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.
Yeah, paternalism is a good word. It is weird though: I'm somehow more okay with advocating killing as a necessary evil than I am with killing as a paternal gift. I got into this in one of the footnotes, but it just seems like the latter is a more dangerous instinct that threatens to justify endless death and as such requires a much higher burden of proof (even if the former has a high burden as well).
> 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.
Thank you!! And yeah, I think philosophers have a bad tendency of focusing so much on (1), known as ideal ethics, that they neglect the vast chasm between it and (2) non-ideal ethics. I am much more interested in the latter because I think so many of the key ethical insights that ground practical reason come from that shift. But, of course, you do still need the former even if it isn't totally sufficient.
Also, good reminder that I still have to read that essay you tagged me in--I've been so busy finishing this monster that I haven't had time. Will try to get to that this week.
re: the essay I tagged you on, I was just excited because I think this is a subtle point that solves a lot of paradoxes, but most people don't get it. And you clearly get it, and I've been growing tired of defending this hill by myself, but now I'm not alone!!!! 💜
(the point being that people's ideology shows them what is good, and what is evil. When they learn that, actually, their ideology is evil, they don't think, "ah, well now I will switch to the other side", they think, "wait, if the good guys are evil...then EVERYTHING is evil, there are no good guys, no good exists" and that's a much worse position to be in)
Thanks for the post. I agree. I’m glad people are starting to point out how disturbing the consequences of this particular kind of animal activism really are.
I made a related argument, in a much shorter, less rigorous post yesterday: Why we shouldn’t pave over the world to save it
Something that stands out to me is that there's not much of a general "theory of happiness" being appealed to, and it really feels like there should be. You mentioned about the bees making honey being their raison d'etre, and I think that's key. If we had a bee Aristotle, they'd probably say that honeymaking was key to their eudaimonia.
If we look at the things that make humans happiest, it's largely the things we're peculiarly evolved for: socialising, singing, dancing, running long distances, throwing stuff, solving puzzles. It's not crazy to think bees love their work. And if we do the simplistic "imagine you're a bee", that sounds cute and fun too!
Yeah, this is a very good point. On one hand I did want to avoid quibbling too much on exactly how much utility is derived from which activity (since imo, it doesn’t matter what *we* think), but the idea that evolution would naturally ascribe very high positive utility towards our natural telos is strong.
Okay, a bunch of things I disagree with. A thing at the top before I get into the list is that if you think insects matter and have nice lives, that has wildly revisionary implications. It implies that nearly all the things we do are immoral because we reduce insect populations. Anyone who cares about insects must be a radical, not just those who think they have bad lives.
More specifically:
1) First of all, the case for net negative insect welfare is much stronger for nearly all creatures other than bees than for bees. Most insects live about a week and then die painfully. Bees have vastly longer lives!
2) I think bees life's are of unclear quality prior to death. But if you have a life of middling quality that is short--just a few weeks or months--and then starve to death, your overall existence wasn't good.
3) Bee conditions are unpleasant. Being in an unnatural environment is unpleasant for animals even if it's not objectively terrible. Water is not objectively terrible, but if you lived in it, that wouldn't go well for you! Bees do find overcrowding unpleasant and the fact they huddle together in the winter when they're freezing to death doesn't give evidence against that. The beekeeper just brazenly asserting bees don't freeze to death in the face of a study on it is pretty ridiculous. The average day of bee life doesn't have to be "unspeakable horror" for bees to have negative lives!
4) It doesn't matter how bad life is in the wild! I don't think wild bee life is nice either.
5) My comment about bees being overworked was based on the fact that bees have been genetically preprogrammed to literally work themselves to death gathering honey, including often mutilating themselves in the process and continuing to labor. I grant bees get some pleasure from their work! I just think the suffering in their life outweighs. As mentioned before, I'm not a negative utilitarian.
6) I grant some deaths from wild animals aren't near as bad as e.g. starvation. Some are quick. But even the quick ones are pretty grisly! Like, just think about how painful it would be for a vice to completely crush your finger. Then imagine that same thing being done *all over your entire body* and it taking minutes for you to die. If you only lived two weeks and then died that way, your life would obviously be hedonically negative! And most insects live vastly shorter lives than bees, so probably for them it's just a week or so of existence. Also, probably starvation is the most common way to die.
There are experiences so painful that when experiencing them, a creature would do anything to make them stop. Probably a large portion of animals have experiences like that in their life--vastly worse than anything that most of us ever experience except during death. For a potentially prolonged experience that bad, you need more than a week of nice life to outweigh it. And most insects have only about a week of life with deeply uncertain, and likely negative, quality.
7) //For now, even if we do adopt this asymmetry of valence and hold that bees are capable of great suffering but not great pleasure// I grant they're capable of great pleasure. But typically the worst experiences are worse than the best experiences are nice. That's true in humans, for instance.
8) Even if you think being alive is intrinsically--rather than instrumentally good--it's doubtful that if you live a week and then die painfully your life was overall worth living. Just imagine a machine that created babies who were fed for a week and left to starve. Would you think they had nice lives, on grounds of "joie de vivre." It's a lot easier to appreciate nature if you're a human capable of higher order reflection than if you're an insect with a simple brain, constantly on the run from threats.
9) I don't share your intuition that negative experiences are better than nothing. Like, for example, I was recently on a plane with a pretty bad headache for many hours--if I could have skipped it I would have. Most of the moments of my life are pleasant, but I wouldn't be in favor of creating more of the unpleasant ones. But I think this is mostly immaterial. Even if slightly hedonically negative existence is nice, existence when you're starving to death or dying of overheating is not. And that's the experience of huge numbers of animals.
10) I'm not a negative utilitarian! Nor am I depressed. In fact, I think I'm abnormally happy and cheerful! I just think that suffering is bad, well-being is good, but most insects have more suffering than well-being by quite a sizeable margin.
11) //If I am being frank, I think the claim that wild animals are better off unborn is a rather embarrassing admission—you are, in a sense, telling on yourself. You’re saying that if deprived of all your modern conveniences—your apartment, your dishwasher, your Lululemon pants—and forced instead to fend for yourself in the wild, you would be despondent.//
Who's anthropomorphizing now? I don't think humans in nature have negative lives. I also think some larger animals with long lives like elephants could very well have decent lives. It's the tiny animals who die painfully after extremely short lives who I'm skeptical about!
12) //Adelstein asks if any of us would choose to live for an additional three weeks of mediocrity if we knew that said period might end in a pain and suffering—and the answer empirically seems to be yes!//
It's not that it "might end in pain and suffering." It's that it would very likely end in an extremely painful death. Try putting your hand under the shower water when it's heating up, beyond the point where it makes it impossible not to pull your hand away. There is a kind of pain that you'd do almost anything to get to stop, and large numbers of creatures experience pain of that intensity for quite a considerable amount of time.
13) I don't get the arrogance charge! You think insects are better off existing. I think they're not. Whichever of us is right, it doesn't seem arrogant to try to bring about what we think is correct. Would it be arrogant to destroy a machine that created babies and then left them to starve to death after just a few days of nice life? Would it be arrogant to be in favor of creating fewer Miserodons? Of course not! It's just as arrogant to think you're sufficiently ethically confident in animals having nice lives that you support bringing about more creatures to suffer horrendously. Everyone has an ethical view--it's not a matter of arrogance to do the things your view says is right.
Sorry this took so long, I felt I owed you a more comprehensive response given that I spent 8,000+ words ripping on your ideas. Although my article was a response to yours, you were not actually the "target audience" of the piece. As you can probably tell by the structure, I assumed the ideal reader would find insect anti-natalism instinctively wrong and then immediately imagine that it is an inherent absurdity, and so then my goal was to convince that sort of person that 1) it is not actually absurd, but 2) it is still deeply wrong in a practical sense. You could say that my "ideal" audience was Trace, and my rhetorical choices reflected that.
I give that preamble because this comment *is* written with you as the target audience, so I'm going to try and write from your frame of reference. And I'll be upfront rn that my goal is not to convince you that you are wrong about insect welfare--I don't think that I'm capable of doing that in a Substack comment. Instead, I'd like to convince you that your critics (myself included) are expressing reasonable objections in a way that goes beyond merely disagreeing at an object-level about the "true" expected net utility of bees. There is a principle of the matter as well.
I originally tried to respond to all the objections you made, but frankly, a lot of them overlap in weird ways so I don't think it's efficient to repeat the same points. There are a couple that warrant standalone response though:
[1] What about other insects: Fair enough, I focused on bees since that was the big button topic at hand. I can't really say what I'd think about the net utility of other insects without knowing how they live. But I still don't believe we would be justified in driving them to extinction for principled reasons that I'll cover last.
[4] You think wild bee lives suck too: Yes, I credited this point to you in the essay multiple times I believe. Not sure where you were responding to this?
[5, 7, 10] You're not a [strict] negative utilitarian: Yep, I did call this out in a footnote. My references to strict negative utilitarians (e.g., Tomasik) were because they also have anti-natalist views. But I don't think any of my arguments against you assumed you were a strict negative utilitarian. That being said--and this is mostly a side point--I do think you resemble a weak negative utilitarian. Your point in 7 seems almost archetypical of that. You often talk about suffering with this broader implicit assumption that the types of suffering you describe are so severe that they cannot reasonably be overcome by positive joys. I do understand this view; it doesn't strike me as unreasonable. But it does seem weakly negative utilitarian. But it's hard to know where you actually draw the line here. Maybe you've said this elsewhere, but like, how many orgasms do you think it would take "outweigh" shooting one person in the stomach? How about crushing them to death (assume it takes 5 seconds for them to die)? Or starving to death? I don't mean these as a gotcha, but the way you typically talk about suffering seems to imply that you think the numbers here would be very very very high.
As for all the rest of your objections, I think the easiest way to structure my response is by walking through three questions and covering your objections as I do:
A) Do *we* think that the day-to-day lives of bees are positive or negative?
B) If the answer to A is positive, then do *we* think that the positives are sufficient to outweigh the negative utility due to manner of death?
C) Does what *we* think about A or B matter? Does it justify us in taking actions like destroying ecosystems?
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A) I think the day-to-day lives of bees seem to be weakly positive--potentially very very positive--and I think your arguments that they are not demonstrate a significant amount of pessimism. I did not argue that bees huddling in winter was evidence that they like being crowded together--I just think it's totally conceivable that they like being crowded together no matter the weather. I'm confused as to why you think they find it unpleasant. Why would they?
As for the "unnatural environment" -- I'm sorry but you just cannot conclude that the Ikea box is some non-negligible source of negative utility. At best, this is a red herring.
And then re: them being overworked, I think your characterization here is super weird. One way to say that something is genetically preprogrammed to do X is that it "really really really wants to do X". One reason it might really want to do X is that it derives a LOT of pleasure in doing X. They seem to be choosing to work even if they are in pain, which suggests that they really really love the work they do. In fact, we should expect evolution to select for bees which derive pleasure from this activity. That sure seems like a good way to motivate them to work until death after all. If you're going to respond with the gambling analogy, I already covered that in the essay: you can't just show it's *possible* that bees are making irrational choices that don't reflect their all things considered enjoyment. You do actually have to prove it. You're the one advocating for ecosystem destruction.
The flip side of your arguments is that if they enjoy working so much that they'll do it until their wings give out then it must be pretty great. These are eusocial creatures--I think you are projecting a mental model of work onto them that you are not justified in doing.
Moreover, you seem to misunderstand the joie de vivre point. It is not an assertion that *any* day lived is better than one not lived. It is an argument that a generic day lived is actually amazing, and many modestly negative ones are actually still better than not existing. You talked about taking a plane flight with a bad headache. What about a long walk with a strong but not overwhelming toothache? If that's all your last day on earth consisted of, would you prefer to euthanize yourself a day early instead? I certainly wouldn't.
I think the way you go about analyzing these questions about day-to-day life of animals reveals a structural bias towards pessimism. If your argument is just that a bee's death sucks and their lives are too mediocre to overcome that horrible death, then fine, lean into it that way. But you tend to paint a bunch of stuff as more horrible than it really is to oversell your point, and you almost never try to find any positives. I think this habit undermines your credibility.
B) I agree that the deaths largely aren't great, but given the above, I think there's no way to answer with a high degree of confidence (I'm talking 99%+, which you gotta have if you're justifying species extinction) whether their lives are net negative in expectation. You seem to just casually assert that many of these deaths last a long time, but that is a load-bearing assumption. Being shot in the head is basically painless--that a death is grisly or gruesome does not mean it is actually bad. I'm also not sure how bad collapsing from exhaustion would be after doing something you love to the point of failure. Humans usually have an endorphin response to that sort of thing.
So if there can be a bee that lives a very happy life collecting nectar and making honey, and they actually derive a lot of utility from that plus joie de vivre, and they like the crowded hive because it's cozy and means safety in numbers, and they even like the box, then three weeks later BAM it's crushed to death or eaten in a single bite...then...idk, seems like it was positive utility to me. Now, how many of those net positive lives have to happen to outweigh the life of the bee that gets partially crushed or freezes to death? Idk, but I also don't think it matters.
Because the point of A) and B) was NOT to prove that insects do, in fact, have positive lives in expectation. It was to prove that it is *possible* (within reason) that they do. Like I said at the top, my disagreement is not purely at the object level. I do not know if insects have net positive or net negative lives. It is an open question with massive error bars. My argument actually is mostly about:
3) You don't get to decide if another species' life is net negative in expectation and use that as justification for driving it to extinction (or destroying large parts of its habitat), particularly when you are so far removed from that being's experiences. This is where the arrogance charge comes in. You don't get to destroy habitats and ecosystems just because you have judged the lives of those in them to be negative. Your judgement doesn't really matter. Only a bee gets to decide that for themselves; it is their right. To presume you can make that choice for the bee is hubris.
You might think this is a necessarily deontologist argument, but it's also perfectly compatible with a consequentialism of rights and even a pragmatic form of preference utilitarianism taken in a non-ideal frame where the only way to know a preference is for a being to either tell you its preference or reveal it through a choice between tradeoffs. The idea is that given the aggregation of utility involves weighing positives and negatives, we do have to assign relative weights to those positives and negatives. I do not mean just calculating [values] in terms of how strongly positive or negative those factors are along their own dimension, but also [weights] in terms of how important they are relative to each other. In reality these weights should be functions because not everything is linear but let's ignore that wrinkle.
You can make all the claims you want about how painful something is, but you don't get to decide the relative weight of pain vs. the relative weight of joy for another being (outside rare and extenuating circumstances), and certainly not for an entire other species. That's the point of the final Miserodon example: it is possible that a being might value somethings a lot more than pain, and you don't get to decide for it.
Why go through A) and B) first though if this was my point? Well because I do think you could argue that if a bee's life was 100% negative and had no positives then it's "impossible" for the life to be net positive. I think this situation is basically impossible to prove, but I do grant that if this was the case, maybe you can argue for anti-natalism as not only theoretically plausible but practically justifiable. But this isn't the case.
A few other notes here.
1) You might say that the bee cannot make this choice because it doesn't know what death is or how to commit suicide and it's life might only become net negative when it's starving to death. Correct. But the fact that it cannot make this choice does not mean that you can. This is a choice that nobody can make. Too bad. There is literally nothing to be done.
2) Anti-natalism/destruction of ecosystems/species genocide is different from other choices about animal welfare. We can choose to reduce animal suffering by reducing specific sources of pain no problem. We get easy feedback from animals about whether they are in pain or not and we can remove those sources without worrying that we are making some crazy choice for them. SWP is fine.
But a choice about whether your life is worth it all things considered is one that only you can make, and it is a preference that can only be revealed by your choice to stay alive or commit suicide. Anyone who tries to make that choice for you is committing a grave violation. Whether it is possible for a life to be negative in expectation is different from whether you believe that said life is negative in expectation, which is different still from whether you are justified in preventing that life from existing because you believe it is negative in expectation (particularly when the manner of prevention is killing its parents).
3) The starving baby example is silly and is mostly just an intuition pump, but you seem stuck on it and your past interlocutors have failed to address it satisfactorily, so let me try. I do think the intuition to turn off the machine is legit--that doesn't mean it's correct but I agree that the intuition is to turn off said machine. However, there are several things that make this very unlike driving a species to extinction.
First, babies are different than bees because we share the same species. We do, in fact, have intimate knowledge of what they as humans likely value, how strong their positive and negative experiences might be, the range of what their weights could be, etc. We can speak for them because they are us and we can make a truly informed decision. We also feel a strong sense of intuitive responsibility over them because they are human babies. This is where it becomes a cheap intuition pump. As I mentioned in the essay, parental figures can make decisions on behalf of their children; paternalism is literally the role of parents! By spawning a bunch of babies who then starve you're playing on the listeners parental instincts. But also, the intuition pump is incomplete! To drive a species to extinction you need to kill all of the ones that are alive today! So if the machine is pumping out 50 babies at a time, then you gotta kill 50 babies to turn it off. I imagine many people's gut intuitions would no longer point in your favor here. So yeah, stick to the Miserodon.
Finally, I will address your first point: does thinking insects matter and have nice lives mean we should stop doing stuff that reduces insect populations? No, because humans matter a lot more than insects. I am very very speciesist. I do not think the relative moral value of animals comes down to their consciousness levels or their capacity of pleasure or pain or even higher virtues. I would simply kill 1 billion bees to save a human life. I would kill a million ants just to make my home less gross to live in. I get that we are miles apart on this issue but I figured I'd mention it since you also keep referencing the "if insects matter at all we should organize our whole lives around them" point and...yeah...no I don't think we do. But just because I think their lives aren't worth very much doesn't mean I think we should exterminate them as a gift.
Doesn't the proposed asymmetry in "arrogance" between killing the bees/fish and leaving them alive come from the idea that bees/fish generally try to stay alive? So, killing them is in a sense believing you know better than them the value of their life, but not killing them is merely deferring to their judgement.
Bravo! This covers all the points on this subject would have made better than I could have made them myself. While I agree with many other things he believes, I do think Matthew's animal antinatalism is a potentially immensely harmful and misguided philosophy. In particular, his intuition that bee's lives are worse because they can't enjoy higher pleasures like art but can experience all the same pains seems to me completely backwards.
If bees don't have the capacity to appreciate art, this wouldn't bother them like a human deprived of the enjoyment of art would, because their highest pleasure would come from something they have the capacity for, like making honey! Conversely, bees would certainly not be able to experience the higher order pains that humans experience, like grief over the loss of loved ones or anxiety about their own death (which they could not possibly be conscious of).
So much of this depends on an absurd anthropomorphism, imagining what it would be like for human minds to inhabit bodies they did not evolve to inhabit. I actually lean toward agreeing with Zapffe that the kind of high-level consciousness humans possess probably leads to more dissatisfaction with life than animals are able to experience.
The essay takes an interesting turn at the end. I find many ecologist types (like myself), when it comes down to what they really value, often default to a quasi-mystical reverence for life itself, independent of utility or even consciousness (we might value a tree more than a rock, for example, simply for being alive). While this way of thinking is difficult to quantify and therefore anathema to more analytic types, I think it is just a necessary position to avoid the nihilistic extremes of a negative utilitarian worldview.
But my favourite bit was the line about a mother watching her kids eat. I used to love watching my daughter eat! I remember one time when she was maybe a year old, I just sat there watching her slurp and munch away, feeling absolute and complete joy. I don't know what it is about that experience that is so wonderful, but I remember absolutely clearly thinking that this is what eternal bliss would feel like.
The example in the blog post is that hedonism would suggest replacing the earth with mouse brains on heroin, if that turned out to be the most efficient way to maximize pleasure. But nobody would actually want to do that.
Similarly, we shouldn't pave over most wild animal habitats and replace them with K-Marts, even if that would do more to improve the welfare of conscious beings than the current state of affairs.
Note that this doesn't suggest that it's a bad thing to improve welfare, including of animals. It just suggests that this isn't the core and non plus ultra of all morality.
Great post, thanks for writing. Ive ended up just blocking Matthew at this point due to his endless stream of idiotic hot takes and infinite amount of time to rationalise any position he likes. BUT Im glad there's always someone to put the 99x more effort it takes into addressing all of the false claims he warms up from singular, heterodox sources (on every single issue).
I like this piece a lot, but I have to wonder if insects are the sort of thing whose choices we have to respect. Do they even make choices, in the sense that matters? To put it another way, it seems to me that, in the human case, we should often (though perhaps not always) defer to people's own judgments about whether their lives are worth living, and certainly not try to euthanize them (or radically reshape their lives) without their consent. But humans are agents, and presumably that requires us to respect their ability to make certain choices and live their lives. But insects are not, in my view, agents in this way. So, I don't know if I'm worried about making decisions for them. That's also why I don't think a bee keeper who doesn't make her bees suffer is acting wrongly, even though she shapes their lives to a considerable degree.
Now, the insect anti-natalist position still has lots of problems, as you point out. It fails to account for other kinds of values, and it is probably overconfident about what we can do about insect suffering without unintended negative consequences and about what we can know about the lives of insects. But I don't think insect paternalism is a problematic position.
Well the weird thing though is that if we don’t have to respect their choices about something as significant as their own life/death/existence, then why do we have to care about their suffering? I find it kind of inconceivable to care about the latter but not the former. And much of the research on whether insects suffer does seem to assume that they make choices (e.g., they try to avoid sources of pain, etc.)
I do think some paternalism can be justified if we’re talking about pure suffering reduction that does not come with some massive tradeoff: the Shrimp Welfare Project seems like an uncontroversially positive thing and while idk if it’s “worth it” or not, I do think the people behind it are doing some good. But once you get into the territory of making a judgement about the worthiness of a life, I don’t think you can make that choice for another being. In fact, I’m not even sure I’d call the above SWF project paternalism—it’s just altruism.
EDIT: also glad you liked the piece! Sorry if the above comes off as somewhat curt—bouncing around a lot of replies rn
I mean, I can bring up the allegory of the cave here in a narrow way: We know better than them. I don’t really care if you think you need to stab yourself in the name of God, I would much rather you feel the joy you get from thinking you feel God’s love WITHOUT the stabbing.
You’ve built a decent argument for preference utilitarianism but I think Bentham is a hedonistic utilitarian. People have bad preferences. Even if they think they wouldn’t prefer joy and fulfillment and happiness, they would — it’s built into the idea of hedonistic utilitarianism that it’s a better experience.
I completely agree with most of the first half of this article — Bentham thinks bee lives are worse than they are, and it’s very very difficult to judge what joy/happiness quirks evolution instilled other animals with. But evolution has many incentives to convince animals to THINK they value living in of itself — that’s the whole ball game. What actually matters is how good or bad the states we’re actually FEELING are — and you already say in your article some probably aren’t worth living.
Lol okay yeah you actually get right to the heart of an issue that I toyed around with raising but then decided to cut because I had too much other stuff to say. So here goes:
I’m not entirely sure I’m a committed preference utilitarian, but I do think my definition of welfare is very preference-centric. I chalk that up partially to being an econ major tbh.
That being said, even if I do hold preferences as “fundamental” in some way for welfare (at least when assessed in a non-ideal ethics framework where you don’t have omniscient access to people’s precise hedonic values), I do agree that they can sometimes be overridden by those who “know better”. Or, to be more precise: I do think it is okay to sometimes violate people’s preferences about some choice because you know that in reality, they actually will prefer / have a better life by doing X instead of Y even though they *say* that they prefer Y to X.
HOWEVER, I don’t think the question of whether a life is worth living is one of those choices—unless there are extenuating circumstances and you are in a position of responsibility (e.g., it’s your wife and she has locked in syndrome and no way to be cured and no way out).
Outside of those extremes (and the conditions for those extremes are complicated and definitely not met by Adelstein with respect to insects), I think only the individuals themselves can make that call.
I could say a ton more here, but one final thing is: I think one of the reasons that death/non-existence is “non-overridable” by default is that it can’t be undone and you get zero feedback on if you are right. You might look at a homeless person who says that they like living on the street, but you say “no, this is Chicago, you could freeze to death, we’re dragging you out of here and getting you an apt, etc etc etc.” Eventually, I think the idea would be that the homeless person would say “damn, thanks for pulling me off the street. I didn’t want to at the time but now I realize this is a lot better”
But if they never did that? If they just insisted “no I actually like the street, the risk of freezing to death is worth it, I hate it indoors” at some point you just gotta accept you were wrong. Let them be. Essentially, you can only violate a preference if you believe there is some other preference that the agent has that they simply are not yet aware of. But if that hidden preference turns out to not exist, then welp. Good try but too bad. Let em do it.
Death and extinction provide no such opportunity for feedback and course correction. It is ultimate and final.
These “hidden preferences” make sense, I agree. There does need to be a better state that they can be in — if the cold is a better experience, then a hedonistic utilitarian agrees the homeless person shouldn’t be let in!
Death is final, but if the only options are Hell or death then death is better. The future is uncertain, though, so you better be damn sure it isn’t getting better with better technology. I agree there’s no course correction with death, and that finality needs to be factored in — if we’re 1 year away from AGI making everyone happy all the time and solving all problems forever, then you should endure pain for 1 more year. But the POTENTIAL of it getting better is the key there — undending miserable pain = bad.
Hey! No rush--this essay ended up way longer than I originally intended. I'm happy to add a clarification if you feel that I've mischaracterized your views anywhere! I actually had a note about you not being a human anti-natalist in an earlier draft. I might go find that and add it back as a footnote.
As for 3), are you saying that you are not even an anti-natalist for insects? I've read through like 5 of your insect suffering essays and it seemed pretty clear that you were in favor of actions which prevent further insect lives from coming into existence. Please let me know if I missed something here though.
I look forward to your response once you get a chance to engage more deeply!
"If I am being frank, I think the claim that wild animals are better off unborn is a rather embarrassing admission—you are, in a sense, telling on yourself."
In the same vein, to be frank, I think you are telling on yourself with this:
"What is common to all of these anti-natalist screeds is that they tend to heavily discount—if not outright ignore—the simple value of being alive. I take this value to be self-evident and fundamental... Squish your feet into the marshy soil of the stream and run your hands along the skin of a sycamore tree... thank God you get to experience the miracle that is life for at least one more day."
At the same time as you criticize others for not touching grass and losing their perspective, you yourself have lost the perspective of how lucky you are to have so clearly never been close to anyone suicidal.
When you are contemplating ending your life, so much of what you take for granted about the world becomes meaningless. To even say "thank you," to express gratitude for someone helping you or gifting you something, is to presuppose that you find any joy in the world at all. In reality, depression makes every positive you mentioned worth absolutely nothing. It is as if you are drowning in the crushing depths 1,000 meters under the ocean, and someone hands you a flower and tells you to appreciate the beauty of the world.
How can we be confident the bees are any different?
Your conclusion soundsss nice, but actually, doesn't make sense. "You don't speak for the bees" - Cause they don’t have a voice? What about "you don't speak for future generations", or "You don't speak for the slaves",
→ If a group doesn't have a voice in society, of course we can and should advocate for them. Is your position that we should only let people advocate for themselves? How would that work here?
I'm really puzzled when people argue that American intervention in Iraq -- I presume that's what you meant by liberation wars in the middle east -- is evidence that even well-intentioned military interventions make people worse off. I mean for that to be true you have to be saying:
Stability and peace are so important that it is worth enduring even a horrible (in a practical sense) cruel dictator and their secret police to avoid chaos.
But if you believe that it implies:
1) After we ousted Sadaam we should have reimplemented his secret police, cruel collective punishments etc bc they are obviously an effective way to ensure stability and it's net worth it.
2) That we could do a huge amount of good by behaving as slightly more enlightened old school colonial empire and imposing our will on lawless chaotic areas like Syria because as bad as that might be it's still way better than chaos and lawlessness.
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And I think this points to what is really going on here: we evaluate situations where we intervene by a different standard than those we don't. When we kinda consult our intuitions about whether an intervention was good we don't really count up utils we mostly ask "do we feel good about what happened or bad" but for standard trolley problem type intuitions (esp when those helped aren't concretely identified) we tend to fell much worse about harms we feel we have caused than those we don't stop.
I'm not convinced that anti-natalism is not absurd.
In my view the absurdity is precisely that non-existence is, well, not-being. So, *for what* could it be preferable? The never-bees? Is there some protean pre-existence from which bees (et al) are formed, which could enjoy the lack of (alleged) suffering?
It's absurd because the entire argument is begging the question: the miserable lives of creatures is not worth living; I doubt that misery is really that objective. You make fine point that being a bee is primarily a business for bees.
Incidentally, my grandmother was called Bea. Towards the end of her time she had a series of strokes and became half paralyzed. Half of her brain had died, and she was even temporarily blinded. My aunt asked her, "on a scale of one to ten, how are you feeling?" She said, after some thought, "I think a nine."
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.
Yeah, paternalism is a good word. It is weird though: I'm somehow more okay with advocating killing as a necessary evil than I am with killing as a paternal gift. I got into this in one of the footnotes, but it just seems like the latter is a more dangerous instinct that threatens to justify endless death and as such requires a much higher burden of proof (even if the former has a high burden as well).
(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.
Thank you!! And yeah, I think philosophers have a bad tendency of focusing so much on (1), known as ideal ethics, that they neglect the vast chasm between it and (2) non-ideal ethics. I am much more interested in the latter because I think so many of the key ethical insights that ground practical reason come from that shift. But, of course, you do still need the former even if it isn't totally sufficient.
Also, good reminder that I still have to read that essay you tagged me in--I've been so busy finishing this monster that I haven't had time. Will try to get to that this week.
re: the essay I tagged you on, I was just excited because I think this is a subtle point that solves a lot of paradoxes, but most people don't get it. And you clearly get it, and I've been growing tired of defending this hill by myself, but now I'm not alone!!!! 💜
(the point being that people's ideology shows them what is good, and what is evil. When they learn that, actually, their ideology is evil, they don't think, "ah, well now I will switch to the other side", they think, "wait, if the good guys are evil...then EVERYTHING is evil, there are no good guys, no good exists" and that's a much worse position to be in)
all the cool twitter personalities are here
Thanks for the post. I agree. I’m glad people are starting to point out how disturbing the consequences of this particular kind of animal activism really are.
I made a related argument, in a much shorter, less rigorous post yesterday: Why we shouldn’t pave over the world to save it
https://woolery.substack.com/p/why-we-shouldnt-pave-over-the-world
Brilliant post!
Something that stands out to me is that there's not much of a general "theory of happiness" being appealed to, and it really feels like there should be. You mentioned about the bees making honey being their raison d'etre, and I think that's key. If we had a bee Aristotle, they'd probably say that honeymaking was key to their eudaimonia.
If we look at the things that make humans happiest, it's largely the things we're peculiarly evolved for: socialising, singing, dancing, running long distances, throwing stuff, solving puzzles. It's not crazy to think bees love their work. And if we do the simplistic "imagine you're a bee", that sounds cute and fun too!
Life is good*.
*(generally)
Yeah, this is a very good point. On one hand I did want to avoid quibbling too much on exactly how much utility is derived from which activity (since imo, it doesn’t matter what *we* think), but the idea that evolution would naturally ascribe very high positive utility towards our natural telos is strong.
Okay, a bunch of things I disagree with. A thing at the top before I get into the list is that if you think insects matter and have nice lives, that has wildly revisionary implications. It implies that nearly all the things we do are immoral because we reduce insect populations. Anyone who cares about insects must be a radical, not just those who think they have bad lives.
More specifically:
1) First of all, the case for net negative insect welfare is much stronger for nearly all creatures other than bees than for bees. Most insects live about a week and then die painfully. Bees have vastly longer lives!
2) I think bees life's are of unclear quality prior to death. But if you have a life of middling quality that is short--just a few weeks or months--and then starve to death, your overall existence wasn't good.
3) Bee conditions are unpleasant. Being in an unnatural environment is unpleasant for animals even if it's not objectively terrible. Water is not objectively terrible, but if you lived in it, that wouldn't go well for you! Bees do find overcrowding unpleasant and the fact they huddle together in the winter when they're freezing to death doesn't give evidence against that. The beekeeper just brazenly asserting bees don't freeze to death in the face of a study on it is pretty ridiculous. The average day of bee life doesn't have to be "unspeakable horror" for bees to have negative lives!
4) It doesn't matter how bad life is in the wild! I don't think wild bee life is nice either.
5) My comment about bees being overworked was based on the fact that bees have been genetically preprogrammed to literally work themselves to death gathering honey, including often mutilating themselves in the process and continuing to labor. I grant bees get some pleasure from their work! I just think the suffering in their life outweighs. As mentioned before, I'm not a negative utilitarian.
6) I grant some deaths from wild animals aren't near as bad as e.g. starvation. Some are quick. But even the quick ones are pretty grisly! Like, just think about how painful it would be for a vice to completely crush your finger. Then imagine that same thing being done *all over your entire body* and it taking minutes for you to die. If you only lived two weeks and then died that way, your life would obviously be hedonically negative! And most insects live vastly shorter lives than bees, so probably for them it's just a week or so of existence. Also, probably starvation is the most common way to die.
There are experiences so painful that when experiencing them, a creature would do anything to make them stop. Probably a large portion of animals have experiences like that in their life--vastly worse than anything that most of us ever experience except during death. For a potentially prolonged experience that bad, you need more than a week of nice life to outweigh it. And most insects have only about a week of life with deeply uncertain, and likely negative, quality.
7) //For now, even if we do adopt this asymmetry of valence and hold that bees are capable of great suffering but not great pleasure// I grant they're capable of great pleasure. But typically the worst experiences are worse than the best experiences are nice. That's true in humans, for instance.
8) Even if you think being alive is intrinsically--rather than instrumentally good--it's doubtful that if you live a week and then die painfully your life was overall worth living. Just imagine a machine that created babies who were fed for a week and left to starve. Would you think they had nice lives, on grounds of "joie de vivre." It's a lot easier to appreciate nature if you're a human capable of higher order reflection than if you're an insect with a simple brain, constantly on the run from threats.
9) I don't share your intuition that negative experiences are better than nothing. Like, for example, I was recently on a plane with a pretty bad headache for many hours--if I could have skipped it I would have. Most of the moments of my life are pleasant, but I wouldn't be in favor of creating more of the unpleasant ones. But I think this is mostly immaterial. Even if slightly hedonically negative existence is nice, existence when you're starving to death or dying of overheating is not. And that's the experience of huge numbers of animals.
10) I'm not a negative utilitarian! Nor am I depressed. In fact, I think I'm abnormally happy and cheerful! I just think that suffering is bad, well-being is good, but most insects have more suffering than well-being by quite a sizeable margin.
11) //If I am being frank, I think the claim that wild animals are better off unborn is a rather embarrassing admission—you are, in a sense, telling on yourself. You’re saying that if deprived of all your modern conveniences—your apartment, your dishwasher, your Lululemon pants—and forced instead to fend for yourself in the wild, you would be despondent.//
Who's anthropomorphizing now? I don't think humans in nature have negative lives. I also think some larger animals with long lives like elephants could very well have decent lives. It's the tiny animals who die painfully after extremely short lives who I'm skeptical about!
12) //Adelstein asks if any of us would choose to live for an additional three weeks of mediocrity if we knew that said period might end in a pain and suffering—and the answer empirically seems to be yes!//
It's not that it "might end in pain and suffering." It's that it would very likely end in an extremely painful death. Try putting your hand under the shower water when it's heating up, beyond the point where it makes it impossible not to pull your hand away. There is a kind of pain that you'd do almost anything to get to stop, and large numbers of creatures experience pain of that intensity for quite a considerable amount of time.
13) I don't get the arrogance charge! You think insects are better off existing. I think they're not. Whichever of us is right, it doesn't seem arrogant to try to bring about what we think is correct. Would it be arrogant to destroy a machine that created babies and then left them to starve to death after just a few days of nice life? Would it be arrogant to be in favor of creating fewer Miserodons? Of course not! It's just as arrogant to think you're sufficiently ethically confident in animals having nice lives that you support bringing about more creatures to suffer horrendously. Everyone has an ethical view--it's not a matter of arrogance to do the things your view says is right.
Sorry this took so long, I felt I owed you a more comprehensive response given that I spent 8,000+ words ripping on your ideas. Although my article was a response to yours, you were not actually the "target audience" of the piece. As you can probably tell by the structure, I assumed the ideal reader would find insect anti-natalism instinctively wrong and then immediately imagine that it is an inherent absurdity, and so then my goal was to convince that sort of person that 1) it is not actually absurd, but 2) it is still deeply wrong in a practical sense. You could say that my "ideal" audience was Trace, and my rhetorical choices reflected that.
I give that preamble because this comment *is* written with you as the target audience, so I'm going to try and write from your frame of reference. And I'll be upfront rn that my goal is not to convince you that you are wrong about insect welfare--I don't think that I'm capable of doing that in a Substack comment. Instead, I'd like to convince you that your critics (myself included) are expressing reasonable objections in a way that goes beyond merely disagreeing at an object-level about the "true" expected net utility of bees. There is a principle of the matter as well.
I originally tried to respond to all the objections you made, but frankly, a lot of them overlap in weird ways so I don't think it's efficient to repeat the same points. There are a couple that warrant standalone response though:
[1] What about other insects: Fair enough, I focused on bees since that was the big button topic at hand. I can't really say what I'd think about the net utility of other insects without knowing how they live. But I still don't believe we would be justified in driving them to extinction for principled reasons that I'll cover last.
[4] You think wild bee lives suck too: Yes, I credited this point to you in the essay multiple times I believe. Not sure where you were responding to this?
[5, 7, 10] You're not a [strict] negative utilitarian: Yep, I did call this out in a footnote. My references to strict negative utilitarians (e.g., Tomasik) were because they also have anti-natalist views. But I don't think any of my arguments against you assumed you were a strict negative utilitarian. That being said--and this is mostly a side point--I do think you resemble a weak negative utilitarian. Your point in 7 seems almost archetypical of that. You often talk about suffering with this broader implicit assumption that the types of suffering you describe are so severe that they cannot reasonably be overcome by positive joys. I do understand this view; it doesn't strike me as unreasonable. But it does seem weakly negative utilitarian. But it's hard to know where you actually draw the line here. Maybe you've said this elsewhere, but like, how many orgasms do you think it would take "outweigh" shooting one person in the stomach? How about crushing them to death (assume it takes 5 seconds for them to die)? Or starving to death? I don't mean these as a gotcha, but the way you typically talk about suffering seems to imply that you think the numbers here would be very very very high.
As for all the rest of your objections, I think the easiest way to structure my response is by walking through three questions and covering your objections as I do:
A) Do *we* think that the day-to-day lives of bees are positive or negative?
B) If the answer to A is positive, then do *we* think that the positives are sufficient to outweigh the negative utility due to manner of death?
C) Does what *we* think about A or B matter? Does it justify us in taking actions like destroying ecosystems?
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A) I think the day-to-day lives of bees seem to be weakly positive--potentially very very positive--and I think your arguments that they are not demonstrate a significant amount of pessimism. I did not argue that bees huddling in winter was evidence that they like being crowded together--I just think it's totally conceivable that they like being crowded together no matter the weather. I'm confused as to why you think they find it unpleasant. Why would they?
As for the "unnatural environment" -- I'm sorry but you just cannot conclude that the Ikea box is some non-negligible source of negative utility. At best, this is a red herring.
And then re: them being overworked, I think your characterization here is super weird. One way to say that something is genetically preprogrammed to do X is that it "really really really wants to do X". One reason it might really want to do X is that it derives a LOT of pleasure in doing X. They seem to be choosing to work even if they are in pain, which suggests that they really really love the work they do. In fact, we should expect evolution to select for bees which derive pleasure from this activity. That sure seems like a good way to motivate them to work until death after all. If you're going to respond with the gambling analogy, I already covered that in the essay: you can't just show it's *possible* that bees are making irrational choices that don't reflect their all things considered enjoyment. You do actually have to prove it. You're the one advocating for ecosystem destruction.
The flip side of your arguments is that if they enjoy working so much that they'll do it until their wings give out then it must be pretty great. These are eusocial creatures--I think you are projecting a mental model of work onto them that you are not justified in doing.
Moreover, you seem to misunderstand the joie de vivre point. It is not an assertion that *any* day lived is better than one not lived. It is an argument that a generic day lived is actually amazing, and many modestly negative ones are actually still better than not existing. You talked about taking a plane flight with a bad headache. What about a long walk with a strong but not overwhelming toothache? If that's all your last day on earth consisted of, would you prefer to euthanize yourself a day early instead? I certainly wouldn't.
I think the way you go about analyzing these questions about day-to-day life of animals reveals a structural bias towards pessimism. If your argument is just that a bee's death sucks and their lives are too mediocre to overcome that horrible death, then fine, lean into it that way. But you tend to paint a bunch of stuff as more horrible than it really is to oversell your point, and you almost never try to find any positives. I think this habit undermines your credibility.
B) I agree that the deaths largely aren't great, but given the above, I think there's no way to answer with a high degree of confidence (I'm talking 99%+, which you gotta have if you're justifying species extinction) whether their lives are net negative in expectation. You seem to just casually assert that many of these deaths last a long time, but that is a load-bearing assumption. Being shot in the head is basically painless--that a death is grisly or gruesome does not mean it is actually bad. I'm also not sure how bad collapsing from exhaustion would be after doing something you love to the point of failure. Humans usually have an endorphin response to that sort of thing.
So if there can be a bee that lives a very happy life collecting nectar and making honey, and they actually derive a lot of utility from that plus joie de vivre, and they like the crowded hive because it's cozy and means safety in numbers, and they even like the box, then three weeks later BAM it's crushed to death or eaten in a single bite...then...idk, seems like it was positive utility to me. Now, how many of those net positive lives have to happen to outweigh the life of the bee that gets partially crushed or freezes to death? Idk, but I also don't think it matters.
Because the point of A) and B) was NOT to prove that insects do, in fact, have positive lives in expectation. It was to prove that it is *possible* (within reason) that they do. Like I said at the top, my disagreement is not purely at the object level. I do not know if insects have net positive or net negative lives. It is an open question with massive error bars. My argument actually is mostly about:
3) You don't get to decide if another species' life is net negative in expectation and use that as justification for driving it to extinction (or destroying large parts of its habitat), particularly when you are so far removed from that being's experiences. This is where the arrogance charge comes in. You don't get to destroy habitats and ecosystems just because you have judged the lives of those in them to be negative. Your judgement doesn't really matter. Only a bee gets to decide that for themselves; it is their right. To presume you can make that choice for the bee is hubris.
You might think this is a necessarily deontologist argument, but it's also perfectly compatible with a consequentialism of rights and even a pragmatic form of preference utilitarianism taken in a non-ideal frame where the only way to know a preference is for a being to either tell you its preference or reveal it through a choice between tradeoffs. The idea is that given the aggregation of utility involves weighing positives and negatives, we do have to assign relative weights to those positives and negatives. I do not mean just calculating [values] in terms of how strongly positive or negative those factors are along their own dimension, but also [weights] in terms of how important they are relative to each other. In reality these weights should be functions because not everything is linear but let's ignore that wrinkle.
You can make all the claims you want about how painful something is, but you don't get to decide the relative weight of pain vs. the relative weight of joy for another being (outside rare and extenuating circumstances), and certainly not for an entire other species. That's the point of the final Miserodon example: it is possible that a being might value somethings a lot more than pain, and you don't get to decide for it.
Why go through A) and B) first though if this was my point? Well because I do think you could argue that if a bee's life was 100% negative and had no positives then it's "impossible" for the life to be net positive. I think this situation is basically impossible to prove, but I do grant that if this was the case, maybe you can argue for anti-natalism as not only theoretically plausible but practically justifiable. But this isn't the case.
A few other notes here.
1) You might say that the bee cannot make this choice because it doesn't know what death is or how to commit suicide and it's life might only become net negative when it's starving to death. Correct. But the fact that it cannot make this choice does not mean that you can. This is a choice that nobody can make. Too bad. There is literally nothing to be done.
2) Anti-natalism/destruction of ecosystems/species genocide is different from other choices about animal welfare. We can choose to reduce animal suffering by reducing specific sources of pain no problem. We get easy feedback from animals about whether they are in pain or not and we can remove those sources without worrying that we are making some crazy choice for them. SWP is fine.
But a choice about whether your life is worth it all things considered is one that only you can make, and it is a preference that can only be revealed by your choice to stay alive or commit suicide. Anyone who tries to make that choice for you is committing a grave violation. Whether it is possible for a life to be negative in expectation is different from whether you believe that said life is negative in expectation, which is different still from whether you are justified in preventing that life from existing because you believe it is negative in expectation (particularly when the manner of prevention is killing its parents).
3) The starving baby example is silly and is mostly just an intuition pump, but you seem stuck on it and your past interlocutors have failed to address it satisfactorily, so let me try. I do think the intuition to turn off the machine is legit--that doesn't mean it's correct but I agree that the intuition is to turn off said machine. However, there are several things that make this very unlike driving a species to extinction.
First, babies are different than bees because we share the same species. We do, in fact, have intimate knowledge of what they as humans likely value, how strong their positive and negative experiences might be, the range of what their weights could be, etc. We can speak for them because they are us and we can make a truly informed decision. We also feel a strong sense of intuitive responsibility over them because they are human babies. This is where it becomes a cheap intuition pump. As I mentioned in the essay, parental figures can make decisions on behalf of their children; paternalism is literally the role of parents! By spawning a bunch of babies who then starve you're playing on the listeners parental instincts. But also, the intuition pump is incomplete! To drive a species to extinction you need to kill all of the ones that are alive today! So if the machine is pumping out 50 babies at a time, then you gotta kill 50 babies to turn it off. I imagine many people's gut intuitions would no longer point in your favor here. So yeah, stick to the Miserodon.
Finally, I will address your first point: does thinking insects matter and have nice lives mean we should stop doing stuff that reduces insect populations? No, because humans matter a lot more than insects. I am very very speciesist. I do not think the relative moral value of animals comes down to their consciousness levels or their capacity of pleasure or pain or even higher virtues. I would simply kill 1 billion bees to save a human life. I would kill a million ants just to make my home less gross to live in. I get that we are miles apart on this issue but I figured I'd mention it since you also keep referencing the "if insects matter at all we should organize our whole lives around them" point and...yeah...no I don't think we do. But just because I think their lives aren't worth very much doesn't mean I think we should exterminate them as a gift.
Let’s just do a substack live at some point about this.
Sure, I’d love to! No idea how one goes about doing that but I’ll follow your lead on this.
Do you have the app?
Yup, using it right now
Doesn't the proposed asymmetry in "arrogance" between killing the bees/fish and leaving them alive come from the idea that bees/fish generally try to stay alive? So, killing them is in a sense believing you know better than them the value of their life, but not killing them is merely deferring to their judgement.
I address this in more detail here https://benthams.substack.com/p/most-animals-have-bad-lives
Bravo! This covers all the points on this subject would have made better than I could have made them myself. While I agree with many other things he believes, I do think Matthew's animal antinatalism is a potentially immensely harmful and misguided philosophy. In particular, his intuition that bee's lives are worse because they can't enjoy higher pleasures like art but can experience all the same pains seems to me completely backwards.
If bees don't have the capacity to appreciate art, this wouldn't bother them like a human deprived of the enjoyment of art would, because their highest pleasure would come from something they have the capacity for, like making honey! Conversely, bees would certainly not be able to experience the higher order pains that humans experience, like grief over the loss of loved ones or anxiety about their own death (which they could not possibly be conscious of).
So much of this depends on an absurd anthropomorphism, imagining what it would be like for human minds to inhabit bodies they did not evolve to inhabit. I actually lean toward agreeing with Zapffe that the kind of high-level consciousness humans possess probably leads to more dissatisfaction with life than animals are able to experience.
The essay takes an interesting turn at the end. I find many ecologist types (like myself), when it comes down to what they really value, often default to a quasi-mystical reverence for life itself, independent of utility or even consciousness (we might value a tree more than a rock, for example, simply for being alive). While this way of thinking is difficult to quantify and therefore anathema to more analytic types, I think it is just a necessary position to avoid the nihilistic extremes of a negative utilitarian worldview.
I really enjoyed this, thank you.
But my favourite bit was the line about a mother watching her kids eat. I used to love watching my daughter eat! I remember one time when she was maybe a year old, I just sat there watching her slurp and munch away, feeling absolute and complete joy. I don't know what it is about that experience that is so wonderful, but I remember absolutely clearly thinking that this is what eternal bliss would feel like.
Premise 2 is obviously wrong. Here is a blog post making this point:
https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2024/06/hedonic-utilitarianism.html
The example in the blog post is that hedonism would suggest replacing the earth with mouse brains on heroin, if that turned out to be the most efficient way to maximize pleasure. But nobody would actually want to do that.
Similarly, we shouldn't pave over most wild animal habitats and replace them with K-Marts, even if that would do more to improve the welfare of conscious beings than the current state of affairs.
Note that this doesn't suggest that it's a bad thing to improve welfare, including of animals. It just suggests that this isn't the core and non plus ultra of all morality.
Great post, thanks for writing. Ive ended up just blocking Matthew at this point due to his endless stream of idiotic hot takes and infinite amount of time to rationalise any position he likes. BUT Im glad there's always someone to put the 99x more effort it takes into addressing all of the false claims he warms up from singular, heterodox sources (on every single issue).
I like this piece a lot, but I have to wonder if insects are the sort of thing whose choices we have to respect. Do they even make choices, in the sense that matters? To put it another way, it seems to me that, in the human case, we should often (though perhaps not always) defer to people's own judgments about whether their lives are worth living, and certainly not try to euthanize them (or radically reshape their lives) without their consent. But humans are agents, and presumably that requires us to respect their ability to make certain choices and live their lives. But insects are not, in my view, agents in this way. So, I don't know if I'm worried about making decisions for them. That's also why I don't think a bee keeper who doesn't make her bees suffer is acting wrongly, even though she shapes their lives to a considerable degree.
Now, the insect anti-natalist position still has lots of problems, as you point out. It fails to account for other kinds of values, and it is probably overconfident about what we can do about insect suffering without unintended negative consequences and about what we can know about the lives of insects. But I don't think insect paternalism is a problematic position.
Well the weird thing though is that if we don’t have to respect their choices about something as significant as their own life/death/existence, then why do we have to care about their suffering? I find it kind of inconceivable to care about the latter but not the former. And much of the research on whether insects suffer does seem to assume that they make choices (e.g., they try to avoid sources of pain, etc.)
I do think some paternalism can be justified if we’re talking about pure suffering reduction that does not come with some massive tradeoff: the Shrimp Welfare Project seems like an uncontroversially positive thing and while idk if it’s “worth it” or not, I do think the people behind it are doing some good. But once you get into the territory of making a judgement about the worthiness of a life, I don’t think you can make that choice for another being. In fact, I’m not even sure I’d call the above SWF project paternalism—it’s just altruism.
EDIT: also glad you liked the piece! Sorry if the above comes off as somewhat curt—bouncing around a lot of replies rn
I mean, I can bring up the allegory of the cave here in a narrow way: We know better than them. I don’t really care if you think you need to stab yourself in the name of God, I would much rather you feel the joy you get from thinking you feel God’s love WITHOUT the stabbing.
You’ve built a decent argument for preference utilitarianism but I think Bentham is a hedonistic utilitarian. People have bad preferences. Even if they think they wouldn’t prefer joy and fulfillment and happiness, they would — it’s built into the idea of hedonistic utilitarianism that it’s a better experience.
I completely agree with most of the first half of this article — Bentham thinks bee lives are worse than they are, and it’s very very difficult to judge what joy/happiness quirks evolution instilled other animals with. But evolution has many incentives to convince animals to THINK they value living in of itself — that’s the whole ball game. What actually matters is how good or bad the states we’re actually FEELING are — and you already say in your article some probably aren’t worth living.
Lol okay yeah you actually get right to the heart of an issue that I toyed around with raising but then decided to cut because I had too much other stuff to say. So here goes:
I’m not entirely sure I’m a committed preference utilitarian, but I do think my definition of welfare is very preference-centric. I chalk that up partially to being an econ major tbh.
That being said, even if I do hold preferences as “fundamental” in some way for welfare (at least when assessed in a non-ideal ethics framework where you don’t have omniscient access to people’s precise hedonic values), I do agree that they can sometimes be overridden by those who “know better”. Or, to be more precise: I do think it is okay to sometimes violate people’s preferences about some choice because you know that in reality, they actually will prefer / have a better life by doing X instead of Y even though they *say* that they prefer Y to X.
HOWEVER, I don’t think the question of whether a life is worth living is one of those choices—unless there are extenuating circumstances and you are in a position of responsibility (e.g., it’s your wife and she has locked in syndrome and no way to be cured and no way out).
Outside of those extremes (and the conditions for those extremes are complicated and definitely not met by Adelstein with respect to insects), I think only the individuals themselves can make that call.
I could say a ton more here, but one final thing is: I think one of the reasons that death/non-existence is “non-overridable” by default is that it can’t be undone and you get zero feedback on if you are right. You might look at a homeless person who says that they like living on the street, but you say “no, this is Chicago, you could freeze to death, we’re dragging you out of here and getting you an apt, etc etc etc.” Eventually, I think the idea would be that the homeless person would say “damn, thanks for pulling me off the street. I didn’t want to at the time but now I realize this is a lot better”
But if they never did that? If they just insisted “no I actually like the street, the risk of freezing to death is worth it, I hate it indoors” at some point you just gotta accept you were wrong. Let them be. Essentially, you can only violate a preference if you believe there is some other preference that the agent has that they simply are not yet aware of. But if that hidden preference turns out to not exist, then welp. Good try but too bad. Let em do it.
Death and extinction provide no such opportunity for feedback and course correction. It is ultimate and final.
These “hidden preferences” make sense, I agree. There does need to be a better state that they can be in — if the cold is a better experience, then a hedonistic utilitarian agrees the homeless person shouldn’t be let in!
Death is final, but if the only options are Hell or death then death is better. The future is uncertain, though, so you better be damn sure it isn’t getting better with better technology. I agree there’s no course correction with death, and that finality needs to be factored in — if we’re 1 year away from AGI making everyone happy all the time and solving all problems forever, then you should endure pain for 1 more year. But the POTENTIAL of it getting better is the key there — undending miserable pain = bad.
That’s my hedonistic utilitarian take, anyway.
Goddamn I wrote out like 10 paragraphs of response and then accidentally hit cancel!
oooooof...I usually write my substack comments in my notes app because I've had this happen a few times already
Not done reading yet (I currently do not have internet so am just typing a brief comment on my phone) but just want to say three things:
1) want to clarify that I’m not an anti-Natalist for people.
2) I appreciate the thoughtful engagement
3) I’m not an anti-natalist
Hey! No rush--this essay ended up way longer than I originally intended. I'm happy to add a clarification if you feel that I've mischaracterized your views anywhere! I actually had a note about you not being a human anti-natalist in an earlier draft. I might go find that and add it back as a footnote.
As for 3), are you saying that you are not even an anti-natalist for insects? I've read through like 5 of your insect suffering essays and it seemed pretty clear that you were in favor of actions which prevent further insect lives from coming into existence. Please let me know if I missed something here though.
I look forward to your response once you get a chance to engage more deeply!
Sorry, I was saying I'm not an anti-natalist for people but am for insects. In fact, I've written a long piece arguing against human anti-natalism.
"If I am being frank, I think the claim that wild animals are better off unborn is a rather embarrassing admission—you are, in a sense, telling on yourself."
In the same vein, to be frank, I think you are telling on yourself with this:
"What is common to all of these anti-natalist screeds is that they tend to heavily discount—if not outright ignore—the simple value of being alive. I take this value to be self-evident and fundamental... Squish your feet into the marshy soil of the stream and run your hands along the skin of a sycamore tree... thank God you get to experience the miracle that is life for at least one more day."
At the same time as you criticize others for not touching grass and losing their perspective, you yourself have lost the perspective of how lucky you are to have so clearly never been close to anyone suicidal.
When you are contemplating ending your life, so much of what you take for granted about the world becomes meaningless. To even say "thank you," to express gratitude for someone helping you or gifting you something, is to presuppose that you find any joy in the world at all. In reality, depression makes every positive you mentioned worth absolutely nothing. It is as if you are drowning in the crushing depths 1,000 meters under the ocean, and someone hands you a flower and tells you to appreciate the beauty of the world.
How can we be confident the bees are any different?
Your conclusion soundsss nice, but actually, doesn't make sense. "You don't speak for the bees" - Cause they don’t have a voice? What about "you don't speak for future generations", or "You don't speak for the slaves",
→ If a group doesn't have a voice in society, of course we can and should advocate for them. Is your position that we should only let people advocate for themselves? How would that work here?
I'm really puzzled when people argue that American intervention in Iraq -- I presume that's what you meant by liberation wars in the middle east -- is evidence that even well-intentioned military interventions make people worse off. I mean for that to be true you have to be saying:
Stability and peace are so important that it is worth enduring even a horrible (in a practical sense) cruel dictator and their secret police to avoid chaos.
But if you believe that it implies:
1) After we ousted Sadaam we should have reimplemented his secret police, cruel collective punishments etc bc they are obviously an effective way to ensure stability and it's net worth it.
2) That we could do a huge amount of good by behaving as slightly more enlightened old school colonial empire and imposing our will on lawless chaotic areas like Syria because as bad as that might be it's still way better than chaos and lawlessness.
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And I think this points to what is really going on here: we evaluate situations where we intervene by a different standard than those we don't. When we kinda consult our intuitions about whether an intervention was good we don't really count up utils we mostly ask "do we feel good about what happened or bad" but for standard trolley problem type intuitions (esp when those helped aren't concretely identified) we tend to fell much worse about harms we feel we have caused than those we don't stop.
I'm not convinced that anti-natalism is not absurd.
In my view the absurdity is precisely that non-existence is, well, not-being. So, *for what* could it be preferable? The never-bees? Is there some protean pre-existence from which bees (et al) are formed, which could enjoy the lack of (alleged) suffering?
It's absurd because the entire argument is begging the question: the miserable lives of creatures is not worth living; I doubt that misery is really that objective. You make fine point that being a bee is primarily a business for bees.
Incidentally, my grandmother was called Bea. Towards the end of her time she had a series of strokes and became half paralyzed. Half of her brain had died, and she was even temporarily blinded. My aunt asked her, "on a scale of one to ten, how are you feeling?" She said, after some thought, "I think a nine."