will asymptotically approach an optimal policy). I infer from the “rights and rules” part that you believe the optimal policy has at its center behavioral decisions based on these concepts. Ethical behavior, then, constitutes identifying the best policy one can, and then adhering to it.
Thus, the consequentialist of rights and rules and the deontologist both believe ethical behavior to consist of adhering to a particular policy, but for the deontologist it is because adhering to the policy is good, whereas for the CRR it is because adhering to the policy achieves good.
Have I understood you correctly?
Beautifully, in fact.
Do allow me to extend just one portion of your statement however:
Precisely. Any individual case may or may not play out as we expect. Thus, what we’re doing when we attempt to analyze an individual case is really applying our beliefs of likelihood of various outcomes (that may arise from instinct, “common sense,” instruction or guess) to the situation. Since that particular situation will never recur, there simply is no way to use empiricism to double check whether our decision was reasonable. We tend to judge it as “right” or “wrong” based on the actual results, but the next time a situation like this recurs we will again not know what the actual results will be. We make that choice in ignorance.
Thus there are reasons to believe that we will actually be more effective in creating the good if we try out rules, then use empiricism to check their effects, possibly then proposing new rules which may be tried by some. Checking their effects, the early adopters may switch back, or the ones that had continued to wait for data before switching might now see the new rule is better and make the change.
This advantage is entirely apart from
1) as humans we simply don’t have time to consider the ethics of each of our choices during a day
and
2) the human mind seems to operate on heuristics anyway: training an entire populace to operate by decisions made after an idiographic analysis of each situation is probably doomed to fail by reason of fundamental aspects of our human psychology.
So there are three strong reasons to go this route – at least three strong reasons a society should go this route. As individuals, of course, we should feel free to engage in individual analyses of each decision if we feel we have the time and skill and information.
Yes and no. Every once in a while we’ll take a leap. If we (in the USA) were engaged in refining towards the optimal policy for promoting physical health in 1929, we might have noticed an asymptotic relationship with some “best outcome” we could achieve within the reality of the world at the time.
But by 1932 our best outcome might be considerably worse because available resources had changed dramatically. But still, being able to inform that policy with empirical data we would presumably more often outperform policies created without any empirical support.
Then 13 years later we have penicillin available and health outcomes would take a considerable jump.
While this is public policy rather than morality, the example is to show that the consequences of a particular action (say, the feds spending .5% of GDP on public health) can be very different when knowledge or resources change. There’s no reason to think that the same thing wouldn’t happen with morality. If you decide to donate 7% of your income to charity while you’re in college, your 7% does a heck of a lot more once you’ve got a stable job in your degree field.
The rules, then, that you choose don’t necessarily asymptotically approach a “best practice,” though they can approach that best practice asymptotically during times when knowledge and resources have an unchanged, and minor, rate of growth over a significant period of time.
Thanks for explaining, this has been really informative!
I find this idea:
to be very interesting; I will have to think about it some more. It sounds like something one might call “moral pluralism”; that it is consequentialist-good for different moral agents to pursue various ethical policies, even if many or most of those policies are sub-optimal, because it allows a subset of moral agents to discover new policies which are more successful at achieving the good than the prior status quo. It seems to me that one wrinkle is that if not all moral agents agree upon what constitutes the good, then they will not be evaluating the effects of their own and each others’ policies according to the same criteria, and that furthermore that because people sometimes tend to realign their beliefs to justify their actions, there may be a tendency for people to adjust their notion of the good to fit their existing policy rather than vice versa. But that may just slow things down; you’ll still have young people who are moral agents still forming their policies on the basis of observing others’ actions and consequences without having already committed themselves to a policy they feel they need to justify.
(Also, just to be absolutely clear, when I say “policy” I’m talking about the individual moral actor’s behavioral choices. From your previous response I’m pretty sure you understood that, but since you also mentioned public policy I just wanted to be clear.)
I’m not sure this ends up addressing the fundamental problems I have with pure consequentialism. E.g., it feels strongly to me that personal autonomy is an intrinsic good that is not comparable to, e.g., happiness or suffering; there is no amount of happiness that could justify enslaving someone, no amount of fetal suffering that could justify banning abortion, no amount of unhappiness among friends, loved ones, and the community that would lead me to deny that a competent person has a right to suicide. Are there consequentialist formulations that allow that some goods or bads are incomparable? It seems to me a problem analogous to the notion of satisficing, whereas consequentialism as I typically understand it is about optimizing.
At any rate, this notion of consequentialism of rights and rules is very interesting! Might be time for me to hit the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a bit.
First, to dispense with this:
That was clear.
Now that you have a handle on a consequentialism of rules, consider that I advocate a consequentialism of rights and rules. There are reasons for teasing these two things apart. Rights, in this scheme, are not merely codified restraints on government action coupled with a duty to promote or enable certain opportunities/behaviors/choices/actions. In that sense, they could be written out longhand as equivalent rules and the distinction would not be necessary.
A consequentialism of rights attempts to determine choices and actions (and, to a lesser extent, beliefs since beliefs can’t be punished on their own, absent some form of expressive behavior, given that we can’t read minds) and resources that are too fundamental to (for instance, this is my preferred formulation) moral agency to be traded away. A consequentialism of rights might protect air quality, since without air we cannot live and without life we cannot be moral agents or exercise moral agency. A consequentialism of rights might protect the right to abortion because without control over our own bodies we cannot exercise moral agency and/or because a necessary condition of moral agency is being accountable for our own choices. If someone other than the person pregnant (say, a group of 536 politicians) determines the course of the pregnancy, then the persons making the decision won’t be rearing the child and otherwise facing the consequences of their own choices.
A consequentialism of rights is open to new information or changes in circumstance that might convince someone that something previously considered important is newly or has been (though unrecognized) fundamental. The reverse is also true. However, so long as something continues to be recognized as fundamental to a value we may not compromise, that fundamental is not subject to balancing save against other fundamentals. It is removed to a different category of analysis.
In the current moment, for instance, truly bionic artificial limbs that interact with the human nervous system are not considered something to which someone with an amputated limb has a “right”. However, with advances in technology and with reduced costs, it might someday be argued successfully that there must be such a right. With further advances that permit tissue and organ regeneration, such a right might be delisted – in this case, probably because it is replaced by a right to limb regeneration.
it’s a pretty fabulous resource, that’s for sure.
Oh for feck’s sake…
First, Noticeably missing is any consideration of the top predator, people. They also have to locked-up or executed or whatevered. I don’t see this being pointed out, which hints at what is perhaps really going on here: Self-centred loathing.
Second, Locking-up or executing is also “morally” “wrong” or “bad” or whatever. Again, conveniently not pointed-out. Authoritarianism much?
Thanks for clarifying the role of rights in consequentialism of rights and rules; that was very helpful! It seems like one could draw a distinction between rights which are necessary for the very concept of moral agency (e.g., freedom of conscience), versus ones which are contingent upon other facts about the world (e.g., your example of a right to good air quality).
Thanks for the discussion; this has been very illuminating!
@blf, 200: First, Noticeably missing is any consideration of the top predator, people.
Well, you see, we’re made in God’s– I mean, the most intelligent species on the planet, so clearly we get to police the entire rest of the animal kingdom.
@Crip Dyke: While I don’t 100% understand all the finer points (my background in philosophy is limited), I am greatly enjoying your breakdown of the McMahan paper.
Say, have any of these ethicists considered that we ought to consult with the other sapient species on our planet before modifying them and their whole ecosystem? I guess we should sit down with the crows of New Caledonia and explain to them that from now on, they may only use their custom-made stick tools to skewer chunks of tofu.
Crip, most if not all bioethicists acknowledge that we should act to protect vulnerable members of other ethnic groups from predators, parasites and starvation. In the wake of the biotech revolution, why not stick to our principles and protect members of other species too – starting with large, long-lived vertebrates? After all, we wouldn’t hesitate to rescue a drowning toddler from a different ethnic group. Why not protect beings of comparable sentience and sentience as well? To be sure, without predation and starvation, a population explosion looms. But just as humans now have family planning, tomorrow’s compassionately run wildlife parks can have cross-species immunocontraception. In short, do we really want a biosphere where sentient beings harm each other?
@David Pearce:
I once wrote in a very different context that one can object to an argument while agreeing with the conclusion.
P1: God told me that 4 is the same thing as 6
P2: God told me that 2 is the same thing as 3
2+2 thus = 3+3 thus = 6 thus = 4
Therefore, 2+2 = 4
That is a horrible argument, but the conclusion is correct.
There has been quite a lot of good work done on why we should care about non-human animals’ lives. Though I don’t read much of it, I’d probably agree with a good chunk, possibly the majority. I myself eat nearly vegan (occasionally an egg in a baked good and 2 or 3 times a year I’ll eat some sushi that includes wild-caught fish).
McMahan’s paper is not merely an argument that we must ethically consider animals, but that, in giving that due consideration one’s proper conclusion should be the elimination of predators as soon as technically feasible.
In my opinion, the argument was sloppily made. If you read the paper, you see that he’s arguing entirely on consequentialist grounds. That’s fine. But he never specifies a good to be maximized, only a bad to be minimized. When you only specify a bad, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that life must be eliminated. In fact, for most states of affairs considered bad in philosophy it is inevitable that one conclude that planetary sterilization is the proper course unless one has a competing good that must be maximized. If you want to minimize physical pain, but you have no competing value acting to preserve life, a quick nuclear holocaust prevents all further pain – get it?
More over, McMahan wanted to paint people who disagree with him as falling into certain logical traps or psychologically undesirable mental states. While alone this isn’t terrible. We are allowed to speculate on the barriers others might have to adopting our ideas, even psychological ones, when you combine his certainty that others must be reasoning in a very particular way with the fact that he hasn’t even made the case on consequentialist grounds AND the fact that instead of failing to reason properly in consequentialism, others simply may not be consequentialist, you get a paper that is quite unreasonable and self centered.
I can forgive the arrogance of a Copernicus who lays out all the evidence and all the math and then insists that if you don’t agree with him, you just don’t understand the math.
I’m not inclined so generously towards a McMahan paper that fails to start from first principles to make the argument that we should eliminate predators, but instead just announces that suffering means end of predators -duh! – and then starts maligning the empathy and/or reasoning of those who don’t agree.
McMahan is educated enough to know that not everyone is a consequentialist. McMahan is educated enough to know the distinction between “suffering” and “unavoidable/necessary suffering”. McMahan is educated enough to know that an argument that only minimizes suffering not only ends in the conclusion that we kill all predators, but that we kill all everything.
Frankly, what McMahan did was take the negative utilitarian argument for planetary sterilization, apply it only to predators, and then wonder aloud why people didn’t marvel at the compelling nature of his logic.
I agree that animals need our consideration. I agree that consciousness and subjective experience is far more broadly experienced in the animal kingdom than most persons would grant.
I think this paper is a bad paper.
@biogeo, 201:
One certainly could. You just have. Go nuts! Give humanity it’s next great ethical revolution, biogeo! I believe in you.
@blf, #200:
To be fair to McMahan, there is a mountain of work on the responsibilities people have for their own actions towards non-human animals. It’s okay for McMahan to choose a narrower topic that has been less considered.
Also to be fair to you, yes, McMahan’s mode of thinking towards animals does seem unusually authoritarian for an animal rights activist.
@Emily, #202:
While I’m happy to rip into McMahan’s paper, when you broaden it to “any of these ethicists” you’re probably doing a disservice to a lot of people who think seriously about animal rights. Unless you were just intending to add the McAskills for their paper that PZ also posted, you might want to set some limits on that.
Consciousness Razor is far better read than I am on animal rights and its philosophy. If you’re looking for things worth reading, you could visit CR’s website!
In the next great ethical revolution, I’m really hoping misuse of “it’s” as a possessive doesn’t end up punishable by anything extreme.
Crip, I agree with you that Jeff McMahan’s NYT piece needs expanding; I wrote to him at that time asking if he had any plans to write it up for a journal article. What is worth stressing is that a long-term goal of phasing out predation – and indeed the biology of involuntary suffering – is consistent with a wide range of value systems ranging from Buddhism (“May all that have life be delivered from suffering” – Gautama Buddha) to Christianity: if the lion and the wolf are to lie down with the lamb, members of each species will need some serious genetic-behavioural tweaking. Critically, one needn’t be any kind of ethical negative utilitarian to support phasing out predation or the biology of involuntary suffering. Nor need support for phasing out predation and starvation – in preference to population control via cross-species immunocontraception etc – entail support for killing existing predators. Questioning whether obligate predators have reproductive rights is less inflammatory than proposals involving violence.
(My own stab at the problem of predation was written back in 2009, just before the CRISPR and “gene drives” revolution exploded; but IMO the general points still stand:
http://www.hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/reprogramming-predators.html)
blf @200:
Any consideration? This is on page 2;
In the next great ethical revolution, it will be a sin which can be absolved by copying out Strunk and White by hand, and by promising to use the proper number of spaces after a period.
@biogeo:
and here I was hoping for a little light spanking. Oh well. Copying Strunk & White is better than solitary confinement.
Crip Dyke:
Fortunately or unfortunately, there is no such website. However, it’s my understanding that because of Rule 34, you may have already had sex with it. I guess at least that’s good. We live in a just world after all.
For what it’s worth, just as a minor criticism, I try not to be too doctrinaire about “consequentialist ethics,” even though it seems to work well for me most of the time. It’s a thinking tool or a way of formulating what our reasoning is about, which I guess does to some extent drive our thought processes in some directions rather than others, but I don’t usually think of it as very significantly different from “others” like deontology, virtue ethics, etc. Whatever sort of system they’re working with, assuming it’s systematic at all, people generally have more or less the same concerns and merely express them differently. Honestly, I’m not sure how to imagine something that can’t somehow be put into terms of a consequence.
To make this a little bit clearer with an example (without going too deep into specifics), I was talking with my mom recently. She was basically complaining to me about how her mother treated her (years ago) because of my grandma’s religious convictions as an extremely devout Catholic (which my mom shares for the most part). She knows I’m not religious, but apparently likes to think I’m much more sympathetic to religion than I actually am. In any case, that’s when the language became pretty useful to me, to express something that seemed blatantly inadequate about it, which she could understand and appreciate, without having to go through any of the trouble of convincing her that all of her (and grandma’s) theological beliefs are false: what she did harmed no one. There was no negative consequence to speak of. That was obvious, and hardly needed to be said. It was instead about an arbitrarily-constructed rule or concept that had nothing to do with any negative consequence that grandma or Jesus or anybody else could possibly identify. That kind of “reasoning” just isn’t about stuff like that. It’s about adhering to some vague principle of dogma that this act supposedly just is sinful (and only apparently for women, in this case, I should add). So, in other words, you couldn’t actually point to anything in the world and say that this is why it was supposedly a bad thing to do. Not anything. Of course I can’t read minds, so grandma might have had some vague suspicion, since we’re all so accustomed to thinking this way, that perhaps it might have lead to some actually-bad result that’s associated with it somehow or another, however tangentially. Who knows what that sort of rationale might look like, if there’s even a sincere attempt to think about one. But on the face of it, that’s clearly not the reason grandma thought it’s bad. The thing that really happened wasn’t bad, it didn’t in any way cause anything bad, and there was no genuine reason to have predicted it would even have a small chance of turning out badly for someone somehow. She thought (and still thinks) it’s bad because an authority says so or commands it to be so: it just is so, according to a deity, a book, an institution, a tradition, a priest, her own parents, or whatever it may be. She’s supposed to obey that thing (and so is everyone else), that’s why. That’s the only reason why.
That doesn’t look like the sort of thing you could formulate as some kind of a consequence in the world, which hurts or helps or does whatever it does, some factual description of what’s actually happening in the real world, that somebody could know something about (or even make a very uncertain prediction about). And if that’s so — if it just can’t logically be done, not that someone merely failed to express themselves in those terms and we’re not even really trying to think about it that way — then I’m not sure I can understand what it is that I’m supposed to find convincing about the claim.
But in a lot of more mundane cases, it seems there are essentially-equivalent ways of describing the issues or situations, which don’t really push us very much toward preferring one kind of ideology over another. When you get down to it, if being a “virtuous person” is a morally significant consequence, or if following a rule is doing that, then I don’t generally have a reason to complain if you use that sort of language for it. They all have their limitations as different ways of representing the world, and they’re all useful as representations as long as that is kept in mind about them — it’s not as if we have some gained kind of knowledge at some point, consisting of the fact that consequentialism is true and its competitors are false. To the extent that is the difference we’re noticing between these systems or ideologies, it’s like saying English is the true language and Spanish is false. I just don’t get where people are even coming from when they say things like that. Maybe I just don’t get what the point is supposed to be, but it doesn’t seem to be a helpful way to think about them.
cr @211: I think Crip Dyke may have been referring to another Consciousness Razor.
Thanks, CR. Now I don’t know whose website I was thinking about if it wasn’t yours. Oh, well.
Truefax.
As I said earlier, when I’ve been labeled a deontologist by people who think that’s an insult, I don’t deny it because I’m more interested in sabotaging the foundations of that thought than defending myself: the process by which you make ethical decisions doesn’t matter much to me, and certainly a person’s metaethical choices don’t make that person worthy of scorn and insult.
I say that I’m a consequentialist because when the time comes for me to think about the ethics of a choice I hadn’t previously considered, I consider the foreseeable consequences to be the best guide to what I should choose. I say it because it accurately describes my process, but not because I have allegiance to it as a flag. I also have articulated that consequentialisms that don’t have a functional similarity to deontological ethical systems in their quotidian operation simply don’t work – humans don’t have the time or the training to consider every situation from first principles.
So I have opinions on what ethical systems will ultimately work best for humanity: it’s kind of hard to avoid developing some kind of opinion on general benefits if you go through the process of explicitly considering adopting one or another approach for yourself. But there’s no requirement for “good people” that a person take an ethics course, or choose what I choose, or anything else. We each do the best we can with what we’ve got. I’ve got a bit of metaethics, so I run with it and try to use it the best I can.
Rob Grigjanis
I looked at that website.
I have a strong feeling that is not our consciousness razor.
but on the internets … ya never know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_dog.jpg
Crip Dyke, thanks for the detailed responses to me and others about the paper. I’m going to bow out of the discussion now, because I haven’t read the paper in-depth and am out of my element in this topic. :)
My wife works in environmental remediation. One of her favorite Aldo Leopold quotes:
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” –Sand County Almanac
@David Pearce:
So I’ve now read your take on ending predation. There, too, there’s no attempt to analyze the consequences of ending predation. It’s quite frustrating.
You start here, and I’m instantly taken aback by your statement on technical feasibility. Traditionally, such technical feasibility is indicated by having all the information and tech we need to do something even though no one has actually bothered to do it. But we don’t have all this information. While CRISPR might allow you to play with genomes over and over until you get one you like, there’s nothing that tells us in advance what genes or combinations of genes can permit the intentional engineering of “genetically preprogrammed gradients of well-being.”
I wish you would go on and make a case for the ethical demand of predator removal, but you like others seemed to analyze only so far as “suffering exists, suffering bad, must end suffering”. You don’t seem to ask, “Is there anything about predation that would make it necessary or desirable despite the suffering it inflicts?” Why is that question nowhere answered in your work?
Take your next paragraph:
The problem is that you’re not only eliminating the suffering of predation, you’re also eliminating the predation. As others have stated in this thread, killing diseased members of a community prevents epidemics. As I have said, predation has a serious impact on the evolution of new traits. Yes, other things being equal, less suffering is good and more suffering is bad. But you’re not holding other things equal.
Thus this does NOT follow straightforwardly from utilitarian ethics. Here’s a concept for you: You have the capacity to reprogram animals, indeed to design entire ecosystems and maintain an ecological balance you impose at which life would otherwise not be in equilibrium. Why not engineer prey animals (whether they themselves are predators or not) to enjoy escaping predators so much they even experience being eaten alive as a serious of opportunities to perform the greatest escape of a lifetime? Now you still have prey attempting to escape predators. You can fine tune the force of the positive motivation (the pleasure of escaping and the lesser pleasure of being caught because it prolongs the exciting, pleasurable sense of possibly getting the escape reward) to be approximately equal to the negative motivation to avoid suffering and death current prey already feel.
At that point, you’ve eliminated the suffering, but natural selection hums along unimpeded. We also don’t have humans designing ecosystems, with all the ethically fraught possibilities involved there. Now you’re actually holding everything equal except the suffering. THAT would flow naturally from your utilitarian observation.
But the only way “ending predation” or “killing all predators” follows naturally is if you have no “good” you are attempting to maximize to trade off against the bad you’re trying to minimize. Why don’t you have a “good”? Why isn’t there some animal good to be maximized in your formulation?
I mean, if you’re buddhist, okay, end all suffering. Nuke the world. But if you’re a consequentialist and you’re not merely engaging in negative utilitarian justifications for planetary sterilization, there has to be some good you’re shooting for, right?
I notice that much later, you say:
But why not?
Why don’t they apply?
Or, rather, why the fuck do they count for humans? If all we’re doing is minimizing suffering, it doesn’t matter if we sabotage cognitive performance: cognitive performance isn’t a utilitarian good in your system.
If cognitive performance is a utilitarian good in your system, why didn’t you specify a method of eliminating suffering that would not impede non-human animal cognitive performance?
It seems vastly arrogant, not to say speciesist (oops!), to skip over the analysis of any good animals experience or provide that might be affected by predation or its lack. I don’t know if you’re actually coming from a consequentialist frame or if you simply employ consequentialism to make sure that your argument convinces those who do, but the argument can’t convince someone if it’s not made. Specify the good you will attempt to preserve. Even if it’s just “happiness,” and you’re critical of nature documentaries, some people experience happiness seeing these animals: add it in. Plausibly, animals in a herd that get away feel relief, a rush of something pleasurable similar to a human in an exciting situation of narrow escape that causes a dump of adrenaline. Add that in. Etc.
it’s fine for you to believe that these bits couldn’t possibly compensate for the suffering inflicted – even a herd of wildebeests feeling relief at escape, in your view, might not experience anywhere near enough pleasure to compensate for the caught wildebeest’s pain. But remember that some suffering is extended by lack of predation – a sick animal suffocating with a lion’s jaws around it’s throat is in horrible suffering for at most a half hour. A sick animal whose lungs are slowly filling up with fluid and whose joints and muscles scream with pain might suffer for days or weeks.
Obviously some animals would suffer less without predation, but clearly some would suffer more. So how much suffering is really saved? Is it enough to offset the good we might lose (or animals might lose)?
You have to make that case if you want to eliminate predation. You haven’t made it. Your case for eliminating suffering would require you to hold everything else equal. You don’t.
So you simply haven’t done the work that should be required of someone attempting to convince the public of the moral necessity of predator elimination.
I’m reminded of Douglas Adams’s intelligent cow at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe which was engineered to desire nothing more in life than to be killed and consumed as a delicious steak.
@biogeo:
Yes, I had that in mind as I wrote. I’m not sure if it inspired the description of “holding other things equal” since I didn’t consciously have it in mind til after I had decided to go about the question of, “what would it look like to hold things equal, save for suffering?” It could have been bopping around unconsciously even before I took up that question. Either way, I had it in mind and thought about working it in, but left it out.
Believe it or not, there are some things I think of to say that I then decide not to bother saying.
Really.
Crip, first feasibility. Is a living world where sentient beings don’t physically hurt, harm and kill each other technically, ecologically, thermodynamically possible?
Initially, of course, we wouldn’t tackle all the world’s ecosystems simultaneously. We’d do a pilot study in a wildlife park: cross-species fertility regulation via immunocontraception, GPS tracking, in vitro meat and/or genetic tweaking of obligate carnivores (etc).
“Killing diseased members of a community prevents epidemics”. Yes, sure. But vaccinations and cures are more civilised than violent solutions for human and non-human animals alike.
Phasing our predation will have “a serious impact on the evolution of new traits”? Yes indeed. But CRISPR genome-editing and “gene drives” promise a far richer diversity of genomes, psychologies and behaviours than was possible under a regime of natural selection.
Teething problems, unanticipated side-effects, you name it? Yes, no doubt. However, we aren’t talking about a Five Year Plan, but rather the long-term future of predation in the context of a wider project of compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world.
Second, ethics and policy-making. You and I could lay out our respective theories of value and normative ethics. Perhaps more fruitful will be exploring the scope for compromise and consensus – just as we almost all agree about the desirability of e.g. eliminating malaria, despite an immense diversity of values and belief systems. Thanks to biotechnology, all that’s needed to get the project of compassionate stewardship off the ground is a weak and watered-down ethical principle: other things being equal, intelligent moral agents should try to reduce the amount of involuntary suffering that sentient beings undergo. The goal of reducing suffering needn’t express our sole or even our primary ethic; we may be utilitarians or deontologists or virtue theorists or ethic pluralists and so forth. Most religious and secular ethicists would put some weight on reducing cruelty and suffering. You don’t need to be a Buddhist or a Benatarian or a negative utilitarian (etc) to believe the burden of avoidable suffering in the living world should be reduced as the biotech revolution matures – and the cost of code-editing collapses.
Ultimately, why preserve involuntary suffering at all?
I’ve yet to hear an ethically compelling case.
“Arrogant”? If one has the chance to save a toddler belonging to another ethnic group from drowning in a shallow pond, or being mauled by a predator (etc), we wouldn’t claim that walking on by is more modest and unassuming. (Who are we to question the mysterious working of Providence? etc) So why is it any more arrogant to rescue beings of comparable sentience and salience to a human toddler but who belong to a different species? We share the same core emotions and pleasure-pain axis. More generally, should our benevolence be ad hoc or systematic?
“Escape reward” at outrunning a predator? How credible is the claim that such acute relief somehow ethically outweighs the life-or-death trauma involved? No doubt someone who escapes from a human predator experiences a wave of relief too. Yet one hesitates to ask, say, a woman who has escaped from the clutches of a violent rapist whether the experience has been a net positive in her life. Such examples could be multiplied: post-traumatic stress disorder is more common.
“Relief” for a sick animal? We wouldn’t argue that violent human predators who prey on the old the sick are doing the vulnerable a favour by putting them out of their misery. Likewise with sentient beings from other species. Believers in an ethic of compassionate stewardship hope that eventually the range and depth of our interventions can be extended across the phylogenetic tree.
But first, let’s close slaughterhouses and factory farms…