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Both Sides Brigade's avatar

Great post! I definitely agree there's a lot of hubris, and not nearly enough intellectual curiosity, underlying a lot of these takes on wild animal suffering. In some sense, it's a weird mirror image of the pro-life movement, in that both are built around this totally silent and morally pure class of victims you can project your own views onto without any need to consider what their own perspective would be. I get why utilitarians are drawn to things like this, since insects and other "lower" animals are easy to conceptualize as pure "utility containers" in a way that avoids a lot of the complications we run into when we look at social issues involving human beings. But that sort of incurious paternalism is dangerous everywhere, I think.

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Defender's avatar

(haven't finished reading yet, but):

> But while anti-natalism doesn’t fail on theoretical grounds, we can show that it fails as a _practical matter_: that as **limited** beings in **this** universe, we are **not justified** in **concluding** and **acting** upon the belief that large swaths of animal species are better off extinct.

This is beautiful. It feels like it rescues the whole thing by making a clear separation between (1) our ability to decide on the ethical option, given all known variables, and for all of us to agree on this, and (2) to reach a completely different conclusion given that we are not God, we do not have perfect information. Some information is in fact impenetrable, necessarily unknown given the range of our senses & actions, and the specific vantage point we take as actors of a certain species inside this world.

Now the correct choice in (2) is very different, BUT we don't make the mistake of letting go of (1), the platonic view of perfection that is our guide that we try to pull our world towards.

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